By half past twelve, I would have plucked up the courage to enter the house, which, like a great Christmas stocking, seemed to promise supernatural delights. The French word Noël, by the way, was never heard from the lips of Mme Swann or Gilberte. They had replaced it by the English word and spoke of le pudding de Christmas, of the présents de Christmas that they had been given, of going away (which gave me an unbearable pang) pour Christmas. At home, it would have been beneath my dignity to speak of Noël, and I went about talking of le Christmas, in the teeth of my father’s ridicule.

Once I was inside, my sole encounter at first was with a footman, who walked me through a series of spacious drawing rooms before putting me into a little one that was uninhabited and was beginning to bask in the blue afternoon from its windows; there I was left in the company of orchids, roses, and violets, which, like people who stand waiting beside you but do not know you, did not break the silence, which their individuality as live things only made the more striking, while they looked shiveringly glad of the warmth of a fire of glowing coals, preciously laid behind a pane of clear crystal, in a trough of white marble, into which now and then crumbled its dangerous rubies.

Having sat down, I jumped up each time I heard the door open—but it was just a second footman, then a third; and the only outcome of these pointlessly thrilling toings and froings was a few coals added to the fire or a drop of water to the vases. The footmen went away and I was left alone again, behind the closed door that Mme Swann was bound to come and open soon. I would have been in less trepidation in an enchanter’s cavern than in this little anteroom with its fire, which might, I felt, have been working Klingsor’s magic transmutations.⁴⁰ At the sound of more footsteps, I sat where I was, it must be just another footman—it was M. Swann! “My dear fellow, what’s this! All by yourself? Ah, that wife of mine, you know, she’s never been very good at knowing what time it is. Ten to one already. Getting later every day. You mark my words—she’ll come drifting in here thinking she’s got plenty of time to spare.” Since he was still subject to neuroarthritis and had become rather ridiculous, the fact of having such an unpunctual wife, who came home inordinately late from the Bois de Boulogne, wasted hours at her dressmaker’s, and was never in time for lunch worried Swann for his stomach but flattered his self-esteem.

He would show me his latest acquisitions and explain their interesting features; but in the heat of such a moment, on an unusually empty stomach, my mind, though agitated, was a vacuum, and though I was capable of talking, I was incapable of hearing. And anyway, for me the main thing about the works he owned was that they lived with him and belonged to this thrilling time just before lunch. Even if the Mona Lisa had figured among them, it would not have given me more joy than one of Mme Swann’s tea gowns or her bottles of smelling salts.

I sat waiting, either alone or with Swann, but often with Gilberte, who came in to sit with us. I was sure that the arrival of Mme Swann, foreshadowed by so many majestic entrances, would have to be a stupendous event. I expected it at each creak of a floorboard. But our expectations are always higher than the tallest cathedral, the mightiest wave in a storm, the highest leap of a dancer; and after all these liveried footmen, whose comings and goings were like those of extras on the stage preparing the climactic coming of the Queen, but thereby making it something of an anticlimax, when Mme Swann did slip in, wearing her short otter-skin coat, her veil lowered over her nose, which glowed from the cold outside, she broke all the promises that the wait had made to my imagination.

However, if she had spent all morning at home, she would come into the drawing room wearing a tea gown in a light shade of crêpe de Chine, which to my eye was more sophisticated than any evening gown.

On certain days, the Swanns would decide to stay at home all afternoon. So, as we had been so late having lunch, I could watch the sunlight quickly dwindle up the wall of the little garden, drawing with it the end of this day, which earlier had seemed to me destined to be different from other days. And despite the lamps of all shapes and sizes, glowing on their appointed altars all about the room, brought in by the servants and set on sideboards, teapoys, corner shelves, little low tables, as though for the enactment of some mysterious rite, our conversation produced nothing out of the ordinary, and I would go home, taking with me that feeling of having been let down which children often experience after Midnight Mass.

However, that disappointment was really only in the mind. I was usually radiant with joy in the Swanns’ house, for if Gilberte had not yet joined us she might come in at any moment and for hours on end let me enjoy her words, her attentive gaze and smile, as I had first seen them at Combray. The greatest of my displeasures was a touch of mild jealousy if she disappeared, as she quite often did, up an inner staircase leading to large rooms on the floor above. Unable to leave the drawing room, like an actress’s lover who has his seat in the stalls but can only imagine the disquieting things that may be happening in the wings or the greenroom, I sat with Swann and, in a voice that was not without a trace of anxiety, asked cunningly disguised questions about that other part of the house. He explained that the room where she sometimes went was the linen room, offered to show it to me, and promised that, whenever she had to go there, he would make sure she took me with her. With these words and the relief they brought me, he suddenly bridged for me one of those dreadful chasms within the heart, which put such a distance between us and the woman we love. It was a moment when I believed my affection for him was even stronger than my affection for Gilberte. For Swann was the master of his daughter, and it was he who gave her to me; whereas, left to her own devices, she could at times withhold herself from me; I did not have the direct power over her that I could exercise indirectly through him. And since I loved her, I could only ever see her through the confused desire for more of her, which when you are with the person you love deprives you of the feeling of loving.

Mostly, though, we did not stay in; we went for a drive. Sometimes, before going to change, Mme Swann would sit down at the piano. The fingers of her lovely hands, emerging from the sleeves of her tea gown in crêpe de Chine, pink, white, or at times in brighter colors, wandered on the keyboard with that wistfulness of which her eyes were so full, and her heart so empty. It was on one of those days that she happened to play the part of the Vinteuil sonata with the little phrase that Swann had once loved so much. Listening for the first time to music that is even a little complicated, one can often hear nothing in it. And yet, later in life, when I had heard the whole piece two or three times, I found I was thoroughly familiar with it. So the expression “hearing something for the first time” is not inaccurate. If one had distinguished nothing in it on the real first occasion, as one thought, then the second or the third would also be first times; and there would be no reason to understand it any better on the tenth occasion. What is missing the first time is probably not understanding but memory. Our memory span, relative to the complexity of the impressions that assail it as we listen, is infinitesimal, as short-lived as the memory of a sleeping man who has a thousand thoughts which he instantly forgets, or the memory of a man in his dotage, who cannot retain for more than a minute anything he has been told. Our memory is incapable of supplying us with an instantaneous recollection of this multiplicity of impressions. Even so, a recollection does gradually gather in the mind; and with pieces of music heard only two or three times, one is like the schoolboy who, though he has read over his lesson a few times before falling asleep, is convinced he still does not know it, but can then recite it word for word when he wakes up the following morning. Except that, in my case, I had heard nothing of the sonata until that moment; and whereas Swann and his wife could make out a distinct phrase, it was as ungraspable to my perception as someone’s name that you try to remember when the mind retrieves nothing but a vacuum, into which, without your assistance, an hour after you stop thinking about them, the complete set of syllables that you have been vainly groping about for suddenly leaps. Not only does one not immediately discern a work of rare quality; but even within such a work, as happened to me with the Vinteuil sonata, it is always the least precious parts that one notices first. So not only was I wrong in my belief that, since Mme Swann had played over for me the most celebrated phrase, the work had nothing more to reveal to me (the result of which was that, for a long time afterward, showing all the stupidity of those who expect that their first sight of Saint Mark’s in Venice will afford them no surprise, because they have seen the shape of its domes in photographs, I made no further attempt to listen to it); but, more important, even after I had listened to the whole sonata from beginning to end, it was still almost entirely invisible to me, like those indistinct fragments of a building that are all one can make out in the misty distance. Therein lies the source of the melancholy that accompanies our discovery of such works, as of all things which can come to fruition only through time. When I came eventually to have access to the most secret parts of Vinteuil’s sonata, everything in it that I had noticed and preferred at first was already beginning to be lost to me, carried away by habit out of the reach of my sensibility. Because it was only in successive stages that I could love what the sonata brought to me, I was never able to possess it in its entirety—it was an image of life. But the great works of art are also less of a disappointment than life, in that their best parts do not come first. In the Vinteuil sonata, the beauties one discovers soonest are also those which pall soonest, a double effect with a single cause: they are the parts that most resemble other works, with which one is already familiar. But when those parts have receded, we can still be captivated by another phrase, which, because its shape was too novel to let our mind see anything there but confusion, had been made undetectable and kept intact; and the phrase we passed by every day unawares, the phrase which had withheld itself, which by the sheer power of its own beauty had become invisible and remained unknown to us, is the one that comes to us last of all. But it will also be the last one we leave. We shall love it longer than the others, because we took longer to love it. This length of time that it takes someone to penetrate a work of some depth, as it took me with the Vinteuil sonata, is only a foreshortening, and as it were a symbol, of all the years, or even centuries perhaps, which must pass before the public can come to love a masterpiece that is really new. This is why the man of genius, wishing to avoid the discontents of being unrecognized in his own day, may persuade himself that, since his contemporaries lack the necessary hindsight, works written for posterity should be read only by posterity, much as there are certain paintings that should not be looked at from too close up. However, any craven urge to avoid being misjudged is pointless, as misjudgment is unavoidable. What makes it difficult for a work of genius to be admired at once is the fact that its creator is out of the ordinary, that hardly anyone is like him. It is his work itself which, by fertilizing the rare spirits capable of appreciating it, will make them grow and multiply. It was the quartets of Beethoven (numbers 12, 13, 14, and 15) which, over fifty years, created and expanded the audience of listeners to the quartets of Beethoven, thus achieving, as all masterpieces do, progress if not in the quality of artists, at least in the company of minds, which is largely composed these days of what was missing when the work appeared: people capable of liking it. What is known as posterity is the work’s own posterity. The creator of the work of genius must make no compromises with, must take no account of, other geniuses, who may at the same period be following their own course toward creating for the future a more aware public, which will reward other geniuses but not himself; the work has to create its own posterity. So, if this work were to be held back, in the hope of its being known only to posterity, it would be greeted not by posterity but by an assembly of its contemporaries who simply happened to be living fifty years later. Which is why the artist who wishes his work to find its own way must do what Vinteuil had done, and launch it as far as possible toward the unknown depths of the distant future. There lies the masterpiece’s true element; and yet, though poor judges can make the mistake of taking no account of the time to come, better judges can at times be tempted by the perilous precaution of taking too much account of it. It is no doubt easy to suffer from an illusion analogous to the one that cancels the differences between all things when seen on a distant horizon, and to entertain the notion that all the revolutions which have ever taken place in painting or music actually had in common a respect for certain rules, and that whatever is right under our nose—Impressionism, dissonance for dissonance’s sake, the exclusive use of the Chinese scale, Cubism, Futurism—shows a flagrant dissimilarity with everything that has gone before. However, when we look at what has gone before, we fail to reflect that a long-drawn-out process of assimilation has turned it all into a substance which, though it is varied, we see as homogeneous, in which Hugo rubs shoulders with Molière. Imagine a youth reading a horoscope forecasting his own middle age, with all the preposterous incongruities he would see in it, in his ignorance of the years to come and the changes they must bring about in him. However, not all horoscopes turn out to be true; and the obligation to take into account the factor of the future, when devising the sum of a work of art’s beauties, must affect our judgment with something as unpredictable, and therefore as devoid of real interest, as any other prophecy that is never fulfilled, an outcome which implies no intellectual mediocrity in the prophet, since whatever it is that gives or denies existence to the possible may not necessarily lie within the scope of the genius. It is possible that even a genius may have disbelieved that railways or airplanes had a future, as it is possible to be an acute psychologist yet disbelieve in the infidelity of a mistress or the deceit of a friend, whose betrayals can be foreseen by someone much less gifted.

Though I did not understand the sonata, I was delighted to hear Mme Swann play. Her touch on the keyboard, like her tea gown, like her perfume drifting down the stairs, like her coats, like her chrysanthemums, seemed to me to belong to a mysterious and individual whole that existed in a world far above the one in which the mind can analyze talent. “That sonata of Vinteuil’s is nice, isn’t it?” Swann said to me. “That moment of nightfall under the trees, when the violin arpeggios make everything feel cool. You must admit, it’s very pretty. It’s captured the whole static quality of moonlight, which is moonlight’s most basic quality. It’s not surprising that a sunlight treatment such as my wife is taking at the moment should act on the muscles, given that moonlight prevents leaves from moving. That’s what’s so neatly caught by that little phrase—the Bois de Boulogne in a catatonic trance. It’s even more striking by the seaside, because then you’ve got the muted responses of the waves, and they can be heard quite distinctly, of course, since nothing else can move. In Paris it’s just the opposite: merely a strange glow, barely noticeable, on the fronts of the great buildings, and that faint glare in the sky, like the reflection from a house on fire, colorless and dangerless, that hint of some immense but banal happening somewhere ... I must say, though, that the little phrase, the whole sonata, for that matter, does take place in the Bois de Boulogne—I mean, in the gruppetto you can clearly hear someone’s voice saying, ‘There’s almost enough light to read the paper by!’ ” Swann’s words might have had the result of distorting my eventual understanding of the sonata, as music is so versatile, too prone to suggestion to exclude entirely whatever somebody hints we might hear in it. But I realized, from other things he said, that the leaves at night in their dense stillness were none other than the ones under which, on many an evening, dining in restaurants on the outskirts of Paris, he had sat listening to the little phrase. Instead of the depth of meaning which he had so often sought in it, what it now brought back to him was all that serried foliage, leafy motifs winding and painted all about it, leaves that the phrase made him yearn to go and see, because it seemed to live on inside them like a soul; it brought back the whole springtime of that past year, which, in a fever of sorrow, he had been too hapless to savor, and which it had kept for him, as one keeps for an invalid the nice things he has been too unwell to eat. The Vinteuil sonata could tell Swann of the charm of certain nights in the Bois de Boulogne, about which it would have been pointless to ask Odette, although she had been no less with him on those nights than the little phrase. But she had only been sitting beside him (whereas the theme by Vinteuil was inside him); and even if she had been gifted with vastly greater understanding, she would have been unable to see what cannot be externalized for anyone (at least, I believed for a long time that this was a rule to which there were no exceptions). “But I mean, it is rather a neat touch, isn’t it,” Swann said, “that there can be reflections from sound as there are from water or from a mirror? Mind you, the only things that phrase of Vinteuil’s shows me now are all the things I didn’t pay attention to at the time. It’s swapped them for my worries and my love affairs, which it has completely forgotten.” “Charles! If you ask me, it sounds as though what you’re saying is not very complimentary to me!” “Not complimentary! Aren’t women wonderful! I’m merely trying to point out to this young fellow here that what music shows, to me at any rate, is nothing like ‘The Will-in-Itself’ or ‘The Synthesis of the Infinite,’ but something like the palm house at the Zoo in the Bois de Boulogne, with old Verdurin in his frock coat. I’ll have you know, that little phrase has come and taken me out to dine dozens of times at Armenonville. God knows it’s far nicer than going out there to dine with Mme de Cambremer.” “That’s a lady who was said to have lost her heart to Charles,” said Mme Swann, laughing, and in the same tone of voice in which she had just said of Vermeer of Delft, whom I was surprised to see she knew of, “Well, you see, that gentleman over there was greatly interested in that painter at the time when he was courting me. Isn’t that so, Charles my love?” “Please do not take the name of Mme de Cambremer in vain,” said Swann, who was really quite flattered. “I’m only repeating what I’ve heard said. Actually, she’s supposed to be very clever, though I’ve never met her. I believe she’s very pushing”—here Mme Swann lapsed again into English—“which really surprises me in a woman who’s clever. Anyway, everyone says she was head over heels in love with you—there’s nothing in that to take offense at.” Swann turned a very obvious deaf ear, which served both to confirm the suggestion and to show his smugness. “Well,” said Mme Swann, with mock peevishness, “since my playing reminds you of the Zoo, perhaps we could go there this afternoon, if this young man feels like an outing? It’s a nice day, and you, my love, could relive your memories! Speaking of the Zoo, do you know that this young fellow was under the apprehension that we were very fond of someone that I cut dead as often as I can—Mme Blatin, can you imagine! I think it’s degrading for people to think she’s a friend of ours. Even nice Dr. Cottard, who wouldn’t speak evil of a soul, says the woman’s a pest.” “Isn’t she ghastly! Her sole redeeming feature is that she’s the image of Savonarola. She’s exactly the portrait of Savonarola by Fra Bartolommeo.” There was nothing implausible in this quirk of Swann’s, of seeing likenesses of real people in paintings: even what we call an individual expression in something general (as we discover to our chagrin when we are in love, and wish to believe in the unique reality of the individual), something that may well have manifested itself at different periods. If Swann was to be believed, the Journey of the Magi, anachronistic enough when Benozzo Gozzoli painted the faces of the Medici brothers into it, was even more in advance of its time, as it contained, he said, the portraits of a host of people, contemporaries not of Gozzoli but of Swann, dating not just from fifteen centuries later than the Nativity, but from four centuries after the time of the painter himself. According to Swann, not one notable Parisian was missing from the retinue of the Magi, as in that scene from a play by Sardou in which, for the sake of their friendship with the playwright and the leading lady, so as to be in fashion, but also for fun, all the men about town, the most famous doctors, politicians, and lawyers, took turns in playing a tiny nonspeaking part, each of them being onstage at a different performance.⁴¹ “But I don’t see Mme Blatin’s connection with the Zoo.” “Oh, it’s obvious!” “You mean she’s got a sky-blue backside like a monkey?” “Charles, you’re being indecent! No, I was remembering what that Singhalese chap said to her that time. Tell him—it’s really such a lovely little story.” “It’s too stupid. You see, Mme Blatin likes to address people in a way that she thinks is friendly, but which gives the impression that she’s talking down to them.” “What our neighbors across the Channel call patronizing,” Odette interrupted. “So recently she went to the Zoo, where there was this exhibition being given by black fellows, from Ceylon, I think, or so I’m told by my wife, who’s much better at ethnography than I am.” “Charles, do stop being facetious.” “I’m not being facetious in the slightest. So there she is, saying to this black fellow, ‘Good morning, blackie!’ ” “Isn’t it just ducky?” “Well, this form of speech was not to the black fellow’s liking—‘Me blackie,’ he bellowed at Mme Blatin, ‘you camel!’ ” “I think that’s a very funny story! I just love that story! Isn’t it lovely? Can’t you just see Mme Blatin’s face: ‘Me blackie, you camel!’ ” I expressed a strong desire to go and see the Singhalese, one of whom had called Mme Blatin a camel. Not that I had the slightest interest in them. But I knew that, in going to and from the Zoo in the Bois de Boulogne, we would cross the Allée des Acacias, where I had once distantly doted on Mme Swann; and I hoped that Coquelin’s⁴² half-caste friend, to whom I had always hoped in vain to show off by bowing to Odette as she passed, would see me now sitting by her side in the victoria.

While Gilberte had gone off to get ready to go out, M. and Mme Swann would sit with me in the drawing room and enjoy telling me about the rare virtues of their daughter. Everything I could see of her for myself seemed to prove they spoke nothing but the truth. I noticed little acts of thoughtful kindness, which confirmed what her mother had said about how she treated not only her friends but the servants and the poor, and a desire to please, premeditated considerateness, a reluctance to give offense, all of which meant she often put herself out to do inconspicuous favors. She had done some embroidery for our barley-sugar woman at the Champs-Élysées, and made a point of taking it to her, though it was snowing, wanting to deliver it in person and without a day’s delay. Her father said, “I can tell you, that girl has a heart of gold, but she keeps it well hidden.” Young as she was, she seemed much more sensible than her parents. When Swann spoke about his wife’s grand acquaintances, Gilberte would turn away and say nothing. But she did this without appearing to disapprove, as she felt it would be impossible to criticize her father in any way. Once, when I mentioned Mlle Vinteuil, Gilberte said:

“She’s a person I’ll never have anything to do with. Because she wasn’t nice to her father—I’ve heard she made him unhappy. You do agree, don’t you? You’d be just as incapable as I am of wanting to outlive your father by a single day, wouldn’t you? It’s quite natural—I mean, how could anyone ever forget someone they’ve always loved?”

And on another occasion, when she had been more than usually loving with Swann, and I had referred to this after he had left us alone together, she replied:

“Yes, poor Papa. It will soon be the anniversary of the death of his father. So you can appreciate what he must be feeling. You understand what it’s like. We feel the same about things like that, you and I, don’t we? I’m just trying to be less of a bother to him than usual.” “But he doesn’t think you’re a bother! He thinks you’re perfect!” “Dear Papa, it’s just because he’s so kindhearted.”

Her parents did not sing the virtues only of Gilberte, the girl who, in my imagination, long before I had even set eyes on her, used to appear standing in front of a church, in a landscape somewhere in the Île-de-France, ⁴³ until the day when my dreams were replaced by memories, and I saw her always in front of a hedge of pink hawthorn, beside the steep little lane that led up to the Méséglise way. There came a day when I asked Mme Swann, taking great care to speak in the casual tone of a family friend asking about a child’s likes and dislikes, whether Gilberte had a particular favorite among her friends; to which her mother replied:

“Well, I’m sure you must be more privy to these secrets than I am! Aren’t you the great confidant, after all? Aren’t you the great ‘crack,’ as our English friends say?”

When reality coincides at last with something we have longed for, fitting perfectly with our dreams, it can cover them up entirely and become indistinguishable from them, as two symmetrical figures placed against one another seem to become one; whereas, so as to give our joy its full intensity of meaning, we would actually prefer every detail of our desires, even at the instant of their fulfillment, to retain the prestige of still being immaterial, so as to be more certain that this really is what we desired. The mind is not even at liberty to remake its own earlier state, so as to compare it with the present one: the new acquaintance we have just made, the memory of those first, unexpected moments, the words we have heard spoken, blocking the entrance to our consciousness, and commanding the exits from memory much more than those from imagination, act backward against our past, which we can no longer see without their presence in it, rather than acting forward on the still-unoccupied shape of our future. For years I had been convinced that to go to the house of Mme Swann was a vague pipe-dream that would never come to pass; a quarter-hour after I first stepped into her drawing room, it was all the former amount of time I had spent not knowing her that had become the pipe-dream, as insubstantial as a mere possibility which has been abolished by the fulfillment of a different possibility. How could I have gone on dreaming of her dining room as an inconceivable place when I could not make the slightest movement in my mind without seeing it shot through by the unbreakable beams of light, radiating to infinity, illuminating the farthest nooks and crannies of my past life, given off by the lobster à l’américaine which I had just eaten? Something similar must have happened to Swann’s way of seeing things too: these rooms in which he sat as my host could be seen as the place where two fancied dwellings had come together and become one, not just the ideal place my imagination had created, but another one, which his jealous love, as inventive as my dreams, had so often pictured: the home which he and Odette might one day share, but which, on nights such as the one when she had invited him to her house with Forcheville to have orangeade, he had despaired of ever being able to inhabit. For Swann, what had become amalgamated into the design of the dining room where we lunched was that inaccessible paradise, which in former years he could never imagine without being beset by a thrilling qualm at the prospect of being able to say one day to their butler the very words I could hear him speak now, in a voice of slight impatience touched with a certain self-satisfaction: “Is Madame ready yet?” I could never grasp my happiness, any more than he could, no doubt; and when Gilberte herself exclaimed, “You could never have imagined, could you, that the little girl you used to watch playing prisoner’s base, without being on speaking terms with her, would one day be a great friend, whose house you can visit any day you like?,” she spoke of a change which I could not help registering from the outside, but on which I had no inner purchase, as it was composed of two states, which I could not focus on at the same time without their becoming a single one.

And yet my own experience told me that, because Swann had subjected that apartment to such an intensity of purposeful desire, he must surely have found in it something of its former charm, just as it had not lost all its mystery for me. By entering their house, I had not completely banished from it the strange, fascinating element in which I had for such a long time imagined the Swanns having their being; I had tamed it a little, I had made it retreat in the face of the outsider I had been, the outcast to whom Mlle Swann now graciously offered a delightful, hostile, and scandalized armchair; and that charm, through memory, I can still feel close to me. Is this perhaps because, while I sat waiting on those days when M. and Mme Swann invited me to have lunch and then share their afternoon outing with Gilberte, my eyes reproduced—all over the carpet, the armchairs, the sideboards, the screens, and the paintings—the idea which was deeply imprinted in me, that Mme Swann, or her husband, or Gilberte was just about to come into the room? Was it because these objects have gone on living beside the Swanns in my memory and have at length absorbed something of them? Was it because, knowing the Swanns spent their lives among them, I had come to see all these things as the emblems of their special existence and of their habits, from which I had been too long excluded for their furniture not to go on seeming alien to me, even after I had been granted the boon of using it? For whatever reason, nowadays when I remember that drawing room, which Swann, without his objection to it implying in any way an intention to go against the wishes of his wife, saw as such a jumble of styles (because, though its design was still based on the concept of the greenhouse-cum-workshop which had been the guiding principle of Odette’s house when he had first known her, she had begun to weed out of this medley some of the Chinese items, which she thought now a little “sham,” quite “stale,” but was replacing them with a clutter of little pieces upholstered in old Louis XVI silks, to which of course were added the masterpieces brought by Swann himself from his old hôtel on the Quai d’Orléans), I see its disparities in retrospect as forming a homogeneous, unified whole, as giving it an individual charm; and these are features one can never see in even the most coherent and uniform compilations left to us from the past, or in those most vividly marked by the imprint of a single person, for it is only ever we ourselves, through our belief that things seen have an existence of their own, who can impart to some of them a soul which lives in them, and which they then develop in us. All the fancies I had formed about the hours spent by the Swanns, different from those which other people experience, in that house which, by being to the daily tissue of their existence in time what the body is to the soul, was bound to express the unique quality of their life, were shared by whatever I saw, absorbed into the positioning of the furniture, the thickness of the carpets, the outlook from the windows, the attentions of the servants, equally thrilling and indefinable in them all. After lunch, when we went through into the drawing room to have coffee, sitting in the broad and sunny bay window, and Mme Swann asked me how many lumps of sugar I took, it was not just the silk-covered footstool that she moved toward me which gave off both the painful charm I used to sense in the name of Gilberte (through the pink hawthorn, then near the clump of laurels) and also the suspicion with which her parents had viewed me, and which this little footstool had apparently known of and shared so vehemently that I now felt unworthy and a little cowardly in placing my feet on its defenseless upholstery; a personal soul made it secretly one with the light of two o’clock in the afternoon, light that was unique to this bay, as it dappled our feet with its golden waves and lapped about the enchanted islands of the bluish sofas and hazy tapestries; and even the Rubens hanging above the mantelpiece glowed with the same kind of charm, almost the same potency of charm, as M. Swann’s lace-up boots and Inverness cape, the like of which I had longed to wear, and which Odette now asked him to go and change for another overcoat, so as to look more elegant when I did them the honor of going out with them. She too went to change, despite my protests that no walking dress could possibly become her as much as the superb crêpe-de-Chine or silk tea gown, in old rose or cherry, Tiepolo pink, white, mauve, green, red, or yellow, self-colored or patterned, in which she had sat with us while having lunch and was now about to remove. When I told her she should wear it for going out, she would laugh, either in mockery of my naïveté or in pleasure at my compliment. She apologized for having so many tea gowns, saying they were the only garments in which she felt comfortable, then went to put on one of those breathtaking outfits that made all heads turn, after having invited me at times to choose the one I preferred to see her wear.

Once we had left the carriage, how proud I was to walk through the Zoological Gardens beside Mme Swann! Her easy step gave a loose, lazy sway to her coat, and she rewarded my admiring glances with a slow, flirtatious smile. If we met any of Gilberte’s friends, girls or boys, they would greet us as we passed; and now I was looked upon by them as one of those blessed beings whom I had envied so much, those friends who also knew her parents and who belonged to the other part of her life, the part that took place away from the Champs-Élysées.

Quite often as we walked along the paths of the Bois de Boulogne or the Zoological Gardens, some grand lady, one of Swann’s friends, might greet us in passing; and if he had not noticed, his wife would draw his attention: “Charles, haven’t you seen Mme de Montmorency?” Though his casual smile bespoke years of friendly familiarity, he would sweep off his hat with an elegant flourish that was all his own. Sometimes the grand lady would pause, glad of the chance to be inconsequentially polite to Mme Swann, who, she knew, was well enough schooled by Swann in such things not to try taking undue advantage of it in the future. For all that, Mme Swann had mastered the manners of the fashionable; and, however elegant and dignified the grand lady might be, Odette was always her equal in them. As she stood for that moment beside the friend of her husband’s, introducing Gilberte and me with such a serene and nonchalant air, she had such affable, unaffected poise that it would have been difficult to tell whether it was Swann’s wife or the aristocratic passerby who was the great lady. On the day when we had gone to view the Singhalese, we saw an old but still-beautiful lady coming toward us, followed by two others who seemed to be escorting her; she was wrapped in a dark overcoat and wearing a little bonnet with its strings tied under the chin. “Now, here’s someone you’ll find interesting,” Swann told me. The old lady, now only a few feet away, was gazing at us with a smile that was all warmth and gentleness. Swann took off his hat to her, and Mme Swann, in a low curtsey, tried to kiss the hand of the lady, who, looking as though she had stepped out of a portrait by Winterhalter,⁴⁴ drew her up and kissed her. “Look, for goodness’ sake, will you put that hat back on,” she said to Swann in a deepish voice that was full of a gruff friendliness. “I’ll present you in a moment to Her Imperial Highness,” Mme Swann said to me. Swann took me briefly aside, while Mme Swann chatted with the Princesse about the fine weather and the animals newly arrived in the Gardens. “It’s Princesse Mathilde,” he said. “You know, the friend of Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, and Dumas. Just think, a niece of Napoleon I! Both Napoleon III and the Tsar of Russia wanted to marry her. Isn’t that interesting? Have a little talk with her. I do hope, though, that she’s not going to keep us standing about here for an hour.” “I met Taine⁴⁵ the other day,” Swann said to her. “He tells me Princesse Mathilde is no longer his friend.” “He behaved like a pig,” she growled, pronouncing cochon as though it were the name of the bishop who tried Joan of Arc.⁴⁶ “After that article of his on the Emperor, I left my card at his house with ‘PPC’ on it.”⁴⁷ I was as surprised as one might be on reading the correspondence of Charlotte-Elizabeth, the Princess Palatine. Princesse Mathilde, full of very French sentiments, was given to feeling them with a forthright bluntness reminiscent of Germany as it once was, a trait that may well have come to her from her mother, who was from Württemberg. She was outspoken in a rather uncouth or mannish way; but as soon as she smiled, this was softened by a languid Italian manner. These impressions were complemented by her costumes, which were so Second Empire in style that, though her reason for wearing them was no doubt only that she was attached to the fashions she had loved when young, she seemed to have made a point of wearing nothing that was historically discrepant, so as not to disappoint those who expected her to remind them of a bygone era. I prompted Swann to ask her whether she had ever known Alfred de Musset.⁴⁸ “Hardly at all, sir,” she told him in a voice that feigned ill temper, the “sir” being her little joke with someone she knew very well. “I invited him once to dinner. Seven o’clock, the invitation said. At half past, he still not having turned up, we went in to dine. He presented himself at eight, gave me a bow, then sat there without uttering a word, and made himself scarce when dinner was done. I hadn’t so much as heard the sound of the man’s voice. Dead drunk. Not the sort of thing to make one want to have him again.” Swann and I were standing a little to one side. “I do hope this isn’t going to take too long,” he said to me. “The soles of my feet are killing me. I can’t understand why my wife is keeping the conversation going like that. She’ll be the one to complain afterward of feeling tired; but I’m the one who can’t take all this standing around.” Mme Swann was in the process of telling Princesse Mathilde something she had learned from Mme Bontemps: that the government, having at last admitted how churlish its recent behavior toward the Princesse had been, had decided to send her a ticket admitting her to the stands for the visit of Tsar Nicholas to the Invalides two days later. But, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, despite having surrounded herself with artists and men of letters, whenever action was called for the Princesse was still very much the niece of Napoleon. “Exactly, madame,” she said. “I received their invitation this morning and sent it straight back to the minister, who must have received it by now. I have told him I have no need of any invitation to go to the Invalides. If the government wishes me to attend, I shall not be in any stands, but in our family vault, where the Emperor lies. And for that I need no ticket—I’ve got my keys. I come and go as I please. The government need only inform me whether it desires my presence or not. But if I do go, that’s where I shall be, and nowhere else.” At that moment Mme Swann and I were greeted by a young man who, having said his “Good afternoon,” did not stop, and whom I did not know she knew: Bloch. When I asked her about him, she said he had been introduced to her by Mme Bontemps and that he was on the minister’s staff, which was news to me. However, she must not have seen much of him, or else she had wanted to avoid pronouncing the name Bloch, perhaps thinking it not “chic” enough, as she said his name was M. Moreul. I assured her she was mixing him up with someone else and that his name was Bloch. The Princesse noticed Mme Swann’s admiring glances at her coat and straightened the train of it, which was twisted. “This is actually made from a fur that the Tsar sent me,” she said, “so, since I’ve just been to see him, I decided to wear it and let him see how it looks when it’s made up into a coat.” “I hear that Prince Louis⁴⁹ has taken a commission in the Russian army,” said Mme Swann, not noticing her husband’s signs of impatience. “Your Highness will be very sad at not having him here at home.” “Much good it’ll do him, I’m sure! As I said to him, ‘You shouldn’t feel obliged to, just because we’ve had a soldier in the family already!’ ” the Princesse replied, referring in her simple, blunt way to the Emperor Napoleon. Swann was more and more impatient. “Madame, I am afraid I must be the one to behave like a highness and request your permission for us to take our leave. My wife has been quite unwell, and I am reluctant for her to remain standing in one spot.” Mme Swann curtseyed once more, and the Princesse gave us all the blessing of a beautiful smile which she seemed to summon out of the past, from the gracious days of her youth and the evenings at Compiègne,⁵⁰ and which all at once smoothed out and softened the brief grumpiness of the face. Then she walked away, followed by her two ladies-in-waiting, who, like interpreters, children’s nannies, or nurses, had done no more than punctuate the conversation with insignificant verbiage and unnecessary explanations. “One day this week you should go and sign the book at her house,” Mme Swann said to me. “It’s not every royal, as the English say, on whom you can leave a card. But with this one, if you sign, you’ll get an invitation.”

On occasion, before our outing we would go and look at one or another of the small exhibitions that were opening during those late-winter days; and in the galleries where they were held, Swann, a noted collector, was always greeted with marked deference by the dealers. The weather being still cold, all my old desire to go to the South, to Venice, was reawakened by those rooms, in which spring was already well established, where hot sunlight slashed the pink Alpilles with glowing purples and deepened a dark transparency of emerald in the Grand Canal. If the weather was unpleasant, we went on to a concert or the theater; and we finished the afternoon in a tearoom. When Mme Swann had something to say to me that she wished to keep from people sitting at tables near ours, or even just from the waiters, she addressed me in English, as though we were the only ones who could speak the language. But of course everybody could speak English—except me, that is, as I had not yet learned the language; and this I had to point out to Mme Swann, to make her desist from passing remarks on those who were drinking the tea, and those who brought it to them, remarks that I could tell were insulting, even though every word of them was lost on me, if not on the people insulted.

Once, in connection with an outing to the theater, Gilberte gave me a great surprise. It was the day she had referred to before, the anniversary of her grandfather’s death. She and I were supposed to be going with her governess to hear a program of operatic extracts; and Gilberte, who had already changed into the outfit she was to wear to the performance, was showing her usual expression of indifference toward the event of the afternoon, saying she did not mind what we did, as long as I wanted to do it and her parents agreed to it. Just before lunch, her mother took us aside to say that Gilberte’s father was quite put out by our intention of going to a concert on such a day. To me, this seemed quite understandable. Gilberte’s face was expressionless, though she turned pale with anger that she could not conceal; and she said not another word. When M. Swann came home, his wife took him down to the other end of the drawing room, where they stood murmuring to each other. He eventually asked Gilberte to come with him into the next room. We could hear voices raised. I could not believe that Gilberte, who was so dutiful, so loving, so biddable, would refuse a request of her father’s on such a day, and for such an unimportant reason. Swann said, as he came back in:

“Well, you’ve heard what I had to say. Now you must do as you see fit.”

Throughout lunch, Gilberte’s face was pinched with irritation. We had no sooner gone to her room afterward than she exclaimed, as though nothing had been further from her mind than the notion of canceling our outing, “Look at the time, will you! Two o’clock! It starts at half past!” And she told her governess to hurry up.

“But isn’t your father annoyed about this?” I said.

“Not in the least.”

“But didn’t he think it would appear odd for us to be going out, because of the anniversary?”

“Look, what do I care about what people think! I think it’s preposterous to worry about other people when feelings are involved. You feel things for yourself, not for an audience. My governess, who hardly gets out at all, has been looking forward to this concert, and I’m not going to spoil her pleasure just to please the gallery!”

She started putting on her hat.

“But, Gilberte,” I said, taking her arm, “it’s not to please the gallery, it’s to please your father.”

“Don’t you start!” she snapped, snatching her arm away.

 

An even greater boon than to be taken to the Zoo in the Bois, or to a concert, was to be included in the Swanns’ friendship with Bergotte, the thing that had been one of the sources of their charm long before I came to know Gilberte, in the days when I had dreamed that to be friends with such a girl, who was a friend of the divine old man, would be a thrilling experience, if only the disdain she must feel for me had not made it forever futile for me to hope I might one day accompany them on their excursions to the towns he loved. Then, one day, Mme Swann sent me an invitation to a special luncheon. I did not know who the other guests were to be. And as I arrived, I was disconcerted and intimidated by a small incident that happened just inside the Swanns’ front door. Mme Swann rarely failed to adopt any of the short-lived customs that are supposed to be smart, which last for a season, then disappear—for instance, many years before, she had had her hansom cab,⁵¹ and had her dinner invitations printed with the English words to meet immediately preceding the name of some guest of any importance. Many of these customs were quite unmysterious, even to the uninitiated. One such at that time was a little fad imported from England, which led Odette to have her husband’s visiting cards printed with the title of Mr. before the name Charles Swann. After my very first visit to their house, Mme Swann had called on me and left one of these “paste-boards,” as she termed them. It was the first time in my life that anyone had ever left a card on me! I had been seized with such a fit of pride, excitement, and gratitude that I scraped together all the money I possessed in the world, ordered a magnificent basket of camellias, and had them sent to her. I also begged my father to go and leave a card on her, but to be sure first to get some with Mr. in front of his name. He did neither of these things, which first plunged me into despair for a few days, then made me wonder whether he had not been right. Futile though it was, this fad for Mr. was at least not misleading. However, the same could not be said for another one, which was revealed to me, without its meaning, on the day of Mme Swann’s special luncheon. Just as I was about to step from the anteroom into the drawing room, the butler handed me a long, thin envelope on which my name was written. Such was my surprise that I thanked him, while I cast a glance at the envelope. I had no more notion of what I was supposed to do with it than a foreigner has of the purpose of the little implements given to guests at Chinese dinners. I could see it was sealed; so, rather than be thought indiscreet by opening it there and then, I slipped it into my pocket with a knowing air. The note Mme Swann had sent me a few days before had mentioned a lunch “for a select few.” Despite which, it was a party of sixteen; and I had no idea that among us was Bergotte. Mme Swann, who had just “named” me, as she put it, to several of the guests, suddenly appended to my name, in exactly the same voice as she had used for pronouncing it, and as though he and I were merely two guests of hers who must be equally glad to make each other’s acquaintance, the name of my soft-voiced bard with the white hair. The name “Bergotte” startled me as though it were a shot fired from a gun; but I was already bowing, going through the motions of polite behavior. There, in front of me, bowing back at me, like the magician in his tails emerging unscathed while a dove flies up from the smoke and dust of a detonation, I saw a stocky, coarse, thickset, shortsighted man, quite young, with a red bottle-nose and a black goatee. I was heartbroken: it was not only that my gentle old man had just crumbled to dust and disappeared, it was also that for those things of beauty, his wonderful works, which I had once contrived to fit into that infirm and sacred frame, that dwelling I had lovingly constructed like a temple expressly designed to hold them, there was now no room in this thick-bodied little man standing in front of me, with all his blood vessels, his bones, his glands, his snub nose, and his little black beard. The whole Bergotte I had slowly and painstakingly constructed for myself, a drop at a time, like a stalactite, out of the limpid beauty of his books, had suddenly been rendered useless by the need to include the bottle-nose and the black goatee, just as our perfect solution to a mathematical problem turns out to be useless because we have misread the terms of it and ignored the fact that the total should add up to a certain number. The presence of the nose and the beard loomed so large and were so bothersome that they not only forced me to rebuild from scratch the character of Bergotte, but also seemed to imply, to create, to be secreting nonstop a certain type of busy and self-satisfied mentality, all of which was quite unfair, as it was a mentality which had nothing in common with the type of mind that informed the books I knew so well, steeped in their mild and divine wisdom. Starting from the books, I could never have foreseen the bottle-nose; but starting from the nose—which looked quite unworried by all of this, and was rather full of itself, like a false nose—I was on a quite different course, which would never lead me to the works of Bergotte, it seemed, but toward the attitudes of some engineer who is always pressed for time, the kind of man who, when you greet him, thinks it is the thing to answer, “Fine, thanks, and yourself?” though you haven’t asked him anything yet, who, when you say you are delighted to make his acquaintance, replies with an abbreviation he thinks is stylish, clever, and up-to-the-minute, because it avoids wasting time in empty chat: “Likewise.” Names are of course fanciful designers; the sketches they draw of people and places are such poor likenesses that we are often struck dumb when, instead of the world as we have imagined it, we are suddenly confronted by the world as we see it (which is not the real world, of course, as the senses are not much better at likenesses than the imagination; so we end up with approximate drawings of reality, which are at least as different from the seen world as the seen world was different from the imagined world). But with Bergotte, the embarrassment of the name, laden with its disconcerting preconceptions, was insignificant compared with the chagrin I felt at the prospect of tying this man with his goatee to the work I knew, as though to a balloon, and wondering whether it might still have the power to become airborne. However, it did appear that he was the man who had written the books I was so fond of, for when Mme Swann made a point of mentioning my liking for one of them he did not appear taken aback that this had been said to him rather than to some other guest, and gave no hint of thinking there must be some misunderstanding: he just stood there, his body, which was looking forward to lunch, filling the frock coat he had put on in honor of all these guests, his attention taken up by other, important things, and gave a reminiscent smile, as though thinking back to some fleeting incident from former years, as though what had been mentioned was the hose and doublet of the Duc de Guise costume he had worn one year to a fancy-dress ball, rather than his books, which instantly collapsed (dragging down with themselves the whole point and glory of Beauty, of the universe, of life itself) and showed that they had never been anything but a trite pastime for a man with a little beard. It occurred to me that he must have put a great effort into this pastime, but also that, if he had lived on an island surrounded by oyster beds, he would have engaged just as successfully in the buying and selling of pearls. His work no longer seemed as inevitable as before. I began to wonder whether originality really shows that great writers are gods, each of them reigning over a kingdom which is his alone, whether misleading appearances might not play a role in this, and whether the differences between their books might not be the result of hard work, rather than the expression of a radical difference in essence between distinct personalities.

We went in to dinner. Lying beside my plate was a carnation, its stem wrapped in silver paper. It bothered me less than the envelope given to me in the anteroom, which I had completely forgotten. Though also new to me, the meaning of this custom soon became clearer, when I saw all the other men at the table pick up carnations lying beside their plates and slip them into the buttonholes of their frock coats. I did the same, with the casual air of the atheist in church, who, though knowing nothing about the service, stands up when the others stand, and kneels with only a moment’s delay when everybody else kneels. Another custom, just as unfamiliar to me but more lasting, was less to my taste. Just to the right of my plate was a smaller dish, full of a blackish substance which, unknown to me, was caviar. I had no idea what one was supposed to do with it; but I was determined not to eat any of it.

As Bergotte’s place at the table was not far from mine and I could hear everything he said, I soon realized why his way of speaking had struck M. de Norpois. He did have a most singular voice. It is the fact that they have to convey thought which, more than anything else, alters the physical properties of a voice: not only are the resonance of the diphthongs and the power of the labials affected by it, so is the delivery itself. To my ear, Bergotte’s way of speaking was completely different from his way of writing; and even the things he said differed from the things that fill his books. A voice emerges from a mask; unaided, it is not up to showing us immediately a face we have glimpsed naked in a style. During conversation, at moments when Bergotte took to talking in a way that M. de Norpois was not the only one to find affected and obnoxious, it took me a long time to discover any close parallel with those parts of his books where his form became so poetic and musical. At such times, Bergotte could see in what he was saying a beauty of form unrelated to the meaning of his sentences; and as human speech is in communication with the soul, albeit not expressing it as style does, Bergotte sounded almost as though he were speaking without meaning, droning on certain words, and, if he was following through a single image under the words, running them together as though they were a single sound, in a way that was fatiguing in its monotony. The fact was that a toneless, turgid, and pretentious delivery was a sign of the aesthetic value of his words; it was the manifestation in his conversation of the power that gave to his books their harmonies and sequences of images. The reason why I had such difficulty in noticing this was that what he said at such moments, for the very reason that it was from Bergotte, did not seem to be by Bergotte. It was composed of a rich flow of exact ideas, quite foreign to the “Bergotte manner” as misappropriated by reviewers; and that dissimilarity was probably another reflection of the fact—glimpsed vaguely through the spoken word, like something seen through smoked glass—that, when one read a page of real Bergotte, it never resembled what would have been written by any of the insipid imitators who kept touching up their prose, in newspapers and books, with pseudo-Bergottisms in imagery and ideas. This difference in style came from the fact that the real thing was first and foremost some precious, genuine element lying concealed within each object, waiting to be drawn out by the great writer with his genius; and it was this drawing out that was the aim of the soft-voiced Bard, not to toss off a page or two in the manner of Bergotte. He did of course write in the manner of Bergotte, given that Bergotte was who he was; and also in the sense that each new touch of beauty in his work was the particle of Bergotte hidden inside a thing, which he had drawn out of it. However, though each of these beauties had something recognizable to it, something in common with the others, it kept its own special quality, like the discovery that had brought it to light; and because it was new, it remained different from the so-called Bergotte manner, that vague composite of earlier Bergottes already found, drawn out, and written up by the man himself, none of which enabled men unendowed with genius to guess at what he might go on to discover in other things. All the great writers are like that: the beauty of their sentences, like the beauty of a woman one has not yet met, is unforeseeable; it is a creation, since its object is an external thing rather than themselves, something in their minds but not yet put into words. A memoirist trying unobtrusively to write like Saint-Simon nowadays might well hit on a line like the opening one in the portrait of the Duc de Villars: “Quite a tall man, dark of complexion, and with a physiognomy that was bright, open, outgoing”—but no determinism could possibly make him say in the next line, of this same physiognomy, “and in truth a trifle mad.”⁵² The real thing smacks of that fullness of genuine and unexpected ingredients, of the branch crammed with blue flowers dangling unexpectedly from the springtime hedge, which already looked unable to bear more blossom; whereas the purely formal replica of the real thing (one could say the same of every other feature of style) is full of vacancy and sameness, full, that is, of what least resembles the real thing and, in the hands of an imitator, can pass for the real thing only in the minds of those who have never seen it in the words of the master.

Hence, just as the spoken manner of Bergotte might well have been pleasing if he had been some mere admirer quoting pseudo-Bergotte (whereas it was inseparable from the active workings of his mind, organically linked to it in ways the ear did not pick up at once), so the reason why there was something too matter-of-fact and overrich in his speech was that he applied his mind with precision to any aspect of reality that pleased him, thereby disappointing those who expected him to speak only of “the headlong torrent of fair forms” and “Beauty’s thrilling enigma.” And then his constant originality when he wrote became, when he spoke, a way of approaching topics that was so subtle in its avoidance of anything already familiar in them that it always sounded as though he were trying to come at it from some petty angle, taking it the wrong way on purpose, or being smart for smartness’s sake; and in this way, his ideas usually sounded confused, each of us having the habit of seeing clarity in ideas that show the same measure of confusion as our own. Besides, as anything new must first do away with the stereotype we are so used to that we have come to see it as reality itself, any new style of conversation, just like any originality in painting or music, will always seem convoluted and wearisome. We find its structuring figures so unwonted that the talker seems to be nothing more than a metaphor-monger, which fatigues the ear and hints at a lack of truthfulness. (Of course, the earlier speech forms themselves were once images, which a listener unfamiliar with the world they described had difficulty in grasping. But they have long since come to be taken as the real world, the reliable world.) So, when one heard Bergotte say of Cottard that he was “a Cartesian devil forever trying to remain in equipoise”—it seems such an unremarkable thing to say nowadays—or of Brichot that “He was even more concerned than Mme Swann with the care of his hair, because, in his dual preoccupation with his profile and his reputation, the lie of his locks had to give him the constant appearance of being both a lion and a philosopher,” one soon tired of it and wished for the firmer footing of something more concrete, by which one meant something one was more used to. The unrecognizable words emitted by the mask in front of me had to be attributed to the writer whom I admired, yet could not have been fitted like spare pieces of a jigsaw puzzle into spaces in any of his books; they existed on a different plane, and required to be transposed, as I discovered one day when, having repeated aloud some phrases I had recently heard uttered by Bergotte, I recognized in them the whole structure of his written style, which in spoken form had sounded so different that I had been unable to see and identify its component parts.

A more superficial thing, the special, intense, and more than punctilious pronunciation he used with certain words, certain adjectives which often recurred in his conversation, and which he slightly overemphasized, bringing out every single syllable and making the stressed one ring (as in the word “visage,” which he invariably used instead of “face,” cramming it with extra v’s, s’s, and g’s, all of which seemed to burst out of his gesturing hand as he spoke them), was the exact correlative of those fine and special places in his prose where he would set such favored words, which were always preceded by a sort of margin, and so precisely designed within the sentence’s intricate balance that, in order to avoid spoiling the rhythm of it, one was obliged to give each of them its full quantity. However, in Bergotte’s spoken words there was no sign of that particular lighting which in his books, as in the books of some other writers, often alters the appearance of words in a written sentence. That form of light comes no doubt from great depths, and its rays cannot reach our words at those times when, by being open to others through conversation, we are partly closed to ourselves. In that sense, one could hear in his books more intonations and more accent than in his speech; for this is an accent which is unrelated to the beauty of a style, which a writer himself may not even have noticed, as it is inseparable from his most private self. This was the accent which always marked its rhythm in the words Bergotte wrote when he was being entirely natural, however insignificant in themselves such words might be. It is an accent marked by no sign on the page, indicated by nothing in the text; and yet it clings to the sentences, which cannot be spoken in any other way; it was the most ephemeral but the most profound thing in the writer, the thing which will bear definitive witness to his nature, which will enable one to tell whether, despite all the harsh things he uttered, he was a gentle man, whether, despite all the sensuality, he was a man of sentiment.

Certain idiosyncrasies of elocution that could be faintly detected in the speech of Bergotte were not peculiar to him; and when I later came to know his brothers and sisters, I noticed that their speech was much more marked by these than his was. It had something to do with a sharp, hoarse fall to the last words of a cheerful statement, or a faint and fading voice at the end of a sad one. Swann, who had known the Master as a child, once told me that in those days Bergotte’s voice was as full as his brothers’ and sisters’ of these more or less family inflections, outbursts of violent glee alternating with slow, melancholy murmurs, and that, when they were all together in the playroom, the young Bergotte could be heard holding his own amid a chorus scored for the deafening and the forlorn. However personal they may be, all these human sounds are transitory, and do not outlive the beings who emit them. But that was not the case with the Bergotte family pronunciation. It may be difficult to understand, even in Die Meistersinger, how any artist can ever invent music by listening to birdsong; but Bergotte had transposed and set in prose those ways of drawing out words which ring repetitively with the sounds of joy, or keep dropping away to the saddest sigh. In some of his books, there are sentence endings in which the long-drawn-out chords resound like those dying notes of an operatic overture which, in its reluctance to close, keeps murmuring its final, sublime harmonies, until the conductor at last lays down his baton, which I came to see later as a musical equivalent of the Bergotte family’s phonetic brasses. But Bergotte himself, as soon as he started to transpose them into his writing, unconsciously gave up using them in speech. His voice, from the day when he started to write (and all the more by the later time when I came to know him), had forever lost the power to orchestrate them.

In wit or delicacy of mind, these young Bergottes, the future writer and his brothers and sisters, were no doubt not the equals of other young people, who thought them very rowdy, and actually rather vulgar, with their irritating jokes, which were typical of the household’s partly pretentious, partly puerile style. But genius, or even great talent, lies less in elements of mind and social refinement superior to those of others than in the ability to transform and transpose them. To heat a liquid with a flashlight, what is required is not the strongest possible torch, but one in which the current can be diverted from the production of light and adapted to the production of heat. To fly through the air, it is not necessary to have the most powerful motorcar, but a motor which, by turning its earthbound horizontal line into a vertical, can convert its speed along the ground into ascent. Likewise, those who produce works of genius are not those who spend their days in the most refined company, whose conversation is the most brilliant, or whose culture is the broadest; they are those who have the ability to stop living for themselves and make a mirror of their personality, so that their lives, however nondescript they may be socially, or even in a way intellectually, are reflected in it. For genius lies in reflective power, and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected. It was when the young Bergotte became capable of showing to the world of his readers the tasteless drawing room where he had spent his childhood, and the rather unamusing exchanges it had witnessed between himself and his brothers, that he rose above his wittier and more distinguished family friends. They could be driven home in their fine Rolls-Royces, sneering a little at the Bergottes and their vulgarities. But he, with his much less impressive flying machine, had at last taken off and soared over their heads.

Other features of his diction he shared not with members of his family but with certain writers of his day. Certain younger writers who were beginning to outgrow him, and who claimed to have no intellectual affinity with him, showed their debt to him unawares in their use of certain adverbs or prepositions that he was always using, in the sentences they spoke modeled on his, in the same dawdling and almost toneless manner of speech, which had been his reaction against the facile grandiloquence of a previous generation. It may be that these young men had never known Bergotte (this was certainly the case, as will be seen, with some of them). But, having been inoculated with his way of thinking, they had developed those modifications of syntax and accent which bear a necessary relation to intellectual originality. This is a relation that requires some interpretation. The fact was that, though Bergotte’s way of writing owed nothing to anyone, he was indebted for his speaking style to one of his old friends, a wonderful talker who had had a great influence on him, whom he imitated unintentionally in conversation, but who, being less gifted than Bergotte, had never written a book that was in any way out of the ordinary. Thus, if judged only on originality of spoken delivery, Bergotte would have been properly deemed to be a mere disciple, a purveyor of hand-me-downs; whereas, despite having been influenced in speech habits by his friend, he had still been original and creative as a writer. His impulse to set himself apart from that previous generation, which had been too fond of grand abstractions and commonplaces, could probably also be seen in the fact that when he wanted to praise a book the thing he would single out or quote was always a scene giving a graphic glimpse of something, a picture without thematic relevance. “Oh, yes,” he would say. “That’s pretty good. That little girl wearing the orange shawl. It’s really nice.” Or else, “Yes, that’s right! That part where there’s a regiment marching through a town! Yes, that’s a good bit!” On matters of style, he was not quite of his own period (though very much of his own country, abhorring Tolstoy, George Eliot, Ibsen, and Dostoevsky); and the word one always heard from him whenever he praised a writer’s style was “smooth”: “Well, actually the Chateaubriand I prefer is the one in Atala rather than the one in Rancé—yes, he’s smoother there.” He used the word as a doctor might to soothe a patient complaining that milk was not good for his stomach: “Oh, but it’s very smooth.” And it is a fact that in his own style there was a type of harmony, the like of which made the ancients praise some of their orators in ways that seem all but inconceivable to us, accustomed as we are to our modern languages, in which no one would try for such effects.

If anyone praised a piece of his own, he would say of it with a shy smile, “I think it’s all right, it’s not bad, it’s worth saying”; but this was mere modesty, after the manner of the woman who, on being told that her dress or her daughter is lovely, replies, “Well, it’s nice and comfortable,” or “Well, she’s a good-natured girl.” But the artisan’s instinct ran too deep in Bergotte for him to be unaware that the sole proof of his having worked to good purpose, and in accord with truth, lay in the joy to be derived from his own work, by himself in the first place, and then by others. Unfortunately, many years later, when his talent had run out, whenever he wrote something that dissatisfied him, rather than scratching it out as he should have done, he talked himself into publishing it with the words he had once spoken to others: “Well, yes, it’s all right, it says something that’s worth saying, for the sake of my country....” The phrases his feigned modesty had murmured for an admirer were later spoken, in the sincerity of his most secret self, to allay the misgivings of pride; the words that had been his unnecessary apology for the quality of his first works became his futile consolation for the mediocrity of his last.

In his urge never to write anything of which he could not say, “It’s smooth,” there was a kind of strictness of taste which, though it had caused him to be seen for so many years as an artist of sterile preciosity, a finicking minimalist, was actually the secret of his strength. For habit is style-forming as well as character-forming; and the writer who, in the expression of his thought, becomes used to aiming only at a certain facility, sets bounds beyond which his talent will never go, just as surely as, by repeated recourse to a pleasure, to idleness, or to the fear of suffering, we pencil in, on a character that it is eventually impossible to touch up, the contours of our vices and the limits of our virtue.

However, though I was later to note many things common both to the writer and to the man, perhaps my very first impression of Bergotte was not quite wrong, that day at Mme Swann’s, when I doubted that the person standing in front of me could be the author of so many divine books, for he himself “disbelieved” it too, in the true meaning of the word. He disbelieved it each time he fawned on fashionable people (not that he was a snob), or toadied to other writers or journalists, all of whom were clearly inferior to him. By now of course he knew about his genius from the plaudits of other people; and that knowledge is something beside which social position and official recognition are negligible. He knew all about his genius; but he disbelieved in it, going on feigning deference to mediocre writers, in the hope of being elected before long to the Académie Française, although neither the Académie nor the Faubourg Saint-Germain has anything more to do with that share of the eternal Spirit which writes the books of a Bergotte than it has to do with the principle of causality or the idea of God. Bergotte was aware of that too, of course; but his awareness was as ineffectual as that of the kleptomaniac who knows that stealing is wrong. Like a lord who cannot help pocketing the cutlery, the man with the goatee and the bottle-nose had to creep up on the coveted seat in the Académie, by courting the duchess who commanded several votes in each of the elections, but in such a way as to prevent anyone who might think this aim unworthy of him from noticing what he was doing. In this, he was only partly successful; and when he spoke, one could always hear, in among the real Bergotte’s words, other words spoken by the self-seeker, the man of ambition who was forever trying to impress people by dropping the names of the influential, the noble, or the rich, despite having depicted in the books he wrote when he was truly himself, as limpid as a spring, the charm of the poor.

As for the other vices mentioned by M. de Norpois, the semiincestuous affair, allegedly further complicated by some indelicacy about money, though they did flagrantly contradict the tendency of his latest novels (which were marked by such a painfully scrupulous care for all that is good that their heroes’ slightest joys were poisoned by it, and that even the reader got from it an anguished feeling which made the easiest life seem hard to bear), they did not prove, even if they could be said to be well founded, that his works were a tissue of falsehoods and his great sensitivity mere play-acting. In pathology, certain states of similar appearance may have different causes, some being due to high blood pressure and others to low, some to an excess of secretion, others to not enough; and in the same way, a single vice can derive either from hypersensitivity or from a deficient sensitivity. It may only be in a life deeply steeped in its vice that the moral question can arise with the full power of its anxiety. This question the artist answers not on the plane of his individual life, but in the mode of existence that represents his true life; and there the answer given is a literary one, of general application. Just as the Fathers of the Church, good as they were, first had to practice the sins of all men, through which they found their own sanctity, so great artists, immoral as they are, often derive from their own vices a definition of the moral rule that applies to us all. It is usually on paper that writers inveigh against the vices (or just the foibles and follies) of their own small world, the prattle or scandalous frivolity of their daughters, the treachery of their wives, or even their own failings, while doing nothing to reform these regrettable or unseemly features of their family life. This disparity used to be less noticeable than in Bergotte’s day, partly because the drift of society toward its own corruption was matched by a growing refinement of moral ideas, and partly because the reading public had become better informed than before about the private lives of writers; and on certain evenings at the theater, people would point out the author whom I had so admired in Combray days, sitting back in a box with people whose company, in relation to the idea he had advocated in his latest book, was tantamount to a flippant disclaimer, a singularly derisive or abject disparagement. His goodness or wickedness was never much clarified for me by any of the informants who spoke to me of the man himself. Someone who knew him well would attest to how harsh he could be; someone else would give an instance (touching, because clearly designed to remain a secret) of his deeply sympathetic nature. He had treated his wife callously. But then, in a country inn where he was spending the night, he had stayed on so as to look after a poor woman who had tried to drown herself; and when he could stay no longer, he had left a large sum of money so that the landlord would not turn her out, but take care of her. The more the great writer grew in Bergotte at the expense of the man with the goatee, the more his individual life was taken over by all the other lives he imagined, which seemed to relieve him of the obligation of performing real duties, replacing it with the duty of imagining those other lives. But at the same time, because he imagined the feelings of others as vividly as if they had been his own, when circumstances brought him into at least temporary contact with someone much less fortunate than himself, rather than adopt his own point of view, he always put himself in the position of the person who was suffering; and this was a position in which he would have been horrified by the language of people who, when faced with the distress of others, go on being engrossed in their own petty concerns. In this way, he gave grounds for many a justified grudge and for enduring gratitude.

Most important, Bergotte was a man who took his greatest pleasure in certain images, in composing and painting them in words, like a miniature in the bottom of a casket. In response to some trifling gift, if it afforded him the opportunity of devising some of these images, he would be lavish in expressing his appreciation, though he might well have nothing to say in return for an expensive present. If he had ever been on trial in a court of law, despite himself he would have chosen his words not for the effect they might have on the judge, but for the sake of imagery that the judge would not even have noticed.

On that occasion when I first met Bergotte at the house of Gilberte’s parents, I told him I had recently been to see La Berma in Phèdre, to which he replied that in the scene where she stood with one arm outstretched at shoulder height—one of the scenes the audience had acclaimed—the nobility of her acting had managed to call to mind masterpieces that she might actually never have seen, a Hesperid making that very gesture on a metope at Olympia and the beautiful maidens from the older Erechtheum.

“It may be a sort of second sight on her part. Though I suspect she frequents museums. That would be an interesting thing to educe, wouldn’t it?” (“Educe” was one of those words Bergotte was always using; and it had been taken up by certain young men who, though they had never met him, spoke like him as though under the influence of remote hypnotism.)

“Do you mean the Caryatids?” Swann asked.

“No, I don’t mean that,” Bergotte replied. “Or, rather, yes, but only in the scene where she confesses her love to Oenone, gesturing with exactly the hand movement of Hegeso on the stele in the Ceramicus. No, usually she brings back to life a form of art that’s much more ancient. I was referring to the korai from the old Erechtheum—and I fully accept that it’s a form of art which is the antithesis of Racine. But, then, there are so many things in Phèdre that one extra ... Even so, I must agree, that pretty little Phèdre straight out of the sixth century B.C. is very nice, the perpendicularity of the arm, the curl of hair looking like marble, there’s no doubt about it, it all adds up to a real brainwave. There’s much more antiquity in it than in many of this year’s books about so-called antiquity.”

As one of Bergotte’s books contained a celebrated address to these archaic statues, his words were full of interest for me, as well as giving me a further reason for my interest in La Berma as an actress. I tried hard to remember what she had looked like in that scene where she raised her arm to shoulder height; and I assured myself, “It’s the Hesperid from Olympia! It’s the sister of one of those admirable praying figures on the Acropolis! What a noble art form!” The trouble was, though, that these assurances could have convinced me of the beauty of La Berma’s gesture only if Bergotte had primed me with them before the performance. Then, while the actress’s posture was in actual existence before my eyes, during that instant when a thing taking place is still pregnant with reality, I could have attempted to draw a notion of archaic sculpture from it. But the memory I had kept of La Berma in that scene was by now indelible, an image as thin as any that lacks those depths full of present time which one can plumb, in which something genuinely new can be found, an image on which I could impose no retrospective interpretation verifiable by comparison with its objective counterpart. Mme Swann, wishing to be part of the conversation, asked me whether Gilberte had ever remembered to let me have Bergotte’s piece on Phèdre, adding, “That daughter of mine, you know, she’s such a scatterbrain!” Bergotte gave his modest smile and said it was just a little thing of no consequence. “No, no! It’s such a delightful little piece! Your little screed,” Mme Swann insisted, to show she was the perfect hostess, and hinting that she had read the little essay, so as to enjoy not just complimenting Bergotte but discriminating among the things he had written, and being an intellectual influence on him. The fact is, she did inspire him, but not in the way she thought. Between the elegance that was once the salon of Mme Swann and a whole aspect of the work of Bergotte, there are connections that make it possible, for men who are now grown old, to read each of them in terms of the other.

I was glad to tell Bergotte of my impressions of La Berma. Though he thought many of them were not quite sound, he let me speak. I told him how much I had liked the greenish lighting effect at the moment when Phèdre held out her arm. “Well, now! The designer, who is a great artist in his own right, would be delighted to know that. I’ll certainly tell him, because he’s very proud of that lighting effect. Mind you, I must say I don’t fancy it very much myself. It floods everything with a sort of glaucous glow and makes poor little Phèdre look too much like a bit of coral decorating an aquarium. I know what you’re going to say—that it brings out the cosmic aspect of the drama being played out—and I agree, it does. But it would still be preferable in a play set in Neptune’s realm. Of course, Phèdre does have something to do with Neptune’s vengeance. Goodness knows, I’m not one to say that Port-Royal with its Jansenism is the be-all and end-all of Racine. But I mean, Racine’s play isn’t about the love of a couple of sea urchins, is it? However, that lighting effect was exactly what my friend was aiming at, it’s really first-rate, and one can’t deny it’s quite pretty. So, yes, you liked it, you saw the point of it, and when all’s said and done, we think alike, you and I. His idea was just a little crazy, wouldn’t you say? But really very clever.” When Bergotte’s view on something differed in this way from my own, it never reduced me to silence, or deprived me of a possible rejoinder, as M. de Norpois’s opinion would have done. Not that Bergotte’s opinions were any less valid than the former ambassador’s. The fact is that a sound idea transmits some of its force even to its contradictor. With its share of the universal value of all mind, it takes root among other adjacent ideas, growing like a graft even in the mind of someone whose own idea it rebuts; and this latter person, drawing some advantage from the new juxtaposition, may round the idea out or adapt it, so that the final judgment on a matter is in some measure the work of the two people who were in disagreement. But the ideas that leave no possibility of a rejoinder are those that are not properly speaking ideas, those that, by being supported by nothing, find nothing to attach to in the other’s mind: on the one side, no brotherly branch is held out, and on the other, there is nothing but a vacuum. The arguments advanced by M. de Norpois (on questions of art) were indisputable because they were devoid of reality.

As Bergotte had not dismissed my objections, I went on to tell him of the disdain with which M. de Norpois had treated them. “Look, he’s just an old parrot,” Bergotte said. “He took a peck at you because he always thinks whatever’s under his nose is birdseed or a cuttlebone.” “What’s that?” Swann asked me. “You know Norpois?” “Oh, isn’t he a dreadful old bore!” Mme Swann said. She had great faith in Bergotte’s judgment and was probably anxious in case M. de Norpois had said something to her detriment. “I tried to have a conversation with him after dinner, and, possibly because of his age, or perhaps poor digestion, I thought the man was quite, quite inane. One had the impression that he had been drugged to the eyeballs!” “True, true,” Bergotte said, “he is obliged to observe frequent silences, so as to reach the end of the evening without using up the supply of starchy stupidities that keep his white waistcoat stiff.” “I do think Bergotte and my dear wife are being rather hard on M. de Norpois,” said Swann, whose job at home was to be the man of sound common sense. “I can appreciate that one may not think he’s all that interesting, but from another point of view”—Swann being something of a “collector” of life’s little curios—“he really is rather a noteworthy man. Noteworthy in his capacity as great lover, I mean.” He added, with a glance to make sure that Gilberte could not hear him, “In the days when he was an attaché at the embassy in Rome, he had left behind in Paris a mistress whom he adored to distraction. So, twice a week, he would find a pretext to dash back and see her for a couple of hours. Mind you, she was a very clever and beautiful woman at that time. A dowager nowadays, of course. And he’s had plenty more since then. I must say that if it had been me, obliged to live in Rome while the woman I loved had to stay in Paris, it would have driven me mad. High-strung people should always choose objects of their affections who are ‘beneath them,’ as the saying goes, so that the self-interest of the woman one loves ensures that she will always be available.” At that moment, Swann realized the connection I might make between this verity and his own love for Odette. This gave him a great fit of pique against me, for even the high-minded, at moments when one seems to be sharing in their higher things, are still capable of the pettiness of self-esteem. This grudge of Swann’s was apparent only in an uneasy look in his eye; and he said nothing about it at that moment. Not that there is anything very surprising in that—a story, which is apocryphal, but which is re-enacted every day of the week in Paris, has it that when Racine spoke the name of Scarron in the presence of Louis XIV, the most powerful monarch on earth said nothing about it to his poet at the time; and he did not fall from favor until the following day.⁵³

However, any theory likes to be fully expounded; and so Swann, after his momentary irritation, wiped the lens of his monocle and rounded off his idea in words that I later came to remember as a prophecy, a warning I would be unable to heed: “But the danger of such liaisons is that, though the subjection of the woman may briefly allay the jealousy of the man, it eventually makes it even more demanding. He reaches the point of treating his mistress like one of those prisoners who are so closely guarded that the light in their cell is never turned off. The sort of thing that usually ends in alarums and excursions.”

I reverted to M. de Norpois. “I wouldn’t trust him—he’s always saying things behind people’s backs,” Mme Swann said in a way which, partly because Swann gave her a quick glance of disapproval, as though to warn her against saying anything more, made me suspect that M. de Norpois must have had something to say behind hers.

Gilberte, who had already been asked twice to go and make her preparations for going out, was still standing there between her parents, listening to us, leaning her loving head on her father’s shoulder. At first sight, there could have been no greater contrast than between Mme Swann, who was dark, and the golden-skinned girl with the fairish hair. Then one began to recognize in Gilberte many features, such as the nose, neatly shortened by a stroke from the sculptor whose unerring chisel models several generations, the expression of her mother, her ways of moving; or, to draw a comparison from another art, Gilberte resembled a portrait of her mother, verging on a good likeness, but done by a fanciful colorist who had made her pose in semi-disguise, dressed for a costume ball as a woman of Venice. It was not just the blond wig she was wearing, but the fact that every last atom of her dark complexion had faded, making it look more naked when stripped of its browner veils, covered only by the glow of an inner sun, as though the makeup were not just superficial but ingrained. Gilberte looked as though she represented some creature out of a fable, or as though she were costumed as a mythological character. Her fair complexion was so clearly her father’s that Nature, in order to create Gilberte, seemed to have been faced with the problem of imitating Mme Swann while being able to use as its sole material the skin of M. Swann. Nature had solved the problem to perfection, as a master cabinetmaker tries to exploit the visible grain of wood, even turning to advantage the knots in it. In Gilberte’s face, just to one side of its perfect reproduction of Odette’s nose, the skin rose slightly to show the two moles of M. Swann. In her, as she stood there with her mother, a new variety of Mme Swann had been achieved, like a white lilac growing beside a purple one. The line separating Gilberte’s twin likenesses was not hard and fast, though. Now and then, as she laughed, you suddenly glimpsed the oval of her father’s cheek in her mother’s face, as though they had been put together to see what such a mixture might look like; the oval took firmer shape, after the manner of an embryo forming, lengthened obliquely, swelled, then disappeared almost at once. In her eyes, one could see the frankness of her father’s fine, open gaze on the world, the one I had seen there on the day when she gave me the agate marble and said, “This is for you, as a memento of our friendship.” Then, if you inquired about what she had been doing, those same eyes filled with the devious, forlorn embarrassment and perplexity that used to cloud Odette’s as, in answer to a question from Swann about where she had been, she told one of those lies which had once reduced her lover to despair, but which now made her husband, a prudently uninquiring man, quickly change the subject. In the days when we used to meet at the Champs-Élysées, this expression of Gilberte’s had often worried me. Usually, however, I need not have worried, as that particular look in her eyes was a mere physical inheritance, and had nothing else of Odette left in it. It was when Gilberte had been to her class, or when she had to be back home in time for a lesson, that her eyes went through the motions Odette’s had once gone through because she feared letting it slip that one of her lovers had visited her during the day, or because she was anxious to be on her way to meet another of them. In this way the two natures of Swann and Mme Swann, each of them predominating by turns, could be seen to ripple and flow across the features of this Mélusine.⁵⁴

Children do take after their parents, of course. But the rearrangement of the inherited qualities and defects is done so strangely that only one of a pair of qualities which seemed inseparable in a parent may turn up in the child; and it may be blended with a defect of the other parent that had once seemed incompatible with it. One of the laws of filial resemblance is that a moral quality will often manifest itself even through a bodily defect that is quite out of keeping with it. One of two sisters will combine the petty-mindedness of her mother with the fine, upright stance of the father, while the other one will receive the father’s intelligence but the mother’s appearance; and so the latter’s big nose, her graceless waistline, and even her voice turn into the outer semblance of gifts one used to meet in a much finer form. It can be rightly said that either of such daughters takes more after either of the parents. Gilberte was, of course, an only child; but there were at least two of her. Her father’s nature and her mother’s did not just mingle in her: it would be truer to say they were in rivalry within her, although even that is an inaccurate description, since it implies there might be a third Gilberte, who found it irksome to be the periodic victim of the other two. But Gilberte was alternately one of the two and then the other, and never more than that single self at any given moment: that is, when she was the less good of the two, she was unable to regret it, since the better of the two Gilbertes, being momentarily absent, could have no knowledge of the lapse. Thus the less worthy Gilberte was free to enjoy unworthy pleasures. When it was the better one speaking from her father’s heart, her views were broad, inspiring one to engage with her in some fine, uplifting enterprise; but when you had told her this, and it was time to launch into it, you found that her mother’s heart had taken her over and was speaking through her; and a petty remark or a sly little snigger, in which she took pleasure as an expression of who she was at that moment, would disappoint you, irritate you, almost fascinate you, as though you were faced with an impostor. The disparity between these two Gilbertes could be so great that one would wonder, quite fruitlessly, what one had done to her that might explain the change. Not only did she not keep the appointment that she herself had suggested, not only did she not apologize for this, but, whatever the reason for her change of heart, her later behavior was so different that you could almost have believed it was a case of mistaken identity, like the one which shapes the plot of the Menaechmi,⁵⁵ and that you were no longer dealing with the person who had so demurely asked to see you, were it not that her present bad mood showed that she knew she was at fault, but wanted to avoid having to talk about it.

“Come on, please,” her mother said to her. “You’ll just make us all have to wait for you.”

“But I’m so happy here with my nice old papa. I just want to stay here for a bit longer,” Gilberte replied, nestling her head into her father’s shoulder as he combed his fingers through her long fair hair.

Swann was one of those men whose lives have been spent in the illusions of love, who, having afforded comforts and, through them, greater happiness to many women, have not been repaid by gratitude or tenderness toward themselves; but in their child they believe they can sense an affection which, by being materialized in the name they bear, will outlive them. A time would come when Charles Swann would have ceased to exist, but there would still be a Mlle Swann or a Mme X, née Swann, who would go on loving her dead father. Swann may even have thought Gilberte would love him too much, for he said to her now, in that emotional voice full of misgiving about the future of someone whose love for us is too passionate, and who is bound to live on after our death, “What a good girl you are.” To conceal the fact that he was moved, he joined in the conversation about La Berma, pointing out to me, albeit in a detached, bored tone that sounded as though he was trying to remain at a distance from what he was saying, the actress’s percipience, the unexpected aptness of the way she had spoken to Oenone the words: “You knew about it!” He was right: that intonation at any rate did convey a genuine and manifest effect, and should therefore have satisfied my desire to find irrefutable reasons for admiring La Berma. But it did not satisfy it, because of its very transparency. Her intonation had been so perceptive, so clear in its meaning and intent, that it seemed to exist in its own right, and any clever actress should have been able to think of it. It certainly was an inspired piece of acting; but anybody capable of grasping it so clearly would also have been capable of producing it. The fact remained that it was La Berma who had thought of it—but could she really be said to have “invented” it, when the thing supposedly invented would have been no different if she had merely acquired it, a thing bearing no essential relation to herself, since it could be reproduced by someone else?

“Goodness me!” Swann said to me. “Doesn’t your presence among us ‘raise the tone’ of the conversation?” It sounded like a discreet apology to Bergotte from the man who had borrowed from the Guermantes’ circle their simple ways of befriending and entertaining great artists, inviting them to dinner, serving them their favorite dish, playing parlor games to please them, or, in the country, arranging for them to practice the sport of their choice. “We do seem to be talking about ‘Art,’ don’t we?” Swann added. “I should think so too! I think it’s very nice,” Mme Swann said, thanking me with a glance in which I read kindness toward myself and a reminder of her former hankerings after more intellectual conversation. Bergotte turned to talk with some of the others, in particular Gilberte. I was surprised to realize how freely I had spoken to him of my thoughts and feelings. But over so many years, for so many private hours of reading and solitude, during which he had been simply the best part of myself, I had been so accustomed to relating to him in total sincerity, frankness, and trust that I was less shy with him than if I had been talking with someone else for the first time. And yet, for that very reason, I was full of qualms about the impression I must have made on him, as my expectation that he would scorn my ideas was no recent thing, but dated from the time long ago when I had first read him, sitting out in the garden at Combray. Perhaps it should have occurred to me that, since both my great attraction to the works of Bergotte and the unaccountable disappointment I had experienced at the theater were sincere, spontaneous reactions of my own mind, these two instinctive and irresistible responses could not be very different from each other, but must be governed by the same laws; and that therefore the spirit of Bergotte, which I had admired so much in his books, was very likely not so utterly alien and hostile to my disappointment, or to my inability to articulate it. For, after all, my mind had to be a single thing; or perhaps there is only a single mind, in which everybody has a share, a mind to which all of us look, isolated though each of us is within a private body, just as at the theater, where, though every spectator sits in a separate place, there is only one stage. No doubt the ideas Bergotte was in the habit of investigating in his books were not those I enjoyed trying to disentangle; but if it was true that he and I were bound to have recourse to the same mind, then it followed that, hearing me try to expound those ideas, he must recall them, like them, and smile on them, while probably keeping his inner eye, despite whatever else I thought he might be doing, fixed on an area of mind remote from the one which had left a remnant of itself in his books, and which had been the origin of all I had imagined about his mental universe. Just as the priests with the broadest knowledge of the heart are those who can best forgive the sins they themselves never commit, so the genius with the broadest acquaintance with the mind can best understand ideas most foreign to those that fill his own works. I should have thought of all this, unpleasant though its implications are: for the benevolence one encounters in the person of broad vision has its sorry counterpart in the obtuse and churlish ways of the petty; and the happiness one may derive from the kindly encounter with a writer through his books counts for much less than the unhappiness caused by the animosity of a woman whom one has not chosen for her qualities of mind, but whom one cannot help loving. I should have thought of all this; but it did not occur to me, and I was convinced that Bergotte thought I was stupid. Then Gilberte whispered to me:

“I’m so happy! You’ve really bowled over my great friend Bergotte! He’s just told my mother that he thought you were highly intelligent.”

“Where are we going?” I asked her.

“Well, you know me, I don’t really mind where we go....”⁵⁶

But ever since what had happened on the anniversary of her grandfather’s death, I had been wondering whether Gilberte’s character was not different from what I had believed, whether her equable indifference to our outings, her pleasing, mild manner, her unfailing biddableness, might not actually conceal intense desires, which pride made her disguise, and which she did not reveal until some chance event thwarted them and brought out a sudden obstinacy in her.

As Bergotte lived not far from my parents’ house, he and I shared a carriage. On the way, he spoke about my health: “The Swanns tell me you’re not in the best of health. I am sorry to hear it. Although I must say I am not too sorry for you, as I can see you must enjoy the pleasures of the intellectual life. I daresay that’s what really counts for you, as it does for anybody who’s familiar with such pleasures.”

Bergotte could not know how untrue this was, how indifferent I was to discussion, however elevated it might be, how happy I became with mere mental idleness, with simple contentment; but I was uneasily aware of how material were the things I looked for in life, of how unnecessary the intellectual life seemed to me. In my inability to distinguish between the disparate origins of certain pleasures, some of them deeper and more durable than others, it occurred to me, as I answered him, that the life I would enjoy would be one in which I could be on friendly terms with the Duchesse de Guermantes and have frequent opportunities of being reminded of Combray, as in the disused tollbooth at the Champs-Élysées, by a cool smell. And in that ideal way of life which I did not dare to speak of, intellectual pleasures had no part.

“Well, actually, no, sir. Intellectual pleasures don’t mean very much to me. I’m not at all fond of them. I’m not even sure I know what they are.”

“Really, is that so?” he replied. “No, look, honestly, you must be fond of them! Bound to be! I suspect you really are.”

I remained unpersuaded; but I did feel happier, less cramped. M. de Norpois’s words had made me see my moments of idle reflection, enthusiasm, and self-confidence as being purely subjective, devoid of reality. Yet Bergotte, who seemed quite familiar with the situation I found myself in, seemed to be implying that the symptoms to ignore were actually my self-disgust and doubts about my abilities. What he had said about M. de Norpois in particular had already done much to lessen the force of what had appeared to be a categorical judgment.

“Tell me, have you got sound medical advice?” Bergotte asked. “Who’s looking after you?” I told him I had been seeing Dr. Cottard and would probably go on seeing him. “But, look here,” he said, “I’m sure he’s not at all the right man. I must say I don’t know the fellow as a doctor. But I have seen him at Mme Swann’s—and he’s a prize idiot! Even if we accept that a man can be an idiot and a good doctor—which I do find hard to swallow—no one can be an idiot and a proper doctor for intelligent people, artistically inclined people. People like you need appropriate doctors and, I might even add, individually designed regimens and medications. Cottard will bore you, and boredom alone will prevent his treatment from working. In any case, such treatment can’t possibly be the same for you as for any average individual. With intelligent people, three-quarters of the things they suffer from come from their intelligence. The thing they can’t do without is a doctor who’s aware of that form of illness. How on earth could Cottard cure you? He can foresee the ill effects of sauces on the digestion, he can predict the bilious attack, but he can’t conceive of the effect of reading Shakespeare! And so all his calculations are thrown out, the little Cartesian devil can’t remain stationary, and up he pops to the surface again. He’ll say what you’ve got is distension of the stomach! He doesn’t even need to examine you for that, because it’s already in his eye. You’ll see it if you look—it’s reflected from his monocle.” I was bewildered by this manner of speaking; and I thought, with the ineptitude of common sense: “But there’s no more distension of the stomach reflected from Cottard’s monocle than there are stupidities inside M. de Norpois’s white waistcoat!” “If I were you,” Bergotte went on, “I’d go and see Dr. du Boulbon. He’s a very clever man.” “He’s a great admirer of your books,” I said. I could see this was not news to Bergotte and decided that like minds seek each other out, that one has few “unknown” admirers. What he said about Dr. Cottard struck me, though it contradicted everything I believed. That my doctor might be a crashing bore did not bother me; all I required of him was that his art, the laws of which were beyond me, should enable him to examine my entrails and utter an infallible oracle on my health. My own intelligence was good enough for both of us, and I saw no need for him to understand it, as I saw it only as a possible means, of no great significance in itself, to the attainment of truth about the world. I was acutely skeptical of the notion that clever people have sanitary requirements that differ from those of fools, and I did not mind having to make do with theirs. “I’ll tell you someone who needs a good doctor,” said Bergotte. “Our friend Swann.” I asked him whether Swann was ill. “No, but here we have the man who married a trollop, who accepts being snubbed every day of the week by women who choose not to know his wife, or looked down on by men who have slept with her. You can see it in that twisted smile of his. Have a look, one evening when he comes back to the house, at the way he raises his eyebrows as he wonders who’s with his wife.” The malice with which Bergotte spoke to a stranger about friends of long standing was as remarkable to me as the honeying manner he adopted with the Swanns when at their house. A person like my great-aunt, for instance, would have been incapable of treating any of us with the fulsome amiability of Bergotte toward the Swanns; and she could take pleasure in saying unpleasant things even to people she liked. But when they were absent, she would never have spoken a word about them that they would have been hurt to hear. Our little world of Combray was as remote as possible from smart society. The world of the Swanns was a first step closer to it, toward its untrustworthy waves. Though not quite the open sea, it was just inside the harbor bar. “This is just between you and me, of course,” murmured Bergotte as he left me outside my parents’ house. A few years later, I would have said, “Of course, I never repeat anything I hear.” This is the ritual statement of people in society, serving as a false reassurance for the scandalmonger. I might even have said it to Bergotte on that occasion, since one does not invent everything one says, especially when one is acting a social role; but I had not yet come across it. In similar circumstances, my great-aunt’s reply would have been: “Well, if you don’t want me to repeat it, why are you saying it?” That is the reply of the unsociable, of those who do not mind being thought “awkward.” Not being one of those, I quietly acquiesced.

Literary people who to me were personages of note had to scheme for years before succeeding in establishing a relationship with Bergotte; and even then their contracts were restricted to vaguely literary things, and never went beyond the walls of his study. Whereas, without ado, I had quietly stepped into the circle of the great writer’s friends, like a spectator who, instead of having to line up with everyone else to get one of the worst seats in the house, is ushered into one of the very best, having been let in by a side door which is generally closed to the public. It had been opened for me by Swann, after the manner of a king who will naturally offer his children’s friends a seat in the royal box, or take them for a cruise on the royal yacht; so Gilberte’s parents admitted their daughter’s friends among the precious things they owned, letting them share in the even more precious moments of the private life which took place in that setting. But at that time I suspected, possibly rightly, that Swann’s kindness to me was indirectly aimed at my parents. Long before, in Combray, I had formed the impression that, because of my admiration for Bergotte, Swann had suggested to my parents that I should meet the writer over dinner at his house; this invitation my parents had declined, saying I was too young and too high-strung to attend such a function. The impression some people had of my parents, in particular those on whom I looked with great awe, was no doubt very different from my own impression of them; which was why, as on the occasion when the lady in pink had sung such praises of my father, who had then shown himself unworthy of them, I now wished my parents could appreciate the priceless compliment I had received, and longed for them to show proper gratitude to Swann, who in his kind, courteous way had done this for me—or, rather, for them!—without seeming to have any more sense of how great a gift he was bestowing than the charming King in Bernardino Luini’s⁵⁷ fresco The Three Kings, the fairhaired one with the aquiline nose, who I believe had once been said to look exactly like Swann.

Unfortunately, this great boon of Swann’s, which I announced as soon as I stepped inside, before I had even taken off my overcoat, in the hope that it would warm my parents’ hearts as it had warmed mine, and inspire them to some grand and decisive overture toward Swann and his family, did not appear to enthrall them. “So Swann has introduced you to Bergotte, has he?” my father said in an ironic tone. “Well, that’s a fine thing, I must say! Nice company you keep! What next?” Then, when I told him Bergotte had nothing good to say about M. de Norpois, he added:

“Well, of course! Which just goes to show what a nasty and bogus mind the man has! My dear boy, we already knew you weren’t gifted with a great deal of common sense. But it’s a shame to see you fall among people who can only make things much worse in that department.”

My parents were already irked that I was on visiting terms with the Swanns. They now saw my introduction to Bergotte as an understandably adverse consequence of an initial fault, their own weakness, what my grandfather would have called their “unheedfulness.” I sensed that, to complete their ill humor, all I had to say was that the immoral man who had such a low opinion of M. de Norpois had also concluded that I was highly intelligent. The fact was that, whenever my father was convinced that someone—for instance, one of my school friends, or myself in this case—was not only risking perdition but also enjoyed the good esteem of a third person whom he did not respect, he took that esteem as mere confirmation of his own adverse diagnosis. The danger he foresaw was only aggravated by it. I knew perfectly well what he would exclaim: “But what do you expect? It’s all of a piece!” This was a statement which, by the imprecision and immensity of the changes it suggested were about to be visited on my quiet little life, could strike terror into my heart. However, since not telling them of what Bergotte had said about me could in no way alter the poor impression my parents already had, it did not matter much if they ended up with a poorer one. I was also so sure that they were being unfair, so convinced they were mistaken, that I had not only no hope of making them take a more balanced view, but almost no desire to. So, though sensing even as I spoke the words how alarmed my parents would be to learn that I had earned the approval of a man who said intelligent men were stupid, who was roundly despised by all solid citizens, and whose praise was likely to lead me astray in the hope of receiving more of the same, I finished my account by delivering this last straw in a rather shamefaced mutter: “And then he told the Swanns he thought I was highly intelligent.” As a poisoned dog in a field bites, without knowing why, at the herb which is the very antidote it requires to the toxin in its system, I had just uttered unawares the only possible statement that could counter my parents’ prejudice against Bergotte, when nothing else I could have said, no argument in his favor, however admirable, no praise of him, however lavish, would have prevailed against it. At once the situation changed:

“Really?” my mother said. “He said you were intelligent? Well, that’s good to hear, from such a talented man.”

“Did he really say that?” my father asked. “Well, I’ve got nothing to say against him at all on literary things—nobody has. It’s just a pity about those dubious goings-on of his that old Norpois hinted at.” My father did not notice that, against the power of the magic words I had just spoken, Bergotte’s moral depravity could not hold out much longer than his nasty and bogus mind had.

“But, my dear,” my mother said, “nothing proves there’s any truth in any of that. People say all sorts of things. And of course, although M. de Norpois is extremely nice, he’s not always full of goodwill, particularly toward people who are not quite his cup of tea.”

“True, true,” said my father. “I’ve noticed that about him too.”

“Anyway,” my mother said, stroking my hair and gazing dreamily at me, “if Bergotte likes my little boy, we won’t judge him too harshly.”

Without knowing Bergotte’s opinion of me, she had already told me that, the next time I had friends to tea, I could invite Gilberte. There were two reasons why I did not dare do this. One was that, at the Swanns’, the only thing to drink was tea; whereas my mother insisted that, in addition to tea, we should have hot chocolate. I dreaded the thought that Gilberte would think this was common of us, and despise us for it. The other reason was a difficulty of protocol that I was never able to resolve. Each time I arrived at Mme Swann’s, my hostess would ask:

“And how is your dear mother?”

To me, whether Mama would agree to follow suit when Gilberte came to tea was a more serious matter than Louis XIV’s insistence that at Versailles only the Dauphin should be addressed as Monseigneur; and so I had broached it with her. She would hear nothing of it.

“Well, no,” she said, “because I don’t know Mme Swann.”

“Yes, but she doesn’t know you either.”

“That may be. But we’re not obliged to be exactly the same as each other. I can be nice to Gilberte in ways that are different from the ways her mother is nice to you.”

But I was unconvinced, and preferred not to invite Gilberte to tea.

Having gone to my room, I was changing my clothes when I suddenly discovered in my pocket the envelope that the Swanns’ butler had handed me just before showing me into the drawing room. Being no longer under the butler’s eye, I opened it—inside was a card on which was written the name of the lady whom I was expected to take in to lunch.

It was about this time that Bloch disturbed my conception of the world and opened before me new vistas of possible happiness (which were later to turn into possibilities of great unhappiness): contradicting what I had believed about women in the days when I used to go for walks along the Méséglise way, he assured me that they were always on the lookout for opportunities to make love. This good turn he complemented with another, which I did not fully appreciate till much later: he it was who took me for the first time to a brothel. He had of course told me there were many pretty women in the world to be slept with. But the faces I had imagined for them were devoid of detail; and these brothels were to enable me to see that each of them had an individual face. So it was that, on the one hand, because of Bloch’s “good news”—that happiness and the possession of beauty are not unattainable, and that we are misguided if we despair of ever enjoying them—I was as indebted to him as one is to the optimistic doctor or philosopher who gives one grounds for expecting a long life in this world, or a continued contact with it even after one has passed into another world; and on the other hand, the brothels I frequented some years later (by giving me samples of happiness, and enabling me to enhance the beauty of women with that element we can never invent, which is not just an amalgam of types of beauty familiar to us, but the truly divine gift, the only one we cannot receive from ourselves, the one beside which all the logical figments of our mind fade away, and which can be acquired only from reality: the charm of the individual) deserve to stand beside those other benefactors, more recent in origin but equal in utility, thanks to whom we can now revel in the full glory of Mantegna, Wagner, and Siena, without having to invent pale, imagined versions of them based on other painters, other composers, and other towns: the publishers of illustrated volumes on the history of painting, producers of symphony concerts, and the compilers of those series on “Cities of the Arts.” But the first hotel Bloch took me to, which he himself had not frequented for some time, was of a rather inferior sort; its women were too nondescript, and they were not renewed often enough, for me to gratify familiar urges or contract unfamiliar ones. The madam did not know any of the women one asked her for, and kept suggesting others that one had no desire for. There was one woman in particular whom she praised to the skies, saying with a suggestive smile, as though talking about a treat or a rarity, “She’s a Jewess! Eh? Couldn’t you fancy that?” (That was presumably why she called the girl Rachel.) And she added, filling her voice with a vacuous, affected rapturousness, which she hoped would be infectious, and dropping it almost to a moan of sensuous delight, “Just think, dearie! A Jewess! I mean! That must really be something, wouldn’t you say? Yes, sir!” I was able to look at Rachel without her seeing me: she was dark, not pretty, but with an intelligent look, and as she licked her lips with the tip of her tongue, she smiled pertly at the different customers who were being introduced to her, and whom I could hear striking up conversation with her. Her face was thin and narrow, framed by curly black hair that looked so irregular as to have been crosshatched in an India-ink wash drawing. At each visit I assured the madam, who kept urging me to have the girl, stressing her high intelligence and level of education, that I would be sure to come back one day for the express purpose of meeting Rachel, for whom my private nickname was “Rachel, when of the Lord.”⁵⁸ But the fact was that, on the very first evening, I had overheard the girl say to the madam as she was leaving:

“So that’s agreed, all right? I’m available tomorrow, and if you’ve got somebody you’ll be sure to send for me?”

These words had instantly prevented me from seeing her as a person, by making her indistinguishable from the ordinary run of those women whose common practice was to turn up there in the evening in the hope of earning a few francs. This statement of Rachel’s rarely varied: sometimes she said “if you need me”; and sometimes it was “if you need anyone.”

The madam, being unfamiliar with Halévy’s opera, had no idea why I had taken to calling the girl “Rachel, when of the Lord.” But an inability to understand a joke has never been an impediment to being amused by it, and she always greeted me with a great laugh and the words:

“So is tonight the night when I can fix you up with ‘Rachel, when of the Lord’? Let’s hear the way you say it, now: ‘Rachel, when of the Lord’! It’s very funny, you know! I’m going to betroth you to her. You won’t be sorry, you’ll see!”

On one occasion I had almost decided to accept the offer; but the girl was “on the job.” Then, another time, she was with the “hairdresser” (this was an old gentleman whose hairdressing consisted solely of oiling the women’s hair, once they had let it down, and then combing it for them). I tired of waiting for her, although several denizens of the establishment, of very humble charms, allegedly working-class women but always out of work, came up to make me a cup of tisane and engage me in a lengthy conversation, to which, despite the seriousness of the subjects we talked about, their partial or total nakedness gave a piquant simplicity. However, I gave up going to that house because, in my desire to do the madam a good turn, she being rather short of furniture, I made her a present of some pieces, notably a large couch, that had been left to me by my aunt Léonie. I rarely saw these things, since my parents, having no room to accommodate them, had put them into storage. But as soon as I set eyes on them again in that brothel, put to use by those women, I was assailed by all the virtues that had perfumed the air in my aunt’s bedroom at Combray, now defiled by the brutal dealings to which I had condemned the dear, defenseless things. I could not have suffered more if it had been the dead woman herself being violated. So I stopped going to that procuress’s establishment, as they seemed to be living creatures, crying out silently to me, like those apparently inanimate objects inside which, as a Persian tale has it, souls are imprisoned, subjected to constant torture, and begging forever to be freed. Moreover, given that memory does not usually produce recollections in chronological order, but acts more like a reflection inverting the sequence of parts, it was not until much later that I remembered this was the couch on which, many years before, I had been initiated into the pleasures of love by one of my cousins, a girl whose presence embarrassed and excited me to distraction, and who had urged me to take perilous advantage of an hour when our aunt Léonie was out of the room.

Another large lot of Aunt Léonie’s furniture, including especially a magnificent set of old silverware, I sold, against the express wishes of my parents, so as to have more money with which to send more flowers to Mme Swann. When she received my huge baskets of orchids, she would say, “Young man, if I was your father, I’d have your allowance stopped!” But could I imagine that a day would come when I would regret having parted with that silver, a day when the greatest pleasure in my life, paying respects to Gilberte’s parents, would have become absolutely worthless? Similarly, it was because of Gilberte, so as not to part from her, that I had decided not to undertake a career as a diplomat. Our furthest-reaching resolutions are always made in a short-lived state of mind. I could barely conceive that the strange substance inhering in Gilberte, and radiating from her parents and the house where she lived, making me feel indifferent to everything else, could detach itself from her person and migrate into another. The very same substance, yet destined to have completely different effects on me. The same illness can evolve; and a sweet poison comes to be less tolerated when, with the years, the heart’s resistance has weakened.

Meanwhile, my parents would have preferred it if the intelligence that had so impressed Bergotte could have been made manifest in some achievement. As long as I had been excluded from the Swanns’ acquaintance, I was convinced that my inability to get down to work was caused by the state of emotional disturbance to which I was reduced by the impossibility of seeing Gilberte as and when I wished to. But then, once I had free access to their house, I could hardly sit down at my desk before I had to jump up again and be off there to visit them. And when I had left the Swanns’ and gone back home, it was only in appearance that I sat alone; my own thoughts could not withstand the torrent of words on which for hours past I had let myself be carried along: I went on turning out words and sentences that might have impressed the Swanns; to make the game more enjoyable, I even played the parts of the absent others, asking myself fictitious questions so designed that, in answering them, I could show off the brilliance of my banter. Silent as it was, this exercise was a real conversation and not a form of reflection; my solitude was a mental drawing-room scene, in which imaginary interlocutors and not myself were in charge of my speech, in which, by producing not ideas that I believed to be true, but ideas that came to me without trouble, without any action of the outer world on the inner, I enjoyed the same sort of pleasure as is enjoyed, in utter passivity, by the person who has nothing better to do after dinner but sit quietly, lulled into a dull somnolence by poor digestion.

If I had not been so determined to set seriously to work, I might have made an effort to start at once. But given that my resolve was unbreakable, given that within twenty-four hours, inside the empty frame of tomorrow, where everything fitted so perfectly because it was not today, my best intentions would easily take material shape, it was really preferable not to think of beginning things on an evening when I was not quite ready—and of course the following days were to be no better suited to beginning things. However, I was a reasonable person. When one has waited for years, it would be childish not to tolerate a delay of a couple of days. In the knowledge that by the day after tomorrow I would have several pages written, I said no more about my decision to the family: much better to wait for a few hours; then, once I had a piece of work in progress to show, my grandmother would be consoled and convinced. Unfortunately, tomorrow turned out not to be that broad, bright, outward-looking day that I had feverishly looked forward to. When it had ended, my idleness and hard struggle against my inner obstacles had just lasted for another twenty-four hours. After a few days, when my projects had still not come to anything, when some of my hope that they would very soon come to something had faded, and with it some of the courage I required in order to subordinate everything to my coming achievement, I went back to staying up late, as I now also lacked my incentive (the certain knowledge that the great work would be begun by the following morning) to go to bed early on any given evening. Before regaining my impetus, I was in need of a respite of several days; and on the only occasion when my grandmother hazarded a reproach in a tone of mild disenchantment—“So is anything happening about this writing?”—I was aggrieved at her, and I concluded that, by her inability to see the staunchness of my purpose, by the anguish her gross unfairness caused me, an utterly unsuitable state of mind in which to undertake such a work as mine, she had just succeeded in putting off once again (and possibly for a long time!) the moment when its accomplishing would be begun. She sensed that her skeptical air had offended an unsuspected but genuine resolve. She apologized with a kiss: “I’m sorry. I won’t say another word about it.” So that I would not lose heart, she added her assurance that a day would come when I would feel well again, and that, of its own accord, my work would then start to flow smoothly.

Anyway, I thought, what if I do spend a lot of time at the Swanns’? So does Bergotte! My family’s view on this might almost have been that, though I was lazy, the life I was leading was actually the best suited to a developing talent, since I was frequenting the same drawing room as a great writer. Yet to acquire talent from someone else, to bypass the need to create it out of oneself, is as impossible as it would be to lead a healthy life by dining out frequently with a doctor, while flouting all the rules of hygiene and indulging in every sort of excess. The person who was most taken in by this illusion, shared by myself and my family, was Mme Swann. If I told her I could not accept one of her invitations, that I had to stay at home and work, she looked at me as though I were making difficulties for the sake of it, as though I had said something rather silly and pretentious:

“But, look here, Bergotte keeps coming, doesn’t he? And you don’t think his stuff isn’t well written—surely, now—do you? You’ll see, he’ll be even better soon—since he’s taken up journalism, he’s actually sharper, and there’s more to him than in his books, where he tends to be a bit thinnish. I’ve managed to get him into Le Figaro, he’s going to do their leader article.” She used the English expression, to which she added another:

“You’ll see, it’ll be a perfect case of the right man in the right place. So do come! Just think of the tips you can pick up from him about writing!”

It sounded as though she were inviting a private to meet his colonel: it was in order to further my career, as though knowing “the right people” could help produce a masterpiece, that she urged me not to miss dinner with Bergotte at her house the following evening.

So it was that my new sweet life with Gilberte was now untroubled both by the Swanns and by my family, the two sources that at different times had appeared likely to make a difficulty; and I could go on seeing her at will, with delight though not with peace of mind. Peace of mind is foreign to love, since each new fulfillment one attains is never anything but a new starting point for the desire to go beyond it. As long as I had been prevented from going to her house, my gaze had been riveted to that unattainable happiness, and it had been impossible for me even to imagine the new sources of emotional disturbance that awaited me in it. Once her parents’ resistance had been overcome, the problem that had thus been solved was to go on being reformulated, but each time in different terms. In that sense, it really was a new relationship that began with Gilberte each day. Back at home each evening, I realized there were things of paramount importance that I had to say to her, things on which the future of our friendship depended; and yet, from one day to the next, they were never the same things. Still, I was happy and there was no sign of any threat to my continuing happiness. A threat was to materialize, however, coming from a source I had never seen as a potential danger—that is, from Gilberte and myself. I should really have been disturbed by what reassured me, by what I took for happiness. In love, happiness is an abnormal state, capable of instantly conferring on the pettiest-seeming incident, which can occur at any moment, a degree of gravity that in other circumstances it would never have. What makes one so happy is the presence of something unstable in the heart, something one contrives constantly to keep in a state of stability, and which one is hardly even aware of as long as it remains like that. In fact, though, love secretes a permanent pain, which joy neutralizes in us, makes virtual, and holds in abeyance; but at any moment, it can turn into torture, which is what would have happened long since if one had not obtained what one desired.

Now and then I had the feeling that Gilberte would have been glad to see me less often. The fact was that, when the desire to see her got the better of me, all I had to do was get myself invited to the house by her parents, who were more and more convinced I was an improving influence on her. Because of them, I thought, my love is in no danger: as long as they are for me, I needn’t worry about anything, since Gilberte is in their hands. Unfortunately, occasional signs of impatience from her, at times when her father had me to the house more or less without her agreement, made me wonder whether the thing I had seen as a protection for my happiness might not be the secret reason why it could not last.

The last time I went to see her, it was raining and she had been invited to a dancing class at the house of some people who were not close enough friends for her to be able to take me with her. Because it was wet, I had taken more caffeine than usual. As Gilberte was about to leave, Mme Swann, perhaps because of the bad weather, perhaps because of some slight ill will she may have harbored toward the people in whose house the lesson was to take place, called out “Gilberte!” in a very sharp voice, and made a gesture in my direction, meaning that I was there to see her and that she should stay at home. It was for my sake that she had snapped “Gilberte!” or, rather, shouted the name; but from the shrug of the shoulders with which Gilberte took off her outdoor things, I realized that, without intending to, her mother had hastened the process—which until then it might still have been possible to arrest—whereby my sweetheart was gradually being separated from me. “One doesn’t have to go dancing every day,” Odette said to her daughter, possibly passing along a lesson in self-discipline once taught to her by Swann. Then, becoming Odette again, she broke into English; and it was instantly as though part of Gilberte’s life was hidden behind a wall, as though some evil genie had kidnapped her. In a language we understand, we have replaced opacity of sound by transparency of idea. But a language we do not speak is a palace closed against us, inside which our beloved may deceive us, while we, left outside to the impotent devices of our own desperation, can see nothing and prevent nothing. A month earlier, this conversation would have made me smile; but now, with the few French proper names I could hear among the English words, it increased my disquiet, gave focus to suspicion, and, though conducted by two motionless people standing beside me, left me as cruelly isolated and abandoned as if Gilberte had been abducted. At length, Mme Swann left us alone together. That day, perhaps from a sense of grievance against me for having been the unwitting cause of her being deprived of an amusement, perhaps also because, sensing and hoping to avoid her ill humor, I myself may have been stiffer than usual, Gilberte’s face was devoid of all joy, laid waste, a blank, melancholy mask, which for the rest of the afternoon seemed to grieve privately for those foursome reels being danced without her, because of my presence here, and to defy all beings, especially me, to comprehend the subtle reasons that had produced in her a sentimental inclination to do the Boston dip. She did no more than contribute occasional comments—on the weather, the fact that the rain was coming on again, or that the clock was a little fast—to a conversation of silences and monosyllables, during which I too, in a sort of rage of despair, outdid her in trying to destroy the moments in which we could have been close and happy. All the words we exchanged were stamped with a sort of stark hardness, by the crushing paradox of their crassness, an effect in which there was nevertheless something consoling, since it meant that Gilberte could not possibly be deceived by the banality of what I was saying and the indifference in my voice. Even though I said, “And yet the other day I had the impression the clock was actually a little slow,” she translated this directly as, “How nasty you’re being!” Even though I persisted throughout the rainy afternoon with my succession of pointless words without sunny intervals, I knew that my cold manner was not as steadfast as I pretended, and that Gilberte must be well aware that, if I had dared to repeat for the fourth time what I had already said three times—that the evenings were drawing in now—I would have had difficulty in not bursting into tears. When she was like that, when a smile was not filling her eyes and revealing her face, how inexpressibly desolate and monotonous were the sadness in her eyes and the gloom of her sulky features. At such moments, her face would turn almost ugly and resembled those bare, boring stretches of beach which, when the tide has receded almost out of sight, tire the eye with their unchanging glare bounded by the fixed and inhibiting horizon. Eventually, not having seen in Gilberte the comforting change of mood I had been hoping to see for hours past, I told her she was not nice. “You’re the one who’s not nice!” she said. “Me? I am nice!” I wondered what I had done and, being unable to think of anything, I asked her what I had done. “Naturally, you think you’re so nice!” she replied with a long laugh. I was struck at that moment by what was so painful to me in being unable to have access to that other, more elusive reach of her mind described by her laughter. The laugh seemed to mean: “I’m not taken in by a single thing you say, you know! I know perfectly well you’re madly in love with me, but it makes no difference, because I don’t care for you at all!” But I reminded myself that laughter is not so determinate a form of speech that I could definitely assume I knew what Gilberte’s meant. And her words had been spoken with a tone of affection. “Well, how am I not nice?” I asked. “Tell me. I’ll do anything you ask me to.” “No, that would be useless. I can’t explain....” For a moment I was afraid she believed I did not love her; and this was a new pain, no less sharp, but requiring to be reasoned with in a different way. “You would tell me if you knew how unhappy you make me.” But the unhappiness I spoke of, which if she had doubted my love for her should have overjoyed her, only irritated her. So, realizing my mistake, determined to ignore whatever she might say, and even disbelieving her when she asserted, “I did love you, really I did. You’ll find that out one day” (that day when, according to the guilty, their innocence will be established, which is never, for some mysterious reason, the day when they are being asked about it), I found the courage to make the sudden resolution never to see her again, and to do this without letting her know about it yet, because she would not have believed me.

A sadness caused by somebody one loves may be bitter, even when it happens amid a round of pastimes, joys, and preoccupations which are extraneous to that person and which, except for brief moments, divert our mind from it. But when such a sadness comes right at the moment when we are basking in the full delight of being with that person, as was my case with Gilberte, the sudden depression which replaces the broad, tranquil sunlight of our inner summer sets off within us a storm so wild that we may doubt our ability to weather it. As I went home that evening, my heart was buffeted and bruised with such violence that I felt I could only get my breath back by retracing my steps, by making up some excuse to return to Gilberte. But she would only have thought: “Him again! Obviously I can treat him like dirt! The more unhappy I make him, the easier he’ll be to manage!” In my mind, however, I was irresistibly drawn back to her; and these alternating urges, the crazy fluctuations of my inner compass, persisted after I reached home, where they turned into the drafts of incoherent letters I wrote to her.

I was on the threshold of one of those difficult junctures which most of us encounter several times in our lives; and on each of those different occasions, we do not meet them in the same way, although in the meantime, despite having grown older, we have not altered our character, our nature (which of itself creates not only the loves we experience but almost the women we love, and even their defects). At such moments, our life is divided, as though apportioned in its entirety between the two sides of a pair of scales. On one of the scales lies our wish not to give offense, by appearing too docile, to the woman we love, albeit without completely understanding her; but this wish we think it advisable to leave to one side, to prevent her from feeling she is indispensable to us, and thus wearying of our devotion. But on the other lies pain—though not a localized and separate pain—which could be abated only if we were to ignore our desire to be liked, put aside our pretense of being able to live without her, and seek her out. If we lighten the scale containing our pride, by removing from it a little of the willpower we have been remiss enough to wear away with age, and if we add to the scale containing our unhappiness an acquired physical pain that we have allowed to become worse, it is not the courageous side that outweighs the other, as would have happened at twenty; it is the craven side which, having become too ponderous and lacking a counterweight, unbalances us at fifty. Also, since situations can change as well as repeat themselves, there is the possibility that, by the middle of life or toward the end of it, one’s self-indulgence may have had the unfortunate effect of complicating love with an element of habit, which adolescence, preoccupied by too many other obligations and lacking personal freedom, has not yet acquired.

I had just dashed off a furious letter to Gilberte, being sure to place in it the life buoy of a few apparently casual words to which she could cling if she wanted us to make up; but then, in a quite different mood, I dashed off another, full of loving words, in which I savored the touching sweetness of certain forlorn expressions such as Never again, so moving for the one who writes, yet so boring for the one who reads, either because she suspects them of being false and translates Never again as This very evening, please, or because she thinks they are true and sees in them the promise of the sort of lifelong separation that we accept with utter indifference when dealing with people we do not love. But since we are unable, while we love, to act as the worthy predecessor to the next person we are going to be, the one who will no longer be in love, how could we accurately imagine the state of mind of a woman who, even though we knew we meant nothing to her, has always figured in our sweetest daydreams, a figment of our illusive wish to fancy a future with her, or of our need to heal the heart she has broken, whispering to us things she would have said only if she had been in love with us? Faced with the thoughts or actions of a woman we love, we are as incapacitated as the very first physicians when faced with natural phenomena (in the time before science had come into being and shed a little light into the unknown); or, even worse, we are like a being for whom the principle of causality hardly exists, who is incapable of perceiving a connection between one phenomenon and another, for whom the spectacle of the world is as unreliable as a dream. Of course I tried to escape from such chaos and find causes. I even tried to be “objective,” to remain aware of the disparity between the importance of Gilberte to me and not only my importance to her, but hers to all people other than myself, since otherwise I might have seen what was a mere civility on her part as a declaration of ungovernable passion, and an unseemly and degrading act on my own part as the pleasing spontaneity that impels a man toward a pretty face. But I was also wary of going to the other extreme, of reading a mere moment’s unpunctuality or bad temper as meaning that Gilberte had an implacable hostility toward me. Somewhere between these two points of view, each of them making for distortion, I tried to find a way of seeing things that was more accurate; the mental efforts this required distracted me a little from my pain; and whether from trust in the answers I arrived at, or whether I had biased these answers toward what I wanted, I decided the following day to go back to the Swanns’, a resolution that left me happy, but happy after the manner of the man who, having worried for a long time about a journey he wishes he did not have to take, goes only as far as the station before returning home to unpack his trunk. And since, during the period one has spent in hesitations, the merest glimpse of a possible determination to end them (unless one has precluded such a thought by resolving not to make such a determination) is like a sturdy seed out of which grow first the broad lines, then all the details of the feelings one could have once the act is accomplished, I reproached myself for having been so absurd, for having allowed my own notion of never seeing Gilberte again to make me suffer as much as if I had really been going to carry it out, telling myself that, since the long and the short of it was that I was going back to see her, I might as well have saved myself so many agonizing changes of heart and dispiriting resolves. This renewal of my relationship with Gilberte lasted as long as it took me to reach her house. It ended, not because the butler, who liked me, said she was out (which was true, as I learned that evening from people who had met her), but because of the way he said it: “Mademoiselle is out, monsieur. I swear to Monsieur I am telling the truth. If Monsieur would like to check what I am saying, I can fetch the maid. As Monsieur well knows, I would do anything for him, and if Mademoiselle was in, I would take Monsieur straight to her.” These words of the butler’s, as important as only spontaneous words can be, because they give us at least a summary X-ray of an inscrutable reality that a rehearsed speech would conceal, proved that the household suspected my attentions were irksome to Gilberte; and as soon as he had finished speaking them, they aroused in me a gust of hatred, which I preferred to direct against him rather than against her; they focused on him whatever feelings of anger I had harbored against her; they cleansed my love of these feelings, and it lived on without them; but they also taught me that for some time I should not try to see Gilberte again. She would be writing to me, no doubt, to apologize. Even so, I would make a point of not going around to see her straight away, just to show her I could live without her. And of course, once I had received her letter, to see her again would be something I could more easily postpone for a time, since I would be certain of being able to be with her whenever I wanted to. To be able to bear that self-imposed separation from her without too much sorrow, all I needed was to feel that my heart had been freed from the dreadful uncertainty of not knowing whether we had fallen out forever, whether she might not be engaged to be married, or have left Paris, or eloped with somebody. The following days were somewhat like the New Year holiday I had once had to spend without a sight of Gilberte. But in those earlier days, I had been sure that, once the week was over, she would come back to the Champs-Élysées, and that I could see her as usual; and equally sure that there was no point in going to the Champs-Élysées until the New Year holiday had ended. Which was why, for the whole of that sad week, long past, it was with an untroubled mind that I had borne my sorrow, because it had neither fear nor hope in it. But this time my pain was unbearable, because I was tormented by a hope that was almost as strong as my fear. Not having received a letter from her by the afternoon mail, I reminded myself of how remiss she could be in such things, of how busy she was, and I had no doubt there would be one by the morning. I awaited the postman each morning with a beating heart, a state that turned into dejection each time I found the mail to consist either of letters from people who were not Gilberte or of no letters at all, an eventuality that was not harder to bear, since a token of friendship from someone else only made the evidence of her indifference to me the more wounding. Then, each day, I would start looking forward again to the afternoon mail. Even between the delivery times I did not dare leave the house, since she might be sending the letter by hand. Each evening the moment eventually came when neither the postman nor the Swanns’ footman could be expected, and I had to postpone the hope of possible consolation till the following morning; in this way, because I believed my pain could not last, I was obliged to keep on renewing it, so to speak. The sorrow I felt may have been the same sorrow all the time; but, unlike my earlier sadness, it was not just a uniform continuation of an initial emotion; it started up several times each day, being at first an emotion which was so often renewed that, though it was a wholly physical state and quite momentary, it ended up at a stable level; and as the disturbance provoked by expectation barely had time to settle before a new reason for expectation arose, there was no moment of the day when I was not in the grip of that form of anguish which it is so difficult to bear even for an hour. So it was that my suffering was much crueler than it had been on that previous New Year’s Day, because this time I was full not of a simple acceptance of it but of the hope, recurring at every instant, that it would end. I did eventually reach that state of acceptance. I reached too the realization that it was to be definitive, and so I gave up Gilberte forever, in the interest of my love itself, but also because I hoped more than anything that she might remember me without contempt. In the future, if she ever sent me an invitation or a suggestion that we meet, I even made a point of accepting some of these, so as to prevent her from suspecting I was acting on anything like lover’s pique, and then, at the last moment, I wrote to cry off, with the sort of great protestations of disappointment that you send to someone you have no real desire to see. It seemed to me that these expressions of regret, usually reserved for people to whom one is indifferent, would be more successful in convincing Gilberte of my indifference toward her than the tone of feigned indifference that one uses with somebody one loves. Once I had proved to her, not just with words, but more effectively with reiterated actions, that I could see nothing pleasing in her company, perhaps she would come to realize there was something pleasing in my mine. Unfortunately, this was not to be: trying to make her discover something pleasing in my company by not seeing her was the surest way to lose her forever. For one thing, if she ever did come to this discovery, I would want its effects to last, and so I would have to be careful not to enjoy them too soon; besides, the worst of my torment would be over by then; it was now that she was necessary to me; I wished I could warn her that, before long, the only purpose of her seeing me again would be to soothe a pain that would have faded so much as no longer to be, as it still was at this moment, a reason for her to allay it by giving in, and for both of us to make up and see each other again. And in the future, when Gilberte’s liking for me had once again become so strong that I could at last safely confess mine for her, I foresaw that mine would not have survived such a long absence, and that I would have come to feel indifferent to her. All this I knew; but if I had said so, she would just have assumed that, in saying I would stop loving her if I had to live without her for too long, my real purpose was to make her ask me to come back to her at once. Meanwhile, a thing that made it easier for me to condemn myself to this separation was that (with the purpose of making Gilberte clearly aware that, for all my statements to the contrary, it really was by choice, and not because of ill health, or some such thing beyond my control, that I was staying away from her), if I knew in advance that she was not going to be at home, was going out with a friend, and would not be back for dinner, I took to visiting Mme Swann, who thus once more became the person she had been in the days when it had been so hard to see her daughter, when if Gilberte did not turn up at the Champs-Élysées I would take a walk along the Avenue des Acacias. In this way, not only could I hear about Gilberte, but I was sure she would hear about me too, and in a way that would make it plain I had lost interest in her. Also, like all those in pain, I had the feeling that my sorry situation could have been worse. Since I had open access to her house, I lived with the knowledge (even though I was resolved never to avail myself of the possibility) that, if ever my suffering became too much for me, I could always bring it to an end. So I was only unhappy for one day at a time. And even that is an overstatement. How many times per hour (but now free of the fever of expectation that had so anguished me in the first weeks after we had fallen out, before I started going back to the Swanns’ house) did I read to myself the letter that Gilberte would definitely send me one day—which she might even bring to me herself! The constant vision of this imaginary happiness helped me to bear the ruining of my real happiness. With a woman who does not love us, as with someone who has died, the knowledge that there is nothing left to hope for does not prevent us from going on waiting. One lives in a state of alertness, eyes and ears open; a mother whose son has gone on a dangerous sea voyage always has the feeling, even when she has long known for certain that he has perished, that he is just about to come through the door, saved by a miracle, unscathed. This waiting, depending on the strength of her memory and her bodily resistance, may enable her to last out the years that will eventually bring her to an acceptance of the death of her son, so that she gradually forgets and goes on living—or it may kill her. Also, my sorrow drew some slight comfort from the knowledge that it benefited my love. Every visit I made to Mme Swann without seeing Gilberte was hurtful to me; but I sensed that it served me by bettering Gilberte’s image of me.

In always making sure, before I went to Mme Swann’s, that Gilberte would be away, I may have been responding not just to my determination to have fallen out with her, but as much to that hope for a reconciliation which overlaid my wish to forgo happiness (few of such wishes are absolute, at least not continuously so, one of the laws of human makeup being intermittence, which is further affected by the unpredictable recurrence of different memories) and masked from me some of its worst pain. I knew perfectly well how illusive that hope was. I was like a poor man who will wet his dry crusts with fewer tears if he imagines that a stranger is about to leave him a fortune. If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two. My hope was more unqualified, while at the same time my severance from Gilberte was more effectively achieved, if we did not meet. If I had happened to see her while visiting her mother, we might have said something irreparable, which would have made our estrangement definitive and annihilated all hope, while setting off new anguish in me, reawakening my love, and making my resignation harder to bear.

Mme Swann had been saying to me for ages, since long before this falling out with Gilberte, “It’s very nice of you to come to see her, you know. But I’d love it if you would come to see me for a change. I don’t mean at my afternoon jamborees—there’s always too much of a multitude, and you wouldn’t like it one bit—but on any other day. I’m always here, you know, toward the end of the day.” So, when I went to her house, it appeared as though I was just belatedly complying with a request of long standing. It was in the late afternoon, sometimes after dark, at a time when my parents would soon be dining, that I set off for the Swanns’ house, where I was sure of never seeing Gilberte, but where I would think of nothing but her. In those days, in that part of Paris, which was seen as rather remote (indeed, the whole city was darker then than nowadays, none of the streets, even in the center of town, being lit by electricity, and very few of the houses), lamps glowing inside a drawing room on a ground floor or a mezzanine, which was where Mme Swann’s receiving rooms were, could light up the street and draw the glance of passersby, who saw in these illuminations a manifest but veiled relation to the handsome horses and carriages waiting outside the front doors. The passerby, seeing one of these carriages move off, might think, not without a certain thrill, that there had been a change in this mysterious relation; but it would only be because a coachman, fearing his horses might catch a chill, was taking them for a turn around the block, their hooves striking sharp and clear against the background of silence laid down by the rubber-rimmed wheels.

The “winter garden,” which the passerby would also generally glimpse, whichever street the house was on, and as long as the rooms were not situated too high above the pavement, can be seen now only in the photogravure illustrations of P.-J. Stahl’s giftbooks; because of the profusion of indoor plants that people had then, and the total lack of stylishness in their arrangement, such a winter garden gives the impression, in contrast to the sparse floral ornamentation of today’s Louis XVI drawing rooms (a single rose or Japanese iris in a long-necked crystal vase that could not contain one more flower), of having been the expression of some headlong and delectable passion among ladies for botany, rather than a frigid fixation with still life. In the large houses of that time, it brought to mind, on a much larger scale, the tiny portable greenhouses sitting in the lamplight on the morning of January 1 (the children having been too impatient to wait for daybreak) among the other New Year’s Day presents, the loveliest of them all because the thought of the plants you were going to be able to grow in them consoled you for the bareness of the wintertime; or, rather, instead of resembling these actual diminutive greenhouses, the winter garden looked more like the one you could see right beside them in a lovely book, another of the New Year’s Day presents, and which, despite being not for the children but for Mlle Lili, the heroine of the story,⁵⁹ delighted them so much that, though they are now almost in their old age, they wonder whether in those dear days winter was not the best of seasons. The passerby who stood on tiptoe might well see in the depths of this winter garden, through the branching foliage of the various species, which made the lamplit windows look like the panes of children’s glass-houses, real or drawn, a gentleman in a frock coat, with a gardenia or a carnation in his buttonhole, standing in front of a lady who was sitting, neither of them very clear, as though intaglioed in topaz, amid the drawing-room atmosphere hazily ambered by the fumes from the samovar, a recent importation of that period, fumes which may still be given off nowadays but which, because of habit, nobody ever sees. Mme Swann was very attached to this teatime of hers; she thought she was showing originality and charm when she said to a man, “I’m always in toward the end of the day. Do come and take tea with me,” words to which she gave a gentle, subtle smile and a brief touch of English accent, and which her listener duly noted as he gave her his most sober bow, as though they were an important and singular message, demanding deference and attentiveness. In addition to those mentioned above, there was another reason why flowers were not mere ornaments in Mme Swann’s drawing room, a reason that had nothing to do with the period but in part with the life which, as Odette de Crécy, she had once lived. The life of a high-class courtesan, such as she had been, being much taken up by her lovers, is largely spent at home; and this can lead such a woman to live for herself. Things one may see on or about a faithful wife, which may well have some importance for the faithful wife, are the very things that have the most importance for the courtesan. The climax of her day is not the moment when she dresses for society, but when she undresses for a man. She has to be as elegant in a housecoat or a nightgown as in a walking-out dress. Other women show off their jewels; she shares her private life with her pearls. It is a type of life that demands, and eventually gives a taste for, the enjoyment of secret luxury—that is, a life which is almost one of disinterest. This taste Mme Swann extended to flowers. Near her armchair there always stood an immense crystal bowl filled to the brim with Parma violets or the plucked petals of marguerites in water, which to the eyes of someone arriving in the room made it seem as though she had been disturbed in a favorite pastime, such as quietly enjoying the private pleasure of a cup of tea; but the spread flowers made it seem a more private pastime even than that, a mysterious one, and seemed to hint that one should apologize for an indiscretion, as one might on inadvertently glimpsing the title of a book lying open and divulging the secret of what she had just read, or perhaps even the thought in her mind at that very moment. But the flowers were more alive than a book: so notable and enigmatic was their presence that one felt embarrassed, if one came to visit Mme Swann, to find she was not alone, or, if one came home with her, to find the drawing room already occupied. They suggested long hours of her life that one knew nothing of, not seeming to have been set out in expectation of visitors, but looking as though just left there by her, after sharing intimate moments with her which would come again soon, secret moments which one was loath to disturb, but which one yearned to be privy to, as one gazed at the wanton mauves, moist and faded, of her Parma violets. By the end of October, Odette would come home as regularly as possible to take tea—a ceremony that was still known in those days by the English expression “five o’clock tea”—because she had once heard it said, and enjoyed repeating, that the real origin of Mme Verdurin’s salon had been the knowledge in people’s minds that their hostess could always be found at home at the same time each day. She now prided herself on having built up a salon of her own, similar in design but freer in spirit, or, as she liked to put it, senza rigore. She saw herself as a latter-day Julie de Lespinasse,⁶⁰ whose rival salon had succeeded in attracting away from the little set’s Mme du Deffand her most desirable men, especially Swann, who, according to a legend that Odette had understandably sown as truth in the minds of newcomers who knew nothing of her past, but not quite in her own mind, had supported her secession and been a companion to her in her retreat. But we play certain favorite parts so often for the eyes of others, and we rehearse them so much in our hearts, that we come to rely more readily on the fictions of their evidence than on a reality we have all but forgotten. On days when she had not been out, one found oneself in the presence of a Mme Swann sitting in a tea gown of crêpe de Chine, as white as newly fallen snow, with which she sometimes wore one of those long garments in fluted chiffon, which made her look as though she were wearing nothing but a sprinkle of pink or white petals, and which people nowadays would think, wrongly, was quite inappropriate for the winter. In the drawing rooms of that period, draped with door curtains and overheated, for which the fashionable novelists of the time could find no smarter epithet than “cozily upholstered,” these flimsy clothes in their soft shades made women look as though they must feel as cold as the roses that stood beside them, braving the winter in their flesh-tinted nakedness, as though it were already spring. As the carpets muffled all sounds, and as she often sat secluded in an alcove, one’s hostess, not having been told of one’s arrival as she would be these days, might still be deep in her book as one stood before her; and this enhanced the impression of a romantic moment, the charm of having uncovered a secret, brought back to us nowadays by the memory of those dresses, which, though already out of date then, were still worn by Mme Swann alone, perhaps, and which to our minds suggest that their wearer must be the heroine of a novel, since most of us have only ever glimpsed them in the romances of Henry Gréville.⁶¹ In those days, in the early winter, Odette’s drawing room would harbor chrysanthemums, which were enormous and in a range of colors that Swann could never have seen in earlier times. No doubt my liking for them—during those sad visits I made to her, when my sorrow had given her back all the mysterious poetry of being the mother of Gilberte, to whom she would say after I had left, “Your young man’s been to see me”—came from the fact that their pale pink matched the Louis XV silk of her armchairs, their snowy white her crêpe-de-Chine tea gown, their burnished red her samovar, and that the decoration of the drawing room was enhanced by this extra color scheme, which was quite as rich in its range, just as refined, gifted with life, though lasting only a few days. But, short-lived as they were, I was touched by something more durable in these shades than their pinkish and coppery counterparts, which the afterglow of the sunset spreads so gorgeously across misty late afternoons in November, when I arrived at Mme Swann’s, and which, as they faded from the sky, were taken up again and transposed into the blushing palette of the blooms. As though a master of color had snatched their fleeting incandescence from the sunlit evening air so as to brighten a human place, these chrysanthemums at teatime invited me, despite all my woe, to savor the short joys of November, which glowed beside me in their strange, secret splendor. Such splendor, however, was sadly lacking in the conversations going on about me. Even with Mme Cottard, and though time was getting on, Mme Swann would put on her most cajoling voice: “No, no, it’s not late! You mustn’t pay any attention to that clock, that’s not the right time, it’s stopped. You can’t be in that much of a hurry, surely?” And she urged the professor’s wife, who still held her card case in her hand, to have another little tart.

“Really,” Mme Bontemps would say to Mme Swann, “this is a very difficult house to get out of!” at which Mme Cottard exclaimed, in her surprise at hearing someone else say exactly what she was thinking, “Yes! That’s exactly what I always say to myself! Me with my little brain! In my own mind, you know ...” And all the gentlemen of the Jockey Club nodded their approval of her, much as their eager bowing and scraping had earlier given the impression that Mme Swann had done them a signal honor by introducing them to this charmless woman of no social distinction, who when faced with Odette’s fine friends was always reserved, or, as she put it herself, being inclined to use inflated language to speak of the simplest things, “adopted a defensive posture.” “Well, it certainly doesn’t look like it,” Mme Swann said in answer to Mme Cottard. “This is the first Wednesday for three weeks that you’ve actually come to see me!” “Oh, I know, Odette, I do know! I haven’t seen you for ages—centuries, in fact! I plead guilty to the charge, but I must tell you”—and here Mme Cottard’s manner became vague and prudish, for, though a doctor’s wife, she could not have brought herself to speak bluntly about rheumatism or renal colic—“I’ve had quite a lot of little distempers. We each have our own, don’t we? And also, I’ve had a crisis in my male household staff. I’m no more of a martinet than the next woman, but I’ve just had to make an example and let the butler go. I do believe he was actually looking elsewhere for a more lucrative situation. But his departure very nearly precipitated the resignation en masse of the whole Cabinet! My maid was all set to leave too! We’ve had titanic struggles. However, I stood alone on the burning deck, and, believe you me, it has taught me a thing or two that I won’t forget in a hurry! I’m sorry to go on like this about below-stairs business, but you know how provoking it is to be obliged to undertake a thoroughgoing recasting of one’s dramatis personae. So—are we not to see that delightful daughter of yours?” “No, the delightful daughter is dining at a friend’s house tonight,” Mme Swann said; then she added, as she turned toward me, “I understand she has written asking you to come and see her tomorrow.” Then “And how are your babies?” she asked of Mme Cottard. I breathed deeply. Mme Swann’s words, proving that I could see Gilberte whenever I felt like it, were exactly the soothing balm that I had hoped to receive from her, and which made it necessary for me to keep on visiting her at that time. “Well, no, actually,” I said. “I’m going to write her a note this evening. In any case, Gilberte and I can’t see each other anymore.” I said this in a tone that suggested an air of mystery in our estrangement; and this in turn fostered in me an illusory feeling of love, which was further abetted by the affectionate manner in which Gilberte and I went on referring to each other. “You know she’s very fond of you,” Mme Swann said. “Are you sure tomorrow’s not possible?” A sudden surge of joy went through me, and I thought: “Well, why not? I mean, it’s her mother who’s asking me!” But my dejection returned at once. I was afraid Gilberte might deduce from my presence that my recent indifference toward her had been only for show, and I decided that the separation should continue. During this exchange, Mme Bontemps was lamenting the fact that she was afflicted by the wives of so many politicians, for she professed to think that everybody was insufferably absurd, and that her husband’s job made life very difficult for her. “So you don’t actually mind being exposed to fifty doctors’ wives one after another?” she said to Mme Cottard, who was full of goodwill toward all and respect for the notion of duty. “Well, I must say that is heroic of you! Of course, at the Ministry, as you can appreciate, one does have certain duties. But you know, after a time, mixing with all those wives of civil servants, I can’t help it, I feel like sticking out my tongue at them! My niece Albertine is just the same! You’ve no idea how cheeky she is! Just last week the wife of the undersecretary of state at the Treasury was at my at-home, and she was saying how useless she was at anything to do with cooking. Well, my niece gave her the sweetest smile and said, ‘But surely, madame, with a father who was a scullery boy, you if anyone should know all about it.’ ” “Now, isn’t that a lovely story?” Mme Swann exclaimed. “I just love that story! But surely, Mme Cottard, on your husband’s consulting days you should make sure of having a little den of your own, with your flowers and your books and all the things you like.” “Ho-ho! Albertine doesn’t mince words, I can tell you! Straight out! Just like that! And not a word to me beforehand! She’s as artful as a bunch of monkeys. You’re lucky, you know how to restrain yourself. I do envy people who can hide their thoughts.” “Yes, but I don’t need to, you see,” Mme Cottard replied in her mild way. “I’m not hard to please. Unlike you, my position doesn’t require it,” she added in the more emphatic voice she used for stressing the clever little compliments she liked to slip into the conversation, the sprinkling of flattery which her husband admired so much, and which contributed to the advancement of his career. “And also I enjoy doing anything that may be of use to the professor.”

“No doubt. But I mean, not everyone is capable of it, you know. You’re probably not the high-strung type. As soon as I see that wife of the minister of war contorting her face the way she does, I can’t help imitating her. You’ve no idea what it’s like to have a passionate nature like mine!”

“Yes, you’re right,” Mme Cottard said. “I’ve heard she’s got a twitch. You see, Dr. Cottard knows someone who moves in those exalted circles, and so when they meet they will talk....”

“Or take the head of protocol at the Foreign Office—the man’s a hunchback. Well, would you believe, he’s only got to be in my house for five minutes and I can’t keep my hands off his hump! My husband says I’ll get him sacked one day. Well, what I say is, the Ministry be damned! Yes, the Ministry be damned! I really feel sometimes like having it printed on my letterhead. I’m sure you’ll think me very shocking, because you’re so well meaning. But I must say I do enjoy getting a good dig at people from time to time! Life would be so dull otherwise.”

She went on talking about the Ministry as though it were Olympus. Changing the subject, Mme Swann said to Mme Cottard:

“Aren’t you beautiful today! Is this one of Redfern’s creations?”

“No, no, as you know, I’m a disciple of Raudnitz. In any case, it’s just something I’ve had remodeled.”

“Well, I never! It’s so smart!”

“How much would you say it cost? ... No, no, only three figures.”

“Three! But that’s giving it away! I was told the figure was three times as high.”

“Well, that’s how history’s written, isn’t it?”⁶² said Mme Cottard. Then she drew Mme Swann’s attention to a necklet she was wearing, a present from Odette herself:

“Do you recognize this, Odette?”

A face might then appear around the edge of the door curtain, its features set in a mime of polite and playful reluctance to interrupt: it was Swann: “Odette, I’ve got the Prince d’Agrigente with me in my study, and he wishes to know whether he may come and pay his respects. What am I to say?” “Tell him I’ll be delighted, of course!” Odette would say, full of gratification, and quite unperturbed by the prospect of being visited by such a fashionable gentleman, something she had always been accustomed to, even as a courtesan. Swann went off to deliver the message; and he would soon come back with the Prince, unless in the meantime Mme Verdurin had made her entrance. On marrying Odette, Swann had asked her to resign from “the little set.” For this he had many reasons; but even if he had had none, he would still have done so, by reason of a law of ingratitude which, quite without exception, demonstrates the improvidence of all go-betweens, or perhaps their disinterest. He had permitted Odette to exchange only two visits a year with Mme Verdurin, a number that seemed excessive to certain of the “regulars” who were offended at the insult done to “the Patronne,” given that for so many years she had treated Odette and even Swann himself as her special favorites. Although the membership of the little clan included certain faithless souls who were capable of “welshing” on certain evenings, so as to slip off and surreptitiously attend some function of Odette’s, and who if they were found out gave as an excuse their eagerness to meet Bergotte (the Patronne’s view being that he never went to the Swanns’, and was devoid of talent anyway, despite which she made constant attempts to, as she liked to put it, “bring him in”), it did also contain its extremists. They, in their disregard for the particular proprieties which can often dissuade others from whatever extreme course one may be urging upon them in one’s desire to do a disservice to someone else, had pressed Mme Verdurin, but to no avail, to sever all contact with Odette, and thus deprive her of the pleasure of saying with a laugh: “We don’t see much of the Patronne now, you know, not since the Schism. While my husband was still a bachelor, of course, there was no difficulty. But for a married couple, it’s not always easy.... To be quite honest, M. Swann is not overfond of old Mother Verdurin, and he would not take kindly to my being among her boon companions. And I’m a very dutiful wife, you know.” Swann would accompany Odette to a soirée of Mme Verdurin’s; but he made a point of not being at home for the latter’s return visit. So it was that if Mme Verdurin was present in the drawing room the Prince d’Agrigente was sure to come in alone. He was also the only man whom Odette ever introduced to Mme Verdurin; for her idea was that if “the Patronne” was surrounded by faces unfamiliar to her, and if she heard the names of no obscurities being uttered, she might believe these people were all aristocrats of note, an idea which worked so well that Mme Verdurin would sneer that evening to her husband, “Charming people! She’s got all the reactionary bigwigs!” As for Odette’s illusion about Mme Verdurin, it was the opposite one. Not that the latter’s salon at that time had even begun to aspire to the status it will later be seen to have. Mme Verdurin had not even reached the stage of incubation, when one postpones one’s most lavish galas lest one’s few recently acquired celebrities should be swamped by the hoi polloi, and when one prefers to await the moment when the generative power of the ten good men and true whom one has managed to “bring in” shall bring forth a hundredfold. As Odette’s was soon to be, Mme Verdurin’s aim was “Society”; but the zones in which she launched her offensives were still so restricted, as well as being remote from those in which Odette might hope to emulate her and begin to make a name for herself, that Odette lived in a state of utter ignorance of the strategic plans drawn up by the Patronne. So, when anyone spoke of Mme Verdurin as a snob, it was with the simplest sincerity that Odette would laugh and say, “No, no, she’s the exact opposite! I mean, she just hasn’t got the basic requirement—she doesn’t know anybody! And to be fair, you must admit that’s how she likes to be. You see, what she really likes is those little Wednesday gatherings of hers, with those inoffensive people who drop in for a chat.” However, Odette did nurse a surreptitious envy of Mme Verdurin’s mastery of those arts (though she rather prided herself too on having picked up the rudiments of them from such an Oracle) to which the Patronne attached so much importance, though all they ever do is refine the nicer quibbles of nonexistence, give vacancy its shape, being in the strictest sense those Arts of Naught practiced by hostesses: the ability to “bring people together,” to “bring people out,” to “match guests with one another,” to “be present but invisible,” to be “a good go-between.”

The other ladies who visited Mme Swann were certainly impressed to see her drawing room graced by a woman whom they generally pictured in her own salon, set within the perpetual frame of her habitués, her little group, which seemed startlingly present, suggested, epitomized, and condensed in the single person sitting in her armchair, the Patronne herself turned into someone else’s guest, cozily wrapped in her great grebe-lined coat, as downy as the white fur rugs strewn in this salon, where Mme Verdurin was herself a salon. The shiest women, deciding it would now be discreet for them to withdraw, said to their hostess, with that plural used by people trying to hint to an invalid’s other visitors that it would be best not to tire her too much on her first day out of bed, “We must be off now, Odette.” Mme Cottard was envied when the Patronne used her first name. “Shall I whisk you away home, then?” Mme Verdurin said, irked by the thought that one of her regulars might stay there rather than leave with her. “Well, actually, this dear lady has very kindly offered to give me a lift,” Mme Cottard replied, loath to let it appear that she might give precedence to a more famous person over Mme Bontemps, whose offer of a lift in the carriage with its ministerial insignia she had already accepted.

“I must confess I am particularly grateful to dear friends who are kind enough to make room for me in their carriages. Having no jehu myself, I must say it’s too good an offer to decline.” “Yes, of course,” replied the Patronne, choosing her words with care, as she was slightly acquainted with Mme Bontemps and had just invited her to one of her Wednesdays. “Especially since you’re so far out of your way here at Mme de Crécy’s—oh, goodness me, what have I said? I’ll never get into the habit of saying ‘Mme Swann’!” Among those of Mme Verdurin’s regulars who had little wit of their own, it was a standing joke to pretend that you could not get used to speaking of Odette as “Mme Swann”: “I tell you, I got so accustomed to referring to Mme de Crécy that I nearly went and said it again by mistake!” Mme Verdurin, the only one not to nearly say it by mistake, said it on purpose. “Odette, aren’t you rather frightened by living in such a godforsaken part of town? I’m sure if I lived hereabouts I’d quake in my shoes at having to come all this way after dark. And it’s so damp! I shouldn’t think it can be very good for your husband’s eczema. You haven’t got rats, I trust?” “Heavens above! The very idea!” “Well, that’s all right at least. Only, someone said you did. I’m glad to hear it’s not true, because I have an utter phobia of rats, and I should never have set foot here again. So—goodbye, my dear sweet Odette. I do hope to see you soon. You know how pleased I am to see you. You’re not very good at arranging chrysanthemums, are you?” she added on the way out, as Mme Swann was moving toward the door with her. “These are Japanese flowers, you know. They should be arranged as the Japanese do them.” “I don’t agree with Mme Verdurin, although I must say her word is gospel for me. But really, Odette, no one has such beautiful chrysanthemums as you—or, rather, chrysanthema, as I believe we’re supposed to say nowadays,” said Mme Cottard after the door had closed on the Patronne. “Dear, sweet Mme Verdurin is not always very kind to other people’s flowers,” Mme Swann replied gently. “So—who’s your flower man?” asked Mme Cottard, cutting short such criticism of the Patronne.

“Is it Lemaître? I must admit there was a great big pink shrub outside Lemaître’s the other day, and I threw economy to the winds!” Her sense of decency prevented her from going into the details of the price she had paid for the shrub; she said no more than that the professor, “who was after all the soul of mildness,” had nearly had a fit, and told her she spent money like water! “No, actually, my only florist ‘by appointment’ is Debac.” “Yes, he’s mine too,” said Mme Cottard. “But I confess to having been occasionally unfaithful to him and frequenting Lachaume.” “Ooh! Infidelities with Lachaume! I’ll tell on you!” exclaimed Odette, always trying to be the witty hostess who keeps the conversation going, which she felt she managed better at home than at the Verdurins’. “Actually, Lachaume charges too much now. His prices are quite exorbitant.” Then, with a laugh, she added, “His prices are quite indecent!”

Mme Bontemps, who had declared a hundred times that she had no desire to go to the Verdurins’, was overjoyed to be invited and was wondering how she could make sure of attending as many of the Wednesdays as possible. She was unaware that Mme Verdurin’s wish was that her guests should attend every single week. Also, she was one of those people whose company is not much sought after and who, having been invited to a “run” of functions by the same hostess, instead of responding like those who know they will always be welcome, and who go to her house whenever they have the opportunity and the desire to go out, decide to abstain from the first and third occasions in the belief that they will be missed, but make a point of attending the second and the fourth; or else, having been assured that the third one will be a particularly brilliant soirée, they arrange their absences in a different sequence, and then apologize by saying “what a pity they weren’t free last time.” So Mme Bontemps calculated how many Wednesdays there were between now and Easter, and how she could manage to get herself invited to an extra one without seeming too forward. She was relying on Mme Cottard to give her some hints about this during the drive home. “Oh, Mme Bontemps!” exclaimed Mme Swann. “I see you’re getting to your feet! I’ll have you know it’s very naughty of you to be giving the signal for a general withdrawal. You’ve got to make amends, don’t you know, for last Thursday, when you didn’t come. So—just sit down again for a minute. I mean, you’re not going to fit in another visit between now and dinnertime, are you? No? Are you quite sure?” she added, proffering a plate of cakes. “Do have one of these little fellows. They may not look like very much, but if you just try one, you’ll be very glad you did.” “Mmm, they do look delicious,” Mme Cottard said. “One is never short of a bite to eat at your house, Odette. I don’t need to ask where these came from. I know you have your standing order at Rebattet’s. I must say I’m not as single-minded as you—for little cakes and all delicacies, I often order from Bourbonneux. But I admit they don’t really know about ices. Whereas Rebattet’s are artists when it comes to ice cream or mousses or sherbets. As my husband says, they’re just the ne plus ultra.” “Well, actually, these are homemade. Are you quite sure you won’t?” “No, really,” said Mme Bontemps. “I’ll have no appetite left for dinner. But I will sit down for a moment. I do so enjoy conversing with a woman as intelligent as yourself. Odette, you may think I’m a great gossip, but I’d love to know what you think of that hat Mme Trombert was wearing. I know that large hats are very fashionable at the moment. But doesn’t that one go a bit far? Although, mind you, it’s minute compared to the one she had on the other day, when she came to me.” “I’m not intelligent,” Odette replied, thinking this a becoming thing to say. “Really, I’m quite gullible. I’m just a woman who believes whatever she’s told and who breaks her heart over a trifle.” She insinuated that, in the early days of marriage, she had suffered much from life with a man like Swann, who had a life of his own and was unfaithful to her. The Prince d’Agrigente, who had caught the words “I’m not intelligent” and thought it behooved him to protest, was not quick-witted enough to interject. “Oh, come now!” exclaimed Mme Bontemps. “Not intelligent? You?” “My sentiments exactly!” the Prince said, grateful for this assistance. “I was just about to say, ‘What’s that I hear?’ I must be hearing things.” “No, no, I assure you,” said Odette. “At heart I’m really just a little middle-class housewife, easily shocked, full of prejudices, living in her small corner, and very ignorant about everything.” Then, taking care to use the English word, she asked the Prince for news of the Baron de Charlus: “What news of the dear Baronet?” “Ignorant? You?” exclaimed Mme Bontemps. “Well, I never! If you’re ignorant, what about the world of officialdom, what about all those ministers’ wives who have nothing better to talk about than clothes! Let me tell you, Mme Swann, no more than a week ago I decided to try a mention of Lohengrin on the wife of the minister of education. Do you know what she said? ‘Lohengrin?’ she said. ‘Isn’t that the new revue at the Folies-Bergère? I’m told it’s hilarious.’ Believe you me, when you hear that sort of thing, it makes your blood boil! I felt like slapping her face. I don’t mind saying I’ve got a bit of a temper. Would you not agree, monsieur?” she added, turning toward me. “Was I not right to feel like that?” “Well, actually,” said Mme Cottard, “I do think one is quite within one’s rights to answer back if one is bombarded with a question like that, point-blank and without warning. I know what it feels like—it’s exactly the sort of thing Mme Verdurin likes doing.” “Oh, speaking of Mme Verdurin,” Mme Bontemps said to her, “do you know who she’s likely to be having at her Wednesday this week? Oh dear, I’ve just remembered—M. Bontemps and I have been invited somewhere else this Wednesday! What would you say to dining with us the following Wednesday? You and I could then go on together to Mme Verdurin’s. I’m rather apprehensive about turning up there all by myself. She’s such a great personage, as you know, and for some reason I’ve always been intimidated by her.” “I know why that is,” said Mme Cottard. “It’s because of her imposing voice. I mean, we can’t expect everybody to have the mellifluous tones of our Mme Swann, can we? But you’ll see, after the first moment spent sizing each other up, as the Patronne says, the ice will soon be broken. She’s really a most welcoming person. But I can understand the feeling. It’s never very nice to venture into new territory like that.” “You could join us for dinner too,” Mme Bontemps said to Mme Swann. “Then, after dinner, all three of us could go and Verdurinate together, I mean Verdurinize. And if it turns out that the Patronne just glares at me and decides not to invite me again, the three of us can sit there and keep each other company. I’m sure that would be rather nice.” Then, casting some doubt on the veracity of this, Mme Bontemps asked: “Who do you think she’ll be having the following Wednesday? What will she have on the program, do you think? She wouldn’t have too many people there, would she?” “Well, I for one won’t be going,” said Odette. “We’ll just look in briefly at the last Wednesday of the run. If you don’t mind waiting till then ...” Mme Bontemps did not seem enraptured by this suggested adjournment.

Although the wittiness of any salon and its degree of fashionableness usually stand in inverse rather than direct relation to each other, it must be assumed, given that Swann thought Mme Bontemps was a pleasant person, that any acceptance of one’s lowered status has its corollary in a relaxing of the standards one applies to the people whose company one is resigned to enjoy, whose wit one is prepared to find amusing. If that is so, then, once the independence of individuals is threatened, their culture and even their language, like those of nations, must also stand in jeopardy. Beyond a certain age, one of the effects of this indulgence is to exacerbate our tendency to take pleasure in hearing praise of our own ways of thinking and preferences, which we see as an invitation to air them again; it is the age at which a great painter may find that the company of his creative peers begins to pall, when he prefers to mix with his pupils, whose only common point with him is their respect for the letter of his tenets, but who listen to him, who extol him; it is the age when, at a party, an outstanding man or woman, living only for some beloved, will be convinced, on hearing some possibly mediocre individual say something which, by suggesting a sympathetic understanding of the life devoted to amorous things, flatters their fond obsession, that they are listening to the only real mind among those present; it was the age at which Swann, in his capacity as husband of Odette, liked both to hear Mme Bontemps say how stupid it is to frequent only duchesses (from which he concluded she was a sensible woman, full of wit, and without a touch of snobbery, the opposite of what he would have thought in earlier times at the Verdurins’) and to share jokes with her that “tickled her fancy,” because, though she had never heard any of them, she always “got” them, being eager to please and ever ready to enjoy a good laugh. “So,” Mme Swann said to Mme Cottard, “you tell me the doctor isn’t a great flower-fancier like yourself ?” “Well, as you know, my husband is the soul of good sense—moderation in all things. Still, I must say, he does have one great passion.” “And what’s that, dear lady?” implored Mme Bontemps, her eyes gleaming with spite, glee, and inquisitiveness. “Reading,” Mme Cottard replied in her artless way. “Oh, well! That’s a reassuring passion for a husband to have!” Mme Bontemps exclaimed, stifling fiendish mirth. “Yes, just give him a good book!” “Well, dear lady, there’s nothing much to be alarmed about in that.” “Oh, but there is! His eyesight! Which reminds me, Odette, I really must be off now. But I’ll be back, knocking on your door, at the earliest opportunity. Speaking of eyesight, have you heard the house that Mme Verdurin has just bought is going to have the electric light in it? It wasn’t my little private police who told me, you know. It was Mildé the electrician himself! I like quoting my sources, as you can see. And even the bedrooms will have electric lamps, with shades on, to soften the light. Very nice, very luxurious! We belong to a generation of ladies for whom everything must be up-to-the-minute, the very latest thing. The sister-in-law of a friend of mine has actually got a telephone installed in her house! She can order something from a shopkeeper without stepping out of her own front door! I must admit I’ve been shamelessly currying favor, so that I’ll be allowed to go and speak into the machine one day. The idea fascinates me—but only in someone else’s house, not in my own. I don’t think I’d like having a telephone about the house. Once the novelty of it wears off, it must be a definite nuisance. Now, Odette, I’m off! And you must also release Mme Bontemps, since she’s looking after me. I really must go! You’ll get me into hot water—Dr. Cottard will be home before me!”

I had to go home too, though I had not savored those promised winter pleasures that had seemed to lie concealed within the brilliant surface of the chrysanthemums. The pleasures had not materialized; yet Mme Swann seemed to be expecting nothing further. She let the servants carry away the tea things, as she might have announced, “Time, please!” She even said to me, “Really, must you go?” Then she added in English, “Well, goodbye!” I sensed that, even if I were to stay on, I would never find those secret pleasures, and that it was not only my sorrow that had withheld them from me. Was it possible they did not lie somewhere along the well-frequented path of those hours that always lead so soon to going-home time, but by some side path, branching off somewhere else unknown to me, which I should have taken? At least I had achieved the aim of my visit: Gilberte would know I had been to her house during her absence, where, as Mme Cottard kept saying, I had “straight off, from the word ‘go,’ completely won over Mme Verdurin!,” whom she had never seen “go to so much trouble.” She had added, “I expect it’s a case of like attracting like.” Gilberte would be told I had spoken about her affectionately, as I could not help doing; and she would know I did not suffer from the inability to live without her, which I felt was the source of her recent discontents with me. I had told Mme Swann I could no longer see Gilberte. I had made it sound as though my decision to sever contact with her was irrevocable. The letter I was going to send Gilberte would also be couched in those terms. But to keep my courage up, I told myself I would make the heroic but brief effort of staying away from her for only a few days longer: “This will be the very last invitation of hers that I decline! I’ll accept the next one!” So as to make my separation from her easier to achieve, I tried to see it as not being definitive. I sensed, however, that it was going to be.

That New Year’s Day was especially painful. When one is unhappy, anything that serves as a reminder or an anniversary can cause this pain. If it is a reminder, say, of the death of a loved one, the grief comes from the sharpened contrast between present and past. In my position, however, it was aggravated by the unacknowledged hope that Gilberte might have been expecting me to make the first step toward a reconciliation, and that, now it was clear I had not made it, she might have decided to take the opportunity of the New Year, with its exchanges of greetings, to send me a note: “Look, what’s the matter? I’m madly in love with you, I can’t live without you, let’s meet and sort it all out.” By the last days of December, it had come to seem likely that I would receive such a letter. Whether it was really likely or not, our desire for such a letter, our need for it, is enough to make us believe it will probably come. The soldier is convinced that an indefinitely extendable period must elapse before he will be killed, the thief before he will be arrested, all of us before we must die. This is the amulet that protects individuals, and sometimes nations, not from danger, but from the fear of danger, or, rather, from belief in danger, which can lead to the braving of real dangers by those who are not brave. Such unfounded confidence sustains the lover who looks forward to a reconciliation or a letter. For me to stop expecting one from Gilberte, I would have had to stop wishing for it. Despite knowing one is an object of indifference to a woman one still loves, one fills her mind with imaginary thoughts (though they may amount only to indifference) and an urge to express them, one sees oneself as the focus of her complicated emotional life, albeit possibly only as a source of dislike, but by the same token as an object of her permanent attention. For me to have an inkling of what was in Gilberte’s real mind on that New Year’s Day, I would have had to be able to feel in advance what I would feel on some future New Year’s Day, by which time I would have ignored entirely any notice or lack of notice Gilberte might take of me, any affection or lack of it that she might feel for me, just as I would have become incapable of having the slightest urge to seek solutions to such problems, for they would have long since ceased to be mine. When we are in love, our love is too vast to be wholly contained within ourselves; it radiates outward, reaches the resistant surface of the loved one, which reflects it back to its starting point; and this return of our own tenderness is what we see as the other’s feelings, working their new, enhanced charm on us, because we do not recognize them as having originated in ourselves. New Year’s Day chimed its hours one after another without Gilberte’s letter being delivered. By January 3, then the 4th, having just received some well-wishers’ cards and letters that had been mailed late, or held up in the great rush of New Year mail, I had not given up my hope, although it had begun to fade. On the following days, I was often in tears. This meant, of course, that I had held on to the hope of having a New Year letter from Gilberte because, in giving her up, I had not been as sincere as I had thought. That hope having now died, before I had been able to fortify myself with a replacement, I was as distressed as an invalid who has finished his vial of morphine without having another one available. But it may also have meant—the two explanations need not rule each other out; and a single feeling may be made of opposites—that my hope of at last receiving a letter had brought the image of Gilberte closer, re-creating in me the feelings I had once had from looking forward to being with her, from the sight of her and her ways with me. The immediate possibility of being reconciled with her had abolished in me the thing of which we never realize the full enormity: resignation. Neurotics never believe people who assure them that, if they just stay in bed, read no letters, and open no newspapers, they will gradually calm down. They foresee that such a regimen can only worsen the state of their nerves. Those in love see renunciation in the same light: they imagine it while living in a state that is its opposite; and, never having so much as begun to try it, they cannot believe in its power of healing.

My heart palpitations had become so violent that I was ordered to reduce my consumption of caffeine. This having put a stop to them, I began to wonder whether the caffeine might not be partly responsible for the anguish I had felt when I more or less chose to fall out with Gilberte, and which I had attributed, each time it recurred, to the grief of separation from her, or the likelihood of being with her only when she was still in the same bad mood. But if this medication was really the source of a suffering that had then been misinterpreted by my imagination (which would not be unheard of, as the most acute emotional pain suffered by a lover often comes from his sheer physical habituation to the woman he loves), then its action was like that of the love potion which, long after Tristan and Yseult have drunk it, continues to bind them. For the physical improvement brought about almost at once by the reduction in caffeine did not inhibit the evolution of the sorrow which the toxic dose had possibly created, or which it had at least contrived to make more acute.

Then, about the middle of January, once my frustrated hopes for a New Year letter had faded, and the extra pain caused by their unfulfillment had settled too, I was assailed once more by the sorrow that had beset me before the holiday period. The cruelest thing in it was still that it was my own handiwork: that, actively and consciously, patiently and ruthlessly, I had brought it upon myself. The only thing I cared for, my relationship with Gilberte, was the very thing I was trying to sabotage, through my prolonging of our separation, through my gradual fostering not of her indifference toward me, but—which would come to the same thing in the end—of mine toward her. My unremitting effort was directed to bringing about the slow, agonizing suicide of the self that loved Gilberte; and this I did with a clear awareness both of my actions in the present and of the consequences of them for the future: I could tell not only that within a certain time I would have stopped loving her, but that she herself would be unhappy about this, that her attempts to see me then would be as pointless as any she might make today, not because I would love her, as now, too much, but because without a doubt I would be in love with some other woman, and all my hours would be spent in the desire for her, in the expectation of a moment with her, and not even a second would I dare subtract from them to spend with a girl I no longer cared for. In this present moment, when Gilberte was already lost to me (since I was determined not to see her again, unless she made an unambiguous request for us to clarify our relationship, accompanied by a full declaration of her love for me, both of which I knew were impossible), and when I loved her more than ever (I knew she meant more to me now than she had the previous year, when I could spend as many afternoons with her as I wished, when I believed nothing could come between us), I detested the thought that one day I might have these same feelings for someone else, as this deprived me not only of Gilberte, but also of my love and my pain, the very love and pain through which, as I wept, I tried to grasp the real Gilberte, though I was obliged to admit they did not belong to her in particular, but would sooner or later devolve to some other woman. For we are always (or so I thought then) detached from the other person: while we love, we are aware that our love does not bear her name, that we may feel it again in the future—or might even have felt it in the past—for someone other than her; and at times when we are not in love, it is precisely because our feelings are unaffected by it that we find it easy to be philosophical toward the contradictoriness of love, that we can speak such untroubled words about it, because we have no consciousness of it at that moment, knowledge in this being intermittent and not outliving the effective presence of the emotion. There would of course have been time to warn Gilberte that the future in which I would no longer love her, a future my pain could foresee, but which my imagination could not distinguish in detail, was bound to take shape piece by piece, that its arrival was, if not imminent, at least inexorable, unless she came to my assistance and nipped my coming indifference in the bud. How often I came close to writing to her or going to say to her: “I warn you, my mind is made up! This is my very last offer! I’m seeing you for the last time! Soon I’ll have stopped loving you!” But what good would it have done? What right had I to reproach her for treating me with the very indifference which, without thinking it blameworthy, I showed for everything except her? The last time! The words appalled me, because I loved her. But they would have made no more impression on her than the sort of letter a friend who is going abroad sends us to suggest a meeting, and which we ignore, as we ignore, say, the importunities of a woman who loves us, because we are looking forward to some enjoyment or other. The time we have to spend each day is elastic: it is stretched by the passions we feel; it is shrunk by those we inspire; and all of it is filled by habit.

Even if I had spoken to Gilberte, she would not have heard me. We always fancy, when we speak, that it is our ears and our minds that listen. If any words of mine had reached Gilberte, they would have been distorted, as though by passing through the mobile curtain of a waterfall, and would have been unintelligible to her, full of ludicrous sounds, and devoid of meaning. Whatever truth one puts into words does not make its way unaided; it is not endowed with irresistible self-evidence. For a truth of the same order to take form within them, a certain time must elapse. When it has elapsed, the proponent of a political idea who, in the teeth of all counterarguments and proofs, once said the proponent of the opposite idea was a blackguard, comes at length to share the abhorrent belief, which has been abandoned in the meantime by the man who once wasted his breath on spreading it. The masterpiece which, to the ears of the admirers who read it aloud, sounded pregnant with the proofs of inherent excellence, while to those of listeners it was inept or nondescript, comes eventually to be pronounced a masterpiece indeed by the latter, but too late for its creator to know of it. So it is with the barriers of love, which the efforts, however despairing, of the one who is excluded by them can do nothing to force; then a day comes when, as a result of quite extraneous influences at work inside the feelings of the once-unloving woman, and though he no longer cares about them, the barriers give way suddenly, but to no purpose. So, even if I had gone to warn Gilberte about my future indifference to her, if I had told her how she might obviate it, she would just have deduced from this that my love for her, my need for her, were even greater than she had thought; and she would have been more irked than ever by the sight of me. It is also a fact that it was this love for her which, because of the sequence of discordant states of mind it created in me, helped me to foresee better than she how it would end. Nevertheless, I might still have sent or spoken such a warning to her after enough time had passed, which, though it would of course have meant she was by then not quite as necessary to me, would also have enabled me to demonstrate to her how unnecessary she was. But then, unfortunately, some well-meaning or ill-intentioned people would speak to her about me in ways which could only give her the impression that I had asked them to do so. Whenever I heard that Dr. Cottard, my own mother, even M. de Norpois had with a few ill-advised words undone the sacrifice I had so laboriously achieved, spoiling the whole effect of my silence toward Gilberte, by making it appear as though I had decided to end it, I was faced with a double difficulty. For one thing, my painful and profitable self-denial, which these meddlers had, unbeknown to me, just interrupted, and thus nullified, would have to be seen now as counting only from the day when they had spoken to her. What was worse was that I myself would have taken less pleasure in seeing her again, since she would have believed, not that I was living in a state of dignified resignation, but that I was intriguing behind her back to bring about a meeting she had declined. I cursed the idle talk of people who, for no particular reason, not even trying to hurt or please, often just for the sake of something to say, or because we have actually indulged in similar idle talk with them, turn out to be as indiscreet as we were, and harm us with a word out of place. However, in the sorry work done to cause the downfall of our love, the contribution of these people is not nearly as important as that of two others, who are in the habit of spoiling it at the very moment when its course promised to run smooth, one of them by being too kind, the other too unkind. Even so, we do not resent this pair as we do the meddling Cottards, as the second of them is the person we love and the first is ourself.

In fact, since Mme Swann, almost every time I went to visit her, would invite me to come to tea with her and her daughter, and told me to send my reply direct to Gilberte, I often had occasion to write to her, sending her notes that I filled not with words that might have won her over, but with words chosen for the sole purpose of letting my sorrow flow free and sweet. Regret, like desire, seeks satisfaction and not self-analysis: in the beginning of love, our time is spent not in finding out what love is made of, but in trying to make sure we can see each other tomorrow; and at the end of love, we do not try to ascertain the nature of our sorrow, but only to voice it in what we hope is its tenderest form to her who is the cause of it. We say things that we feel the need to say, and which she will not understand; we talk only for our own benefit. So I wrote to Gilberte: I used to believe it couldn’t be possible. But I can see now, alas, it’s not that difficult. . . . Though I added, I expect I’ll never see you again, I was still careful not to adopt a distant tone, which might have made her suspect it was feigned; and as I wrote these words, I was in tears, because I felt they expressed, not what I would have liked to believe, but what was in fact going to happen. I knew that when her next invitation came I would once again be brave enough not to give in, and that each successive invitation declined would bring me gradually to a time when, having gone without seeing her for so long, I would have no further wish to see her at all. So, with tears, courage, and consolation, I sacrificed the happiness of being with her to the possibility of one day seeming lovable in her eyes, though knowing it would be a day when the prospect of seeming lovable in her eyes would leave me cold. Even the albeit highly unlikely hypothesis that at this very instant she still loved me, as she had claimed during my last visit to her, that what I saw as the annoyance of having to be with someone whose company is irksome was really only an expression of touchy possessiveness, an affectation of indifference no more genuine in her than mine was in me, served only to make my determination less cruel. And I felt as though, at a time several years hence, when we had completely forgotten one another, when I could look back on this letter I was writing and tell her there had been not one word of sincerity in it, she would say, “What? You mean you did love me? Oh, if you only knew how I had been looking forward to getting that letter! How I longed for us to meet! How I cried when I read it!” As I sat writing to her, having just come home from visiting her mother, the thought that I was possibly there and then in the act of consummating that very misunderstanding, the sadness of it all, the joy of believing Gilberte loved me, made me go on with my letter.

My thoughts, as I left Mme Swann’s at the end of her teatime, were all for what I was going to say in my letter to her daughter; but Mme Cottard’s thoughts were full of something very different. As she carried out her little “tour of inspection,” she had made a point of congratulating Mme Swann on any new piece of furniture or any recent “acquisition” she had noticed in the drawing room. Among them she might also have noticed a meager remnant of the things Odette had once surrounded herself with in the rue La Pérouse house, especially the animals in precious stones and metals, her fetishes.

However, to Mme Swann, the word “sham,” picked up from a friend whom she admired, had opened new horizons by its applicability to things which, years ago, she had called “chic”; and one after another, most of those things had followed into oblivion the gold-painted garden trellis against which her chrysanthemums had stood, many a bonbonnière from Giroux’s, and the notepaper embossed with a coronet (to say nothing of the louis coins in golden cardboard adorning her mantelpieces, which a man of taste had once hinted, long before she met Swann, that she might dispense with). As well, in the artistic disarray, the bohemian jumble, of her rooms, with their walls still painted dark, making them as different as possible from the white drawing rooms she was to have a little later, the Far East was giving ground under the increasing onslaughts of the eighteenth century; and the cushions which Mme Swann plumped up and heaped behind me to make me (as she said in English) comfortable were decorated now with Louis XV posies, rather than Chinese dragons. In the room where one usually came upon her, of which she liked to say, “Yes, I’m quite fond of it, I’m in here a lot. I couldn’t live among unfriendly things, you see, ugly-pretentious things. This is where I work”—though she never specified what it was she was working at, a picture, a book perhaps, those being the days when the idea of writing was occurring to the kind of women who like to have something to do, rather than sit idly about—she sat amid Dresden china, of which she would speak with an English accent, and which she liked so much that she was forever saying, about anything that took her eye, “Isn’t it pretty? It’s just like Dresden flowers!”; and as she feared for these pieces even more than she had once feared for her Chinese grotesques and vases, any clumsy servant who alarmed her by handling them the wrong way would be roundly abused in terms that Swann, the mildest and most urbane of masters, would hear but not be shocked by. Affection is undiminished by the clear sight of certain defects; it is what makes them appear charming. Nowadays, to receive guests, Odette less frequently wore a Japanese kimono, preferring the pale, foamy silks of her Watteau tea gowns, floating in them, seeming to caress their flowery froth against her breasts, basking, frolicking, and with such an air of health and well-being, of refreshment of the skin and deep breathing, that they looked as though their function was not just the decorative one of being a setting for her, but one as necessary as her daily “tub” or her “constitutional,” satisfying both the demands of her looks and the finer requirements of the healthful life. She was in the habit of maintaining that she would go without bread sooner than be deprived of art and cleanliness, and that she would have been more upset by the burning of the Mona Lisa than by the annihilation of “swarms” of people of her acquaintance. These conceptions appeared paradoxical to her lady friends, giving her among them the renown of a high-minded woman, and brought the Belgian ambassador to visit her once a week; and in the little world that revolved about her sun, everybody would have been astounded to learn that elsewhere—at the Verdurins’, for example—she was seen as stupid. It was this spirit of spontaneous repartee in Mme Swann that made her prefer men’s company to women’s. And when she had something to say against certain women, it was always the former courtesan who drew attention to defects that might tell against them with men, thick wrists and ankles, a stale complexion, bad spelling, hairy legs, a dreadful smell, false eyebrows. She could, however, be kinder in speaking of any woman who had been friendly or indulgent toward her, especially if it was someone who had known happier days. Odette would be shrewd in defense of the woman: “Oh, they say awful things about her. But she’s really a nice person, I can assure you.”

It was not only the interior decoration of Odette’s drawing room that Mme Cottard and all who had known Mme de Crécy would have had difficulty in recognizing if they had not seen her for a long time, it was Odette herself. She seemed to have grown so many years younger! This was in part no doubt because she had filled out, enjoyed better health, looked calmer, cooler, more relaxed; and in part because the new, sleeker hairstyles gave more room to her face, which was enlivened by a little pink powder, and in which the former flagrancy of her eyes and profile seemed to have been toned down. But another reason for this change was that Odette had now reached the middle years of life, where she found in herself, or invented for herself, a personal style of face, full of a fixed character, a recognized pattern of beauty; and on her formerly undesigned features (which for so many years had been left to the random whims of the responsive flesh, briefly aging by years at the slightest indisposition, managing somehow to collaborate with her moods and daily demeanors in the composition of her variable face, unfocused, unshaped, and charming) she now wore this immutable model of eternal youth.

In Swann’s own bedroom, instead of the grand photographs taken nowadays of his wife, in which, however unalike her different hats and dresses were, the same enigmatically imperious expression identified her triumphant figure and features, he kept a modest little old daguerreotype dating from the days before this unvarying model of Odette’s, in which she seemed devoid of her new youth and beauty, as yet undiscovered by her. In this no doubt he clung, or had reverted, to a different conception of her, doting forever on the Botticellian graces of a slender young woman with pensive eyes and a forlorn look, caught in a posture between stride and stillness. The fact was, he could still see her as a Botticelli. Odette herself, who always tried to conceal things she did not like about her own person, or at least to compensate for them rather than bring them out, things that a painter might have seen as her “type,” but which as a woman she saw as defects, had no time for Botticelli. Swann owned a wonderful Oriental stole, in blue and pink, which he had bought because it was exactly the one worn by the Virgin in the Magnificat. Mme Swann would not wear it. Once only, she relented and let him give her an outfit based on La Primavera’s garlands of daisies, bellworts, cornflowers, and forget-me-nots. In the evenings, Swann would sometimes murmur to me to look at her pensive hands as she gave to them unawares the graceful, rather agitated movement of the Virgin dipping her quill in the angel’s inkwell, before writing in the holy book where the word Magnificat is already inscribed. Then he would add, “Be sure not to mention it to her! One word—and she’d make sure it wouldn’t happen again!”

Except at such yielding moments of un-self-conscious languor, when Swann could hope to catch a glimpse of Botticelli’s melancholy attitudes, Odette’s body was now blocked out as a single profile, a unitary shape that took its outline from the woman within and ignored the former fashions, with their fussy broken lines, the artificiality of their protrusions and indentations, their jutting angles and crisscrossings, their composite effect of disparate complexity, but which could also, if that anatomy within erred and made unwanted departures from the ideal design, correct these mistakes of nature with a firm stroke, redrawing whole sections of the contour so as to make good any deficiencies, whether of flesh or cloth. All the padding, the appalling “dressimprovers” and bustles, had gone; as had the long vest bodices that for so many years, overlapping the skirt and rigid with whalebone, had added a false abdomen to Odette and made her look like a creature of separate parts unlinked by any individuality. The vertical fringes of jet and the stiff curves of the ruches had been replaced by the suppleness of a body which, having freed itself like an independent and organized life-form from the long opacity and chrysaloid chaos of the outworn modes, now rippled silk as a mermaid ripples water and gave a human look to the gloss of percaline. Mme Swann had managed to retain a vestige of some of these modes, amid the others that had replaced them. Some evenings, when I was unable to work, and when I was quite sure that Gilberte had gone to the theater with a party of friends, I would call unannounced at her parents’ house, where I was often greeted by Mme Swann in one of her handsome housedresses, the skirt of which, in one of those magnificent dark shades, a deep red or orange, which seemed to have a special meaning because they were no longer fashionable, showed through a broad diagonal panel of black lace reminiscent of an outmoded flounce. Before Gilberte and I had fallen out, on one of those wintry spring days when Mme Swann had taken me to the Zoo in the Bois de Boulogne, the indented edging of her blouse, under the jacket which she would unbutton a little as the walk warmed her up, had looked just like the absent lapel of the vest bodices she had once worn, and which she always preferred with such a slight zigzag edge; and she had been wearing a necklet (in a tartan pattern, which she had never abandoned, though she had by now so toned down its colors, the red having shaded into pink and the blue into lilac, that it could almost have been taken for one of those dove-colored taffetas which had just come in) knotted in a bow under the chin in a way that, because one could not see how it was fastened, instantly reminded one of those hats with long bands tied round the throat which nobody now wore. Before very long, young men, trying to define her ways of dressing, would be saying to each other, “Mme Swann is a real period piece, you know!” In her ways of dressing, as in a fine written style that embraces different forms of expression and is enriched by a concealed tradition, these semi-reminiscences of bodices and bows, an occasional instantly repressed hint of the “monkey jacket,” and even a faint whisper of an allusion to long “follow-me-lads” hat ribbons, filled the actual forms of what she did wear with a constant unformed suggestion of older ones, which no real seamstress or milliner could have contrived, but which hung about her all the time, surrounding her with something noble—possibly because the very uselessness of these trappings made them appear designed for a more-than-utilitarian purpose, perhaps because of the remnant they preserved of former times, or even because of a kind of individuality in dress, peculiar to herself, which gave to what she wore, however dissimilar her ensembles, a sort of family resemblance. One could sense that, for her, dressing was not just a matter of comfort or adornment of the body: whatever she wore encompassed her like the delicate and etherealized epitome of a civilization.

Though Gilberte usually held her tea parties on her mother’s at-home days, she sometimes went out instead; and when that happened I could go to one of Mme Swann’s “afternoon jamborees.” I would find her wearing a magnificent dress, sometimes of taffeta, sometimes of faille, or else of velvet, crêpe de Chine, satin, or silk, not a loose garment like the housedresses she usually wore at home, but with something of the walking dress in it, which somehow gave to her afternoon idleness indoors a quality of readiness and activity. The dashing simplicity of their cut suited her figure and her movements, which seemed to color her sleeves variously each day: on blue-velvet days, the material was full of sudden decisiveness, which became simple good nature when it was the turn of white taffeta; and, in order to become visible, a sort of supreme and distinguished reserve in her way of holding out her arm had taken on the glowing smile of self-sacrifice that shines in black crêpe de Chine. But at the same time, her complicated “accessories,” which had no visible purpose or practical usefulness, added something to these brilliant dresses, something disinterested, thoughtful, and secret, matching the melancholy still to be seen around her eyes and in the delicate joints of her hands. Under the dangle of sapphire-studded lucky charms, enameled four-leaf clovers, silver medals, gold medallions, turquoise amulets, fine ruby chains, chestnut-sized topazes, there would be a colored pattern patched onto the dress itself, a borrowed panel enjoying a new lease on life, a row of little satin buttons that could neither button anything nor ever be unbuttoned, a length of matching braid trying to please with the unobtrusive aptness of a subtle reminder; and all of them, like the jewels, seemed to be there—for otherwise they had no conceivable function—to hint at a purpose, to be a token of tenderness, to keep a secret, exercise a superstition, commemorate a cure, a vow, a lover, or a philippine. Sometimes a hint of a Plantagenet slash in the blue velvet of a bodice, or a slight bulge in a black satin dress—either high on the sleeve, suggesting the 1830s and their leg-ofmutton, or under the skirt, suggesting Louis XV hoop petticoats—would almost make it look as though she were in fancy dress; and by slipping this sort of barely recognizable allusion to the past into the life of the present, they added to the person of Mme Swann the charm of certain historical or fictional heroines. If I said this to her, she replied, “Unlike some of my friends, I do not play golf. Unlike me, they have an excuse for being swaddled in sweaters.”

Amid the jostle of people in her drawing room, as she came back in from seeing someone out or handed round a plate of cakes, Mme Swann would take me aside for a moment: “Gilberte has most particularly urged me to invite you to lunch the day after tomorrow. I didn’t know whether I would see you or not, so I was going to drop you a note about it if you didn’t come today.” I persisted in my resistance to Gilberte’s invitations. This resistance was now costing me less and less: however much one may savor one’s poison, when one has been forcibly deprived of it for any length of time, one is bound to be struck by how restful it can be to do without it, by the absence of excitements and sorrows. We may be not entirely sincere in hoping never again to see the woman we love; but the same may well be true when we say we do hope to see her again. Of course, any absence from her can only be bearable if we mean it to be brief, if we keep thinking of being together again with her one day; but against that, we are aware of how much less disturbing these daily dreams of prompt but ever-deferred reunion are than a real encounter with her would be, with its likely resurgence of jealousy; and so the knowledge that one is going to see her again could cause a recurrence of upsetting emotions. And what we keep postponing now, day after day, is no longer an end to the unbearable anguish of separation, but the dreaded renewal of futile feelings. How preferable the malleable memory of her seems: instead of the real meeting with her, in your solitude you can dramatize a dream in which the girl who is not in love with you assures you that she is! This memory, which can become as sweet as possible, by being gradually flavored with what you most desire, is far better than the future encounter with a person whose words will be put into her mouth not by you, but by her foreseeable indifference and even her unforeseeable animosity. To be no longer in love is to know that forgetting—or even a fading memory—causes much less pain than the unhappiness of loving. What I preferred, without admitting it to myself, was the reposeful promise of that foreshadowed forgetting.

There is another reason why the pains of this treatment by isolation and emotional withdrawal may be gradually lessened, which is that, as a preliminary to curing us of the obsessive preoccupation of our love, it weakens the force of it. My own love was still strong enough for me to want Gilberte to look at me again with the eyes of admiration. So, with every day that passed, it seemed to me that my prestige, because of my self-imposed separation from her, must be slowly growing in her eyes; and that each of these days of calm sadness when I saw nothing of her, in their gradual accumulation, with neither interruption nor expected expiry time (unless some ill-advised person interfered with my arrangements), was a day gained, and not lost, to my love. A day pointlessly gained, perhaps, as I might soon be pronounced cured. Resignation, which is one of the modes of habit, favors the indefinite growth of some of our resources. By now, the puny forces which, on the evening of my first breach with Gilberte, were all I had at my command to help me bear my heartbreak, had been raised to an incalculable power. However, the tendency of all existing things to go on existing is sometimes interrupted by sudden impulses, which we obey without great qualms at breaking our own rule, since we know, from all those days and months when we have already managed to abstain, for how many more of them we would be able to make our abstention last. It is often when the purse in which we have been setting aside our savings is nearly full that we suddenly decide to spend them all; it is when we have become used to a course of treatment, rather than when it has had its full effect, that we abandon it. One day, as Mme Swann spoke the usual words about how pleased Gilberte would be to see me, setting within my reach the happiness I had deprived myself of for so long, all at once I was overwhelmed by the knowledge that it was still possible to have it. I could hardly wait for the next day—I had just decided to surprise Gilberte by turning up at her house the following afternoon, before dinnertime.

What helped me to bear the thought of waiting for a whole day was a plan I had. Now that the entire thing was forgotten and we were coming back together, it was inconceivable to me that I could go to her in any capacity other than as a lover. Not a day must pass without her being sent the loveliest flowers I could find! If her mother should happen to rule against daily deliveries of flowers (not that she was entitled to severity in such things), I could think of more valuable but less frequent presents to send. My pocket money from my parents did not allow me to buy expensive things. But I remembered a large vase in old Chinese porcelain that Aunt Léonie had left to me. My mother was forever predicting the day when Françoise would come and report, “It’s gone and got broken!” and it would be irreparable. In that case, was it not wiser to sell it, so as to lavish every pleasure on Gilberte? I thought it might fetch a thousand francs. One good thing about getting rid of it was that it afforded me the opportunity to get to know it: as it was being wrapped up, I noticed how habit had prevented me from ever seeing it. I took it with me on my way out and told the coachman to drive to the Swanns’ via the Champs-Élysées: on a nearby corner, I knew there was a large shop dealing in Oriental articles owned by a friend of my father’s. To my amazement, he offered me on the spot not one thousand francs but ten thousand! I handled the banknotes with delight: a year’s worth of daily roses and lilacs for Gilberte! From the shop, the coach set off again for the Swanns’; and as they lived not far from the Bois de Boulogne, instead of taking the usual route, the coachman naturally headed up the Avenue des Champs-Élysées itself. We had passed the corner of the rue de Berri and were very close to the Swanns’ when I thought I saw Gilberte with a young man in the twilight: they were going in the opposite direction to myself, away from her house; she was walking slowly, but with a purposeful step, and talking to this young man, whose face I could not make out. I sat up, intending to tell the driver to stop; but then I hesitated. The pair were already at quite a distance, their two faint, close silhouettes fading slowly into the gathering Elysian gloom. Soon we drew up outside Gilberte’s house. “Oh dear!” Mme Swann said. “She will be sorry! I can’t imagine why she’s not here. She came home from a class complaining of being too hot and said she felt like taking a little walk in the open air with one of her girlfriends.” “I think I may have just glimpsed her along the Avenue des Champs-Élysées.” “Oh, no, I don’t think so. But, whatever you do, don’t mention it to her father. He doesn’t like her to be out and about at this hour of the day.” She added in English “Good evening!” and I left. I told the cabman to go back the way we had come; but there was no sign of the pair. Where had they been? What manner of things had they been saying to each other in the gloaming, walking together in that intimate way?