PART I

At Mme Swann’s

WHEN IT WAS FIRST SUGGESTED we invite M. de Norpois to dinner, my mother commented that it was a pity Professor Cottard was absent from Paris and that she herself had quite lost touch with Swann, either of whom the former ambassador would have been pleased to meet; to which my father replied that, although a guest as eminent as Cottard, a scientific man of some renown, would always be an asset at one’s dinner table, the Marquis de Norpois would be bound to see Swann, with his showing off and his name-dropping, as nothing but a vulgar swank, “a rank outsider,” as he would put it. This statement of my father’s may require a few words of explanation, as there may be some who remember Cottard as a mediocrity and Swann as the soul of discretion and modesty in all things social. As regards Swann, it turns out that our old family friend was now no longer only “young Swann” and “Swann of the Jockey Club”; to these personalities he had added a new one, which was not to be his last, that of Odette’s husband. Adapting to her humble ambitions all the flair, desires, and industry that he had always possessed, Swann had contrived to construct a new position for himself, albeit far below the one he had formerly occupied, but suited to the wife with whom he must now share it. And in this position he had turned into a new man. Since this was the beginning of a second life for both of them, among a circle of new people (except for personal friends from his bachelor days whom he went on seeing alone, and whom he did not wish to burden with the acquaintance of Odette, unless they themselves expressed the wish to meet her), it would have been understandable if, in judging the social standing of these new people, and thereby gauging the degree of self-esteem that their company might afford him, his standard of comparison had been based at least on Odette’s former associates, if not on the exalted individuals among whom he himself had moved before his marriage. However, even when one knew that the people he now wished to associate with were unrefined civil servants, or the sort of dubious women who were fixtures of the annual ball at certain ministries, one could still be astounded to hear this man (who in former days, and even now, could show such exquisite tact in not advertising an invitation to Twickenham¹ or Buckingham Palace) braying out the fact that the wife of an undersecretary’s undersecretary had returned Mme Swann’s visit. It may be thought that this was because the simplicity of manners in the fashionable Swann was only a finer form of vanity, and that, after the manner of certain Jews, our old family friend had passed through the successive phases of a development observable in the breed he belonged to, going from the most guileless snobbery, the crassest caddishness, to the politest of refinements. The main reason, however, was (and it is one which holds good for all of humanity) that even our virtues are not extraneous, free-floating things which are always at our disposal; in fact, they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions we feel they should accompany that, if we are required to engage in some different activity, it can take us by surprise, so that we never even think that it too might entail the use of those very virtues. In his gushing ways with these new friends and his boastful citing of their exploits, Swann was like the great artist who takes up cooking or gardening late in life and who, though modest enough to be untroubled by criticism of his masterpieces, cannot bear to hear faint praise of his recipes or flower beds, and basks naïvely in the delight of hearing them lauded; or who, though generous enough to let a canvas go for nothing, will be put out by losing a few pennies at dominoes.

As for Professor Cottard, we shall meet him again eventually, and at some length, at La Raspelière, the château of the Patronne. For the moment, let the following remark suffice. The change in Swann may well be surprising, since it had already come about, albeit without my knowledge, by the time I had become familiar with him as the father of Gilberte, at the Champs-Élysées; and then, of course, as he never spoke to me, he could not brag about his connections in the political world. (And even if he had done so, I might well not have been immediately aware of his vanity, as one’s long-standing mental image of others deprives one of sight and hearing in their presence—my mother took three years to notice the lipstick that one of her nieces was using; for all she could see, it might have been totally and invisibly dissolved, till the day when either an extra dab of it or some other cause brought about the reaction known as supersaturation: all the unseen lipstick crystallized and, in the face of this sudden splash of color, my mother declared, after the manner of Combray, that it was a disgrace, and all but broke off relations with the girl.) With Cottard, however, the days when we saw him witnessing Swann’s introduction to the Verdurins were long past. Honors and official titles come with the years. Also, it is possible to be unread, and to like making silly puns, while having a special gift that outweighs any general culture, such as the gift of the great strategist or the great clinician. So Cottard was seen by his medical colleagues not just as an obscure practitioner who had eventually risen to celebrity throughout Europe. The cleverest of the younger doctors declared—for a few years at any rate, since all fashions, having arisen from a desire for change, eventually pass away for the same reason—that if ever they should fall ill Cottard was the only eminent man to whom they would entrust their persons. Obviously, for conversation, they preferred the company of certain other senior colleagues who were more cultivated or more artistically minded, and with whom they could discuss Nietzsche or Wagner. At Mme Cottard’s musical evenings, to which she invited students and colleagues of her husband’s in the hope that he would one day become dean of the faculty, Cottard himself never listened to a note, preferring to play cards in one of the other rooms. But he was renowned for his diagnostic skill, for the unhesitating acuity and accuracy of his eye. In addition, in considering the general effect that Cottard’s manners made on someone like my father, it should be noted that the nature we display in the second part of our life may not always be, though it often is, a growth from or a stunting of our first nature, an exaggeration or attenuation of it. It is at times an inversion of it, a garment turned inside out. In youth, everyone except the Verdurins, who had taken a great fancy to him, had mercilessly mocked him for his hesitant air, his excessive diffidence and affability. Did some kind friend suggest he adopt an icy demeanor? The eminence of his position certainly made it easy for him to comply. Except at the Verdurins’, where he instinctively became himself again, he now made a show of being cold and taciturn; when speech was required, he was brusque and made a point of saying unpleasant things. He first tried his new manner on patients who had no prior acquaintance with him, who could therefore make no comparisons, and who would have been amazed to learn that he was not a man to whom such abruptness came naturally. He aimed first and foremost at being impassive; and even when he made some of his puns doing the rounds in the hospital, making everyone laugh, from the medical superintendent to the newest student, he would always do it without moving a muscle in his face, which, since he had shaved off his beard and mustache, was also quite unrecognizable.

Of the Marquis de Norpois it can be said that, having been a plenipotentiary of Napoleon III before the Franco-Prussian War, he had been briefly elevated to an ambassadorship during the constitutional crisis of May 16, 1877. Despite this, and to the great astonishment of many, he had also been appointed several times since then as an extraordinary representative of France, accomplishing special missions and even acting as Comptroller of Public Moneys in Egypt, where his great financial ability enabled him to render important services, at the behest of Radical cabinets, on whose behalf a mere middle-class reactionary would have declined to act, and to which M. de Norpois’s past, connections, and opinions should have made him suspect. But these progressive ministers seemed to realize that, in making such an appointment, they were demonstrating the breadth of vision of which they were capable when the higher interests of France required it—so outclassing the average politician that they might expect to be called “statesmen” by the Journal des débats itself!—while basking in the prestige afforded by the man’s noble name and title, and in the interest created by a dramatically unforeseeable choice. They knew too that, in having recourse to M. de Norpois, they could enjoy these advantages without fear of political disloyalty on his part, as the Marquis’s breeding, rather than giving them grounds to suspect him of any such thing, ensured against it. In this, the government of the Republic was not mistaken, for the good reason that a certain aristocracy, bred from childhood to see their name as an intrinsic benefit which nothing can take away (and the value of which is fairly well gauged by their peers and by those of even higher birth), know they can spare themselves the efforts made by many a commoner to profess only opinions seen as sound, and to mix only with people seen as proper, as these efforts would be of no profit to them. However, wishing to magnify themselves in the eyes of the princely or ducal families which are their immediate superiors, these aristocrats also know that they can do this only if they enhance their name with something extraneous to it, something that, other names being equal, will make theirs prevail: a political influence, a literary or artistic reputation, a large fortune. So they lavish their attentions not on the futile squireen who is courted by the commoner, or on a fruitless friendship that will never impress a prince, but on the politicians who, though they may be Freemasons, can get someone appointed to a plum job in an embassy or elected to a safe seat, on the artists or academics who can pull a string or two in the area they dominate, on anyone who might be able to lend some distinction, or help in the making of a rich marriage.

In the case of M. de Norpois, however, the most important thing was that, through long practice of diplomacy, he had deeply imbued himself with the spirit known as “government mentality,” that negative, ingrained conservative spirit which informs not just the mentality of all governments, but in particular, inside all governments, that of the Foreign Office. The career of the diplomatist had given him an aversion, a dread, and a disdain for the more or less revolutionary, or at least improper, ways that are those of oppositions. Apart from some uncouth members of the working and the fashionable classes, who are incapable of making such subtle distinctions, what brings people together is not shared opinion but a latent propensity of mind. Despite his fondness for the classics, an Academician of the likes of Legouvé may still approve Maxime Du Camp’s or Mézières’s eulogy of the Romantic Victor Hugo more than Claudel’s of the classical Boileau. Though a shared jingoism may be enough to endear Barrès to those who vote for him, and who probably see little difference between him and M. Georges Berry, more would be required to endear him to those of his colleagues in the Académie Française who, despite sharing his political opinions, have a different cast of mind, and will thus prefer adversaries such as M. Ribot and M. Deschanel; and the latter pair of Republicans may be favored by staunch monarchists over Maurras and Léon Daudet, despite the fact that these two are also supporters of a restoration of the throne. M. de Norpois was a man of few words, not only by virtue of the diplomatist’s habits of prudence and reserve, but also because words have a greater worth, and more subtle shades of meaning, for men whose efforts over a decade to bring together two countries may amount to a single adjective in a speech or a protocol, but in which, unremarkable though it may appear, they can read volumes. At the Select Committee, on which M. de Norpois was one of my father’s fellow members, and where the others saw him as very standoffish, they constantly congratulated my father on the friendliness shown toward him by the former ambassador. My father was as surprised as they were by this friendliness. Being himself of a less than sociable disposition, he was used to having few relationships outside his immediate circle, and made no secret of it. He was aware that the diplomatist’s good opinion of him was no more than an effect of that personal idiosyncrasy which biases each of us for or against those we like or dislike, against which no qualities of intellect or sensitivity in a person who irritates or bores us will outweigh the straightforwardness and the lightheartedness we enjoy in someone else whom others would see as vacuous, flippant, and insignificant. “It’s quite remarkable—Norpois is taking me out to dinner again! It’s the talk of the Select Committee! A man who doesn’t cultivate personal relations with anybody! I expect he’ll pass on some more of his revelations about the Franco-Prussian War.” My father was aware that M. de Norpois had been perhaps the only one to warn Napoleon III about Prussia’s growing power and warlike intentions, and that Bismarck had a high regard for his intelligence. And quite recently, during the state visit of King Theodosius, the newspapers had commented on the sovereign’s lengthy conversation with M. de Norpois at the command performance at the Opéra. “I must find out whether that state visit was really important,” said my father, who was greatly interested in foreign affairs. “I know old Norpois is very tight-lipped. But he has a nice way of opening up with me.”

As for my mother, the ambassador’s intelligence may not, of itself, have been quite the kind to which she would have been most attracted. I must say M. de Norpois’s conversation was such a complete catalogue of outmoded speech forms belonging to the style of a particular career, class, and period—a period which, for that career and class, may not have quite ended yet—that I sometimes regret not having simply written down statements I heard him utter. It would have been an easy way of achieving an outdated effect, rather like the actor from the Théâtre du Palais-Royal who, when asked where on earth he found such bizarre hats, replied, “I don’t find ’em—I keep ’em.” To tell the truth, I think my mother saw M. de Norpois as rather behind the times; not that this irked her in a man’s manners; but it certainly would have been less to her taste in his ways of expressing himself, if not in the ideas he voiced, those of M. de Norpois being actually quite up to the minute. However, she felt that she was subtly pleasing her husband by expressing admiration of the diplomat who had so singled him out. By strengthening in my father’s mind the high opinion he had of M. de Norpois, and thereby also fostering in him a higher opinion of himself, she felt she was fulfilling the wifely duty of making life sweet for her husband, just as she did when she saw to the excellence of the cooking and the quietness of the servants. Being incapable of lying to my father, she did her best to admire the ambassador, so as to be able to praise him in all sincerity. She did, in any case, take an honest pleasure in his kind manner, his slightly old-fashioned courtesy (which made him such a stickler for ceremony that, if he caught sight of my mother passing in a carriage while he was striding along with his upright gait, he would even throw away a cigar he had just lit before doffing his hat to her), his deliberate manner in conversation, referring as seldom as possible to himself, and always attending to whatever might please his hearer, and his punctuality in sending off a reply to a letter, which was so striking that if my father, having just written to him, recognized M. de Norpois’s hand on an envelope, his impulse was to believe that their letters had unfortunately crossed in the post—it was almost as if the post office arranged extra collections for his special convenience. It never occurred to my mother, who marveled that a man could be so punctilious though so busy, so attentive though so widely connected, that every “although” hides an unrecognized “because,” and that (just as the old are always “remarkable for their age,” kings never lose “the common touch,” and provincials are always “up with everything that’s going on”) M. de Norpois’s different abilities—to have so many irons in the fire yet to be so orderly in his replies, to be all things to all men yet still be nice to us—were rooted in common habits. Furthermore, as with all those who are too modest, my mother’s mistake came from the fact that she always ranked her own interests below those of others, and thus saw them as quite separate from others’. In seeing proof of considerateness in the letter dashed off by my father’s friend, a man who wrote so many letters in a day, she failed to see that it was only a single one among those many; just as it did not enter her head that for him to dine at our table was no more than one act among the countless acts making up his social life, that the ambassador had long been accustomed by the diplomatic career to seeing the honoring of invitations to dinner as part of his functions, and to displaying to that end an ingrained graciousness which he should not be expected to put aside just because for once he was dining with us.

The first occasion when M. de Norpois came to dinner, at a time when I was still playing at the Champs-Élysées, has stayed in my memory because that very afternoon I had at last been to see La Berma, in a matinee performance of Phèdre; and also because, in chatting with M. de Norpois, I realized suddenly and in a new way how different were the feelings aroused in me by everything connected to Gilberte Swann and her parents from the feelings aroused by the same family in all other people.

One day my mother, who had presumably noticed my dejection at the imminence of the New Year holidays, during which, as Gilberte herself had told me, it would be impossible for me to see her, said to me, “If you’re still so keen on seeing La Berma, I think your father might allow you to go. Grandma could take you.”

It was because M. de Norpois had urged my father, who till then had been quite opposed to my wasting my time and possibly even falling ill just for the sake of what he called, giving umbrage to my grandmother, “stuff and nonsense,” to let me go and see La Berma, as it would be something for a young man to remember, that he had almost come to see the outing to the theater, now that it was advised by the ambassador, as a sort of prescribed activity among certain others deemed vaguely essential for anyone hoping to achieve a brilliant career. My grandmother, who had forgone on my behalf the benefit she believed I would have derived from seeing La Berma, and who saw this great sacrifice as justified in the interest of my health, was astonished to learn that, at a single word from M. de Norpois, this interest turned out to be of no significance. Rationalist that she was, she placed invincible trust in the regimen of fresh air and early bedtimes which had been prescribed for me; and, seeing my intended departure from it as a disaster, she said sadly to my father, “How irresponsible you can be.” To which he barked, “What! You mean you don’t want him to go now? Well, that’s rich! You were the one who kept saying how much good it would do him!”

My father’s ambitions for me had been altered by M. de Norpois in another particular, of much greater importance to me. My father had always looked forward to seeing me enter the diplomatic corps; and I could not bear the thought that, even if I was to remain in Paris for a while attached to the Ministry, I must risk being packed off one day to serve as an ambassador in capital cities where Gilberte would never live. I would have preferred to take up again the literary ambitions which I had once cherished, then given up, during my walks along the Guermantes way. But my father had constantly opposed the idea of my embarking upon a career in writing, which he saw as far inferior to diplomacy, even denying that it could count as a career, until the day when M. de Norpois, who rather looked down on the newer generation of diplomats, assured him that it was perfectly possible for a writer to enjoy as much esteem, and to exercise as much influence, as any diplomat, while retaining more independence.

“Well, who’d have believed it!” my father said. “Old Norpois’s got nothing against the idea that you might make a career in literature.” Being himself quite influential, he believed there was nothing that could not be sorted out and favorably resolved by a chat between important men. “I’ll bring him home to dinner one of these nights after a session at the Select Committee. You can have a chat with him and he’ll be able to form some opinion of you. So just write something nice that you can show him. He’s a great friend of the editor of the Revue des deux mondes, you know. He could get you in there, he could look after it for you, he’s a pretty sharp old fellow. I must say, he doesn’t sound greatly enamored of the diplomatic career nowadays.”

The blissful prospect of not being parted from Gilberte made me eager, but not able, to write a fine piece that could be shown to M. de Norpois. From sheer boredom, the pen dropped from my hand after a few preliminary pages; and I dissolved in tears of rage at the thought that I would never have any talent, that I was not gifted, that I could not even turn M. de Norpois’s imminent visit to the advantage of remaining forever in Paris. The only thing that cheered me a little was the knowledge that I was going to be allowed to see La Berma. But, just as the only storms I longed to see were those that raged along the wildest shores, so I wished to see the great actress only in one of those classical parts in which Swann had assured me she rose to the sublime. When our wish to be touched by nature or art is prompted by the hope of a grandiose revelation, we are loath to let it be replaced by lesser impressions, which might mislead us as to the true value of Beauty. La Berma in Racine’s Andromaque or Phèdre, in Les Caprices de Marianne by Musset, these were the stirring things that I had gloated on in imagination. I knew that if I could ever hear La Berma deliver the speech beginning

 

It is said, Sire, that a prompt departure must take you away, etc.² my delight would be the same as when I could step out of a gondola, to stand in front of the Titian in the Frari or the Carpaccios in San Giorgio degli Schiavoni. My acquaintance with these lines of Racine’s was in black and white, as mere print on the pages of books; but now my heart beat faster at the thought that I would soon see them in the warm, sunny glow shed on them by the Golden Voice. A Carpaccio in Venice, La Berma in Phèdre, were masterworks of pictorial or dramatic art; and the glamour that surrounded them gave them such vital force, and made them so indivisible into their parts, that if I had had to look at Carpaccios in a room at the Louvre, or see La Berma in a play that I had never heard of, I would never have felt that delight of amazement at being face-to-face at last with the unique and ungraspable object of so many thousands of dreams. Also, in my expectation that La Berma’s acting would give me a revelation about nobility and grief, I had the impression that everything great and true in her acting was bound to become greater and truer if she put it into a work of genuine worth, instead of embroidering Truth and Beauty on the coarse cloth of some valueless vulgarity.

In any case, seeing her in a new play would make it difficult for me to appreciate her skill and diction, as I would be unable to distinguish between the unfamiliar text and all the intonations and gestures which, although she had added them, would seem to belong inseparably to it; whereas the classical texts I knew by heart were like broad surfaces, already designated and prepared, awaiting only the fluent frescoes that La Berma would lavish upon them and the unconstrained appreciation with which I would greet the inexhaustible felicities of her inspiration. Unfortunately, she had abandoned the classical stage and its repertoire years before, and was now the star and mainstay of a more popular theater; and however often I went to look at the posters, the only plays they ever advertised were recent ones, tailor-made for her by modish authors. Then, one morning, as I scanned the Morris column for the matinees being given during the first week in January, I saw for the first time a program which, after a presumably insignificant curtain-raiser, whose title seemed opaque because it was full of the proceedings of a plot that was unknown to me, promised as the final item Mme Berma in two acts of Phèdre; and for the following matinees, it specified Dumas’s Le Demi-Monde and Musset’s Les Caprices de Marianne, titles that to my eye, like Phèdre, were transparent, full of nothing but illumination, because the works were so well known to me, glowing through and through with the smile of Art. They seemed to add nobility to La Berma herself, once I had read in the newspapers, after the programs for these matinees, a mention that it was she herself who had decided to make a public appearance once again in some of her time-honored parts. Clearly, the artiste knew that in certain roles there is an interest which outlasts the novelty of their first appearances, or the success of their revivals, and that her own interpretation made them into museum pieces, which it might be instructive to display again to a generation who had once admired her in them, or to reveal to another which had not. By having Phèdre advertised among other plays, which were intended only to while away an evening, its title neither printed in special characters nor occupying more space than the others, she gave it a touch of the understatement used by a hostess who, as she introduces you to your fellow guests just as you are all about to go in to dinner, includes among the names that are merely names, and in the same tone of voice in which she has announced all the others, “M. Anatole France.”

My doctor, the one who had forbidden me all travel, advised my parents against letting me go to the theater: afterward, and possibly for a long time, I would be sure to be ill; the net result for me would be more pain than pleasure. I might have been dissuaded by such a fear, if what I expected from the matinee had been a mere pleasure that could be canceled by the counterbalance of subsequent pain. But what I did expect from it—as from the journeys I had longed to make to Balbec and Venice—was something far beyond a pleasure: it was access to truths which dwelt in a realer world than I did, truths which, once glimpsed, could never be taken from me by any of the nugatory incidents making up my futile existence, however painful they might be to my body. Any pleasure to be had from the performance seemed to me no more than the possibly inevitable form which the glimpsing of these truths must take; and this was enough for me to hope the predicted sickness would hold off until the end of the matinee, so that the pleasure might not be jeopardized or vitiated. I badgered my parents, who, since the doctor’s pronouncement, no longer wanted me to go to see Phèdre. I kept reciting the speech

It is said, Sire, that a prompt departure must take you away ...

trying to put all possible intonations into it, the better to enjoy the unexpected one that La Berma would be sure to employ. By day and by night my mind was haunted by the knowledge of the divine Beauty which her acting would be bound to reveal, hidden like the Holy of Holies by the impenetrable veil, behind which I imagined it in constantly changing guises, according to whichever of Bergotte’s images recurred to my mind from his little study of Racine, which Gilberte had managed to find for me—“her noble plasticity,” “the white garb of Christian penitence,” “her Jansenist pallor,” “this Princess of Clèves and of Troezen,” “this Mycenaean melodrama,” “a Delphic symbol,” “a solar myth”—and it was the reckless severity of my parents that was to decide whether or not in this mind of mine, where her altar was perpetually lit, the perfections of the Goddess would stand unveiled forever at the very spot where now stood her invisible form. With my gaze fixed on the unimaginable figure, I had to struggle all day long against the obstacles raised by my family. Then, once these obstacles had fallen, and once my mother, despite the fact that the matinee was on the very day of the Select Committee session after which my father was to bring M. de Norpois home to dinner, had said to me, “Look, we don’t want you to be sad. If you really think you’ll enjoy it so much, you’d better go,” now that it was up to me to decide on the outing to the theater which had previously been forbidden, now that I was free of the need to make sure it should cease to be impossible, I began to wonder whether it was desirable, whether reasons other than my parents’ prohibition should not perhaps make me choose to stay at home. For one thing, having hated their cruelty to me, I now loved them so much for their kindness that the idea of saddening them saddened me; the point of existence seemed no longer to be the seeking for truth, but the finding of fondness; and life as a good or a bad thing could only be judged by whether my parents were happy or unhappy. “If you’re going to worry about it,” I said to my mother, “I’d really rather not go.” She, however, did her best to scotch the notion that she might be unhappy, saying that it could spoil my enjoyment of Phèdre, which had been their main consideration in changing their minds about the outing. But now that I seemed to be under an obligation to enjoy myself, I found it rather irksome. What if I did fall ill afterward? Would I get better by the end of the holidays, and be able to go back to the Champs-Élysées as soon as Gilberte returned? In the hope of deciding which to choose, I weighed against all these reasons the veiled invisibility of La Berma’s perfections. On one side of the scales, I put “knowing Mama’s worrying, me not being able to go to the Champs-Élysées”; and on the other, “her Jansenist pallor” and the “solar myth.” But the words themselves gradually grew darker in my mind, and lost all weight and meaning for me; my hesitations became so painful that the only reason I could have had now for choosing to go to the theater would have been to put an end to them, to be rid of them for good. And by going so as to cut short my sufferings, rather than to seek perfection and derive intellectual benefit, I would have been going not to the gentle Goddess once imagined, but to some implacable, faceless, nameless Divinity who had surreptitiously taken the other’s place behind the veil. Then, all at once, everything changed, and my longing to see La Berma act was revived by something that made me look forward to the matinee with joy and impatience. As though turned into a stylite, I had gone to my Morris column, a daily activity which of late had become very painful, and there I had seen the first detailed poster for Phèdre itself, still damp with paste, which, though the other members of the cast offered nothing that could help me decide whether to go or not to go, did give to one of the rewards of my contending urges a more concrete form, and a kind of imminence that made it seem on the very point of becoming a reality: as the poster showed the date not of the day when I stood there reading it, but of the day when the matinee would be performed, and even the time when the curtain would rise, I was suddenly inspired by the happy thought that, on that day, at that very hour, I would be sitting in my seat ready to see La Berma; and in the fear that there might not be time now for my parents to book two good seats for my grandmother and myself, I ran all the way home, full of the magic of the words that had displaced “her Jansenist pallor” and the “solar myth” in my imagination: Ladies wearing hats may not sit in the stalls. The doors will be closed at two o’clock sharp.

This first matinee was, alas, a great disappointment. My father had suggested giving my grandmother and myself a lift to the theater, which was on his way to the Select Committee. As he left the house, he said to my mother, “You’ll make sure it’s a nice dinner tonight, won’t you? Remember, Norpois’s coming home with me.” She had not forgotten. Since the day before, Françoise, glad to be practicing the cook’s art, for which she had a definite gift, inspired by the coming of a new guest, and knowing she was required to compose, in accordance with methods known only to herself, a dish of beef in aspic, had been living in a flurry of artistic creativity. Like Michelangelo spending eight months in the mountains of Carrara, selecting the most perfect blocks of marble for the tomb of Pope Julius II, Françoise, who attached extreme importance to the inherent quality of the materials out of which her masterpieces were to be wrought, had been down to Les Halles in person more than once to choose the finest slabs of rump steak, the best shin of beef and calf’s foot. She threw herself so strenuously into this pursuit that my mother, seeing our old servant turn red in the face, feared that, as the sculptor of the Medici tombs had sickened in the quarries at Pietrasanta, she might make herself ill from overwork. The day before, Françoise had sent down to the oven of the local baker what she called “a Nev York ham,” looking like pink marble inside its coating of breadcrumbs. In the belief that the language was poorer than it is, and her own ears less reliable than they were, the first time Françoise had heard of “York ham,” she must have deduced that the lexicon could not possibly be so abundant as to allow for both York and New York, that she had misheard, and that the right name was the one she already knew. Hence, ever since, the name of York was always preceded, for Françoise’s ears and eyes, by the word “New,” which she pronounced “Nev.” So it was with total sincerity that she would say to her scullery maid, “Go down to Olida’s and get some ham. Ma’am particularly said she wants the Nev York.” On the day in question, while Françoise’s state of mind was the burning certainty of the great creators, my own was the thankless anxiety of the seeker after truth. To be sure, right up until the moment when I saw La Berma act, I enjoyed the day. I enjoyed it in the little garden outside the theater, where, two hours later, the gas lamps, once lit, would cover the leafless horse-chestnuts in a metallic sheen and illuminate the details of their branches; I enjoyed it in the lobby, faced with the box-office staff, whose selection, promotion, and fate all depended on the great artiste whose word was law in that theater, in which there was an obscure succession of temporary and purely nominal managers; I enjoyed it as they took our tickets without a glance at us, in their anxiety to be sure that each and every requirement of Mme Berma’s had been definitely made known to the new employees, that the hired clappers must never applaud her, that windows had to stay open till she was onstage, but that every single door must then be closed, that a pitcher of hot water must be concealed near her, so as to keep down the dust—and sure enough, any moment now her carriage and long-maned pair would draw up in front of the theater, she would step down wrapped in her furs, favor those who greeted her with a moody wave of the hand, then send one of her ladies-in-waiting to check that her friends had been allotted the proper stage box, to see that the house temperature was right, find out who was in the best boxes tonight, inspect the attendants, for the theater and the audience were no more than an outer garment which she put on, the medium of greater or lesser conductivity through which her talent had to pass. I even enjoyed it inside the auditorium; since learning that all the spectators looked at the same stage, unlike what my childish imagination had long pictured, I had supposed that so many people must make it as difficult for each of them to see as it is when one stands among a crowd; but now I realized that, because of the layout of the theater, which is in a way symbolic of perception itself, each person has the impression of being at the center; and this explained why Françoise, having been treated to a seat in the gods at a melodrama, had told us hers had been the best seat in the house and that, instead of feeling remote from the stage, she had been intimidated by the proximity of the curtain, which had seemed a mysterious living thing. I enjoyed it even more when, from behind the curtain, I began to hear sounds as vague and strange as those heard from inside the shell of an egg when a chick is about to emerge; they soon grew louder, until, suddenly, from that world which our eye could not penetrate but which could see us, they became three portentous strokes,³ clearly intended for us, and as thrilling as a message from Mars. The curtain having risen, my enjoyment continued at the sight of a writing table and a fireplace, both of them quite nondescript actually, which obviously meant that any individuals who might come in would not be actors turning up to speak lines, like some I had once seen at a party, but just people in their own home, engaged in living a day of their lives, on which I happened to be eavesdropping. My pleasure was interrupted by a moment’s unease: just as I was looking forward to the beginning of the play, a couple of bad-tempered men came walking across the stage, raising their voices enough for everyone in that thousand-strong audience to make out every word, whereas when two customers start scuffling and shouting in a small café you have to ask the waiter what they are saying; but at that same instant, in my surprise that everyone else was paying polite attention to them, all sitting submerged in unanimous silence, the surface of which was now and then broken by a ripple of laughter, I realized that this rude pair of intruders were the actors, and that the short play called a curtain-raiser had just begun. It was followed by an interval which went on for so long that the audience, having come back in, began to express their impatience by stamping their feet on the floor. I was alarmed at this; for, just as, when I read in a report of a trial that a man of courage and honor was to jeopardize his own interests by giving evidence in defense of an innocent man,⁴ I dreaded the thought that people might not treat him well, that his act might not be properly acknowledged, that he might not be handsomely rewarded, and that in his disgust he might even join the forces of injustice; so, equating genius with virtue, I was afraid that La Berma might take umbrage at the bad manners of such an uncouth audience (among whom I would have much preferred her to be able to recognize and draw comfort from a few celebrities whose good judgment she valued) and express her displeasure and disdain for them by acting badly. I gazed about me as though to implore these stamping savages not to trample underfoot the fragile, precious impression that had brought me there. The final vestiges of my enjoyment lasted until the opening scenes of the performance of Phèdre. The character of Phèdre does not appear in those early scenes of act II; and yet, no sooner had the curtain gone up, and the red velvet of another curtain had been partly opened, so as to double the depth of the stage, as was done in all the star’s performances, than there entered upstage an actress who looked and sounded exactly as I had been led to believe La Berma would. They must have changed the cast! All my careful study of the part of Theseus’ wife was pointless! But then a second actress engaged in a dialogue with the first one—I must have been mistaken in thinking she was La Berma, as this newcomer looked even more like the star and came much closer to her diction! Both of them now enhanced their speeches with noble gestures—which were clear and recognizably relevant to the text, as they lifted the folds of their fine robes—and with ingenious intonations, fraught with passion or irony, which showed me shades and depths in lines I had read at home without paying enough attention to what they meant. Then, suddenly, a woman appeared between the parted curtains of the inner sanctum, standing there as though within a frame, and instantly—from the fear that filled me, much more acute than any La Berma might have felt, at the prospect of someone opening a window, spoiling her delivery of a line by rustling a program, upsetting her by applauding her fellow actors, or by not applauding her enough, and from the effort of concentration, also greater than hers, which forced me from that moment on to sense the auditorium, the audience, the actors, the play, and even my own person as nothing but an acoustical medium, of importance only insofar as it might enrich the modulations of that voice—I realized that the pair of actresses whom I had been admiring for some minutes past bore not the slightest resemblance to the one I was there to see and hear. But at the same time, all my enjoyment had dissipated: however hard I strained toward her with my eyes, ears, and mind, so as not to miss a single scrap of the incentives she would offer me to admire her, I could not manage to find any. I could not even perceive in her diction or use of movement, as I had with the other actresses, any sensitivity of tone or delicacy of gesture. I sat there and listened to her as I might have read Phèdre, or as though at that moment Phèdre herself was saying the things I was hearing, without La Berma’s talent seeming to add anything at all to them. I wished I could arrest and hold motionless before me each of her intonations, freeze each of the changing expressions on her face, so as to study them in depth and find out what was beautiful in them; at least I tried, by using all my mental agility, by having my whole attention at the ready and focused on a line just before its delivery, not to waste in preliminaries any iota of the time taken by each word or gesture, in the hope of being able, by sheer intensity of attention, to absorb each of them as I might have done if I had been able to hold them before me for hours on end. But the time they occupied was so short! My ear had barely registered each sound when it was replaced by the following one. In one scene, where La Berma stands still for a moment against a backdrop of the sea, with one arm raised to face level, and her whole figure given a greenish tint by an effect of the lighting, the audience had no sooner burst into applause than she changed position and the tableau I wished I could study closely disappeared. I told my grandmother I could not see very well, and she lent me her opera glasses. But when you believe in the reality of things, using an artificial means to see them better is not quite the same as feeling closer to them. I felt it was not La Berma that I was seeing, only an enlarged picture of her. I put the glasses down—but what if the image received by the naked eye was no more accurate, given that it was an image reduced by distance? Which was the true Berma? When she reached Phèdre’s declaration of desire for Hippolyte, a part I had been specially looking forward to, because the diction of Oenone and Aricie kept revealing unsuspected subtleties in parts that were not as fine as it, I was sure her intonations would be more striking than any I had contrived to imagine while reading the play at home: but she did not even rise to the effects that the other two actresses would have managed; she blurred the whole speech into a toneless recitative, blunting the keen edges of contrasts which any semi-competent performer, even a girl in a school production, could hardly have failed to bring out; and she gabbled through it at such speed that it was not until she reached the closing line that my mind became aware of the deliberate monotone in which she had delivered the opening ones.

At length I felt a first surge of admiration within me—it was brought on by a sudden outburst of frantic clapping from the other members of the audience. I clapped and clapped too, keeping on as long as possible, in the hope that La Berma might excel herself out of gratitude, and I could then be certain of having seen her on one of her best days. The remarkable thing is that the moment when that storm of applause broke out was, as I later learned, one of those when her acting was at its most inspired. Certain transcendent realities seem to give off a sort of radiation which the crowd can pick up. From the unclear reports of certain great events, such as a danger threatening an army on a national frontier, a defeat or a great victory, the educated man may be unable to make much sense, but the crowd thrills with an excitement which surprises him and which, once he has been authoritatively informed of the military situation, he recognizes as their perception of that “aura” surrounding events of great moment and visible from hundreds of miles away. We learn of a victory either after the war is over, or at once from the janitor’s jubilation. A touch of genius in the acting of La Berma is revealed to us by the reviews a week after we have seen her onstage, or by the cheers from the back stalls. But as this immediate communal responsiveness also expresses itself in many mistaken outbursts, here people usually applauded at the wrong moments; and the waves of clapping were often mechanical consequences of previous applause, just as in a gale the waves may go on rising, once the surface of the sea is disturbed enough, even though the wind is no stronger. So, the longer I went on clapping, the better La Berma’s acting seemed to have become. “Say what you like,” a rather common woman sitting nearby said, “you’ve got to admit she throws herself into it. She really hits herself, you know. And she runs around! That’s real acting!” Relieved to learn of these grounds for believing in the genius of La Berma—though suspecting they were as inadequate to account for it as were the words of the peasant on seeing the Mona Lisa or Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus: “Well, it’s pretty good, isn’t it? It’s all gold! Good stuff, huh? A lot of work went into that!”—I let the cheap wine of this popular enthusiasm go to my head. Even so, once the curtain had fallen, I was aware of being disappointed that the enjoyment I had longed for had not been greater, but also of wishing that, such as it was, it would continue, and that I was not obliged to leave behind me forever, as I walked out of the auditorium, this life of the theater in which I had just shared for a few hours. To part from it and go straight home would have been as heartrending as going into exile, had I not looked forward to learning a lot about La Berma from the admirer of hers to whom I owed the fact of having been allowed to go and see Phèdre, M. de Norpois. To introduce me, my father called me into his study before dinner. When I entered the room, the former ambassador stood up, bowed from his full height, gave me his hand and the careful scrutiny of his blue eyes. During his period as France’s representative abroad, with each passing stranger introduced to him (all of them, not excluding well-known singers, being people of more or less note, of whom he knew as he met them that he would be able to say, if he should happen in the future to hear mention of their names in Paris or Saint Petersburg, that he well remembered the evening spent in their company in Munich or Sofia), he had cultivated the habit of making a show of affability, so as to let them see how pleased he was to make their acquaintance; and, in his belief that life in capital cities, where one is thrown into constant contact both with the personalities of interest who pass through and with the customs of the local population, affords one a thorough knowledge of history, of geography, of the ways of different peoples and of the intellectual life of Europe, which no book can give, he also turned upon every newcomer his acute proficiency in observation, so as to see for himself what manner of man he was dealing with. It was a long time since the government had appointed him to a post in a foreign capital; but when people were introduced to him, his eyes, as though they had not been notified of his removal from the active list, still took up their work of profitable observation, while his whole demeanor set about assuring such persons that their names were not unknown to him. So, as M. de Norpois spoke to me with the kindly and important air of the man who is aware of his own vast experience, he examined me with a perceptive curiosity calculated to derive all possible benefit from me, as though I were some outlandish custom, an instructive landmark, or a star on a foreign tour. In this, he treated me with both the majestic considerateness of wise Mentor and the studious curiosity of young Anacharsis.

However, he made me no promise of good offices with the Revue des deux mondes, although he did ask me certain questions on my past life and studies, as well as on the things I liked, this being the first time anybody had mentioned such things in a way which, instead of giving me the idea that it was my duty to resist them, suggested they might be perfectly respectable. Seeing that I was inclined toward literature, M. de Norpois, rather than try to put me off it, spoke of it with deference, as though it were a charming dowager whose select company one remembers well from having been admitted to it in Rome or Dresden, and whom one would be glad to see more of, were it not for the unavoidable impediments of life. More favored and freer than himself, I could be sure of having a good time with her, or so a hint of envious naughtiness in his smile seemed to suggest. But the very words he used showed me that Literature was utterly different from the image I had had of it in Combray; and I realized how right I had been to abandon all notion of it. Until that moment, my only thought had been that I had no gift for writing; but M. de Norpois now freed me of the very urge to write. I tried to explain what my dreams had been; I was trembling with emotion, in my anxiety to find the most accurate words to express what I had felt but had never before tried to put into words; and that was why what I did say was so garbled. It may have been a professional habit with him, it may have been the acquired composure of any important man being asked for advice who, knowing that control of the conversation remains in his hands, lets you meander about and exhaust yourself looking for the best words, or it may have been to display at its best the style of his head, which he saw as Grecian notwithstanding his great muttonchop whiskers, but M. de Norpois, while you held forth, kept as straight a face as if you were haranguing an ancient (and stone-deaf) bust in the Glyptothek at Munich or Copenhagen. Then, as conclusive as an auctioneer’s gavel or the Oracle at Delphi, his voice as he replied struck you with unexpected force, nothing in his expression having let you guess at the effect you had been making, or what view he would give.

“Quite,” he said suddenly, as though the matter was closed, having let me flounder about under his unmoving stare. “I know of the case of the son of a friend of mine who, mutatis mutandis, is just like you.” (His tone, as he spoke of our shared hankerings after the writing life, was reassuring, as though we had a predisposition toward rheumatism rather than literature, and he wanted me to know it was not fatal.) “So he preferred to leave the Quai d’Orsay, despite the fact that, thanks to his father, his career path was clear, and then, without caring so much as a fig for any views others might have on the matter, he started to publish. He is not likely to repine at having done so, believe you me. Two years ago now, he wrote a book—he’s a good bit older than yourself, of course—on the Sentiment of the Infinite on the western shore of Lake Victoria Nyanza, and then, this very year, a work of lesser scope, but still written with a nimble—nay, sometimes a sharp—nib, on the repeating rifle in the Bulgarian army, and these two productions have really put him in a class all his own. So he has already gone a fair way. He’s not a man to do things by halves, and I can assure you that, though no firm nomination of him for the Académie des Sciences Morales is yet being envisaged, his name has cropped up once or twice in conversation, and that in a manner far from disadvantageous to him. In a word, though it would be untrue to say he has yet scaled the highest peak, it must be said that, by dint of meritorious endeavor, he has contrived to make a pretty fine position for himself, and that his worthy efforts have been duly crowned by success—for success, you know, does not always go to the muddleheads and scatterbrains of this world, or indeed to the upsetters of applecarts, who usually turn out to be in it for show, anyway.”

By this time, my father had no doubt I would be a member of the Académie in a very few years; and his satisfaction was increased when M. de Norpois, after a momentary pause in which he appeared to ponder the consequences of such an act, handed me a card and said, “Go and see him, tell him I sent you—I warrant he’ll have some good advice to give you,” words which caused me as much heartache and alarm as if he had told me I was to be taken on, the very next day, as a cabin boy on a clipper.

I had inherited from my aunt Léonie, as well as many more objects and furniture than I knew what to do with, almost the whole of her money, the posthumous display of an affection for me which I had never noticed while she lived. My father, who was charged with managing this money until I came of age, sought M. de Norpois’s advice on a certain number of investments. M. de Norpois recommended certain low-yield stocks that he looked on as rock-solid, notably English Consolidated and the Russian 4 percents: “With first-rate stocks like those, though the return may not be very high, at least you are sure that your capital will never suffer.” My father told him succinctly about the other stock he had bought. M. de Norpois’s smile of congratulation was all but imperceptible: like all rentiers, he saw money as a desirable thing, but deemed it tactful to restrict his compliments on what anyone owned to a veiled glance of understanding; also, being himself hugely wealthy, he believed good taste required him to appear impressed by the lesser incomes of others, while enjoying a quiet reminder of the superiority of his own. However, he did not hesitate to congratulate my father on the “composition” of his portfolio, “very stylish, very neat, very handsome.” It sounded as though he endowed the differences between the market values of shares, and even the shares themselves, with something like aesthetic merit. When my father mentioned one of these securities, quite a new one, not very well known, M. de Norpois, like the man who has read a book that you thought you were the only one to have read, said, “Yes, yes! I enjoyed following it in the Share List—good buy, wasn’t it?” And he smiled with the reminiscent appreciation of the subscriber to a review who has read its latest serialized novel, installment by installment. “I would not advise you against buying up some of the issue to be floated in the coming days. It’s very tempting, they’re offering the shares at attractive prices.” My father, referring to certain older stocks but not quite remembering their names, which were easily confused with other, similar ones, opened a drawer and showed the ambassador the certificates themselves. I was delighted by the appearance of them, all decorated with cathedral spires and allegorical figures, looking like old publications from the Romantic period that I had once looked at. All the productions of a particular time look alike; the artists who illustrate the poems of a certain period are the same ones who are employed by its banking houses. There is nothing more evocative of certain episodes of Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, or works by Gérard de Nerval, as I used to see them displayed outside the grocery store in Combray, than the river divinities wielding the beflowered rectangle that frames a stock certificate issued by the Compagnie des Eaux.

My father’s attitude toward my type of mind was scorn sufficiently diluted by affection for his reaction to whatever I did to be, on the whole, blind indulgence. So he had no hesitation in sending me to fetch a little prose poem I had written one year at Combray, on the way home from an outing. I had written it in a state of exhilaration which I felt it must directly convey to anyone who read it. But my exhilaration must have failed to touch M. de Norpois; and he handed it back to me without a word.

My mother, who was full of respect for any of my father’s occupations, came in to ask shyly whether it was time for her to have dinner served. She was reluctant to interrupt any conversation in which she was not supposed to be participating. So my father went on reminding the Marquis of some useful measure or other which they had decided to support at the next meeting of the Select Committee, in that special tone of voice used by two professional colleagues (or two classmates) who, though out of their usual element, and in the presence of others who are not privy to the shared experiences of their other life, speak of these experiences, while apologizing for doing so.

The state of total independence from his facial muscles in which M. de Norpois lived enabled him to listen while not seeming to hear. My father, having stumbled through a longish preamble, eventually had to grope for a word: “So I had been thinking I might just ask for, you know, the views of the Select Committee ...” Whereupon, from the countenance of the aristocratic virtuoso, who had been sitting as still as an instrumentalist awaiting his turn to play, there came, with perfect attack and a smooth delivery, in a sharpened pitch and sounding as though finishing a phrase just begun, but in a different tone-coloring, the words, “... of which, of course, you will not hesitate to convene a meeting, given that each and every one of its members is personally known to you and can come in at any moment.” In itself, this completion was hardly remarkable. But the unmoving posture that had preceded it gave it the sudden crystal clarity, the almost mischievous surprise of the phrases by which the piano, after its silent rests, makes its punctual little replies to the cello in a Mozart concerto.

As we went through to dinner, my father asked me, “So—did you enjoy the matinee?” so as to give me a chance to shine, and in the hope that my enthusiasm would find favor in the eyes of M. de Norpois; then, with the technical and conspiratorial tone of retrospective allusiveness which he used for referring to the sessions of the Select Committee, he added for the benefit of the diplomat, “He’s just been to see La Berma, you know. You remember we spoke of it.”

“You must have been delighted,” M. de Norpois said, “especially if you were seeing her for the first time. Your good father here was inclined to be anxious about the repercussions your little escapade might have on your state of health—I understand you’re rather delicate, not in the best of health. However, I reassured him. Theaters nowadays are not what they used to be, even just twenty years ago. I mean, one has more or less comfortable seats to sit in; and the air circulates a bit—though we still have a long way to go to equal Germany and England, which in that respect (as in many another!) have far outstripped us. I have never seen Mme Berma in Phèdre, but I have been told she is outstanding. It must, of course, have been a great thrill for you.”

M. de Norpois, being incomparably cleverer than I was, must be in possession of the truth that I had been unable to derive from La Berma’s acting! He would be able to reveal it to me. In answer to his question, I was going to beg him to tell me where that truth lay; and in so doing he would vindicate the desire that had urged me to go and see her. I had no more than a moment to take advantage of, to focus my inquiries on the salient points. But what were they? Concentrating my whole attention on my impressions, which were hopelessly confused, with no thought of shining or finding favor, but in the hope of getting from him the truth I sought, I made no effort to substitute set phrases for the words that failed me, I made no sense, and eventually, so as to have him say straight out what was so admirable about La Berma, I owned up to my disappointment.

“What’s that?” exclaimed my father, appalled at the poor impression my ineptness might make on M. de Norpois. “How can you say you didn’t enjoy it? Your grandmother told us you didn’t miss a word, that you just stared and stared at her, that nobody else in the whole audience lapped it up the way you did!”

“Well, yes, I was listening as hard as I could, to see what was so great about her. I mean, she’s very good ...”

“Well, then, if she’s very good, what more do you want?”

“One of the things which contribute most definitely to the success of Mme Berma,” said M. de Norpois, taking care to turn toward my mother, so as to bring her into the conversation and to fulfill punctiliously the duty of being courteous to one’s hostess, “is the impeccable taste she exercises in her choice of parts, which always ensures her a clear success, one that is thoroughly deserved. She rarely plays mediocre parts—I mean, here she is now as Phèdre. And one can see the same good taste in her costumes and in her acting. Even though she has made frequent and profitable tours to England and to America, the vulgarity—I won’t say of John Bull, that would be quite an unfair thing to say of the England of this Victorian era of ours—but the vulgarity of Uncle Sam seems not to have affected her. Never any colors that are too flagrant, never any exaggerated vocal effects. Just that wonderful voice, which serves her so well, which she uses to such good effect, which she plays on, I might almost say, like a musician on an instrument!”

My interest in La Berma’s acting, being no longer subject to the compression and constraints of reality, had gone on growing since the end of the performance. But I felt the need to find explanations for this interest, which, while she was onstage, had sated itself with equal intensity on all the rich complexities of real life, as she offered them to my eyes and ears, but without separating any of them or distinguishing anything. So there was some relief to be had in finding a reasonable cause for it in these praises of her as an unspoiled and tasteful artiste; it attracted them to itself by its own power of absorption; it latched on to them, as the drunken man in his bonhomie is moved to maudlin by the actions of a passerby. “He’s right, you know!” I thought. “What a lovely voice, what simple costumes! How clever of her to think of doing Phèdre ! Of course I’m not disappointed!”

The cold beef with carrots now made its appearance, laid out by the Michelangelo of our kitchen on great crystals of aspic that looked like blocks of transparent quartz.

“You have a chef of superlative quality, madame,” said M. de Norpois. “And that is a thing worthy of note. Speaking as one who has had to keep up a certain standard of such things in foreign parts, I know how difficult it can often be to find the perfect Vatel.⁵ I see you have prepared a sumptuous repast for your guest.”

It was true that Françoise, inspired by the challenge offered by a guest of such quality to create a dinner fraught with difficulties that for once were worthy of her, had taken pains of a sort she no longer took when we dined among ourselves, and had become once more the incomparable cook she had been in Combray days.

“Now, that is something you can’t get in any public eating establishment, not excluding the very best: a dish of braised beef, with aspic that doesn’t smell like glue, in which the meat has absorbed the flavor of the carrots—quite magnificent! Do allow me to have a little more,” he added, with a gesture that requested another helping of the aspic. “I would be interested to see how your Vatel would acquit himself of quite a different dish—beef Stroganoff, for example.”

To contribute his fair share to the enjoyment of the meal, M. de Norpois now served up for us several stories which his diplomatic colleagues were familiar with, some of them featuring the sesquipedalianism of a certain politician known for his preposterous utterances larded with mixed metaphors, others featuring the epigrammatic brevity of a diplomat who was a master of elegant Atticism. It was clear that M. de Norpois’s judgment of these two types of sentence was based on a criterion utterly unlike the one I applied to literature. I missed many niceties in his stories: I could see little difference between the clumsy sentences, which he accompanied with guffaws, and the others, which he thought were so fine. He was the kind of man who would have said of the books I liked, “So you fancy this sort of stuff, do you? Personally, I have to say I don’t see much in it, I’m not one of the initiated.” But I could have said the same thing to him: in a statement or a speech, I could not see what he saw as witty or what he thought was stupid, what was eloquence and what was bombast; and the lack of any apparent reason why one was good and the other bad meant that these literary standards struck me as most mysterious and obscure. The only deduction I could draw was that, in politics, it was a mark of superiority rather than inferiority to repeat what everybody else thought. Each time M. de Norpois used certain expressions, which were as trite as the newspapers in which he read them, and which he spoke with emphasis, one could sense that, by virtue of having been uttered by him, they became an act, and that this act would not go unnoticed.

My mother had been expecting the pineapple-and-truffle salad to be a great success. But the ambassador, after spending a moment exercising his penetrating gift of observation on the dish, ate the salad with complete diplomatic discretion and vouchsafed no opinion on it. My mother urged him to have some more; and as he did so, instead of offering the expected compliment, he said, “I cannot refuse, ma’am, since you have clearly issued an ukase.”

“We read in the ‘public prints,’ ” my father said, “that you had a long conversation with King Theodosius.”

“Quite. His Majesty, whose memory for faces is remarkable, was gracious enough to recall, when he noticed me in the front stalls, that I had had the honor of seeing him over a period of a few days at the Court of Bavaria, at a time when he had no thought of his Eastern throne—as you know, it fell to him as a result of a European congress; and he even had some serious hesitation about whether to accept it or not, as he saw it as not quite up to his lineage, which is the noblest in the whole of Europe, heraldically speaking. So an equerry brought me the command to go and greet His Majesty, and naturally I lost no time in complying.”

“And do you find the results of his visit satisfactory?”

“Completely and entirely! Mind you, one might well have harbored some misgivings about how well such a young monarch might comport himself in such difficult circumstances, especially given the delicate times we live in. Personally, I must say I had no qualms whatsoever about the sovereign’s political instincts. However, even my expectations were more than borne out. The toast he proposed at the Élysée—which wholly reliable sources have assured me was entirely his own work, from the first word to the last—was in every way worthy of the universal interest it has aroused. It can only be called a masterstroke. A daring one, I grant you, but one which events have fully vindicated. The traditions of diplomacy undoubtedly have their value, but in this case they had managed to create between his country and our own a staleness in the atmosphere, which was unhealthy for both of us. And, of course, one way to get a breath of fresh air—a way which one would obviously be loath to recommend, but which King Theodosius could afford to adopt—is to break windows! He did it with a fine humor, which delighted everyone, and an accuracy in the choice of words which showed he is the worthy descendant of that lineage of highly literate princes to which he belongs through his mother. Certainly, when he spoke of the ‘affinities’ linking his country to France, he used a word which, though it may not be of common currency in the lexicon of the chancellery, was singularly apt. As you can see,” he said, aiming the remark at me, “literature never goes amiss, even in diplomacy, even on a throne. I admit that the state of affairs had been recognized for a long time; and the relations between the two powers had become excellent. Still, it needed to be said. We had been hoping for some such word; the one used was selected with perfect taste; and you can see what an effect it has had. I for one applaud it wholeheartedly.”

“Your friend M. de Vaugoubert must have been very happy. He had been working at the rapprochement for years.”

“Yes, especially since His Majesty made a point of springing it on him by surprise, the sort of thing he is in the habit of doing, I may add. And it was a complete surprise for everybody, not excluding his own minister of foreign affairs, who, as I have been told, did not find it entirely to his taste. He is reported to have said quite unambiguously to someone who broached the matter with him, and in a loud enough voice to be heard by others, ‘I was neither consulted nor warned,’ giving clearly to understand that he took no share of responsibility for the event. It must be admitted that it has stirred up quite a fuss; and I should not care to wager,” he went on with a mischievous smile, “that certain colleagues of mine, who appear to make a virtue of sloth, have not been disturbed in their repose. As for Vaugoubert, you know he had been roundly attacked for his policy of rapprochement, which must have cut the man to the quick—and he’s so sensitive, he’s the soul of delicacy. I know what I’m saying, you know, for, though he’s very much my junior, I have had a great deal to do with him—we have been friends for many a year, and I know him well. Who wouldn’t know him, I ask you? The man’s soul is as clear as crystal. Actually, that’s the only fault one could find with him—it’s not necessary for a diplomatist to have a heart as transparent as his. Despite which, there’s talk of sending him to Rome, which would be a great step forward for him, but also a very great challenge. Between ourselves, I suspect that Vaugoubert, though he’s utterly devoid of ambition, would be very pleased if it was true, and has no desire to let that cup pass from him. If he does go to Rome, he may well turn out to be very successful. He’s the candidate favored by the Consulta; and I for one can see him being well suited, with that artistic bent of his, to the setting of the Farnese Palace and the Carracci gallery.⁶ One might think that nobody could dislike such a man, though it must be said there is a clique who are close to King Theodosius who are little more than the creatures of the Wilhelmstrasse,⁷ always acting in response to its suggestions, and who have definitely attempted to put a spoke in Vaugoubert’s wheel. He has had to contend not only with backstairs intrigues, but with the insults of hired scribblers who, with the cowardice of all stipendiary journalists, and though later they were the first to cry ‘Pax,’ had no objection to broadcasting the paltry accusations made against our representative by unprincipled men. Yes, for more than a month, the enemies of Vaugoubert were like a scalping party doing the war dance,” M. de Norpois said, stressing this term. “But forewarned, as we know, is forearmed, and he just kicked the insults aside,” he said, with even greater force, and a glare that made us stop eating for a moment. “As a fine old Arabian proverb puts it: ‘The dogs bark, the caravan moves on.’ ” M. de Norpois paused, watching us to see what effect this quotation would have on us. It had a great effect: his proverb was well known to us. All worthy men had been using it that year instead of “Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind,” which was in need of a rest, not being a hardy annual like “To labor and to seek for no reward.” The culture of these eminent men was of the alternating variety, usually triennial in its cycle. Not that the articles M. de Norpois wrote for the Revue des deux mondes would have appeared less than sound and well informed had he not deftly sprinkled these sayings throughout them. Even without the ornamentation which they added to his prose, the lay reader could instantly identify and acknowledge the career diplomat in the other type of expression that M. de Norpois could always be relied upon to place aptly in his articles: “The Court of Saint James was not slow to perceive the danger”; or “At Pevchesky Bridge, where an anxious eye was kept on the selfish yet astute policy of the Double-Headed Eagle, excitement now reached fever pitch”; or “A cry of alarm sounded in the Montecitorio”; or “This predictable double game carries the hallmark of the Ballhausplatz.”⁸ But what had led some to see in M. de Norpois not just the career diplomat but the man of higher culture was his studied way of using certain quotations, of which the unquestionable paradigm in those days was: “Show me sound policies and I’ll show you sound finances, as Baron Louis was fond of saying.” (This was before the time when we imported from the Far East “Victory goes to him who can hold out for a quarter hour longer than his opponent, as the Japanese say.”) It was this reputation as a man of letters, as well as a real genius for intrigue concealed behind a mask of indifference, that had got M. de Norpois elected to the Académie des Sciences Morales. There were those who became convinced that his rightful place was actually in the Académie Française on the day when, in his conviction that it was by strengthening our ties with Russia that we could reach an understanding with England, he did not hesitate to pen the following sentence: “Let this be well understood at the Quai d’Orsay, let it figure in all school geography books that do not make a point of saying so today, let every candidate at the baccalauréat who cannot repeat it be failed out of hand: all roads may lead to Rome, but the road which goes from Paris to London must of necessity pass through Saint Petersburg.”

“As a matter of fact,” M. de Norpois went on, talking to my father, “Vaugoubert has made a great success of this, one which really goes further than he had been hoping. He had expected a formal toast, nothing more, which, given the coldness of recent years, would actually have been a good sign. Several people among those present have assured me that, if one merely reads the text of the toast, it is not possible to realize the effect it had when it was proposed and so brilliantly expounded by the King, who, being the master he is in the art of public speaking, brought out so well each and every intent, each and every shade of it. In that connection, a rather choice detail has been brought to my attention, one which shows to advantage, yet again, the youthful goodheartedness which so many find endearing in King Theodosius. I have been assured that at the very moment when he spoke that word ‘affinities,’ which was after all the great novelty of the speech, one which, mark my words, will lend itself to much comment in the chancelleries, His Majesty, foreseeing the joy it would cause our ambassador, who would see it as the fulfillment of his every effort, the realization of his dream, one might say, in a word, his marshal’s baton, His Majesty half turned toward Vaugoubert, rested that engaging eye of the Oettingens on him, and carefully enunciated that word ‘affinities,’ so well chosen, such a felicitous expression, in a tone of voice which let everyone know it was being used quite deliberately and with intent. It appears that Vaugoubert was quite unmanned for a moment; and I must say that, to a certain extent, I sympathize with him. After the banquet, when His Majesty had gathered about him a more restricted circle—I have this from a person whose word is utterly unimpeachable, you understand—it is said the King even approached Vaugoubert and murmured to him, ‘Well, Marquis, are you satisfied with your pupil?’ It is indubitable that a toast of that sort has done more than twenty years of negotiations to strengthen our two countries’ affinities, as Theodosius II so vividly put it. You may say it’s only a word, but it’s certainly one to conjure with—look at the echoes it has awakened throughout Europe, the press everywhere have taken it up, people have sat up and taken notice, it has struck a new note! And that’s quite typical of this particular sovereign. I won’t pretend that he produces such gems of genius every day, but in his prepared speeches—indeed, even in the most impromptu conversation—it is very rare for him not to leave his distinguishing mark—I almost said, not to inscribe his signature—by the coining of some trenchant phrase. No one can suspect me of bias in this, as I am utterly opposed to innovation in such things. Nineteen times out of twenty it is pernicious.”

“Yes, I was pretty sure the Kaiser’s recent telegram would not be very much to your taste,” my father said.

As much as to say, “That man!,” M. de Norpois cast his eyes heavenward: “For one thing, it was an act of arrant ingratitude. It was worse than a crime—it was a mistake!⁹ And as for the stupidity of it, the only word for that is monumental. For another thing, if someone doesn’t put a stop to it, the man who gave Bismarck his marching orders is quite capable of repudiating each and every one of Bismarck’s policies. And when that happens, we’ll see a fine mess!”

“My husband tells me, monsieur, that you’re thinking of taking him off to Spain with you one of these summers. I’m sure he would enjoy that.”

“Yes, I must say it’s a most engaging prospect, madame, I’m looking forward to it very much. I really would relish such a trip in your company, my dear fellow. But what about yourself, dear lady, have you any plans for the holidays?”

“My son and I may be going to Balbec, but it’s not quite certain.”

“Ah, Balbec! A lovely spot, I took a look at it not so many years ago. Lots of very smart houses going up. I’m sure you will find the place to your liking. How, may I inquire, did you come to choose Balbec?”

“My son has a great desire to see some of the churches in the area, especially the church of Balbec itself. I had been a little apprehensive about his health, what with the strains of the journey and especially inconveniences of accommodations. But I have been told they’ve just built a first-class hotel, which will mean he can have the kind of comfort required by his state of health.”

“Well, I really must pass that information along to a certain person. She will be glad to know of it.”

“The church at Balbec is a fine one, isn’t it, monsieur?” I asked, despite the displeasure of knowing that one of Balbec’s attractions lay in its smart houses.

“Well, it’s not bad. But it can’t bear comparison with delicately worked gems such as the cathedrals of Rheims and Chartres, or that jewel in our crown, the Sainte-Chapelle here in Paris.”

“But the church of Balbec is partly Romanesque, isn’t it?”

“Absolutely. It is in the Romanesque manner, which is of course one reason among others why it is so frigid. It’s a style which in no way seems to foreshadow the elegance, the delicate inventiveness of the Gothic architects, who could work the stone like lace. No doubt the church of Balbec is worth a visit, if one happens to be in the vicinity—you could while away a rainy afternoon if you had nothing better to do, take a look inside, see the tomb of Admiral de Tourville.”¹⁰

“Did you happen to go to the dinner at Foreign Affairs last night?” my father asked. “I couldn’t manage to attend.”

“No,” said M. de Norpois, smiling. “I must confess I sacrificed that pleasure to a very different way of passing the evening. I dined at the house of a lady of whom you may have heard—the beautiful Mme Swann.”

My mother all but trembled. Being of a readier responsiveness than my father, she was often alarmed on his behalf by something that would not affect him until a moment later. She was the first to notice things which would cause him displeasure, much as bad news for France is known sooner abroad than at home. However, she was curious to know what sort of people went to the Swanns’, and inquired of M. de Norpois about his fellow guests.

“Well, now ... to tell you the truth ... I must say it’s a house at which most of the guests appear to be ... gentlemen. There were certainly several married men present—but their wives were all indisposed yesterday evening, and had been unable to go,” the ambassador replied, with a crafty glance masked by joviality, his eyes full of a demure discretion that pretended to moderate their mischievousness while making it more obvious.

“To be completely fair,” he added, “I must also say that there are women who go there. But they ... belong—how shall I put it?—let’s say to the world of Republican sympathies, rather than to the world of Swann himself.” (This name he pronounced “Svann.”) “Who can tell? One day it may turn out to be a literary or political salon. Although they do appear to be quite satisfied with the present state of affairs. Swann himself actually makes it rather too obvious, if you ask me. I was taken aback that a man of such delicacy should be so brash and tactless, not to say tasteless, about dropping the names of people who’ve invited him and his wife to dinner next week—yet I can assure you they were not people one would be proud to be invited by! He kept on saying, ‘We’re not free on a single evening!,’ as though this were something to boast about, as though he were a vulgar outsider, which of course he isn’t. Once upon a time, after all, he did have many friends both male and female, and no doubt not all of the latter, perhaps not even most of them, but I do know for a fact that one of them—I believe one can go so far as to say this without risking being indiscreet—who is a very great lady indeed, might not have evinced total reluctance at the suggestion of frequenting Mme Swann. And if that had happened, then very likely some more of Panurge’s sheep¹¹ would have followed suit. However, it would appear that Swann put out no feelers in that direction. Ah, what’s this, now? What, another Nesselrode pudding! After such a feast of Lucullus, it will behoove me to take the waters at Karlsbad! Mind you, Swann may well have sensed that it would have all been far too difficult. What’s clear is that the marriage was thoroughly deplored. Mention has been made of the wife’s money, but nothing could be further from the truth. However, people did think the whole thing was too unsavory. And not only that, but there was Swann’s aunt, a woman who’s hugely rich and very highly thought of, the wife of a man who, financially speaking, is a force to be reckoned with. Well, not only did she close her doors to Mme Swann, but she even conducted an all-out campaign to make sure all her friends and acquaintances did the same. I don’t mean to imply that anyone in the best Paris society actually cut her dead. No, no, of course not! The husband being, in any case, quite capable of sending around his seconds! Anyway, the strange thing about all of this is that Swann, with all his connections in the best society, lavishes such attention on company of which the best that can be said is that it is extremely mixed. I used to know him quite well, and I must say I was both astounded and amused to see such a man, a man who’s so well bred, so much at home in the most fashionable and exclusive circles, falling over himself to thank the chief undersecretary of the postmaster general for gracing him with a visit, asking him whether Mme Swann might feel free to call on his wife! He must feel out of his element. It’s so clearly not his world. And yet, you know, I don’t think the man’s unhappy. It’s true that the woman stooped to some pretty nasty things in the years before the marriage, some quite unsavory emotional blackmail—if he ever declined to satisfy her on something or other, she just forbade him access to the child. And poor old Swann, who’s really as naïve as he’s refined, assumed each time that the disappearance of his daughter was mere coincidence, and would not see the truth of the matter. Also, she made him so miserable with her nonstop scenes that everyone thought that, if she ever had her way and got him to marry her, she would lead him a dog’s life, and the marriage would be a disaster. Then, lo and behold, what happened was the very opposite! People take great pleasure in laughing behind Swann’s back at the way he goes on about his wife. Not that anyone expects a man who’s more or less aware of the fact that he’s a ... (Molière’s word, you understand) ¹² to go about proclaiming it urbi et orbi. Still, people think he’s going a little too far when he tells you what a wonderful wife he’s got. Yet, you know, it’s not as far-fetched as they think. The way she behaves toward him, which is not the way all husbands would prefer—and, mind you, between you and me, it strikes me as improbable that Swann, who’s nobody’s fool and who had known her for years, didn’t have a shrewd suspicion about you-know-what—there can be no denying that she seems fond of him. I’m not saying she’s not still a bit flighty, and certainly Swann himself doesn’t let the grass grow under his feet in that regard, at least if one listens to what people say—and, as you can imagine, people do say. But she’s grateful for what he has done for her; and, notwithstanding all the dire forebodings voiced by everyone, she seems to have become as mild as can be.” This change in Odette may not have been such an extraordinary thing as M. de Norpois thought. She had never believed that Swann would eventually marry her. Every time she informed him in a meaning tone that a certain fashionable gentleman had just married his mistress, she had been met with an icy silence; and if she went so far as to say to him straight out, “So—don’t you think that was a nice thing to do? Don’t you think it’s the decent thing for him to make an honest woman of someone that’s given him the best years of her life?,” the most she ever got was the tart reply, “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it—he can please himself.” In fact, Odette had come close to believing that he would do what he sometimes threatened to do in a fit of temper and leave her for good, for she had not long since heard a sculptress declare, “There’s nothing men won’t stoop to, there’s not a good one among them”; and the pessimism of this profound verity had so struck her that she had taken to uttering it in all sorts of situations, accompanying it with a defeated air that seemed to mean, “Well, what would you expect, it’d be just my luck!” As a consequence, all efficacy had gone from the optimistic maxim which had hitherto guided Odette’s steps through life: “You can treat men that are in love with you any way you like, they’re such fools,” to which she always gave the twinkle of the eye that might accompany a statement like, “Don’t worry—he’s quite house-trained!” Meanwhile, Odette was mortified to think how Swann’s conduct must appear to one of her friends, who had recently managed to marry a man whom she had been “with” for a shorter time than Swann and Odette had been together, even though she did not have a child by him, and who was relatively accepted now, receiving invitations to balls at the Élysée Palace. A more perceptive clinician than M. de Norpois could no doubt have made a different diagnosis—that it was this feeling of humiliation and shame that had embittered Odette, that the shrewish character which came out in her was neither integral to her nor an incurable malady—and he might have easily foreseen what had in fact taken place, that a new regimen, marriage, would bring about an almost magical remission of these painful attacks, which, though of daily occurrence, were in no way organic. The marriage came as a surprise to almost everybody, which is itself a surprise. No doubt, few people understand either the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon of love, or how it creates a supplementary person who is quite different from the one who bears our beloved’s name in the outside world and is mostly formed from elements within ourselves. So there are few who see anything natural in the disproportionate dimensions we come to perceive in a person who is not the same as the one they see. In the case of Odette, however, it should have been possible to notice that, though she had admittedly never fully appreciated the quality of Swann’s mind, at least she was acquainted with the titles and the details of his writings, that the name of Vermeer was as familiar to her as the name of her dressmaker, that she knew by heart certain traits of Swann, the kind which all other people either mock or do not know, the true fond likeness of which reposes only in a mistress’s or a sister’s heart; and these traits in ourself we cling to so much, even the ones we would most like to see changed, that when a woman comes to have an indulgent and banteringly amicable attachment to them, seeing them more as they are seen by ourselves and by our close relatives, a long-standing liaison can come to have something of the mildness and strength of affections within the family. The feelings we share with another are sanctified when, in judging one of our faults, that person adopts the same point of view as we do. However, there were certain aspects of Swann’s mind that Odette had in fact appreciated, since they too were in part outcomes of his character. She lamented the fact that, when Swann did produce a study or some other piece of writing, these aspects were not as perceptible as in his letters or in his conversation, where they abounded. She suggested that he should give them greater scope. Her reason for this was that it was these features she herself preferred in the man; but since this preference meant only that these things were more “him” than others, she may have been right to wish they might be more visible in his writings. Perhaps she thought too that if these writings could have more vitality in them they might be more successful, which might then have enabled her to aspire to the thing which in her time with the Verdurins she had come to see as the greatest of all achievements—a salon of her own.

Twenty years earlier, those who thought such a marriage quite outlandish, people who, if the question had ever arisen for themselves, would have wondered, “What ever will M. de Guermantes think, what will Bréauté have to say when I marry Mlle de Montmorency?,” the people who maintained that sort of social ideal, would have included Swann himself: in those days, he had gone to great trouble to be elected to membership in the Jockey Club, and had fully expected that, by eventually making a brilliant marriage, he would consolidate his position and become one of the most notable men about town. However, if they are not to wither and fade, such imaginings of a future marriage must be constantly revivified by external stimuli. Your dearest dream may be to humiliate the man who spurned you. But if you go to live in another country and hear no more of him, your enemy will come in time to have no importance for you. If you have lost touch with all the people because of whom, twenty years ago, you longed to become a member of the Jockey Club or the Institut de France, the prospect of belonging to one or another of these bodies will have lost all its power of attraction. A long-standing relationship can do as much as illness, retirement, or a religious conversion to replace old images with new. When Swann married Odette, he did not go through a process of renunciation of his former social ambitions—she had long since brought him to a state of detachment from them, in the spiritual sense of the word. And had he not been detached from them, it would have been all the more to his credit. In general, marriages that degrade one of the partners are the worthiest of all, because they entail the sacrifice of a more or less flattering situation to a purely private satisfaction—and, of course, marrying for money must be excluded from the notion of a degrading match, as no couple of whom one partner has been sold to the other has ever failed to be admitted in the end to good society, given the weight of tradition, the done thing, and the need to avoid having double standards. In any case, the idea of engaging in one of those crossbreedings common to Mendelian experiments and Greek mythology, and of joining with a creature of a different race, an archduchess, or a good-time girl, someone of blue blood or no blood at all, might well have titillated the artist, if not the pervert, in Swann. On the occasions when it occurred to him that he might one day marry Odette, there was only one person in society whose opinion he would have cared for, the Duchesse de Guermantes, and snobbery had nothing to do with this. Odette herself was all but indifferent to the Duchesse de Guermantes, thinking only of the people who were immediately above her, rather than of those who inhabited such a remote and exalted sphere. But at moments when Swann sat daydreaming about what it might be like to be the husband of Odette, he always saw the moment when he would introduce her, and especially their daughter, to the Princesse des Laumes, or the Duchesse de Guermantes, as she had become upon the death of her father-in-law. He had no desire to present them to anyone else; but as he imagined the Duchesse talking about him to Odette, and Odette talking to Mme de Guermantes, and the tenderness the latter would show to Gilberte, making much of her, making him proud of his daughter, he could be so moved that he spoke aloud the words they would say. The circumstances that made up this fancied presentation scene were as detailed and concrete as those invented by people who set about drawing up ways to spend some huge imaginary lottery prize. To the extent that a decision may be motivated by a mental image coinciding with it, it can be said that the purpose of Swann’s marrying Odette was to introduce her and Gilberte, even though no one else might be present, even though no one else might ever know of it, to the Duchesse de Guermantes. As will be seen, the fulfillment of this social ambition, the only one he had ever harbored for his wife and child, was the very one that was to be denied him; and the veto preventing it was to be so absolute that Swann was to die without imagining that the Duchesse would ever meet them. It will be seen too that the Duchesse de Guermantes did come, after Swann’s death, to be acquainted with Odette and Gilberte. He might well have been wise, given that he saw so much importance in something so trivial, not to see the future as too dark in that respect, and not to exclude the possibility that the meeting he longed for might take place, even if at a time when he was no longer there to enjoy it. The mills of causality, which eventually bring to pass more or less all possible effects, including those that had been believed to be the least likely, can at times grind slowly. Their workings can be slowed still more by our own desire, which impedes them while trying to hasten them, or even by our very existence; and they may produce nothing until long after the exhaustion of that desire, or even the end of our life. Swann could really be said to have known this already from his own experience—for, when he eventually married the Odette whom he had not found to his taste to begin with, whom he had then loved so distractedly, but whom he did not marry until he had stopped loving her, until the man who had once longed to spend his whole life with Odette, and who had despaired of ever being able to do so, had long since died within him, did not this mode of posthumous happiness somehow foreshadow what was to happen after his death?

Fearing that the conversation might turn away from the subject of the Swanns, I now broached the subject of the Comte de Paris,¹³ to ask M. de Norpois whether he was not a friend of Swann’s. “Absolutely,” M. de Norpois replied, turning toward me and staring at my modest person through the blue of his eyes, in which his great capacity for intellectual toil and his powers of assimilation could be seen floating as though in their natural element. Then he added, turning back to address my father, “And if I may say so, without overstepping the bounds of the respect I profess for His Highness—albeit I do not entertain personal relations with him of a sort which would conflict with my position, however unofficial it is—I permit myself to retail to you a rather choice little incident which, as recently as four years ago, took place in a small railway station in a certain country of Central Europe, where His Highness had occasion to set eyes on Mme Swann. Now, of course, no one in his entourage saw fit to ask His Highness what he thought of her. Such a thing would not have been seemly. But when the vagaries of conversation happened subsequently to bring up her name, His Highness appeared not averse to letting it be divined, by means of certain signs, you understand, which, though they may verge on the imperceptible, are withal quite unambiguous, that his impression of the lady had been far from, in a word, unfavorable.”

“But it would surely have been quite out of the question,” my father said, “to present her to the Comte de Paris?”

“Well, now, who can say?” M. de Norpois replied. “One never knows with princes! Some of the most illustrious, some of those who are most adept at having rendered unto themselves what must be rendered, are also on occasion those who ride roughshod over even the most inviolable decrees of public opinion, if in so doing they can reward certain good and faithful servants. And what’s certain is that the Comte de Paris has always noted with the greatest goodwill the devotion evinced by Swann, who is also, be it remembered, a fellow of fine wit.”

“And what was your own impression, Excellency?” asked my mother, as much from politeness as from curiosity.

M. de Norpois’s reply, delivered with all the energy of the old connoisseur, was at variance with the moderation with which he was accustomed to express himself:

“Absolutely first-rate!”

Then, knowing that owning up to having been strongly impressed by a woman, as long as one announces it in a waggish manner, is consistent with a highly regarded notion of table talk, the old diplomat laughed quietly to himself for a few moments, bringing water to his blue eyes and a little quiver to nostrils finely veined with red, and added:

“Why, she is quite, quite charming!”

“And was there a writer by the name of Bergotte at the dinner, sir?” I asked, in a diffident attempt to keep the conversation focused on the Swanns.

“Yes, Bergotte was there,” M. de Norpois replied, inclining a courteous head toward me, as though in his goodwill toward my father he attached real importance to anything connected with him, including the questions of a boy as young as myself, who was unaccustomed to be shown such deference by men as old as himself. “Do you know him?” he added, gazing at me with the bright eyes which Bismarck admired for their acuity.

“My son doesn’t know Bergotte,” said my mother. “But he admires him very much.”

“Well, now, I’m afraid that’s not a view I can share,” M. de Norpois said (and when I realized that the thing I set far above myself, the one thing I saw as the highest in the world, was the least of his admirations, the doubts this planted in my mind about my own intelligence were much more crippling than those which usually assailed me). “Bergotte is what I call a flute-player. It must of course be admitted that he tootles on his flute quite mellifluously, albeit with more than a modicum of mincing mannerism and affectation. But when all’s said and done, tootling is what it is, and tootling does not amount to a great deal. His works are so flaccid that one can never locate in them anything one could call a framework. There’s never any action in ’em, well, hardly any, and especially no scope. It’s their base that is their weak point—or, rather, they have no base. In this day and age, when the increasing complexity of modern life leaves one barely any time for reading, when the map of Europe has undergone a profound recasting, and may well be on the point of undergoing another which may prove to be even more profound, when so many new and threatening problems are cropping up on all sides, you will allow that one may fairly claim the right to expect that a writer might aspire to be something higher than a glib wit, whose futile hair-splittings on the relative merits of merely formal matters distract us from the fact that we may be overrun at any moment by a double wave of barbarians, those from within and those from without! Now, I know that to speak thus is to utter blasphemies against the sacrosanct school of what certain gentlemen call Art for Art’s Sake—but in our day and age there are more urgent tasks than stringing jingles of words together. I must admit that Bergotte’s jingles can at times be quite pretty, but all in all they add up to something that is pretty jejune, pretty precious—and pretty unmasculine, if you ask me! Now that I’m aware of your quite excessive admiration for Bergotte, I can appreciate better that little thing you showed me before dinner, about which, by the way, the less said the better—I owe it to you to say so, for did you not say yourself, quite openly, that it was mere childish scribbling?” It was true, I had said so—but I had not meant it. “All sins shall be forgiven, especially the sins of our youth. Many another man could own up to something similar. You’re not the only young fellow who has ever fancied himself a poet. But in that piece you showed me, one can detect Bergotte’s pernicious influence. Now, clearly, it will come as no surprise to you to learn that it contained none of his better qualities, he being a past master in the art of a certain phrase-making—though one should add, mind you, that it’s a shallow art—and you being a boy who cannot be expected to have grasped even the rudiments of that. Still, young as you are, it’s exactly the same defect, the aberration of stringing together a few fine-sounding words, and not finding any substance to put into them until afterward. That’s what’s known as putting the cart before the horse. And even in Bergotte’s own stuff, all these finicking futilities, all that rancid and insubstantial Mandarin manner that he goes in for, none of that is to my taste. Nowadays, a chap sets off a few verbal fireworks and everyone acclaims him as a genius. But masterpieces aren’t as easy to come by as that! Among all of Bergotte’s stuff, I should have to say he hasn’t got to his credit a single novel that aspires to anything above the mundane, one of those books that one keeps in a special place on the shelf—not one, if you ask me, in the man’s whole output. Though, mind you, in his case it must be said that the work is a cut above the man himself. Believe you me, he’s the perfect illustration of the idea of that clever fellow who once said that the only acquaintance one should have with writers is through their books.¹⁴ I defy you to find an individual who is more unlike his books than Bergotte—he’s so pretentious, so solemn, so uncongenial! At times he’s vulgar, at other times he talks like a book—not like one of his own books, mind you, but like a boring book, for, say what you like, at least his aren’t boring. If ever there was a mind that was woolly and convoluted, it’s his! He’s what an earlier generation was wont to call a trader in fustian. And the things he says are made even more displeasing by the way he speaks. Much the same thing was said of Alfred de Vigny by Loménie—or was it Sainte-Beuve?¹⁵ But, unlike Vigny, Bergotte has never written anything of the caliber of Cinq-Mars or Le Cachet rouge, whole passages of which deserve to figure in any self-respecting anthology.”

I was devastated by what M. de Norpois had said about the piece I had given to him to read; and at the thought of the difficulties I encountered whenever I tried to write an essay, or even just engage in some consecutive thinking, I became once more acutely aware of my own intellectual poverty and of the fact that I had no gift for writing. It was true that, once upon a time in Combray, certain impressions of humble things, or a page of Bergotte, had moved me to thoughts and feelings which seemed important and valuable. But it was those very thoughts and feelings that my prose poem expressed; and there could be no doubt that a mere mirage had misled me into thinking something was good in it, whereas M. de Norpois, who was no fool, had seen through it at a glance. What he had done was inform me of the microscopic insignificance of myself when judged by an outside expert who was not only objective but also highly intelligent and well disposed toward me. I felt deflated and dumbfounded; and just as my mind, like a fluid whose only dimensions are those of the container into which it is poured, had once expanded so as to fill the vast vessel of my genius, so now it shrank and fitted exactly into the exiguous confines of the mediocrity to which M. de Norpois had suddenly consigned it.

“The bringing together of Bergotte and myself,” M. de Norpois said to my father, “did have its potentially prickly side—though even prickles, of course, may tickle the fancy, if I may say so. You see, some years back, during my time as ambassador in Vienna, Bergotte turned up there on his travels. He was introduced to me by the Princess Metternich, subsequently signed the book at the embassy, and let it be known that he wished to be invited to the ambassador’s table. Now, I being the representative abroad of France, and he being a man whose writings do honor in some measure to our country (to be quite accurate, an inconsiderable measure), I should have been quite prepared to forget the poor opinion I have formed of his private life. However, he was not traveling alone; and, what’s more, he insisted on not being invited without his ... traveling companion. I believe I can honestly lay claim to being no more of a prude than the next man; and, being a bachelor, I might have been able to open the doors of the embassy a little wider than if I had been a husband and father. Nonetheless, I vouch that there is a degree of ignominy at which I draw the line, and which is made even more revolting by the high moral tone, or, rather, the frankly moralistic tone, which he adopts in print. For the books are just chock-full of incessant analysis (which, between you and me, is actually quite sickly), with agonizing scruples and morbid remorse and a veritable deluge of preachifying over the merest peccadilloes—and we all know what that’s worth!—when, all the time, in his private life, the man behaves with the most out-and-out cynicism and lack of conscience. So, to cut a long story short, I did not commit myself. And when the Princess gave me a reminder about it, she got no more satisfaction. With the result that I must suppose I am in no very good odor with the gentleman in question; and I can only wonder whether he greatly appreciated Swann’s delicacy in inviting him and myself at the same time—unless, of course, it was Bergotte himself who suggested it. No way of knowing, though, as the man’s ill. That’s the real explanation—indeed, it’s his only excuse.”

“And was Mme Swann’s daughter present at the dinner, sir?” I asked, glad to be able to broach this matter as we went through to the drawing room, and thus conceal my excitement more easily than I might have at the table, sitting up there in full view.

M. de Norpois seemed for a moment to search his memory:

“Ah, yes. A young lady of fourteen or fifteen? Yes, I do recall her being presented to me before dinner as the daughter of Mine Host. I must say, though, that I saw little of her, and she went off to bed at an early hour. Or perhaps she went out to the house of a friend, I’m afraid I can’t remember. But look here, I see you are very well informed about the house of Swann.”

“I play with Mlle Swann at the Champs-Élysées. I think she’s lovely.”

“Aha! Yes, I see how the land lies! Well, yes, I must tell you, I thought she was charming. Mind you, I do feel it incumbent upon me to say that I doubt whether she will ever have the looks of her mother—if I may so put it without in any way intending to wound your own feelings.”

“I prefer Mlle Swann’s face, but I also admire her mother very much. I go for walks in the Bois just in the hope of seeing her pass by.”

“Really? Well, I must tell them! They’ll be delighted!”

As he spoke these words and for a few seconds longer, M. de Norpois was in the position of anyone else who, on hearing me speak of Swann as an intelligent man, of his respectable family firm of stockbrokers, of his fine house, assumed that I would speak in identical terms of any other equally intelligent man, of other just as respectable stockbrokers, of any other fine house; he was at the stage when the sane man has not quite realized that the man he is chatting with is insane. Also, he was perfectly aware that it is natural to enjoy the sight of pretty women, and that when a man speaks warmly of a pretty woman it is good form to pretend to believe he is in love with her, to share a little joke with him about it, and promise to put in a good word for him. But when he said he would mention me to Gilberte and her mother (which would enable me, like one of the gods of Olympus taking on the fluidity of a breath of air, or, rather, the appearance of the old man impersonated by Minerva, to be an invisible visitor to the salon of Mme Swann, there to capture her attention, be thought about by her, earn her gratitude for my admiration, and stand revealed as the friend of an important man, a worthy future guest at her house, someone who could be admitted to her family circle), I was suddenly so overcome by tender feelings for this important man, who was going to exercise on my behalf the great prestige he must enjoy in the eyes of Mme Swann, that I had to restrain myself from kissing his soft hands, so white and wrinkled that they looked as though they had spent too long steeped in water. I thought no one noticed how close I came to doing this. But it is difficult for any of us to gauge the scale on which others register our acts and words; for fear of seeing ourselves as overimportant, and by magnifying hugely the dimensions to which other people’s memories must stretch if they are to cover a lifetime, we imagine that all the peripheral aspects of our speech and gestures make little imprint in the consciousness of the people we talk to, let alone stay in their memory. It is this sort of assumption that makes criminals retrospectively emend statements they have made, in the belief that no one will ever be able to compare the new variant with an older version. However, it is quite possible that, even in relation to the immemorial march of humanity, the newspaper columnist’s philosophy that everything passes away into oblivion may be less reliable than the opposite prediction, that all things will last. In a newspaper in which the author of the leading article, a moralist commenting on some event, a masterpiece, or more likely just a songstress who has “had her hour of fame,” laments, “But who will remember any of this ten years from now?,” page three of the very same issue will carry an account of a session at the Academy of Antiquities concerning something that is of less intrinsic importance, a piece of doggerel, say, dating from the time of the Pharaohs, yet which is still known in its entirety. In a short human lifespan, of course, things may not happen quite like that. Nevertheless, some years later, when I was a guest at a house where among the other guests M. de Norpois seemed to be my surest ally, since he was not only a friend of my father’s and an indulgent man, well disposed to our family, but also inclined by profession and nature to be discreet, I was told after he left that he had spoken of an incident long ago “when I had been on the point of kissing his hand.” This not only made me blush to the roots of my hair; it also astounded me with the knowledge that both the ambassador’s way of speaking of me and the very stuff of his memory were very different from what I would have expected. This piece of gossip, by enlightening me on the makeup of human consciousness, and its unexpected potential for absentmindedness and presence of mind, for memory and forgetfulness, was as much a wonder and a revelation to me as it had been to read in a book by Maspero, the Egyptologist, that the exact names of the huntsmen invited by Assurbanipal to his battues, ten centuries before Christ, were known to us.¹⁶

“Oh, if you would do that, sir,” I exclaimed to M. de Norpois when he said he would mention to Gilberte and Mme Swann my admiration for them, “if you did mention me to Mme Swann, I would be indebted to you for life—my life would be yours! However, I should just point out that I don’t know Mme Swann and have never been introduced to her.”

This final statement I added only out of a punctilious concern not to be thought to be boasting improperly of an acquaintance to which I could lay no claim. But even as I spoke the words, I could sense there was now no purpose for them to serve. The warmth of my thanks was so chilling in its effect that, from the first syllable, I caught a glimpse of hesitancy and annoyance flitting across the ambassador’s face, and saw in his eyes that cramped, vertical, averted expression (like the obliquely receding line of one side of a figure, in a projection) meant for the invisible listener one carries within, and to whom one addresses a remark that one’s other listener, the person one has been talking to—in this case, me—is not supposed to catch. I realized at once that the words I had uttered, quite inadequate as they were to express the huge rush of gratitude that swept through me, and though it had seemed to me they could not fail to touch M. de Norpois, and must succeed in persuading him to act in a way which would afford him so little trouble while affording me so much joy, were perhaps the very ones (among all the potentially evil words that might have been spoken by people wishing to harm me) which would make him decide not to. And just as when a stranger with whom we have been agreeably exchanging what appear to be shared opinions on passersby, who we both think are vulgar, suddenly shows the real pathological distance separating us by patting his pocket and saying casually, “Mmm, pity I didn’t bring my revolver with me—I could have picked ’em all off,” so, when he heard me speak these words, M. de Norpois, knowing that nothing was easier or less prized than to be recommended to Mme Swann and to join her circle, but seeing also that for me this represented something of such value that it must be assumed to be out of my reach, decided that the seemingly unexceptionable wish I had expressed must actually conceal some quite different ulterior motive, a dubious intent or the memory of a faux pas, which must be the reason why no one had ever wished to offend Mme Swann by undertaking to put in a word for me. I realized then that M. de Norpois would never put in such a word, that even if he saw Mme Swann daily for years on end he would never once mention my name in her hearing. However, a few days after this, he did find out from her some information I had asked for and passed it on to me via my father. He had not seen fit to tell her on whose behalf he was seeking the information. She would therefore not learn that I was acquainted with M. de Norpois or that I longed to visit her house. This was perhaps less of a disaster than I thought; for, even if she had learned of this longing, it would probably have done little to increase the effect of my being acquainted with M. de Norpois, as this acquaintance was itself of doubtful benefit to me. Since the notion of her own life and house caused no mysterious agitation in Odette’s heart, she did not see the people of her acquaintance, the people who visited her house, as the fabulous beings they were to one who, like me, would have been glad to throw a stone through the Swanns’ front window if only I could have written on it that I knew M. de Norpois—I was sure that such a message, even if delivered in such a startling fashion, would do more to recommend me to the lady of the house than it would to prejudice her against me. But even if I had been able to comprehend that M. de Norpois’s unaccomplished mission would in any event have been useless, or that it might actually have biased the Swanns against me, even if M. de Norpois had been willing to comply with my request, I would never have had the courage to withdraw it and forgo the ecstasy, however baneful its consequences might be for me, of knowing that my name and person were, just for a moment, in the presence of Gilberte, inside her unknown house and life.

After M. de Norpois’s departure, my father glanced at the evening paper, while I sat thinking over my experience of La Berma. The pleasure I had taken in seeing her act was so far from the pleasure I had been looking forward to, and was in such acute need of sustenance, that it immediately assimilated whatever might nourish it, such as the qualities M. de Norpois had identified in her acting, which my mind had absorbed as easily as a parched meadow soaks up water. My father now handed me the newspaper, pointing to a review of the matinee: “The performance of Phèdre given today before an enthusiastic audience, distinguished by the presence of the foremost personalities in the world of the arts and criticism, afforded Mme Berma in the title part the opportunity to score a triumph than which, in the whole course of her illustrious career, she has rarely had a greater. We shall have more, much more, to say on another occasion about this production, which marks a veritable milestone in the theater. Suffice it for the moment to note that the best-qualified judges are as one in pronouncing that such an interpretation will stand not only as a landmark in our appreciation of the character of Phèdre, one of the greatest and the most searching parts ever produced by Racine, but also as the finest, highest achievement in the realm of art that any of us have been privileged to witness in this day and age.” This new concept of “the finest, highest achievement in the realm of art” had no sooner entered my mind than it located the imperfect enjoyment I had had at the theater, and added to it a little of what it lacked; this made such a heady mixture that I exclaimed, “What a great artiste she is!” It may be thought I was not altogether sincere. Think, however, of so many writers who, in a moment of dissatisfaction with a piece they have just written, may read a eulogy of the genius of Chateaubriand, or who may think of some other great artist whom they have dreamed of equaling, who hum to themselves a phrase of Beethoven for instance, comparing the sadness of it to the mood they have tried to capture in their prose, and are then so carried away by that perception of genius that they let it affect the way they read their own piece, no longer seeing it as they first saw it, but going so far as to hazard an act of faith in the value of it, by telling themselves, “It’s not bad, you know!” without realizing that the sum total which determines their ultimate satisfaction includes the memory of Chateaubriand’s brilliant pages, which they have assimilated to their own, but which, of course, they did not write. Think of all the men who go on believing in the love of a mistress in whom nothing is more flagrant than her infidelities; of all those torn between the hope of something beyond this life (such as the bereft widower who remembers a beloved wife, or the artist who indulges in dreams of posthumous fame, each of them looking forward to an afterlife which he knows is inconceivable) and the desire for a reassuring oblivion, when their better judgment reminds them of the faults they might otherwise have to expiate after death; or think of the travelers who are uplifted by the general beauty of a journey they have just completed, although during it their main impression, day after day, was that it was a chore—think of them before deciding whether, given the promiscuity of the ideas that lurk within us, a single one of those that afford us our greatest happiness has not begun life by parasitically attaching itself to a foreign idea with which it happened to come into contact, and by drawing from it much of the power of pleasing which it once lacked.

My mother did not seem very happy that my father had given up all thought of a diplomatic career for me. I think she lived in the hope of seeing my nervous susceptibility subjected to the discipline of an ordered way of life, and that her real regret was not so much that I was abandoning diplomacy as that I was taking up literature. “Oh, look, give it up,” my father exclaimed. “The main thing is to enjoy what one does in life. He’s not a child anymore, he knows what he likes, he’s probably not going to change, he’s old enough to know what’ll make him happy in life.” These words of my father’s, though they granted me the freedom to be happy or not in life, made me very unhappy that evening. At each one of his unexpected moments of indulgence toward me, I had always wanted to kiss him on his florid cheeks, just above the beard line; and the only thing that ever restrained me was the fear of annoying him. On this occasion, much as an author, to whom his own conceptions seem to have little value because he cannot think of them as separate from himself, may be alarmed at seeing his publishers putting themselves to the trouble of selecting an appropriate paper for them and setting them in a typeface that he may think too fine, I began to doubt whether my desire to write was a thing of sufficient importance for my father to lavish such kindness upon it. But it was especially what he said about my likings probably never changing, and what would make me happy in life, that planted two dreadful suspicions in my mind. The first was that, though I met each new day with the thought that I was now on the threshold of life, which still lay before me all unlived and was about to start the very next day, not only had my life in fact begun, but the years to come would not be very different from the years already elapsed. The second, which was really only a variant of the first, was that I did not live outside Time but was subject to its laws, as completely as the fictional characters whose lives, for that very reason, had made me feel so sad when I read of them at Combray, sitting inside my wickerwork shelter. Theoretically, we are aware that the earth is spinning, but in reality we do not notice it: the ground we walk on seems to be stationary and gives no cause for alarm. The same happens with Time. To make its passing perceptible, novelists have to turn the hands of the clock at dizzying speed, to make the reader live through ten, twenty, thirty years in two minutes. At the top of a page, we have been with a lover full of hope; at the foot of the following one, we see him again, already an octogenarian, hobbling his painful daily way round the courtyard of an old-people’s home, barely acknowledging greetings, remembering nothing of his past. When my father said, “He’s not a child anymore, he’s not going to change his mind,” etc., he suddenly showed me myself living inside Time; and he filled me with sadness, as though I was not quite the senile inmate of the poorhouse, but one of those heroes dismissed by the writer in the final chapter with a turn of phrase that is cruel in its indifference: “He has taken to absenting himself less and less from the countryside. He has eventually settled down there for good,” etc.

My father, in an attempt to forestall any criticism we might have to make about his guest, said to my mother:

“I must say old Norpois was rather ‘old hat,’ as you two say. When he said it would ‘not have been seemly’ to ask a question of the Comte de Paris, I was afraid you might burst out laughing.”

“Not at all,” my mother replied. “I’m full of admiration for a man of his caliber and his age who hasn’t lost that simple touch. All it shows is a fundamental honesty and good breeding.”

“But of course! And that doesn’t prevent him from being acute and intelligent either, as I know from my dealings with him at the Select Committee, where he’s quite different from how he was here tonight,” my father said, very pleased to see that Mama appreciated M. de Norpois, and trying to persuade her that he was even more admirable than she thought, for cordiality magnifies merit as gladly as pettiness minimizes it. “How did he put it again: ‘One never knows with princes ...’?”

“Yes, that was it. I thought it was very clever when I heard it. Anyone can see he’s a man with a broad experience of life.”

“Isn’t it remarkable that he dined at the Swanns’, though? And that the people he met there are really quite normal, I mean civil-service types. Where on earth can Mme Swann have dug up people like that, I wonder?”

“Did you notice the mischievous way he phrased his remark about ‘a house at which most of the guests appear to be ... men’?”

Both of them tried to imitate M. de Norpois’s delivery of this comment, as though it had been a line spoken by Bressant or Thiron in L’Aventurière or Le Gendre de M. Poirier.¹⁷ But the person who most enjoyed one of M. de Norpois’s obiter dicta was Françoise: years later, she could still not “keep a straight face” if you reminded her that she had once been called “a chef of superlative quality,” an accolade which my mother had relayed to her down in the kitchen, as the minister of war passes on the congratulations of a visiting head of state after the review of the troops. (I had been down to the kitchen before her, having earlier extracted from Françoise, the bloodthirsty pacifist, a promise not to inflict too much pain on the rabbit she had had to kill, and wishing to know how it had met its death. Françoise assured me that everything had gone off perfectly, very quickly: “I never seen any animal like that. It just died without saying a single word. Maybe it was dumb....” Unversed in the speech habits of animals, I suggested that perhaps rabbits do not screech quite like chickens. “Oh, what a thing to say!” Françoise gasped in indignation at such ignorance. “As if a rabbit wouldn’t screech as loud as a chicken! They’ve actually got much louder voices!”) Françoise accepted M. de Norpois’s compliments with all the simple pride, the joyous and (albeit momentarily) intelligent look of the artist listening to talk of his art. My mother had once sent her to certain celebrated restaurants to see how they did the cooking. I was as pleased to hear Françoise call some of the most famous ones “just feeding places” as I had once been to learn that, with respect to actors, the reputed order of their merits was different from the real one. “The ambassador insisted,” my mother said, “that one can’t get cold beef or soufflés like yours anywhere!” Françoise agreed with this, as though accepting in all modesty a simple statement of fact, and without being in the slightest impressed by the title of ambassador. She said of M. de Norpois, with the fellow-feeling due to somebody who had thought she was a chef, “He’s a good old bloke, just like me.” She had of course tried to catch a glimpse of him as he arrived; but, knowing that Mama detested any spying at doors or windows, and being convinced that, if she did try to look out for him, the other servants or else the concierge and his wife would “tell on her” (Françoise lived surrounded by “backbitings” and “telltalings,” which in her imagination played the same unchanging sinister role as others believe is played by the machinations of the Jesuits or the Jews), she had been satisfied to risk a glance at him through the kitchen hatch, “so her upstairs wouldn’t have a bone to pick”; and in that summary glimpse of M. de Norpois she had concluded he was “the spitting image of M. Legrandin” because of his “nimbleness” (even though the two men had not a single feature in common). “But look,” my mother asked her, “how do you explain that nobody can make beef jelly like you—when you feel like it, that is?” “Well, now, I don’t know as I know how that becomes about, madame,” replied Françoise, who made no clear distinction between the verbs “come,” in some of its usages, and “become.” This was the truth, of course, at least in part, as Françoise was no more able (or willing) to reveal the mystery behind the superiority of her jellies and custards than a fine fashionable lady would have been to divulge the secret of her elegance in dress, or a great prima donna the secret of her singing. Such explanations never reveal much in any case; and the same held true for our cook’s recipes. “They always cook everything in too much of a hurry,” she said of the famous restaurateurs whose establishments she had visited. “And they don’t do the things together. I mean, the beef has got to turn into a sort of sponge, so it soaks up all the gravy. Though I must say there was one of them cafés where I thought they knew a thing or two about cooking. Mind you, I’m not saying they could manage my jelly, but it was done nice and slow, nice and gentle, you know, and the soufflés had plenty of cream in them.” “Was that at the Henry?” asked my father, who had just come in, and who had a high opinion of the restaurant on the Place Gaillon, where he and his colleagues dined at regular intervals. “Oh, no, sir,” Françoise replied, concealing her deep disdain in a mild tone. “I was talking about a little restaurant. At that Henry’s, it’s all very good of course, but it’s not really a restaurant, is it? More like a ... soup kitchen!” “Do you mean Weber’s, then?”¹⁸ “Oh no, sir! I’m talking about a good restaurant! Weber’s is on the rue Royale, and it’s not a real restaurant, it’s only a flashy big café. And I’m sure they don’t even serve you properly. I don’t think they’ve even got tablecloths! They just bring it along and plunk it down in front of you, just like that.” “Was it Cirro’s?” “Well, now,” Françoise said, smiling, “I’m pretty sure that, as far as cooking, what they go in for is ladies of virtue.” To Françoise, “virtue” meant “easy virtue.” “Well, I mean, it’s for the young ones, isn’t it?” In her views of famous chefs, we could see that, for all her air of simplicity, Françoise was as devastating a “colleague” as the most envious and self-centered actress toward her peers. But we felt she had a proper sense of her art and a respect for tradition when she added, “No, it was a restaurant where the cooking looked nice, like right and proper, kind of home cooking. But still a big sort of a place. You should see the business they do, the money they make, the pennies they rake in!” The economical Françoise always spoke in pennies, leaving the golden louis to the bankrupt. “You know, madame, up on the big boulevards, along on the right there, set back a little bit....” The restaurant of which she was speaking with such fair-mindedness mingled with pride and nonchalance turned out to be the Café Anglais!¹⁹

 

When New Year’s Day came around, my first occupation was to accompany Mama on family visits. So as not to tire me, she had my father map out an itinerary for us; and she arranged our calls according to which part of town our relatives lived in, rather than in any order of family precedence. But we had hardly set foot in the drawing room of a rather distant cousin—the lack of distance to her house being the reason why she was first on the list—when my mother was horrified to see, among the bringers of the seasonal offerings marrons glacés and marrons déguisés, the best friend of the touchiest of my uncles, who would therefore be informed that we had seen fit to make our first visit of the morning to someone other than himself. My uncle would be sure to be offended, as he would no doubt have taken it for granted that we should go all the way down from the Madeleine to his house, near the Jardin des Plantes, then come all the way back to Saint-Augustin before crossing the river again to go to the rue de l’École-de-Médecine.

When these visits were finished, my grandmother having excused us from making one to her as we were to dine with her that evening, I dashed to the Champs-Élysées with a letter for Gilberte, which I wanted to give to our woman in the booth, who would pass it on to the servant of the Swanns’ who bought the spice cake from her several times a week. This letter was a New Year’s Day message, which I had decided to write to Gilberte on the day when she had made me so unhappy, in which I told her that our former friendship had died with the old year, that I was going to forget my grievances and disappointments, and that, from January 1, we were going to build together a new friendship, which would be so sound that nothing could destroy it, and so wonderful that I hoped she would try to take pride in it, keep it beautiful, and warn me in good time, as I promised to do for her too, of anything that might jeopardize its well-being. On the way home, Françoise made me stop at an open-air stand on the corner of the rue Royale, where she spent her New Year’s gratuity on two photographs, one of Pius IX and the other of Raspail,²⁰ and where I bought one of La Berma. The artiste’s face, her only one, seemed a meager gratification to offer to so many admirers: as unvarying and vulnerable as the coat worn by people who have no more than one to wear, all it could ever display was the same soft little groove on the upper lip, the high-set eyebrows, and a few other physical features, always the same ones, always susceptible to a chance burn or blow. It was a face which of itself would not have seemed beautiful; but because of all the kissing it must have had, kissing which its flirtatiously tender looks and archly innocent smile still seemed to invite from the surface of the “album copy,” it gave me the idea and consequently the desire to kiss it myself. After all, the desires that La Berma confessed through the disguise of Phèdre she must often experience for young men in real life; and everything, including the prestige of her name, which enhanced her beauty and extended her youth, must make it easy for her to satisfy those desires. In the gathering dusk, I stood beside a Morris column with its posters announcing La Berma’s New Year’s Day performance. There was a mild, damp wind blowing. It was weather I was quite familiar with; and a sudden feeling and presentiment ran through me: that New Year’s Day was not a day that differed from any other, not the first day of a new life, when I could remake the acquaintance of Gilberte with the die still uncast, as though on the very first day of Creation, when no past yet existed, as though the sorrows she had sometimes caused me had been wiped out, and with them all the future ones they might portend, as though I lived in a new world in which nothing remained of the old except one thing, my wish that Gilberte would love me. I realized that, since my heart yearned in this way for the redesign of a universe which had not satisfied it, this meant that my heart had not changed; and I could see there was no reason why Gilberte’s should have changed either. I sensed that, though it was a new friendship for me, it would not be a new friendship for her, just as no years are ever separated from each other by a frontier, and that, though we may put different names to them, they remain beyond the reach of our yearnings, unaware of these, and unaffected by them. Though I might dedicate this year to Gilberte, though I might try to imprint upon New Year’s Day the special notion I had made up for it, as a religion is superimposed on the blind workings of nature, it was in vain: I was aware that this day did not know it was called New Year’s Day, and that it was coming to an end in the twilight in a way that was not unknown to me. What I recognized, what I sensed in that mild wind blowing about the Morris column with its posters, was the reappearance of former times, with the never-ending unchangingness of their substance, their familiar dampness, their ignorant fluidity.

I went home. I had just experienced the New Year’s Day of older men, who differ on that day from the young, not because nobody brings them presents, but because they no longer believe in the New Year. I had received presents; but they had not included the only one that could have brought me any pleasure: a note from Gilberte. However, I was still young, as I had been capable of writing one to her, full of the forlorn yearning for tenderness which I had hoped would inspire the same in her. The sadness of the man who has grown old is that, having learned how pointless they are, he does not even think of writing such letters.

I lay in bed, prevented from sleeping by the street noises, which went on later than usual because of the celebrations. I thought of all the people who would end the day in pleasure, the lover or possibly the band of rakes who must have waited at the stage door for La Berma, after the performance I had seen advertised for this evening. To soothe the agitation I suffered from during the sleepless night, I could not even tell myself that La Berma probably gave no thought to love, since the lines she spoke, which she had studied at great length, reminded her incessantly that love is full of delights, which she knew anyway, as was clear from her ability not only to reproduce its notorious pangs—albeit fraught with a fresh violence and an unsuspected sweetness—but to strike new wonder into spectators, though each of them had felt these pangs to the full. I lit my candle again to gaze once more at her face. At the thought that at this very moment it was being caressed by the men whom I could not prevent myself from seeing with her, from drawing superhuman but imprecise pleasures from her person, the passion I felt was a cruel rather than a sensuous yearning, exacerbated now by the note of the hunting horn one hears in the night at Mid-Lent and often at other public holidays, which, because it is devoid at such times of poetry, sounds more mournfully from a drinking den than when it “haunts the heart of the evening woods.”²¹ At that moment, a note from Gilberte might not have been what I most needed. Our desires interweave with each other; and in the confusion of existence, it is seldom that a joy is promptly paired with the desire that longed for it.

On fine days, I continued to go to the Champs-Élysées, through streets of elegant pink houses which, because there were a great many exhibitions of watercolorists at that time, were washed by the subdued and variable light of pastel skies. It would not be true to say that in those days the palaces of Gabriel on the Place de la Concorde seemed to me things of greater beauty than the adjoining buildings, or even that they dated from a different period.²² To my eye there was greater style and even greater age, if not in the Palais de l’Industrie, at least in the Palais du Trocadéro.²³ My adolescence, wherever it walked, deep in its fevered sleep, saw whole districts through the same waking dream; and I had never suspected that there might be an eighteenth-century building on the rue Royale, just as I would have been astonished to learn that the Porte Saint-Martin and the Porte Saint-Denis, masterpieces dating from the days of Louis XIV, were not of the same period as the most recent constructions in the squalid areas that now surround them. Only once did one of the palaces of Gabriel make me stop and gaze for a longish moment: it was after nightfall, and the columns of stone had been desolidified by the moonlight, which, by turning them into cardboard cutouts, and reminding me of a stage set for Orpheus in the Underworld,²⁴ gave me my very first glimpse of beauty.

Gilberte had still not come back to the Champs-Élysées. Yet I very much needed to set eyes on her, as I could not even remember her face. When we look at the person we love, our inquisitive, anxious, demanding gaze, our expectation of the words that will make us hope for (or despair of) another meeting tomorrow, and, until those words are spoken, our obsession fluctuating between possible joy and sorrow, or imagining both of these together, all this distracts our tremulous attention and prevents it from getting a clear picture of the loved one. Also, it may be that this simultaneous activity of all the senses, striving to discover through the unaided eyes something that is out of their reach, is too mindful of the countless forms, all the savors and movements of the living person, all those things which, in a person with whom we are not in love, we immobilize. But the beloved model keeps moving; and the only snapshots we can take are always out of focus. I could not really say what the features of Gilberte’s face were like, except at those heavenly moments when she was there, displaying them to me. All I could remember was her smile. Unable to picture the loved face, however strenuously I tried to make myself remember it, I was forever irritated to find that my memory had retained exact replicas of the striking and futile faces of the carousel man and the barley-sugar woman, just as the bereaved, who each night search their dreams in vain for the lost beloved, will find their sleep is peopled by all manner of exasperating and unbearable intruders, whom they have always found, even in the waking world, more than dislikable. Faced with the impossibility of seeing clearly the object of their grief, they come close to accusing themselves of not grieving, just as I was tempted to believe that my inability to remember the features of Gilberte’s face meant that I had forgotten her and had stopped loving her. Eventually, she came back to the Champs-Élysées to play almost every day. Each time she came, she left me with new things to desire for the following day, new things to ask her; and this did have the effect of transforming my love for her into a new love every day. But then something happened to alter once again the way in which, about two o’clock every afternoon, I was faced with the problem of my love. Had M. Swann intercepted the letter I had sent to Gilberte? Or was she perhaps alluding to a state of affairs of long standing, meaning that I should be more careful? As I was telling her how much I admired her father and mother, her features started to take on that unfocused look, full of secrecy and unspoken things, which she always put on when anyone mentioned the things she had to do, visits she had to pay, shopping to be done; and suddenly she said, “They don’t fancy you very much, you know!” Then, slipping away like a water nymph—that was how she was—she burst out laughing. There were times when her laughter was at variance with her words, and appeared to be translating an invisible surface into another dimension, as music does. Her parents were not demanding that she give up coming to play with me; but she thought they would have preferred our relationship never to have begun. They frowned upon my having any dealings with her, thought I was quite untrustworthy, and assumed that I was bound to have a bad influence on their daughter. I could imagine the type of unscrupulous young man that M. Swann thought I was: hating the parents of the girl he loves, flattering them to their faces, but making fun of them when with her, enticing her into disobedience of them, and finally, once he has had his way with her, preventing them from seeing her. Against these characteristics (which are never those that the most hardened villain sees in himself) my innocent heart protested vehemently, alleging the true nature of the feelings it held for M. Swann, which were so passionate that, if he could only know of them, I was convinced he would come to see his assessment of me as a miscarriage of justice crying out to be put right! I went so far as to set out everything I felt for him in a long letter, which I asked Gilberte to take to him. She agreed to do this—but, alas, it turned out that he took me for an even greater fraud than I had thought! He was skeptical about my sixteen pages of protestations and truth! And so the letter, which contained no less passion and sincerity than the words I had spoken to M. de Norpois, met with no more success than they had. Gilberte told me the following day, after having taken me round to a secluded little pathway behind a clump of laurel, where we sat on chairs, that as her father had read the letter, which she had brought to give back to me, he had shrugged his shoulders and said, “This whole thing is pointless. It just goes to show how right I was!” To me, knowing the innocence of my intentions, the purity of my conscience, it was galling that my words had had not the slightest effect on M. Swann’s absurd misconception. For at that moment I had no doubt that it was a misconception. I was convinced that my delineation of certain unimpeachable features of my sincerest self had been so accurate that the only explanation of M. Swann’s inability to recognize them through my words, as of his failure to seek me out, beg my forgiveness, and admit to his mistake, was that he had never had such noble feelings himself, and consequently that he was incapable of appreciating them in others.

Of course, Swann may well have known that magnanimity is often nothing more than the outward appearance of a selfish impulse that we have not yet seen as such or named. In my protestations of goodwill toward him, perhaps he recognized a mere effect, as well as a resounding confirmation, of my love for his daughter; and he may have foreseen that my subsequent acts would be inevitably governed by this love, and not by my secondary veneration for himself. This was not a view I could share, as I had not managed to isolate my love from my self, to see it as belonging to the same general category as any other love, and to hazard an experimental deduction about its likely consequences. I was in despair. I had to leave Gilberte for a moment, as Françoise had called me. She wanted me to go with her to a little green-trellised pavilion that looked something like one of the disused Paris tollbooths from former times, in which had recently been installed what the English call a lavabo²⁵ and the French, in their misguided Anglomania, “water closets.” In the entrance, where I stood waiting for Françoise, the smell of the old damp walls, which was cool and musty, instantly freed me from the worries I had contracted from M. Swann’s words as told to me by Gilberte, filling me with a pleasure that was of a different essence from all others; for they leave us more unstable, unable to grasp them or possess them, whereas this one was of a denser consistency, reliable, delightful, peaceful, pregnant with a lasting truthfulness, which was as inexplicable as it was undeniable. I would have liked to try, as I had done before, on our walks along the Guermantes way, to fathom the charm of the impression that had come over me, to pause for a moment’s investigation of this old-fashioned redolence, which invited me not just to enjoy the pleasure, offered as a mere bonus, but to see through it to a reality it had not quite revealed. But the woman in charge of the establishment, an old dame with plastered cheeks and a ginger wig, struck up a conversation with us. Françoise was convinced the woman came from “her parts of the country.” Her eldest had married what Françoise called “a posh young man,” that is, someone who in her view differed as much from a worker as in Saint-Simon’s view a duke differed from a man “belonging to the dregs of the people.”²⁶ No doubt this woman, before becoming what she was, had been better off. But Françoise was convinced she was a countess, of the Saint-Ferréol family. The countess urged me not to stand about in the inclement air; she even opened one of her cubicles for me: “Wouldn’t you like to step inside? Here’s one that’s nice and clean—and you can use it free of charge!” This may have been nothing more than the sort of offer I sometimes received from the sales assistants in Gouache’s, who, when Mama and I were placing an order, would urge me to have one of the sweets under the glass covers standing on the counter, which my mother, to my chagrin, would never allow me to accept; or it may have been the slightly less innocent sort of suggestion made by an old florist from whom Mama bought blooms for her ornamental flower-stands, who would make eyes at me and give me a rose. But if the fancy of Françoise’s countess did run to youths for whom she opened the hypogean portal into her stone cubes, where men crouch like sphinxes, the aim of this kindness toward them must have been less the chance of seducing them than the unrequited pleasure of being indulgent toward a loved one, as I never saw her being visited by anyone other than one of the old park-keepers.

Having taken leave of the “countess,” I soon left Françoise to her own devices and went back to Gilberte. I saw her sitting on a chair behind the clump of laurels, so as to be invisible to her friends, with whom she was playing hide-and-seek. I sat beside her. She was wearing a flat toque, which almost covered her eyes and gave them the sly, unfocused, evasive expression I remembered from the first time I had seen it at Combray. I asked her whether there might not be a way for me to talk this thing over with her father. Gilberte said she had already suggested this, and that he could see no point in it. “Anyway, look,” she said, “here’s your letter back. We’d better go back to the others now, since nobody’s found me.”

If M. Swann had come upon us before I had managed to retrieve the letter whose sincerity he had been unreasonable enough to doubt, he might well have concluded that his doubt was fully justified. As I came close to Gilberte, who was leaning back in her chair, telling me to take the letter but not handing it to me, I felt so attracted by her body that I said:

“You try to stop me from getting it and we’ll see who wins.”

She held it behind her back, and I put my hands behind her neck, lifting the long plaits which hung on her shoulders, either because it was a hairstyle that suited her age, or because her mother wanted her to appear younger than she was, so as not to age too rapidly herself; and in that strained posture, we tussled with each other. I kept trying to draw her closer to me; she kept resisting. Flushed with the effort, her cheeks were as red and round as cherries; she laughed as though I were tickling her. I had her pinned between my legs as though she were the bole of a little tree I was trying to climb. In the middle of all my exertions, without my breathing being quickened much more than it already was by muscular exercise and the heat of the playful moment, like a few drops of sweat produced by the effort, I shed my pleasure, before I even had time to be aware of the nature of it, and managed to snatch the letter away from her. Gilberte said in a friendly tone:

“If you like, we could wrestle a bit more.”

Perhaps she had obscurely sensed that my antics had an ulterior motive, though she may have been unable to notice that my aim was now fulfilled. However, fearing that she might have detected it (a slight movement that she made a moment later, hinting at restraint or withdrawal, as though her sense of delicacy was offended, made me suspect I was right), I agreed to wrestle with her again, in case she might think my only purpose, now achieved, had been the pleasure that left me feeling no desire other than to sit quietly beside her.

On the way home, I suddenly recognized the hitherto hidden memory of the impression that I had been drawn toward by the cool, almost sooty air of the little trellised booth, but without being able to glimpse it or identify it. It was the memory of my uncle Adolphe’s little room in the house at Combray, which was full of the same dampish redolence. I could not understand, and I postponed the effort of finding out, why the memory of such an insignificant impression should have filled me with such bliss. This made me feel that I really did deserve the disdain of M. de Norpois: not only was my favorite writer someone he dismissed as a “flute-player,” but I had experienced a moment of genuine rapture, not from some idea of importance, but from a musty smell.

For some time, if a visitor chanced to mention the gardens of the Champs-Élysées in certain family circles, the name had been greeted by the mothers with the jaundiced look with which they might deprecate a mention of a highly regarded doctor who they claim has made too many mistakes of diagnosis for them to place any trust in him—these gardens, it was said, were not good for children, and were responsible for too many cases of sore throats, measles, and different sorts of fevers. When my mother did not forbid my visits to the Champs-Élysées, some of her friends, though not openly questioning her love for me, did at least doubt her wisdom.

Neurotics are perhaps—pace accepted wisdom—those who “coddle themselves” the least: they are so used to detecting disorders in themselves, which they later come to realize were quite harmless, that they reach the stage of paying no attention to any of them. Their nervous system has so often cried wolf, as though it is faced with a serious illness, when it has nothing more untoward to contend with than a fall of snow or a move to a new flat, that they come to ignore these warnings, as easily as a soldier in the heat of battle can avert his mind from them and, for another few days, even though he is dying, go on leading the life of a healthy man. One forenoon, with my habitual disorders in their usual state of coordination, my mind paying as little attention to their constant circulation within me as to the circulation of my blood, I ran cheerfully into the dining room to join my parents at the table and sat down, with the customary thought that feeling cold may mean, not that you should try to get warm, but only that you have been chided for something, and that not feeling hungry may mean it is going to rain, rather than that you should avoid eating. As soon as I started to swallow my first mouthful of an appetizing chop, I was overcome by a wave of vertigo and nausea, the feverish response of my body to an illness which had already begun, to which my indifference had turned a blind eye, masking and delaying the symptoms, but which was now adamantly refusing the food I was in no state to absorb. At the same instant, like a wounded man’s instinct of self-preservation, the thought that, if I was seen to be unwell, I would not be allowed out, gave me the strength to drag myself to my room, take my temperature (it was 104), and get ready to go to the Champs-Élysées. My smiling soul, through the permeable and sickly body that surrounded it, was already there, insisting on the sweet pleasure of a game of prisoner’s base with Gilberte; and an hour later, barely able to stand but happy to be with her, I still had enough strength left to enjoy it.

When we got back home, Françoise announced that I had “had a turn,” that I must have caught “a touch of the chill”; and the doctor, who was immediately summoned, announced that he “preferred” the “fierce onset” and the “virulence” of the attack of fever accompanying my lung congestion, which he said would turn out to be nothing but a “flash in the pan,” to a more “insidious” or “lurking” form of it. For years I had suffered from attacks of shortness of breath; and our doctor, despite the disapproval of my grandmother, who was convinced I would go to an alcoholic’s early grave, had recommended that, in addition to the caffeine already prescribed as an aid to my breathing, I should have a drink of beer, champagne, or brandy each time I felt an attack coming on. The “euphoria” brought on by the alcohol would, he said, “nip it in the bud.” Rather than conceal the state of breathlessness I was in, I was often obliged almost to exaggerate it before my grandmother would allow me to have such a drink. Also, as soon as I felt an attack coming on, my uncertainty about how serious it might or might not be became a more acute anxiety because of my grandmother’s sorrow, which always upset me more than the fit itself. However, my body, whether because it was too infirm to bear the stress of keeping this secret to itself, or because it feared that someone unaware of the imminence of the attack might require me to make an effort that would prove impossible or harmful to it, made me need to inform my grandmother of my discomfort with a degree of accuracy that I eventually came to invest with a sort of physiological realism. If I noticed within me a bothersome symptom I had never before identified, my body remained distressed until I could let my grandmother know. If she pretended not to pay attention, my body required me to persevere. Sometimes I went too far; and, wincing with pain, the loved face, which was not as skilled as it had once been at concealing its emotions, showed an expression of pity. The sight of her grief cut me to the quick, and I fell into her arms, as though my kisses might take the grief away, as though my love for her could cause her as much joy as my being well and happy. My anxiety being now lessened by the knowledge that she was aware of the discomfort I had been in, my body had no objection to my reassuring her. I told her there was nothing distressing in the discomfort, that she must not feel sorry for me, that she could be sure I was happy. My body had been trying to receive as much sympathy as it deserved; and as long as it was known that it had a pain in its right side, it did not mind if I stated that the pain was neither severe nor an impediment to my happiness. My body did not take itself for a philosopher; philosophy was not its province. During my convalescence, I had fits of breathlessness like this almost every day. On one occasion, when my grandmother had seen me quite well earlier in the evening, she came back into my room much later; and when she saw how short of breath I was, her face was stricken with grief and she moaned, “Oh dear, oh dear! You’re so ill!” She went straight out, I heard the porte cochère, and she came back in a little while with a bottle of brandy, which, as we had none in the house, she had gone out to buy. I soon started to feel better. My grandmother was rather flushed and looked embarrassed; and her eyes were full of an expression of weariness and discouragement.

“I think I’ll leave you, now that it’s doing you a little good,” she said, turning quickly away. I had time to kiss her and to feel something wet on her cool cheek, which I thought might have been a trace of the damp night air out of doors. The following day she did not come in to see me till the evening, as she had had to go out, I was told. I thought to myself that this showed a fairly indifferent attitude toward my well-being; and I had a good mind to tell her so.

When my attacks of breathlessness went on inexplicably, long after my pleurisy had cleared up, my parents called in Dr. Cottard. A doctor consulted in a case like this must be more than just well versed. In the face of symptoms which may be those of three or four different illnesses, the thing that enables him to decide which of them he is most likely to be dealing with, behind appearances that are very similar, is ultimately his flair, the sharpness of his eye. This mysterious gift implies no superiority in other aspects of the mind, and may be found even in a person of the utmost vulgarity, someone who is devoid of intellectual curiosity and who enjoys the most dreadful painting or music. In my case, what was externally observable might have been caused by nervous spasms, the early stages of tuberculosis, asthma, a toxic alimentary dyspnea with renal insufficiency, chronic bronchitis, or even a complex condition comprising several of these factors. The nervous spasms needed to be treated with disdain, the tuberculosis with great care and a form of overnutrition, which could have been bad for an arthritic condition like asthma, and possibly dangerous for a toxic alimentary dyspnea, which in its turn requires a regimen quite harmful to a patient suffering from tuberculosis. But Dr. Cottard barely hesitated before issuing the imperious command: “Drastic, violent purgatives. Milk and nothing but milk for several days. No meat. No alcohol.” My mother murmured that I really needed building up, that I was high-strung enough as it was, that this draconian purging and such a regimen would be hard on me. From Dr. Cottard’s eyes, which looked as anxious as though he were afraid of missing a train, I could see he was wondering whether he might not have behaved with his natural mildness of manner. He was trying to remember whether he had made sure to put on his mask of frigidity, the way one looks for a mirror to see whether one has not neglected to knot one’s tie. In this uncertainty, and so as to compensate just in case, he barked rudely, “I am not in the habit of repeating my prescriptions. Get me a pen. Milk, milk, that’s the main thing. After a while, once we’ve dealt with the attacks of breathlessness and the insomnia, we can start taking some clear soup, then some broth, but always and still with milk—milk, that’s the thing! You’ll like that, because Spain is fashionable these days—olé! au lait!”²⁷ His students were familiar with this pun, which he trotted out whenever he prescribed a milk diet for a cardiac case or a patient with a liver disorder. “Then we can gradually come back to the ordinary family diet. But if ever the cough and the breathlessness come back, purgatives, enemas, bed, and milk!” With an icy demeanor, he heard out my mother’s final objections, saying nothing in return, then took his leave without so much as a word to explain why he had chosen this treatment. My parents, taking a view that it was irrelevant to my condition and needlessly debilitating, decided not to try it. They naturally sought to keep the professor in ignorance of their lack of compliance; and to make sure of this, they stayed away from any of the houses where they might have run the risk of meeting him. Then, my condition having worsened, they decided to follow Dr. Cottard’s instructions to the letter; three days later, all the rattling in my chest had gone, my cough had cleared up, and I could breathe properly. We came to understand that Cottard, though, as he said later, he had thought I was asthmatic and especially “not quite right in the head,” had seen clearly that what predominated in me at that moment was a toxic reaction, that the liver and kidneys had therefore to be washed out, thus decongesting the bronchial tubes and enabling me to breathe and sleep again, and regain my strength. So it was we realized that Cottard the buffoon was a great doctor. At length I was able to get up. But the talk now was of not allowing me to go back to the Champs-Élysées. The reason given was the unhealthy air. But I was sure this was just an excuse for them to keep me away from Mlle Swann; and I made myself say over and over the name of Gilberte, as though it were a native tongue and I one of those captives in exile who endeavor to keep it alive, so as not to forget the homeland they will never see again. Sometimes my mother would stroke my forehead and say:

“Don’t little boys tell their sorrows to their mamas anymore?”

Every day, Françoise would come in and say: “Ooh, young master don’t look so good! You should take a look at yourself—you’re like death warmed up!” Of course, if I had had the merest cold, Françoise would have been just as lugubrious. Her lamentations were inspired by her “class” rather than by my ill health. At that time I could not be sure whether Françoise was a pessimist more in sorrow than in satisfaction. I decided provisionally that she was a social and professional pessimist.

One day, when the postman had just come, my mother laid a letter on my bed. I opened it, my mind elsewhere, as it could not possibly contain the only signature which would have made me happy, that of Gilberte Swann, because I never had any contact with her away from the Champs-Élysées. Yet there, at the bottom of the page, which was stamped with a silver seal in the form of a helmeted knight surmounting a scrolled motto Per viam rectam, at the end of a letter in an expansive hand, which seemed to have underlined nearly all the sentences, because the crossbar of every t was dashed above the letter and not through it, thus scratching a line under the corresponding word in the line above, the signature I read was Gilberte’s! However, because I knew this signature to be impossible in a letter addressed to me, the sight of it, unaccompanied as it was by any belief in it, brought me no happiness. For a moment, all it did was cast an unreal light on everything around me. At dizzying speed, the improbable signature jumbled the things in my room, the bed, the fireplace, the walls. Everything I looked at was wobbling, as though I had had a fall from a horse; and I wondered whether there might not be some other mode of existence, quite different from the one known to me, at variance with it but more real than it, which in the glimpse I had just caught of it had filled me with the hesitancy which sculptors depicting the Last Judgment show on the faces of the awakened dead, who stand already on the threshold of the Other World. The letter said: “Dear Friend, I hear you have been very ill and are not going to the Champs-Élysées now. I’ve almost stopped going there too, because of everybody falling ill. But my girlfriends come to tea with me every Monday and Friday. My mother wants you to know we should be very pleased if you could come too, as soon as you are well again. We could have nice chats at home the way we used to at the Champs-Élysées! So, in the hope that your parents will allow you to come to afternoon tea very soon, I say goodbye and send you all my best wishes. Gilberte.”

While I was reading these words, my nervous system, with admirable diligence, was receiving the news that a great joy was descending upon me. But my inner self, the one most closely concerned after all, was still in ignorance of it. Happiness, happiness from Gilberte, was something I had constantly thought about, something that existed only in thought, something like what Leonardo da Vinci said about painting, cosa mentale. And thought cannot instantly assimilate a sheet of paper covered in letters. But as soon as I had finished reading it, I thought about it, and it became an object of reflection; it too became cosa mentale, and I felt such love for it that every five minutes I had to read it again and kiss it. It was then that I became aware of my happiness.

Such miracles lie in wait for the lover, who may expect one at any time. This particular one may have been arranged by my mother, who, seeing that for some time past I had lost all pleasure in living, had perhaps had a message transmitted to Gilberte, asking her to write to me, much as, in earlier days, when I was learning to swim in the sea, she would, unbeknown to me, to make me enjoy swimming under water, which I hated, as it prevented me from breathing, give wonderful boxes covered in seashells and branches of coral to my swimming instructor, so that, when I came upon them lying on the seabed, I could believe they were my own discoveries. In any case, it is best not to inquire into how life, with all its contrasting developments, can impinge upon our love: the laws that govern such things, whether their workings are inexorable or just unexpected, seem to be those of magic rather than of rationality. When a woman who is plain and without money of her own leaves a multimillionaire with whom she has been living, a man of charm despite his wealth, and when he in his despair summons up all the powers of his wealth and sets in motion all the influences of this world, but fails to get her to come back to him, rather than seeking a logical explanation, it is better to assume, in the face of the willful mistress’s resolve, that Destiny wishes to crush him and make him die of a broken heart. The obstacles against which such a lover has to struggle, and which his imagination, overstimulated by suffering, tries vainly to identify, may lie in a singularity of character of the wayward woman, in her stupidity, in the influence now exercised on her by people whom the lover does not know, in fears they may have put into her mind, in appetites she is briefly bent on satisfying, which may be of the sort that her lover, with all his fortune, cannot satisfy. Moreover, the lover who seeks to know the nature of such obstacles is handicapped: the woman’s guile will hide it from him; and his own judgment, biased by his love, prevents him from assessing it accurately. Obstacles of this kind are like tumors that a doctor may succeed at last in reducing without ever knowing what caused them: though temporary, they remain mysterious. However, such obstacles generally last longer than love. And as love is not a disinterested passion, the erstwhile lover no longer strives to find out why, in her need and obstinacy, the flighty woman whom he once loved declined for years to let him go on keeping her.

In love, it is not only the causes of catastrophe that may lie forever beyond our grasp: just as often we remain in ignorance of the whys and wherefores of sudden outcomes that are happier—such as the one that Gilberte’s letter brought to me—or, rather, outcomes which appear to be happy, as there are few truly happy outcomes in the life of a feeling, which can generally look for no better reward than a shift in the site of the pain it entails. At times, however, a temporary remission is granted, and for a while one may have the illusion of being cured.

As for the letter itself (on which Françoise refused to recognize the name Gilberte, because the G leaning against an undotted i was so embellished that it looked more like an A, while the last part of the name ran on into a fancy elongated flourish), if it is deemed that a rational explanation is required for the change of heart which it signaled, and which brought me such joy, perhaps it will be said I owed it in part to an incident that I had actually expected would be the sort of thing to damn me forever in the sight of the Swanns. Not long before, at a moment when Professor Cottard happened to be with me—now that I was following his instructions, my parents had called him in again—Bloch had come up to see me. The consultation was over, and since Dr. Cottard, who was staying to dine with my parents, was sitting with me like any visitor, Bloch too was allowed in. In the course of conversation, Bloch having told how he had heard from someone whom he had met at dinner the previous night, someone who was very close to Mme Swann, that she was very fond of me, I knew I should tell him he was quite certainly mistaken, and thus, in accordance with the scruple that had moved me to speak of the same thing to M. de Norpois, and in case Mme Swann should think I was a liar, have it acknowledged once for all that I did not know her, and had never so much as spoken to her. But I did not have the courage to correct Bloch’s error, because I could see well enough it was a deliberate one, and because I knew that, in inventing something that Mme Swann could never in fact have said, he was trying to show himself in a flattering light by saying another thing which was untrue: that he had dined with a lady who was a friend of Mme Swann’s. However, whereas M. de Norpois, on learning that I did not know Mme Swann but would very much like to, had been careful not to mention me to her, Cottard, who was her doctor, having deduced from Bloch’s statement that she knew me very well and liked me, said to himself that, if he told her the next time he saw her that I was a charming fellow and that he knew me well, he would not be pushing me forward but would be putting himself in a good light, two reasons which persuaded him to put in a good word for me with Odette at the first opportunity.

And so that apartment opened to me, sending the perfume used by Mme Swann down the stairs to greet me, and welcoming me with an even more fragrant charm, which was the specific and forlorn flavor of the life led by Gilberte. Before long, when I asked the once-implacable concierge, now transformed into a benevolent Eumenid, whether I could go upstairs, he took to raising his cap with an auspicious hand, which showed my wish was granted. Soon, when I had spent a whole summer afternoon in Gilberte’s room, it fell to me to open the very windows which, from the outside, had once interposed between me and treasures not meant for me a gleaming, haughty, and superficial glance, which had seemed like the gaze of the Swanns themselves; yet now I was the one to let some fresh air in, or even, if it was her mother’s at-home day, to lean out alongside Gilberte and see the ladies as they arrived, stepping out of a carriage and sometimes glancing up to wave to me, as though thinking I was a nephew of their hostess. At such moments, Gilberte’s plaits would touch my cheek. Her hair seemed to me, in the delicacy of its grain, both natural and supernatural; and in the power of its artful foliations I saw a masterwork crafted from grasses grown in paradise. If I could have had even the tiniest sample of it, a heavenly herbarium would have been the only fitting repository for it. But since I could not hope to possess a real length of her hair, if I could have had just a photograph of it, how much more precious it would have been than any picture of little flowers drawn by Leonardo! To this end, I made compromising overtures to family friends of the Swanns, and even to photographers, which did not get me what I wanted, but made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.

Whenever I stepped into the Swanns’ dim anteroom, where the atmosphere thrilled with the perpetual possibility of meeting one or the other of Gilberte’s parents, who had for so long prevented me from seeing her, an encounter more awesome but more longed for than a glimpse of the King would have been at Versailles (and where I would trip over a huge seven-branched coatrack like the Candlestick in Scripture, ²⁸ before effusively greeting a footman who sat in his long gray frock coat on the firewood chest, and whom I mistook in the half-dark for Mme Swann), if she or her husband did happen to cross my path at that moment, my hand was shaken, I was smiled upon and spoken to in an unirritated voice:

“Good afternoon! Gilberte knows you’re here, does she? Good, good, that’s fine, then.” Both of her parents, by the way, said “Good aft’noon,” pronouncing “afternoon” without the middle syllable, which of course, as soon as I was back at home, it became my incessant pastime and pleasure to omit too.

But the most important thing was that the tea parties to which Gilberte’s girlfriends were invited, and which had for such a long time seemed the most impregnable of the many barriers separating her from me, had now become an opportunity for being with her. To these functions I was summoned, as a still quite recent acquaintance, on a variety of different notepapers. One of them was embossed with a blue poodle over a humorous English motto ending in an exclamation point; another was stamped with a ship’s anchor. Once, the monogram G.S., hugely magnified and elongated, was bounded by a rectangle running right down the page from top to bottom; on other occasions, it would be the name Gilberte either scrawled across one corner in golden letters imitating her signature and final flourish, and sheltering under an open umbrella printed in black, or else enclosed inside a motif in the shape of a Chinaman’s hat, on which the name figured in capital letters, none of which was individually legible. And as her range of notepapers, though extensive, was not inexhaustible, after a few weeks I would receive an invitation written on the one she had sent first, with the motto Per viam rectam under the helmeted knight on his seal of burnished silver. In those days, I assumed her choice of this one or that one on particular days was determined by certain rites. But now I think she just tried to remember the ones she had already sent, so as to be sure of letting the longest possible time elapse before sending another of the same to any of the recipients, or at least to anyone for whom she did not mind taking a little trouble. Because some of the friends invited to her teas attended different classes at different times of the afternoon, and had to leave just as others were arriving, on my way up the stairs I could hear the murmur of voices from the anteroom; and this, combined with the emotional disturbance created by the awe-inspiring ceremony which was about to be enacted before me, suddenly severed the links that joined me to my former life and, long before I reached the Swanns’ floor, deprived me of the ability to remember to take off my scarf as soon as I was indoors in the warmth, or to keep an eye on the time so as not to be late home. The staircase itself, entirely of wood and of the style favored at the time by certain speculative builders who liked imitation Renaissance, so long Odette’s ideal but soon to be abandoned by her, was adorned with a notice saying It Is Forbidden to Use the Elevator for Coming Down, the like of which had never been seen in the house we lived in; and it impressed me as a thing of such magnificence that I told my parents it was a genuine antique staircase, acquired by M. Swann and brought there by him from somewhere very far away. My respect for the truth was so great that, even if I had known this information to be untrue, I would still have said the same thing, for this was the only way to have my family share the esteem inspired in me by the dignity of the Swanns’ staircase. It was a reasoning akin to that which advises one, when dealing with an ignoramus who cannot see the genius of a great doctor, to say nothing of his inability to cure the common cold. But since I was very inobservant, being generally ignorant of the names and species of the most everyday things, knowing only that if they had anything to do with the Swanns they must be quite out of the ordinary, it did not strike me as a certainty that, in assuring my parents of the aesthetic value and distant origin of this staircase, I was telling a lie. Not a certainty; but perhaps a probability, as I felt myself turn very red when my father interrupted me with the words: “I know those kind of houses, and if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Swann just rents a few floors—they were all built by Berlier.”²⁹ He added that he had at one time thought of renting an apartment in one of them, but had changed his mind because they were not really comfortable, and the main entrance was badly lit. Thus spake my father; but, knowing instinctively that my mind must make whatever sacrifices might be necessary to the prestige of the Swanns and my own happiness, I exercised the authority of my inner self and, despite what I had just heard, put behind me once and for all, as a true Catholic might shun Renan’s Life of Jesus,³⁰ the corrosive notion that the Swanns’ apartment was a perfectly ordinary apartment, an apartment that we ourselves might have lived in.

So, on Gilberte’s afternoon-tea days, I climbed that staircase, step by step, divested already of memory and the power of thought, reduced to a creature of the crudest reflexes, and came at last to the level where the fragrance of Mme Swann’s perfume floated. My mind was full of the majestic chocolate cake set in the circle of side plates and little gray damask napkins, required by etiquette and peculiar to the Swanns. But the workings of this regulated and unchanging arrangement, like those of Kant’s necessary universe, seemed to depend on a supreme act of free will. That is, once we were all gathered in Gilberte’s little sitting room, she would dart a glance at the clock and say:

“Look here, it’s been hours since lunchtime, dinner’s not till eight, and I’m feeling quite hungry. Would anyone care to join me?”

Whereupon, she would show us through to the dining room, which was as dim as an Asian temple interior as Rembrandt might have painted it, and was dominated by the architectural splendor of a cake, as cheerful and familiar as it was imposing, which seemed to be standing there as though this day was an ordinary day, just in case Gilberte might have felt a passing urge to demolish its chocolate battlements and lay waste the slopes of its steep, dark ramparts, baked like the bastions of Darius’ palace. The best thing was that, in setting about the destruction of her Ninevite cake-castle, Gilberte was motivated not only by the urges of her own appetite; she inquired also about mine, as she salvaged for me from the crumbling ruins a whole wall varnished and studded with scarlet fruit, in the Oriental style. She even asked me what time my parents dined, as though I knew something about it, as though the emotional upset from which I was suffering could enable any sensation such as lack of appetite or hunger, any notion of dinner or family, to survive in my vacant memory and paralyzed stomach. Unfortunately, this paralysis was only temporary; and there would come a time when the cakes I consumed without noticing them would have to be digested. But that moment was still in the future; and in the present, Gilberte made “my tea.” I drank huge quantities of it, although normally a single cup of tea would keep me awake for twenty-four hours. So it was that my mother had come to remark, “It’s a worry—every time that boy goes to the Swanns’ he comes home sick.” But while I was at the Swanns’ I would have been unable to say whether or not it was really tea I was drinking. And even if I had known, I would have gone on drinking it; for even if I had been restored momentarily to proper awareness of the present, this would not have given me back the ability to remember the past or foresee the future. My imagination was incapable of stretching to the remote moment when I might feel tired or think of going to bed.

Not all of Gilberte’s other guests were so tipsy with excitement that making up their minds was impossible. Some of these girls actually declined the offer of tea! At which Gilberte would say a thing that people said a lot at that time, “Well, my tea doesn’t seem to be a great winner, does it?” Then, in an effort to make the occasion look less ceremonial, she shifted a few of the chairs set at regular intervals about the table, adding, “For goodness’ sake, we look as though we’re at a wedding breakfast! Aren’t servants stupid!”

She nibbled her cake, sitting sideways on an X-shaped seat which stood at an awkward angle to the table. And if Mme Swann, having just seen one of her visitors out—her at-homes were usually on the same days as Gilberte’s tea parties—should look in quickly, sometimes in blue velvet, often in a dress of black satin covered in white lace, she would say in a tone of surprise, which suggested Gilberte might have had all those little cakes to eat without her mother knowing about it:

“What’s this! Doesn’t that look scrumptious! It makes my mouth water to see you all sitting here eating cake.”

“Well, please join us, Mama,” Gilberte would reply.

“You know I can’t, my precious. Whatever would all my ladies say? I’ve still got Mme Trombert, Mme Cottard, and Mme Bontemps—you know how the visits of dear Mme Bontemps are never very brief, and she’s just arrived. What would these good ladies have to say if I left them in the lurch? But when they’ve gone, if nobody else comes, then I’ll come back and have a nice chat with you all. That would be so much more to my liking! I think I deserve a little rest—I’ve had forty-five visitors today, and of those forty-five at least forty-two have talked about Gérôme’s new painting!”³¹ Then, turning to me as she made ready to return to her ladies, she added, “Look, why don’t you drop in one of these days? You could have your cup of tea with Gilberte. She knows how you like it, the way you have it at home, in your own little studio.” She made it sound as though what I was seeking in this world of mystery was something as familiar to me as my own habits (if my supposed liking for tea could be called that; and as for the alleged “studio,” I was unclear whether I had one or not). “So—when will you come? Tomorrow? We’ll have toast for you that’s as good as you can get at Columbin’s.³² No, you really can’t? Well, you’re a selfish thing!” She delivered this last statement in tones reminiscent of the mincing tyranny of Mme Verdurin, for Odette, now that she was beginning to have a salon of her own, had started to ape some of that lady’s ways. Since both “Colombin” and the English word toast were utterly obscure to me, her promise could not make her house more attractive to me. As for the eulogy she then delivered of our old “nurse,” my momentary inability to understand whom she was referring to may appear somewhat stranger, given that the word is now used by everyone, possibly even at Combray. Despite my ignorance of English, I soon grasped that it meant Françoise. Whereas at the Champs-Élysées I had been so anxious about the bad impression Françoise must have made, I now learned from Mme Swann that what had predisposed her and her husband in my favor was everything Gilberte had told them about my “nurse”: “It’s pretty clear that she’s devoted to you, that she’s just perfect!” (My opinion of Françoise changed instantly, one effect of which was that it no longer seemed so essential to me to have a governess equipped with a raincoat and a hat with a feather in it.) I deduced too, from certain words that Mme Swann spoke about Mme Blatin, whose kindness she praised and whose visits she dreaded, that to have been on friendly terms with the lady would have been of less value to me than I had thought, and would in no way have improved my standing with the Swanns.

Though I had begun, full of this tremulous respect and joy, to explore the enchanted domain which had just given me the freedom of its hitherto forbidden avenues, it was only in my capacity as a friend of Gilberte. The realm in which I was now welcomed was itself encompassed by another even more mysterious one, in which Swann and his wife had their supernatural being, and which, if we chanced to meet, going through the anteroom in our different directions, closed behind them again as soon as they had shaken my hand. However, soon I too had access to their Inner Sanctum. For instance, if Gilberte was not at home but her parents were, they would ask who it was at the door; and, having been told it was me, they would have me sent in to see them, with the aim of asking me to influence their daughter toward a certain course of action in some matter or other. I remembered the exhaustive, persuasive screed which I had not long since sent to M. Swann, and to which he had never deigned to reply. I was struck by the impotence of the mind, the reason, and the heart in bringing about the slightest change in people, in reducing a single one of the difficulties which life, left to its own devices and in ways that escape us, manages to resolve so easily. My new status as friend of Gilberte, capable of influencing her for the better, put me in the favorable position of someone who happened to be the school friend of a king’s son, as well as being always at the head of the class, and who, because of those fortuitous facts, now has the run of the palace and private audiences in the throne room: with infinite kindness, and as though he was not much occupied with lofty considerations, Swann would usher me into his study and speak to me for an hour about things that my state of emotional turmoil prevented me from understanding a single word of, and to which I could reply only with stammerings, diffident dumbness, and sudden daring outbursts of short-winded incoherence; thinking they might interest me, he showed me books and finely wrought objects, the beauty of which, I was prospectively convinced, must infinitely surpass all the holdings of the Louvre and the Bibliothèque Nationale, impossible though it was for me to view these. At such moments, the Swanns’ butler would have endeared himself to me had he asked me to hand over my watch, my tie pin, and my boots, or if he had begged me to sign a deed recognizing him as my heir. The state I was in is described perfectly by a fine colloquialism—“I didn’t know whether I was coming or going!”—the coiner of which is as unknown as the author of the greatest epic poems, but which, like them—and pace the theory of Wolf³³—must have had an originator, one of those modest creative spirits who turn up every now and then to enrich the rest of us with a felicitous expression like “putting a name to a face,” but whose own face we can never put a name to. However long I was closeted with Swann, all I ever got from these moments was a feeling of surprise at the utter non-achievement they led to, the total lack of satisfying outcome I derived from the hours spent in the enchanted dwelling. Not that my disappointment came from any deficiency in the masterpieces he showed me, or the impossibility of forcing my distracted eye to focus on them. It was not the intrinsic beauty of these things which made it miraculous for me to be in Swann’s study; it was that, adhering to the things (which could have been the ugliest imaginable), there was the special, sad, thrilling emotion that I had invested in this place for so many years, and of which it was still redolent. Nor was it Mme Swann’s multitude of mirrors, silver brushes, and little shrines to Saint Anthony of Padua, painted or sculpted by friends of hers who counted among the finest artists, that filled me with the knowledge of my unworthiness and her own regal graciousness, whenever she received me for a moment in her room, where three beautiful and imposing creatures, her first, her second, and her third maids, were smiling and laying out wonderful garments, and to which I wended my way, when the footman in breeches and hose had conveyed to me the injunction that Madame wished to speak to me, along a winding corridor that was remotely perfumed by the precious essences wafting the constant current of their sweet scents all the way from her dressing room.

When Mme Swann had gone back to her visitors, we could still hear her talking and laughing; for, even in the presence of only two people, as though commanding the attention of the full complement of “chums,” she raised her voice, she held forth, as she had so often seen the “Patronne” do among the “little clan” so as to “keep the conversation going.” The expressions we have most recently borrowed being those we most like to use, at least for a time, Mme Swann sometimes chose the ones she had picked up from the few distinguished people whom her husband had not managed to avoid introducing to her (such as the mannerism of dropping the article or the demonstrative pronoun before an adjective describing a person), and sometimes more vulgar ones (for instance, “Isn’t it ducky!,” which one of her close friends was always saying); and these she tried to work into whatever stories she told, as had been her wont since the days of the “little clan.” At the end of her stories, she would sometimes add, “I’m very fond of that story,” or “Now, you must admit, that’s a lovely story!,” a habit she had acquired, via her husband, from the Guermantes, whom she did not know.

After Mme Swann had left the dining room, her husband, who had just come home, might then look in. “Is your mother alone now, Gilberte, do you happen to know?” “No, she’s still got some of her ladies with her.” “What? At seven o’clock in the evening! How dreadful! The poor dear must be exhausted. It’s quite odious.” At home I had been accustomed to hearing “odious” with a long o; but both Mme Swann and M. Swann gave the word a short one, making it into “oddious.” “Just think,” he went on, turning to me, “she’s been going since two this afternoon! And Camille tells me that there must have been twelve of them just between four and five! What am I saying, twelve? I think it was fourteen he said! I tell a lie, it was twelve—or was it? Anyway, when I came home just now, I had quite forgotten it was her at-home day, and when I saw all the carriages outside, I thought there must be a wedding in the house! And for the last few minutes, sitting in my study, I’ve heard nothing but the doorbell ringing. Given me quite a headache, I can tell you. Has she still got many of them with her?” “No, just two now.” “And who might they be, do you know?” “Mme Cottard and Mme Bontemps.” “Ah, yes, the wife of the private secretary to the minister of works.” “Well, I know her hubby works in a big minister’s office or something, but I don’t know what he is,” Gilberte said, putting on a silly voice.

“Silly girl! You sound like a two-year-old. Works in a big office, indeed! He’s actually the private secretary to the minister—that means he’s the boss of the whole thing! Or wait, no, what am I saying? I’m as silly as you are—he’s not just the private secretary—he’s the principal private secretary!”

“Well, how am I supposed to know? So a principal private secretary, that’s good, is it?” Gilberte said, always ready to show indifference to whatever her parents took pride in, or possibly thinking to enhance the effect of their acquaintance with such an exalted personage by appearing not to attach much importance to it.

“Good, is it?” Swann exclaimed, preferring plainer speech to such modesty, which might have left me in some doubt. “I’ll have you know he’s next in importance to the minister himself! Or actually he’s more important than the minister, because he’s the one who’s in charge of everything. I’m told he’s a man of caliber, too, a first-rate man, a really distinguished person. Officer of the Legion of Honor. A fine fellow in all respects, and actually very handsome too.”

In fact, his wife had married him, against much opposition from within her family, because he was a “charmer.” The general effect of this person of superlative refinement may be judged from the fact that he had a silky fair beard, a pretty face, an adenoidal pronunciation, bad breath, and a glass eye.

“I don’t mind telling you,” Swann said to me, “that it’s really quite funny to see people like that in government circles these days. You see, they’re the Bontemps of the Bontemps-Chenut family, the epitome of your narrow-minded middle classes, priest-ridden reactionaries. Your late grandfather was very familiar, at least by sight and repute, with old Chenut—who never tipped a cabman more than two cents in his life, though he was wealthy for those days—and Baron Bréau-Chenut. They lost everything in the collapse of the Union Générale,³⁴ which you’re too young to remember anything about, and since then they’ve had to pick up whatever pieces they can.”

“He’s the uncle of a girl that used to go to my school. She was in one of the classes well below mine—‘that Albertine,’ everybody used to call her. I’m sure she’ll be very ‘fast’ one of these days, but at the moment she’s the funniest-looking thing.”

“What an amazing daughter I’ve got! She knows everyone!”

“No, I don’t know her. I just used to see her about and hear everybody shouting ‘Albertine, Albertine’ all the time. But Mme Bontemps I do know, and I can tell you I don’t like her much either.”

“Well, you’re quite wrong there, my girl. Mme Bontemps is charming, pretty, and intelligent. Witty too. I’ll just pop in and say hello to her, ask her whether her husband thinks there’s going to be a war, and whether we can rely on King Theodosius. He’s very much in the know, so he must know a thing or two about that, wouldn’t you say?”

In earlier days, Swann would never have spoken in this way. But a similar change can be seen in the once-unpretentious princess of royal blood who, ten years later, having eloped with a footman, then tries to re-enter society, only to sense that people are not very willing to frequent her; so she spontaneously adopts the conversational habits of boring old women who, when the name of a fashionable duchess is spoken in their hearing, instantly say, “She looked in to see me only yesterday,” and “I lead a very sheltered life these days, you know.” Which shows how pointless it is to study human manners; they can be deduced from the laws of human psychology.

The Swanns were not immune from this foible, common to people whose circle of acquaintance is not as wide as they would like. A visit, an invitation, even a friendly word spoken by anyone who was at all noted, they took to be an event that should be bruited abroad. If by some ill chance the Verdurins were in London when Odette happened to hold a dinner party that was at all remarkable, there was always some way of making sure that a mutual friend would telegraph the news to them. The merest letter or even just a telegram that Odette might receive, if it was in any sense flattering, the Swanns were incapable of keeping to themselves. Friends were told about it; the document itself was circulated. The Swanns’ salon was reminiscent of those hotels in seaside resorts where they pin up messages on a bulletin board.

Also, the people who had known the former Swann not just in a private capacity, as I had, but also in society, in the world of the Guermantes—where the highest standards of wit and charm were expected of everyone, except duchesses and highnesses, and where even eminent men might be unwelcome if they were seen to be boring or vulgar—might have been surprised to discover not only that the former Swann had turned into someone whose ways of referring to people he was acquainted with were indiscreet, but that his criteria for choosing such people were also quite lax. How was it possible for him not to be exasperated by Mme Bontemps, who was so common and nasty? How could he possibly say she was a pleasant person? His memories of the Guermantes set should surely have prevented it. But in fact they abetted it. The Guermantes, unlike three-quarters of the world’s social sets, certainly had taste, and exquisite taste at that. But they also had snobbery, which makes for the possibility of momentary failures in the functioning of taste. In the case of someone who was not an indispensable member of their set—a minister of foreign affairs, say, rather too full of his own Republicanism, or a garrulous Academician—their taste discriminated against him; Swann would commiserate with Mme de Guermantes over her having had to dine with such commensals at an embassy; and the whole Guermantes set infinitely preferred a fashionable man, a man of their own world, that is, devoid of any special talent, but with the Guermantes cast of mind. However, a grand duchess or a princess of royal blood, by dining frequently at the house of Mme de Guermantes, would also be seen as being in the set, although, by virtue of her lack of the Guermantes cast of mind, she was not of it. But with the naïveté of the fashionable, since she was one of their number, they did their best to think she was good company, rather than knowing that it was because she was good company that she was one of their number. “She’s actually quite a nice woman,” Swann would say in support of Mme de Guermantes, after HRH had left. “And she’s even got a touch of comedy in her. I must say, I doubt whether she has ever read the Critique of Pure Reason from cover to cover! Still, she’s not too bad.”

“I agree entirely,” the Duchesse de Guermantes would reply. “Mind you, today she was a little bit shy. But you’ll see, she can be quite charming.” “She’s much less of a bore than Mme XJ”—this being the wife of the garrulous Academician, a quite outstanding woman—“who keeps spouting books at you.” “Oh, there’s no comparison!” It was at the Duchesse de Guermantes’s that Swann had acquired his facility in saying such things, which he said in all sincerity; and it was an ability he had kept. It served him now with the people who visited his wife. He tried hard to see in them, and to like, the qualities which any human being shows if examined with a favorable bias, and not with the disdain of the fastidious; and nowadays he stressed the merits of Mme Bontemps as he had once stressed those of the Princess of Parma, who would really have been unacceptable to the Guermantes set, had not certain highnesses benefited from preferential treatment—and even if the ones admitted had been expected to possess wit and a little charm. As has been seen, Swann had once enjoyed exchanging his social position for one which, in certain circumstances, suited him better; and all he was doing at present was adapting this practice to a more lasting situation. It is only people who are incapable of perceiving the composite nature of what seems at first sight indivisible who think that person and position are one. The same man, seen on different rungs of the social ladder at consecutive moments of his life, belongs to separate worlds, each of which is not necessarily more elevated than the previous one; and every time a new phase of living brings us into, or back into, a certain social circle that welcomes us with open arms, we quite naturally start to put down roots and become attached to it.

As for Mme Bontemps, when Swann spoke of her in such glowing terms, I think he was also quite pleased by the thought that my parents would know she was on visiting terms with his wife. It must be said, however, that the identity of the people with whom Mme Swann gradually came to be on such terms aroused more curiosity in my family than admiration. On hearing the name of Mme Trombert, my mother said:

“Now, there’s a new recruit! And she’ll bring in others.”

And she added, as though Mme Swann’s brisk and impetuous conquest of new acquaintances were a colonial war:

“Now that the Tromberts are subdued, the neighboring tribes will not hold out much longer.”

If she happened to pass Mme Swann in the street, she would tell us about it that evening:

“I saw Mme Swann today in full battle order. She must have been launching an incursion into the lands of the Massechuto, the Singhalese, or the Tromberts.”

When I mentioned all the new people I had seen at the Swanns’, a somewhat mixed and artificial society, many of whom had been rather unwilling to belong to it, and who derived from very different backgrounds, my mother could tell at once how they came to be there, and spoke of them as though they were spoils of war:

“Brought back from an expedition to Mme de This’s or Mme de That’s.”

In the case of Mme Cottard, my father was amazed that Mme Swann should think there was kudos to be got from the company of such a dowdy middle-class person: “Even allowing for the professor’s position, I must say it’s beyond me.” To my mother, on the other hand, it was quite clear: she knew that a woman could miss much of the pleasure to be got from graduating to circles different from those she had moved in before, if she could not inform her old acquaintances about the relatively more conspicuous acquaintances with whom she had replaced them. For this purpose, a witness is required, who shall be allowed into the world of new delights, as the blundering insect plunders a flower, then flies off to visit others, to spread the news, or so it is hoped, sprinkling its random pollens of envy and admiration. Mme Cottard, perfect for this role, belonged to that special category of guests whom Mama, who had some of her father’s style of wit, called “Strangers to Speak in Sparta.”³⁵ Besides—apart from another reason, which did not come to light until many years later—in inviting this friend, who was demure, reserved, and well meaning, to her splendid at-homes, Mme Swann had no need to fear she might be harboring a traitor or a competitor. She knew the great number of middle-class blooms that this tireless worker, armed with her plumed hat and her little card case, could pollinate in one busy afternoon. She knew how prolific this form of seeding could be; and, allowing for the law of averages, she was right to expect that, by the next day but one, this or that “regular” of the Verdurins’ would have heard of the card left on her by the commanding officer of the Paris region, or even that M. Verdurin in person would be told that none other than the chairman of the Turf Club, M. Le Hault de Pressagny, had included the Swanns in his party for the grand ball in honor of King Theodosius. She imagined that these two events, both of them flattering for herself, would be the only ones the Verdurins would learn of, for the particular concrete manifestations of fame which we like to picture and to which we aspire are few, given our penury of mind and our inability to imagine simultaneously more than one of the many blessings of fame, though we still harbor the vague hope of seeing them all descend upon us at once.

Besides, Mme Swann’s only successes so far had been in what is known as “the world of officialdom.” Fashionable ladies did not frequent her house. It was not that they were deterred by the presence of the Republic’s representatives. During the early years of my childhood, all who belonged to conservative society belonged also to fashionable society; no self-respecting salon would have countenanced admitting a Republican. Those who constituted this set were convinced that the impossibility of ever inviting an Opportunist,³⁶ let alone an unspeakable Radical, was something that would last forever, like oil lamps and horse trolleys. But after the manner of kaleidoscopes, which are turned from time to time, society composes new designs by jumbling the order of elements that once seemed immutable. By the time I had taken my first communion, prim and proper ladies were being confronted, to their astonishment, with elegant Jewesses in some of the houses they frequented. These new designs in the kaleidoscope are made by what a philosopher would call a change of criterion. Another of these was to come with the Dreyfus Affair, at a time slightly later than my first entry into the world of Mme Swann, and again the kaleidoscope shuffled its little tinted shapes. All things Jewish were displaced, even the elegant lady, and hitherto nondescript nationalists came to the fore. The most brilliant salon in Paris was that of an ultra-Catholic Austrian prince. If instead of the Dreyfus Affair there had been a war with Germany, the kaleidoscope would have turned in a different direction. The Jews, who would have shown to everyone’s astonishment that they were patriotic, could have kept their position; and no one would have wished to go, or even admit to ever having gone, to the Austrian prince’s. Even so, each time society is briefly stable, those who make it up imagine that further change is ruled out, just as, having seen the advent of the telephone, they now wish to disbelieve in airplanes. And the philosophers of the daily press damn the former time, not only in its modes of pleasure, which they see as the epitome of decadence, but even in the work of its artists and thinkers, which they now see as worthless, as though it were inseparably linked to the constant inconstancies of the fashionable and the frivolous. The only thing that never changes is that there always appears to be “something changing in France.” In the days when I started frequenting Mme Swann’s world, the Dreyfus Affair had not yet happened, and certain notable Jews were very influential, none more so than Sir Rufus Israels, whose wife was an aunt of Swann’s. Lady Israels did not enjoy the same fashionable connections as her nephew once had; and he, though he must presumably have been her heir, had little enough contact with her, as he disliked her. However, she was the only relative of Swann’s who knew something of his real standing in the elegant world, the others being as ignorant in that respect as my own family had been for years. When one member of a family emigrates to high society—something which at the time seems to him a unique occurrence, but which with ten years’ hindsight he can see has been managed by more than one of the young men with whom he was brought up, albeit in a different way, and for different reasons—he lives inside a twilight zone, a terra incognita, which is quite visible in its finest detail for all those who inhabit it, but which is dark and empty for all who do not have access to it, who may live alongside it without ever suspecting that it exists. No Reuters news agency ever having informed Swann’s cousins about the people he mixed with, these ladies would exchange stories at family dinners about how they had—before the man’s wretched marriage, of course—“dutifully” devoted their Sunday afternoon to visiting “Cousin Charles,” who they thought was somewhat given to the poor relation’s envy of his betters, and whom, with a pun on the title of Balzac’s Cousine Bette, they wittily dubbed “Cousin Batty.” If envy there was, it was on the part of Lady Israels, who knew perfectly well the identity of the people who lavished their friendship on him. Her husband’s family, who were as rich as the Rothschilds, had for some generations managed the affairs of the princes of Orléans. Lady Israels, who was hugely wealthy and very influential, had contrived to make sure that no one of her acquaintance would ever be at home to Odette. Only one person, the Comtesse de Marsantes, had disobeyed, and that secretly. One day, as Odette arrived to visit this lady, by an ill chance in swept Lady Israels. Mme de Marsantes, who was on tenterhooks, plucked up the cowardice of those who could just as well choose to be brave, and said nothing to Odette for the duration of her visit. This occurrence did nothing to inspire Odette to venture further into a zone of society which in any case was not the one she wished to belong to. In her utter disregard for the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Odette remained the untutored light-o’-love, quite different from the middle-class people who are minutely informed on the finer points of genealogy and whose longing for aristocratic connections, unrequited by life, can be assuaged only by perusal of an older generation’s memoirs. As for Swann, no doubt he went on being the lover who turns a blind and indulgent eye to a former mistress’s idiosyncrasies; and I would often hear Odette utter the most flagrant howlers about things social while Swann, moved either by a lingering fondness, or by the low esteem in which he now held her, or perhaps because he could no longer be bothered trying to improve her, sat by and did nothing to correct them. This may also have been a mode of the simplicity of manner which had had us fooled for so many years at Combray, and which, since he had kept up his separate connection with some of the most outstanding members of the Faubourg, made him reluctant to mar the conversation in his wife’s drawing room by seeming to attach any importance to such people. In fact, for Swann himself they were of less importance than ever, the center of gravity of his life having shifted. So Odette, in her complete ignorance of society, went on saying, whenever a passing mention was made of the Princesse de Guermantes just after a mention of her cousin the Duchesse de Guermantes, “I see! They’re princes now, are they? They’ve gone up in the world!” If people referred to the Duc de Chartres as “the Prince,” she would set them right: “No, no, he’s not a prince, he’s a duke.” Of the Duc d’Orléans, the son of the Comte de Paris, she would say, “It’s odd, isn’t it, the son being above the father like that.” Then, like the Anglophile she was, she would add, “All these ‘royals’! Isn’t it confusing!” And once, when someone asked her which of France’s old provinces the Guermantes family hailed from, she gave the name of a département, “From the Aisne.”

In any case, Swann was blind not only to the gaps in Odette’s education, but also to her poverty of mind. Indeed, when she told one of her silly stories, he would listen to her full of an obliging, cheerful, even admiring attentiveness, which could be explained only by his finding her still sexually arousing; whereas, in the same conversation, Odette’s inveterate way was to lend a perfunctory ear, bored or impatient, to anything subtle or even profound that he might say, to half ignore and at times sharply contradict him. It must be supposed that, in many marriages, such subservience of the outstanding to the vulgar is the rule, for one need only think of the opposite case, that of the gifted wife who smilingly defers to her crass boor of a husband as he crushes her nicest conceits, then gushes with loving indulgence at the inept buffoonery he thinks is humor. Among the other reasons which at that time prevented Odette from being accepted in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, it must be said that a series of scandals had lately caused another shift in the patterns of the social kaleidoscope. Certain women, with whom people had been mixing without suspecting anything untoward, turned out to be common prostitutes and English spies. For a while, it was going to be expected, or so it was believed, that the only acceptable people would be those who were of unimpeachable respectability. Odette stood for everything which had just been shunned, but which (as people do not change overnight, but seek to continue a former state of affairs in the guise of a new one) was soon going to be welcomed back with open arms, having slightly altered its forms, thus enabling society to fool itself into believing it was no longer the same as it had been before the scandal. However, at that time Odette bore too close a resemblance to society’s lately exposed ladies. The elegant are nothing if not shortsighted—at the very moment when, having ostracized all the Jewish ladies of their acquaintance, they are looking about for other ladies with whom to replace them, they suddenly notice a newcomer who turns up like an orphan in the storm, but who happens to be Jewish too; it is the novelty of her that prevents them from seeing in her what they had seen, but chosen to abhor, in her predecessors. She requires no one to have no other gods before hers; and she is adopted. In the days when I was making my first entry into the world of Mme Swann, though the problem was not anti-Semitism, she was of a kind with those who were to be kept at a distance, for a time.

As for Swann, he would often visit some of his former set, all of whom belonged of course to the most elegant society. However, if he ever spoke to us of the people he had been to see, I noticed that his choice among his former acquaintances was influenced by the same semi-artistic, semi-historical sense that informed his taste as a collector. When I realized that the reason why he was particularly fond of this or that great lady who had come down in the world was that she had been Liszt’s mistress, or that Balzac had dedicated a novel to her grandmother, just as he would buy a drawing if it was mentioned in Chateaubriand, I began to suspect that we had substituted for the misleading Combray Swann, the middle-class man without social connections, another Swann, who was just as misleading, the man about town who belonged to the best circles. To be on friendly terms with the Comte de Paris means nothing. Plenty of men who are the friends of princes will never be accepted in self-respecting drawing rooms. Princes know they are princes, are not snobbish, and in any case see themselves as being so far above anyone who is not of their blood that those beneath them, the middle classes and peers of the realm, appear to be almost of the same rank.

However, the pleasure Swann derived from his social contacts was not just the straightforward kind enjoyed by the cultivated man with an artistic bent who restricts himself to society as it is constituted, and enjoys his familiarity with the names engraved in it by the past and still legible now. He also took a rather vulgar enjoyment in making as it were composite posies out of disparate elements, bringing together people from very different backgrounds. These experiments in the sociology of entertainment, which is how he saw them, did not have exactly the same effect—or, rather, did not have a constant effect—on all the ladies who visited his wife. He would say with a laugh to Mme Bontemps, “I’m thinking of having the Cottards to dinner with the Duchesse de Vendôme,” looking like a gourmet whose mouth waters at the novel undertaking of adding cayenne pepper to a particular sauce instead of the usual cloves. But this design of Swann’s, though it would certainly strike the Cottards as entertaining, was calculated to appear quite outrageous to Mme Bontemps. She, having herself only recently been introduced by the Swanns to the Duchesse de Vendôme, and having deemed this occurrence to be as pleasing as it was natural, had found that impressing the Cottards by telling them all about it had been not the least of the pleasures it afforded her. But, like those who, as soon as their own names figure in the latest Honors List, would like to see the supply of such decorations run dry, Mme Bontemps would have been better pleased if, after she had been presented to the Duchesse de Vendôme, nobody else from her circle could be. She secretly cursed Swann for the warped taste with which, merely to satisfy a misplaced aesthetic curiosity, he had wantonly squandered all the kudos she had seen reflected in the eyes of the Cottards as she told them about the Duchesse de Vendôme. Would she even have the heart to tell her own husband that Professor Cottard and his wife were not to partake of the very pleasure that she had assured him was unique to themselves? If the Cottards could only learn that their invitation was not seriously meant, but had been sent just for fun! The fact was that the Bontemps had been sent their invitation for exactly the same reason; but then Swann, who had borrowed from the aristocracy Don Juan’s undying gift for fooling each of two commonplace women into believing she is the only one he really loves, had assured Mme Bontemps that, to dine with a woman such as the Duchesse de Vendôme, no one could be better qualified than herself. “Yes,” Mme Swann said some weeks later, “we’re thinking of having the Duchesse de Vendôme with the Cottards. My husband thinks it’s a conjugation that might produce some quite entertaining results.” Though Odette had retained from her days in “the little clan” some habits dear to Mme Verdurin, like shouting so as to be heard by all the “regulars,” she had also picked up words such as “conjugation,” dear to the Guermantes set, which, as the moon does to the sea, exercised its power on her from a distance without her knowing it—and without her coming any closer to it either. “Yes,” Swann said, “the Cottards with the Duchesse de Vendôme—that should be good fun, don’t you think?” To which Mme Bontemps replied tartly, “I think it’s quite preposterous! It’s playing with fire, nothing good will come of it, and it will serve you right!” In fact, she and her husband³⁷ were also invited to the dinner in question, as was the Prince d’Agrigente; and both Mme Bontemps and Dr. Cottard took to describing the event in two different ways, depending on the identity of those to whom they described it. To the first group, Mme Bontemps on the one hand and Dr. Cottard on the other both replied casually, when asked who else had been there, “Oh, just the Prince d’Agrigente. It was very restricted, you know, very select.” The other group were those who might be better informed than the first—one of them had even asked Cottard, “But surely the Bontemps were there as well?” “Ah, yes, I’d forgotten them,” Cottard replied, with a blush and a mental note to classify this person as a pernicious gossip. For the benefit of this second group, both Mme Bontemps and Dr. Cottard, quite independently of each other, had a version which was identical in plot, but in which their names featured in reverse order. Dr. Cottard’s version ran like this: “Well, there were our hosts, of course, then the Vendômes, the Duc and Duchesse, you know, and”—here he gave a smug smile—“Professor and Mme Cottard. Oh, yes, and there was another couple there too, though nobody could figure out why—M. and Mme Bontemps, sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb!” Mme Bontemps rattled off exactly the same speech, except that the gloating intonation stressed the place of her husband and herself between the Duchesse de Vendôme and the Prince d’Agrigente, while the disreputables who she went so far as to say had gate-crashed the event, and who were such flagrant outsiders, were the Cottards.

When Swann came home from his afternoon out, it was often shortly before dinnertime. At six in the evening, which had once been the hour of such sadness for him, he no longer wondered what Odette might be up to; he was now almost indifferent to whether she had someone with her or whether she had gone out somewhere. Now and again it did occur to him that there had been a time, many years before, when he had tried to decipher a letter from Odette to Forcheville through its envelope. But he found this memory irksome; and to avoid the full sense of the shame it brought, he preferred to twitch the corners of his mouth, or even give a little shake of the head, as though to say, “Well, so what?” He had, however, come to see as unfounded the notion he had often entertained in those former days that Odette’s daily doings were quite innocent, and that it was only the dark figments of his jealousy which sullied them (a beneficent notion, in fact, since it had soothed his anguish, for the duration of his lovesickness, by whispering that it was imaginary); and he now believed it was the jealousy that had been right all along, that, though she might well have loved him more than he had given her credit for, she had also been much more often unfaithful to him than he had liked to believe. In those days, wallowing in his grief, he had promised himself that when he had stopped loving her, when he would no longer care about annoying her, or making her feel importuned by being loved too much, he would enjoy sitting down with her and finding out, in a spirit of simple respect for the truth, as a mere point of historical fact, whether or not Forcheville had been in bed with her on the day when Swann had rung her doorbell, then banged on her window, and she had not come to the door at first but had later sent the note to Forcheville saying it was an uncle of hers who had turned up. But this fascinating problem, which Swann was looking forward to solving as soon as his jealousy had abated, stopped fascinating him when he stopped being jealous. This did not happen instantly. There was a time when, though Odette herself no longer aroused his jealousy, he could still be plunged back into its throes by the thought of that afternoon when he had stood outside the little hôtel on the rue La Pérouse banging on the door.³⁸ It was as though his jealousy, after the manner of those illnesses that seem to have their seat or source of contagion more in certain places, certain houses, than in certain individuals, had not focused so much on Odette as on that past day, that long-lost moment when Swann had stood knocking at all the entrances of her house. It was as though that single day, or that evening hour, had had the power of fossilizing a few last particles of the loving personality which had once been his, and which he could only ever retrieve at that point in time. He had long since ceased to care whether Odette had been unfaithful to him, and even whether her infidelities continued to this day. Yet, over a period of some years, attempting to assuage those persistent pangs of unrequited curiosity, he had gone on seeking out former servants of Odette’s, in the hope of learning whether, at six o’clock on that day,³⁹ so long ago, she had been in bed with Forcheville. Then even the curiosity had faded; but his investigations continued. He persisted in trying to find out something in which he no longer had any interest, because his former self, albeit now in the final stages of its senility, went on functioning mechanically, at the urge of a preoccupation so extinct that Swann could no longer even imagine his former anguish, though it had once been so acute that he could not imagine ever being rid of it, and the death of the woman he loved had seemed the only thing capable of clearing a way for him through the grief-encumbered years ahead. (Yet the pain of jealousy, as a cruel counterdemonstration will show in a later part of this book, is proof even against death.)

To know the truth of what it was in Odette’s life that had caused him such pain had not been Swann’s only longing. He had nursed another deep desire: to avenge that pain at a time when, having survived his love for Odette, he would no longer live in fear of her. The opportunity of enjoying this revenge was now to hand, since Swann was in love with another woman, a woman who, though she gave him no grounds for jealousy, made him jealous all the same, since in his inability to find new ways of loving he put to use again with the other woman the way that had once served him with Odette. For his jealousy to revive, it was not necessary for this woman to be unfaithful; all that was required was that for some reason she had been away from him, at a dinner perhaps, and had apparently enjoyed herself. This roused all his old anguish, the sad counterproductive excrescence of his love, and deflected Swann away from the real woman into a compulsion to find out the truth about her feelings for him, the concealed cravings that made up her daily life, the secrets of her heart; for, between him and the woman he loved, the anguish set a solid, irreducible mass of once-harbored suspicions originating in Odette, or possibly in some other woman who had preceded Odette, and which obliged the aging lover to relate to his present mistress through the ancient collective figment in which he arbitrarily embodied his new love: The Woman Who Made Him Jealous. Swann often suspected that this jealousy misled him into believing in nonexistent infidelities; but then he would remember that he had once been misled into giving Odette the benefit of this very doubt. So, whenever the young woman he loved was away from him, whatever it was she happened to be doing came to lose all semblance of innocence. But whereas, long ago, foreseeing a possible day when he might stop loving the woman who he did not know would one day become his wife, he had sworn to flaunt the full sincerity of his indifference to her, to avenge the self-esteem which she had for so long humiliated, now that he could slake this thirst for vengeance with impunity (since what did it matter to him if Odette took him at his word and deprived him of her company, which had once been so necessary to him?), he could not be bothered taking his revenge. When his love for her had ended, the desire to show her that his love for her had ended had also disappeared. And the Swann who, when he suffered because of Odette, had wished for the day when he might let her see him in love with someone else, took ingenious precautions, now that this was possible, to keep his wife in ignorance of his new affair.

These invitations to tea, to events that had once caused me the sadness of seeing Gilberte leave me to go home early, were not the only way in which I was now included in her life. M. and Mme Swann allowed me to be part of Gilberte’s outings with her mother, either a carriage drive or a matinee at the theater, which had prevented her from coming to the Champs-Élysées and so deprived me of her on those days when I hung about alone on the lawns or near the merry-go-round; not only did I have my place in her parents’ landau, but I was the one they asked whether I preferred to go to a play, a dancing lesson at the house of one of Gilberte’s friends, a social gathering at the house of one of the Swanns’ own friends (what Mme Swann called in her English a little “meeting”), or to see the Tombs of the Kings at Saint-Denis.

On days when I was going out with the Swanns, I was also invited to what Mme Swann called “the lunch.” As the Swanns’ invitation was for half past twelve and my parents lunched at a quarter past eleven, it was after they had left the table that I would set off for the Swanns’ luxurious district, which was rather deserted at any hour of the day but especially so at this time, when everybody else was indoors. Even on frosty days in winter, if it was fine, adjusting from time to time the knot in my magnificent tie from Charvet’s, and making sure the gloss on my patent-leather boots remained unsullied, I loitered about the broad avenues, in the hope that it would soon be twenty-seven minutes past twelve. From a distance, I could see the leafless trees in the Swanns’ little front garden, sparkling in the sunshine as though white with frost. There were only two of these trees; but the untoward hour made it a novel spectacle for me. Such pleasures from the natural world, sharpened for me by the departure from habit and even by hunger, were mixed with the overwhelming prospect of lunch at Mme Swann’s; this prospect, though it dominated those other pleasures, did not diminish them; it exploited them, turned them into fashionable accessories. So, although that time of day, when I did not normally notice fine weather, cold air, and winter light, gave me the feeling of having just discovered them, they also felt like a mere preface to the eggs Béchamel, a sort of patina, an icy pink glaze added to the outside of that mysterious sanctum, the house where Mme Swann lived, inside which all would be warmth, perfumes, and flowers.