I went home in despair, clutching my windfall of ten thousand francs, which was to have enabled me to give Gilberte so many little pleasures, and realizing that I was now determined never to see her again. The visit to the shop with the Chinese vase had gladdened me with the prospect that, now and forever, my sweetheart’s sole feelings for me would be happiness and gratitude. Yet, if I had not made that detour to the shop, if the coach had not driven up the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, I would never have seen Gilberte with the young man. For the stem of a single event may bear counterbalancing branches, the unhappiness it brings canceling the happiness it caused. What had happened to me was the opposite of what is more usual: one yearns for a fulfillment that remains unattainable because one lacks the wherewithal required for it. As La Bruyère says, “It is sad to be a lover without wealth.”⁶³ One’s only resource is the relentless endeavor to stifle one’s yearning. The wherewithal was not what I lacked; but at the very moment when it materialized, an adventitious if not logical consequence of its acquisition had deprived me of the expected joy. It would appear that this is the fate of all our joys. They do of course tend to last longer than the single evening on which we have acquired what makes them possible. More usually, our fever of expectation lasts longer. Even so, happiness can never happen. Once the external circumstances are overcome, if they can be, nature then transforms the struggle into an internal one, by bringing about a gradual change in our heart, so that the gratification it desires is different from the one it is about to receive. And if the change in circumstances has come about so quickly that our heart has not had time to change with it, nature, nothing daunted, taking its own time, sets about defeating us in a way which, though more devious, is no less effective. Fulfillment is snatched from our grasp at the last moment; or, rather, it is fulfillment itself which nature, the malicious trickster, uses to destroy happiness. Having failed with everything belonging to the world of fact and external life, nature creates its ultimate impediment to happiness by making it a psychological impossibility. The phenomenon of happiness does not come to pass; or else it leads to utter bitterness.

I locked away my ten thousand francs. They were of no use to me now; and they were to end up being spent even more quickly than if I had sent flowers to Gilberte every day, since as twilight came each evening I was so unhappy that, rather than stay at home, I went to lie weeping in the arms of other women, whom I did not love. As for trying to please Gilberte with presents, I had lost all desire to do so. To step inside her house now would have been to face the certainty of suffering. Just to see her—a thing that had seemed so exhilarating the previous evening—would have been of little help to me: every moment when I could not be with her would have revived my anxiety. This explains why every new pain that a woman inflicts on us (which she often does without meaning to) increases not only her power over us, but also the demands we make on her. By every use of her power to hurt, the woman constricts us more and more, shackling us with stronger chains; but she also shows us the weakness of those that once seemed strong enough to bind her and thus to enable us to feel untroubled by her. Only the day before, had I not wanted to avoid upsetting Gilberte, I would have settled for infrequent meetings with her; but now these could no longer have satisfied me, and my conditions would have been very different. For in love, unlike war, the more one is defeated, the more one imposes harsh conditions; and one constantly tries to make them harsher—if one is actually in a position to impose any, that is. With Gilberte, I was not in this position. So, to begin with, I preferred not to go back to her mother’s house. I also went on telling myself that Gilberte did not love me, that I had known this for ages, that I could see her whenever I liked, and that, if I preferred not to see her, I would eventually forget her. But these thoughts, like a medication that has no effect on certain disorders, were quite ineffectual against what came intermittently to my mind: those two close silhouettes of Gilberte and that young man, stepping slowly along the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. This was a new pain, but one that would eventually fade and disappear in its turn; it was an image which one day would come back to my mind with all its noxious power neutralized, like those deadly poisons that can be handled without danger, or the small piece of dynamite one can use to light a cigarette without fear of being blown up. For the time being, though, there was another force in me, fighting for all it was worth against the pernicious impulse that kept showing me, without the slightest alteration, Gilberte walking through the twilight: working against memory, trying to withstand its repeated onslaughts, there was the quiet and helpful endeavor of imagination. The force of memory went on showing the pair walking down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, along with other irksome images from the past, such as Gilberte shrugging her shoulders when her mother asked her to stay in with me. But the second force, sketching freely on the canvas of my hopes, improvised a future that was much more lovingly detailed than the meager glimpses afforded by such a paltry past. To think that, against a single moment of the sullen Gilberte, I had a wealth of other moments, all devoted to her attempts to bring about our reconciliation—or even our engagement! This force, though directed toward the future by my imagination, did of course draw its sustenance from the past; and as my unhappiness at Gilberte’s surly shrug of the shoulders gradually faded, so would my memory of her charm and the yearning for her that came with it. However, at the present moment, that death of the past was still remote. I still loved Gilberte, though I believed I hated her. Whenever somebody complimented me on the neatness of my hair, whenever anyone said I was looking well, I wished she could be there to hear it. Throughout that whole period, I was irritated by receiving so many invitations; and I turned them all down. On one occasion there was an unpleasant scene at home because I declined to accompany my father to an official function, at which M. and Mme Bontemps were to be present with their niece Albertine, who was then little more than a child. The different periods of our life overlap. Because you are now in love with someone who will one day mean nothing to you, you refuse out of hand to meet someone who means nothing to you now, but whom you will one day come to love, someone whom you might have loved sooner if you had agreed to an earlier meeting, who might have curtailed your present sufferings (before replacing them, of course, with others). My own sufferings were changing. I was surprised to notice certain feelings in myself, one day a particular emotion, the following day some quite different one, generally inspired by some hope or fear focused on Gilberte. The Gilberte of my private imaginings, I mean. But I ought to have borne in mind that the other Gilberte, the real one, was perhaps utterly different from this private one, that she probably lived in ignorance of all the regrets I invented for her to feel, and thought not only much less about me than I about her, but much less than I pretended she thought about me in my moments of private communion with the fictitious Gilberte, when I longed to know her real intentions toward me and pictured her as spending her days doting on me.

During these periods when sorrow, though already beginning to wane, still persists, there is a difference between the mode of sorrow caused by the obsessive thought of the loved one and the sorrow brought back to mind by certain memories: a nasty thing said, a verb once used in a letter. Let it be said here (all the diverse modes of sorrow will be described in connection with a later love affair) that the first of these modes is not nearly as cruel as the second. This is because our impression of the woman, living forever within us, is enhanced by the halo which our adoration constantly creates for her, and is tinged, if not by the glad promises of recurrent hope, at least by the peace of mind of lasting sadness. (It is noteworthy too that our image of a person who causes us pain takes up little space among the complications which exacerbate a heartbreak, which make it persist and prevent us from getting over it, just as in certain illnesses the cause is out of all proportion to the ensuing fever and the length of time required for a cure.) Though our image of the whole person we love is lit by the glow of a generally optimistic mind, this is not the case with the individual memory of the hurtful words spoken on a particular occasion or the unfriendly letter (I only ever had one like that from Gilberte): it feels as though these fragments, however minute they are, contain the whole person, amplified to a power well in excess of what she has in the usual imagined glimpses we have of her, entire though she is in them. Unlike the loved image of her, we have never gazed at the terrible letter with the untroubled eyes of melancholy and regret; the moment we spent reading it, devouring it, was fraught with the awful anguish of unexpected catastrophe. The difference in the making of these sorts of sorrows is that they come from the outside world and take the shortest and most painful route to the heart. The image of the woman we love, though we think it has a pristine authenticity, has actually been often made and remade by us. And the memory that wounds is not contemporaneous with the restored image; it dates from a very different time; it is one of the few witnesses to a monstrous past. Since this past goes on existing, though not inside us, where we have seen fit to replace it with a wondrous golden age, a paradise where we are to be reunited and reconciled, such memories and such letters are a reminder of reality; their sudden stab ought to make us realize how far we have strayed from that reality, and how foolish are the hopes with which we sustain our daily expectation. Not that this reality has to remain the same, although that can happen too. There have been many women in our lives with whom we have long since lost touch, and who have understandably matched our unpurposed silence with a similar lack of interest in ourselves. However, not being in love with them, we have never counted the years spent without them; and in our reasoning on the efficacy of separation, we disregard this counterexample, which should invalidate it, as those who believe in the possibility of foretelling the future overlook all the cases in which what they foresaw did not eventuate.

Even so, separation can be effective: the heart that at present ignores us may be visited by the wish to see us again, or by an expectation of pleasure in our company. It just takes time. And the demands we make on time are as inordinate as the requirements of a heart if it is to change. In the first place, time is the very thing we wish not to grant; for our pain is acute, and we are in haste to have it cease. As well, in the time it takes for the other’s heart to change, our own heart will be changing too; and when the fulfillment desired comes within our reach, we will desire it no longer. Actually, the very notion that it will come within reach—that there is no fulfillment which will be forever denied us, as long as it has ceased to be a fulfillment we desire—is one which, though true, is only partly true. By the time it comes to us, we have become indifferent to it. And our very indifference has made us less critical of it, which enables us to believe in retrospect that it would have delighted us at a time when, in fact, it might well have seemed grossly deficient. One’s standards are not high, and one is no great judge, in things one does not care about. The friendliness of a person whom we no longer care for, though it may seem too much to our indifference, might have been deemed too little by our love. The affectionate words, the suggestion of a meeting make us think of the joy they might have led to, but not of all the other joys by which we would have wanted them to be immediately followed, and which that very eagerness of ours might well have prevented from ever coming to pass. So it is not certain that the happiness that comes too late, at a time when one can no longer enjoy it, when one is no longer in love, is exactly the same happiness for which we once pined in vain. There is only one person—our former self—who could decide the issue; and that self is no longer with us. No doubt too, if the former self did come back, identical or not as it might be, that would be enough for the happiness in question to vanish.

The belated coming true of these dreams, at a time when I would have ceased to long for it, was still in the future; and because I went on inventing, as in the days when I hardly knew Gilberte, words for her to say to me, letters in which she begged for forgiveness, confessed to never having loved another, asked me to marry her, this sequence of sweet and constantly regenerated images came to occupy more space in my mind than the glimpse of her with the young man, which weakened for lack of nourishment. I might well have gone back to Mme Swann’s, had it not been for a dream I had, in which a friend of mine, quite unknown to me in the waking world, behaved toward me with the most villainous duplicity, while believing I was the treacherous one. This caused me such pain that I woke with a start; and as my pain did not abate, I thought again of the dream, in an attempt to identify the friend who had visited my sleeping mind and whose name, a Spanish one, was now fading away. As both Joseph and the Pharaoh, I set about interpreting the dream.⁶⁴ I knew that in many dreams one must disregard the appearance of people, who may be disguised or may have exchanged faces with one another, like those mutilated saints on the fronts of cathedrals which have been repaired by ignorant archaeologists in a jumble of mismatched heads and bodies, attributes and names. Those we give to characters in our dreams can be misleading. The one we love can be recognized only by the quality of the pain we feel. It was this that identified for me the person who as I slept had turned into a young man, and whose recent treachery still ached within me—Gilberte. I remembered then that, on the last occasion when we had been together, the day when her mother had forbidden her to go to a dancing lesson, she had burst out with a strange laugh and refused, either sincerely or in pretense, to believe that my intentions toward her were quite proper. By association, this memory brought to mind another: long before that day, Swann himself had been the one to doubt my sincerity, to suspect that I was not a suitable friend for his daughter. I had written him my futile letter, which Gilberte had brought back and given to me with that same baffling laughter. She had not given it back immediately, of course; and I could remember the whole scene behind the clump of laurels. Unhappiness is a great promoter of morality. Gilberte’s present unpleasantness toward me now seemed a punishment meted out by life because of my behavior that day. Because one can avoid dangers by watching out while crossing the street, one has the impression that one can also avoid punishment. But punishments can come from within; and the unexpected danger may arise from the heart. The words she had spoken, “If you like, we could wrestle a bit more,” now horrified me. I imagined her behaving like that with the young man I had seen with her on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, at home perhaps, up in the linen room. So, just as, some time ago, I had been ill advised enough to believe I had come to a state of tranquil, stable happiness, I had been rash enough, now that I had accepted that happiness was not for me, to believe I had achieved at least a haven of lasting calm. The fact is that, as long as our heart harbors the dear image of another person, it is not only our happiness that runs the constant risk of sudden destruction; even when happiness has gone and pain has come, even when we have contrived to lull our pain, the state of calm we reach is no less illusory and precarious than happiness once was. My own state of calm did eventually come back, as whatever enters our minds in the guise of a dream, affecting our desires and our inner being, sooner or later fades away like all other things, grief being no more capable than anything else of aspiring to permanence. Besides, those who suffer the torments of love are, as is said of people suffering from certain diseases, their own doctors. As the only consolation they can find must come from the person responsible for their pain, and as the giving of that pain is an attribute of that person, the remedy they eventually find for it lies within it. One day, their pain reveals their remedy—as they mull it over, the pain shows them a new aspect of the person whom they miss so terribly: sometimes she is so hateful that they lose all desire to see her again, and any pleasure they might take in her company demands that they first wound her in their turn; sometimes she is so loving that they turn this lovingness into an objective quality of the loved one, and see in it a reason to hope. In my own case, although this new phase of my suffering did gradually come to an end, I was left with a much-diminished desire to go back to see Mme Swann. In the hearts of those whose love is unrequited, the state of expectation in which they spend their days— even though it may be an unrecognized expectation—turns very gradually into a second phase, which, though it seems identical to the first, is in fact its exact opposite. That first phase was the consequence, the reflection of the hurtful incidents that caused the initial sorrow. Our expectation of what might happen next is mixed with apprehension, especially since, if we hear nothing more from the beloved, we are full of the urge to do something, but are unsure of the likely outcomes of any step we might take, including the possibility that the one we do take may well rule out any further one. But soon, without our realizing it, our continuing expectation is determined, as we have seen, not by our memory of the past we have just been through, but by the imaginary future we look forward to. By then, our expectation is almost pleasant. After all, if the first phase has lasted for some time, we have already become used to living with an eye to tomorrow. The pain we felt during our final encounters with her still lives in us, albeit subdued. We are reluctant to have it revive, especially since we cannot see what further demands we could possibly make. To possess a little more of her would only increase our need for the part of her that we do not possess; and in any case, within that part, since our needs arise out of our satisfactions, something of her would still lie forever beyond our grasp.

When this reason was later reinforced by another one, I completely gave up my visits to Mme Swann’s. This belated reason was not that I had already forgotten Gilberte: it was that I hoped in that way to forget her sooner. Of course, since the end of my acute unhappiness, my residual sorrow had once again drawn from my visits to Mme Swann the sedative and the diversion which I had found so comforting at an earlier stage. But the reason why the sedative was effective was also the reason why the diversion was a drawback: that the memory of Gilberte was inseparable from such visits. The diversion could have been beneficial only if it could have pitted thoughts, interests, or passions unrelated to Gilberte against a feeling that was no longer reinforced by her presence. Such states of mind, from which the loved one is entirely absent, serve to take up a space which, though minimal to begin with, leaves a little less room in the heart for the love that once occupied it entirely. They must be fostered, they must be fortified, in time with the waning of the emotion that is no more than a memory, so that the new elements provided to the mind can encroach on a larger and larger area of the self and finally take it over completely. I realized it was the only way to kill a feeling of love; and I was young enough and brave enough to undertake to do this, to inflict this wound on myself, the cruelest of all wounds, since it comes from one’s knowledge that, however long it may take, one is bound to succeed. When I wrote to Gilberte now, the reason I alleged for my reluctance to see her was some mysterious misunderstanding, utterly untrue of course, which had come between us, and about which I had at first been hoping she would invite me to explain myself. But in fact no clarification, even in the most trivial relationships, is ever required by any correspondent who knows that a designedly obscure, untrue, or incriminating statement is included in a letter for the express purpose of provoking a protest, and who is satisfied to see in it a proof that he (or she) not only enjoys a commanding position and retains the initiative, but will continue to do so. In love relationships this is even more true, for love has so much eloquence, and indifference so little curiosity. As Gilberte had never expressed a doubt on this supposed misunderstanding, or tried to find out what it was, it had become a reality for me, and I alluded to it in each letter. There is, in such readiness to misinterpret, in the pretense of standoffishness, a dire charm that leads you further and further on. Having so often used the phrase “since we fell out,” so as to make Gilberte reply, “But we haven’t, let’s talk about it,” I had managed to persuade myself that we had. By so often writing statements like “Life may have parted us, but it can never alter the feeling we shared,” in the hope of being told, “Nothing has parted us, our feeling is as strong as ever,” I had become used to the idea that life had parted us, that our erstwhile feeling would live in our memories, as certain neurotics start by simulating an illness and end by really being ill. Whenever I had occasion to write to Gilberte now, I made a point of mentioning life’s imagined parting of us. And, this role of life having been tacitly accepted by virtue of Gilberte’s never referring to it in her replies, it would go on parting us. But then, eschewing mere reticence, she overtly adopted my point of view; and thenceforward, as a visiting head of state will incorporate into his speech of reply to an official welcome some of the words used by his host, each time I wrote, “Life may have come between us, but the memory of our time together will live on,” she took to saying, “Life may have come between us, but it can never make us forget the dear days we shared” (why “life” should be said to have come between us or to have changed anything, we would have been hard put to say). By now my pain had much abated. But then, one day when I was telling her in a letter that I had just heard of the death of our old barley-sugar woman from the Champs-Élysées, as I wrote these words, “I’m sure you must have been sad to hear of it; it certainly brought back many memories to me,” I collapsed in helpless tears, as I realized that, though I had gone on hoping against hope that our love was still a living emotion, or at least one that could revive, I was now speaking of it in the past, as though it too had died and was all but forgotten. How affectionate this correspondence was, between friends trying not to meet! Her letters were fully as considerate as any I wrote to people who meant nothing to me; and I was greatly comforted to receive from her the very same tokens of apparent affection that I sent to them.

Gradually, the more often I declined her suggestion that we meet, the less pain it caused me. As she became slowly less dear to me, my hurtful and incessantly recurring memories of her lost the power to prevent the thought of a visit to Florence or Venice from giving me pleasure. At such moments, I regretted that I had turned down the diplomatic career and tied myself to a life without travel, so as not to absent myself from a girl whom I would not now be seeing again, whom I had already more or less forgotten. We design our life for the sake of an individual who, by the time we are able to welcome her into it, has turned into a total stranger, and never comes to share that life with us; and so we live on, imprisoned in an arrangement made for someone else. Though my parents judged Venice to be too distant and fever-ridden for me, at least it was easy and untiring to go for a time to Balbec. But that would have entailed leaving Paris and giving up my visits, infrequent though they were, to Mme Swann’s, where I could hear her speak about her daughter, and where I was even beginning to discover other pleasures, which had nothing to do with Gilberte.

As spring advanced, as the Ice Saints⁶⁵ and Eastertime with its squalls of hail brought back the cold, Mme Swann was convinced that the house was freezing, and I often had occasion to see my hostess wearing furs: her shivery hands and shoulders disappeared under the dazzling white of a great flat muff and tippet, both of ermine, which she had been wearing outside, and which looked like winter’s last and most persistent patches of snow, unthawed by the warmth of her fireside or the change of season. The composite truth of those icy but already flowering weeks was brought into that drawing room, which I was soon to cease visiting, by whiteness of a more affecting sort, such as the snowballs of the Guelder roses, each of their tall stems, as bare as the Pre-Raphaelites’ linear flora, topped by its single clustered globe, as white as a herald angel and surrounded by the scent of lemon. For Odette, as befitted the lady of Tansonville, knew that even the iciest April is never without its flowers, and that winter, springtime, and summer are not as hermetically partitioned from one another as may be supposed by the man about town who, until the first warm weather arrives, cannot imagine the world containing anything other than bare housefronts dripping rain. No doubt Mme Swann did not rely solely on what her gardener regularly sent up from Combray, and she did not decline to palliate, with the assistance of her “florist by appointment,” the insufficiencies of her artificial springtime by drawing on the resources afforded by Mediterranean precocity. Not that this mattered to me. Apart from the snows of Mme Swann’s muff, all that was required to set me yearning for the countryside was that the snowballs of the Guelder roses (which may have had no other purpose than to join with my hostess’s furniture and her own outfit in making the “Symphony in White major” that Bergotte liked to talk of) should remind me that the Good Friday Spell⁶⁶ represents a natural miracle, which we could witness every year, had we but the good sense to do so, and that these white flowers, along with the heady, acid perfume of blooms of other species, the names of which were unknown to me, but which had often made me pause on my walks about Combray, should give to Mme Swann’s drawing room an air that was as virginal, as candid, as blossomy without leaves, as thick with genuine smells as the steep little path leading up to Tansonville.

But even the memory of the little path was almost too much. The danger of it was that it might keep alive in me the remaining vestige of my love for Gilberte. So, despite the fact that my visits to Mme Swann now caused me no grief at all, I made them even more infrequent, trying to see her as little as possible. I did allow myself, since I persisted in not leaving Paris, to walk with her a few times. Fine, warm weather had at last arrived. Knowing that Mme Swann went out each day before lunch and took a short walk in the Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne, not far from the Arc de Triomphe, quite close to the spot that was known in those days, in honor of the citizenry who went there to see all the rich people they had heard of, as the “Hard-Up Club,” I had asked my parents’ permission to go out for a walk late on Sunday mornings (not being free on weekdays at that time) and not to come back to lunch till a quarter past one, which was much later than their own lunchtime. During that month of May, I did not miss a single Sunday, Gilberte having gone off to spend some time in the country with friends. I would arrive at the Arc de Triomphe about midday and stand at the end of the Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne, from where I could watch the corner of the side street from which Mme Swann would emerge, coming from her house, which was only a few steps away. It was the hour at which many of those who had been out for a walk were going home to lunch; of the few remaining, most belonged to fashionable society. Then it was, stepping onto the fine gravel of the avenue, that Mme Swann would make her entrance, as late, languid, and luxuriant as the most beautiful flower, which never opened until noon, in outfits that gave her a bloom of radiance, and which, though they were always different, I remember as mainly mauve. The bright moment of her flowering was complete when, on an elongated stretch of stem, she unfurled the silky vexillum of a broad sunshade blending with the full-blown shimmer of her frock. She was accompanied by a whole retinue: Swann was there, as were four or five other clubmen who had either dropped in to see her that morning or whom she had just encountered. And as the blacks and grays of this disciplined formation executed their almost mechanical movements, lending an inert frame to Odette, they made the woman, the only one with any intensity in her gaze, appear to be staring past them all, looking straight ahead as though leaning out of a window, and made her stand out, fragile and fearless, in the nudity of her gentle colors, as though she were a creature of a different species or of some mysterious descent, with a suggestion of something warlike about her, all of which enabled her single person to counterbalance her numerous escort. Beaming with smiles, contented with the lovely day and the sunshine, which was not yet too warm, with all the poise and confidence of a creator who beholds every thing that he has made and sees it is very good, and knowing (though vulgar passersby might not appreciate this) that her outfit was more elegant than anyone else’s, she wore it for herself but also for her friends, naturally, without show but also without complete indifference, not objecting if the light bows on her bodice and skirt drifted slightly in front of her, like pets whose presence she was aware of but whose caprices she indulged, leaving them to their own devices as long as they stayed close to her; and as though her purple parasol, often furled when she first emerged into the avenue, was a posy of Parma violets, it too at times received from her happy eyes a glance which, though directed not at her friends but at an inanimate object, brimmed with so much gentle goodwill that it still seemed to be a smile. A margin of elegance, which Mme Swann’s choice of outfit made all her own, was accepted as her essential and exclusive prerogative by the gentlemen whom she addressed most familiarly; and in this they deferred to her with the air of ignorant outsiders who do not mind recognizing themselves as such, conceding the aptness of her authority, as they might with an invalid on the matter of the special care he must take, or with a mother on how best to bring up her children. It was not just this suite of retainers, surrounding her and seeming not to notice passersby, that suggested Mme Swann’s indoor life: by reason of the lateness of her advent on the avenue, she brought to mind the house in which she had spent long morning hours, where she would soon have to return for lunch; the proximity of it was in the calm and leisured simplicity of her manner, as though she were strolling down her own garden path; the cool, subdued light of its interior seemed to hang about her as she passed. But this vision of her only gave me a heightened sense of the fresh air and the warmth of the day, especially since (in my conviction that, in accordance with her pious expertise in the rites and liturgy of such things, Mme Swann’s ways of dressing were linked to the season and the time of day by a bond that was necessary and unique) the flowers on her soft straw hat and the little bows on her frock seemed a more natural product of May than any flowers cultivated in beds or growing wild in the woods; and to witness the thrilling onset of the new season, I needed to lift my eyes no higher than Mme Swann’s sunshade, opened now and stretched above me like a nearer, more temperate sky, full of its constantly changing blue. Though subordinate to none, these rites were honor-bound, as was consequently Mme Swann herself, to defer to the morning, the springtime, and the sunshine, none of which I ever thought seemed flattered enough that such an elegant woman should make a point of respecting them, of choosing for their pleasure a frock in a brighter or lighter material, its lower neckline and looser sleeves suggesting the moist warmth of the throat and the wrists, that she should treat them as a great lady treats the common people whose invitation to visit them in the country she has cheerfully condescended to accept, and for whose special occasion, though they are nobodies, she makes a point of giving her dress a bucolic touch. As soon as she appeared, I made my bow to Mme Swann; she paused with me and gave me her smiling English “Good morning!” As we strolled, I realized that it was for her own sake that she observed these standards in dress, as though they were the tenets of a superior form of worship, which she merely served as a high priestess; for, if she felt too warm, if she unbuttoned or even took off and asked me to carry the jacket that she had originally meant to keep buttoned, I discovered in the blouse she wore under it a host of details of handiwork which might well never have been noticed, after the manner of those orchestral parts that the composer has worked with exquisite care although no ears among the audience will ever hear them; or else in the sleeves folded over my arm I picked out and studied, for the pleasure of looking at them or for the pleasure of being pleasant, this or that tiny detail, a strip of cloth of a delightful shade, or a mauve satinet normally unseen by any eye, but just as delicately finished as any of the outer parts of the garment, like the fine Gothic stonework hidden eighty feet up a cathedral, on the inner face of a balustrade, just as perfectly executed as the bas-relief statues in the main doorway, but which no one had ever set eyes on until an artist on a chance visit to the city asked to be allowed to climb up there, walk about at sky level, and survey a whole townscape from between the twin steeples.

For those who were ignorant of Mme Swann’s practice of taking a “constitutional,” the impression she gave of walking along the Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne as though it were a pathway in her back garden was enhanced by the fact that she was on foot, that no carriage followed her, even though by the month of May she could usually be seen sitting behind the neatest pair of high-steppers in Paris, attended by grooms in the smartest livery, as relaxed and serene as a goddess, basking in the clement open air of a vast C-springed victoria. By walking, especially with her leisurely warm-weather gait, Mme Swann appeared to have acted on a whim, to be committing a graceful little breach of protocol, like a queen at a gala performance who, without telling anyone, and, as her household looks on in a slightly shocked wonderment, none of them daring to protest, leaves the royal box during an intermission, so as to spend a few moments mingling with ordinary members of the audience. Watching Mme Swann as she walked, people sensed between her and themselves the barriers of a certain form of wealth, which always seem to the crowd to be the most impassable barriers of all. But the Faubourg Saint-Germain has its barriers too, albeit less striking to the eye and the imagination of members of the “Hard-Up Club.” When the latter see a great lady who is unaffected in manner, whom, because she has never lost the common touch, they can almost take for someone as lowly as themselves, they will never have the feeling of inequality, one might say the feeling of their own unworthiness, that they have when faced with the likes of Mme Swann. Unlike them, a woman of her sort is no doubt unimpressed by the sumptuous world in which she moves; she ignores it, for the very reason that she has become accustomed to it; that is, she has come to see it as all the more natural and necessary to herself, she has come to judge other people according to their greater or lesser familiarity with these standards of luxury; and so, the grand manner (which she enjoys showing off and recognizes in others) being entirely material, flagrantly noticeable, long to acquire, and hardly replaceable by anything, when such a woman deems a passerby to be someone of no consequence, it is in the same way as he has seen her to be someone of the greatest consequence—without hesitation, at first sight, and once for all. It may be that this particular class of women no longer exists, or at least not with the same character and the same charm. It was a social class which at that time included women like Lady Israels, who was on terms with women of the aristocracy, and Mme Swann, who was one day to be on terms with them, a class that was intermediate, lower than the Faubourg Saint-Germain, since they courted it, but higher than others who were not part of the Faubourg Saint-Germain; and it was peculiar in that, though existing apart from the society of the rich, it was of course a moneyed class, but one in which money had become tractable and had taken to responding to artistic ideas and purposes—it was malleable money, poetically refined money, money with a smile. In any case, the women who belonged to it then would have by now lost the quality that was their greatest claim to ascendancy: having aged, almost all of them have lost their beauty. For the stately, smiling, gentle Mme Swann who sauntered along the Avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne was not only in the prime of her noble wealth, she was also at the glorious height of her own mellow and stilldelectable summertime, from which, like Hypatia, she could watch the turning of worlds beneath her measured tread.⁶⁷ Young men, seeing her pass, glanced anxiously at her, unsure whether their tenuous acquaintance with her (and apprehensive too about whether Swann, whom they had hardly met on more than a single occasion, would recognize them) could justify their daring to greet her. When they plucked up the resolve to do so, they were full of trepidation, in case such a foolhardy and provocative act of sacrilege, slighting the inviolable supremacy of a caste, might set off a catastrophe or bring down upon their heads the thunderbolt of divine retribution. All it did set off, however, in a sort of clockwork reaction, was the gesticulation of many little characters, who suddenly started to bow—Odette’s courtiers, following the example of Swann, who, with the gracious smile once learned in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, but without the indifference that would once have accompanied it, was raising his topper lined with green leather. As though he had been infected by the prejudices of Odette, his former indifference had become both the annoyance of having to acknowledge somebody so badly dressed and the satisfaction of having a wife who knew so many people, mixed feelings which he expressed to the retinue of their fashionable friends: “Another one! I must say, I do wonder where Odette gets these people!” “So it’s really all over between you?” Mme Swann said to me, having nodded at the alarmed passerby, who was now out of sight but whose heart was still palpitating. “You’re never going to come and see Gilberte again? I’m certainly glad you’ve made an exception for me and that I’m not to be completely jilted. I do like it when you come. But I also liked your influence on my daughter. I’m sure she’s sorry about it all too. Still, I’m not going to bully you—you might decide you’d had enough of me too!” “Odette, there’s Sagan⁶⁸ saying good morning to you,” Swann murmured. And there was the Prince, like a knight in an old painting, or as though taking part in a grandiose finale on a theater stage or in a circus ring, making his horse wheel around, and greeting Odette with a grand dramatic gesture that was almost allegorical in its evocation of politeness and chivalry, of the nobleman’s homage to Woman, even though she was embodied in a woman whom his mother or sister would never stoop to frequent. From all sides now, through the liquid transparency and glossy luminosity of the shadow cast on her by the sunshade, Mme Swann was being recognized and greeted by the last of the late riders, who looked as though filmed at a canter against the white midday shimmer of the avenue, members of fashionable clubs, whose names—Antoine de Castellane, Adalbert de Montmorency,⁶⁹ and many more—famous to the public mind, were to Mme Swann the familiar names of her friends. So it is that the average life expectancy, the relative longevity, of memories being much greater for those that commemorate poetic sensation than for those left by the pains of love, the heartbreak I suffered at that time because of Gilberte has faded forever, and has been outlived by the pleasure I derive, whenever I want to read off from a sundial of remembrance the minutes between a quarter past twelve and one o’clock on a fine day in May, from a glimpse of myself chatting with Mme Swann, sharing her sunshade as though standing with her in the pale glow of an arbor of wisteria.