The reference to the “lyfte” had come as no surprise to me: a few days earlier, Bloch having asked me what I was doing in Balbec (he seemed to take it for granted that his own presence there was self-explanatory) and whether I was hoping to “pick up a few useful connections,” and as I had replied that my visit there was the fulfillment of one of my oldest dreams, not quite as strong, however, as my longing to see Venice, he said, “Ah, yes, sitting about with the lovely ladies, sipping sherbet, pretending to read The Stones of Venyce of Lord John Ruskin—a moping monomaniac, by the way, and one of the crashingest bores ever invented.” Bloch clearly thought that in England not only all individuals of the masculine gender were lords, but that the letter i was always pronounced like a y. My new friend Saint-Loup looked on this mispronunciation as nugatory, tending to see it as indicating the mere absence of certain attributes of an elegant class, attributes which he dismissed with a scorn that was as profound as was his own mastery of them. However, his apprehension that one day Bloch would learn not only the proper pronunciation of “Venice” but that Ruskin was no lord, and that with hindsight he might suspect Robert of having thought him ridiculous, made Robert feel as guilty as though he had shown a lack of the considerateness he actually had in abundance; and so, with foresight and his capacity for seeing himself as others might, he felt his own face color with the blush that would darken Bloch’s face on the day when he discovered his mistake. He was pretty sure, of course, that Bloch would see it as much more important than he did. Bloch himself proved this some time later, when he overheard me speak of the “lift” and interrupted me with, “I see—so it’s ‘lift.’ ” To which, in a sharp and supercilious tone, he added, “Anyway—doesn’t matter.” One may hear this statement, which is analogous to a reflex, spoken by all who have a touch of self-esteem, in circumstances which can vary from the trivial to the tragic, and which reveals, as it did on the present occasion, how much the thing that is said not to matter does matter to the speaker; and in the tragic vein, the first thing to come to the lips of any man who takes a certain pride in himself, if his last hope has just been dashed by someone’s refusal to help him out, may well be the brave, forlorn words, “Oh well, it doesn’t matter, not to worry—I’ll think of something else,” the something else that is the alternative to what “doesn’t matter” being sometimes the last resort of suicide.

Bloch’s next words to me were very kind. There can be no doubt that he was trying to be as pleasant as possible. But then he asked, “Tell me, are you hobnobbing with de Saint-Loup-en-Bray because you imagine rising to the level of the nobility? Of course, his branch of the nobility is small beer—but you always were naïve. You must be going through a fine fit of snobbery, eh? Are you a snob, do you think? You are, aren’t you?” It was not that he had suddenly taken leave of his intention to be pleasant. But, his defect being what is known as “bad manners,” it was the one defect he never noticed in himself, the one he thought nobody could be offended by. Taking humankind as a whole, the incidence of the virtues shared by all is no more remarkable than the multiplicity of the defects peculiar to each. It is probably true to say that it is not “common sense that is the commonest thing in the world,”⁴⁵ but common kindness. In the remotest regions, one can be amazed by seeing it suddenly and unexpectedly flower, as one can come upon a single poppy standing all by itself in a little valley, identical to every other poppy in the world, though it has never seen any of them, and has never known anything other than the wind that from time to time ruffles the silk of its lonely scarlet standard. Even if this kindness is so paralyzed by self-interest as to be in abeyance, it still exists; and whenever its functioning is not thwarted by some selfish urge—for example, during the reading of a novel or a newspaper—it opens like a spreading bloom and, even in the heart of someone who, though a murderer in real life, is still easily moved by tribulations in fiction, becomes the wish to succor the weak, the just, and the persecuted. But that variety in faults is no less striking than the similarity in virtues. The most perfect of persons has a particular fault, which gives rise to rage or shock. A man may have an admirable mind, may see all things with the loftiest disinterest and never speak ill of a soul, but he forgets he still has in his pocket the urgent letter he himself offered to mail for you, thus making you miss an appointment of the utmost importance; yet, instead of apologizing, he will smile, because he takes pride in never letting his own life be ruled by the clock. Another one is so considerate, so thoughtful, so mild-mannered, that in conversing with you he only ever speaks of you in ways calculated to cheer you; but you have reason to suspect there are other reflections that he never voices, quite different things about you that he keeps to himself, things that fester in the heart; yet the pleasure he takes in being with you is so great that he will wear you out with kindness rather than leave you alone. Or there is the one whose sincerity is greater, but who takes it so far as to inform you, after you have pleaded ill health as a reason for not visiting him, that you were seen going to the theater, in what appeared to be a state of robust health, or that, since the good turn you tried to do him was only partially successful, and since in any case three other people have already offered to do it, he now feels little sense of obligation toward you. In both of these circumstances, the second friend would have feigned ignorance of your outing to the theater and of the fact that the same good turn could have been done for him by several others. The third friend, having also felt the need to repeat or divulge to someone else something that you have said that can only embarrass you, basks in his own frankness and boasts, “That’s how I am!” And of course there are those who irritate you by their inquisitiveness, or even by their lack of curiosity, which can be so great that, even though you tell them of the most amazing events, they have not the slightest notion of what you are talking about; and there are others who will put off answering your letter for months, as long as it deals with something of concern to you but not to them; or who will let you know they are coming to see you about some matter, which makes you stay at home so as not to miss them, and then do not come, so for weeks you hear nothing more from them, because, not having received from you an answer their letter did not seem to require, they assumed they had offended you in some way. There are people who, heeding their own wishes rather than yours, keep talking without letting you get a word in, if it happens they are in good spirits and are pleased to see you; but the same people, if they, or the weather, are out of sorts, will be struck dumb, meeting your best efforts with languid inertia, no more eager to utter so much as a monosyllable in reply than if they had not heard you speak. Each of our friends is so inseparable from his faults that, if we are to go on liking him, we must leaven them with reminders of his talent, his kind heart, his affectionate ways, or, rather, we must try, by exercising all our goodwill, to overlook them. Unfortunately, this stubborn willingness on our part to overlook the fault in our friend is outweighed by his own dogged persistence in it, he being either blind to himself or convinced that others are blind to him. Either he does not see it or he believes we do not. As the danger of giving offense lies mainly in the difficulty of gauging what will and what will not pass unnoticed, we should make a rule of never speaking of ourselves, given that it is a subject on which we may be sure our own view and that of others will never coincide. On seeing into the real life of another person, learning the truth of an existence that is overlaid by an appearance of truth, we can expect as many surprises as though we were exploring a house of ordinary demeanor that turns out to be full of ill-gotten gains, cat burglar’s jimmies, and corpses; and the opposite surprise can result if, instead of the image of ourselves we have formed from the things others say of us to our face, we discover from what they say in our absence the utterly dissimilar image they have of us and our life. Each time we have spoken of ourselves, we may be sure that our harmless, cautious words, received with ostensible politeness and a pretense of approval, have later inspired a diatribe of unfavorable judgment on us, full of exasperation or hilarity at our expense. If nothing else, we run the risk of being thought irritating, because of the disparity between our idea of ourselves and our words, which is what usually makes the things people say about themselves as laughable as the approximate hummings of would-be music-lovers who, when they feel the need to tra-la-la their favorite piece, have to make up for the meagerness of their inarticulate rendition of it by an energetic pantomime and an air of admiration that is quite out of keeping with the impression they make on their listeners. The bad habit of speaking of oneself and one’s faults should not go without mention of its corollary, the habit of criticizing in others faults closely analogous to our own. These are always the ones we choose to speak of, as though this were an unobtrusive way of speaking of ourselves, one that adds to the pleasure of self-forgiveness the pleasure of confession. It seems too that our attention, constantly attracted to whatever distinguishes us, notices this in others more than anything else. “He can hardly see his hand in front of his face,” says one shortsighted person of another; a consumptive will voice a misgiving about the state of the healthiest man’s lungs; someone who never washes keeps talking about the baths that others never take; the man who stinks says people stink; the deceived husband seeks cuckoldry everywhere; the flighty woman speaks of flighty women; the snob’s talk is of snobs. And of course each vice, like each of the professions, requires and acquires a special knowledge that we are not displeased at being able to display. It takes a homosexual to detect a homosexual; a dressmaker at a fashionable party has not so much as chatted with you, yet he already appreciates the fabric of the clothes you are wearing, and his fingertips itch with the desire to feel it; and if after several moments’ conversation with an odontologist you were to ask him for his true opinion of yourself, he would tell you the number of your bad teeth. To him, there is nothing more important; to you, who have noticed his own bad teeth, there is nothing more ridiculous. It is not only when we speak of ourselves that we think others are blind: we act as though they were. Each of us is watched over by a special god, who hides our fault, or promises us it shall be invisible, just as he masks the eyes and blocks the nostrils of those who never wash, persuading them that they can blithely ignore the tidemark near their ears and the smell of sweat hanging about their armpits, as these will remain imperceptible to the world in which they move. Those who wear or give fake pearls as presents always assume that others will think they are genuine. Bloch was a badmannered, neurotic snob; and since he belonged to a family of no note, he suffered, as though at the bottom of the ocean, from the incalculable pressures bearing upon him from not just the Gentiles on the surface, but the superimposed layers of Jewish society, all more estimable than the one he belonged to, and each of them pouring scorn on the one immediately below itself. To rise to the fresh air, through each level of Jewish families, would have taken Bloch several thousand years. A much better solution was to find a way out in some other direction.

When Bloch spoke of the fit of snobbery I must be having and invited me to own up to being a snob, I could have answered, “If I were a snob, I wouldn’t be mixing with you.” But all I said was that it was not a very nice thing to say. He made an attempt at an apology; but it was of the sort often favored by the ill-mannered man, who is glad to revisit words of his that have given offense, as it gives him the chance to compound the latter. “Do forgive me,” he would say thereafter. “I was a brute, I was horrible to you, I took pleasure in being nasty to you. And yet, mankind in general and your good friend in particular being such a singular animal, you have no idea of the depth of affection for you harbored in this heart of mine. Though I tease you unmercifully, it has been known to move me to tears.” These words he accompanied with a little sob.

There was one thing about Bloch that surprised me more than his tactlessness, and that was how uneven his conversation was. This fellow, who could dismiss the most up-to-the-minute writer with, “The man’s a dismal imbecile, an out-and-out idiot!,” was capable of reveling in unfunny anecdotes and judging a complete mediocrity to be “somebody really interesting.” This dual standard of judgment, applied to the mind, the merit, and the interestingness of people, was something of a mystery to me until the day I met M. Bloch senior.

I had assumed we might never have the privilege of being introduced to him, Bloch the younger having spoken ill of me to Saint-Loup and of Saint-Loup to me. In particular, he had told Saint-Loup that I was (still) a dreadful snob. “Yes, he is, he is, I tell you! He’s beside himself at being acquainted with M. LLLLegrandin.” This habit of Bloch’s, of stressing a certain word, was a marker of both irony and literature. Saint-Loup, who had never heard of Legrandin, said in surprise, “Really? Who’s he?” “Oh, he’s really someone!” said Bloch with a laugh, slipping his hands, as though for warmth, into his jacket pockets, and convinced that what he was witnessing was the quainter side of a petty provincial gentleman more preposterous than any in the pages of Barbey d’Aurevilly.⁴⁶ In his inability to describe M. Legrandin, he contented himself with multiplying his initial consonant and savoring the flavor of the name, like a connoisseur with a mouthful of a fine old vintage. This, however, was a private pleasure, to which others had no access. Having spoken ill of me to Saint-Loup, Bloch then did the same about Saint-Loup to me. It was no later than the following day that each of us learned all about what had been said—not that either of us had repeated Bloch’s statements to the other (that would have seemed too reprehensible to both of us), but Bloch himself thought it would be only natural and inevitable for us to do that; so, in his uneasiness, and in the conviction that he was telling us something we were bound to find out anyway, he chose to take the initiative. Taking Saint-Loup aside, he told him he had spoken ill of him on purpose, but only so that it would get back to him; and he swore, “by the Kroniôn Zeus, keeper of oaths,”⁴⁷ that he was much attached to him, that he would willingly die for him, then wiped away a little tear. That same day, he made a point of seeing me alone, owned up to what he had said about me, insisting that he had acted only for my benefit, because he was firmly of the belief that, for me, there were certain social relations from which nothing good could ever come, and that I “deserved better.” He took my hand, as maudlin as a drunkard, though his intoxication was purely nervous: “Do believe me! May the black Ker carry me off this instant and bear me beyond the gates of Hades, detestable to men, if I did not spend last night weeping for you, in memory of Combray, my inexhaustible affection for you, and certain afternoons at school that you won’t even remember. Yes, there I was, crying all night long! I swear it—but, alas, I speak as one who knows what men are like, and I know you won’t believe me.” I did not believe him, of course; and no great weight was added to words that I knew had been invented on the spot by his invocation of “the black Ker,” as Bloch’s Hellenic cult was a purely literary thing. Besides, every time he felt a touch of maudlin coming over him and wanted you to share a moment’s bogus emotion, he always said, “I swear it!”—not so much with the aim of having you believe he was telling the truth, but, rather, for the hysterical delight he took in telling a lie. So I did not believe him; but I bore him no ill will, as my mother and grandmother had handed down to me not only their inability to bear a grudge, even against those who deserved it more than he did, but their reluctance to condemn anybody.

Not that Bloch was irredeemably flawed; he was in fact capable of acts of great kindness. Now that the Combray breed, the strain from which there once sprang people of utter integrity, like my grandmother and mother, seems all but extinct, and if one’s choice among men is more or less reduced, on the one hand, to uncomplicated troglodytes, unfeeling, straightforward creatures the mere sound of whose voice tells you they have not the slightest interest in any of your concerns, and, on the other, a race of men who, while they are in your company, can sympathize with you, cherish you, be moved to tears by you, and then, a few hours later, contradict all this by making a cruel joke about you, but who can go on being charming toward you, full of understanding, still on the same footing of momentary closeness, then I am inclined to think that, of the two, I prefer men of the latter breed, if not for their human value, at least for their company.

“You’ve no idea,” Bloch would say, “how sad it makes me to think of you. There really is a Jewish streak in me somewhere,” he added with an ironic narrowing of the eyes, as though trying to measure by microscope a minute drop of “Jewish blood,” as might be said (but most certainly never would be) by a great French aristocrat whose exclusively Christian ancestors might just have included a Samuel Bernard,⁴⁸ or, even more remotely, the Virgin Mary herself, from whom all people called Lévy descend, it is said. “Yes, just my Jewish streak coming out. Among my various emotions, I do quite like to be aware of the feeble few that may just derive from my Jewish origins.” He made this statement because it seemed to him both witty and bold to speak the truth about his racial origins, while making sure to mitigate them somewhat, like a miser who, having decided to pay his accumulated debts, can pluck up the courage to settle only half of them. The type of fraudulence that consists of being bold enough to utter a difficult truth while diluting it with enough untruths to falsify it, is more widespread than one might think; and even those who do not make a habit of this may now and then have recourse to it, if some critical episode in life, particularly one involving a love affair, gives them the opportunity.

The outcome of all these confidential diatribes of Bloch’s to Saint-Loup against me, and to me against Saint-Loup, was an invitation to dinner. I think he may even have made a preliminary attempt to invite only Saint-Loup. Everything I know about him makes for the plausibility of this hypothesis; but it was unsuccessful, and it was in the presence of both Saint-Loup and myself that Bloch said one day, “Good my lord, and you, knight favored of Ares, de Saint-Loup-en-Bray, subduer of steeds, since I have met you on this surf-resounding strand of Amphitrite, close by the tents of Menier of the swift ships,⁴⁹ would you both please come to dinner one evening during the week, at the table of my illustrious father of irreproachable heart?” Bloch issued this invitation because of his desire for closer relations with Saint-Loup, who he hoped would give him access to aristocratic circles. If I had been the one to have such a desire, with such an intent, Bloch would have seen it as a mark of the most detestable snobbery, in keeping with the view he had formed of an aspect of my character (an aspect which, at least for the moment, he did not consider to be my most important feature); but the same desire on his part struck him as proof of his own mind’s commendable curiosity about social explorations of a kind that might afford him some literary material. When he informed his father that he was bringing a friend of his to dinner, a friend whose name and title he announced in a tone charged with sarcastic satisfaction, “the Marquis de Saint-Loup-en-Bray,” M. Bloch senior had been seized by a fit of vehement emotion. “The Marquis de Saint-Loup-en-Bray!” he gasped. “Egad!” This was the exclamation which, for him, best expressed deference toward one’s social superiors. The gaze he turned upon this son of his, who was capable of having such friends, was full of admiration and clearly meant: “What an amazing boy! Can such a prodigy really be a son of mine?” The younger Bloch basked in this glory, and looked as though his monthly allowance had just been increased by fifty francs. Within the family, he lived usually in a state of some unease, feeling that his father believed he had gone to the dogs, with his admiration of poets like Leconte de Lisle, Heredia,⁵⁰ and other such “bohemians.” But to be friendly with Saint-Loup-en-Bray, whose father had been the president of the Suez Canal Company (egad!), was an “incontrovertible” advantage. What a pity that the stereoscope, which might have suffered some damage in transit, had been left in Paris! M. Bloch senior was the only one with the skill, or, rather, the right, to make use of the stereoscope. This he did only on rare, judiciously selected occasions, on special gala evenings when they had taken on extra menservants. These stereoscope sessions conferred upon those who attended them a sort of distinction, a feeling of being singled out and privileged, and there devolved upon the host who was responsible for them a form of prestige akin to that accorded to talent, which could not have been greater if the images projected had been taken by M. Bloch himself, or if the instrument had been of his own invention. “You didn’t have an invitation to Salomon’s yesterday?” one member of the family would ask another. “No, I wasn’t one of the chosen few—what was going on?” “Oh, a great bean-feast, with the stereoscope and everything!” “Well, if it was a stereoscope occasion, then I’m sorry to have missed it. I’m told Salomon is just brilliant with it.” “But look here,” M. Bloch senior said to his son, “it will be better not to give him everything all at once. Then he’ll still have something to look forward to.” M. Bloch, like a good father who wishes to do right by his son, had certainly considered sending for the apparatus. However, time was “of the essence,” or so they thought; but then the dinner had to be postponed, as Saint-Loup could not get away, one of his uncles being expected in Balbec to spend forty-eight hours with Mme de Villeparisis. This uncle was very fond of physical exercise, especially in the form of long walks; and so, as he was coming on foot from the château where he was at present a guest, sleeping overnight at farmhouses along the way, the timing of his arrival at Balbec was rather uncertain. Saint-Loup, who did not wish to risk missing him, even asked me to go to Incarville, where there was a telegraph office, and send the dispatch he was in the habit of cabling every day to his mistress. The expected uncle was called Palamède, a name handed down from the princes of Sicily, his ancestors. In later life, whenever I read historical texts that contained this name, a fine medallion of the Renaissance—some said a genuine antique—a name borne by some podestà or prince of the Church, which had always remained in the family, being handed on from descendant to descendant, from the chancellery of the Vatican right down to my friend’s uncle, I would experience the special pleasure savored by those who, in their inability to afford a collection of medals or to constitute a private gallery of artworks, cultivate instead a passion for old names (place-names, as documentary and picturesque as an out-of-date map or isometric projection, a tradesman’s sign, or a customary; and baptismal names, with their fine French final syllables, in which one still hears the ring of the long-standing mutilations that our ancestors, by speech defects, the intonation of some ethnic vulgarity, or mispronunciation, inflicted on Latin and Saxon words, in a way that later elevated them into the grammarians’ noble statutes), repertoires of antique sonorities that enable them to enjoy private concerts, like those people who acquire a viola da gamba or viola d’amore so as to play ancient music on period instruments. Saint-Loup told me that, even within the most exclusive aristocratic circles, his uncle Palamède was distinguished by being even more exclusive, peculiarly difficult to get to know, disdainful, infatuated with his own nobility, and at the center of a group that included his brother’s wife and a few other hand-picked associates, known as the Circle of the Phoenixes. Even within that inner circle, he was so dreaded for his insolent words that in the past, when fashionable people seeking an introduction had on occasion approached his brother, the latter had been known to refuse out of hand. “No, please don’t ask me for an introduction to Palamède. Even if my wife were to try on your behalf, even if any or all of us were to try, it would be pointless. Or else there would be the danger of his being less than friendly, and I would prefer to avoid that.” At the Jockey Club, with a few friends, the uncle had drawn up a list of two hundred members whom he would never permit to be introduced to him. In the household of the Comte de Paris, he was dubbed “the Prince,” in virtue of his elegance and his haughtiness.

Saint-Loup told me something of his uncle’s younger days, long past. He had shared an apartment with two friends who were as handsome as he was, which was why they were known as “the Three Graces”; and every day he would bring women to it.

“One day, a fellow who has nowadays become what Balzac would have called “one of the most prominent members of the Faubourg Saint-Germain,” but who in those early days went through an unfortunate period when he showed rather untoward tendencies, made an appointment with my uncle at the apartment. When he got there, the fellow made his intentions quite clear—but toward my uncle Palamède, not toward the women! My uncle pretended not to understand, then on some pretext or other sent for his two friends. They turned up, took the miscreant, stripped the clothes off him, beat him till his blood ran red, then kicked him out—it was ten below zero, and when he was found he was lucky to be alive. The police started an investigation, and the fellow had great difficulty in getting them to drop it. These days, my uncle would never have anything to do with such a cruel punishment—despite his unapproachability with people of his own station, you’ve no idea of the number of working-class men whom he takes a liking to, whom he takes under his wing, though he may well get no thanks for it in the end. A footman who attends him in a hotel somewhere and whom he’ll set up in Paris; a peasant lad whom he gets apprenticed to a trade—that sort of thing. It’s just this rather nice side of his nature, as opposed to his society side.” Saint-Loup was one of those young men of fashion who live at an altitude where certain expressions can take root and grow—for instance, “the rather nice side of his nature” or “there’s rather a nice thing about him,” somewhat precious blooms, which soon turn into a way of seeing things that reduces oneself to nothing, while exalting “the proletariat”; quite the opposite, in fact, of the plebeian’s pride in his origins. “It seems we have no idea of the way he used to set the trends as a young man, the standards he set for the whole of society. At all times, he only ever did what was convenient, what struck him as enjoyable, but whatever it was, it was instantly imitated by all the snobs. If he felt thirsty at the theater, say, and sent out for a drink to be brought to him in his box, the following week all the little sitting rooms behind the boxes were full of refreshments. Or one rather wet summer, when he’d had a touch of rheumatism, he wanted a vicuña overcoat—it’s a cloth that is soft but warm, normally used only for traveling rugs—and the one he got still had the blue-and-orange stripes on it. All the best tailors were immediately inundated with orders for shaggy blue overcoats with a fringe. On another occasion, if he was spending a day or two at a château, he might turn up without his tails, because for some reason he felt like dining without any great ceremony; and so he would go in to dinner wearing his town clothes, and in country houses it became the fashion not to change for dinner. If he took to eating his cake not with a spoon but with a fork, or some other instrument of his own design, specially made for him by a goldsmith, or even with his fingers, then it was soon inconceivable not to do likewise. Once, when he wanted to be reminded of some of the quartets of Beethoven (despite his preposterous ideas, he’s no fool, he’s a gifted man), he just got a group of musicians to come to his house each week, and they played them for him and a few of his friends.⁵¹ So the really elegant thing that year was to hold very select little gatherings with chamber music. I’m pretty sure he’s had a fair amount of pleasure in life. A man as handsome as he was—think of the number of women he must have had! I’ve no idea who they were, as he’s a very discreet man. But I do know he was very unfaithful to my late aunt. Mind you, he was also very attentive and charming toward her, and she adored him, and after her death he was inconsolable for a long time. Even now, when he’s in Paris, he still visits the cemetery nearly every day.”

On the morning after Robert told me these things about this expected uncle, who had eventually failed to materialize, I was walking back to the hotel when, right in front of the Casino, I had a sudden feeling of being looked at by someone at quite close quarters. I glanced around and saw a very tall, rather stout man of about forty, with a jetblack mustache, who stood there nervously flicking a cane against the leg of his trousers and staring at me with eyes dilated by the strain of attention. At times, they seemed shot through with intense, darting glances of a sort which, when directed toward a total stranger, can only ever be seen from a man whose mind is visited by thoughts that would never occur to anyone else, a madman, say, or a spy. He flashed a final look at me, like the parting shot from one who turns to run, daring, cautious, swift, and searching; then, having gazed all about, with a sudden air of idle haughtiness, his whole body made a quick side-turn and he began a close study of a poster, humming the while and rearranging the moss rose in his buttonhole. From his pocket he produced a little notebook, and appeared to write down the title of the performance advertised; he looked a couple of times at his fob watch; he pulled his black straw hat lower on his brow and held his hand to the rim of it like a visor, as though looking out for someone he was expecting; he made the gesture of irritation that is meant to suggest one has had enough of waiting, but which one never makes when one has really been waiting; then, pushing back his hat to reveal close-cropped hair with rather long, waved side-wings, he breathed out noisily, as people do, not when they are too hot, but when they wish it to be thought they are too hot. It crossed my mind that he might be a hotel thief who, having perhaps noticed me and my grandmother over the last few days, and having some dishonest intent, had just realized I had noticed him while he was watching my movements; and, so as to put me off the scent, he may only have been trying to express absentmindedness and nonchalance, but he did it with such marked exaggeration that his purpose appeared to be not just to disarm suspicion, but also to avenge some humiliation I had inflicted upon him unawares, to make me think not so much that he had not seen me, but that I was so insignificant an object that he could not be bothered to pay the slightest attention to me. He had drawn himself up with a challenging air, setting his lips in a sneer, twirling his mustache, and charging his eye with something hard and indifferent, something close to insulting. It was the strangeness of his expression that made me think he must be a thief, if not a madman. Yet his way of dressing, which was the acme of good taste, was both much more serious and much more simple than that of any of the bathers I saw at Balbec, as well as being something of a comfort to me in my suit, which had so often been humiliated by the bright and banal whiteness of their beach outfits. My grandmother now appeared, and we went for a little walk. An hour later, she having gone back in for a moment, I was waiting for her outside the hotel when I saw Mme de Villeparisis come out in the company of Robert de Saint-Loup and the stranger who had stared at me near the Casino. His glance flashed rapidly through me just as before; then, as though he had not seen me, it lowered, seemed to settle somewhere outside his eyes, dull and neutral, like a look that feigns to see nothing outside itself, and is incapable of seeing anything inside, the look expressing nothing but the satisfaction of knowing it is edged by eyelashes, among which it merely sits, roundly pleased with its own crass candor, the smug and sanctimonious look of certain hypocrites, the conceited look of certain fools. I saw that he had changed his clothes: the suit he now wore was even darker than the other one—no doubt true elegance is closer to simplicity than is false elegance, but there was something else about him: at close range, one sensed that the almost complete absence of color from his clothes came not from any indifference to color, but because, for some reason, he deprived himself of it. The sobriety apparent in his clothing gave the impression of deriving from a self-imposed diet, rather than from any lack of appetite. In the fabric of his trousers, a fine stripe of dark green harmonized with a line visible in his socks, the refinement of this touch revealing the intensity of a preference which, though suppressed everywhere else, had been tolerated in that one form as a special concession, whereas a red design in the cravat remained as imperceptible as a liberty not quite taken, a temptation not quite succumbed to.

“How are you? Allow me to introduce my nephew, the Baron de Guermantes,” said Mme de Villeparisis. The gentleman so named, without looking at me, mumbled a vague “How d’you do?” which he followed with “Hmmm, hmmm,” as though to mark the fact that this politeness had been forced upon him; then, withholding his thumb, his little finger, and his index finger, he proffered the other two, neither of which bore a ring, and which I shook through his suede glove. Then, still without having given me a glance, he turned his eyes to Mme de Villeparisis.

“Good heavens!” she exclaimed. “What am I saying? Baron de Guermantes indeed! Allow me to introduce my nephew, the Baron de Charlus! Not that it’s a very heinous error—you are, after all, a Guermantes.”

My grandmother appeared, and we all walked along the road together. Saint-Loup’s uncle neither spoke a single word to me nor gave me so much as a glance. Though he glared at strangers (two or three times during our brief stroll, he flashed his awesome and searching eye deep into the heart of nondescript passersby of the most humble extraction), he was in the habit, if his attitude toward me was any guide to his behavior, of avoiding at all moments the eye of people he knew, like a police officer on a secret mission who excludes his friends from the scope of his professional observations. I fell back a little with Saint-Loup, letting the uncle walk on with my grandmother and Mme de Villeparisis:

“Tell me—did I hear right? Madame de Villeparisis said to your uncle that he was a Guermantes.”

“But of course—he’s Palamède de Guermantes.”

“Do you mean the same Guermantes family who have a château near Combray and who claim descent from Geneviève de Brabant?”

“Absolutely. My uncle, who’s terribly heraldic, would soon let you know that our ‘cry,’ our war cry, which later became Passavant, was originally Combraysis,”⁵² Saint-Loup said with a laugh, which was meant to forestall any suspicion that he might take pride in sharing in the prerogative of the “cry,” enjoyed only by houses of nearly royal status, by the greatest warlords. “He is the brother of the present owner of the château.”

Mme de Villeparisis was therefore related, and very closely at that, to the Guermantes, though she had for such a long time been only the lady who, when I was little, had given me a duck holding a box of chocolate, more remote in those days from the Guermantes way than if she had been enclosed in the Méséglise way, less splendid, less highly valued by me than the optician of Combray, but now suddenly experiencing one of those fantastic elevations, the corollary of equally unexpected devaluations of other objects in our possession, which, whether rising or falling, fill our adolescence and the parts of our lives in which a little of our adolescence lives on with metamorphoses as numerous as those Ovid speaks of.

“And doesn’t the château contain busts of all the former lords of Guermantes?”

“Yes, it’s a grand spectacle!” Saint-Loup said ironically. “Between ourselves, I think all that sort of thing is just a little quaint. But one thing there is at Guermantes that’s really interesting is a very touching portrait of my aunt by Carrière.⁵³ It’s every bit as good as anything by Whistler or Velázquez,” he added, the tyro’s enthusiasm getting the better, as it sometimes did, of his sense of proportion. “And there are other canvases, very stirring ones, by Gustave Moreau.⁵⁴ My aunt is the niece of your friend Mme de Villeparisis, who brought her up, and she then married her cousin, the present Duc de Guermantes, who is also a nephew of my aunt de Villeparisis.”

“So what’s your uncle?”

“He bears the title of Baron de Charlus. Strictly speaking, at the death of my great-uncle, my uncle Palamède should have taken the title of Prince des Laumes, which was his brother’s before he in his turn became the Duc de Guermantes—the people in my family change their titles the way other people change their shirts. However, my uncle has his own way of thinking on such things: he takes the view that there are rather too many Italian duchies and Spanish grandees and the like, and so, though he could have chosen any one of four or five titles that would have made him Prince of This or That, he remained plain Baron de Charlus, as a sort of protest, but with a lot of pride concealed under the apparent simplicity of it. ‘Nowadays,’ he says, ‘when every Tom, Dick, or Harry is a prince, one requires something else with which to differentiate oneself. I’ll keep my “Prince” for when I’m traveling incognito.’ According to him, there’s no title as ancient as Baron de Charlus: if he undertakes to prove to you that it’s older than the titles of the Montmorency family, who falsely claim to be the first Barons of France, when all they were was Barons of Île-de-France,⁵⁵ because that’s where their feudal lands were, he’ll take a delight in inundating you, submerging you with facts and figures about it. It must be said that, although he’s very clever, very gifted, he thinks that’s a brilliant topic of conversation,” Saint-Loup said with a smile. “But I’m not like him, and you’re not going to get me to talk for hours about genealogies—life is too short to spend it prattling about boring, out-of-date nonsense like that.”

I now realized that the fierce stare that had attracted my attention earlier that afternoon outside the Casino was the one I had seen at Tansonville, when Mme Swann had called out the name of Gilberte.

“Did Mme Swann ever happen to be one of the many mistresses you say your uncle, M. de Charlus, used to have?”

“Oh, no, absolutely not! He’s a great friend of Swann’s, that is, and has always stood by him, but no one has ever suggested he might have been the wife’s lover. You would create consternation in the ranks of society if it was thought you believed that.”

I did not dare reply that I would have created greater consternation in Combray if it was thought I did not believe it.

My grandmother was delighted with M. de Charlus. There was no doubt that he did attach extreme importance to all matters of birth and social status; but her awareness of this was uncolored by any of the severe disapproval that is the mark of a secret envy and the vexation of seeing someone else enjoying advantages one would like to enjoy, but which are out of reach. My grandmother, quite content with her lot in life, untroubled by any wish to live in grander society, exercised on M. de Charlus only her mind, which enabled her to observe his foibles and to speak of this uncle of Saint-Loup with the benevolent, smiling detachment that is close to affection, and is our way of rewarding the object of our disinterested observation for the pleasures we find in it, in this case especially because the object was a personage full of pretensions which, though possibly misplaced, she found at least picturesque, and which sharply differentiated him from all the other people with whom she usually had occasion to mix. But there were things in M. de Charlus, such as intelligence and sensibility, which one sensed were of acute potency, distinguishing him from the many society people whom Saint-Loup found painfully amusing; and it was especially these things that made my grandmother so indulgent toward his aristocratic bias. Unlike the nephew, the uncle had not sacrificed this preference to values seen as higher: he had reconciled it with them. In his capacity as descendant of the Ducs de Nemours and the Princes de Lamballe, he owned archives, furniture, tapestries, portraits painted for his ancestors by Raphael, Velázquez, or Boucher, and could quite properly have said, when merely glancing over a few family souvenirs, that he was visiting a museum or some grand library; and it was this rich heritage of the aristocracy that he valued so highly and his nephew so little. In addition, there being less of the ideologue in him than in Saint-Loup, less readiness to take fine words at face value, more realism in his judgment of men, he may have been loath to neglect something that they see as essential to prestige, something that, as well as affording its disinterested delights to his imagination, could also be powerfully effective as an aid to his practical purposes. There is no common ground between men of his sort and those who aspire to an inner ideal that urges them to divest themselves of such advantages and to devote themselves solely to it, who thereby show a similarity with painters or writers who renounce their virtuosity, artistic peoples who embrace modernization, warlike peoples who opt for total disarmament, dictatorial governments that turn democratic and repeal harsh laws, though often the world will not reward them for this noble effort: some lose their talent, some their hereditary predominance; pacifism can lead to war, and indulgence can foster crime. However noble and sincere the impulse of Saint-Loup toward emancipation, when one saw the result, one was convinced that it was just as well it was not shared by M. de Charlus, who had had most of the admirable wood paneling transferred from the Guermantes family hôtel to his own house, rather than replace it, as his nephew had done, with an Art Nouveau décor and paintings by Lebourg and Guillaumin. ⁵⁶ Even so, M. de Charlus’s ideal was factitious in the extreme, and—if one may say such a thing of an ideal—it was one that aspired toward the fashionable world as much as to the world of art. In certain women who were exceptionally beautiful and extraordinarily cultivated, whose great-great-grandmothers, two centuries before, had been part of the full glory and elegance of the ancien régime, he perceived a form of distinction that made them the only women whose company he found at all pleasant; and though no doubt this admiration was sincere, it was colored by the reminders of history and art that rang for him in their names, just as reminders of antiquity may explain the pleasure a cultured man enjoys in an ode of Horace, though it may be inferior to poems of our own day that leave him indifferent. In the view of M. de Charlus, a pretty woman of the middle classes, in relation to any of these women, was like a contemporary painting of a road or a wedding party in relation to an old master, the history of which we know, from the pope or the king who commissioned it to the various personages in whose company it has lived, as a result of donation, purchase, legacy, or looting, and because of which it can recall an event or at least a union of two houses, some historical interest, some element of learning, all of which adds to it an extra dimension of usefulness, and increases our appreciation of the richness of what we can possess through memory or erudition. M. de Charlus drew comfort too from the fact that a similar bias to his own prevented these few great ladies from frequenting other women of lesser breeding, thus enabling him to worship them in their unimpaired nobility, as intact as an eighteenth-century façade still supported by its shallow columns of pink marble, unchanged in any particular by modern times.

In celebrating the true nobility of mind and heart of these women, M. de Charlus was playing on a double meaning of the word, which deceived him, and in which there lay not only the falseness of such a misbegotten notion, this medley of aristocracy, magnanimity, and art, but also its dangerous attractiveness for people such as my grandmother, in whose eyes the flagrant but harmless prejudice of the noble who attends to the number of quarterings in another man’s escutcheon, and for whom nothing else counts, would have seemed too ridiculous; but she was susceptible to something masquerading as a spiritual superiority, which was why she thought princes were the most blessed of men, in that they could have as their tutor a La Bruyère or a Fénelon.⁵⁷

The three Guermantes took their leave of us in front of the Grand-Hôtel; they were going to lunch with the Princess of Luxembourg. While my grandmother, Saint-Loup, and Mme de Villeparisis were saying their farewells, M. de Charlus, who had still not spoken a syllable to me, dropped back a few steps and said, “This evening, after dinner, in the rooms of my aunt de Villeparisis, I shall take tea. I hope you will do me the pleasure of attending, in the company of your grandmother.” He then rejoined the Marquise.

Though it was a Sunday, there were no more cabs in front of the hotel than at the beginning of the season. The wife of the notary from Le Mans, in particular, was of the opinion that it was rather expensive to hire a carriage once a week so as not to go to the Cambremers’, and she preferred to stay in her room all day instead.

“Is Mme Blandais not well, then?” people asked the notary. “We haven’t seen her all day.”

“She has a slight headache.... The heat, you know, this stormy weather. The slightest thing ... But I expect you’ll see her tonight. I’ve suggested she should come down. I’m sure it would do her good.”

I imagined that M. de Charlus, by inviting us to the suite of his aunt, whom he had no doubt consulted on the matter, intended to make amends for his discourtesy toward me during our walk that morning. Yet, when I arrived in Mme de Villeparisis’s sitting room and attempted to greet her nephew, however hard I tried to catch his eye, I found it impossible: he just went on recounting in a shrill voice a rather disobliging story about one of his relatives. I decided to bid him good evening in a loud voice, so that he could be aware of my presence, but I soon saw that he had noticed me: just as I was about to bow, and before a word had passed my lips, I saw his two fingers extended for me to grasp, although he had not even glanced toward me or stopped talking. He had obviously seen me, but had given no hint of it, which was what made me realize that his eyes, which never met those of the person with whom he was speaking, were in constant motion in all directions, like the eyes of some animals when frightened, or those of peddlers who, while they recite their patter and display their illicit wares, manage to study all the points of the compass without so much as looking around, in case the police are about. I was also rather surprised to see that Mme de Villeparisis, though pleased to see us come in, had seemed not to have been expecting us; and then I was even more surprised to hear M. de Charlus say to my grandmother, “Well, how nice of you to think of dropping in like this! Isn’t it charming of them, Aunt?” He must have noticed Mme de Villeparisis’s expression of surprise at our arrival and thought, as a man accustomed to setting the tone, that to turn her surprise into pleasure all he had to do was make it plain that he himself took pleasure in the present circumstance, and that pleasure was an appropriate response. In this he was a good judge, for Mme de Villeparisis, who greatly esteemed her nephew and knew how hard to please he was, instantly appeared to discover new qualities in my grandmother and welcomed her with open arms. It was difficult to accept that, in the few hours which had passed since the morning, M. de Charlus could have forgotten an invitation which, though curtly delivered, had had all the appearances of being intentional and premeditated, and that he should now say my grandmother was just “dropping in,” when it was he who had asked us to come! With a respect for the facts, which I retained until the day when I realized that the truth about a man’s motive is not to be got from him by direct questioning, and that the damage likely to be done by a misunderstanding that could pass unnoticed may well be less than that done by naïve persistence, I said to him, “Surely you must remember, sir, that it was you who asked us to come this evening?” He gave no hint, either by word or movement, of having heard me. So I repeated my question, like a diplomat or a youngster who, after a falling out, tries and tries again, with indefatigable but futile goodwill, to reason with someone who is determined not to be reasoned with. M. de Charlus persisted in not replying. I thought I could see a smile flicker about his lips: the smile of the man who looks down from a great height on the characters and manners of lesser men.

In the face of M. de Charlus’s refusal to explain himself, I was reduced to conjecture, though I knew that none of the possible explanations which came to mind might be the right one. Perhaps he did not remember; perhaps I had misheard what he had said that morning.... It appeared more likely that it was his pride making him wish to avoid appearing to seek out people whom he despised, and that he therefore shrugged off onto them the idea that they should come to visit. But if he despised us, why had he wanted us to come—or, rather, since he addressed not a syllable to me all evening and spoke only to my grandmother, why had he wanted her to come? Sitting almost behind her and Mme de Villeparisis, and all but hidden by them, as though in a theater box, he contented himself from time to time with glancing away from them and letting his penetrating eye rest on my face, which it investigated with an air of gravity and preoccupation, as though I were a manuscript full of indecipherable things.

If it had not been for his eyes, M. de Charlus’s face would have been similar to those of many handsome men. When, at a later date, Saint-Loup said, of other men of the Guermantes family, “I tell you, there’s not one of them who has my uncle Palamède’s air of breeding, that look of being every inch a peer,” confirming for me that there was nothing mysterious or new in a thoroughbred air and aristocratic bearing, that these consisted of elements I had already recognized without difficulty, without experiencing any special emotion, I was to sense the fading of one of my illusions. However, although M. de Charlus was careful to keep a hermetic seal on the expression of his face, to which a faint dusting of powder gave something theatrical, his eyes were like a crack in a wall, or a loophole in a fortification, which he had been unable to close up, and through which, depending on one’s position with regard to him, one felt oneself to be suddenly in the line of fire of some inner device that seemed potentially perilous, even for the person who, without having it completely under his control, carried it about with him in a state of permanent instability and readiness to explode; and the expression in his eyes, circumspect and incessantly uneasy, left on his face, whatever its fineness of design and construction, deep marks of fatigue, including dark circles hanging low under them, and made one think of an incognito, a disguise adopted by a powerful man threatened by some danger, or at times just of an individual who was dangerous but tragic. I wished I could guess what this secret was that other men did not have to bear, which had made such an enigma of the very first look he had shot at me near the Casino. Now that I knew something of his family history, I could no longer entertain the notion that it was the glance of a thief; and, having listened to his conversation, I was sure he was no madman. That he should be so cold to me, while being so amiable with my grandmother, might have nothing to do with any personal antipathy, for generally speaking he was as well disposed toward women (whose faults he could speak of without in any way departing from his habitual indulgence in their favor) as he was disgusted by men, and especially young men, his violent criticisms of whom were of the sort that some misogynists reserve for the opposite sex. When Saint-Loup happened to mention the names of two or three gigolos who were relations or friends of his, M. de Charlus said, with an expression close to ferocity, which was markedly different from his customary lack of warmth, “They are nasty little beasts!” I gathered that the thing he disliked most about young men of today was their effeminacy. “They are just women,” he said scornfully. But the life led by any man would have seemed effeminate compared with the kind of life he would have preferred to see men lead, ever more energetic and virile. (During the long walks he enjoyed, after hiking for hours, his body burning, he would throw himself into icy streams.) He even disliked it if a man wore a ring on his finger. Not that this bias in favor of virility prevented him from having some of the finest qualities of sensibility. Mme de Villeparisis asked him to describe for my grandmother a château where Mme de Sévigné had stayed, adding that she detected a fair amount of writer’s posturing in the despair the letter-writer expresses at being separated from that tedious Mme de Grignan.⁵⁸

“There I must disagree,” M. de Charlus said. “It seems to me to be completely genuine. Also, it was a time when such sentiments were better appreciated. You might well think, my dear aunt, that in La Fontaine, the inhabitant of Monomotapa hurrying to see his friend because of a dream in which he had seemed a little sad, or the pigeon who thinks the greatest of misfortunes is the absence of the other pigeon,⁵⁹ are as exaggerated as Mme de Sévigné in her impatience for the moment when she can be alone with her daughter. Think of what she says on leaving her: ‘This separation pains me to the soul, and I feel it like an ache in the body. In absence, we make free with the hours: we live already in the time we long for.’⁶⁰ Is it not beautiful?” My grandmother was delighted to hear Mme de Sévigné’s Letters spoken of exactly as she would have spoken of them herself. She was amazed that a man could appreciate them so well; and she detected in M. de Charlus feminine sensitivity and intuitions. Later, when she and I were alone together, we agreed that he must have been profoundly influenced by a wife, his mother, or perhaps a daughter, if he had had any. “A mistress,” was what I thought, remembering the influence I believed Saint-Loup’s mistress must have had on him, which enabled me to have an idea of what power for the refinement of men is given to the women they lived with.

“Oh, once she was back together with her daughter,” said Mme de Villeparisis, “she probably had nothing to say to her.”

“Nothing of the kind,” said M. de Charlus. “She would have said the sort of things she says are ‘so slight that none, save you and I, ever notices them.’⁶¹ And in any case, she was with her, which, as La Bruyère says, is the most essential thing in life: ‘To be with those one loves is enough: to talk with them or not to talk with them is all the same.’⁶² He’s right—it is the only happiness,” he added in a melancholy tone. “Life is, alas, so badly arranged that we rarely enjoy that happiness. Mme de Sévigné was actually better off than most: she spent much of her life with a loved one.”

“You’re forgetting that it wasn’t love, though—it was just her daughter.”

“But the important thing in life is not whom one loves,” he exclaimed, in a voice that was authoritative, peremptory, almost cutting. “The important thing is to love. The feelings of Mme de Sévigné for her daughter can more properly deserve the name of the passion depicted by Racine in Andromaque or Phèdre than the paltry goings-on between the young Sévigné and his mistresses. The same goes for the love of a mystic for his God. The limits we set to love are too restrictive and derive solely from our great ignorance of life.”

“Do you really like Andromaque and Phèdre, then?” Saint-Loup asked his uncle in a tone of slight disdain.

“There is more truth in a single tragedy by Racine than in all the melodramas of M. Victor Hugo put together,” M. de Charlus replied.

“Aren’t fashionable people the limit?” Saint-Loup murmured to me. “Preferring Racine to Victor! I ask you!” He was sincerely dejected by what his uncle had said, but the pleasure of saying “the limit” and especially “I ask you” was of some consolation to him.

In expressing these views on the sadness of the life lived without the loved one (views which led my grandmother to say to me later that the nephew of Mme de Villeparisis was in some ways a better judge of books than his aunt, and in particular that there was something in him that made him far superior to the majority of clubmen), M. de Charlus not only showed a delicacy of sentiment that is indeed rarely to be found in a man; but his very voice, like certain contralto voices in which the middle register has been insufficiently trained and which, in song, sounds rather like an antiphonal duet between a young man and a woman, rose as he expressed these subtle insights to higher notes, took on an unexpected gentleness, and seemed to echo choirs of brides and loving sisters. This bevy of girls which M. de Charlus, with his horror of effeminacy, would have been dismayed to know took over his voice, played a part not only in his interpretation and modulation of the passages full of sentiment. While he spoke, one could often hear their light laughter, the giggling of coquettes or schoolgirls full of pranks, mischief, and teasing talk.

He spoke of an estate that had once belonged to his family, with a house in which Marie-Antoinette had slept and a park designed by Le Nôtre,⁶³ now in the possession of the Israels, the wealthy financiers who had bought it. “Israel, at least that’s the name borne by the persons in question, although it does seem to me to be not a proper name, but a generic or ethnic term. Who knows, it may be that such people do not have names. Perhaps they are identified only insofar as they belong to a particular grouping? However!” he shrieked. “Just think—to have been the dwelling of the Guermantes and to be owned by the Israels! It puts one in mind of the room in the château at Blois where the guide showing you around says, ‘And now this here is where your Mary Queen of Scots used to say her prayers, and now it’s where I keeps me brooms.’ Naturally, I now have not the slightest wish to have any knowledge of that house, which has disgraced itself, just as I have no desire for contact with my cousin Clara de Chimay, who has left her husband.⁶⁴ However, I do keep a photograph of the house as it was when unsullied, just as I have one of the Princesse de Chimay taken at a time when her great eyes were full of no one but the cousin of mine who married her. Photography acquires a certain dignity, which it does not normally have, when it is not just a reproduction of reality but can show us things that no longer exist. I could give you a copy,” he added to my grandmother, “since you have an interest in that manner of architecture.” At that moment, noticing that his embroidered handkerchief was revealing part of its colored edging, he thrust it back into his pocket with a startled glance, like a prudish but not innocent woman concealing bodily charms that in her excessive modesty she sees as wanton. “Can you believe,” he said, “that the first thing those Israel persons did was lay waste Le Nôtre’s park? Why, it’s like defacing a canvas by Poussin! The place for such people is behind bars. Although, of course,” he added with a smile after a moment of silence, “there are probably plenty of other reasons why they should be behind bars! However! I leave to your imagination the effect produced by an English-style garden in front of the architecture of such a house!”

“Well, actually,” said Mme de Villeparisis, “the architecture of the house is the same as that of the Petit Trianon at Versailles. That didn’t stop Marie-Antoinette from having her English garden in front of it.”⁶⁵

“Yes,” said M. de Charlus. “And it completely spoils the façade, which is by Gabriel. Obviously it would be an act of barbarism if anyone were nowadays to raze Marie-Antoinette’s English cottages. But whichever fad each day may bring, I do find it difficult to believe that a passing fancy of a Mme Israel could have the same value as a memento of the Queen.”

My grandmother had signaled to me that it was time for bed, despite the protests of Saint-Loup, who, to my great shame, had been referring in his uncle’s hearing to the feelings of evening sorrow that often afflicted me around bedtime; and I was sure that M. de Charlus would think this was very unmanly of me. I delayed for a few minutes, then went off to bed. Not long afterward, having heard a knock at my bedroom door and having asked who was there, I was surprised to hear the voice of M. de Charlus say in a sharp tone:

“Charlus here. May I come in, monsieur?” Then, having stepped in and closed the door, he said in the same tone, “Monsieur, my nephew said you might be rather unsettled before getting to sleep. He also tells me you are a great admirer of the books of Bergotte, and since I happened to have in my trunk a Bergotte that is very likely unfamiliar to you, I have brought it for you, in the hope that it may help you feel better at a time you find distressful.”

I thanked M. de Charlus with all the effusion at my command and told him that my fear had been that Saint-Loup’s words about my disquiet at nightfall might have made him think me more of a fool than I was.

“Not at all,” he replied in a gentler voice. “You may well be devoid of personal worth, but in that case you’re like nearly everyone else! However, at least for a time you have youth, and youth is always irresistible. Moreover, young man, it is the height of stupidity to think there is something ridiculous or reprehensible in feelings one does not share. I love the night and you say you dread it. I love the scent of roses, yet I have a friend in whom it sets off a fever. Do you suppose that, for me, that makes him a lesser man than I am? I strive to understand everything and do not allow myself to condemn anything. However! Do not feel too sorry for yourself. Not that I would ever maintain that such dejection as yours is not hard to bear—I know how much one can suffer for things others could never understand. But at least you have your grandmother to whom to entrust your affection. You can see her all the time. And it is a permissible mode of affection, I mean a requited love. There are so many other modes of affection of which one cannot say the same!”

He was striding about the room, lifting or staring at an object here or there. I felt he had something he wanted to say to me but that he could not find the right words.

“I have another volume of Bergotte with me,” he said as he rang the bell. “I’ll just get it for you.” A page appeared, to whom M. de Charlus said haughtily, “Fetch me the butler, boy. He’s the only one around here who’s clever enough to run an errand.” “Do you mean M. Aimé, monsieur?” asked the page. “I do not know the fellow’s name! But, now you mention it, yes, I seem to remember he’s called Aimé. Look sharp—it’s urgent!” “He’ll be here straight away, monsieur. I saw him downstairs just now,” said the page, wishing to appear efficient. After a moment, he came back: “M. Aimé is in bed, monsieur. But I could do the errand instead.” “No, you must get him out of bed.” “Monsieur, I can’t. He doesn’t sleep at the hotel.” “In that case, leave us.” “Monsieur,” I said when the page had left, “you are too kind—a single volume of Bergotte will suffice.” “Yes, I agree, actually.” M. de Charlus was still striding up and down. Several minutes went by; then, after hesitating for a few moments and making as though to leave several times, he swung round and made his exit, calling out in his former scathing voice, “I bid you good evening, monsieur!” After all the elevated sentiments I had heard him express that evening, he amazed me on the beach the following morning: just before he was to leave Balbec, and as I was about to go in for a swim, he came down to tell me my grandmother would like to see me as soon as I came out of the water, and as he spoke he pinched me on the neck, with a most vulgar laugh and air of familiarity:

“Who’s the naughty little rascal, then, who couldn’t care less about what his old granny wants?”

“I adore her, monsieur!”

“Monsieur,” he said icily, stepping back, “you are young! But you should take advantage of your youth to learn two things: The first is that you should abstain from expressing sentiments that are too natural not to be taken for granted. And the second is that it is a mistake to get on one’s high horse and take offense at things said to one before one has properly understood their meaning. Had you taken that precaution just now, you might have contrived not to appear to be giving voice at random, speaking without rhyme or reason, and thereby compounding the ludicrousness of wearing that bathing suit with anchors embroidered upon it! I lent you a volume of Bergotte which I need to have back. Send it to me within the hour by the butler with the hilarious and undeserved Christian name,⁶⁶ who, one assumes, is not in bed at this time of day. You have made me aware that, in speaking as I did last evening of the irresistibleness of youth, I spoke too soon—I should have done you a greater service had I pointed out youth’s foolishness, its inconsistencies, and its wrongheadedness! I trust, monsieur, that this little dressing down will prove as beneficial to you as your dip in the sea. However! You must not stand about like that—you might catch cold. I bid you good day, sir!”

M. de Charlus must have regretted his words, for some time later I received another copy—morocco-bound and with a panel of incised leather on its front cover showing a sprig of forget-me-not in halfrelief—of the book that he had lent me and which, it being Aimé’s day off, I had asked the “lift” to take back to him.

M. de Charlus having departed, Robert and I were at last able to go to dinner at Bloch’s. I realized that evening that the anecdotes at which Bloch was inclined to laugh too heartily were stories he had heard from M. Bloch senior, and that the “somebody really interesting” who figured in them was always one of the latter’s friends, whom he described in those words. We can all recall certain people we admired as children, a father who was wittier than the rest of the family, a teacher whose mind we saw as better than it was because he revealed philosophy to us, a fellow pupil more advanced than ourselves (as Bloch had been in relation to me), who despises the Musset of “L’Espoir en Dieu” at a time when we still admire him, but who, by the time we have moved on to old Leconte de Lisle or Claudel, will still be full of enthusiasm for the Musset of:

À Saint-Blaise, à la Zuecca,
Vous étiez, vous étiez bien aise ...

without forgetting:

Padoue est un fort bel endroit
Où de très grands docteurs en droit ...
Mais j’aime mieux la polenta ...
... Passe dans son domino noir
La Toppatelle

and who rejects all of the “Nuits” except:

Au Havre, devant l’Atlantique,
À Venise, à l’affreux Lido,
Où vient sur l’herbe d’un tombeau
Mourir la pâle Adriatique.⁶⁷

When we are impressed by someone, we remember and quote with admiration things that are markedly inferior to other things we would not even consider saying if left to the resources of our own invention, just as in a novel a writer will include real characters and their sayings because they are true, notwithstanding the fact that they represent a mediocre element, a dead weight in the living whole. The portraits of Saint-Simon are admirable, though presumably he did not admire himself as he wrote them; and the words he quotes as charming, spoken by wits of the time, have remained mediocre or become incomprehensible. He would have scorned to invent what he quotes as so acute or so vivid from Mme Cornuel⁶⁸ or Louis XIV, a feature which can be remarked in many others, and which lends itself to various interpretations, the only one of which relevant here is the following: that, in the state of mind in which one “observes,” one is well below the level at which one creates.

So, set within my old school friend Bloch was Bloch senior, forty years behind the times of his son, who recounted stupid stories and laughed at them in the son’s voice, as much as the real Bloch senior laughed at them in his own voice, since whenever he bayed with laughter and repeated the funny part several times, so that his audience would properly savor the point of each anecdote, the gales of the son’s faithful guffaws would never fail to celebrate in unison with the father the latter’s table talk. The younger Bloch was capable of saying things that were strikingly clever, which he would follow immediately by showing what he owed to his family, telling for the thirtieth time some jokes of his father’s that the latter trotted out, along with his frock coat, only on those ceremonial occasions when Bloch the younger brought home somebody it was worth going to some trouble to impress: one of his former teachers, a “chum” who was a great prize-winner, or, as on this occasion, Saint-Loup and myself. So we were treated to this: “A military commentator of genius, who had proved without the shadow of a doubt why, in the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese would be beaten and the Russians could not fail to win ...”; and then to this: “He’s an eminent man who’s seen as a great financier in political circles and a great politician in financial circles.” These statements were interchangeable with others concerning the Baron de Rothschild and Sir Rufus Israels, two characters who were introduced ambiguously, in a way that could make a listener infer that M. Bloch senior had known them personally.

I was caught out by this habit of M. Bloch’s: his way of referring to Bergotte gave me to understand that he too was one of his old friends. But the fact was that the only famous people whom M. Bloch knew were those he knew of, people whom, “without being acquainted with them,” he had seen in the distance at the theater or about town. He was pretty sure his own person, his name, his identity as a personality were not unknown to these people, who, when they caught sight of him, probably had to resist a frequent furtive urge to greet him. Though people in high society may well be acquainted at first hand with people of talent, may have them to dinner, this does not mean they understand them any better. But when one has a certain familiarity with society, the vacuity of those who compose it makes one overwilling to frequent obscure people, who know the famous “without being acquainted with them,” and overready to expect them to be intelligent. I was to discover this when speaking of Bergotte. M. Bloch senior was not the only one to be a success in his own house: my old school friend was even more celebrated among his sisters, at whom he kept grumbling, with his face almost in his plate. At this, they laughed till they cried. They had also adopted their brother’s lingo: they spoke it fluently, as though it were compulsory, as though it were the only language that intelligent people could use. On our arrival, the eldest daughter said to one of the younger ones, “Go and tell our wise father and our venerable mother.” “Minxes and hussies,” said Bloch, “I bring you my lord Saint-Loup of the swift javelins, who is come for some days from Doncières of the smooth-stoned dwellings, Doncières the dam of horses.” Bloch being as vulgar as he was cultured, his speech usually ended with a less Homeric pleasantry: “Look here, close up your peplos of the beautiful clasps a bit! What sort of goings-on are these? I mean, he’s not my father,⁶⁹ is he?” Whereupon Mlles Bloch collapsed in a maelstrom of merriment. I told their brother how much pleasure he had given me by recommending to me to read Bergotte, whose books I loved.

M. Bloch senior, who had no acquaintance with Bergotte but had heard something of his life by lending an ear to gossip in theaters, had an equally indirect way of being familiar with his books, relying on judgments of apparent literary relevance. His world was that of approximations, where greetings are half exchanged, where half-truths usurp the place of judgment. Inaccuracies and incompetence in no way reduce self-assurance. The opposite is more usual: self-esteem works its beneficent miracle and, since few of us can enjoy intimacy with the great or familiarity with higher learning, those who are excluded from these can still see their own position as the most enviable; the point of view we have from the social tier we occupy makes each of us believe it is the best, for we can see not only many who are worse off than ourselves and to be pitied, but also the great, whom we can name and condemn without knowing them, misjudge and disdain without understanding them. Those who believe they deserve a share of happiness greater than that accorded to others, who find deficient the degree of it afforded them even by self-esteem’s magnification of their meager personal advantages, can call upon envy to make up the deficit. Envy may well express itself, of course, in the accents of disdain; and “I have no wish to know him” must be translated as “I have no possibility of knowing him.” The latter is the literal translation; but the passionate meaning remains: “I have no wish to know him.” We know it is untrue; yet it is not simple dishonesty that makes us say it: we say it because that is how we feel, and that is enough to abolish the difference between truth and untruth, enough for our happiness.

Self-centeredness thus making each man a king, enabling him to see the ordered ranks of the universe beneath him, M. Bloch enjoyed the luxury of absolute monarchy every morning as he leafed through the paper, over his bowl of chocolate, whenever he caught sight of the name of Bergotte at the foot of an article: he granted him a haughty and cursory audience, handed down his judgment, and, between sips at his scalding beverage, savored the joy of sneering: “Really, that Bergotte fellow has become unreadable. What an old bore! Makes you feel like stopping your subscription. What a piece of convoluted nonsense! What a rigmarole!” And he helped himself to some more bread and butter.

M. Bloch senior’s illusion of importance reached a little beyond the confines of his own range of vision. For one thing, his children saw him as an outstanding man. All children tend either to underrate or to overrate their parents; but a good son always sees his father as the best of all possible fathers, without reference to any objective grounds for admiration. Such grounds, in the case of M. Bloch senior, were not completely absent: he was educated, percipient, affectionate toward his relations. Those relations who were closest to him were particularly attached to him, especially since in middle-class life, with its multiplicity of smaller worlds (unlike in “society,” where people are judged by a single standard which is fixed, however absurd and false it may be, and which is, for purposes of comparison, an aggregate derived from the sum total of all elegant people), there will always be supper parties and family celebrations that have as their life and soul somebody who is deemed to be amusing and agreeable, yet who in society proper would be given short shrift. Also, in those smaller worlds, where the aristocracy’s factitious scale of grandeurs does not exist, it is replaced by distinctions that are even sillier. So it was that, within the family, even well beyond the closest circles, because of a supposed likeness in the cut of his mustache and the bridge of the nose, M. Bloch was known as “the Duc d’Aumale’s double.”⁷⁰ (Among clubmen who hunt and shoot, the one who wears his cap at a jaunty angle and buttons his tunic very tight, so as to give himself what he thinks is the look of an officer from a foreign army, will always be seen as something of a character by the others.)

This resemblance was remote; yet it seemed to be viewed as a sort of title. People said, “Which Bloch do you mean—the Duc d’Aumale?” as they might say, “Which Princesse Murat do you mean—the Queen of Naples?” One or two other minute features were enough to make all the kith and kin exclaim about how distinguished he looked. Though his style of life did not run to a carriage, on certain days M. Bloch would hire an open victoria and pair, and have himself driven through the Bois de Boulogne, nonchalantly sprawling, with two fingers at his temple and two under his chin; and though passersby who did not know him may have thought he was “just a joker,” the whole family knew that, when it came to “the high life,” Uncle Salomon could show a thing or two to Gramont-Caderousse himself.⁷¹ He was one of those men who, when they die, are described in the social column of Le Radical , because they used to eat in a restaurant on the boulevards at the same table as the editor of that little newspaper, as “a personality well known to Parisians.” M. Bloch said to Saint-Loup and me that Bergotte was well aware why he, M. Bloch, never greeted him, that Bergotte averted his eyes as soon as he caught sight of him at the theater or at the club. Saint-Loup started to blush at the thought that such a club could not possibly be the Jockey Club, of which his father had been the chairman. Yet it had to be quite an exclusive one, as M. Bloch had just said that nowadays Bergotte would not be elected to it. So, with some apprehension, in case he was “underestimating the opponent,” Saint-Loup asked whether the club in question was not the Cercle de la Rue Royale, which was a club deemed to be “beyond the pale” by his family, to which he knew certain Jews had been elected. “No,” replied M. Bloch with an air of negligence, pride, and shame, “it’s a small club, but much more enjoyable than that one: the Old Duffers’ Club. We’re very select, you know.” “Isn’t Sir Rufus Israels the chairman?” the younger Bloch asked, to give his father the opportunity to tell a lie that would put him in a good light, and quite without realizing that the financier’s name did not have the same prestige for Saint-Loup as it had for him. In point of fact, the Old Duffers’ Club counted among its members not Sir Rufus Israels but one of his employees. This man, being on good terms with his employer, carried about a supply of cards bearing the financier’s name, one of which he would give to M. Bloch whenever the latter was about to travel with a railway company of which Sir Rufus was a director. M. Bloch would say, “I must look in at the club and get a recommendation from Sir Rufus.” Once he was on the train, the card enabled him to impress the guard. Mlles Bloch being more interested in Bergotte than in pursuing the subject of the Old Duffers, the youngest of them asked her brother in a voice that was completely serious (for she was under the impression that the only way to speak of talented men was to use her brother’s repertoire of expressions), “Is this Bergotte customer really an outstanding sort of a fellow? I mean, is he one of your Villiers or your Catulles,⁷² really big customers like that?” “I’ve met him at a few opening nights,” said M. Nissim Bernard. “He’s awkward, a sort of Peter Schlemihl.”⁷³ M. Bloch had nothing against this reference to the Count von Chamisso; but the mention of a word like “Schlemihl,” though it belonged to the sort of semi-German, semi-Jewish dialect which delighted him within the family circle, he thought was vulgar and out of place when spoken in front of strangers. He shot a dark look at his uncle. “He does have some talent,” Bloch said. “Oh, I see,” the sister replied, in a very sober voice, as though meaning that in that case I was to be excused. “All writers have some talent,” M. Bloch senior said scornfully. “It’s even being said,” said the son, brandishing his fork and screwing his eyes into a diabolically ironic expression, “that he’s going to present himself for election to the Académie Française!” “Oh, for goodness’ sake! The man’s a lightweight!” replied M. Bloch senior, who seemed not to hold the Académie in such low esteem as his son and daughters. “He doesn’t have the necessary caliber.” “In any case, the Académie is a salon and Bergotte enjoys too little credit,” pronounced Mme Bloch’s uncle, a harmless and gentle individual with money to leave, whose surname, Bernard, might have been enough to stimulate my grandfather’s diagnostic gift, though it might also have seemed insufficiently in harmony with a face that could have been brought back from the palace of Darius and recomposed by Mme Dieulafoy, ⁷⁴ had it not been preceded by the name of Nissim, chosen by some expert wishing to crown this visage from Susa in an aptly Oriental way, by spreading above it the wingspan of some androcephalous bull from Khorsabad. M. Bloch senior would often insult this uncle, either because he was stimulated to pick on him by the man’s simple but vulnerable good nature, or because, the villa being rented in the name of M. Nissim Bernard, he wanted to show that, though his beneficiary, he was not beholden to him in any way, and especially that he was not trying to ingratiate himself with the aim of inheriting all that money when the time came. M. Nissim Bernard was upset mainly at being treated rudely in the presence of the butler. He murmured something unintelligible, in which all one could make out was, “When the Meschores are here.” In the Bible, “Meschores” means the “servant of God.” Among themselves, the Blochs used the word with the meaning of “the servants” and they had great fun in using it: their belief that neither Gentiles nor indeed their servants understood the allusion quickened for both M. Nissim Bernard and M. Bloch senior the gratification they derived from their double status of “masters” and “Jews.” However, the latter satisfaction turned into dissatisfaction when guests were present. When M. Bloch heard his uncle say “Meschores,” he felt he was drawing too much attention to his Easternness, as a courtesan entertaining some of her kind along with more respectable people will be annoyed if the loose women raise the subject of their profession or use objectionable language. So, rather than mollifying M. Bloch, his uncle’s murmur of complaint irritated him beyond measure; and he lost no opportunity to berate the poor man. “Naturally, when there’s some pompous stupidity to utter, one may be sure you will do it. You would be the first to lick Bergotte’s boots if he was here!” M. Bloch exclaimed, while M. Nissim Bernard lowered the dense locks of the beard of King Sargon toward his plate. Young Bloch too now wore a beard, which was also frizzed and blue-black, bringing out in him a close resemblance to his great-uncle. “What, do you mean you are the son of the Marquis de Marsantes?” M. Nissim Bernard said to Saint-Loup. “I knew him well.” I thought he must mean “knew” in the way M. Bloch senior said he “knew” Bergotte, by sight. But M. Nissim Bernard then added, “Your father was a good friend of mine.” Young Bloch had turned extremely red, his father looked profoundly upset, Mlles Bloch were stifling laughter. In M. Nissim Bernard, the art of showing off, which was curbed in M. Bloch senior and his offspring, had led to a habit of perpetual mendacity. If staying at a hotel when traveling, M. Nissim Bernard, as M. Bloch senior might have done, always had his manservant bring all the newspapers to him in the dining room, in the middle of lunch, so that the other guests could see he was a man who traveled with a manservant. But if he struck up an acquaintance with any of these guests, M. Nissim Bernard would be sure to say he was a senator, which his nephew would never have done. Although he knew perfectly well that it would come out one day that he had no right to this title, at the moment of speaking of it, he could not resist the temptation to acquire it. These lies told by his uncle, and the difficulties they could create, were a trial to M. Bloch. “Pay no attention,” he murmured to Saint-Loup. “It’s just his way of making a little joke.” Saint-Loup, who had a strong interest in the psychology of liars, was very interested in all of this. “A bigger liar than Odysseus of Ithaca,” said Bloch, “despite the fact that Athena said of the latter that he was the greatest liar among men.” “Well, I must say,” exclaimed M. Nissim Bernard, “I did not expect to find myself dining with the son of my friend! I have in Paris a photograph of your father and any number of letters from him. He always called me ‘Uncle,’ for some reason. A charming man, of sparkling wit. I remember a dinner I once gave in Nice, for Sardou, Labiche, Augier ...”⁷⁵ “Molière, Racine, Corneille,” M. Bloch senior continued ironically, his list being completed by his son: “Plautus, Menander, Kalidasa.” ⁷⁶ M. Nissim Bernard, with hurt feelings, abandoned his story, ascetically forgoing a great pleasure, and said not another word throughout the rest of dinner.

“O bronze-helmeted Saint-Loup,” said Bloch, “do have some more of this duck with thighs thick with fat, whereon the illustrious sacrificer of poultry has poured copious libations of the red wine.”

Usually, once M. Bloch senior, in order to impress one of his son’s important friends, had brought out his choicest stories about Sir Rufus Israels, he would withdraw, feeling that he had already touched a chord of deepest gratitude in his son, and not wanting to “go too far” in front of “the lad.” But if there was some quite exceptional reason, such as the time when “the lad” passed the agrégation,⁷⁷ then M. Bloch would augment the normal series of anecdotes by bringing out an ironic remark that he generally preferred to keep for his select group of friends, and which, now that it was offered to friends of the younger Bloch, filled the latter with an excess of pride: “The government’s behavior is an outrage! They have not sought the view of M. Coquelin! M. Coquelin has let it be known he is extremely upset.” (M. Bloch took pride in being reactionary and scornful toward theater people.)

Mlles Bloch and their brother blushed to the roots of their hair, a sign of how impressed they were, when their parent, to show that he knew how to behave like a king when occasion demanded it, gave the order to serve champagne, then let drop the news that, as a “treat” for his son’s “faithful friends,” he had booked three seats for the performance to be given at the Casino that very night by a touring comicopera company. He was sorry he could not get a box, but they were all taken; however, he had often tried every one of them, and you were far better off in the front stalls. Whereas the son’s failing—that is, a way of behaving he thought was invisible to others—was bad manners, the father’s fault was avarice. So he had the “champagne,” really a mediocre sparkling wine, poured from a carafe, and he treated us to “front stalls” that turned out to be seats in the back stalls, half the price of the others, under the miraculous persuasion of his failing that no one would notice the difference, whether at dinner or in the theater (where all the boxes were in fact unoccupied). M. Bloch having let us wet our lips in shallow champagne glasses, which his son described as “craters with deep-swept flanks,” he invited us to admire a painting he liked so much that it had accompanied him to Balbec. It was a Rubens, he told us. Saint-Loup was naïve enough to ask whether it was signed. M. Bloch replied with a blush that he had had the signature cut off because of the frame, but this was of no importance, as he had no intention of selling it. Then he bundled us out, so as to catch up on his reading of the Journal officiel,⁷⁸ piles of which were to be seen about the house, and which he said he could not avoid reading, because of his “parliamentary situation,” on which he did not enlighten us further. “I’ll just get a scarf,” said Bloch, “as Zephyrus and Boreas are abroad on the fish-teeming seas, and if we delay even a little after the performance, our homecoming will be lit by the first glimmerings of rosy-fingered Eos. By the way,” he said to Saint-Loup once we had left the house (and I had my heart in my mouth, having immediately realized that Bloch’s irony was now being exercised at the expense of M. de Charlus), “who’s the priceless clown in the dark suit that you were parading on the beach the other day?” “That was my uncle,” Saint-Loup answered curtly. Such a blunder was not the sort of thing to give Bloch pause. He spluttered with laughter: “Congratulations! I ought to have realized—he’s very neatly turned out, and he’s got a physiog that stamps him as a codger of the first water.” “You are utterly and completely mistaken,” Saint-Loup snapped. “He is a man of high intelligence.” “Well, that’s a pity,” Bloch said, “because it makes him less than perfect. I wouldn’t mind getting to know him, though, as I’m sure I could write something pretty good on customers like him. When you see him walk past, it’s just huge! Mind you, I would have to underplay the face, with its burlesque aspect, caricature being beneath any artist who’s really interested in the plastic beauty of his sentences—though, mind you, it did give me a good laugh! And I’d bring out your uncle’s aristocratic side, which really makes a splendiferous effect, and once you get over the first fit of the giggles it really does strike you with its grand manner. Tell me,” Bloch said to me, “just to change the subject for a moment, there’s one thing I keep meaning to ask you; then, every time we meet, some divinity, some blessed denizen of Olympus, makes me completely forget to find out from you something that could come in handy someday—that might already have come in handy! Who is that beautiful creature I saw you with once at the Zoo? She was with a gent that I know by sight and a damsel with long hair.” I had of course noticed at the time that the name of Bloch was unfamiliar to Mme Swann, who had called him by some other name and said he was attached to a ministry, a statement I had never thought to ask him to verify. I could not understand how Bloch, who, according to what she had said, had sought an introduction to her, could remain in ignorance of her name. This so surprised me that I was speechless for a moment. “Well, anyway,” he said, “you deserve to be congratulated—she must have given you a nice time. I had just met her a few days before, you see, riding on the suburban line. She had no objection to yours truly, and so a nice ride was had by one and all, and we were just on the point of arranging to do it again, on a future occasion, when someone she knew had the bad form to get on, just one stop before the terminus.” I said nothing, which did not appear much to his liking. “So,” he said, “I was sort of hoping you could let me have her address, and then I could pop round there a few times a week and share with her the joys of Eros, favorite of the gods. But look, if you’re reluctant to let me into the secrets of a professional who, between central Paris and the Point-du-Jour, had no reluctance about letting me into her, three times in a row and with refinements, then so be it, I won’t insist. I’m bound to come across her again, one of these evenings.”

I went to see Bloch shortly after this dinner, and when he came to the hotel to return my visit, I was out. As he was asking for me, he was noticed by Françoise, who, as it happened, though he had once come to Combray, had never set eyes on him before. All she knew was that “one of my gents” had called to see me, but she “didn’t know for why”; all she could say was that it was a man dressed in no particular style who had made no great impression on her. Though I knew that some of Françoise’s notions about social things would remain forever impenetrable to me, that they derived from misheard words, names once mistaken and never thereafter put right, and though I had long since taken the view that any investigation into this was pointless, I could not help wondering, to no avail, of course, what there could possibly be in the name “Bloch” that she found so stupendous. For I had no sooner told her that the young man she had seen was M. Bloch, than she stepped back, dumbfounded and disappointed. “What! You mean that’s M. Bloch?” she gasped, quite staggered, as though such a prestigious personage should have had an appearance that would make manifest to all and sundry that they were in the presence of a prodigy of nature; and, like someone finding out that a historical figure does not live up to his reputation, she repeated in an awestruck voice which suggested that in future she would be a sadder but wiser, if more skeptical, woman, “So that was M. Bloch! Well, all I can say is, you wouldn’t think so to see him!” She seemed to bear me a grudge, as though I had misled her about him, or exaggerated his importance. She did, however, have the considerateness to add, “Well, if that’s your M. Bloch, sir, then all I can say is you’re every bit as good as he is!”

Françoise soon had to endure, with regard to Saint-Loup, whom she adored, a disillusionment of a different order, but more short-lived: she learned that he was a Republican. Despite the fact that, when she spoke, say, of the Queen of Portugal, she could say, with that homely disrespect which is the expression of supreme respect among the lower classes, “Amélie, that sister of Philippe’s,” Françoise was a royalist. But that someone who was not only a marquis, but a marquis who had dazzled her, could be a supporter of the Republic, seemed beyond the bounds of the possible. She was as peeved at me as though I had given her a box that she had believed to be of solid gold, for which she had thanked me from the bottom of her heart, only to be told by a jeweler that it was just gold-plated. She instantly lost her admiration for Saint-Loup—which she soon gave back to him, however, it having occurred to her that, since he was the Marquis de Saint-Loup, he could not possibly be a Republican and was therefore only pretending, out of self-interest, since, with “a government like that, he stood to make a bit out of it.” From then on, her coolness toward him and her spite toward me disappeared; and when she spoke of Saint-Loup, she would say, “He’s just a hypocrite,” her broad, kindly smile showing that she thought as well of him as before and that she had forgiven him.

Saint-Loup’s sincerity and disinterest were—pace Françoise—absolute. In fact, it was this complete integrity of his which, in its inability to find entire fulfillment in a self-regarding emotion such as love, and since he was, unlike myself, free of the impossibility of finding spiritual sustenance anywhere but within the self, made him as capable as I was incapable of friendship.

Françoise was equally mistaken when she said of Saint-Loup that he “just looked as though he didn’t look down on people beneath him,” but that this was really untrue: you only had to see the way he got angry with his coachman. Robert, it was true, had more than once had occasion to speak rather severely to the man; but that, rather than a proof of any consciousness of class distinction, was a proof of his belief in equality between the classes. “But look here,” he said, when I reproached him for having treated his coachman harshly, “why should I affect to speak politely to the fellow? Are we not equals? Is he not as close to me as my uncles and my cousins? You seem to suggest that I should handle him with care, like an inferior!” And he added disdainfully, “You’re speaking like an aristocrat.”

If anything, Saint-Loup’s class-consciousness, expressed as a bias or a prejudice, went against the aristocracy, to the extent that he was as ready to disbelieve in the moral superiority of a man of fashion as he was ready to believe in that of a man of the people. When I mentioned the Princess of Luxembourg and her encounter with me and my grandmother, he said:

“She’s just a silly old bore, like all her kind. A sort of cousin of mine, actually.”

Robert rarely went into society, with his prejudice against the people who made it up; and when he did, the attitude of disgust and coldness he took with him increased all his close relatives’ distress about his liaison with a woman “of the theater,” which they believed was doing him great harm, in particular because it had fostered his tendency toward willful and systematic disparagement, because it had “led him astray” and “addled his mind,” and could be expected to lead him to complete abandonment of his social position. This explained why many of the most frivolous men of the Faubourg Saint-Germain said the most cutting things about Robert’s mistress: “Harlots have their job to do, they’re a necessary evil, but she is quite unforgivable! She has done too much harm to someone we are very fond of.” Not that Robert was the first man ever to fall victim to a loose woman; but the others saw their women as a mere pastime for men of the world, and went on thinking as men of the world in all things, politics included. Robert’s family thought he was “embittered.” They did not understand that, for many young men in fashionable society, who might otherwise never acquire a certain cultivation of mind or a measure of mildness in friendship, who might never be exposed to good taste or gentler ways of doing things, it is often in a mistress that they find their best teacher, and in relationships with such women that they make their only acquaintance with morality, serve an apprenticeship in higher culture, and learn to see the value of knowledge for its own sake. Even among the lowest classes, who can often vie in uncouthness with the highest, it is the woman, with her greater sensitivity and delicacy and her idle mind, who inquires further into certain refinements, aspires to modes of beauty or art which, even though she may not fully grasp them, she still sees as more important than the things, like money or position, that to the eyes of the man would have seemed more desirable. The lover, whether a young clubman like Saint-Loup or a young workingman (nowadays electricians, for example, have a rightful place in the ranks of the true nobility), has so much admiration and respect for his mistress that he will naturally extend these sentiments to what she respects and admires, and this leads to a complete reversal of his scale of values. By virtue of her sex, she is weak and prone to inexplicable nervous troubles, which, if he encountered them in a man, or in some other woman—an aunt or a cousin of his, for instance—the sturdy youngster would dismiss with a smile. But the woman he loves he cannot bear to see in pain. When a young aristocrat like Saint-Loup takes his mistress to dinner at an exclusive little restaurant, he soon acquires habits, such as making sure he has in his pocket the valerianate that she may need during the evening, or telling the waiter, forcefully and without irony, not to let the doors bang, and not to include damp moss among the table decoration, so as to prevent her from feeling ill, a reaction that he himself has never had to it, but which is part of an occult world which she has taught him to see as real, which despite his lack of personal experience now arouses his sympathy and will continue to arouse it in the future at the sight of somebody else suffering in the same way. Because she was fond of animals (her dog, her canaries, and her parrots went everywhere with her), Saint-Loup’s mistress had taught him—as the earliest monks in the Middle Ages had taught Christendom—not to inflict suffering on dumb creatures; and he now took great care of all her pets and spoke of people who were cruel to animals as brutes. In addition, an actress, whether real or, like the one who lived with Saint-Loup, so called, whether she was intelligent or unintelligent (and her intelligence was something I knew nothing about), by making him see the company of fashionable ladies as insipid and the requirement to attend their functions as intolerable, had saved him from snobbery and cured him of frivolity. Although his mistress had helped reduce the importance of society and its relations in his life, she had had the converse effect of making him invest with real nobility and refinement his relations with friends, which, if he had been merely a frequenter of fashionable salons, would have been governed by vanity or self-interest and dominated by grossness. With her woman’s instinct, better able to appreciate in men certain qualities of sensitivity that her lover might otherwise have overlooked or mocked, she had the gift of immediately identifying among his friends the ones whose affection for him was genuine, and also the habit of preferring them to the others. She knew how to make him feel real gratitude to these friends, to make him show it and pay attention to the things they enjoyed and the things they disliked. Before long, he came to have no need of her reminders and attended to all this himself; and so, in her absence, at Balbec, though she had never set eyes on me, though he had perhaps never even mentioned me in the letters he wrote to her, he took care to close the windows of carriages for me, took away flowers that might make me have an attack, and when he was taking his leave of several people at once, made sure to say his farewells in such an order as to be able to have a few final minutes alone with me, marking a difference between them and me, treating me in a way that contrasted with the way he treated other people. The mistress had opened his mind to things invisible; she had brought serious considerations into his life; she had changed his heart for the better. But none of this was apparent to the family, who went on lamenting, “That whore will be the death of him! She has already led him into a life of dishonor!” By this time, to be sure, Robert had derived from her all the benefit she had to give; and now she could do nothing but hurt him, as her feelings for him had turned to disgust and she tortured him. It had started one day when she had thought for the first time that he was stupid and ridiculous, some friends of hers, writers and actors, having assured her this was the case; and she had taken to repeating what they had said of him, with all the passion and lack of moderation that one puts into the expression of opinions and the display of attitudes of which one has just discovered the existence. She maintained, like her theatrical friends, that there was now an unbridgeable gulf between her and Saint-Loup, because their worlds were too dissimilar, she being an intellectual and he, whatever he might say, being a born enemy of the intellectual life. This way of seeing herself and Saint-Loup struck her as acute, and she enjoyed looking for proof of it in his most insignificant statements and his slightest actions. Then, once these same friends had convinced her that she was squandering on someone unworthy of her the great promise she had already shown, that her lover was bound to have a bad effect on her, that by living with him she was throwing away her chance to become a great actress, the scorn she had for him was combined with a hatred that could not have been more virulent if he had been trying to infect her with a fatal disease. She saw him as infrequently as possible, while still putting off the moment of a definitive break with him, an eventuality that seemed remote to me. The sacrifices Saint-Loup made for her were so great that, unless she was strikingly lovely (he had always declined to show me a photograph of her, saying, “For one thing, she’s no great beauty; and for another, she doesn’t photograph well. They’re just snaps I took myself with my Kodak, and they’d give you a misleading impression of her”), I thought she would have trouble finding another man who would be prepared to do so much for her. It did not occur to me that, even for an obscure little tart, the passing fancy of being famous, though one may have no talent to speak of, or just the good opinion of a few people who matter to her, may be (though, of course, that might not be the case for Saint-Loup’s mistress) much more powerful motives than the satisfaction of making money. Although Saint-Loup, without clearly understanding what was in her mind, did not believe she was entirely sincere, either in her unfair criticisms of him or in her promises of undying love, he did now and then suspect she would break with him when it suited her; and so, no doubt acting on his love’s instinct for self-preservation, which may have been more perceptive than he was, and exercising a practical side of his nature which could function in tandem with the most passionate and spontaneous urgings of his heart, he had refused to advance her any sizable capital, while borrowing a huge sum so that she should lack for nothing, but making sure it was paid to her in the form of a daily allowance. If she really did intend to leave him, no doubt she would wait quietly until she had “made her pile,” which, in view of the sums doled out by Saint-Loup, looked as though it might take a very short time, although any time, however short, would afford my new friend a little extra happiness—or unhappiness.

This dramatic period of their liaison (now reaching not only its climax but its cruelest phase for Saint-Loup, since in her exasperation with him she had forbidden him to remain in Paris and had obliged him to spend his leave at Balbec, not far from where he was garrisoned) had begun one evening at the house of one of his aunts, Saint-Loup having prevailed upon this lady to put on a performance by his mistress, in which she recited, before the aunt’s many guests, excerpts from a symbolist play in which she had once acted on an avant-garde stage, and which she admired so much that she had communicated her liking for it to him.

However, when she made her entrance in front of the gathering of clubmen and duchesses, with a tall lily in her hand and wearing a costume copied from the Ancilla Domini,⁷⁹ which she had assured Robert was a true “vision of art,” her appearance had been greeted by smiles, which the singsong monotony of her delivery, the outlandishness of certain words, and the frequent repetitions of them had changed into tittering, quickly stifled at first, but then becoming so irrepressible that the poor artiste had had to abandon the performance. The following day, Saint-Loup’s aunt had been unanimously condemned for having presented such a bizarre performer. A prominent duke made no secret of the fact that, if people were criticizing her, she had only herself to blame: “Well, for goodness’ sake, what do you expect, if you will expose people to that sort of nonsense? If the woman actually had a bit of talent—but she hasn’t, nor will she ever! And, heavens above, Paris isn’t as stupid as it’s said to be. Society isn’t entirely composed of idiots. It’s obvious that your little lady thought she could show Paris a thing or two. But it takes a bit more than that to show Paris anything, and there are some things that just won’t wash!”

The artiste herself said to Saint-Loup as she was leaving, “God, what a gang! Brainless hussies, ill-mannered bitches, and rotten pigs, all of them! I don’t mind telling you that those dirty old men spent the evening making eyes at me, every single one of them, and trying to play footy-footy with me, and it was because I refused to have anything to do with them that they decided to get back at me!”

These words had changed Robert’s antipathy toward society into a much deeper and more painful abhorrence, which he felt especially in the presence of some toward whom it was least justified, those devoted relatives who, at the family’s behest, had attempted to persuade his mistress to give him up, and who she told Robert were motivated solely by their own desire for her. Though he had immediately broken off all contact with these men, Robert sometimes thought, especially when he was away from her, as he was at Balbec, that they or others would take advantage of his absence to make further advances to her, and that she had perhaps given in to them. When he spoke of the sort of rake who could deceive a friend, attempt to seduce women, lure them into bawdy houses, his face contorted with pain and hatred.

“I could kill them with less compunction than if they were dogs—a dog is at least a loving, loyal, and faithful animal. People like that deserve the guillotine, more so than the poor devil who has been pushed into crime by poverty and the ruthlessness of the rich.”

At Balbec, he spent most of his time writing letters to his mistress and sending off telegrams to her. Every time she managed not just to prevent him from returning to Paris, but to provoke a squabble with him, even at such a distance, I had only to glance at his wretched expression to know what had happened. She would never say outright what her grievance against him was; and Robert, with the idea that her silence on this matter meant she had no particular grievance but just a general feeling of having had enough of him, kept asking by letter for the frank discussion he would have preferred: “Please tell me what I have done wrong. I’m quite willing to admit I’ve behaved badly.” His sorrow had the effect of convincing him that he was the one at fault.

She always kept him waiting for her answers, which, when they came at last, made no sense. I usually saw him coming back emptyhanded and with furrowed brow from the post office, the only person in the hotel, apart from Françoise, who fetched and carried his own letters, he being impelled to do this by lover’s haste, she by servant’s distrust. (To send his telegrams, he was obliged to go much farther afield.)

A few days after the dinner party at the Blochs’, my grandmother told me, with an overjoyed air, that Saint-Loup had just asked her whether she would not like him to take a photograph of her before he left Balbec; and when I saw that, in view of this, she had put on her best clothes and was trying to decide which hat to wear, I felt a touch of irritation that she should make such a fuss over something so trivial, which struck me as surprising in her. I even wondered whether I was not mistaken in my estimate of my grandmother, whether I had not put her on too high a pedestal, whether concern for self was as genuinely foreign to her as I had always thought, whether she did not have some slight measure of what I believed her completely free of: affectation.

I was ill advised enough, in Françoise’s presence, to show something of my disgruntlement at the intended photography session, and at the gratification that my grandmother seemed to derive from it; and Françoise, having noticed this, unintentionally aggravated my mood by making a sentimental and lachrymose remark, which I greeted with an expression calculated to dissociate myself from it.

“Oh, master, your dear grandmother will love having her photo took—and she’s even going to wear the hat that her dear old Françoise has done up for her. We mustn’t stand in her way, sir.”

I told myself it was not unkind to scorn Françoise’s mode of sensibility, with the reminder that my mother and grandmother, my models in all things, often did so. But my grandmother, noticing that I looked put out, said that, if the taking of the photograph was bothersome to me, she would not go ahead with it. I did not want her to abandon the idea, told her I had no objection, and let her titivate herself. But I thought it was pretty clever and superior of me to say a few hurtful and sarcastic words to her, so as to neutralize the pleasure she seemed to look forward to from being photographed; and though I was obliged to see her magnificent hat, at least I managed to banish from her face the signs of a joy that I ought to have been happy to share with her, but which, as so often happens while those whom we love best are still alive, can strike us as a mere irritant, a mark of something silly and small-minded, rather than the precious revelation of the happiness we long to give to them. My bad mood was mainly the result of the fact that, throughout that week, my grandmother had appeared to be avoiding me, and that I had been unable to have a moment with her, either during the day or in the evening. When I went back to the hotel in the afternoons, to have a little time with her, I was told she was not in; or else she was closeted with Françoise, having long confabulations that I was not supposed to interrupt. Or if I had been out all evening with Saint-Loup, and came back to the hotel savoring the prospect of being with her again and giving her a kiss, I would wait in vain for her little knocks on the wall, which were her invitation to me to go in and kiss her good night; I would get into bed, a little resentful of this unfamiliar indifference in her, of her way of depriving me of a pleasure that I had been much looking forward to; and with my heart throbbing as much as it had ever done when I was a child, I would lie there listening to the silence of the wall, until sleep came to dry my tears.

 

That day, as on the preceding days, Saint-Loup had had to go to Doncières, where his presence was required until late each afternoon, and where he would soon have to return full-time. I missed him in Balbec. I could see young women alighting from carriages, some of them going into the ballroom at the Casino, some into the ice-cream parlor, and from a distance they seemed lovely. I was at one of those times of youth when the idle heart, unoccupied by love for a particular person, lies in wait for Beauty, seeking it everywhere, as the man in love sees and desires in all things the woman he cherishes. We need only to see in passing a single real feature of a woman, a glimpse of her at a distance or from behind, which can be enough for us to project Beauty onto her, and we imagine we have found it at last: the heart beats faster, we lengthen our stride, and, on condition that she disappears, we may be left with the certainty of having set eyes upon it—it is only if we succeed in catching up with her that we discover our mistake.

Also, my health was going from bad to worse, and I was inclined to magnify the simplest of pleasures because of the obstacles that lay between me and the possibility of enjoying them. Beautifully dressed women seemed to be everywhere, because I was unable to approach them, being either too weary if I saw them on the beach, or too diffident if I saw them in the Casino or in a cake shop. If I was fated to die young, I wished I could first find out for myself what real life had to offer in the persons of the prettiest girls, even if someone other than me, or possibly no one, was ultimately to enjoy them (I did not recognize that, underlying my curiosity about them, there was a desire for possession). I would have been brave enough to walk into the ballroom if only Saint-Loup had been with me. By myself, I was standing about outside the Grand-Hôtel, waiting for the moment when I would go into sit with my grandmother; and there, still far away along the esplanade, where they made a strange mass of moving colors, I saw five or six young girls, as different in their appearance and ways from all the other people one was used to seeing in Balbec as the odd gaggle of seagulls that turns up out of the blue to strut along the beach, the stragglers flapping their wings to catch up with the leaders, in a procession that seems as obscure in its purpose to the bathers, whom they seem not to see, as it is clear to their bird-minds.

One of these girls was walking along pushing her bicycle; two others carried golf clubs; and their accoutrements made a flagrant contrast with the appearance of other young girls in Balbec, for even those who practiced certain sports did not walk about dressed in a particular way.

It was the hour for ladies and gentlemen to take their daily walk along the esplanade, directly into the merciless line of fire of the lorgnette held by the wife of the First President from Caen, who scrutinized each and every one of them as though they might be tainted with some blemish which she felt bound to inspect in its minutest details, as she sat in her proud posture in front of the bandstand, midway along the redoubtable row of chairs in which the subjects of her scrutiny would themselves soon come to sit, actors turned critics, and set themselves to the task of examining all the other people strolling past. All these esplanade walkers were pitching about as though stepping along the deck of a ship (for they could not take a stride without also swinging an arm, shifting their glance, setting their shoulders straight, counterbalancing on one side of their body the movement they had just made on the other, and becoming flushed about the face), and though they pretended not to see the other strollers walking beside them or coming in the other direction, so as to let it be thought they had no interest in them, while actually glancing at them surreptitiously so as to avoid colliding with them, they collided with them nonetheless, or jostled them, because all of them had been furtively looking at each other, their attention concealed behind the same apparent disdain for everyone else; for love, hence fear, of the crowd is one of the most powerful motives in all individuals, whether they wish to please others, astonish them, or show that they despise them. In a recluse, the most irrevocable, lifelong rejection of the world often has as its basis an uncontrolled passion for the crowd, of such force that, finding when he does go out that he cannot win the admiration of a concierge, passersby, or even the coachman halted at the corner, he prefers to spend his life out of their sight, and gives up all activities that would make it necessary for him to leave the house.

Amid all these people, some of whom were following a train of thought but revealed its mobility through restless gesturing or wandering looks, all of which made them look just as uncoordinated as the others with their circumspect lurchings, the girls I had seen, with the confidence of gesture that comes from the perfect mastery of a supple body and sincere contempt for the rest of humanity, strode straight on, without hesitation or stiffness, making exactly the movements they wished to make, each of their limbs in complete independence from all the others, while most of the body retained the poise that is so remarkable in good waltzers. They were now not far from me. Though each of them was of a type quite different from the others, all of them were beautiful; but I had been looking at them for so few moments, and was so far from daring to stare at them, that I had not yet been able to individualize any of them. With the exception of one, whose straight nose and darker complexion marked her out among the rest, as a king of Arabian looks may stand out in a Renaissance painting of the Magi, they were knowable only as a pair of hard, stubborn, laughing eyes in one of the faces; as two cheeks of that pink touched by coppery tones suggesting geraniums in another; and none of even these features had I yet inseparably attached to any particular girl rather than to some other; and when (given the order in which I saw their complex whole unfold before me, wonderful because the most dissimilar aspects were mixed into it and all shades of color were juxtaposed, but also as confused as a piece of music in which one cannot isolate and identify the phrases as they form, which once heard are as soon forgotten) I noticed the emergence of a pale oval, of two green eyes, or black ones, I had no idea whether they were those whose charm had struck me a moment before, in my inability to single out and recognize one or another of these girls and allot them to her. The fact that my view of them was devoid of demarcations, which I was soon to draw among them, sent a ripple of harmonious imprecision through their group, the uninterrupted flow of a shared, unstable, and elusive beauty.

It may not have been mere fortuitousness that, in bringing all these girls together, had managed to choose only beautiful ones; the girls themselves (whose attitudes sufficed to show their tough, daring, and frivolous nature), by their excessive sensitivity to anything ridiculous or ugly, their inability to feel an attraction of an intellectual or moral sort, may have naturally coincided in feeling repelled by any of their coevals whose pensive or sensitive dispositions were revealed by shyness, embarrassment, or awkwardness, by girls whom they probably saw as “horrid” and whom they had ruled out as possible friends; and they may have taken up with others to whom they felt drawn by a blend of gracefulness, ease, and bodily elegance, the only appearance through which they could conceive of candor and attractiveness in a character, offering a promise of good times together. It may also have been that the social class to which they belonged, which I could not define with any degree of precision, had reached a stage in its evolution where—by reason of growing prosperity and leisure, or because of the new interest in sports, spreading now even among the working classes, and in physical training without any concomitant training of the mind—a social environment similar to that of certain schools of sculpture, in which harmony of line and prolific creativity aspire as yet to no overelaboration or distortions, produces naturally an abundance of beautiful bodies with lovely limbs and handsome hips, with lusty, unperturbed faces and an air of sprightly cunning. For surely these were noble and tranquil models of human beauty that met my eye, against the sea, like statues in the sun along a shore in Greece.

As though with a single mind, this gang of girls, making its way along the esplanade like a shining comet, seemed to think the crowd of people all about them was composed of beings of another species which, even if it was capable of suffering, could not move them to sympathy, as they advanced seemingly oblivious to it, forcing everyone who stood in their way to move aside, to give way as though to a locomotive bearing down upon them without the slightest likelihood that it would avoid pedestrians; and their only reaction, if some fearful or furious old gentleman, of manifestly negligible existence, whom they swept aside as they passed, hobbled urgently or ludicrously out of their path, was to exchange a look among themselves and burst out laughing. For anyone or anything outside their group they affected no scorn; their sincere scorn was enough. They could not see an obstacle without taking pleasure in jumping over it, either by running at it or from the standing position, because they were full to overflowing with youthfulness, which must expend itself, which even when one is sad or unwell makes one obey the needs of age rather than the mood of the day, so that one can never come upon the possibility of leaping or sliding without making a point of leaping or sliding, and deliberately punctuating one’s slow progress, as Chopin does with even the most melancholy of his phrases, with serial detours full of grace, impulsiveness, and virtuosity. The wife of an old banker, after having indecisively tried several different places for her husband to sit, had eventually settled him in his deck chair facing the esplanade, where he was sheltered from the wind and the sun by the bandstand. Once he was comfortable, she went off to buy a newspaper, so as to read to him and keep him amused, never being away for more than five minutes at a time, while he sat by himself during her brief absences, which he found long but which she repeated, in the hope that her aged husband, the beneficiary of her close but unobtrusive care, could have the feeling that he was still capable of living a normal life and did not require help and support from anybody. The floor of the bandstand jutted out above the old man’s head, forming a natural springboard so tempting that the eldest of the little gang⁸⁰ of girls, without the slightest hesitation, dashed across and jumped off the edge, sailing right over him; he was terrified by a pair of nimble feet grazing his nautical cap, to the great amusement of the other girls, and especially of a pair of green eyes in a chubby face full of admiration, merriment, and possibly also some slight shyness, or, rather, a sort of bare-faced bashfulness, which was not apparent in the others’ expressions. “Oh, what a poor old guy! He’d break your heart, he really would—he’s got one foot in the grave!” said one of them in a broad, husky accent that was half ironic. They all walked on a few paces, then halted for a moment right in the middle of the promenade, unconcerned about holding up the procession of strollers, forming a dense, shapeless, untoward mass, loud with squawking, like a prattle of birds that gather just before flying off; and then they took up again their own slow stroll along the esplanade, above the sea.

By now, their charm was not blended into undifferentiated features. I could separate these from one another and apportion them to individual girls (in lieu of their names, which I had no knowledge of), such as the tall one who had jumped over the old banker; the small one who set off her plump pink cheeks and her green eyes against the horizon of the sea; the one whose darker coloring and straight nose made her look so different from the others; another one with a face as white as an egg, on which a little nose, like a chick’s beak, drew an arc of a circle, a face reminiscent of some very young men’s; the other one who was tall and wearing a hooded cape, which made her look so poor, and was in such contrast with the rest of her elegant outfit that my idea of her was that she must have parents whose brilliance and self-esteem, drawn from things well above the heads of Balbec and its bathers, things utterly divorced from considerations of the elegance or otherwise of their own offspring, enabled them to be totally indifferent to the fact that this daughter of theirs went walking along the esplanade wearing something that people of the lower classes would have deemed too unprepossessing; a girl with shining, laughing eyes and full, matte-complexioned cheeks, a little black toque pulled right down, who was pushing a bicycle along and swinging her hips so freely, while using slang words that were so strong, and which she shouted out so loud as I passed close by (among which I distinctly heard the unladylike expression “She’s no better than she should be”), that I had to replace the hypothesis I had built on the hood and cape of her friend by another more plausible one: every one of these girls belonged to the crowds who frequent velodromes, and must be the extremely youthful girlfriends of racing cyclists. Certainly, in none of my conjectures did I entertain the possibility that they might be chaste. I had known as much at a glance: I saw it in the way they kept exchanging looks and laughs, and in the insistent stare of the one with the cheeks and the matte complexion. Moreover, my grandmother’s concern for me had always been so overscrupulous that I had come to believe that the things one must not do are a single indivisible set, and that young girls who are prepared to be rude to old age might well have few qualms about infringing other prohibitions, in which the pleasures to be enjoyed are more tempting than just jumping over an octogenarian.

Though the girls were now individualized, the connivance in the glowing glances they kept exchanging, bright with conceit and their joy in being the little clique they were, flashing with self-interest or insolent indifference, depending on whether they were looking at each other or at people passing, as well as their sense of knowing one another closely enough to be always out together, to be “as thick as thieves,” linked their separate and independent bodies into an invisible harmony, as though they shared the same warm shade, walked within a separate atmosphere, which made of them an entity as alike in its parts as it was unlike the throng through which their closed little company wended its slow way.

For an instant, as I passed close to the brunette with the full cheeks and the bicycle, I glimpsed her oblique, laughing glance, looking out from the inhumane world that circumscribed the life of their little tribe, an inaccessible terra incognita, obviously incapable of harboring or offering a home to any notion of who or what I was. With her toque pulled down low on her brow, entirely engrossed in what her companions were saying, did she see me at the moment when the black ray from her eyes encountered me? If so, what must I have seemed like to her? What sort of world was the one from which she was looking at me? I could not tell, any more than one can tell from the few details that a telescope enables us to descry on a neighboring planet whether it is inhabited by human beings, whether or not they can see us, or whether their view of us has inspired any reflections in them.

If we believed that the eyes of such a girl were nothing but shiny little disks of mica, we would not be eager to enter her life and link it to our own. But we are well aware that whatever it is that shines in those reflective discs is not reducible to their material composition; that flitting about behind them are the black incognizable shadows of the ideas she forms about the people and places she knows—the paddocks at racecourses, the sandy paths along which she might have pedaled, drawing me after her, over hill and meadow, like a little Peri⁸¹ more seductive than the sprite from the Persian paradise—the dimness of the house into which she will disappear, her own impenetrable projects, and the designs of others upon her; and what we are most aware of is that she herself lies behind them, with her desires, her likes and dislikes, the power of her inscrutable and inexhaustible will. I knew I could never possess the young cyclist, unless I could also possess what lay behind her eyes. My desire for her was desire for her whole life: a desire that was full of pain, because I sensed it was unattainable, but also full of heady excitement, because what had been my life up to that moment had suddenly ceased to be all of life, had turned into a small corner of a great space opening up for me, which I longed to explore, and which was composed of the lives led by these young girls, because what was laid out now before my eyes was that extension and potential multiplication of self that we know as happiness. The fact that they and I shared nothing, no habit, no idea, was surely bound to make it more difficult for me to make their acquaintance and meet with their approval. But perhaps it was my very awareness of these differences between us, my knowledge that, in the nature of the girls as in their every action, there was not one iota of an element that was known to me or that I could have access to, which had replaced my satiety of life by a thirst, akin to that of a drought-stricken land, for a life which my soul, having gone forever without a single drop of it, would now absorb in great greedy drafts, letting it soak me to the roots.

I had been staring so much at the bright-eyed cyclist that she seemed to notice it: she said something to the tallest girl, which I did not catch but which made her laugh. This bicycling brunette was not in fact the one I liked best, for the very reason that she was a brunette: for me, the unattainable ideal, ever since the day I had caught sight of Gilberte from the steep little lane by Tansonville, had been a golden-skinned girl with fairish ginger hair. But, then, had I not also fallen in love with Gilberte because she had appeared to me surrounded by the halo of glory conferred upon her by being the friend of Bergotte, by going with him to look at cathedrals? In the same way, was it not promising that I had seen the brunette look at me (which made me hope it might prove easier to get to know her first), since she would be able to introduce me to the others, to the ruthless one who had jumped over the old man’s head, to the heartless one who had said, “Oh, what a poor old guy!,” and then all of them, one after another, in her capacity, and her prestige, as their inseparable companion? And yet, in the assumption that I might one day be a friend of one or another of those girls, that the eyes which passed their unknown glances over me, as unaware of me as a touch of sun on a wall, might ever undergo the miraculous alchemy that would enable a notion of my existence, or friendship for my person, to merge with the inexpressible minutiae of their minds, that I myself might one day be a member of their bevy as it roamed along the seafront, there was a contradiction as insoluble as though I had thought it possible not just to stand and admire the parading figures in an ancient frieze or fresco, but to be admired in return and step up to join in their divine progress.

Was the happiness of knowing these young girls really unattainable? It would certainly not have been the first happiness of that sort that I had abandoned all hope of ever enjoying. I needed only to think of all the unknown girls, even on the roads around Balbec, whom I had had to give up as the speeding carriage parted me from them forever. Even the joy I derived from this little group, as noble as though composed of Hellenic virgins, had something in it akin to the feeling I got from those fleeting passersby on the road. The transience of brief strangers who enter our life and force us out of the normality in which all the women we are used to will eventually reveal their blemishes, puts us into a state of readiness to pursue them, in which nothing inhibits the imagination. For a pleasure divested of imagination is a pleasure reduced to itself, to nothing. If they had been offered to me by a madam—in the sort of house that, as has been seen, I did not disdain—divorced from the element that lent them so many colors and such attractive imprecision, they would have been less enchanting. The imagination, aroused by the possibility that it will not achieve its aim, is obliged to mask it with another, and, by replacing sensual pleasure with the idea of penetrating someone’s life, makes sure we neither recognize that pleasure, experience its true flavor, nor restrict it to its dimension of mere pleasure. If we were to set eyes on a fish for the first time as it might be served on a dinner table, it would hardly appear to be worth the countless ruses and devious tricks required to land it, unless between us and it there were afternoons spent fishing, eddies through which glimpses barely caught of fleshy gleams and an imprecise shape ruffle the surface of our indecision about what to do with them, in the blue fluidity of a transparent and mobile medium.

The girls benefited also from the alteration in social proportions that is characteristic of holiday life at the seaside. All the ways in which our usual environment confers advantages on us, extending and inflating our importance, become invisible there, indeed are abolished, while other people in whom we imagine such advantages, which may be nonexistent, move in a world enriched for us by this same fictitious density. It was this that made it easy for unknown women, as on that day this group of girls, to assume enormous significance in my eyes, while making it impossible for me to give them any indication of my own significance.

Though this little sauntering gang of girls was an example of the countless occasions when young passersby had escaped my grasp, a failure that had always irked me, this time the escapers had slowed their pace almost to the point of immobility. That faces, instead of dashing past, should make a slow enough disappearance for their features to be set and distinct, yet still appear beautiful, prevented me from believing, as I had so often believed when Mme de Villeparisis’s carriage was whisking me farther and farther away from a young woman, that at close range, if I had been able to pause for a moment, certain details of her face or body—a pock-marked complexion, an imperfection in the nostrils, a dull look, a crude smile, a graceless waist—would have supplanted those my imagination had seen in her; for often I had needed no more than a pretty contour of a body, a glimpse of a cool complexion, to create in all good faith a lovely shoulder to go with it, or a look from delightful eyes, memories or preconceptions that I carried about with me at all times; and such cursory decipherings of a creature seen in a fleeting glimpse expose us to the same misconceptions as hasty readings of a text, whereby, on the faith of a single syllable, and without pausing to identify the others, we replace the word printed by another quite different word proffered by memory. But this occasion had to be different: I had been able to have a close look at each of their faces; and though I had been unable to see any of them from both sides, and few of them in full face, I had still managed to sketch two or three aspects of them that were sufficiently different from one another for me to be able to make either the necessary adjustments to their different hypothetical contours and colors, as jotted down by my first glance, or the verification and proof of them, and to see through their few overlaid expressions to something immutably material. So I knew I could say with certainty that, whether in Paris or in Balbec, assuming the most favorable possible outcomes with any of the young women who had ever caught my eye in passing, if I had been able to pause for a while and chat, there had never been any whose appearance, then disappearance without anything’s coming of it, would have left me with such regrets as would these, or who could have made me believe there would be such excitement in being their friend. No actress, no peasant girl, no boarder at a convent school had ever been so beautiful to me, so fascinating in a suggestion of the unknown, so invaluably precious, so probably unattainable. The exemplar these girls offered of life’s potential for bringing unsuspected happiness was so full of charm, in a state of such perfection, that it was almost for intellectual reasons that I despaired of ever being able to experience, in unique conditions that would allow no room for possible error, the profound mystery to be found in the beauty one has longed for, the beauty one replaces, because one knows it is forever beyond one’s reach, by seeking mere pleasure from women one has not desired—which Swann had always refused to do, before meeting Odette—with the result that one dies without ever having enjoyed that other form of fulfillment. It was of course possible that there would have been no revelation in such a fulfillment, that the mystery would have been nothing but a projection or mirage of desire, to be dispelled by proximity. If so, I would have to blame an inescapable law of nature (which, if it was applicable to these girls, would be applicable to all girls), and not any defectiveness in the present object. For this present object was the one I would have preferred above all, as I knew perfectly well, having botanized so much among such young blossoms, that it would be impossible to come upon a bouquet of rarer varieties than these buds, which, as I looked at them now, decorated the line of the water with their gentle stems, like a gardenful of Carolina roses edging a cliff top, where a whole stretch of ocean can fit between adjacent flowers, and a steamer is so slow to cover the flat blue line separating two stalks that an idling butterfly can loiter on a bloom that the ship’s hull has long since passed, and is so sure of being first to reach the next flower that it can delay its departure until the moment when, between the vessel’s bow and the nearest petal of the one toward which it is sailing, nothing remains but a tiny glowing gap of blue.

I had to go back to the hotel, as Robert and I were going out to dinner at Rivebelle and my grandmother insisted that on such occasions I take an hour’s rest on my bed, a siesta that the Balbec doctor soon ordered me to extend to all other evenings as well.

To go back into the hotel, there was now no need to leave the esplanade, walk around the back, and enter by the main lobby: by a change of timetable analogous to Combray’s Saturday, when lunch was one hour early, the midsummer days had become so long that, when the tables were being set for dinner at the Grand-Hôtel of Balbec, the sun was still high in the sky, making it feel like afternoon teatime. And as the tall sliding glass doors, which opened right onto the esplanade, stayed wide open, all I had to do was step over a low wooden frame, straight into the dining room, then walk directly to the elevator.

As I passed the office, I gave the manager a smile and received one in return, signaled by his face, which, since the beginning of our stay at Balbec, my studious attentiveness had been injecting and gradually transforming as though it were a specimen in natural history. The features of his face had become nondescript, expressive of a meaning which, though mediocre, was as intelligible as handwriting one can read; they no longer resembled the outlandish and unbearable characters printed on this face as I had seen it on our first day, when I had been confronted by a personage now forgotten—or at least, if I ever contrived to remember him, now unrecognizable—and difficult to identify in this polite and insignificant person, of whom the other had been only a caricature, hideous and summary. Freed of the shyness and distress of the evening of my arrival, I rang for the “lift,” who did not now observe unbroken silence as we ascended together, as though inside a mobile rib cage gliding upward along the vertical column, but kept saying, “Not as many people around now as a month ago. Days getting shorter. They’ll all start leaving soon.” He said this not because it was true, but because he had another job waiting for him on a warmer stretch of the coast and wished we would all go away as soon as possible, so that the hotel would close and he might have a few days to himself before “recommencing” his “new situation.” “Recommencing” and “new” were in no way contradictions for him, “to recommence” being for him the normal form of the verb “to start.” The only thing that surprised me in what he said was the word “situation,” for he belonged to the working classes of modern times, who try to remove from their speech all reminder of the system of domestic service to which they belong. He also told me that in this “situation” where he was about to “recommence,” he would have a handsomer “tunic” and higher “remunerations,” the words “uniform” and “wages” seeming antiquated and unseemly to him. Vocabulary having, by an absurd contradiction, outlived the idea of inequality in the minds of the “bosses,” I always had trouble in understanding what the “lift” said. For instance, if what I really wanted to know was whether my grandmother was in or out, the “lift” would anticipate my questions and say, “The lady has just left your rooms.” This caught me out every time without fail: I always thought he meant my grandmother. “No, I mean that lady that’s an employee of yours, I think.” A cook, at least in middle-class terminology of former times, soon no doubt to be abolished, never having been “an employee,” I would think for a moment: “He’s mistaken: we’re not factory-owners—we don’t have employees.” Then I remembered that the word “employee” is as essential to the self-esteem of servants as wearing a mustache is to waiters in cafés, and realized that the “lady” who had just left our rooms was Françoise (probably off to visit the pantry or to watch the young chambermaid sewing for the Belgian lady); though even this degree of self-esteem was insufficient for the “lift,” who, as he bemoaned the lot of his own class, also liked to say not “workers” but “the worker,” not “commoners” but “the commoner,” using the sort of singular with which Racine, meaning “poor men,” refers to “the poor man.” Usually, however, since I had lost all my early eagerness and timidity, I no longer spoke to the “lift.” He was the one who spoke, without receiving an answer, as he put his little craft to full speed ahead and, with his hand on the tiller, piloted us up through the hotel, which was like a hollow toy, and which, as story replaced story, deployed all about us its branching corridors, where distant light faded away into soft shadows, thinning down communicating doors and the faint steps of stairways, converting them into that golden amber, as insubstantial and mysterious as twilight, from which Rembrandt models a window ledge or the handle of a well. And at each of these stories, a golden glow on the carpet showed it was now sunset beyond the lavatory windows.

I wondered whether the girls I had seen lived in Balbec and who they might be. When the focus of our desire singles out a tiny human tribe, whatever may bear upon them in any way sets off an emotion in us, which then becomes a wondering daydream. On the esplanade I had overheard a lady say, “Yes, she’s one of the friends of the Simonet girl,” with the smug, superior knowledge of the person in the know who says, “Yes, he’s very tight with the young Duc de La Rochefoucauld.” I was instantly aware of a look of curiosity on the face of the person being told this, a quickened interest in somebody who was so favored as to be “one of the friends of the Simonet girl.” It was clear this was a privilege not open to all and sundry. Aristocracy is relative: there are all sorts of inexpensive little resorts where the son of a furniture salesman may be the arbiter of all things elegant, holding court like a young Prince of Wales. Since that moment when I first heard the name “Simonet,” I have often tried over the years to remember how it must have sounded there on the esplanade, in my uncertainty about its shape, which I had not quite noticed, about its meaning and the identity of this or that person to whom it might belong: full of the imprecision and foreignness we later find so moving, when our unremitting attention to this name, with its letters more deeply imprinted in us with each passing second, has turned it (as the name of “the Simonet girl” was to be turned for me, but not until several years later) into the first word to come to consciousness, whether on waking each morning or after fainting, even before any inkling of the time of day or where we are, almost before the word “I” itself, as though the one it names were more us than we are ourselves, as though the first respite, always to end after a few moments’ oblivion, was the respite of not thinking of it. Why I decided, there and then, that the name “Simonet” must belong to one of the gang of girls, I have no idea: how to get to know the Simonet family became my constant preoccupation, and especially how to be introduced to them by people they would see as above themselves—which should not prove difficult, if the girls were just vacuous and immoral specimens from the working classes—so that they could not look down on me: perfect knowledge of those who disdain you, like complete absorption of any such person, is impossible unless you have overcome that disdain. Every time we are assailed by images of women very different from ourselves, unless these images are eliminated by being forgotten or overlaid by others, we can have no peace of mind until we have converted these strangers into something more like us, the self in that respect being similar in its action and reactions to the physical organism, which is incapable of accepting a foreign body within itself without immediately setting to work to digest and assimilate the intruder. The Simonet girl must be the prettiest of them, and also, it seemed to me, the one who might be able to become my mistress, since she was the only one who, by turning slightly away two or three times, had appeared aware of my staring eyes. So I asked the “lift” whether he knew of anyone in Balbec called Simonet. Being reluctant to admit to ignorance of anything, he replied that he thought he had “heard tell of some such a name.” When we reached the top floor, I asked him to have them send up the latest list of newcomers.

On leaving the elevator, instead of going directly to my room, I walked farther along the corridor, as at that time of day the servant on duty, despite his aversion to drafts, had opened the window at the far end of it, and this window, though it overlooked the hillside and the valley instead of the sea, never let one see them, since its panes were of opaque glass and it was usually kept shut. I stood for a moment in front of it, long enough to make my devotions to the view it had for once disclosed: this went beyond the hill against which the hotel backed, and contained a single house, set some distance away, but with its bulk preserved by the perspective and the evening light, which had worked delicately on it, embossing it and setting it within a velvet-lined casket, as though it were an example of miniaturized architecture, a tiny temple or chapel worked in gold and enamel, used as a reliquary, and exposed only on rare occasions to the veneration of the faithful. But my moment of worship had gone on too long, and the servant on duty, holding a bunch of keys in one hand and touching the other to his sexton’s cap, rather than exposing himself to the cool evening air by raising it to me, came along to close the windows, like the little double doors of a monstrance, thus putting an end to my adoration of the golden relic of the miniature church. I went to my room, where the painting on show in the window frame kept changing as the season advanced. At the beginning of my stay, it was broad daylight, its tones sometimes dulled by bad weather: the sea, through the glaucous glass bulging with its round waves, held between the iron uprights of the frame as though set in the lead of a latticed window, teased out along the deep, rocky fringe of the bay triangles plumed with spray which hung motionless, touched in with the delicacy of down or a feather penciled by Pisanello, and fixed by the creamy white never-fading enamel used for a fall of snow in glassworks by Gallé.⁸²

Then the days grew shorter; and when I went to my room, the violet sky, which seemed to have been branded by the rigid, geometrical, fleeting, flashing iron of the sun (as though in representation of some miraculous sign or mystical apparition), hung down over the sea at the juncture of the horizon like a religious canvas above a high altar, while the different parts of the sunset, exhibited in the glass doors of the low mahogany bookcases running around the walls, and which I mentally compared to the marvelous painting from which they had been detached, were like the different scenes with which an old master once decorated a shrine for a religious house, now divided into separate panels, for display in a museum, where only the imagination of a visitor to the exhibition can reassemble them on the predellas of the altarpiece. Some weeks later, when I went up, the sun would have already set. Lying above the sea, there would be a band of red, as dense and fine-edged as a slab of aspic, similar to the red that striped the sky at Combray, above the wayside cross, on evenings when I was nearing home after a walk and intended to go down to the kitchen before dinner; and before long, right on top of the water, which had the coldness and the color of the fish known as gray mullet, there would be another sky, of the same pink as one of the salmon we would soon order at Rivebelle; and these shades whetted my expectation of the pleasure of changing into evening clothes to go out to dine. Very close to the shore, trying to rise over the sea, in tiers that spread ever wider, its layers superimposed upon one another, there was a haze as black as soot, but also with the smooth sheen and consistency of agate, its highest parts, visibly top-heavy, beginning to tilt above their deformed support, leaning away from the center of gravity of those that had hitherto underpinned them, and seeming about to crumble and collapse into the sea, dragging down with them from halfway up the sky the whole precarious edifice. The sight of a ship leaving, like a night traveler, gave me the impression I had once had in the train, of being freed of the restrictions of sleeping and staying closed up in a room. Not that I felt hemmed in by this room, since within the hour I was going to walk out of it and go off in a carriage. I lay down on the bed; and, as though I were on a bunk aboard one of the boats I could see not far away, which after nightfall people might be surprised to see moving slowly through the darkness, like dim, silent swans that never sleep, I was surrounded on all sides by images of the sea.

However, quite often they were nothing but images: I would forget that, beneath the color of them, there was the forlorn, empty shoreline, with the uneasy evening wind, which had so upset me on my arrival in Balbec. Also, even in my room, my thoughts were full of the girls I had seen walking along the esplanade, and my state of mind was neither calm enough nor disinterested enough for me to be able to attend properly to vivid impressions of beauty. Because I was looking forward to the dinner at Rivebelle, my state of expectancy made me feel even more frivolous; and my mind, occupying at such moments the surface of my body, which I was about to clothe in such a way as to appear as attractive as possible to the eyes of women staring at me under the bright lights of the restaurant, was unable to see through the colors of things to anything deeper. Had it not been for the tireless and restful aerobatics of the swifts and swallows outside my window, their sudden vertical spurts like water jets, fireworks of vitality, filling the intervals between their vertiginous rocketlike ascents with the straight white wake of a long unwavering glide, making a delightful miracle of a natural and local phenomenon, linking the landscapes before my eyes to reality, I could have seen these landscapes as a mere selection of paintings, changed every day, arbitrarily exhibited at the spot where I happened to be, but having no necessary relation to it. One evening it would be an exhibition of Japanese prints: beside the flimsy cutout of the sun, red and as round as the moon, a yellow cloud was a lake against which black blades, and the trees on its bank, were silhouetted; a bar of soft pink, in a shade I had not set eyes on since my very first paintbox, swelled like a river, with boats seemingly beached on both sides of it, looking as though waiting there to be refloated. With the bored, disdainful superficiality of the sated expert, or the elegant lady glancing in at an exhibition during her crowded day of visits to fashionable friends, I dismissed it with the thought: “Quite an interesting sunset, rather different, but I’ve seen plenty of others that are just as delicately done and every bit as striking.” On other evenings, there was greater enjoyment to be had: from a ship which had been absorbed and liquefied by the horizon, and which had such an appearance of being of the same color as it, as though in an Impressionist painting, that it also seemed to be made of the same material, as though, once the hull and rigging had been cut out of it, it had faded away into the hazy blue of the sky. Or it was the sea itself that took up almost the whole height of the window, having been extended upward by a broad band of sky topped by a strip of the same blue as the sea, which I thought was the sea, the difference in shade being due to an effect of the light. Or else the sea was painted only in the lower part of the window, all the rest being filled by clouds in horizontal stripes piled on top of one another, so numerous that it looked as though the artist might have intended the panes to contain one of his specialties, a Study in Clouds, while the different glass-fronted doors of the bookcases, showing clouds that were similar but reflected from other points of the horizon, and variously colored by the light, seemed to be, as one sees in the works of certain contemporary masters, endless repetitions of a single effect, none of them noted at the same time of day, but all of them, through the immobility of art, now available to be viewed together in one room, executed in pastel, and displayed under glass. Sometimes, with exquisite delicacy, a touch of pink was added to the uniform gray of sea and sky; and at the very bottom of this Harmony in Grey and Pink after Whistler,⁸³ a tiny moth asleep on the windowpane seemed to lend its wings to the favorite signature of the master from Chelsea. Then even the pink disappeared, and there was nothing else to look at. I got up to close the tall curtains, then lay down again. From my bed, I could see the fading line of daylight that lingered above the curtains, growing dimmer and fainter; but I had no qualms or regrets about letting the last daylight hour die behind the curtains at a time when I was usually in the dining room, for I knew this day was of a different kind from the rest, lasting longer, like those polar days that turn into a night of a few minutes’ duration; I knew that a brilliant metamorphosis was at work within the chrysalis of this twilight, and that from it there would soon emerge the dazzling illuminations of the restaurant at Rivebelle. I thought, “It’s time”; I stretched, still lying on the bed, then arose and finished getting ready to go; and I found a great charm in these slack moments unburdened by any material concern, which everyone else spent sitting downstairs at the dinner table, as I used the energy stored during the inactive evening, drying my body, putting on a dinner jacket, tying my bow tie, going through all these motions that were already informed by the expected pleasure of being once again in the presence of a particular woman whom I had noticed the last time we had gone to Rivebelle, who had appeared to look at me, who had even left the room for a moment, conceivably for the sole purpose of giving me the chance to follow her out; it was a joy to put on this finery, so that I could be ready to devote myself wholly to my new life of freedom and lack of care, when my hesitations could rest on Saint-Loup’s untroubled certainties, and I could choose, from all the species of natural history and products from all countries, those that would challenge my appetite or my imagination to make the most unusual dishes, which my friend would order for me forthwith.

Then, right at the end, there came days when it was no longer possible to step straight from the esplanade into the dining room, because it was already dark outside and the glass doors were not open, and the swarms of the poor and the curious, chilled to the marrow by the north wind, drawn toward the blazing, unreachable illuminations, were clinging in thick black clusters to the glowing sliding panels of our hive of glass.

There was a knock at the door: it was Aimé, making a point of being the one to bring me the latest list of newcomers.

Before he left the room, Aimé felt the need to inform me that there could be no doubt that Dreyfus was guilty, totally and utterly.⁸⁴ “The whole truth,” he said, “will come out, not this year, but next. It was this gent that’s very close to the General Staff that told me.” I asked him whether it would not be decided to divulge everything all at once, before the end of the year. “Look, he put down his cigarette,” Aimé said, acting the scene for me, shaking his head and his forefinger at me, as the hotel guest had done, meaning: Don’t be so demanding. “‘Not this year, Aimé,’ he says, giving me a tap on the shoulder. ‘Out of the question. But just you wait and see what Easter brings!’ ” Aimé gave me a tap on the shoulder, then said, “There, that’s exactly what he did,” either because he was flattered at having been treated so familiarly by a great man, or so that I could better appreciate the force of the argument and the validity of the reasons why we must live in hope.

It was not without a little palpitation that I read, on the first page of the list of newcomers: The Simonet family. There was in me a residue of old dreams of love, dating from my childhood, full of all the tenderness my heart was capable of, all the love it had ever felt, and which was now indistinguishable from it, which could be suddenly brought back to me by someone as different as possible from me. This someone I now once more invented, this time using the name “Simonet” and the memory of the harmony shared by the group of young bodies I had seen making their way along the seafront in an athletic procession worthy of ancient Greece or Giotto. I had no idea which of these girls—or, indeed, whether any of them—might be Mlle Simonet; but I knew that Mlle Simonet loved me and that, because of Saint-Loup’s presence, I was going to try to make her acquaintance. Unfortunately, he was obliged to return to Doncières every day, that being the condition on which he had managed to have an extension of his leave approved. Despite this, in the hope of having him disregard his orders, I had thought I might be able to play, if not on his friendship for me, at least on the same sort of naturalist’s curiosity about human beings that in my own case (on hearing a mere mention of a pretty cashier working in a fruit market, and without even having set eyes on the person spoken of) had so often led me to an observation of a new variety of feminine beauty. However, I had been mistaken in thinking that, by telling Saint-Loup about my gang of girls, I might stimulate this curiosity in him. It had been paralyzed by his liaison with the actress whose lover he was. And even if he had been tempted to feel it, he would have repressed it, under the influence of a sort of superstitious belief: that the fidelity of his mistress to him might depend on his to her. So he gave me no promise to further my cause with the girls, and we set off to dine at Rivebelle.

The first few times we went there, the sun had just set when we arrived, but there was still light: in the garden of the restaurant, they had not yet lit the lamps, and the heat of the day was dropping, subsiding, as though into a vase, lining the inner surface of it with the dim, crystalline transparency of the air, which seemed so firm that a tall rosebush, veining with pink the darkened wall against which it stood, resembled the arborization to be seen inside an onyx. Before long, it was dark by the time we stepped out of the carriage, or even by the time we left Balbec, if the weather was bad and we had delayed the moment of harnessing up in the hope of an improvement. Even on those days, I was not upset by the bluster of the wind; I knew it would not frustrate plans for the evening or result in my having to stay indoors; I knew that, as we walked into the large dining room of the restaurant, to the music of the Gypsy band, the countless lamps would easily cure the dark and the cold, by applying to them their broad golden cauteries; and I happily took my place alongside Saint-Loup in the brougham that stood waiting in the rain. For some time, the conviction expressed by Bergotte that, despite what I said, I was made for the pleasures of the intellectual life, had made me think again about what I might do with my life, reviving hopes that were, however, doomed to frustration every time I sat down to a desk to sketch the draft of a critical study or a novel. “Well,” I thought, “it may be that the pleasure to be taken in writing it is not an infallible criterion of the value of a fine page. Perhaps it’s only an accessory state, often present, but not necessarily invalidating the writing by its absence. Perhaps it’s possible to yawn all the way through the composition of a masterpiece.” My self-doubt was assuaged by my grandmother, who assured me that if I were in good health I would work well and with enjoyment. Our doctor having thought it wiser to add the view that my state of health could expose me to serious risks, setting forth all the precautions I must take so as to avoid having an attack, I now subordinated all pleasures to the aim, which seemed infinitely more important than they were, of becoming well enough to accomplish the work I might have it in me to produce; and since coming to Balbec I had been paying constant and close attention to my health. No one could have made me drink a cup of coffee, and jeopardize thereby the night’s sleep I needed if I were not to suffer from fatigue the following day. But as soon as we arrived at Rivebelle—because of the excitement generated in me by a new pleasure, and having crossed the line that anything exceptional makes us cross after it has severed the thread, patiently woven over so many days, that was leading us toward a more sensible way of living—as though no tomorrow would ever come, as though the worthier achievements were of no importance, the whole careful arrangement of wiser precautions, the whole point of which was to make those achievements possible, would disappear. While a servant helped to relieve me of my overcoat, Saint-Loup would say:

“Won’t you feel the cold? It might be better to keep it on, it’s not very warm here.”

To which I replied, “No matter.” Perhaps I did not even feel the cold, but certainly I had lost all fear of being ill; and the need to protect myself against the possibility of dying, like the importance of getting down to work, had likewise vanished from my mind. I handed over the coat, we stepped into the dining room to the strains of a swashbuckling march played by the Gypsies and walked between the rows of set tables as though we were conquering heroes; and though we could feel in our bodies the thrill of exuberance communicated by the rhythms of the band, as it accorded us these military honors and an undeserved triumph, we hid it behind an appearance of glacial gravity and a worldweary gait, avoiding any suggestion of the type of swaggering songstress who performs in cabarets, strutting onto her little stage with the martial air of a victorious general, and launching into a bawdy adaptation of a marching song.

From that moment on, I was a different person, no longer the grandson of my grandmother, to whom I would not give another thought until after having left the restaurant, but briefly the brother of the waiters who were about to serve us.

An amount of beer, let alone of champagne, that I would not have wanted to drink in a week at Balbec, even though my mind, when unclouded and sober, was capable of having a clear appreciation of the taste of these drinks as a pleasure, albeit one that could easily be forgone, now passed my lips in the space of an hour, interspersed with a little port, which I was too preoccupied even to taste; and to the violinist, who had just played for us, I gave the two golden louis, saved over the previous month to enable me to buy something that had now completely gone from my head. Some of the waiters rushed along the aisles between the rows of tables, on outstretched hand bearing a dish that it was the seeming purpose of this type of race not to drop. Sure enough, the chocolate soufflés reached their destination without spilling, the potatoes à l’anglaise, despite the canter and the apparent shaking about, always arrived as they had set out, neatly ranged about the Pauillac lamb.⁸⁵ I noticed one of these servers, very tall, with a superb plume of black hair, and wearing makeup of a color more suggestive of certain species of rare birds than of a human face, who ran to and fro, without letup and, it seemed, without purpose, from one end of the room to the other, and brought to mind the macaws that fill the large aviaries in zoos with their gorgeous coloring and incomprehensible agitation. Soon the spectacle became more ordered, at least to my eyes, turning into something nobler and calmer. All the giddy activity slowed down and settled into a soothing harmony. I could see the round tables, a countless constellation of them filling the restaurant like so many planets, as depicted in allegorical paintings from earlier times. These different heavenly bodies also exercised irresistible attractions on one another, and at every table the diners kept looking at the other tables, except for a rich man entertaining guests, including a famous writer whom he had managed to attract, whom he was now plying with questions, in the hope that the virtues of the turning table would induce him to utter inanities, which the ladies would marvel at. The harmony of these astral tables did not impede the incessant revolutions of the innumerable servers who, being on foot, unlike the seated diners, moved in a higher realm. Of course, one or another of them dashed in with the hors d’œuvres, changed the wine, brought extra glasses. But despite these particular reasons, their perpetual hurrying about among the round tables eventually clarified the law of its own restlessness, dizzying but regulated. Like a pair of witches, sitting behind a great floral decoration, two ghastly cashiers, endlessly busy with their arithmetic, seemed engaged in astrological calculations of the upheavals that might on occasion disrupt life in this planetary system, designed in accordance with the science of the Middle Ages.

I felt rather sorry for the diners, because I sensed that for them the round tables were not planets, and that they were unpracticed in the art of cross-sectioning things so as to rid them of their customary appearance and enable us to see analogies. Their heads were full of the knowledge that they were dining with such-and-such a person, that the meal would cost this or that much, that they would probably eat another dinner the following day. They seemed absolutely impervious to the appearance of a procession of young assistant waiters who, probably having no urgent business to attend to, were processionally bringing in bread in baskets. Some of them, too young, and victimized by the senior waiters, who cuffed them about the head in passing, had their hangdog eyes on a distant daydream, and cheered up only if a guest staying at the Balbec hotel, where they had been formerly employed, recognized them, spoke to them, and asked them in person to take away the champagne, which was undrinkable, an event that filled them with pride.

I could hear the muffled protests of my nerves, in which there was actually a feeling of well-being, unconnected with the external objects which can supply it, but which the slightest movement I made with my body or my mind sufficed to give to me, as a gentle pressure on a closed eye can create an impression of color. I had already drunk a great deal of port; and when I asked for more, it was less because I was hoping the next glasses would give a feeling of well-being than because the previous ones had already given it. I let the music conduct my pleasure to each note, and it rested on them docilely. While the restaurant at Rivebelle, like the chemical industries that produce great quantities of substances which, in nature, occur only by chance and are very rare, brought together more women and their prospects of happiness for me than a year of chance encounters during journeys or outings in the country could have brought me, the music we could hear (arrangements of waltzes, German operettas, and cabaret songs, all of it new to me) was itself like an airy place of pleasure, superimposed on the real one and more exciting than it: each musical phrase, though as individual as a particular woman, limited the secret of its sensual thrills not to a single privileged person, as she would have done—it offered them to me, it ogled me, it accosted me, it toyed with me in seductively whimsical or vulgar ways, it caressed me, as though I had suddenly become more attractive, powerful, or wealthy; and in the tunes I detected something cruel: the fact that the slightest disinterested sense of beauty or vestige of intelligence was foreign to them—for them, there is nothing beyond physical pleasure. They are the most merciless form of hell, the hell with no way out, for any poor victim of jealousy who hears that pleasure in them—the pleasure the woman he loves enjoys with someone else—and who hears it as the only thing desired in the whole world by the woman who is the whole world to him. To me, as I hummed over the tune and returned its kiss, the special sensual pleasure it gave enchanted me so much that I would have left my parents to follow the echoes of the phrase through the singular world it created in its invisible element, its outlines at times languishing, at times sprightly. At such moments, despite the fact that this secret joy is not of a sort that increases the attractiveness of the person who has acquired it, since no one else can perceive it, and though any failure to impress a woman who may have dismissed us at a single glance cannot possibly be imputed to our having or not having this inner and subjective bliss, since, in her unawareness of its presence or absence in us, her view of us is bound to be unaffected by it, I felt endowed with a power that seemed to make me almost irresistible. It felt as though my love was no longer something irksome, something to be dismissed with a smile, but that it had exactly the touching beauty, the wistful charm of this music, which itself now gave the impression of being a favorable place and time that had brought me and the woman I loved together, to meet and become close.

Women of easy virtue were not the only people to frequent this restaurant; there were also people from the most fashionable society, who would go to it for afternoon tea or else held lavish dinner parties there. Afternoon tea was served in a long, narrow gallery, like a corridor walled with glass, leading from the entrance hall to the dining room and forming one side of the garden, from which it was separated only by its few pillars of stone and the large windows, many of which were often open. The result of this arrangement was not only that it was very drafty, but that one was exposed to sudden and intermittent sunlight, a dazzling and unreliable form of illumination that made it all but impossible to make out the women having tea; and when they sat there, crammed at pairs of tables along both sides of the narrow passageway, shimmering at every movement they made as they sipped their tea or greeted each other, the place looked like a tank or a creel that a fisherman has filled with his shiny catch, some of the fish being half out of the water, their sheen glistening and changing under glossy lights.

Some hours later, during dinner, which was served of course in the dining room, the lamps would be lit though it was still daylight outside, and in the garden one could see, alongside outlying pavilions still lit by the dusk, and looking like pallid evening ghosts of themselves, arbors of green gloom shot through by the last rays of sunlight, and resembling, out there beyond the glass of the lamplit room where we sat dining—and unlike the late-afternoon ladies at tea, enmeshed in the sparkling moisture of their bluish-gold passage—plants in a giant aquarium bathed in a faint, supernaturally green light. As dinner finished and the room began to empty, the diners who, though they had spent their time during the meal looking at, recognizing, or asking to be informed of the names of other diners nearby, held together in complete cohesion around their own tables, now began to be freed of the gravitational force which had kept them close to their host of the evening, which lost its power over them at the moment when they drifted out to take coffee in the corridor where afternoon tea had been served; and a dinner party on the move would often shed one or more of its corpuscles, which had been too strongly affected by the attractive power of a competing dinner party, and was briefly replaced by a lady or gentleman who stepped across to greet a friend, before going back to his or her own group, saying, “Must go—I’m with M. X’s party tonight.” One had a momentary impression of two separate bouquets exchanging a few of their flowers. Then even the corridor was deserted. Some nights this long corridor was left unlit, as there was still a little daylight even after dinner, and with the trees hanging down nearby, just outside the glass, it had the look of a path through a shadowy, overgrown garden. On occasion a lady, detached from a dinner party, lingered in the half-dark. One evening, as I crossed the corridor on my way out, I noticed, sitting among a group of people unknown to me, the beautiful Princess of Luxembourg. I raised my hat to her but did not stop. She recognized me and inclined her head, smiling: from far above this movement of her head, and emitted by it, a few melodious words for me rose into the air, probably an elongated “good evening” intended not to delay me, but just to round off the nod of the head, to make it a spoken nod. Her words were so indistinct to me, and the sound of them, which was all I heard, lasted so long and was so musical, that it was as though a nightingale amid the close, leafy twilight had burst into song. If, as sometimes happened, Saint-Loup decided to finish the night with a group of his friends whom we had met, and with whom he went on to the Casino of one of the neighboring seaside towns, he would put me into a carriage by myself: I told the cabman to set the horse at a gallop, so as to abridge as much as possible the interval during which I could rely on no one but myself to provide my sensitivity—by engaging its reverse gear, and switching off the mechanism of passivity in which I had been held—with the stimuli which, ever since arriving at Rivebelle, I had been receiving from other people. Nothing, not even the possibility of colliding with a carriage coming in the other direction, along these paths that were pitch-dark and wide enough for only a single vehicle at a time, the uneven ground often littered with earthfalls from the cliff above, or the nearby precipice on the other side dropping straight to the sea, could bring me to make the small effort required for the idea of danger, and the fear of it, to rise to my reasoning mind. Just as it is not the wish to be famous, but a habit of hard work, that may make a creative artist of us, so it is not the joy we take in the present, but sober reflection on the past, that may enable us to safeguard the future. In my own case, not only had I begun the evening at Rivebelle by throwing away my crutches of rationality and self-discipline, which help us in our infirmity to walk a straight path, and had been afflicted thereby by a sort of moral ataxia, but then the alcohol, with its heightened effect on the nerves, had filled the present minutes with a quality and a charm whose effect had not been to make me more able, or even more willing, to defend myself against them: my state of light-headedness segregated them from the rest of my life and made me see them as vastly preferable to it; I was trapped in the present, as heroes are, or drunkards; in brief eclipse, my past had ceased to project in front of me that shadow of itself which we call our future; seeing the purpose of my life not in any past dreams coming true but in the simple bliss of the passing moment, I could see no further than that moment. So, by the working of a contradiction that was one only in appearance, it was at the very moment when I experienced an exceptional pleasure, when I sensed that my life could be one of fulfillment, and should therefore have seen it as having increased in value, that I felt liberated from the anxieties it had hitherto inspired in me, and was prepared to commit it without hesitation to the unsure hands of chance. In fact, what I was doing was condensing into one evening the unconcern that others dilute in their whole existence: every day they take the needless risk of a sea voyage, a ride in an airplane, a drive in a motorcar, when the person who would be stricken by grief if they were to die sits waiting for them at home, when the book, as yet unrevealed to the world, in which they see the point of their whole life, still lives only within their fragile brain. If somebody had turned up at the Rivebelle restaurant with the intention of killing me on one of the evenings when we stayed on there, when my grandmother, my life to come, and my unwritten books had all shrunk to a remote unreality, when I had no mind to give to anything but the fragrance of the woman at the next table, the courtesies of the headwaiter, the outlines of the waltz tune being played, when I was glutted with the present sensation and had no existence beyond it, no wish except to be never separated from it, I would have died in its embrace, I would have let myself be torn limb from limb, without raising a hand to defend myself, like a bee so bemused by tobacco smoke that it has lost its intent to garner away the supplies its efforts have gathered, and all hope of ever reaching the hive.

It must be added that the insignificance that all serious things acquired in the face of my intense exhilaration eventually touched even Mlle Simonet and her friends. The enterprise of getting to know them now seemed easy, but a matter of indifference, since nothing but my present sensation, because of the extraordinary power of it, the euphoria afforded by its slightest variations, and even by the mere continuity of it, had any importance; everything else, my parents, my work, my pleasures, my gang of girls at Balbec, was reduced to the insubstantiality of a fleck of spray in the high wind that prevents it from coming to earth, and had no existence except insofar as it related to my sensation of power: drunkenness brings about, for the space of a few hours, subjective idealism, pure phenomenalism; all things become mere appearances, and exist only as a function of our sublime selves. This does not mean that genuine love, if we happen to have such a feeling, cannot survive in these conditions. But we are well aware, as though we had moved into a new element, that unknown pressures have altered the dimension of our feeling, and we can no longer consider it as we did before. We know it is still there somewhere, but it has shifted, it no longer weighs on us, it is satisfied with the sensation afforded it by the present, a sensation that satisfies us too, for we have no interest in anything that is not the present. Unfortunately, the coefficient that alters values in this way works only during the hour of drunkenness. Tomorrow the individuals who had become insignificant, whom we blew away like soap bubbles, will again take on their full density; and the work left undone, which had lost all meaning, will have to be faced once more. Even more seriously, these morning-after mathematics, which are no different from day-before mathematics, are not only the making of the unavoidable problems which we must still contend with, they are also the mathematics which, unknown to ourselves, have in fact been governing our life during the drunken hours. If at those moments we are with a woman whose virtue or unfriendliness made her inaccessible, what was implausible the day before (that she should be attracted to us) now seems a million times easier, although it has not become any easier in fact, it being only in our eyes, our inner view of ourself, that we have changed. At the moment when we take a little liberty with her, she is as displeased as we will be the morning after, when we remember having tipped the porter a hundred francs, and for the same reason, which for us has simply been delayed: the fact of not being drunk.

I knew none of the women who were at Rivebelle and who, because they were part of my drunkenness, as reflections are part of a mirror, seemed infinitely more desirable than the more and more nonexistent Mlle Simonet. A young blonde with a forlorn air, sitting alone, wearing her straw hat with wildflowers about its brim, gave me a brief wistful glance and seemed attractive to me. I noticed another one, then a third; she was replaced by a brunette with a magnificent complexion. Almost all of them were known, if not to me, to Saint-Loup.

Before meeting his present mistress, he had in fact been so familiar with the small world of debauchery that, of all the women who dined on those evenings at Rivebelle, many of whom were there quite by chance, some having come to the coast at the behest of their present lovers, others in the hope of finding a new lover, there were very few whom he did not know, either he or one or another of his friends having spent at least a night with most of them. If a woman was in the company of a man, he did not greet her; and though the women glanced at him more than at other men, since the indifference they knew he felt toward any woman who was not his actress gave him a strange prestige in the eyes of the others, they too gave the appearance of not knowing him. One of them would murmur, “There’s young Saint-Loup. It seems he still loves his little trollop. It’s the great love of his life! What a handsome fellow, though! I think he’s just lovely. And what style! Some women have all the luck. He’s a good sort in all other ways too. I knew him well when I was with d’Orléans—they were inseparable. Mind you, he burned the candle at both ends in those days! He’s stopped all that now, though: he’s only got eyes for her. I wonder if she knows how lucky she is. And I wonder what he sees in her. He must be a bit of a fool, though: she’s got feet like barges and a walrus mustache—and her undies are just filthy! Even a factory girl wouldn’t have drawers like hers! Take a look at those eyes—a girl could really go for a man like him. Not a word, now, he’s recognized me, he’s laughing—he knew a thing or two about me! Just ask him about me!” I caught knowing glances passing between him and them. I wished he would introduce me to these women, so that I could ask them for an appointment and they agree to me, even though I might not be able to keep it. Otherwise, in my memory, a particular part would be forever missing from the face of each of them—as though she had been wearing a veil—a part that varies from woman to woman, which we cannot imagine on an individual face when we have never seen it there, as it appears only in eyes looking at ours, accepting our desire, and promising that it will be satisfied. However, even in this unfinished form, the faces of these women meant much more to me than those of women I suspected of being virtuous, having none of the flatness and emptiness of theirs, which were made out of a single piece and without depth. For me, of course, these faces were not what they must have been for Saint-Loup: in his memory, through the transparent indifference of impassive features that feigned not to know him, under the ordinariness of a greeting that could have been exchanged with anyone else, he could see the tumbled hair, the gasping mouth, the half-closed eyes, all the detail of a silent scene which a painter, wishing not to offend visitors to his studio, conceals behind a more seemly canvas. For me, aware as I was that nothing of my life had penetrated these women’s, and that, whichever roads they might take in the future, nothing of me would go with them, their faces remained closed. But the simple knowledge that they could open was enough to make me see them as prizes worth winning, which they would not have seemed if they had been mere medals, however fine, rather than lockets with mementos of love hidden inside. As for Robert, who became restless as soon as he had to sit for a while, concealing behind the smile of the courtier the warrior’s zest for action, I only had to look at him closely to realize how similar the emphatic bone structure of his triangular face must be to that of his ancestors, more that of the ardent archer than of the sensitive bookman. Through the fine skin, the strong shapes of feudal architecture were visible. His head reminded one of an ancient castle keep, with its unmanned battlements still preserved but its interior transformed into a library.

All the way back to Balbec, if it happened that Robert had introduced me to one or another of these unfamiliar women, I kept repeating to myself, as though singing over a remembered refrain, without a second’s pause, but almost without noticing what I was doing, “What a delightful woman!” The words, rather than expressing a lasting judgment, were prompted by a state of nervous excitement. Nevertheless, if I had had a thousand francs on me, and if any jewelers had been open at that hour, I would have bought a ring for her. When the compartments in which we live parts of our lives are too different from one another, we can expend ourselves on a person who, by the following day, may come to seem uninteresting. But we feel responsible for what we may have said the night before, and wish to honor it.

As I was back late to the hotel on those nights, it was a pleasure to walk into the bedroom, which had stopped being hostile, and find the bed, in which I had been sure on first arriving that I could never go to sleep, and which was now a comfort to my weary limbs; and one after the other, my thighs, my hips, my shoulders tried to imprint their every feature in the sheets enveloping the mattress, as though my fatigue were a sculptor molding a cast of the whole human body. However, sleep evaded me: I was aware of the imminence of the morning; peace of mind and well-being of body were no longer in me. In my distress, I felt I had lost them forever. To enjoy them again, I would have needed to sleep for a long time. But even if I had fallen asleep, I would still have been wakened a couple of hours later by the symphony concert. Then, suddenly, I was unconscious, submerged in the dense sleep that reveals to us mysteries such as youth regained, the rediscovery of years past, and emotions once felt, disincarnation, the transmigration of souls, the summoning up of the dead, the illusions of the mad, travel in time back to the most primitive stages of nature (for it is said we often see animals in our dreams, forgetting that, almost always when we dream, we ourselves are animals deprived of the clarity of certainty shed on all things by our faculty of reason; instead of it, all we can turn on the spectacle of life is an infirm gaze, which is abolished by oblivion at every successive moment, each reality no sooner glimpsed than vanishing in the face of the next one, as the slides projected by a magic lantern succeed one another), mysteries which we think are closed to us, yet which we are admitted to almost every night, just as we are to the other great mystery of annihilation and resurrection. The difficulty of digesting the Rivebelle dinner meant that it was in a more fitful light that I visited, in incoherent succession, the darkened zones of my past life, and that I became a creature for whom supreme happiness would have been to meet Legrandin, with whom I had just had a dream conversation.

In addition, even my own daily life would be completely hidden from me by new scenery, like the décor set out near the edge of the stage, in front of which, while the scene-changing is going on behind it, actors present a divertissement. The one in which I was cast to play a part was after the manner of Oriental tales: I had no knowledge of my past life or of myself, because of the extreme nearness of the intervening scenery; I was just a character getting a good flogging, being punished in various ways for an unexplained misdemeanor, which was that I had drunk too much port. Suddenly awake, I would realize that a long sleep had prevented me from hearing the symphony concert. It was already the afternoon, as I would see from my watch, after attempts to sit up, unsuccessful at first and interrupted by collapses onto the pillow, brief collapses of the sort that follow sleep, the drunkenness caused by wine, or that other intoxication one experiences in convalescence; but in any case, before I had looked at the time, I knew for certain it was after midday. The night before, I had been a creature without substance, weightless, and unable to stop moving or talking (as, in order to sit up, it is necessary to have been lying down, and in order to stop talking, it is necessary to have been asleep); I had had neither consistency nor center of gravity, I was unstoppable, I felt my monotonous trajectory could have taken me as far as the moon. But in sleeping, though my eyes had been incapable of telling the time, my body had known how to, measuring it not according to the surface markings of a clockface, but by its continuous hefting of all my refreshed energies, which, cog by cog, like the mechanism of a powerful timepiece, it had gradually lowered, moving them from my brain down into the rest of my body, where they were now stocked, the unused abundance of their supply reaching already above my knees. If it is true that the sea was once our life-giving environment, in which we must reimmerse our blood so as to restore our strength, the same can be said of forgetting, of mental oblivion: for some hours, we seem to live outside time; but the energy accumulated unspent during that period measures it by itself, as accurately as the weights of a clock or the trickling little sandhill in an hourglass. Such a sleep is no easier to leave than a period of prolonged wakefulness, all things tending to endure; and if it is true that some narcotics make one sleep, sleep itself, if long, is a more powerful narcotic, from which we have great difficulty waking. Like a sailor who can see the pier where he must moor but whose boat is still rocked by the waves, I had a clear impression of looking at the time and getting up; but my body was tossed back again and again into sleep; my landing was a difficult one, and before I could stand up and reach for my watch, to compare its time with the time indicated by the wealth of materials stored in my once-weary legs, I fell back two or three more times on the pillow.

Able at last to make out the time—“Two o’clock in the afternoon!”—I rang; but then I immediately fell into another sleep, which, to judge by the feeling I had on waking from it, of being fully rested, and the vision I had of having slept through an immense length of night, must have been infinitely longer than the previous one. Yet, since what woke me was Françoise coming in, in answer to my ring, this sleep that had seemed so much longer than the earlier one, and had afforded me such a depth of beneficent relief from consciousness, had lasted no more than half a minute.

My grandmother was opening my bedroom door; I asked her some questions about the Legrandins.

I had done more than just return to mental repose and well-being: between them and me, the night before, there had been more than a slight distance, and I had had to struggle all night long against a strong current; yet now here they were, not only back within my reach, but inside me. My ideas had taken up their former places in precise and as yet rather painful corners of my empty head, which would one day be split open, scattering them to the winds and ending an existence they had so far put, alas, to little profit.

Once more I had escaped the impossibility of sleeping, and the ravages and the havoc of nervous disorder it brought. Things that had been a menace to me the night before, when I was without rest, were now incapable of alarming me. A new life stretched before me: without making a single movement, since I still felt crippled though already alert, I reveled in my exhaustion; it had dismembered me and broken the bones in my arms and legs, which I could feel lying there nearby, ready to be reassembled, and which I was going to bring together again, with a mere song, like the builder in the fable.⁸⁶

I suddenly remembered the young blonde with the wistful look who had glanced at me at Rivebelle. During the evening at the restaurant, many other women had seemed just as nice, yet she was the one who now stood alone in my memory. I had the feeling that she must have noticed me: one of the waiters from Rivebelle might even now be bringing me a note from her! She was not known to Saint-Loup, who had thought she was respectable. It would be difficult to see her, and to go on seeing her. But I was prepared to do anything that would make it possible; I could think of nothing but her. Philosophy talks of free acts and necessary acts. Perhaps none is so completely inescapable as the one which, on the release of a hitherto compressed elevating force, brings up to the surface of the idling mind a memory that was weighted down at the same level as others by the ballast of activity and preoccupation, and makes it spring to the mind’s eye because, unknown to us, it contains a charm that the others lack, and which we notice only twenty-four hours later. But perhaps none is so completely free either, since such an act is still unaffected by habit, that type of mental obsessiveness which, under the aggravation of love, becomes the exclusive rehearsal of the memory of a certain person.

It was the day after I had seen my group of girls profiled in beautiful procession against the sea. I asked several of the hotel guests about them, people who often spent their summers at Balbec, but they could tell me nothing. Some time later, a photograph was to explain why: in the group as it was now, in these girls who had barely, but definitively, left behind the age at which we change forever, could anyone have recognized the delightful, amorphous mass of little girls, still children, who only a few years before were to be seen sitting in a circle on the sand, by a tent, a white blur of a constellation, in which a pair of eyes finer than any other pair, a mischievous face, a head of fair hair, once noticed, would soon have gone unnoticed, blended back into the milky, indistinct nebula?

No doubt, at that time, so few years before, it was not the vision of the group that lacked clarity, as it had been the day before, when they first appeared to me, but the group itself. In those days, the girls were too young to have gone beyond the elementary degree of formation of self, when personality has not yet stamped its seal on each face. Like primitive organisms in which the individual hardly exists, or, rather, in which it is constituted more by the polypary than by each of its component polyps, they lived in a close conglomerate, huddled together. One of them would suddenly push another one over, and a fit of the giggles, which seemed to be the only manifestation in them of personal life, convulsed them all at once, masking and unifying the undefined, grimacing faces in the sparkle and translucency of a single, quivering cluster. In an old photograph they subsequently gave me, which I have kept, their pack of children numbers no fewer of them than were to figure later in their feminine company; it suggests that even then the blur of color they made on the beach was remarkable enough to make eyes turn toward them, but in order to recognize any of them individually, one must resort to deduction, try to imagine the whole range of their possible transformations during later childhood, up to the point at which their remodeled forms started to coincide with another individual set of features, which one must attempt to identify also in the beautiful face (now accompanied by full height and hair that is waved) that might once have belonged to the photo’s wizened and grimacing gnome; and the distance covered in so short a time by the physical characteristics of each of the girls was such an unreliable criterion—in addition to which, their collectiveness, so to speak, and the things they had in common, were already so marked—that even their best friends could look at that photograph and mistake them for one another; with the result that the uncertainty could be dispelled only by the presence of some article of clothing that one of them knew without a doubt she, and not one of the others, had worn. Different though those earlier days were from the day when I had seen them on the esplanade—different, yet so close to it—the girls still enjoyed laughing with gusto, as I had noticed the day before; but this laughter was not the intermittent and almost automatic sort indulged in by children, the spasmodic release that had once made the whole group of heads duck down as one, as a block of minnows in the Vivonne used to dive and disintegrate, before re-forming a moment later; their individual faces had now become capable of self-mastery, their eyes remaining fixed throughout on the aim they pursued; and the day before, it had been only my indecision and the vacillation of my initial perception which, like their former hilarity and the old photo, had fused into an indistinct whole the now individualized and separated sister stars of the pale madrepore.

Of course, when I saw pretty girls pass by, I often promised myself I would make a point of seeing them again. Usually, such girls make no reappearance in one’s life; and memory, quickly mislaying their existence, would be hard put to remember their features; perhaps our eyes would not even recognize them again, and before long we see others passing by, whom we shall not see again either. However, on other occasions—and this was what was to happen with this little gang of impudent girls—further chance encounters bring them back into our field of vision. In such chance there is seeming beauty, for we see in it an incipient intent or effort to organize our life, to give it shape; and it is this same chance that can make it easy, inevitable, and sometimes even cruel—after intermissions that may have made us hope for a cessation of such memories—for us to acquire a sort of fidelity to mental images that we may come to believe we were predestined to acquire, yet which, had it not been for that chance, we could have forgotten at the very beginning, like so many others, so easily.

Saint-Loup’s stay at Balbec was soon to come to an end. I had not seen any of the girls on the beach again. He could spend too few afternoons at Balbec to be able to busy himself with getting to know them on my behalf. In the evenings, he had more time and often took me out to Rivebelle. In those sorts of restaurants, as in public parks and trains, one comes across people enclosed in an ordinary appearance, whose names astonish us if, having asked by chance what they are called, we discover them to be, not the nondescript nobodies we had supposed, but none other than the minister or the duke whom we have so often heard of. In the Rivebelle restaurant, Saint-Loup and I had several times noticed a tall man, very well built, with regular features and a beard turning gray, who, having arrived when most other diners were leaving, would sit at a table resolutely staring at nothing with pensive, unfocused eyes. When we asked the owner one night who this unknown, solitary, belated diner was, he replied, “What? Don’t you know the famous painter Elstir?” Swann had once spoken the name of Elstir in my presence, though I had completely forgotten in what connection; but the loss of a memory, like the omission of a phrase during reading, rather than making for uncertainty, can lead to a premature certainty. “He’s a friend of Swann’s, a very well-known artist, among the best,” I said to Saint-Loup. The immediate thought that thrilled through the mind of each of us was that Elstir was a great artist, a famous man; and the next was that he must look on us as he looked on the other diners, and be quite unaware of the excitement that filled us at the knowledge of his brilliance. Had we not been at the seaside, we would not have been irked to realize he knew nothing of our admiration for him or our acquaintance with Swann. But we were still at an age when enthusiasm cries out to be known of; and with a sudden conviction that our incognito was intolerable, we wrote a letter, which we both signed, telling Elstir that the two diners sitting not far away were ardent admirers of his ability and friends of his great friend Swann, and asking his permission to present our compliments. We got a waiter to take our message to the famous man.

To tell the truth, Elstir may not have been quite as famous at that time as the owner of the restaurant claimed, or as he became not many years later. He had been one of the first to live in the restaurant, at a time when it was still little more than a farmhouse, to which he had brought a colony of artists (all of whom had later migrated elsewhere, once the farmhouse, where they had eaten out of doors under a simple canopy, had become a fashionable rendezvous; the only reason Elstir himself had come back to eat at that time at Rivebelle was that his wife, with whom he lived not far from there, was briefly away from home). But a great talent, even when it goes largely unrecognized, is bound to give rise to certain manifestations of admiration, such as those the owner of the farmhouse had seen in the questions of more than one visiting Englishwoman, eager for information on the life led by Elstir, and in the number of letters the artist received from abroad. The owner had also noticed that Elstir disliked being interrupted while he was working, that when the moonlight was good he got up in the middle of the night, so as to take a young model down to pose in the nude by the sea; and on recognizing in one of Elstir’s paintings a wooden cross that stood just outside Rivebelle, he had decided that such self-imposed discipline was not wasted, and the admiration of the tourists not unjustified. “It’s the very same cross, I tell you!” he would say in amazement. “You can see the four bits of it! Mind you, he really goes at it.”

And he wondered whether a little Sunrise on the Sea, given to him by Elstir, might not be worth a fortune.

We saw Elstir read our letter, slip it into his pocket, go on with his dinner, then ask for his things and leave the table. By now we were so sure that by writing to him we had given offense that we would have preferred (as much as before we would have been reluctant) to leave the restaurant without being noticed by him. We gave not the slightest thought to a thing that should have seemed the most important of all: that our enthusiasm for Elstir, the sincerity of which we would not have allowed anyone to doubt (and in its support we could, of course, have alleged our bated breath and our wish to do anything for the great man, as long as it was difficult or heroic), was not, as we believed it was, admiration, since we had never seen any of his canvases; it was possible for such a feeling to be inspired by the empty idea of “a great artist,” but not by work that was completely unknown to us. At best, it was theoretical admiration, the nervous framework and emotional skeleton of an admiration without object—that is to say, something as inseparably linked to childhood as certain organs that no longer exist in the body of a grown man: we were still boys. Elstir had almost reached the door when he turned and came toward us. I felt myself flooded with a feeling of delicious terror, the likes of which I would have been incapable of experiencing a few years later, for not only does age diminish the ability, but habituation to society takes away all impulse, to bring about such strange occasions and the sort of feelings that accompany them.

Elstir sat with us at our table and spoke a few words; but he did not pursue any of the allusions I made to Swann. I could easily have believed he did not know him. He did, however, invite me to go and see him at his studio in Balbec, an invitation that did not include Saint-Loup, and which I owed to the fact that I had said a few things which made him think I had an interest in the arts (an invitation, be it said, that might never have been issued in response to a recommendation from Swann, if Elstir had been a close friend of his, as the influence of disinterest on the feelings of men is greater than is commonly believed). He treated me in a markedly friendly manner, which outdid Saint-Loup’s as much as Saint-Loup’s outdid the affability of a person from the lower-middle classes. However charming the kindness of a lord may be compared with the kindness of a great artist, it always suggests play-acting, pretense. Saint-Loup’s aim was to please; Elstir’s was to give, and to give himself: he would have gladly given whatever he possessed—ideas, works, and all the rest, which he valued much less highly—to anyone who understood him. But he found something lacking in the company of most people, and lived in a state of isolation and unsociability that fashionable people saw as ill mannered and affected, the powers-that-be as wrongheaded, his neighbors as mad, and his family as arrogant and inconsiderate.

To begin with, even in his solitude, he must have taken pleasure in the thought that, through his works, he was addressing, albeit at a remove, those who had misunderstood or offended him, and giving them a better opinion of himself. Perhaps his choice of the solitary life was motivated not by indifference toward others, but by love for them; and, much as I had given up Gilberte in the hope of being able to appear to her in the future in a more lovable guise, perhaps he painted with certain people in mind, in a sort of gesture of reconciliation toward them, so that, without ever meeting again, they would love him, admire him, speak about him; renunciation is not always total from the very first moment—the self that commits us to it is a former self, one that has not yet been acted upon by the fact of renunciation itself, whether it be the renunciation of the invalid, the monk, the artist, or the hero. However, even if Elstir’s intention had been to work with a view to impressing certain people, in working he had lived only for himself, turning his back on the society to which he had become indifferent: the practice of solitude had given him a love for it, which is what happens with any important thing that we have ever begun by fearing, because we knew it was incompatible with pettier things to which we were attached, and from which it must sever us forever, rather than just distract us from them. Before we have committed ourselves to it, our whole concern is to know how we may be able to reconcile it with certain pleasures, which will cease being pleasures as soon as we have experience of it.

Elstir did not sit talking with us for very long. I told myself I would go to his studio at some time over the next two or three days; but then, the very next afternoon, my grandmother and I having been for a walk to the cliffs of Canapville, right at the far end of the esplanade, we were on our way back when we passed a young girl, at the corner of one of the side streets that run perpendicular to the beach: hanging her head, like an animal being forced back to the stable, and carrying golf clubs, she was walking in front of an authoritative-looking personage, presumably her English governess, or the English governess of one of her friends, who looked like John Jeffreys in the portrait by Hogarth, with a complexion so red as to make one think she drank gin rather than tea, and a black trace of tobacco adding its curl to a gray mustache, which was quite pronounced. The girl walking in front of her bore some resemblance to the one in the group whose chubby, motionless face, with its laughing eyes, had been topped by a black toque; this girl also wore a black toque, but she seemed much prettier than the other one, the line of her nose being straighter and the wings of her nostrils wider and more fleshy. The first one had looked like a pale and proud young lady; this one was more like a pink-faced child, grudgingly submissive. However, as she was pushing a similar bicycle along, and wearing the same reindeer-skin gloves, I deduced that the differences might have to do with my angle of vision and the circumstances, since it was unlikely there would be a second young girl in Balbec whose face looked so much like hers, and with so many other similarities in articles of dress and equipment. She sidled a quick glance toward me; and over the following days, each time I caught sight of the little gang of girls on the beach, and even later, after I had come to know all of them, I could never be absolutely sure whether any of them, including the first one with the bicycle, who looked more like her than any of the others, was in fact this one I had seen that evening, at the far end of the beach, by the streetcorner, this one who was hardly any different, but who was actually a little bit different, from the one I had noticed in their procession.

From that moment on, although until then I had been thinking mostly about the tall one, it was once more the girl with the golf clubs, whom I assumed to be Mlle Simonet, who preoccupied me. Walking along with the others, she would often stop, making her friends, who seemed to respect her greatly, also come to a standstill. That is how I see her to this day: standing there, her eyes shining under her toque, silhouetted against the backdrop of the sea, and separated from me by the transparent sky-blue stretch of time elapsed since that moment, the first glimpse of her in my memory, a very slight image of a face first desired and pursued, then forgotten, then found again, a face that since then I have often projected into the past, so as to say to myself, of a girl with me in my bedroom, “That was her!”

But I was not really sure whether the girl I would have preferred to know was not perhaps the one with the green eyes and the cheeks suggesting geraniums. And whichever one of them I chose to look out for on different days, the presence of the others, even without her, was enough to fill me with excitement: though my desire bore on one of them some of the time and on another at other times, it went on seeing them all, as on the first day of my indistinct vision of them, as one, as a little world apart, living a single life, which was probably how they liked to see themselves; and if I could have become friends with only one of them, I would have gained access—like a refined pagan, or a Christian full of scruples, fallen among barbarians—to a whole society with powers of rejuvenation, a society based on rude health, recklessness, bodily pleasure, cruelty, nonintellectuality, and joy.

My grandmother, whom I had told of my encounter with Elstir, and who was pleased to think of all the intellectual advantage there could be for me in the friendship of such a man, thought I was absurd and impolite not to have gone and visited him before this. But I could think of nothing other than the little band of girls; and unsure as I was of when they might appear, I did not dare to leave the esplanade. My grandmother was also surprised at how elegantly I dressed, as I had suddenly remembered suits which till then had remained in my trunk. Now I wore a different one every day and had even written to Paris to ask that new hats and ties be sent down.

The life we lead in a seaside resort such as Balbec can acquire much charm if the sight of a pretty face, a seller of seashells, a florist, a girl in a cake shop, painted in its vivid colors in our morning memory, becomes the aim of each of the sunlit days we idle away on the sands. It is this aim that makes them, though holidays, as busy as workdays, marked by directions and destinations, tending always toward the coming moment, when in buying our fossil shells, our shortbread, or our roses, we can delight in the colors of a feminine face, as pure and clear as those of a flower. But with shopgirls, at least one can chat, which avoids the necessity of filling in by imagination all the aspects of them not directly perceptible to the eye, of inventing a life for them and exaggerating the charm of it, as though extrapolating from a mere portrait; and for another thing, for the very reason that they can be chatted with, one can learn where and when to meet them. This, of course, was nothing like the position I was in with the girls of the little gang. On days when I did not see them, as their habits were unknown to me, I was in total ignorance of the possible cause of their nonappearance: did they only come every second day, or in certain weather, or were there days when they were never to be seen? I imagined being their future friend and being able to say, “But you didn’t come on such-and-such a day?” “True, because it was a Saturday, and we never come on Saturdays because ...” Not that it was as simple as just knowing that on sad Saturdays it was futile to hope against hope, and that I could walk up and down the beach, sit in the window seat of the cake shop, pretend to eat an éclair, wander into the curiosity shop, moon around waiting for it to be time to go for a swim, listen to the concert, watch the fishing boats come in, see the sunset, then nightfall, and still not have seen the little group I longed for. It was possible the dreaded day did not come round once a week. Nor might it be a Saturday. Certain atmospheric conditions might have an influence on it—or, conversely, might have nothing at all to do with it. How many patient, but not dispassionate, observations must be recorded about the apparently erratic movements of these unknown worlds, before one can be sure of having ruled out misleading coincidences, of having confirmed one’s predictions, and being able to draw up the infallible laws, arrived at through cruel experience, of this passionate astronomy! I would remember that I had not seen them on this day last week and conclude that they would not appear, that it was pointless to stay down on the beach. And then I would see them! But there would come another day, which, insofar as I could detect the functioning of laws in the recurrences of their constellation, I had calculated must be an auspicious one, yet they did not appear. Then my initial uncertainty about whether I would see them or not on a particular day was aggravated by another, much more serious one, whether I would see them ever again—for all I knew, they might be leaving for America or returning to Paris. This was enough to make me begin to fall in love with them. Having a liking for someone is one thing; but to be afflicted with the sadness, the feeling of something irreparable having happened, the anguish that all accompany the onset of love, what is necessary is the risk—which may even be the object to which passion in its fretfulness tries to cling, rather than to a person—of an impossibility. These forces were already working within me, and they revive each time one falls in love (they can in fact attach themselves, though usually this only happens in town life, to working-class girls, if one is unaware of their day off and fails to see them leaving the factory at the end of the day’s work), or at least that is what happened with my successive love affairs. Perhaps such forces are inseparable from all love: it may be that whatever particularities were present in our first experience of it become incorporated into the following ones, by the workings of memory, suggestion, or habit, and that, throughout the consecutive periods of our existence, they give a common character to its different phases.

On all possible pretexts, I went down to the beach at any hour when I hoped they might be expected. Having seen them once while we were having lunch, I became very unpunctual at that mealtime, waiting about on the esplanade in case they came along; for the short time I sat in the dining room, my stare questioned the blue of the glass doors; I went without dessert so as not to miss them if they had been out for their walk at some different hour; and I was annoyed at my grandmother’s unintentional unkindness when she made me sit there with her after the time I thought the most propitious. I tried to lengthen the horizon by setting my chair at an angle to the table; and if by some chance I caught sight of any one of the girls, it suddenly felt, since all of them had a share in the same special essence, as though a fickle and diabolical hallucination had projected before my eyes a scene from the latent dream, baleful yet ardently desired, that a moment before had existed only in my mind, where it always lay in readiness.

Loving them all, I was in love with none of them; and yet the possibility of meeting them was the only element of delight in my days, the only source of those hopes which make one feel capable of overcoming all obstacles, and which for me, if I did not see them, were often dashed and turned to rage. The girls eclipsed my grandmother: I would gladly have left for a long journey if it had promised to lead me to where they were. They were what was always hovering agreeably in my thoughts, whenever I thought I was thinking of something else, or of nothing. And even when I was unaware of thinking about them, at a deeper level of unconsciousness they were the towering blue waves or the shapes of a parade passing in front of the sea. If I went to another town where I might meet them, it was the sea I looked forward to seeing. The most exclusive love for any person is always love for something else.

My grandmother, because I had now developed an acute interest in golf and tennis, which was preventing me from seizing the opportunity of going to watch an artist at work—an artist she knew to be among the greatest—and listen to his talk, now treated me with scorn, which seemed to me very narrow-minded of her. At the Champs-Élysées I had had an inkling, which since those days had become clearer to me, that when we are in love with a woman all we are doing is projecting onto her a state of our own self; that, consequently, what is important is not the merit of the woman, but the intensity of that state; and that the emotions a mediocre young girl can give us may enable us to bring up to consciousness elements of ourself that are more private and personal, more remote and essential than anything we may acquire from the conversation of an extraordinary man, or even the admiration with which we gaze at his works.

I eventually had to comply with my grandmother’s urgings, though I did so with a bad grace, which was aggravated by the fact that Elstir lived nowhere near the esplanade, but in one of the newest avenues of Balbec. The heat of the day made me take the trolley along the rue de la Plage; and I sat there trying to imagine I was in the ancient realm of the Cimmerians, in the land of King Mark, or perhaps on the very spot where the Forest of Broceliande had been,⁸⁷ so as to avoid looking at the sham luxury of the buildings all around me, among which Elstir’s villa was perhaps the most sumptuous in its ugliness, despite which he had rented it because it was the only one of all Balbec’s villas that afforded him the use of a spacious studio.

As I walked through the garden, I kept my eyes averted also from the lawn—smaller than, but reminiscent of, that of any middle-class philistine in the suburbs of Paris—the statuette of a lovelorn gardener, glass balls for looking at one’s reflection, borders of begonias, and a little arbor with rocking chairs set out around a metal table. After all these approaches full of citified ugliness, once in the studio itself I paid no attention to the chocolate-colored moldings on its baseboards: I was perfectly happy among all the studies ranged about, for I glimpsed in them the possibility that I might rise to a poetic awareness, rich in fulfilling insights for me, of many forms that I had hitherto never distinguished in reality’s composite spectacle. Elstir’s studio seemed like the laboratory out of which would come a kind of new creation of the world: from the chaos made of all things we see, he had abstracted, by painting them on various rectangles of canvas now standing about on all sides, glimpses of things, like a wave in the sea crashing its angry lilac-shaded foam down on the sand, or a young man in white twill leaning on a ship’s rail. The young man’s jacket and the splash of the wave had taken on a new dignity, in virtue of the fact that they continued to exist, though now deprived of what they were believed to consist in, the wave being now unable to wet anyone, and the jacket unable to be worn.

As I came in, the creator, paintbrush in hand, was just putting the last touch to the shape of the sun as it set.

The blinds being down on most sides, the studio was rather cool; and, except for one part where daylight’s fleeting decoration dazzled the wall, it was dim; the only window open was a small rectangle framed in honeysuckle, looking out on a strip of garden, then a road; so most of the studio was in half-darkness, transparent and compact in its mass, but moist and glistening at the angles where the light edged it, like a block of rock crystal with one of its sides already cut and polished in patches, so that it shines like a mirror and gives off an iridescent glow. While Elstir, at my request, went on with his painting, I wandered through this chiaroscuro, stopping here and there in front of a picture.

Most of those in the studio were not what I would have preferred to see: the paintings from his first and second periods, so called by an English art magazine I had found lying on the table in the salon at the Grand-Hôtel—that is, his mythological manner and the paintings in which a Japanese influence had become evident, both of which were admirably represented, the article said, in the collection of Mme de Guermantes. Almost all of the works I could see around me in the studio were, of course, seascapes done recently here in Balbec. But I could see that their charm lay in a kind of metamorphosis of the things depicted, analogous to the poetical device known as metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, Elstir re-created them by removing their names, or by giving them other names. The names of things always express a view of the mind, which is foreign to our genuine impressions of them, and which forces us to eliminate from them whatever does not correspond to that view.

At the hotel in Balbec, there had been mornings when Françoise unpinned the blankets keeping out the light, or evenings when I was waiting for it to be time to go out with Saint-Loup, when an effect of sunlight at my bedroom window had made me see a darker area of the sea as a distant coastline, or filled me with joy at the sight of a zone of liquid blue that it was impossible to say was either sea or sky. The mind quickly redistributed the elements into the categories the impression had abolished. Similarly, in my room in Paris, I had heard sounds of squabbling, almost rioting in the streets, until I had linked them to their cause—for instance, the rumbling approach of a dray, the sound of which, once identified, made me eliminate from it the high-pitched, discordant shouting which my ear had really heard, but which my mind knew is not made by wheels. Those infrequent moments when we perceive nature as it is, poetically, were what Elstir’s work was made of. One of the metaphors that recurred most often in the sea pictures surrounding him then was one that compares the land to the sea, blurring all distinction between them. And it was this comparison, tacitly, tirelessly repeated in a single canvas, imbuing it with its powerful and multifarious unity, that was the source of the enthusiasm felt, though sometimes they were not quite aware of this, by many lovers of Elstir’s painting.

It was to a metaphor of this sort—in a painting showing the harbor of Carquethuit, which he had finished only a few days before, and which I looked at for a long time—that Elstir had alerted the mind of the spectator, by using marine terminology to show the little town, and urban terms for the sea. Whether because the houses hid part of the harbor and the caulking basin, say, or perhaps because inlets of sea indented the land, as is very frequent in the country around Balbec, beyond the extreme promontory on which the town stood, masts rose above roofs, like chimneys or steeples, as though making citified things of the ships to which they belonged, things built on land, an illusion enhanced by the presence of other boats lying alongside the pier, in ranks so serried that men conversed from one deck to another without there being any visible separation between them, any interstice of water, giving the impression that the fishing fleet was more out of place on the sea than, for instance, the churches of Criquebec, which seemed to be standing in the water, surrounded by it on all sides, so distant as to be seen without their town, amid a sparkling haze of sunlight and spindrift, blown out of alabaster or foam, and making, when bounded by the versicolored sash of a rainbow, an unreal and mystic picture. On the beach in the foreground, the painter had accustomed the eye to distinguish no clear frontier, no line of demarcation, between the land and the ocean. Men pushing boats out moved in the tide as on the sand, which, being wet, reflected the hulls as though it were water. The sea did not invade evenly, but followed the irregularities of the shoreline, which the perspective made more jagged, and a ship out to sea, half hidden by the outworks of the arsenal, seemed to be sailing in the thick of the buildings; women shrimping among rocks looked, because they were surrounded by water, and because, beyond the circular barrier of rocks, the beach dipped down to the level of the sea at the two points closest to the land, as though they were in an undersea grotto, with waves and boats above, open yet miraculously protected from the inrush of waters. Though the whole painting gave the impression of seaports where the waves advance into the land, where the land almost belongs to the sea, and the population is amphibious, the power of the marine element was everywhere manifest; and out by the rocks or at the end of the pier, where the sea was rough, the efforts of the sailors, and the slanting of the boats, lying at an acute angle near the upright stability of the wharf, the church, and the houses of the town, with some people coming in and others setting out to fish, made one sense the urgency in their step as they scurried over the heaving water, as though it were a swift and spirited animal which, had it not been for their nimbleness, might throw them to the ground. A group of holiday-makers were setting out gaily in a yawl, which was shaken about like a farm cart; a sailor, cheerful but also careful, controlled it as though with reins, driving the spirited sail, all sitting in their proper places so as not to overload the equipage at one side and capsize it, and she cantered across sunlit fields and through shaded places, prancing down the slopes. The morning was radiant, despite a recent thunderstorm. One could even sense the powerful activity that the motionless boats had had to contend with, as they lazed now in their fine equilibrium in the sun and the cool, on parts of the sea which were so calm that the reflections were almost more solid and real than the hulls, which were turned to vapor by an effect of the light and run into one another by the perspective. Or, rather, they did not look like other parts of the sea: there was as great a difference between these areas of sea as between any one of them and the church rising out of the waters, or the ships behind the town. It was the mind which, on second thoughts, came to see as one and the same element what was stormy black at one point, at another indistinguishable from the sky in color and sheen, and elsewhere so blanched by sunlight, mist, and spray, so compact, so landlike, so hedged about by houses, that one was reminded of a causeway of stone or a snowfield, on which it was alarming to see a ship steeply climbing the dry slope, like a carriage shaking water as it rattles up from a river ford, but which one realized before long, as one saw other ships lurching about on the high, uneven expanse of its solid plateau, was identical in all its differences, and nothing other than the single sea.