Title:      Cities of the Plain
            (Sodom et Gomorrhe)
            [Vol. 4 of Remembrance of Things Past--
            (À la Recherche du temps perdu)]
Author:     Marcel Proust
            Translated from the French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
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Language:   English
Date first posted:          March 2003
Date most recently updated: March 2003

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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Cities of the Plain
            (Sodom et Gomorrhe)
            [Vol. 4 of Remembrance of Things Past--
            (À la Recherche du temps perdu)]
Author:     Marcel Proust
            Translated from the French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff





CONTENTS

Part I

Introducing the men-women, descendants of those of the inhabitants of
Sodom who were spared by the fire from heaven.

CHAPTER ONE M. de Charlus in Society--A physician--Typical physiognomy
of Mme.  de Vaugoubert--Mme. d'Arpajon, the Hubert Robert fountain and
the merriment of the Grand Duke Vladimir--Mmes.  d'Amoncourt, de
Citri, de Saint-Euverte, etc.--Curious conversation between Swann and
the Prince de Guermantes--Albertine on the telephone--My social life
in the interval before my second and final visit to Balbec--Arrival at
Balbec.

The Heart's Intermissions

CHAPTER TWO The mysteries of Albertine--The girls whom she sees
reflected in the glass--The other woman--The lift-boy--Madame de
Cambremer.

Part II

CHAPTER TWO (continued) The pleasures of M. Nissim Bernard
(continued)--Outline of the strange character of Morel--M. de Charlus
dines with the Verdurins.

CHAPTER THREE The sorrows of M. de Charlus--His sham duel--The
stations on the "Transatlantic"--Weary of Albertine, I decide to break
with her.

CHAPTER FOUR Sudden revulsion in favour of Albertine--Agony at
sunrise--I set off at once with Albertine for Paris,



TRANSLATOR'S DEDICATION

To

Richard and Myrtle Kurt
and Their Creator

Pisa, 1927




PART I

Introducing the men-women, descendants of those of the inhabitants
of Sodom who were spared by the fire from heaven.

_La femme aura Gomorrhe et l'homme aura
Sodome_. Alfred de Vigny.


The reader will remember that, long before going that day (on the
evening of which the Princesse de Guermantes was to give her party) to
pay the Duke and Duchess the visit which I have just described, I had
kept watch for their return and had made, in the course of my vigil, a
discovery which, albeit concerning M. de Charlus in particular, was in
itself so important that I have until now, until the moment when I
could give it the prominence and treat it with the fulness that it
demanded, postponed giving any account of it. I had, as I have said,
left the marvellous point of vantage, so snugly contrived for me at
the top of the house, commanding the broken and irregular slopes
leading up to the Hôtel de Bréquigny, and gaily decorated in the
Italian manner by the rose-pink campanile of the Marquis de Frécourt's
stables. I had felt it to be more convenient, when I thought that the
Duke and Duchess were on the point of returning, to post myself on the
staircase. I regretted somewhat the abandonment of my watch-tower. But
at that time of day, namely the hour immediately following luncheon, I
had less cause for regret, for I should not then have seen, as in the
morning, the foptmen of the Bréquigny-Tresmes household, converted by
distance into minute figures in a picture, make their leisurely ascent
of the abrupt precipice, feather-brush in hand, behind the large,
transparent flakes of mica which stood out so charmingly upon its
ruddy bastions. Failing the geologist's field of contemplation, I had
at least that of the botanist, and was peering through the shutters of
the staircase window at the Duchess's little tree and at the precious
plant, exposed in the courtyard with that insistence with which
mothers 'bring out' their marriageable offspring, and asking myself
whether the unlikely insect would come, by a providential hazard, to
visit the offered and neglected pistil.  My curiosity emboldening me
by degrees, I went down to the ground-floor window, which also stood
open with its shutters ajar. I could hear distinctly, as he got ready
to go out, Jupien who could not detect me behind my blind, where I
stood perfectly still until the moment when I drew quickly aside in
order not to be seen by M. de Charlus, who, on his way to call upon
Mme. de Villeparisis, was slowly crossing the courtyard, a pursy
figure, aged by the strong light, his hair visibly grey. Nothing short
of an indisposition of Mme. de Villeparisis (consequent on the illness
of the Marquis de Fierbois, with whom he personally was at daggers
drawn) could have made M. de Charlus pay a call, perhaps for the first
time in his life, at that hour of the day. For with that eccentricity
of the Guermantes, who, instead of conforming to the ways of society,
used to modify them to suit their own personal habits (habits not,
they thought, social, and deserving in consequence the abasement
before them of that thing of no value, Society--thus it was that Mme.
de Marsantes had no regular 'day,' but was at home to her friends
every morning between ten o'clock and noon), the Baron, reserving
those hours for reading, hunting for old curiosities and so forth,
paid calls only between four and six in the afternoon.  At six o'clock
he went to the Jockey Club, or took a stroll in the Bois. A moment
later, I again recoiled, in order not to be seen by Jupien. It was
nearly time for him to start for the office, from which he would
return only for dinner, and not even then always during the last week,
his niece and her apprentices having gone to the country to finish a
dress there for a customer. Then, realising that no one could see me,
I decided not to let myself be disturbed again, for fear of missing,
should the miracle be fated to occur, the arrival, almost beyond the
possibility of hope (across so many obstacles of distance, of adverse
risks, of dangers), of the insect sent from so far as ambassador to
the virgin who had so long been waiting for him to appear. I knew that
this expectancy was no more passive than in the male flower, whose
stamens had spontaneously curved so that the insect might more easily
receive their offering; similarly the female flower that stood here,
if the insect came, would coquettishly arch her styles; and, to be
more effectively penetrated by him, would imperceptibly advance, like
a hypocritical but ardent damsel, to meet him half-way. The laws of
the vegetable kingdom are themselves governed by other laws,
increasingly exalted. If the visit of an insect, that is to say, the
transportation of the seed of one flower is generally necessary for
the fertilisation of another, that is because autofecundation, the
fertilisation of a flower by itself, would lead, like a succession of
intermarriages in the same family, to degeneracy and sterility,
whereas the crossing effected by the insects gives to the subsequent
generations of the same species a vigour unknown to their forebears.
This invigoration may, however, prove excessive, the species develop
out of all proportion; then, as an anti-toxin protects us against
disease, as the thyroid gland regulates our adiposity, as defeat comes
to punish pride, fatigue, indulgence, and as sleep in turn depends
upon fatigue, so an exceptional act of autofecundation comes at a
given point to apply its turn of the screw, its pull on the curb,
brings back within normal limits the flower that has exaggerated its
transgression of them. My reflexions had followed a tendency which I
shall describe in due course, and I had already drawn from the visible
stratagems of flowers a conclusion that bore upon a whole unconscious
element of literary work, when I saw M. de Charlus coming away from
the Marquise. Perhaps he had learned from his elderly relative
herself, or merely from a servant, the great improvement, or rather
her complete recovery from what had been nothing more than a slight
indisposition. At this moment, when he did not suspect that anyone was
watching him, his eyelids lowered as a screen against the sun, M. de
Charlus had relaxed that tension in his face, deadened that artificial
vitality, which the animation of his talk and the force of his will
kept in evidence there as a rule. Pale as marble, his nose stood out
firmly, his fine features no longer received from an expression
deliberately assumed a different meaning which altered the beauty of
their modelling; nothing more now than a Guermantes, he seemed already
carved in stone, he Pala-mède the Fifteenth, in their chapel at
Combray. These general features of a whole family took on, however, in
the face of M. de Charlus a fineness more spiritualised, above all
more gentle. I regretted for his sake that he should habitually
adulterate with so many acts of violence, offensive oddities,
tale-bearings, with such harshness, susceptibility and arrogance, that
he should conceal beneath a false brutality the amenity, the kindness
which, at the moment of his emerging from Mme. de Villeparisis's, I
could see displayed so innocently upon his face. Blinking his eyes in
the sunlight, he seemed almost to be smiling, I found in his face seen
thus in repose and, so to speak, in its natural state something so
affectionate, so disarmed, that I could not help thinking how angry M.
de Charlus would have been could he have known that he was being
watched; for what was suggested to me by the sight of this man who was
so insistent, who prided himself so upon his virility, to whom all
other men seemed odiously effeminate, what he made me suddenly think
of, so far had he momentarily assumed her features, expression, smile,
was a woman.

I was about to change my position again, so that he should not catch
sight of me; I had neither the time nor the need to do so. What did I
see?  Face to face, in that courtyard where certainly they had never
met before (M. de Charlus coming to the Hôtel de Guermantes only in
the afternoon, during the time when Jupien was at his office), the
Baron, having suddenly opened wide his half-shut eyes, was studying
with unusual attention the ex-tailor poised on the threshold of his
shop, while the latter, fastened suddenly to the ground before M. de
Charlus, taking root in it like a plant, was contemplating with a look
of amazement the plump form of the middle-aged Baron. But, more
astounding still, M. de Charlus's attitude having changed, Jupien's,
as though in obedience to the laws of an occult art, at once brought
itself into harmony with it. The Baron, who was now seeking to conceal
the impression that had been made on him, and yet, in spite of his
affectation of indifference, seemed unable to move away without
regret, went, came, looked vaguely into the distance in the way which,
he felt, most enhanced the beauty of his eyes, assumed a complacent,
careless, fatuous air. Meanwhile Jupien, shedding at once the humble,
honest expression which I had always associated with him, had--in
perfect symmetry with the Baron--thrown up his head, given a becoming
tilt to his body, placed his hand with a grotesque impertinence on his
hip, stuck out his behind, posed himself with the coquetry that the
orchid might have adopted on the providential arrival of the bee. I
had not supposed that he could appear so repellent. But I was equally
unaware that he was capable of improvising his part in this sort of
dumb charade, which (albeit he found himself for the first time in the
presence of M. de Charlus) seemed to have been long and carefully
rehearsed; one does not arrive spontaneously at that pitch of
perfection except when one meets in a foreign country a compatriot
with whom an understanding then grows up of itself, both parties
speaking the same language, even though they have never seen one
another before.

This scene was not, however, positively comic, it was stamped with a
strangeness, or if you like a naturalness, the beauty of which
steadily increased. M. de Charlus might indeed assume a detached air,
indifferently let his eyelids droop; every now and then he raised
them, and at such moments turned on Jupien an attentive gaze. But
(doubtless because he felt that such a scene could not be prolonged
indefinitely in this place, whether for reasons which we shall learn
later on, or possibly from that feeling of the brevity of all things
which makes us determine that every blow must strike home, and renders
so moving the spectacle of every kind of love), each time that M. de
Charlus looked at Jupien, he took care that his glance should be
accompanied by a spoken word, which made it infinitely unlike the
glances we usually direct at a person whom we do or do not know; he
stared at Jupien with the peculiar fixity of the person who is about
to say to us: "Excuse my taking the liberty, but you have a long white
thread hanging down your back," or else: "Surely I can't be mistaken,
you come from Zurich too; I'm certain I must have seen you there often
in the curiosity shop." Thus, every other minute, the same question
seemed to be being intensely put to Jupien in the stare of M.  de
Charlus, like those questioning phrases of Beethoven indefinitely
repeated at regular intervals, and intended--with an exaggerated
lavish-ness of preparation--to introduce a new theme, a change of
tone, a 'reentry.' On the other hand, the beauty of the reciprocal
glances of M. de Charlus and Jupien arose precisely from the fact that
they did not, for the moment at least, seem to be intended to lead to
anything further. This beauty, it was the first time that I had seen
the Baron and Jupien display it. In the eyes of both of them, it was
the sky not of Zurich but of some Oriental city, the name of which I
had not yet divined, that I saw reflected.  Whatever the point might
be that held M. de Charlus and the ex-tailor thus arrested, their pact
seemed concluded and these superfluous glances to be but ritual
preliminaries, like the parties that people give before a marriage
which has been definitely 'arranged.' Nearer still to nature--and the
multiplicity of these analogies is itself all the more natural in that
the same man, if we examine him for a few minutes, appears in turn as
a man, a man-bird or man-insect, and so forth--one would have called
them a pair of birds, the male and the female, the male seeking to
make advances, the female--Jupien--no longer giving any sign of
response to these overtures, but regarding her new friend without
surprise, with an inattentive fixity of gaze, which she doubtless felt
to be more disturbing and the only effective method, once the male had
taken the first steps, and had fallen back upon preening his feathers.
At length Jupien's indifference seemed to suffice him no longer; from
this certainty of having conquered, to making himself be pursued and
desired was but the next stage, and Jupien, deciding to go off to his
work, passed through the carriage gate. It was only, however, after
turning his head two or three times that he escaped into the street
towards which the Baron, trembling lest he should lose the trail
(boldly humming a tune, not forgetting to fling a 'Good day' to the
porter, who, half-tipsy himself and engaged in treating a few friends
in his back kitchen, did not even hear him), hurried briskly to
overtake him. At the same instant, just as M. de Charlus disappeared
through the gate humming like a great bumble-bee, another, a real bee
this time, came into the courtyard. For all I knew this might be the
one so long awaited by the orchid, which was coming to bring it that
rare pollen without which it must die a virgin. But I was distracted
from following the gyrations of the insect for, a few minutes later,
engaging my attention afresh, Jupien (perhaps to pick up a parcel
which he did take away with him eventually and so, presumably, in the
emotion aroused by the apparition of M. de Charlus, had forgotten,
perhaps simply for a more natural reason) returned, followed by the
Baron. The latter, deciding to cut short the preliminaries, asked the
tailor for a light, but at once observed: "I ask you for a light, but
I find that I have left my cigars at home." The laws of hospitality
prevailed over those of coquetry. "Come inside, you shall have
everything you require," said the tailor, on whose features disdain
now gave place to joy. The door of the shop closed behind them and I
could hear no more. I had lost sight of the bee. I did not know
whether he was the insect that the orchid needed, but I had no longer
any doubt, in the case of an extremely rare insect and a captive
flower, of the miraculous possibility of their conjunction when M. de
Charlus (this is simply a comparison of providential hazards, whatever
they may be, without the slightest scientific claim to establish a
relation between certain laws and what is sometimes, most ineptly,
termed homosexuality), who for years past had never come to the house
except at hours when Jupien was not there, by the mere accident of
Mme. de Villeparisis's illness had encountered the tailor, and with
him the good fortune reserved for men of the type of the Baron by one
of those fellow-creatures who may indeed be, as we shall see,
infinitely younger than Jupien and better looking, the man predestined
to exist in order that they may have their share of sensual pleasure
on this earth; the man who cares only for elderly gentlemen.

All that I have just said, however, I was not to understand until
several minutes had elapsed; so much is reality encumbered by those
properties of invisibility until a chance occurrence has divested it
of them. Anyhow, for the moment I was greatly annoyed at not being
able to hear any more of the conversation between the ex-tailor and
the Baron. I then bethought myself of the vacant shop, separated from
Jupien's only by a partition that was extremely slender. I had, in
order to get to it, merely to go up to our flat, pass through the
kitchen, go down by the service stair to the cellars, make my way
through them across the breadth of the courtyard above, and on coming
to the right place underground, where the joiner had, a few months
ago, still been storing his timber and where Jupien intended to keep
his coal, climb the flight of steps which led to the interior of the
shop.  Thus the whole of my journey would be made under cover, I
should not be seen by anyone. This was the most prudent method. It was
not the one that I adopted, but, keeping close to the walls, I made a
circuit in the open air of the courtyard, trying not to let myself be
seen. If I was not, I owe it more, I am sure, to chance than to my own
sagacity. And for the fact that I took so imprudent a course, when the
way through the cellar was so safe, I can see three possible reasons,
assuming that I had any reason at all.  First of all, my impatience.
Secondly, perhaps, a dim memory of the scene at Montjouvain, when I
stood concealed outside Mlle. Vinteuil's window.  Certainly, the
affairs of this sort of which I have been a spectator have always been
presented in a setting of the most imprudent and least probable
character, as if such revelations were to be the reward of an action
full of risk, though in part clandestine. Lastly, I hardly dare, so
childish does it appear, to confess the third reason, which was, I am
quite sure, unconsciously decisive. Since, in order to follow--and see
controverted--the military principles enunciated by Saint-Loup, I had
followed in close detail the course of the Boer war, I had been led on
from that to read again old accounts of explorations, narratives of
travel. These stories had excited me, and I applied them to the events
of my daily life to stimulate my courage. When attacks of illness had
compelled me to remain for several days and nights on end not only
without sleep but without lying down, without tasting food or drink,
at the moment when my pain and exhaustion became so intense that I
felt that I should never escape from them, I would think of some
traveller cast on the beach, poisoned by noxious herbs, shivering with
fever in clothes drenched by the salt water, who nevertheless in a day
or two felt stronger, rose and went blindly upon his way, in search of
possible inhabitants who might, when he came to them, prove cannibals.
His example acted on me as a tonic, restored my hope, and I felt
ashamed of my momentary discouragement. Thinking of the Boers who,
with British armies facing them, were not afraid to expose themselves
at the moment when they had to cross, in order to reach a covered
position, a tract of open country: "It would be a fine thing," I
thought to myself, "if I were to shew less courage when the theatre of
operations is simply the human heart, and when the only steel that I,
who engaged in more than one duel without fear at the time of the
Dreyfus case, have to fear is that of the eyes of the neighbours who
have other things to do besides looking into the courtyard,"

But when I was inside the shop, taking care not to let any plank in
the floor make the slightest creak, as I found that the least sound in
Jupien's shop could be heard from the other, I thought to myself how
rash Jupien and M. de Charlus had been, and how wonderfully fortune
had favoured them.

I did not dare move. The Guermantes groom, taking advantage no doubt
of his master's absence, had, as it happened, transferred to the shop
in which I now stood a ladder which hitherto had been kept in the
coach-house, and if I had climbed this I could have opened the
ventilator above and heard as well as if I had been in Jupien's shop
itself. But I was afraid of making a noise. Besides, it was
unnecessary. I had not even cause to regret my not having arrived in
the shop until several minutes had elapsed.  For from what I heard at
first in Jupien's shop, which was only a series of inarticulate
sounds, I imagine that few words had been exchanged. It is true that
these sounds were so violent that, if one set had not always been
taken up an octave higher by a parallel plaint, I might have thought
that one person was strangling another within a few feet of me, and
that subsequently the murderer and his resuscitated victim were taking
a bath to wash away the traces of the crime. I concluded from this
later on that there is another thing as vociferous as pain, namely
pleasure, especially when there is added to it--failing the fear of an
eventual parturition, which could not be present in this case, despite
the hardly convincing example in the _Golden Legend_--an immediate
afterthought of cleanliness.  Finally, after about half an hour
(during which time I had climbed on tip-toe up my ladder so as to peep
through the ventilator which I did not open), a conversation began.
Jupien refused with insistence the money that M. de Charlus was
pressing upon him.

"Why do you have your chin shaved like that," he inquired of the Baron
in a cajoling tone. "It's so becoming, a nice beard." "Ugh! It's
disgusting," the Baron replied. Meanwhile he still lingered upon the
threshold and plied Jupien with questions about the neighbourhood.
"You don't know anything about the man who sells chestnuts at the
corner, not the one on the left, he's a horror, but the other way, a
great, dark fellow? And the chemist opposite, he has a charming
cyclist who delivers his parcels." These questions must have ruffled
Jupien, for, drawing himself up with the scorn of a great courtesan
who has been forsaken, he replied: "I can see you are completely
heartless." Uttered in a pained, frigid, affected tone, this reproach
must have made its sting felt by M. de Charlus, who, to counteract the
bad impression made by his curiosity, addressed to Jupien, in too low
a tone for me to be able to make out his words, a request the granting
of which would doubtless necessitate their prolonging-their sojourn in
the shop, and which moved the tailor sufficiently to make-him forget
his annoyance, for he studied the Baron's face, plump and flushed
beneath his grey hair, with the supremely blissful air of a person
whose self-esteem has just been profoundly flattered, and, deciding to
grant M. de Charlus the favour that he had just asked of him, after
various remarks lacking in refinement such as: "Aren't you naughty!"
said to the Baron with a smiling, emotional, superior and grateful
air: "All right, you big baby, come along!"

"If I hark back to the question of the tram conductor," M. de Charlus
went on imperturbably, "it is because, apart from anything else, he
might offer me some entertainment on my homeward journey. For it falls
to my lot, now and then, like the Caliph who used to roam the streets
of Bagdad in the guise of a common merchant, to condescend to follow
some curious little person whose profile may have taken my fancy." I
made at this point the same observation that I had made on Bergotte.
If he should ever have to plead before a bench, he would employ not
the sentences calculated to convince his judges, but such Bergottesque
sentences as his peculiar literary temperament suggested to him and
made him find pleasure in using. Similarly M. de Charlus, in
conversing with the tailor, made use of the same language that he
would have used to fashionable people of his own set, even
exaggerating its eccentricities, whether because the shyness which he
was striving to overcome drove him to an excess of pride or, by
preventing him from mastering himself (for we are always less at our
ease in the company of some one who is not of our station), forced him
to unveil, to lay bare his true nature, which was, in fact, arrogant
and a trifle mad, as Mme. de Guermantes had remarked. "So as not to
lose the trail," he went on, "I spring like a little usher, like a
young and good-looking doctor, into the same car as the little person
herself, of whom we speak in the feminine gender only so as to conform
with the rules of grammar (as we say, in speaking of a Prince, 'Is His
Highness enjoying her usual health'). If she changes her car, I take,
with possibly the germs of the plague, that incredible thing called a
'transfer,' a number, and one which, albeit it is presented to _me_,
is not always number one! I change 'carriages' in this way as many as
three or four times, I end up sometimes at eleven o'clock at night at
the Orleans station and have to come home.  Still, if it were only the
Orleans station! Once, I must tell you, not having managed to get into
conversation sooner, I went all the way to Orleans itself, in one of
those frightful compartments where one has, to rest one's eyes upon,
between triangles of what is known as 'string-work,' photographs of
the principal architectural features of the line. There was only one
vacant seat; I had in front of me, as an historic edifice, a 'view' of
the Cathedral of Orleans, quite the ugliest in France, and as tiring a
thing to have to stare at in that way against my will as if somebody
had forced me to focus its towers in the lens of one of those optical
penholders which give one ophthalmia. I got out of the train at Les
Aubrais together with my young person, for whom alas his family (when
I had imagined him to possess every defect except that of having a
family) were waiting on the platform! My sole consolation, as I waited
for a train to take me back to Paris, was the house of Diane de
Poitiers. She may indeed have charmed one of my royal ancestors, I
should have preferred a more living beauty.  That is why, as an
antidote to the boredom of returning home by myself, I should rather
like to make friends with a sleeping-car attendant or the conductor of
an omnibus. Now, don't be shocked," the Baron wound up, "it is all a
question of class. With what you call 'young gentlemen,' for instance,
I feel no desire actually to have them, but I am never satisfied until
I have touched them, I don't mean physically, but touched a responsive
chord. As soon as, instead of leaving my letters unanswered, a young
man starts writing to me incessantly, when he is morally at my
disposal, I grow calm again, or at least I should grow calm were I not
immediately caught by the attraction of another. Rather curious, ain't
it?--Speaking of 'young gentlemen,' those that come to the house here,
do you know any of them?" "No, baby. Oh, yes, I do, a dark one, very
tall, with an eye-.  glass, who keeps smiling and turning round." "I
don't know who' you mean." Jupien filled in the portrait, but M. de
Charlus could not succeed in identifying its subject, not knowing that
the ex-tailor was one of those persons, more common than is generally
supposed, who never remember the colour of the hair of people they do
not know well. But to me, who was aware of this infirmity in Jupien
and substituted 'fair' for 'dark,' the portrait appeared to be an
exact description of the Duc de Châtellerault.  "To return to young
men not of the lower orders," the Baron went on, "at the present
moment my head has been turned by a strange little fellow, an
intelligent little cit who shews with regard to myself a prodigious
want of civility. He has absolutely no idea of the prodigious
personage that I am, and of the microscopic animalcule that he is in
comparison. After all, what does it matter, the little ass may bray
his head off before my august bishop's mantle." "Bishop!" cried
Jupien, who had understood nothing of M. de Charlus's concluding
remarks, but was completely taken aback by the word bishop. "But that
sort of thing doesn't go with religion," he said. "I have three Popes
in my family," replied M. de Charlus, "and enjoy the right to mantle
in gules by virtue of a cardinalatial title, the niece of the
Cardinal, my great-uncle, having conveyed to my grandfather the title
of Duke which was substituted for it. I see, though, that metaphor
leaves you deaf and French history cold. Besides," he added, less
perhaps by way of conclusion than as a warning, "this attraction that
I feel towards the young people who avoid me, from fear of course, for
only their natural respect stops their mouths from crying out to me
that they love me, requires in them an outstanding social position.
And again, their feint of indifference may produce, in spite of that,
the directly opposite effect.  Fatuously prolonged, it sickens me. To
take an example from a class with which you are more familiar, when
they were doing up my Hôtel, so as not to create jealousies among all
the duchesses who were vying with one another for the honour of being
able to say that they had given me a lodging, I went for a few days to
an 'hotel,' as they call inns nowadays.  One of the bedroom valets I
knew, I pointed out to him an interesting little page who used to open
and shut the front door, and who remained refractory to my proposals.
Finally, losing my temper, in order to prove to him that my intentions
were pure, I made him an offer of a ridiculously high sum simply to
come upstairs and talk to me for five minutes in my room. I waited for
him in vain. I then took such a dislike to him that I used to go out
by the service door so as not to see his villainous little mug at the
other. I learned afterwards that he had never had any of my notes,
which had been intercepted, the first by the bedroom valet, who was
jealous, the next by the day porter, who was virtuous, the third by
the night porter, who was in love with the little page, and used to
couch with him at the hour when Dian rose. But my disgust persisted
none the less, and were they to bring me the page, simply like a dish
of venison on a silver platter, I should thrust him away with a
retching stomach. But there's the unfortunate part of it, we have
spoken of serious matters, and now all is over between us, there can
be no more question of what I hoped to secure. But you could render me
great services, act as my agent; why no, the mere thought of such a
thing restores my vigour, and I can see that all is by no means over."

>From the beginning of this scene a revolution, in my unsealed eyes,
had occurred in M. de Charlus, as complete, as immediate as if he had
been touched by a magician's wand. Until then, because I had not
understood, I had not seen. The vice (we use the word for convenience
only), the vice of each of us accompanies him through life after the
manner of the familiar genius who was invisible to men so long as they
were unaware of his presence.  Our goodness, our meanness, our name,
our social relations do not disclose themselves to the eye, we carry
them hidden within us. Even Ulysses did not at once recognise Athena.
But the gods are immediately perceptible to one another, as quickly
like to like, and so too had M. de Charlus been to Jupien. Until that
moment I had been, in the presence of M. de Charlus, in the position
of an absent-minded man who, standing before a pregnant woman whose
distended outline he has failed to remark, persists, while she
smilingly reiterates: "Yes, I am a little tired just now," in asking
her indiscreetly: "Why, what is the matter with you?" But let some one
say to him: "She is expecting a child," suddenly he catches sight of
her abdomen and ceases to see anything else. It is the explanation
that opens our eyes; the dispelling of an error gives us an additional
sense.

Those of my readers who do not care to refer, for examples of this
law, to the Messieurs de Charlus of their acquaintance, whom for long
years they had never suspected, until the day when, upon the smooth
surface of the individual just like everyone else, there suddenly
appeared, traced in an ink hitherto invisible, the characters that
compose the word dear to the ancient Greeks, have only, in order to
convince themselves that the world which surrounds them appears to
them at first naked, bare of a thousand ornaments which it offers to
the eyes of others better informed, to remind themselves how many
times in the course of their lives they have found themselves on the
point of making a blunder. Nothing upon the blank, undocumented face
of this man or that could have led them to suppose that he was
precisely the brother, or the intended husband, or the lover of a
woman of whom they were just going to remark: "What a cow!" But then,
fortunately, a word whispered to them by some one standing near
arrests the fatal expression on their lips. At once there appear, like
a _Mené, Tekel, Upharsin_, the words: "He is engaged to," or, "he is
the brother of," or "he is the lover of the woman whom we ought not to
describe, in his hearing, as a cow." And this one new conception will
bring about an entire regrouping, thrusting some back, others forward,
of the fractional conceptions, henceforward a complete whole, which we
possessed of the rest of the family. In M. de Charlus another creature
might indeed have coupled itself with him which made him as different
from other men as the horse makes the centaur, this creature might
indeed have incorporated itself in the Baron, I had never caught a
glimpse of it. Now the abstraction had become materialised, the
creature at last discerned had lost its power of remaining invisible,
and the transformation of M. de Charlus into a new person was so
complete that not only the contrasts of his face, of his voice, but,
in retrospect, the very ups and downs of his relations with myself,
everything that hitherto had seemed to my mind incoherent, became
intelligible, brought itself into evidence, just as a sentence which
presents no meaning so long as it remains broken up in letters
scattered at random upon a table, expresses, if these letters be
rearranged in the proper order, a thought which one can never
afterwards forget.

I now understood, moreover, how, earlier in the day, when I had seen
him coming away from Mme. de Villeparisis's, I had managed to arrive
at the conclusion that M. de Charlus looked like a woman: he was one!
He belonged to that race of beings, less paradoxical than they appear,
whose ideal is manly simply because their temperament is feminine and
who in their life resemble in appearance only the rest of men; there
where each of us carries, inscribed in those eyes through which he
beholds everything in the universe, a human outline engraved on the
surface of the pupil, for them it is that not of a nymph but of a
youth. Race upon which a curse weighs and which must live amid
falsehood and perjury, because it knows the world to regard as a
punishable and a scandalous, as an inadmissible thing, its desire,
that which constitutes for every human creature the greatest happiness
in life; which must deny its God, since even Christians, when at the
bar of justice they appear and are arraigned, must before Christ and
in His Name defend themselves, as from a calumny, from the charge of
what to them is life itself; sons without a mother, to whom they are
obliged to lie all her life long and even in the hour when they close
her dying eyes; friends without friendships, despite all those which
their charm, frequently recognised, inspires and their hearts, often
generous, would gladly feel; but can we describe as friendship those
relations which flourish only by virtue of a lie and from which the
first outburst of confidence and sincerity in which they might be
tempted to indulge would make them be expelled with disgust, unless
they are dealing with an impartial, that is to say a sympathetic mind,
which however in that case, misled with regard to them by a
conventional psychology, will suppose to spring from the vice
confessed the very affection that is most alien to it, just as certain
judges assume and are more inclined to pardon murder in inverts and
treason in Jews for reasons derived from original sin and racial
predestination. And lastly--according at least to the first-» theory
which I sketched in outline at the time and which we shall see
subjected to some modification in the sequel, a theory by which this
would have angered them above all things, had not the paradox been
hidden from their eyes by the very illusion that made them see and
live--lovers from whom is always precluded the possibility of that
love the hope of which gives them the strength to endure so many risks
and so much loneliness, since they fall in love with precisely that
type of man who has nothing feminine about him, who is not an invert
and consequently cannot love them in return; with the result that
their desire would be for ever insatiable did not their money procure
for them real men, and their imagination end by making them take for
real men the inverts to whom they had prostituted themselves. Their
honour precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the
discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the
poet who one day was feasted at every table, applauded in every
theatre in London, and on the next was driven from every lodging,
unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill
like Samson and saying like him: "The two sexes shall die, each in a
place apart!"; excluded even, save on the days of general disaster
when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round
Dreyfus, from the sympathy--at times from the society--of their
fellows, in whom they inspire only disgust at seeing themselves as
they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them,
accentuates every blemish that they have refused to observe in
themselves, and makes them understand that what they have been calling
their love (a thing to which, playing upon the word, they have by
association annexed all that poetry, painting, music, chivalry,
asceticism have contrived to add to love) springs not from an ideal of
beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable malady; like the
Jews again (save some who will associate only with others of their
race and have always on their lips ritual words and consecrated
pleasantries), shunning one another, seeking out those who are most
directly their opposite, who do not desire their company, pardoning
their rebuffs, moved to ecstasy by their condescension; but also
brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism that
strikes them, the opprobrium under which they have fallen, having
finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel,
with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes
beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with
which he who, more closely blended with, better assimilated to the
opposing race, is relatively, in appearance, the least inverted, heaps
upon him who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society
of their kind, and even some corroboration of their own life, so much
so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of
which is the vilest of insults), those who succeed in concealing the
fact that they belong to it they readily unmask, with a view less to
injuring them, though they have no scruple about that, than to
excusing themselves; and, going in search (as a doctor seeks cases of
appendicitis) of cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in
recalling that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Israelites claim
that Jesus was one of them, without reflecting that there were no
abnormals when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-Christians before
Christ, that the disgrace alone makes the crime because it has allowed
to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to every
example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so
peculiar that it is more repugnant to other men (even though it may be
accompanied by exalted moral qualities) than certain other vices which
exclude those qualities, such as theft, cruelty, breach of faith,
vices better understood and so more readily excused by the generality
of men; forming a freemasonry far more extensive, more powerful and
less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity
of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic,
glossary, and one in which the members themselves, who intend not to
know one another, recognise one another immediately by natural or
conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs which indicate one of
his congeners to the beggar in the street, in the great nobleman whose
carriage door he is shutting, to the father in the suitor for his
daughter's hand, to him who has sought healing, absolution, defence,
in the doctor, the priest, the barrister to whom he has had recourse;
all of them obliged to protect their own secret but having their part
in a secret shared with the others, which the rest of humanity does
not suspect and which means that to them the most wildly improbable
tales of adventure seem true, for in this romantic, anachronistic life
the ambassador is a bosom friend of the felon, the prince, with a
certain independence of action with which his aristocratic breeding
has furnished him, and which the trembling little cit would lack, on
leaving the duchess's party goes off to confer in private with the
hooligan; a reprobate part of the human whole, but an important part,
suspected where it does not exist, flaunting itself, insolent and
unpunished, where its existence is never guessed; numbering its
adherents everywhere, among the people, in the army, in the church, in
the prison, on the throne; living, in short, at least to a great
extent, in a playful and perilous intimacy with the men of the other
race, provoking them, playing with them by speaking of its vice as of
something alien to it; a game that is rendered easy by the blindness
or duplicity of the others, a game that may be kept up for years until
the day of the scandal, on which these lion-tamers are devoured; until
then, obliged to make a secret of their lives, to turn away their eyes
from the things on which they would naturally fasten them, to fasten
them upon those from which they would naturally turn away, to change
the gender of many of the words in their vocabulary, a social
constraint, slight in comparison with the inward constraint which
their vice, or what is improperly so called, imposes upon them with
regard not so much now to others as to themselves, and in such a way
that to themselves it does not appear a vice.  But certain among them,
more practical, busier men who have not the time to go and drive their
own bargains, or to dispense with the simplification of life and that
saving of time which may result from cooperation, have formed two
societies of which the second is composed exclusively of persons
similar to themselves.

This is noticeable in those who are poor and have come up from the
country, without friends, with nothing but their ambition to be some
day a celebrated doctor or barrister, with a mind still barren of
opinions, a person unadorned with manners, which they intend, as soon
as possible, to decorate, just as they would buy furniture for their
little attic in the Latin quarter, copying whatever they had observed
in those who had already 'arrived' in the useful and serious
profession in which they also intend to establish themselves and to
become famous; in these their special taste, unconsciously inherited
like a weakness for drawing, for music, a weakness of vision, is
perhaps the only living and despotic originality--which on certain
evenings compels them to miss some meeting, advantageous to their
career, with people whose ways, in other respect, of speaking,
thinking, dressing, parting their hair, they have adopted. In their
quarter, where otherwise they mix only with their brother students,
their teachers or some fellow-provincial who has succeeded and can
help them on, they have speedily discovered other young men whom the
same peculiar taste attracts to them, as in a small town one sees an
intimacy grow up between the assistant master and the lawyer, who are
both interested in chamber music or mediaeval ivories; applying to the
object of their distraction the same utilitarian instinct, the same
professional spirit which guides them in their career, they meet these
young men at gatherings to which no profane outsider is admitted any
more than to those that bring together collectors of old snuff-boxes,
Japanese prints or rare flowers, and at which, what with the pleasure
of gaining information, the practical value of making exchanges and
the fear of competition, there prevail simultaneously, as in a
saleroom of postage stamps, the close cooperation of the specialists
and the fierce rivalries of the collectors. No one moreover in the
café where they have their table knows what the gathering is, whether
it is that of an angling club, of an editorial staff, or of the 'Sons
of the Indre,' so correct is their attire, so cold and reserved their
manner, so modestly do they refrain from anything more than the most
covert glances at the young men of fashion, the young 'lions' who, a
few feet away, are making a great clamour about their mistresses, and
among whom those who are admiring them without venturing to raise
their eyes will learn only twenty years later, when they themselves
are on the eve of admission to the Academy, and the others are
middle-aged gentlemen in club windows, that the most seductive among
them, now a stout and grizzled Charlus, was in reality akin to
themselves, but differently, in another world, beneath other external
symbols, with foreign labels, the strangeness of which led them into
error. But these groups are at varying stages of advancement; and,
just as the 'Union of the Left' differs from the 'Socialist
Federation' or some Mendelssohnian musical club from the Schola
Cantorum, on certain evenings, at another table, there are extremists
who allow a bracelet to slip down from beneath a cuff, sometimes a
necklace to gleam in the gap of a collar, who by their persistent
stares, their cooings, their laughter, their mutual caresses, oblige a
band of students to depart in hot haste, and are served with a
civility beneath which indignation boils by a waiter who, as on the
evenings when he has to serve Dreyfusards, would find pleasure in
summoning the police did he not find profit in pocketing their
gratuities.

It is with these professional organisations that the mind contrasts
the taste of the solitaries, and in one respect without straining the
points of difference, since it is doing no more than copy the
solitaries themselves who imagine that nothing differs more widely
from organised vice than what appears to them to be a misunderstood
love, but with some strain nevertheless, for these different classes
correspond, no less than to diverse physiological types, to successive
stages in a pathological or merely social evolution. And it is, in
fact, very rarely that, one day or another, it is not in some such
organisation that the solitaries come to merge themselves, sometimes
from simple weariness, or for convenience (just as the people who have
been most strongly opposed to such innovations end by having the
telephone installed, inviting the Iénas to their parties, or dealing
with Potin). They meet there, for that matter, with none too friendly
a reception as a rule, for, in their relatively pure lives, their want
of experience, the saturation in dreams to which they have been
reduced, have branded more strongly upon them those special marks of
effeminacy which the professionals have sought to efface. And it must
be admitted that, among certain of these newcomers, the woman is not
only inwardly united to the man but hideously visible, agitated as one
sees them by a hysterical spasm, by a shrill laugh which convulses
their knees and hands, looking no more like the common run of men than
those monkeys with melancholy, shadowed eyes and prehensile feet who
dress up in dinner-jackets and black bow ties; so that these new
recruits are judged by others, less chaste for all that themselves, to
be compromising associates, and their admission is hedged with
difficulties; they are accepted, nevertheless, and they benefit then
by those facilities by which commerce, great undertakings have
transformed the lives of individuals, and have brought within their
reach commodities hitherto too costly to acquire and indeed hard to
find, which now submerge them beneath the plethora of what by
themselves they had never succeeded in discovering amid the densest
crowds. But, even with these innumerable outlets, the burden of social
constraint is still too heavy for some, recruited principally among
those who have not made a practice of self-control, and who still take
to be rarer than it actually is their way of love. Let us leave out of
consideration for the moment those who, the exceptional character of
their inclinations making them regard themselves as superior to the
other sex, look down upon women, make homosexuality the privilege of
great genius and of glorious epochs of history, and, when they seek to
communicate their taste to others, approach not so much those who seem
to them to be predisposed towards it (as the morphino-maniac does with
his morphia) as those who seem to them to be worthy of it, from
apostolic zeal, just as others preach Zionism, conscientious objection
to military service, Saint-Simonism, vegetarianism or anarchy. Here is
one who, should we intrude upon him in the morning, still in bed, will
present to our gaze an admirable female head, so general is its
expression and typical of the sex as a whole; his very hair affirms
this, so feminine is its ripple; unbrushed, it falls so naturally in
long curls over the cheek that one marvels how the young woman, the
girl, the Galatea barely awakened to life, in the unconscious mass of
this male body in which she is imprisoned, has contrived so
ingeniously by herself, without instruction from anyone, to make use
of the narrowest apertures in her prison wall to find what was
necessary to her existence. No doubt the young man who sports this
delicious head does not say: "I am a woman." Even if--for any of the
countless possible reasons--he lives with a woman, he can deny to her
that he is himself one, can swear to her that he has never had
intercourse with men. But let her look at him as we have just revealed
him, lying back in bed, in pyjamas, his arms bare, his throat and neck
bare also beneath the darkness of his hair. The pyjama jacket becomes
a woman's shift, the head that of a pretty Spanish girl. The mistress
is astounded by these confidences offered to her gaze, truer than any
spoken confidence could be, or indeed any action, which his actions,
indeed, if they have not already done so, cannot fail later on to
confirm, for every creature follows the line of his own pleasure, and
if this creature is not too vicious he will seek it in a sex
complementary to his own. And for the invert vice begins, not when he
forms relations (for there are all sorts of reasons that may enjoin
these), but when he takes his pleasure with women. The young man whom
we have been attempting to portray was so evidently a woman that the
women who looked upon him with longing were doomed (failing a special
taste on their part) to the same disappointment as those who in
Shakespeare's comedies are taken in by a girl in disguise who passes
as a youth. The deception is mutual, the invert is himself aware of
it, he guesses the disillusionment which, once the mask is removed,
the woman will experience, and feels to what an extent this mistake as
to sex is a source of poetical imaginings. Besides, even from his
exacting mistress, in vain does he keep back the admission (if she,
that is to say, be not herself a denizen of Gomorrah): "I am a woman!"
when all the time with what stratagems, what agility, what obstinacy
as of a climbing plant the unconscious but visible woman in him seeks
the masculine organ. We have only to look at that head of curling hair
on the white pillow to understand that if, in the evening, this young
man slips through his guardians' fingers, in spite of anything that
they, or he himself can do to restrain him, it will not be to go in
pursuit of women. His mistress may chastise him, may lock him up; next
day, the man-woman will have found some way of attaching himself to a
man, as the convolvulus throws out its tendrils wherever it finds a
convenient post or rake. Why, when we admire in the face of this
person a delicacy that touches our hearts, a gracefulness, a
spontaneous affability such as men do not possess, should we be
dismayed to learn that this young man runs after boxers? They are
different aspects of an identical reality. And indeed, what repels us
is the most touching thing of all, more touching than any refinement
of delicacy, for it represents an admirable though unconscious effort
on the part of nature: the recognition of his sex by itself, in spite
of the sexual deception, becomes apparent, the uncon-fessed attempt to
escape from itself towards what an initial error on the part of
society has segregated from it. Some, those no doubt who have been
most timid in childhood, are scarcely concerned with the material kind
of the pleasure they receive, provided that they can associate it with
a masculine face. Whereas others, whose sensuality is doubtless more
violent, imperiously restrict their material pleasure within certain
definite limitations.  These live perhaps less exclusively beneath the
sway of Saturn's outrider, since for them women are not entirely
barred, as for the former sort, in whose eyes women would have no
existence apart from conversation, flirtation, loves not of the heart
but of the head. But the second sort seek out those women who love
other women; who can procure for them a young man, enhance the
pleasure which they feel on finding themselves in his company; better
still, they can, in the same fashion, enjoy with such women the same
pleasure as with a man. Whence it arises that jealousy is kindled in
those who love the first sort only by the pleasure which they may be
enjoying with a man, which alone seems to their lovers a betrayal,
since these do not participate in the love of women, have practised it
only as a habit, and, so as to reserve for themselves the possibility
of eventual marriage, representing to themselves so little the
pleasure that it is capable of giving that they cannot be distressed
by the thought that he whom they love is enjoying that pleasure;
whereas the other sort often inspire jealousy by their love-affairs
with women. For, in the relations which they have with her, they play,
for the woman who loves her own sex, the part of another woman, and
she offers them at the same time more or less what they find in other
men, so that the jealous friend suffers from the feeling that he whom
he loves is riveted to her who is to him almost a man, and at the same
time feels his beloved almost escape him because, to these women, he
is something which the lover himself cannot conceive, a sort of woman.
We need not pause here to consider those young fools who by a sort of
arrested development, to tease their friends or to shock their
families, proceed with a kind of frenzy to choose clothes that
resemble women's dress, to redden their lips and blacken their
eyelashes; we may leave them out of account, for they are those whom
we shall find later on, when they have suffered the all too cruel
penalty of their affectation, spending what remains of their lifetime
in vain attempts to repair by a sternly protestant demeanour the wrong
that they did to themselves when they were carried away by the same
demon that urges young women of the Faubourg Saint-Germain to live in
a scandalous fashion, to set every convention at defiance, to scoff at
the entreaties of their relatives, until the day when they set
themselves with perseverance but without success to reascend the slope
down which it had seemed to them that it would be so amusing to glide,
down which they had found it so amusing, or rather had not been able
to stop themselves from gliding. Finally, let us leave to a later
volume the men who have sealed a pact with Gomorrah. We shall deal
with them when M. de Charlus comes to know them. Let us leave out for
the present all those, of one sort or another, who will appear each in
his turn, and, to conclude this first sketch of the subject, let us
say a word only of those whom we began to mention just now, the
solitary class. Supposing their vice to be more exceptional than it
is, they have retired into solitude from the day on which they
discovered it, after having carried it within themselves for a long
time without knowing it, for a longer time only than certain other
men. For no one can tell at first that he is an invert or a poet or a
snob or a scoundrel. The boy who has been reading erotic poetry or
looking at indecent pictures, if he then presses his body against a
schoolfellow's, imagines himself only to be communing with him in an
identical desire for a woman.  How should he suppose that he is not
like everybody else when he recognises the substance of what he feels
on reading Mme. de Lafayette, Racine, Baudelaire, Walter Scott, at a
time when he is still too little capable of observing himself to take
into account what he has added from his own store to the picture, and
that if the sentiment be the same the object differs, that what he
desires is Rob Roy, and not Diana Vernon? With many, by a defensive
prudence on the part of the instinct that precedes the clearer vision
of the intellect, the mirror and walls of their bedroom vanish beneath
a cloud of coloured prints of actresses; they compose poetry such as:

  I love but Chloe in the world,
  For Chloe is divine;
  Her golden hair is sweetly curled,
  For her my heart doth pine.

Must we on that account attribute to the opening phase of such lives a
taste which we shall never find in them later on, like those flaxen
ringlets on the heads of children which are destined to change to the
darkest brown? Who can tell whether the photographs of women are not a
first sign of hypocrisy, a first sign also of horror at other inverts?
But the solitary kind are precisely those to whom hypocrisy is
painful. Possibly even the example of the Jews, of a different type of
colony, is not strong enough to account for the frail hold that their
upbringing has upon them, or for the artfulness with which they find
their way back (perhaps not to anything so sheerly terrible as the
suicide to which maniacs, whatever precautions one may take with them,
return, and, pulled out of the river into which they have flung
themselves, take poison, procure revolvers, and so forth; but) to a
life of which the men of the other race not only do not understand,
cannot imagine, abominate the essential pleasures but would be filled
with horror by the thought of its frequent danger and everlasting
shame.  Perhaps, to form a picture of these, we ought to think, if not
of the wild animals that never become domesticated, of the lion-cubs
said to be tame but lions still at heart, then at least of the Negroes
whom the comfortable existence of the white man renders desperately
unhappy and who prefer the risks of a life of savagery and its
incomprehensible joys. When the day has dawned on which they have
discovered themselves to be incapable at once of lying to others and
of lying to themselves, they go away to live in the country, shunning
the society of their own kind (whom they believe to be few in number)
from horror of the monstrosity or fear of the temptation, and that of
the rest of humanity from shame. Never having arrived at true
maturity, plunged in a constant melancholy, now and again, some Sunday
evening when there is no moon, they go for a solitary walk as far as a
crossroads where, although not a word has been said, there has come to
meet them one of their boyhood's friends who is living in a house in
the neighbourhood. And they begin again the pastimes of long ago, on
the grass, in the night, neither uttering a word. During the week,
they meet in their respective houses, talk of no matter what, without
any allusion to what has occurred between them, exactly as though they
had done nothing and were not to do anything again, save, in their
relations, a trace of coldness, of irony, of irritability and rancour,
at times of hatred. Then the neighbour sets out on a strenuous
expedition on horseback, and, on a mule, climbs mountain peaks, sleeps
in the snow; his friend, who identifies his own vice with a weakness
of temperament, the cabined and timid life, realises that vice can no
longer exist in his friend now emancipated, so many thousands of feet
above sea-level. And, sure enough, the other takes a wife. And yet the
abandoned one is not cured (in spite of the cases in which, as we
shall see, inversion is curable). He insists upon going down himself
every morning to the kitchen to receive the milk from the hands of the
dairyman's boy, and on the evenings when desire is too strong for him
will go out of his way to set a drunkard on the right road or to
"adjust the dress" of a blind man. No doubt the life of certain
inverts appears at times to change, their vice (as it is called) is no
longer apparent in their habits; but nothing is ever lost; a missing
jewel turns up again; when the quantity of a sick man's urine
decreases, it is because he is perspiring more freely, but the
excretion must invariably occur. One day this homosexual hears of the
death of a young cousin, and from his inconsolable grief we learned
that it was to this love, chaste possibly and aimed rather at
retaining esteem than at obtaining possession, that his desires have
passed by a sort of virescence, as, in a budget, without any
alteration in the total, certain expenditure is carried under another
head. As is the case with invalids in whom a sudden attack of
urticaria makes their chronic ailments temporarily disappear, this
pure love for a young relative seems, in the invert, to have
momentarily replaced, by metastasis, habits that will, one day or
another, return to fill the place of the vicarious, cured malady.

Meanwhile the married neighbour of our recluse has returned; before
the beauty of the young bride and the demonstrative affection of her,
husband, on the day when their friend is obliged to invite them to
dinner, he feels ashamed of the past. Already in an interesting
condition, she must return home early, leaving her husband behind; he,
when the time has come for him to go home also, asks his host to
accompany him for part of the way; at first, no suspicion enters his
mind, but at the crossroads he finds himself thrown down on the grass,
with not a word said, by the mountaineer who is shortly to become a
father. And their meetings begin again, and continue until the day
when there comes to live not far off a cousin of the young woman, with
whom her husband is now constantly to be seen. And he, if the
twice-abandoned friend calls in the evening and endeavours to approach
him, is furious, and repulses him with indignation that the other has
not had the tact to foresee the disgust which he must henceforward
inspire. Once, however, there appears a stranger, sent to him by his
faithless friend; but being busy at the time, the abandoned one cannot
see him, and only afterwards learns with what object his visitor came.

Then the solitary languishes alone. He has no other diversion than to
go to the neighbouring watering-place to ask for some information or
other from a certain railwayman there. But the latter has obtained
promotion, has been transferred to the other end of the country; the
solitary will no longer be able to go and ask him the times of the
trains or the price of a first class ticket, and, before retiring to
dream, Griselda-like, in his tower, loiters upon the beach, a strange
Andromeda whom no Argonaut will come to free, a sterile Medusa that
must perish upon the sand, or else he stands idly, until his train
starts, upon the platform, casting over the crowd of passengers a gaze
that will seem indifferent, contemptuous or distracted to those of
another race, but, like the luminous glow with which certain insects
bedeck themselves in order to attract others of their species, or like
the nectar which certain flowers offer to attract the insects that
will fertilise them, would not deceive the almost undiscoverable
sharer of a pleasure too singular, too hard to place, which is offered
him, the colleague with whom our specialist could converse in the
half-forgotten tongue; in which last, at the most, some seedy loafer
upon the platform will put up a show of interest, but for pecuniary
gam alone, like those people who, at the Collège de France, in the
room in which the Professor of Sanskrit lectures without an audience,
attend his course but only because the room itself is heated. Medusa!
Orchid! When I followed my instinct only, the medusa used to revolt me
at Balbec; but if I had the eyes to regard it, like Michelet, from the
standpoint of natural history, and aesthetic, I saw an exquisite wheel
of azure flame. Are they not, with the transparent velvet of their
petals, as it were the mauve orchids of the sea? Like so many
creatures of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, like the plant which
would produce vanilla but, because in its structure the male organ is
divided by a partition from the female, remains sterile unless the
humming-birds or certain tiny bees convey the pollen from one to the
other, or man fertilises them by artificial means, M. de Charlus (and
here the word fertilise must be understood in a moral sense, since in
the physical sense the union of male with male is and must be sterile,
but it is no small matter that a person may encounter the sole
pleasure which he is capable of enjoying, and that every 'creature
here below' can impart to some other 'his music, or his fragrance or
his flame'), M. de Charlus was one of those men who may be called
exceptional, because however many they may be, the satisfaction, so
easy in others, of their sexual requirements depends upon the
coincidence of too many conditions, and of conditions too difficult to
ensure. For men like M. de Charlus (leaving out of account the
compromises which will appear in the course of this story and which
the reader may already have foreseen, enforced by the need of pleasure
which resigns itself to partial acceptations), mutual love, apart from
the difficulties, so great as to be almost insurmountable, which it
meets in the ordinary man, adds to these others so exceptional that
what is always extremely rare for everyone becomes in their case well
nigh impossible, and, if there should befall them an encounter which
is really fortunate, or which nature makes appear so to them, their
good fortune, far more than that of the normal lover, has about it
something extraordinary, selective, profoundly necessary. The feud of
the Capulets and Montagues was as nothing compared with the obstacles
of every sort which must have been surmounted, the special
eliminations which nature has had to submit to the hazards, already
far from common, which result in love, before a retired tailor, who
was intending to set off soberly for his office, can stand quivering
in ecstasy before a stoutish man of fifty; this Romeo and this Juliet
may believe with good reason that their love is not the caprice of a
moment but a true predestination, prepared by the harmonies of their
temperaments, and not only by their own personal temperaments but by
those of their ancestors, by their most distant strains of heredity,
so much so that the fellow creature who is conjoined with them has
belonged to them from before their birth, has attracted them by a
force comparable to that which governs the worlds on which we passed
our former lives. M. de Charlus had distracted me from looking to see
whether the bee was bringing to the orchid the pollen it had so long
been waiting to receive, and had no chance of receiving save by an
accident so unlikely that one might call it a sort of miracle. But
this was a miracle also that I had just witnessed, almost of the same
order and no less marvellous.  As soon as I had considered their
meeting from this point of view, everything about it seemed to me
instinct with beauty. The most extraordinary devices that nature has
invented to compel insects to ensure the fertilisation of flowers
which without their intervention could not be fertilised because the
male flower is too far away from the female--or when, if it is the
wind that must provide for the transportation of the pollen, she makes
that pollen so much more simply detachable from the male, so much more
easily arrested in its flight by the female flower, by eliminating the
secretion of nectar which is no longer of any use since there is no
insect to be attracted, and, that the flower may be kept free for the
pollen which it needs, which can fructify only in itself, makes it
secrete a liquid which renders it immune to all other pollens--seemed
to me no more marvellous than the existence of the subvariety of
inverts destined to guarantee the pleasures of love to the invert who
is growing old: men who are attracted not by all other men, but--by a
phenomenon of correspondence and harmony similar to those that precede
the fertilisation of heterostyle trimorphous flowers like the _lythrum
salicoria_--only by men considerably older than themselves. Of this
subvariety Jupien had just furnished me with an example less striking
however than certain others, which every collector of a human herbary,
every moral botanist can observe in spite of their rarity, and which
will present to the eye a delicate youth who is waiting for the
advances of a robust and paunchy quinquagenarian, remaining as
indifferent to those of other young men as the hermaphrodite flowers
of the short-styled _primula veris_ so long as they are fertilised
only by other _primu-lae veris_ of short style also, whereas they
welcome with joy the pollen of the _primula veris_ with the long
styles. As for M. de Charlus's part in the transaction, I noticed
afterwards that there were for him various kinds of conjunction, some
of which, by their multiplicity, their almost invisible speed and
above all the absence of contact between the two actors, recalled
still more forcibly those flowers that in a garden are fertilised by
the pollen of a neighbouring flower which they may never touch. There
were in fact certain persons whom it was sufficient for him to make
come to his house, hold for an hour or two under the domination of his
talk, for his desire, quickened by some earlier encounter, to be
assuaged. By a simple use of words the conjunction was effected, as
simply as it can be among the infusoria.  Sometimes, as had doubtless
been the case with me on the evening on which I had been summoned by
him after the Guermantes dinner-party, the relief was effected by a
violent ejaculation which the Baron made in his visitor's face, just
as certain flowers, furnished with a hidden spring, sprinkle from
within the unconsciously collaborating and disconcerted insect. M. de
Charlus, from vanquished turning victor, feeling himself purged of his
uneasiness and calmed, would send away the visitor who had at once
ceased to appear to him desirable. Finally, inasmuch as inversion
itself springs from the fact that the invert is too closely akin to
woman to be capable of having any effective relations with her, it
comes under a higher law which ordains that so many hermaphrodite
flowers shall remain unfertile, that is to say the law of the
sterility of autofecundation. It is true that inverts, in their search
for a male person, will often be found to put up with other inverts as
effeminate as themselves. But it is enough that they do not belong to
the female sex, of which they have in them an embryo which they can
put to no useful purpose, such as we find in so many hermaphrodite
flowers, and even in certain hermaphrodite animals, such as the snail,
which cannot be fertilised by themselves, but can by other
hermaphrodites.  In this respect the race of inverts, who eagerly
connect themselves with Oriental antiquity or the Golden Age in
Greece, might be traced back farther still, to those experimental
epochs in which there existed neither dioecious plants nor monosexual
animals, to that initial hermaph-roditism of which certain rudiments
of male organs in the anatomy of the woman and of female organs in
that of the man seem still to preserve the trace. I found the
pantomime, incomprehensible to me at first, of Jupien and M. de
Charlus as curious as those seductive gestures addressed, Darwin tells
us, to insects not only by the flowers called composite which erect
the florets of their capitals so as to be seen from a greater
distance, such as a certain heterostyle which turns back its stamens
and bends them to open the way for the insect, or offers him an
ablution, or, to take an immediate instance, the nectar-fragrance and
vivid hue of the corollae that were at that moment attracting insects
to our courtyard. From this day onwards M. de Charlus was to alter the
time of his visits to Mme. de Villeparisis, not that he could not see
Jupien elsewhere and with greater convenience, but because to him just
as much as to me the afternoon sunshine and the blossoming plant were,
no doubt, linked together in memory. Apart from this, he did not
confine himself to recommending the Jupiens to Mme. de Villeparisis,
to the Duchesse de Guermantes, to a whole brilliant list of patrons,
who were all the more assiduous in their attentions to the young
seamstress when they saw that the few ladies who had held out, or had
merely delayed their submission, were subjected to the direst
reprisals by the Baron, whether in order that they might serve as an
example, or because they had aroused his wrath and had stood out
against his attempted domination; he made Jupien's position more and
more lucrative, until he definitely engaged him as his secretary and
established him in the state in which we shall see him later on. "Ah,
now! There is a happy man, if you like, that Jupien," said Françoise,
who had a tendency to minimise or exaggerate people's generosity
according as it was bestowed on herself or on others. Not that, in
this instance, she had any need to exaggerate, nor for that matter did
she feel any jealousy, being genuinely fond of Jupien. "Oh, he's such
a good man, the Baron," she went on, "such a well-behaved, religious,
proper sort of man. If I had a daughter to marry and was one of the
rich myself, I would give her to the Baron with my eyes shut." "But,
Françoise," my mother observed gently, "she'd be well supplied with
husbands, that daughter of yours. Don't forget you've already promised
her to Jupien." "Ah! Lordy, now," replied Françoise, "there's another
of them that would make a woman happy. It doesn't matter whether
you're rich or poor, it makes no difference to your nature. The Baron
and Jupien, they're just the same sort of person."

However, I greatly exaggerated at the time, on the strength of this
first revelation, the elective character of so carefully selected a
combination.  Admittedly, every man of the kind of M. de Charlus is an
extraordinary creature since, if he does not make concessions to the
possibilities of life, he seeks out essentially the love of a man of
the other race, that is to say a man who is a lover of women (and
incapable consequently of loving him); in contradiction of what I had
imagined in the courtyard, where I had seen Jupien turning towards M.
de Charlus like the orchid making overtures to the bee, these
exceptional creatures whom we commiserate are a vast crowd, as we
shall see in the course of this work, for a reason which will be
disclosed only at the end of it, and commiserate themselves for being
too many rather than too few. For the two angels who were posted at
the gates of Sodom to learn whether its inhabitants (according to
Genesis) had indeed done all the things the report of which had
ascended to the Eternal Throne must have been, and of this one can
only be glad, exceedingly ill chosen by the Lord, Who ought not to
have entrusted the task to any but a Sodomite. Such an one the
excuses: "Father of six children--I keep two mistresses," and so forth
could never have persuaded benevolently to lower his flaming sword and
to mitigate the punishment; he would have answered: "Yes, and your
wife lives in a torment of jealousy.  But even when these women have
not been chosen by you from Gomorrah, you spend your nights with a
watcher of flocks upon Hebron." And he would at once have made him
retrace his steps to the city which the rain of fire and brimstone was
to destroy. On the contrary, they allowed to escape all the
shame-faced Sodomites, even if these, on catching sight of a boy,
turned their heads, like Lot's wife, though without being on that
account changed like her into pillars of salt. With the result that
they engendered a numerous posterity with whom this gesture has
continued to be habitual, like that of the dissolute women who, while
apparently studying a row of shoes displayed in a shop window, turn
their heads to keep track of a passing student. These descendants of
the Sodomites, so numerous that we may apply to them that other verse
of Genesis: "If a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy
seed also be numbered," have established themselves throughout the
entire world; they have had access to every profession and pass so
easily into the most exclusive clubs that, whenever a Sodomite fails
to secure election, the blackballs are, for the most part, cast by
other Sodomites, who are anxious to penalise sodomy, having inherited
the falsehood that enabled their ancestors to escape from the accursed
city. It is possible that they may return there one day. Certainly
they form in every land an Oriental colony, cultured, musical,
malicious, which has certain charming qualities and intolerable
defects. We shall study them with greater thoroughness in the course
of the following pages; but I have thought it as well to utter here a
provisional warning against the lamentable error of proposing (just as
people have encouraged a Zionist movement) to create a Sodomist
movement and to rebuild Sodom.  For, no sooner had they arrived there
than the Sodomites would leave the town so as not to have the
appearance of belonging to it, would take wives, keep mistresses in
other cities where they would find, incidentally, every diversion that
appealed to them. They would repair to Sodom only on days of supreme
necessity, when their own town was empty, at those seasons when hunger
drives the wolf from the woods; in other words, everything would go on
very much as it does to-day in London, Berlin, Rome, Petrograd or
Paris.

Anyhow, on the day in question, before paying my call on the Duchess,
I did not look so far ahead, and I was distressed to find that I had,
by my engrossment in the Jupien-Charlus conjunction, missed perhaps an
opportunity of witnessing the fertilisation of the blossom by the bee.




CHAPTER ONE

M. de Charlus in Society.--A physician.--Typical physiognomy of Mme.
de Vaugoubert.--Mme. d'Arpajon, the Hubert Robert fountain and the
merriment of the Grand Duke Vladimir.--Mmes.  d'Amoncourt, de Citri,
de Saint-Euverte, etc.--Curious conversation between Swann and the
Prince de Guermantes.--Albertine on the telephone.--My social life in
the interval before my second and final visit to Balbec. Arrival at
Balbec.


As I was in no haste to arrive at this party at the Guermantes', to
which I was not certain that I had been invited, I remained sauntering
out of doors; but the summer day seemed to be in no greater haste than
myself to stir.  Albeit it was after nine o'clock, it was still the
light of day that on the Place de la Concorde was giving the Luxor
obelisk the appearance of being made of pink nougat. Then it diluted
the tint and changed the surface to a metallic substance, so that the
obelisk not only became more precious but seemed to have grown more
slender and almost flexible. You imagined that you might have twisted
it in your fingers, had perhaps already slightly distorted its
outline. The moon was now in the sky like a section of orange
delicately peeled although slightly bruised. But presently she was to
be fashioned of the most enduring gold. Sheltering alone behind her, a
poor little star was to serve as sole companion to the lonely moon,
while she, keeping her friend protected, but bolder and striding
ahead, would brandish like an irresistible weapon, like an Oriental
symbol, her broad and marvellous crescent of gold.

Outside the mansion of the Princesse de Guermantes, I met the Duc de
Châtellerault; I no longer remembered that half an hour earlier I had
still been persecuted by the fear--which, for that matter, was
speedily to grip me again--that I might be entering the house
uninvited. We grow uneasy, and it is sometimes long after the hour of
danger, which a subsequent distraction has made us forget, that we
remember our uneasiness. I greeted the young Duke and made my way into
the house. But here I must first of all record a trifling incident,
which will enable us to understand something that was presently to
occur.

There was one person who, on that evening as on the previous evenings,
had been thinking a great deal about the Duc de Châtellerault, without
however suspecting who he was: this was the usher (styled at that time
the _aboyeur_) of Mme. de Guermantes. M. de Châtellerault, so far from
being one of the Princess's intimate friends, albeit he was one of her
cousins, had been invited to her house for the first time. His
parents, who had not been on speaking terms with her for the last ten
years, had been reconciled to her within the last fortnight, and,
obliged to be out of Paris that evening, had requested their son to
fill their place. Now, a few days earlier, the Princess's usher had
met in the Champs-Elysées a young man whom he had found charming but
whose identity he had been unable to establish.  Not that the young
man had not shewn himself as obliging as he had been generous. All the
favours that the usher had supposed that he would have to bestow upon
so young a gentleman, he had on the contrary received.  But M. de
Châtellerault was as reticent as he was rash; he was all the more
determined not to disclose his incognito since he did not know with
what sort of person he was dealing; his fear would have been far
greater, although quite unfounded, if he had known. He had confined
himself to posing as an Englishman, and to all the passionate
questions with which he was plied by the usher, desirous to meet again
a person to whom he was indebted for so much pleasure and so ample a
gratuity, the Duke had merely replied, from one end of the Avenue
Gabriel to the other: "I do not speak French."

Albeit, in spite of everything--remembering his cousin Gilbert's
maternal ancestry--the Duc de Guermantes pretended to find a touch of
Courvoisier in the drawing-room of the Princesse de
Guermantes-Bavière, the general estimate of that lady's initiative
spirit and intellectual superiority was based upon an innovation that
was to be found nowhere else in her set.  After dinner, however
important the party that was to follow, the chairs, at the Princesse
de Guermantes's, were arranged in such a way as to form little groups,
in which people might have to turn their backs upon one another. The
Princess then displayed her social sense by going to sit down, as
though by preference, in one of these. Not that she was afraid to pick
out and attract to herself a member of another group. If, for
instance, she had remarked to M. Détaille, who naturally agreed with
her, on the beauty of Mme. de Villemur's neck, of which that lady's
position in another group made her present a back view, the Princess
did not hesitate to raise her voice: "Madame de Villemur, M. Détaille,
with his wonderful painter's eye, has just been admiring your neck."
Mme. de Villemur interpreted this as a direct invitation to join in
the conversation; with the agility of a practiced horsewoman, she made
her chair rotate slowly through three quadrants of a circle, and,
without in the least disturbing her neighbours, came to rest almost
facing the Princess. "You don't know M. Détaille?" exclaimed their
hostess, for whom her guest's nimble and modest tergiversation was not
sufficient. "I do not know him, but I know his work," replied Mme. de
Villemur, with a respectful, engaging air, and a promptitude which
many of the onlookers envied her, addressing the while to the
celebrated painter whom this invocation had not been sufficient to
introduce to her in a formal manner, an imperceptible bow. "Come,
Monsieur Détaille," said the Princess, "let me introduce you to Mme.
de Villemur." That lady thereupon shewed as great ingenuity in making
room for the creator of the _Dream_ as she had shewn a moment earlier
in wheeling round to face him.  And the Princess drew forward a chair
for herself; she had indeed invoked Mme. de Villemur only to have an
excuse for quitting the first group, in which she had spent the
statutory ten minutes, and bestowing a similar allowance of her time
upon the second. In three quarters of an hour, all the groups had
received a visit from her, which seemed to have been determined in
each instance by impulse and predilection, but had the paramount
object of making it apparent how naturally "a great lady knows how to
entertain." But now the guests for the party were beginning to arrive,
and the lady of the house was seated not far from the door--erect and
proud in her semi-regal majesty, her eyes ablaze with their own
incandescence--between two unattractive Royalties and the Spanish
Ambassadress.

I stood waiting behind a number of guests who had arrived before me.
Facing me was the Princess, whose beauty is probably not the only
thing, where there were so many beauties, that reminds me of this
party. But the face of my hostess was so perfect; stamped like so
beautiful a medal, that it has retained a commemorative force in my
mind. The Princess was in the habit of saying to her guests when she
met them a day or two before one of her parties: "You will come, won't
you?" as though she felt a great desire to talk to them. But as, on
the contrary, she had nothing to talk to them about, when they entered
her presence she contented herself, without rising, with breaking off
for an instant her vapid conversation with the two Royalties and the
Ambassadress and thanking them with: "How good of you to have come,"
not that she thought that the guest had shewn his goodness by coming,
but to enhance her own; then, at once dropping him back into the
stream, she would add: "You will find M. de Guermantes by the garden
door," so that the guest proceeded on his way and ceased to bother
her. To some indeed she said nothing, contenting herself with shewing
them her admirable onyx eyes, as though they had come merely to visit
an exhibition of precious stones.

The person immediately in front of me was the Duc de Châtellerault.

Having to respond to all the smiles, all the greetings waved to him
from inside the drawing-room, he had not noticed the usher. But from
the first moment the usher had recognised him. The identity of this
stranger, which he had so ardently desired to learn, in another minute
he would know.  When he asked his 'Englishman' of the other evening
what name he was to announce, the usher was not merely stirred, he
considered that he was being indiscreet, indelicate. He felt that he
was about to reveal to the whole world (which would, however, suspect
nothing) a secret which it was criminal of him to force like this and
to proclaim in public. Upon hearing the guest's reply: "Le duc de
Châtellerault," he felt such a burst of pride that he remained for a
moment speechless. The Duke looked at him, recognised him, saw himself
ruined, while the servant, who had recovered his composure and was
sufficiently versed in heraldry to complete for himself an appellation
that was too modest, shouted with a professional vehemence softened by
an emotional tenderness: "Son Altesse Monseigneur le duc de
Châtellerault!" But it was now my turn to be announced. Absorbed in
contemplation of my hostess, who had not yet seen me, I had not
thought of the function--terrible to me, although not in the same
sense as to M. de Châtellerault--of this usher garbed in black like a
headsman, surrounded by a group of lackeys in the most cheerful
livery, lusty fellows ready to seize hold of an intruder and cast him
out of doors. The usher asked me my name, I told him it as
mechanically as the condemned man allows himself to be strapped to the
block. At once he lifted his head majestically and, before I could beg
him to announce me in a lowered tone so as to spare my own feelings if
I were not invited and those of the Princesse de Guermantes if I were,
shouted the disturbing syllables with a force capable of bringing down
the roof.

The famous Huxley (whose grandson occupies an unassailable position in
the English literary world of to-day) relates that one of his patients
dared not continue to go into society because often, on the actual
chair that was pointed out to her with a courteous gesture, she saw an
old gentleman already seated. She could be quite certain that either
the gesture of invitation or the old gentleman's presence was a
hallucination, for her hostess would not have offered her a chair that
was already occupied. And when Huxley, to cure her, forced her to
reappear in society, she felt a moment of painful hesitation when she
asked herself whether the friendly sign that was being made to her was
the real thing, or, in obedience to a non-existent vision, she was
about to sit down in public upon the knees of a gentleman in flesh and
blood. Her brief uncertainty was agonising. Less so perhaps than mine.
>From the moment at which I had taken in the sound of my name, like the
rumble that warns us of a possible cataclysm, I was bound, to plead my
own good faith in either event, and as though I were not tormented by
any doubt, to advance towards the Princess with a resolute air.

She caught sight of me when I was still a few feet away and (to leave
me in no doubt that I was the victim of a conspiracy), instead of
remaining seated, as she had done for her other guests, rose and came
towards me. A moment later, I was able to heave the sigh of relief of
Huxley's patient, when, having made up her mind to sit down on the
chair, she found it vacant and realised that it was the old gentleman
that was a hallucination.  The Princess had just held out her hand to
me with a smile. She remained standing for some moments with the kind
of charm enshrined in the verse of Malherbe which ends:

  "To do them honour all the angels rise."

She apologised because the Duchess had not yet come, as though I must
be bored there without her. In order to give me this greeting, she
wheeled round me, holding me by the hand, in a graceful revolution by
the whirl of which I felt myself carried off my feet. I almost
expected that she would next offer me, like the leader of a cotillon,
an ivory-headed cane or a watch-bracelet.  She did not, however, give
me anything of the sort, and as though, instead of dancing the boston,
she had been listening to a sacred quartet by Beethoven the sublime
strains of which she was afraid of interrupting, she cut short the
conversation there and then, or rather did not begin it, and, still
radiant at having seen me come in, merely informed me where the Prince
was to be found.

I moved away from her and did not venture to approach her again,
feeling that she had absolutely nothing to say to me and that, in her
vast kindness, this woman marvellously tall and handsome, noble as
were so many great ladies who stepped so proudly upon the scaffold,
could only, short of offering me a draught of honeydew, repeat what
she had already said to me twice: "You will find the Prince in the
garden." Now, to go in search of the Prince was to feel my doubts
revive in a fresh form.

In any case I should have to find somebody to introduce me. One could
hear, above all the din of conversation, the interminable chatter of
M. de Charlus, talking to H. E. the Duke of Sidonia, whose
acquaintance he had just made. Members of the same profession find one
another out, and so it is with a common vice. M. de Charlus and M. de
Sidonia had each of them immediately detected the other's vice, which
was in both cases that of soliloquising in society, to the extent of
not being able to stand any interruption.  Having decided at once
that, in the words of a famous sonnet, there was 'no help,' they had
made up their minds not to be silent but each to go on talking without
any regard to what the other might say. This had resulted in the
confused babble produced in Molière's comedies by a number of people
saying different things simultaneously. The Baron, with his deafening
voice, was moreover certain of keeping the upper hand, of drowning the
feeble voice of M. de Sidonia; without however discouraging him, for,
whenever M. de Charlus paused for a moment to breathe, the interval
was filled by the murmurs of the Grandee of Spain who had
imperturbably continued his discourse. I could easily have asked M. de
Charlus to introduce me to the Prince de Guermantes, but I feared (and
with good reason) that he might be cross with me. I had treated him in
the most ungrateful fashion by letting his offer pass unheeded for the
second time and by never giving him a sign of my existence since the
evening when he had so affectionately escorted me home. And yet I
could not plead the excuse of having anticipated the scene which I had
just witnessed, that very afternoon, enacted by himself and Jupien. I
suspected nothing of the sort. It is true that shortly before this,
when my parents reproached me with my laziness and with not having
taken the trouble to write a line to M. de Charlus, I had violently
reproached them with wishing me to accept a degrading proposal.  But
anger alone, and the desire to hit upon the expression that would be
most offensive to them had dictated this mendacious retort. In
reality, I had imagined nothing sensual, nothing sentimental even,
underlying the Baron's offers. I had said this to my parents with
entire irresponsibility.  But sometimes the future is latent in us
without our knowledge, and our words which we suppose to be false
forecast an imminent reality.

M. de Charlus would doubtless have forgiven me my want of gratitude.
But what made him furious was that my presence this evening at the
Princesse de Guermantes's, as for some time past at her cousin's,
seemed to be a defiance of his solemn declaration: "There is no
admission to those houses save through me." A grave fault, a crime
that was perhaps inexpiable, I had not followed the conventional path.
M. de Charlus knew well that the thunderbolts which he hurled at those
who did not comply with his orders, or to whom he had taken a dislike,
were beginning to be regarded by many people, however furiously he
might brandish them, as mere pasteboard, and had no longer the force
to banish anybody from anywhere. But he believed perhaps that his
diminished power, still considerable, remained intact in the eyes of
novices like myself. And so I did not consider it well advised to ask
a favour of him at a party at which the mere fact of my presence
seemed an ironical denial of his pretentions.

I was buttonholed at that moment by a man of a distinctly common type,
Professor E----. He had been surprised to see me at the Guermantes'. I
was no less surprised to see him there, for nobody had ever seen
before or was ever to see again a person of his sort at one of the
Princess's parties. He had just succeeded in curing the Prince, after
the last rites had been administered, of a septic pneumonia, and the
special gratitude that Mme. de Guermantes felt towards him was the
reason for her thus departing from custom and inviting him to her
house. As he knew absolutely nobody in the rooms, and could not wander
about there indefinitely by himself, like a minister of death, having
recognised me, he had discovered, for the first time in his life, that
he had an infinite number of things to say to me, which enabled him to
assume an air of composure, and this was one of the reasons for his
advancing upon me. There was also another. He attached great
importance to his never being mistaken in his diagnoses. Now his
correspondence was so numerous that he could not always bear in mind,
when he had seen a patient once only, whether the disease had really
followed the course that he had traced for it. The reader may perhaps
remember that, immediately after my grandmother's stroke, I had taken
her to see him, on the afternoon when he was having all his
decorations stitched to his coat. After so long an interval, he no
longer remembered the formal announcement which had been sent to him
at the time. "Your grandmother is dead, isn't she?" he said to me in a
voice in which a semi-certainty calmed a slight apprehension. "Ah!
Indeed! Well, from the moment I saw her my prognosis was extremely
grave, I remember it quite well."

It was thus that Professor E-----learned or recalled the death of my
grandmother, and (I must say this to his credit, which is that of the
medical profession as a whole), without displaying, without perhaps
feeling, any satisfaction. The mistakes made by doctors are
innumerable. They err habitually on the side of optimism as to
treatment, of pessimism as to the outcome. "Wine? In moderation, it
can do you no harm, it is always a tonic.... Sexual enjoyment? After
all it is a natural function. I allow you to use, but not to abuse it,
you understand. Excess in anything is wrong." At once, what a
temptation to the patient to renounce those two life-givers, water and
chastity. If, on the other hand, he has any trouble with his heart,
albumen, and so forth, it never lasts for long. Disorders that are
grave but purely functional are at once ascribed to an imaginary
cancer.  It is useless to continue visits which are powerless to
eradicate an incurable malady. Let the patient, left to his own
devices, thereupon subject himself to an implacable regime, and in
time recover, or merely survive, and the doctor, to whom he touches
his hat in the Avenue de l'Opéra, when he supposed him to have long
been lying in Père Lachaise, will interpret the gesture as an act of
insolent defiance. An innocent stroll, taken beneath his nose and
venerable beard, would arouse no greater wrath in the Assize Judge
who, two years earlier, had sentenced the rascal, now passing him with
apparent impunity, to death. Doctors (we do not here include them all,
of course, and make a mental reservation of certain admirable
exceptions), are in general more displeased, more irritated by the
quashing of their sentence than pleased by its execution. This
explains why Professor E----, despite the intellectual satisfaction
that he doubtless felt at finding that he had not been mistaken, was
able to speak to me only with regret of the blow that had fallen upon
us. He was in no hurry to cut short the conversation, which kept him
in countenance and gave him a reason for remaining.  He spoke to me of
the great heat through which we were passing, but, albeit he was a
well-read man and capable of expressing himself in good French, said
to me: "You are none the worse for this hyperthermia?" The fact is
that medicine has made some slight advance in knowledge since
Molière's days, but none in its vocabulary. My companion went on: "The
great thing is to avoid the sudations that are caused by weather like
this, especially in superheated rooms. You can remedy them, when you
go home and feel thirsty, by the application of heat" (by which he
apparently meant hot drinks).

Owing to the circumstances of my grandmother's death, the subject
interested me, and I had recently read in a book by a great specialist
that perspiration was injurious to the kidneys, by making moisture
pass through the skin when its proper outlet was elsewhere. I thought
with regret of those dog-days at the time of my grandmother's death,
and was inclined to blame them for it. I did not mention this to Dr.
E----, but of his own accord he said to me: "The advantage of this
very hot weather in which perspiration is abundant is that the kidney
is correspondingly relieved." Medicine is not an exact science.

Keeping me engaged in talk, Professor E-----asked only not to be
forced to leave me. But I had just seen, making a series of sweeping
bows to right and left of the Princesse de Guermantes, stepping back a
pace first, the Marquis de Vaugoubert. M. de Norpois had recently
introduced me to him and I hoped that I might find in him a person
capable of introducing me to our host. The proportions of this work do
not permit me to explain here in consequence of what incidents in his
youth M. de Vaugoubert was one of the few men (possibly the only man)
in society who happened to be in what is called at Sodom the
"confidence" of M. de Charlus. But, if our Minister to the Court of
King Theodosius had certain defects in common with the Baron, they
were only a very pale reflexion. It was merely in an infinitely
softened, sentimental and simple form that he displayed those
alternations of affection and hatred through which the desire to
attract, and then the fear--equally imaginary--of being, if not
scorned, at any rate unmasked, made the Baron pass. Made ridiculous by
a chastity, a 'pla-tonicism' (to which as a man of keen ambition he
had, from the moment of passing his examination, sacrificed all
pleasure), above all by his intellectual nullity, these alternations
M. de Vaugoubert did, nevertheless, display.  But whereas in M. de
Charlus the immoderate praises were proclaimed with a positive burst
of eloquence, and seasoned with the subtlest, the most mordant banter
which marked a man for ever, by M. de Vaugoubert, on the other hand,
the affection was expressed with the banality of a man of the lowest
intelligence, and of a public official, the grievances (worked up
generally into a complete indictment, as with the Baron) by a
malevolence which, though relentless, was at the same time spiritless,
and was all the more startling inasmuch as it was invariably a direct
contradiction of what the Minister had said six months earlier and
might soon perhaps be saying again: a regularity of change which gave
an almost astronomic poetry to the various phases of M. de
Vaugoubert's life, albeit apart from this nobody was ever less
suggestive of a star.

The greeting that he gave me had nothing in common with that which I
should have received from M. de Charlus. To this greeting M. de
Vaugou-bert, apart from the thousand mannerisms which he supposed to
be indicative of good breeding and diplomacy, imparted a cavalier,
brisk, smiling air, which should make him seem on the one hand to be
rejoicing at being alive--at a time when he was inwardly chewing the
mortification of a career with no prospect of advancement and with the
threat of enforced retirement--and on the other hand young, virile and
charming, when he could see and no longer ventured to go and examine
in the glass the lines gathering upon a face which he would have
wished to keep full of seduction.  Not that he would have hoped for
effective conquests, the mere thought of which filled him with terror
on account of what people would say, scandals, blackmail. Having
passed from an almost infantile corruption to an absolute continence
dating from the day on which his thoughts had turned to the Quai
d'Orsay and he had begun to plan a great career for himself, he had
the air of a caged animal, casting in every direction glances
expressive of fear, appetite and stupidity. This last was so dense
that he did not reflect that the street-arabs of his adolescence were
boys no longer, and when a newsvendor bawled in his face: "_La
Presse_!" even more than with longing he shuddered with terror,
imagining himself recognised and denounced.

But in default of the pleasures sacrificed to the ingratitude of the
Quai d'Orsay, M. de Vaugoubert--and it was for this that he was
anxious still to attract--was liable to sudden stirrings of the heart.
Heaven knows with how many letters he would overwhelm the Ministry
(what personal ruses he would employ, the drafts that he made upon the
credit of Mme. de Vaugoubert, who, on account of her corpulence, her
exalted birth, her masculine air, and above all the mediocrity of her
husband, was reputed to be endowed with eminent capacities and to be
herself for all practical purposes the Minister), to introduce without
any valid reason a young man destitute of all merit into the staff of
the Legation. It is true that a few months, a few years later, the
insignificant attaché had only to appear, without the least trace of
any hostile intention, to have shown signs of coldness towards his
chief for the latter, supposing himself scorned or betrayed, to devote
the same hysterical ardour to punishing him with which he had showered
favours upon him in the past. He would move heaven and earth to have
him recalled and the Director of Political Affairs would receive a
letter daily: "Why don't you hurry up and rid me of that lascar. Give
him a dressing down in his own interest. What he needs is a slice of
humble pie." The post of attaché at the court of King Theodosius was
on this account far from enjoyable. But in all other respects, thanks
to his perfect common sense as a man of the world, M. de Vaugoubert
was one of the best representatives of the French Government abroad.
When a man who was reckoned a superior person, a Jacobin, with an
expert knowledge of all subjects, replaced him later on, it was not
long before war broke out between France and the country over which
that monarch reigned.

M. de Vaugoubert, like M. de Charlus, did not care to be the first to
give a greeting. Each of them preferred to 'respond,' being constantly
afraid of the gossip which the person to whom otherwise they might
have offered their hand might have heard about them since their last
meeting. In my case, M. de Vaugoubert had no need to ask himself this
question, I had as a matter of fact gone up of my own accord to greet
him, if only because of the difference in our ages. He replied with an
air of wonder and delight, his eyes continuing to stray as though
there had been a patch of clover on either side of me upon which he
was forbidden to graze. I felt that it would be more becoming to ask
him to introduce me to Mme. de Vaugoubert, before effecting that
introduction to the Prince which I decided not to mention to him until
afterwards. The idea of making me acquainted with his wife seemed to
fill him with joy, for his own sake as well as for hers, and he led me
at a solemn pace towards the Marquise. Arriving in front of her, and
indicating me with his hand and eyes, with every conceivable mark of
consideration, he nevertheless remained silent and withdrew after a
few moments, in a sidelong fashion, leaving me alone with his wife.
She had at once given me her hand, but without knowing to whom this
token of friendship was addressed, for I realised that M. de
Vaugoubert had forgotten my name, perhaps even had failed to recognise
me, and being unwilling, from politeness, to confess his ignorance had
made the introduction consist in a mere dumb show. And so I was no
further advanced; how was I to get myself introduced to my host by a
woman who did not know my name? Worse still, I found myself obliged to
remain for some moments talking to Mme. de Vaugoubert. And this
annoyed me for two reasons. I had no wish to remain all night at this
party, for I had arranged with Albertine (I had given her a box for
_Phèdre_) that she was to pay me a visit shortly before midnight.
Certainly I was not in the least in love with her; I was yielding, in
making her come this evening, to a wholly sensual desire, albeit we
were at that torrid period of the year when sensuality, evaporating,
visits more readily the organ of taste, seeks above all things
coolness. More than for the kiss of a girl, it thirsts for orangeade,
for a cold bath, or even to gaze at that peeled and juicy moon which
was quenching the thirst of heaven. I counted however upon ridding
myself, in Albertine's company--which, moreover, reminded me of the
coolness of the sea--of the regret that I should not fail to feel for
many charming faces (for it was a party quite as much for girls as for
married women that the Princess was giving. On the other hand, the
face of the imposing Mme. de Vaugoubert, Bourbonian and morose, was in
no way attractive).

People said at the Ministry, without any suggestion of malice, that in
their household it was the husband who wore the petticoats and the
wife the trousers. Now there was more truth in this saying than was
supposed.  Mme. de Vaugoubert was really a man. Whether she had always
been one, or had grown to be as I saw her, matters little, for in
either case we have to deal with one of the most touching miracles of
nature which, in the latter alternative especially, makes the human
kingdom resemble the kingdom of flowers. On the former hypothesis--if
the future Mme. de Vaugoubert had always been so clumsily
manlike--nature, by a fiendish and beneficent ruse, bestows on the
girl the deceiving aspect of a man. And the youth who has no love for
women and is seeking to be cured greets with joy this subterfuge of
discovering a bride who figures in his eyes as a market porter.  In
the alternative case, if the woman has not originally these masculine
characteristics, she adopts them by degrees, to please her husband,
and even unconsciously, by that sort of mimicry which makes certain
flowers assume the appearance of the insects which they seek to
attract. Her regret that she is not loved, that she is not a man,
virilises her. Indeed, quite apart from the case that we are now
considering, who has not remarked how often the most normal couples
end by resembling each other, at times even by an exchange of
qualities? A former German Chancellor, Prince von Bùlow, married an
Italian. In the course of time, on the Pincio, it was remarked how
much the Teutonic husband had absorbed of Italian delicacy, and the
Italian Princess of German coarseness. To turn aside to a point
without the province of the laws which we are now tracing, everyone
knows an eminent French diplomat, whose origin was at first suggested
only by his name, one of the most illustrious in the East. As he
matured, as he grew old, there was revealed in him the Oriental whom
no one had ever suspected, and now when we see him we regret the
absence of the fez that would complete the picture.

To revert to habits completely unknown to the ambassador whose
profile, coarsened by heredity, we have just recalled, Mme. de
Vaugoubert realised the acquired or predestined type, the immortal
example of which is the Princess Palatine, never out of a riding
habit, who, having borrowed from her husband more than his virility,
championing the defects of the men who do not care for women, reports
in her familiar correspondence the mutual relations of all the great
noblemen of the court of Louis XIV. One of the reasons which enhance
still farther the masculine air of women like Mme. de Vaugoubert is
that the neglect which they receive from their husbands, the shame
that they feel at such neglect, destroy in them by degrees everything
that is womanly. They end by acquiring both the good and the bad
qualities which their husbands lack. The more frivolous, effeminate,
indiscreet their husbands are, the more they grow into the effigy,
devoid of charm, of the virtues which their husbands ought to
practise.

Traces of abasement, boredom, indignation, marred the regular features
of Mme. de Vaugoubert. Alas, I felt that she was regarding me with
interest and curiosity as one of those young men who appealed to M. de
Vaugoubert, and one of whom she herself would so much have liked to
be, now that her husband, growing old, shewed a preference for youth.
She was gazing at me with the close attention shewn by provincial
ladies who from an illustrated catalogue copy the tailor-made dress so
becoming to the charming person in the picture (actually, the same
person on every page, but deceptively multiplied into different
creatures, thanks to the differences of pose and the variety of
attire). The instinctive attraction which urged Mme. de Vaugoubert
towards me was so strong that she went the length of seizing my arm,
so that I might take her to get a glass of orangeade. But I released
myself, alleging that I must presently be going, and had not yet been
introduced to our host.

This distance between me and the garden door where he stood talking to
a group of people was not very great. But it alarmed me more than if,
in order to cross it, I should have to expose myself to a continuous
hail of fire.

A number of women from whom I felt that I might be able to secure an
introduction were in the garden, where, while feigning an ecstatic
admiration, they were at a loss for an occupation. Parties of this
sort are as a rule premature. They have little reality until the
following day, when they occupy the attention of the people who were
not invited. A real author, devoid of the foolish self-esteem of so
many literary people, if, when he reads an article by a critic who has
always expressed the greatest admiration for his works, he sees the
names of various inferior writers mentioned, but not his own, has no
time to stop and consider what might be to him a matter for
astonishment: his books are calling him. But a society woman has
nothing to do and, on seeing in the _Figaro_: "Last night the Prince
and Princesse de Guermantes gave a large party," etc., exclaims:
"What! Only three days ago I talked to Marie-Gilbert for an hour, and
she never said a word about it!" and racks her brains to discover how
she can have offended the Guermantes. It must be said that, so far as
the Princess's parties were concerned, the astonishment was sometimes
as great among those who were invited as among those who were not. For
they would burst forth at the moment when one least expected them, and
summoned in people whose existence Mme. de Guermantes had forgotten
for years.  And almost all the people in society are so insignificant
that others of their sort adopt, in judging them, only the measure of
their social success, cherish them if they are invited, if they are
omitted detest them. As to the latter, if it was the fact that the
Princess often, even when they were her friends, did not invite them,
that was often due to her fear of annoying 'Palamede,' who had
excommunicated them. And so I might be certain that she had not spoken
of me to M. de Charlus, for otherwise I should not have found myself
there. He meanwhile was posted between the house and the garden, by
the side of the German Ambassador, leaning upon the balustrade of the
great staircase which led from the garden to the house, so that the
other guests, in spite of the three or four feminine admirers who were
grouped round the Baron and almost concealed him, were obliged to
greet him as they passed. He responded by naming each of them in turn.
And one heard an incessant: "Good evening, Monsieur du Hazay, good
evening, Madame de la Tour du Pin-Verclause, good evening, Madame de
la Tour du Pin-Gouvernet, good evening, Philibert, good evening, my
dear Ambassadress," and so on. This created a continuous barking
sound, interspersed with benevolent suggestions or inquiries (to the
answers to which he paid no attention), which M. de Charlus addressed
to them in a tone softened, artificial to shew his indifference, and
benign: "Take care the child doesn't catch cold, it is always rather
damp in the gardens. Good evening, Madame de Brantes. Good evening,
Madame de Mecklembourg.  Have you brought your daughter? Is she
wearing that delicious pink frock?  Good evening, Saint-Geran."
Certainly there was an element of pride in this attitude, for M. de
Charlus was aware that he was a Guermantes, and that he occupied a
supreme place at this party. But there was more in it than pride, and
the very word _fête_ suggested, to the man with aesthetic gifts, the
luxurious, curious sense that it might bear if this party were being
given not by people in contemporary society but in a painting by
Carpaccio or Veronese. It is indeed highly probable that the German
Prince that M. de Charlus was must rather have been picturing to
himself the reception that occurs in _Tannhäuser_, and himself as the
Margrave, standing at the entrance to the Warburg with a kind word of
condescension for each of his guests, while their procession into the
castle or the park is greeted by the long phrase, a hundred times
renewed, of the famous March.

I must, however, make up my mind. I could distinguish beneath the
trees various women with whom I was more or less closely acquainted,
but they seemed transformed because they were at the Princess's and
not at her cousin's, and because I saw them seated not in front of
Dresden china plates but beneath the boughs of a chestnut. The
refinement of their setting mattered nothing. Had it been infinitely
less refined than at Oriane's, I should have felt the same uneasiness.
When the electric light in our drawing-room fails, and we are obliged
to replace it with oil lamps, everything seems altered. I was recalled
from my uncertainty by Mme. de Souvré.  "Good evening," she said as
she approached me. "Have you seen the Duchesse de Guermantes lately?"
She excelled in giving to speeches of this sort an intonation which
proved that she was not uttering them from sheer silliness, like
people who, not knowing what to talk about, come up to you a thousand
times over to mention some bond of common acquaintance, often
extremely slight. She had on the contrary a fine conducting wire in
her glance which signified: "Don't suppose for a moment that I haven't
recognised you. You are the young man I met at the Duchesse de
Guermantes. I remember quite well." Unfortunately, this protection,
extended over me by this phrase, stupid in appearance but delicate in
intention, was extremely fragile, and vanished as soon as I tried to
make use of it. Madame de Souvré had the art, if called upon to convey
a request to some influential person, of appearing at the same time,
in the petitioner's eyes, to be recommending him, and in those of the
influential person not to be recommending the petitioner, so that her
ambiguous gesture opened a credit balance of gratitude to her with the
latter without placing her in any way in debt to the former.
Encouraged by this lady's civilities to ask her to introduce me to M.
de Guermantes, I found that she took advantage of a moment when our
host was not looking in our direction, laid a motherly hand on my
shoulder, and, smiling at the averted face of the Prince who was
unable to see her, thrust me towards him with a gesture of feigned
protection, but deliberately ineffective, which left me stranded
almost at my starting point. Such is the cowardice of people in
society.

That of a lady who came to greet me, addressing me by my name, was
greater still. I tried to recall her own name as I talked to her; I
remembered quite well having met her at dinner, I could remember
things that she had said. But my attention, concentrated upon the
inward region in which these memories of her lingered, was unable to
discover her name there. It was there, nevertheless. My thoughts began
playing a sort of game with it to grasp its outlines, its initial
letter, and so finally to bring the whole name to light. It was labour
in vain, I could more or less estimate its mass, its weight, but as
for its forms, confronting them with the shadowy captive lurking in
the inward night, I said to myself: "It is not that." Certainly my
mind would have been capable of creating the most difficult names.
Unfortunately, it had not to create but to reproduce. All action by
the mind is easy, if it is not subjected to the test of reality. Here,
I was forced to own myself beaten. Finally, in a flash, the name came
back to me as a whole: 'Madame d'Arpajon.' I am wrong in saying that
it came, for it did not, I think, appear to me by a spontaneous
propulsion. I do not think either that the many slight memories which
associated me with the lady, and to which I did not cease to appeal
for help (by such exhortations as: "Come now, it is the lady who is a
friend of Mme. de Souvré, who feels for Victor Hugo so artless an
admiration, mingled with so much alarm and horror,")--I do not believe
that all these memories, hovering between me and her name, served in
any way to bring it to light. In that great game of hide and seek
which is played in our memory when we seek to recapture a name, there
is not any series of gradual approximations. We see nothing, then
suddenly the name appears in its exact form and very different from
what we thought we could make out. It is not the name that has come to
us. No, I believe rather that, as we go on living, we pass our time in
keeping away from the zone in which a name is distinct, and it was by
an exercise of my will and attention which increased the acuteness of
my inward vision that all of a sudden I had pierced the semi-darkness
and seen daylight.  In any case, if there are transitions between
oblivion and memory, then, these transitions are unconscious. For the
intermediate names through which we pass, before finding the real
name, are themselves false, and bring us nowhere nearer to it. They
are not even, properly speaking, names at all, but often mere
consonants which are nol to be found in the recaptured name. And yet,
this operation of the mind passing from a blank to reality is so
mysterious, that it is possible after all that these false consonants
are really handles, awkwardly held out to enable us to seize hold of
the correct name. "All this," the reader will remark, "tells us
nothing as to the lady's failure to oblige; but since you have made so
long a digression, allow me, gentle author, to waste another moment of
your time in telling you that it is a pity that, young as you were (or
as your hero was, if he be not yourself), you had already so feeble a
memory that you could not recall the name of a lady whom you knew
quite well." It is indeed a pity, gentle reader. And sadder than you
think when one feels the time approaching when names and words will
vanish from the clear zone of consciousness, and when one must for
ever cease to name to oneself the people whom one has known most
intimately. It is indeed a pity that one should require this effort,
when one is still young, to recapture names which one knows quite
well. But if this infirmity occurred only in the case of names barely
known, quite naturally forgotten, names which one would not take the
trouble to remember, the infirmity would not be without its
advantages. "And what are they, may I ask?" Well, Sir, that the malady
alone makes us remark and apprehend, and allows us to dissect the
mechanism of which otherwise we should know nothing. A man who, night
after night, falls like a lump of lead upon his bed, and ceases to
live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will such a man ever
dream of making, I do not say great discoveries, but even minute
observations upon sleep? He barely knows that he does sleep. A little
insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in
throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. A memory without fault is
not a very powerful incentive to studying the phenomena of memory. "In
a word, did Mme. d'Arpajon introduce you to the Prince?" No, but be
quiet and let me go on with my story.

Mme. d'Arpajon was even more cowardly than Mme. de Souvré, but there
was more excuse for her cowardice. She knew that she had always had
very little influence in society. This influence, such as it was, had
been reduced still farther by her connexion with the Duc de
Guermantes; his desertion of her dealt it the final blow. The
resentment which she felt at my request that she should introduce me
to the Prince produced a silence which, she was artless enough to
suppose, conveyed the impression that she had not heard what I said.
She was not even aware that she was knitting her brows with anger.
Perhaps, on the other hand, she was aware of it, did not bother about
the inconsistency, and made use of it for the lesson which she was
thus able to teach me without undue rudeness; I mean a silent lesson,
but none the less eloquent for that.

Apart from this, Mme. d'Arpajon was extremely annoyed; many eyes were
raised in the direction of a renaissance balcony at the corner of
which, instead of one of those monumental statues which were so often
used as ornaments at that period, there leaned, no less sculptural
than they, the magnificent Marquise de Surgis-le-Duc, who had recently
succeeded Mme.  d'Arpajon in the heart of Basin de Guermantes. Beneath
the flimsy white tulle which protected her from the cool night air,
one saw the supple form of a winged victory. I had no recourse left
save to M. de Charlus, who had withdrawn to a room downstairs which
opened on the garden. I had plenty of time (as he was pretending to be
absorbed in a fictitious game of whist which enabled him to appear not
to notice people) to admire the deliberate, artistic simplicity of his
evening coat which, by the merest trifles which only a tailor's eye
could have picked out, had the air of a 'Harmony in Black and White'
by Whistler; black, white and red, rather, for M. de Charlus was
wearing, hanging from a broad ribbon pinned to the lapel of his coat,
the Cross, in white, black and red enamel, of a Knight of the
religious Order of Malta. At that moment the Baron's game was
interrupted by Mme. de Gallardon, leading her nephew, the Vicomte de
Cour-voisier, a young man with an attractive face and an impertinent
air.  "Cousin," said Mme. de Gallardon, "allow me to introduce my
nephew Adalbert. Adalbert, you remember the famous Palamède of whom
you have heard so much." "Good evening, Madame de Gallardon," M. de
Charlus replied. And he added, without so much as a glance at the
young man: "Good evening, Sir," with a truculent air and in a tone so
violently discourteous that everyone in the room was stupefied.
Perhaps M. de Charlus, knowing that Mme. de Gallardon had her doubts
as to his morals and guessing that she had not been able to resist,
for once in a way, the temptation to allude to them, was determined to
nip in the bud any scandal that she might have embroidered upon a
friendly reception of her nephew, making at the same time a resounding
profession of indifference with regard to young men in general;
perhaps he had not considered that the said Adalbert had responded to
his aunt's speech with a sufficiently respectful air; perhaps,
desirous of making headway in time to come with so attractive a
cousin, he chose to give himself the advantage of a preliminary
assault, like those sovereigns who, before engaging upon diplomatic
action, strengthen it by an act of war.

It was not so difficult as I supposed to secure M. de Charlus's
consent to my request that he should introduce me to the Prince de
Guermantes.  For one thing, in the course of the last twenty years,
this Don Quixote had tilted against so many windmills (often relatives
who, he imagined, had behaved badly to him), he had so frequently
banned people as being 'impossible to have in the house' from being
invited by various male or female Guermantes, that these were
beginning to be afraid of quarrelling with all the people they knew
and liked, of condemning themselves to a lifelong deprivation of the
society of certain newcomers whom they were curious to meet, by
espousing the thunderous but unexplained rancours of a brother-in-law
or cousin who expected them to abandon for his sake, wife, brother,
children. More intelligent than the other Guermantes, M.  de Charlus
realised that people were ceasing to pay any attention, save once in a
while, to his veto, and, looking to the future, fearing lest one day
it might be with his society that they would dispense, he had begun to
make allowances, to reduce, as the saying is, his terms. Furthermore,
if he had the faculty of ascribing for months, for years on end, an
identical life to a detested person--to such an one he would not have
tolerated their sending an invitation, and would have fought, rather,
like a trooper, against a queen, the status of the person who stood in
his way ceasing to count for anything in his eyes; on the other hand,
his explosions of wrath were too frequent not to be somewhat
fragmentary. "The imbecile, the rascal!  We shall have to put him in
his place, sweep him into the gutter, where unfortunately he will not
be innocuous to the health of the town," he would scream, even when he
was alone in his own room, while reading a letter that he considered
irreverent, or upon recalling some remark that had been repeated to
him. But a fresh outburst against a second imbecile cancelled the
first, and the former victim had only to shew due deference for the
crisis that he had occasioned to be forgotten, it not having lasted
long enough to establish a foundation of hatred upon which to build.
And so, I might perhaps--despite his ill-humour towards me--have been
successful when I asked him to introduce me to the Prince, had I not
been so ill-inspired as to add, from a scruple of conscience, and so
that he might not suppose me guilty of the indelicacy of entering the
house at a venture, counting upon him to enable me to remain there:
"You are aware that I know them quite well, the Princess has been very
kind to me." "Very well, if you know them, why do you need me to
introduce you?" he replied in a sharp tone, and, turning his back,
resumed his make-believe game with the Nuncio, the German Ambassador
and another personage whom I did not know by sight.

Then, from the depths of those gardens where in days past the Duc
d'Aiguillon used to breed rare animals, there came to my ears, through
the great, open doors, the sound of a sniffing nose that was savouring
all those refinements and determined to miss none of them. The sound
approached, I moved at a venture in its direction, with the result
that the words _good evening_ were murmured in my ear by M. de
Bréauté, not like the rusty metallic-sound of a knife being sharpened
on a grindstone, even less like the cry of the wild boar, devastator
of tilled fields, but like the voice of a possible saviour.

Less influential than Mme. de Souvré, but less deeply ingrained than
she with the incapacity to oblige, far more at his ease with the
Prince than was Mme. d'Arpajon, entertaining some illusion perhaps as
to my position in the Guermantes set, or perhaps knowing more about it
than myself, I had nevertheless for the first few moments some
difficulty in arresting his attention, for, with fluttering, distended
nostrils, he was turning in every direction, inquisitively protruding
his monocle, as though he found himself face to face with five hundred
matchless works of art. But, having heard my request, he received it
with satisfaction, led me towards the Prince and presented me to him
with a relishing, ceremonious, vulgar air, as though he had been
handing him, with a word of commendation, a plate of cakes. Just as
the greeting of the Duc de Guermantes was, when he chose, friendly,
instinct with good fellowship, cordial and familiar, so I found that
of the Prince stiff, solemn, haughty. He barely smiled at me,
addressed me gravely as 'Sir.' I had often heard the Duke make fun of
his cousin's stiffness. But from the first words that he addressed to
me, which by their cold and serious tone formed the most entire
contrast with the language of Basin, I realised at once that the
fundamentally disdainful man was the Duke, who spoke to you at your
first meeting with him as 'man to man,' and that, of the two cousins,
the one who was really simple was the Prince. I found in his reserve a
stronger feeling, I do not say of equality, for that would have been
inconceivable to him, but at least of the consideration which one may
shew for an inferior, such as may be found in all strongly
hierarchical societies; in the Law Courts, for instance, in a Faculty,
where a public prosecutor or dean, conscious of their high charge,
conceal perhaps more genuine simplicity, and, when you come to know
them better, more kindness, true simplicity, cordiality, beneath their
traditional aloofness than the more modern brethren beneath their
jocular affectation of comradeship. "Do you intend to follow the
career of Monsieur, your father?" he said to me with a distant but
interested air. I answered his question briefly, realising that he had
asked it only out of politeness, and moved away to allow him to greet
the fresh arrivals.

I caught sight of Swann, and meant to speak to him, but at that moment
I saw that the Prince de Guermantes, instead of waiting where he was
to receive the greeting of--Odette's husband, had immediately, with
the force of a suction pump, carried him off to the farther end of the
garden, in order, as some said, 'to shew him the door.'

So entirely absorbed in the company that I did not learn until two
days later, from the newspapers, that a Czech orchestra had been
playing throughout the evening, and that Bengal lights had been
burning in constant succession, I recovered some power of attention
with the idea of going to look at the celebrated fountain of Hubert
Robert.

In a clearing surrounded by fine trees several of which were as old as
itself, set in a place apart, one could see it in the distance,
slender, immobile, stiffened, allowing the breeze to stir only the
lighter fall of its pale and quivering plume. The eighteenth century
had refined the elegance of its lines, but, by fixing the style of the
jet, seemed to have arrested its life; at this distance one had the
impression of a work of art rather than the sensation of water. The
moist cloud itself that was perpetually gathering at its crest
preserved the character of the period like those that in the sky
assemble round the palaces of Versailles. But from a closer view one
realised that, while it respected, like the stones of an ancient
palace, the design traced for it beforehand, it was a constantly
changing stream of water that, springing upwards and seeking to obey
the architect's traditional orders, performed them to the letter only
by seeming to infringe them, its thousand separate bursts succeeding
only at a distance in giving the impression of a single flow. This was
in reality as often interrupted as the scattering of the fall, whereas
from a distance it had appeared to me unyielding, solid, unbroken in
its continuity. From a little nearer, one saw that this continuity,
apparently complete, was assured, at every point in the ascent of the
jet, wherever it must otherwise have been broken, by the entering into
line, by the lateral incorporation of a parallel jet which mounted
higher than the first and was itself, at an altitude greater but
already a strain upon its endurance, relieved by a third. Seen close
at hand, drops without strength fell back from the column of water
crossing on their way their climbing sisters and, at times, torn,
caught in an eddy of the night air, disturbed by this ceaseless flow,
floated awhile before being drowned in the basin. They teased with
their hesitations, with their passage in the opposite direction, and
blurred with their soft vapour the vertical tension of that stem,
bearing aloft an oblong cloud composed of a thousand tiny drops, but
apparently painted in an unchanging, golden brown which rose,
unbreakable, constant, urgent, swift, to mingle with the clouds in the
sky. Unfortunately, a gust of wind was enough to scatter it obliquely
on the ground; at times indeed a single jet, disobeying its orders,
swerved and, had they not kept a respectful distance, would have
drenched to their skins the incautious crowd of gazers.

One of these little accidents, which could scarcely occur save when
the breeze freshened for a moment, was distinctly unpleasant. Somebody
had told Mme. d'Arpajon that the Duc de Guermantes, who as a matter of
fact had not yet arrived, was with Mme. de Surgis in one of the
galleries of pink marble to which one ascended by the double
colonnade, hollowed out of the wall, which rose from the brink of the
fountain. Now, just as Mme. d'Arpajon was making for one of these
staircases, a strong gust of warm air made the jet of water swerve and
inundated the fair lady so completely that, the water streaming down
from her open bosom inside her dress, she was soaked as if she had
been plunged into a bath. Whereupon, a few feet away, a rhythmical
roar resounded, loud enough to be heard by a whole army, and at the
same time protracted in periods as though it were being addressed not
to the army as a whole but to each unit in turn; it was the Grand Duke
Vladimir, who was laughing wholeheartedly upon seeing the immersion of
Mme. d'Arpajon, one of the funniest sights, as he was never tired of
repeating afterwards, that he had ever seen in his life. Some
charitable persons having suggested to the Muscovite that a word of
sympathy from himself was perhaps deserved and would give pleasure to
the lady who, notwithstanding her tale of forty winters fully told,
wiping herself with her scarf, without appealing to anyone for help,
was stepping clear in spite of the water that was maliciously spilling
over the edge of the basin, the Grand Duke, who had a kind heart, felt
that he must say a word in season, and, before the last military
tattoo of his laughter had altogether subsided, one heard a fresh
roar, more vociferous even than the last. "Bravo, old girl!" he cried,
clapping his hands as though at the theatre. Mme. d'Arpajon was not at
all pleased that her dexterity should be commended at the expense of
her youth. And when some one remarked to her, in a voice drowned by
the roar of the water, over which nevertheless rose the princely
thunder: "I think His Imperial Highness said something to you." "No!
It was to Mme. de Souvré," was her reply.

I passed through the gardens and returned by the stair, upon which the
absence of the Prince, who had vanished with Swann, enlarged the crowd
of guests round M. de Charlus, just as, when Louis XIV was not at
Versailles, there was a more numerous attendance upon Monsieur, his
brother. I was stopped on my way by the Baron, while behind me two
ladies and a young man came up to greet him.

"It is nice to see you here," he said to me, as he held out his hand.
"Good evening, Madame de la Trémoïlle, good evening, my dear
Herminie." But doubtless the memory of what he had said to me as to
his own supreme position in the Hôtel Guermantes made him wish to
appear to be feeling, with regard to a matter which annoyed him but
which he had been unable to prevent, a satisfaction which his
high-and-mighty impertinence and his hysterical excitement immediately
invested in a cloak of exaggerated irony.  "It is nice," he repeated,
"but it is, really, very odd." And he broke into peals of laughter
which appeared to be indicative at once of his joy and of the
inadequacy of human speech to express it. Certain persons, meanwhile,
who knew both how difficult he was of access and how prone to insolent
retorts, had been drawn towards us by curiosity, and, with an almost
indecent haste, took to their heels. "Come, now, don't be cross," he
said to me, patting me gently on the shoulder, "you know that I am
your friend.  Good evening, Antioche, good evening, Louis-René. Have
you been to look at the fountain?" he asked me in a tone that was
affirmative rather than questioning. "It is quite pretty, ain't it? It
is marvellous. It might be made better still, naturally, if certain
things were removed, and then there would be nothing like it in
France. But even as it stands, it is quite one of the best things.
Bréauté will tell you that it was a mistake to put lamps round it, to
try and make people forget that it was he who was responsible for that
absurd idea. But after all he has only managed to spoil it a very
little. It is far more difficult to deface a great work of art than to
create one. Not that we had not a vague suspicion all the time that
Bréauté was not quite a match for Hubert Robert."

I drifted back into the stream of guests who were entering the house.
"Have you seen my delicious cousin Oriane lately?" I was asked by the
Princess who had now deserted her post by the door and with whom I was
making my way back to the rooms. "She's sure to be here to-night, I
saw her this afternoon," my hostess added. "She promised me to come. I
believe too that you will be dining with us both to meet the Queen of
Italy, at the Embassy, on Thursday. There are to be all the Royalties
imaginable, it will be most alarming." They could not in any way alarm
the Princesse de Guermantes, whose rooms swarmed with them, and who
would say: 'My little Coburgs' as she might have said 'my little
dogs.' And so Mme.  de Guermantes said: "It will be most alarming,"
out of sheer silliness, which, among people in society, overrides even
their vanity. With regard to her own pedigree, she knew less than a
passman in history. As for the people of her circle, she liked to shew
that she knew the nicknames with which they had been labelled. Having
asked me whether I was dining, the week after, with the Marquise de la
Pommelière, who was often called 'la Pomme,' the Princess, having
elicited a reply in the negative, remained silent for some moments.
Then, without any other motive than a deliberate display of
instinctive erudition, banality, and conformity to the prevailing
spirit, she added: "She's not a bad sort, the Pomme!"

While the Princess was talking to me, it so happened that the Duc and
Duchesse de Guermantes made their entrance. But I could not go at once
to greet them, for I was waylaid by the Turkish Ambassadress, who,
pointing to our hostess whom I had just left, exclaimed as she seized
me by the arm: "Ah! What a delicious woman the Princess is! What a
superior being!  I feel sure that, if I were a man," she went on, with
a trace of Oriental servility and sensuality, "I would give my life
for that heavenly creature." I replied that I did indeed find her
charming, but that I knew her cousin, the Duchess, better. "But there
is no comparison," said the Ambassadress.  "Oriane is a charming
society woman who gets her wit from Même and Babal, whereas
Marie-Gilbert is _somebody_."

I never much like to be told like this, without a chance to reply,
what I ought to think about people whom I know. And there was no
reason why the Turkish Ambassadress should be in any way better
qualified than myself to judge of the worth of the Duchesse de
Guermantes.

On the other hand (and this explained also my annoyance with the
Ambassadress), the defects of a mere acquaintance, and even of a
friend, are to us real poisons, against which we are fortunately
'mithridated.'

But, without applying any standard of scientific comparison and
talking of anaphylaxis, let us say that, at the heart of our friendly
or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured
but recurring by fits and starts. As a rule, we suffer little from
these poisons, so long as people are 'natural.' By saying 'Babal' and
'Mémé' to indicate people with whom she was not acquainted, the
Turkish Ambassadress suspended the effects of the 'mithridatism'
which, as a rule, made me find her tolerable. She annoyed me, which
was all the more unfair, inasmuch as she did not speak like this to
make me think that she was an intimate friend of 'Mémé,' but owing to
a too rapid education which made her name these noble lords according
to what she believed to be the custom of the country. She had crowded
her course into a few months, and had not picked up the rules.  But,
on thinking it over, I found another reason for my disinclination to
remain in the Ambassadress's company. It was not so very long since,
at Oriane's, this same diplomatic personage had said to me, with a
purposeful and serious air, that she found the Princesse de Guermantes
frankly antipathetic.  I felt that I need not stop to consider this
change of front: the invitation to the party this evening had brought
it about. The Ambassadress was perfectly sincere when she told me that
the Princesse de Guermantes was a sublime creature. She had always
thought so. But, having never before been invited to the Princess's
house, she had felt herself bound to give this non-invitation the
appearance of a deliberate abstention on principle.  Now that she had
been asked, and would presumably continue to be asked in the future,
she could give free expression to her feelings. There is no need, in
accounting for three out of four of the opinions that we hold about
other people, to go so far as crossed love or exclusion from public
office. Our judgment remains uncertain: the withholding or bestowal of
an invitation determines it. Anyhow, the Turkish Ambassadress, as the
Baronne de Guermantes remarked while making a tour of inspection
through the rooms with me, 'was all right.' She was, above all,
extremely useful. The real stars of society are tired of appearing
there. He who is curious to gaze at them must often migrate to another
hemisphere, where they are more or less alone. But women like the
Ottoman Ambassadress, of quite recent admission to society, are never
weary of shining there, and, so to speak, everywhere at once. They are
of value at entertainments of the sort known as _soirée_ or _rout_, to
which they would let themselves be dragged from their deathbeds rather
than miss one. They are the supers upon whom a hostess can always
count, determined never to miss a party.  And so, the foolish young
men, unaware that they are false stars, take them for the queens of
fashion, whereas it would require a formal lecture to explain to them
by virtue of what reasons Mme. Standish, who, her existence unknown to
them, lives remote from the world, painting cushions, is at least as
great a lady as the Duchesse de Doudeauville.

In the ordinary course of life, the eyes of the Duchesse de Guermantes
were absent and slightly melancholy, she made them sparkle with a.
flame of wit only when she had to say how-d'ye-do to a friend;
precisely as though the said friend had been some witty remark, some
charming touch, some titbit for delicate palates, the savour of which
has set on the face of the connoisseur an expression of refined joy.
But upon big evenings, as she had too many greetings to bestow, she
decided that it would be tiring to have to switch off the light after
each. Just as an ardent reader, when he goes to the theatre to see a
new piece by one of the masters of the stage, testifies to his
certainty that he is not going to spend a dull evening by having,
while he hands his hat and coat to the attendant, his lip adjusted in
readiness for a sapient smile, his eye kindled for a sardonic
approval; similarly it was at the moment of her arrival that the
Duchess lighted up for the whole evening. And while she was handing
over her evening cloak, of a magnificent Tiepolo red, exposing a huge
collar of rubies round her neck, having cast over her gown that final
rapid, minute and exhaustive dressmaker's glance which is also that of
a woman of the world, Oriane made sure that her eyes, just as much as
her other jewels, were sparkling.  In vain might sundry 'kind friends'
such as M. de Janville fling themselves upon the Duke to keep him from
entering: "But don't you know that poor Mama is at his last gasp? He
had had the Sacraments." "I know, I know," answered M. de Guermantes,
thrusting the tiresome fellow aside in order to enter the room. "The
viaticum has acted splendidly," he added, with a smile of pleasure at
the thought of the ball which he was determined not to miss after the
Prince's party. "We did not want people to know that we had come
back," the Duchess said to me. She never suspected that the Princess
had already disproved this statement by telling me that she had seen
her cousin for a moment, who had promised to come. The Duke, after a
protracted stare with which he proceeded to crush his wife for the
space of five minutes, observed: "I told Oriane about your
misgivings." Now that she saw that they were unfounded, and that she
herself need take no action in the attempt to dispel them, she
pronounced them absurd, and continued to chaff me about them. "The
idea of supposing that you were not invited! Besides, wasn't I there?
Do you suppose that I should be unable to get you an invitation to my
cousin's house?" I must admit that frequently, after this, she did
things for me that were far more difficult; nevertheless, I took care
not to interpret her words in the sense that I had been too modest. I
was beginning to learn the exact value of the language, spoken or
mute, of aristocratic affability, an affability that is happy to shed
balm upon the sense of inferiority in those persons towards whom it is
directed, though not to the point of dispelling that sense, for in
that case it would no longer have any reason to exist. "But you are
our equal, if not our superior," the Guermantes seemed, in all their
actions, to be saying; and they said it in the most courteous fashion
imaginable, to be loved, admired, but not to be believed; that one
should discern the fictitious character of this affability was what
they called being well-bred; to suppose it to be genuine, a sign of
ill-breeding. I was to receive, as it happened, shortly after this, a
lesson which gave me a full and perfect understanding of the extent
and limitations of certain forms of aristocratic affability. It was at
an afternoon party given by the Duchesse de Montmorency to meet the
Queen of England; there was a sort of royal procession to the buffet,
at the head of which walked Her Majesty on the arm of the Duc de
Guermantes.  I happened to arrive at that moment. With his disengaged
hand the Duke conveyed to me, from a distance of nearly fifty yards, a
thousand signs of friendly invitation, which appeared to mean that I
need not be afraid to approach, that I should not be devoured alive
instead of the sandwiches. But I, who was becoming word-perfect in the
language of the court, instead of going even one step nearer, keeping
my fifty yards' interval, made a deep how, but without smiling, the
sort of bow that I should have made to some one whom I scarcely knew,
then proceeded in the opposite direction. Had I written a masterpiece,
the Guermantes would have given me less credit for it than I earned by
that bow. Not only did it not pass unperceived by the Duke, albeit he
had that day to acknowledge the greetings of more than five hundred
people, it caught the eye of the Duchess, who, happening to meet my
mother, told her of it, and, so far from suggesting that I had done
wrong, that I ought to have gone up to him, said that her husband had
been lost in admiration of my bow, that it would have been impossible
for anyone to put more into it. They never ceased to find in that bow
every possible merit, without however mentioning that which had seemed
the most priceless of all, to wit that it had been discreet, nor did
they cease either to pay me compliments which I understood to be even
less a reward for the past than a hint for the future, after the
fashion of the hint delicately conveyed to his pupils by the
headmaster of a school: "Do not forget, my boys, that these prizes are
intended not so much for you as for your parents, so that they may
send you back next term." So it was that Mme. de Marsantes, when some
one from a different world entered her circle, would praise in his
hearing the discreet people whom "you find at home when you go to see
them, and who at other times let you forget their existence," as one
warns by an indirect allusion a servant who has an unpleasant smell,
that the practice of taking a bath is beneficial to the health.

While, before she had even left the entrance hall, I was talking to
Mme.  de Guermantes, I could hear a voice of a sort which, for the
future, I was to be able to classify without the possibility of error.
It was, in this particular instance, the voice of M. de Vaugoubert
talking to M. de Charlus.  A skilled physician need not even make his
patient unbutton his shirt, nor listen to his breathing, the sound of
his voice is enough. How often, in time to come, was my ear to be
caught in a drawing-room by the intonation or laughter of some man,
who, for all that, was copying exactly the language of his profession
or the manners of his class, affecting a stern aloofness or a coarse
familiarity, but whose artificial voice was enough to indicate: 'He is
a Charlus' to my trained ear, like the note of a tuning fork. At that
moment the entire staff of one of the Embassies went past, pausing to
greet M. de Charlus. For all that my discovery of the sort of malady
in question dated only from that afternoon (when I had surprised M. de
Charlus with Jupien) I should have had no need, before giving a
diagnosis, to put questions, to auscultate. But M. de Vaugoubert, when
talking to M. de Charlus, appeared uncertain. And yet he must have
known what was in the air after the doubts of his adolescence. The
invert believes himself to be the only one of his kind in the
universe; it is only in later years that he imagines--another
exaggeration--that the unique exception is the normal man. But,
ambitious and timorous, M. de Vaugoubert had not for many years past
surrendered himself to what would to him have meant pleasure. The
career of diplomacy had had the same effect upon his life as a
monastic profession. Combined with his assiduous fréquentation of the
School of Political Sciences, it had vowed him from his twentieth year
to the chastity of a professing Christian. And so, as each of our
senses loses its strength and vivacity, becomes atrophied when it is
no longer exercised, M. de Vaugoubert, just as the civilised man is no
longer capable of the feats of strength, of the acuteness of hearing
of the cave-dweller, had lost that special perspicacy which was rarely
at fault in M. de Charlus; and at official banquets, whether in Paris
or abroad, the Minister Plenipotentiary was no longer capable of
identifying those who, beneath the disguise of their uniform, were at
heart his congeners. Certain names mentioned by M. de Charlus,
indignant if he himself was cited for his peculiarities, but always
delighted to give away those of other people, caused M. de Vaugoubert
an exquisite surprise. Not that, after all these years, he dreamed of
profiting by any windfall. But these rapid revelations, similar to
those which in Racine's tragedies inform Athalie and Abner that Joas
is of the House of David, that Esther, enthroned in the purple, comes
of a Yiddish stock, changing the aspect of the X-----Legation, or of
one or another department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, rendered
those palaces as mysterious, in retrospect, as the Temple of Jerusalem
or the Throne-room at Susa. At the sight of the youthful staff of this
Embassy advancing in a body to shake hands with M. de Charlus, M. de
Vaugoubert assumed the astonished air of Elise exclaiming, in
_Esther_: "Great heavens! What a swarm of innocent beauties issuing
from all sides presents itself to my gaze! How charming a modesty is
depicted on their faces!" Then, athirst for more definite information,
he cast at M. de Charlus a smiling glance fatuously interrogative and
concupiscent.  "Why, of course they are," said M. de Charlus with the
knowing air of a learned man speaking to an ignoramus. From that
instant M. de Vaugoubert (greatly to the annoyance of M. de Charlus)
could not tear his eyes from these young secretaries whom the
X-----Ambassador to France, an old stager, had not chosen blindfold.
M. de Vaugoubert remained silent, I could only watch his eyes. But,
being accustomed from my childhood to apply, even to what is
voiceless, the language of the classics, I made M.  de Vaugoubert's
eyes repeat the lines in which Esther explains to Elise that
Mardochée, in his zeal for his religion, has made it a rule that only
those maidens who profess it shall be employed about the Queen's
person.  "And now his love for our nation has peopled this palace with
daughters of Sion, young and tender flowers wafted by fate,
transplanted like myself beneath a foreign sky. In a place set apart
from profane eyes, he" (the worthy Ambassador) "devotes his skill and
labour to shaping them."

At length M. de Vaugoubert spoke, otherwise than with his eyes. "Who
knows," he said sadly, "that in the country where I live the same
thing does not exist also?" "It is probable," replied M. de Charlus,
"starting with King Theodosius, not that I know anything definite
about him." "Oh, dear, no! Nothing of that sort!" "Then he has no
right to look it so completely.  Besides, he has all the little
tricks. He had that 'my dear' manner, which I detest more than
anything in the world. I should never dare to be seen walking in the
street with him. Anyhow, you must know what he is, they all call him
the White Wolf." "You are entirely mistaken about him. He is quite
charming, all the same. The day on which the agreement with France was
signed, the King kissed me. I have never been so moved." "That was the
moment to tell him what you wanted." "Oh, good heavens!  What an idea!
If he were even to suspect such a thing! But I have no fear in that
direction." A conversation which I could hear, for I was standing
close by, and which made me repeat to myself: "The King unto this day
knows not who I am, and this secret keeps my tongue still enchained."

This dialogue, half mute, half spoken, had lasted but a few moments,
and I had barely entered the first of the drawing-rooms with the
Duchesse de Guermantes when a little dark lady, extremely pretty,
stopped her.

"I've been looking for you everywhere. D'Annunzio saw you from a box
in the theatre, he has written the Princesse de T-----a letter in
which he says that he never saw anything so lovely. He would give his
life for ten minutes' conversation with you. In any case, even if you
can't or won't, the letter is in my possession. You must fix a day to
come and see me.  There are some secrets which I cannot tell you here.
I see you don't remember me," she added, turning to myself; "I met you
at the Princesse de Parme's" (where I had never been). "The Emperor of
Russia is anxious for your father to be sent to Petersburg. If you
could come in on Monday, Isvolski himself will be there, he will talk
to you about it. I have a present for you, by dear," she went on,
returning to the Duchess, "which I should not dream of giving to
anyone but you. The manuscripts of three of Ibsen's plays, which he
sent to me by his old attendant. I shall keep one and give you the
other two."

The Duc de Guermantes was not overpleased by these offers. Uncertain
whether Ibsen and D'Annunzio were dead or alive, he could see in his
mind's eye a tribe of authors, playwrights, coming to call upon his
wife and putting her in their works. People in society are too apt to
think of a book as a sort of cube one side of which has been removed,
so that the author can at once 'put in' the people he meets. This is
obviously disloyal, and authors are a pretty low class. Certainly, it
would not be a bad thing to meet them once in a way, for thanks to
them, when one reads a book or an article, one can 'read between the
lines,' 'unmask' the characters.  After all, though, the wisest thing
is to stick to dead authors. M.  de Guermantes considered 'quite all
right' only the gentleman who did the funeral notices in the
_Gaulois_. He, at any rate, confined himself to including M. de
Guermantes among the people 'conspicuous by their presence' at
funerals at which the Duke had given his name. When he preferred that
his name should not appear, instead of giving it, he sent a letter of
condolence to the relatives of the deceased, assuring them of his deep
and heartfelt sympathy. If, then, the family sent to the paper "among
the letters received, we may mention one from the Duc de Guermantes,"
etc., this was the fault not of the ink-slinger but of the son,
brother, father of the deceased whom the Duke thereupon described as
upstarts, and with whom he decided for the future to have no further
dealings (what he called, not being very well up in the meaning of
such expressions, 'having a crow to pick'). In any event, the names of
Ibsen and D'Annunzio, and his uncertainty as to their survival,
brought a frown to the brows of the Duke, who was not far enough away
from us to escape hearing the various blandishments of Mme. Timoléon
d'Amoncourt. This was a charming woman, her wit, like her beauty, so
entrancing that either of them by itself would have made her shine.
But, born outside the world in which she now lived, having aspired at
first merely to a literary salon, the friend successively--and nothing
more than a friend, for her morals were above reproach--and
exclusively of every great writer, who gave her all his manuscripts,
wrote books for her, chance having once introduced her into the
Faubourg Saint-Germain, these literary privileges were of service to
her there. She had now an established position, and no longer needed
to dispense other graces than those that were shed by her presence.
But, accustomed in times past to act as go-between, to render
services, she persevered in them even when they were no longer
necessary. She had always a state secret to reveal to you, a potentate
whom you must meet, a water colour by a master to present to you.
There was indeed in all these superfluous attractions a trace of
falsehood, but they made her life a comedy that scintillated with
complications, and it was no exaggeration to say that she appointed
prefects and generals.

As she strolled by my side, the Duchesse de Guermantes allowed the
azure light of her eyes to float in front of her, but vaguely, so as
to avoid the people with whom she did not wish to enter into
relations, whose presence she discerned at times, like a menacing reef
in the distance. We advanced between a double hedge of guests, who,
conscious that they would never come to know 'Oriane,' were anxious at
least to point her out, as a curiosity, to their wives: "Quick,
Ursule, come and look at Madame de Guermantes talking to that young
man." And one felt that in another moment they would be clambering
upon the chairs, for a better view, as at the Military Review on the
14th of July, or the Grand Prix. Not that the Duchesse de Guermantes
had a more aristocratic salon than her cousin. The former's was
frequented by people whom the latter would never have been willing to
invite, principally on account of her husband. She would never have
been at home to Mme. Alphonse de Rothschild, who, an intimate friend
of Mme. de la Trémoïlle and of Mme. de Sagan, as was Oriane herself,
was constantly to be seen in the house of the last-named. It was the
same with Baron Hirsch, whom the Prince of Wales had brought to see
her, but not to the Princess, who would not have approved of him, and
also with certain outstandingly notorious Bonapartists or even
Republicans, whom the Duchess found interesting but whom the Prince, a
convinced Royalist, would not have allowed inside his house. His
anti-semitism also being founded on principle did not yield before any
social distinction, however strongly accredited, and if he was at home
to Swann, whose friend he had been since their boyhood, being,
however, the only one of the Guermantes who addressed him as Swann and
not as Charles, this was because, knowing that Swann's grandmother, a
Protestant married to a Jew, had been the Duc de Berri's mistress, he
endeavoured, from time to time, to believe in the legend which made
out Swann's father to be a natural son of that Prince. By this
hypothesis, which incidentally was false, Swann, the son of a Catholic
father, himself the son of a Bourbon by a Catholic mother, was a
Christian to his finger-tips.

"What, you don't know these glories?" said the Duchess, referring to
the rooms through which we were moving. But, having given its due meed
of praise to her cousin's 'palace,' she hastened to add that she a
thousand times preferred her own 'humble den.' "This is an admirable
house to visit. But I should die of misery if I had to stay behind and
sleep in rooms that have witnessed so many historic events. It would
give me the feeling of having been left after closing-time, forgotten,
in the Château of Blois, or Fontainebleau, or even the Louvre, with no
antidote to my depression except to tell myself that I was in the room
in which Monaldeschi was murdered. As a sedative, that is not good
enough. Why, here comes Mme.  de Saint-Euverte. We've just been dining
with her. As she is giving her great annual beanfeast to-morrow, I
supposed she would be going straight to bed. But she can never miss a
party. If this one had been in the country, she would have jumped on a
lorry rather than not go to it."

As a matter of fact, Mme. de Saint-Euverte had come this evening, less
for the pleasure of not missing another person's party than in order
to ensure the success of her own, recruit the latest additions to her
list, and, so to speak, hold an eleventh hour review of the troops who
were on the morrow to perform such brilliant evolutions at her garden
party. For, in the long course of years, the guests at the
Saint-Euverte parties had almost entirely changed. The female
celebrities of the Guermantes world, formerly so sparsely scattered,
had--loaded with attentions by their hostess--begun gradually to bring
their friends. At the same time, by an enterprise equally progressive,
but in the opposite direction, Mme. de Saint-Euverte had, year by
year, reduced the number of persons unknown to the world of fashion.
You had ceased to see first one of them, then another. For some time
the 'batch' system was in operation, which enabled her, thanks to
parties over which a veil of silence was drawn, to summon the
inéligibles separately to entertain one another, which dispensed her
from having to invite them with the nice people. What cause had they
for complaint?  Were they not given (_panem et circenses_) light
refreshments and a select musical programme? And so, in a kind of
symmetry with the two exiled duchesses whom, in years past, when the
Saint-Euverte salon was only starting, one used to see holding up,
like a pair of Caryatides, its unstable crest, in these later years
one could distinguish, mingling with the fashionable throng, only two
heterogeneous persons, old Mme. de Cambremer and the architect's wife
with a fine voice who was always having to be asked to sing. But, no
longer knowing anybody at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's, bewailing their
lost comrades, feeling that they were in the way, they stood about
with a frozen-to-death air, like two swallows that have not migrated
in time. And so, the following year, they were not invited; Mme. de
Fran-quetot made an attempt on behalf of her cousin, who was so fond
of music.  But as she could obtain for her no more explicit reply than
the words: "Why, people can always come in and listen to music, if
they like; there is nothing criminal about that!" Mme. de Cambremer
did not find the invitation sufficiently pressing, and abstained.

Such a transformation having been effected by Mme. de Saint-Euverte,
from a leper hospice to a gathering of great ladies (the latest form,
apparently in the height of fashion, that it had assumed), it might
seem odd that the person who on the following day was to give the most
brilliant party of the season should need to appear overnight to
address a last word of command to her troops. But the fact was that
the pre-eminence of Mme.  de Saint-Euverte's drawing-room existed only
for those whose social life consists entirely in reading the accounts
of afternoon and evening parties in the _Gaulois_ or _Figaro_, without
ever having been present at one. To these worldlings who see the world
only as reflected in the newspapers, the enumeration of the British,
Austrian, etc., Ambassadresses, of the Duchesses d'Uzès, de la
Trémoïlle, etc., etc., was sufficient to make them instinctively
imagine the Saint-Euverte drawing-room to be the first in Paris,
whereas it was among the last. Not that the reports were mendacious.
The majority of the persons mentioned had indeed been present. But
each of them had come in response to entreaties, civilities, services,
and with the sense of doing infinite honour to Mme. de Saint-Euverte.
Such drawing-rooms, shunned rather than sought after, to which people
are so to speak roped in, deceive no one but the fair readers of the
'Society' column. They pass over a really fashionable party, the sort
at which the hostess, who could have had all the duchesses in
existence, they being athirst to be 'numbered among the elect,'
invites only two or three and does not send any list of her guests to
the papers. And so these hostesses, ignorant or contemptuous of the
power that publicity has acquired to-day, are considered fashionable
by the Queen of Spain but are overlooked by the crowd, because the
former knows and the latter does not know who they are.

Mme. de Saint-Euverte was not one of these women, and, with an eye to
the main chance, had come to gather up for the morrow everyone who had
been invited. M. de Charlus was not among these, he had always refused
to go to her house. But he had quarrelled with so many people that
Mme. de Saint-Euverte might put this down to his peculiar nature.

Assuredly, if it had been only Oriane, Mme. de Saint-Euverte need not
have put herself to the trouble, for the invitation had been given by
word of mouth, and, what was more, accepted with that charming,
deceiving grace in the exercise of which those Academicians are
unsurpassed from whose door the candidate emerges with a melting
heart, never doubting that he can count upon their support. But there
were others as well. The Prince d'Agrigente, would he come? And Mme.
de Durfort? And so, with an eye to business, Mme. de Saint-Euverte had
thought it expedient to appear on the scene in person. Insinuating
with some, imperative with others, to all alike she hinted in veiled
words at inconceivable attractions which could never be seen anywhere
again, and promised each that he should find at her party the person
he most wished, or the personage he most wanted to meet. And this sort
of function with which she was invested on one day in the year--like
certain public offices in the ancient world--of the person who is to
give on the morrow the biggest garden-party of the season conferred
upon her a momentary authority. Her lists were made up and closed, so
that while she wandered slowly through the Princess's rooms to drop
into one ear after another: "You won't forget about me to-morrow," she
had the ephemeral glory of turning away her eyes, while continuing to
smile, if she caught sight of some horrid creature who was to be
avoided or some country squire for whom the bond of a schoolboy
friendship had secured admission to Gilbert's, and whose presence at
her garden-party would be no gain. She preferred not to speak to him,
so as to be able to say later on: "I issued my invitations verbally,
and unfortunately I didn't see you anywhere." And so she, a mere
Saint-Euverte, set to work with her gimlet eyes to pick and choose
among the guests at the Princess's party. And she imagined herself, in
so doing, to be every inch a Duchesse de Guermantes.

It must be admitted that the latter lady had not, either, whatever one
might suppose, the unrestricted use of her greetings and smiles. To
some extent, no doubt, when she withheld them, it was deliberately.
"But the woman bores me to tears," she would say, "am I expected to
talk to her about her party for the next hour?"

A duchess of swarthy complexion went past, whom her ugliness and
stupidity, and certain irregularities of behaviour, had exiled not
from society as a whole but from certain small and fashionable
circles. "Ah!" murmured Mme. de Guermantes, with the sharp, unerring
glance of the connoisseur who is shewn a false jewel, "so they have
that sort here?" By the mere sight of this semi-tarnished lady, whose
face was burdened with a surfeit of moles from which black hairs
sprouted, Mme. de Guermantes gauged the mediocre importance of this
party. They had been brought up together, but she had severed all
relations with the lady; and responded to her greeting only with the
curtest little nod. "I cannot understand," she said to me, "how
Marie-Gilbert can invite us with all that scum. You might say there
was a deputation of paupers from every parish.  Mélanie Pourtalès
arranged things far better. She could have the Holy Synod and the
Oratoire Chapel in her house if she liked, but at least she didn't
invite us on the same day." But, in many cases, it was from timidity,
fear of a scene with her husband, who did not like her to entertain
artists and such like (Marie-Gilbert took a kindly interest in dozens
of them, you had to take care not to be accosted by some illustrious
German diva), from some misgivings, too, with regard to Nationalist
feeling, which, inasmuch as she was endowed, like M. de Charlus, with
the wit of the Guermantes, she despised from the social point of view
(people were now, for the greater glory of the General Staff, sending
a plebeian general in to dinner before certain dukes), but to which,
nevertheless, as she knew that she was considered unsound in her
views, she made liberal concessions, even dreading the prospect of
having to offer her hand to Swann in these anti-semitic surroundings.
With regard to this, her mind was soon set at rest, for she learned
that the Prince had refused to have Swann in the house, and had had 'a
sort of an altercation' with him. There was no risk of her having to
converse in public with 'poor Charles,' whom she preferred to cherish
in private.

"And who in the world is that?" Mme. de Guermantes exclaimed, upon
seeing a little lady with a slightly lost air, in a black gown so
simple that you would have taken her for a pauper, greet her, as did
also the lady's husband, with a sweeping bow. She did not recognise
the lady and, in her insolent way, drew herself up as though offended
and stared at her without responding. "Who is that person, Basin?" she
asked with an air of astonishment, while M. de Guermantes, to atone
for Oriane's impoliteness, was bowing to the lady and shaking hands
with her husband. "Why, it is Mme. de Chaussepierre, you were most
impolite." "I have never heard of anybody called Chaussepierre." "Old
mother Chanlivault's nephew." "I haven't the faintest idea what you're
talking about. Who is the woman, and why does she bow to me?" "But you
know her perfectly, she's Mme.  de Charleval's daughter, Henriette
Montmorency." "Oh, but I knew her mother quite well, she was charming,
extremely intelligent. What made her go and marry all these people I
never heard of? You say that she calls herself Mme. de Chaussepierre?"
she said, isolating each syllable of the name with a questioning air,
and as though she were afraid of making a mistake. "It is not so
ridiculous as you appear to think, to call oneself Chaussepierre! Old
Chaussepierre was the brother of the aforesaid Chan-livault, of Mme.
de Sennecour and of the Vicomtesse de Merlerault. They're a good
family." "Oh, do stop," cried the Duchess, who, like a lion-tamer,
never cared to appear to be allowing herself to be intimidated by the
devouring glare of the animal. "Basin, you are the joy of my life. I
can't imagine where you picked up those names, but I congratulate you
on them.  If I did not know Chaussepierre, I have at least read
Balzac, you are not the only one, and I have even read Labiche. I can
appreciate Chanlivault, I do not object to Charleval, but I must
confess that Merlerault is a masterpiece.  However, let us admit that
Chaussepierre is not bad either. You must have gone about collecting
them, it's not possible. You mean to write a book," she turned to
myself, "you ought to make a note of Charleval and Merlerault. You
will find nothing better." "He will find himself in the dock, and will
go to prison; you are giving him very bad advice, Oriane." "I hope,
for his own sake, that he has younger people than me at his disposal
if he wishes to ask for bad advice; especially if he means to follow
it. But if he means to do nothing worse than write a book!" At some
distance from us, a wonderful, proud young woman stood out delicately
from the throng in a white dress, all diamonds and tulle. Madame de
Guermantes watched her talking to a whole group of people fascinated
by her grace. "Your sister is the belle of the ball, as usual; she is
charming to-night," she said, as she took a chair, to the Prince de
Chimay who went past. Colonel de Froberville (the General of that name
was his uncle) came and sat down beside us, as did M. de Bréauté,
while M. de Vaugou-bert, after hovering about us (by an excess of
politeness which he maintained even when playing tennis when, by dint
of asking leave of the eminent personages present before hitting the
ball, he invariably lost the game for his partner) returned to M. de
Charlus (until that moment almost concealed by the huge skirt of the
Comtesse Mole, whom he professed to admire above all other women),
and, as it happened, at the moment when several members of the latest
diplomatic mission to Paris were greeting the Baron. At the sight of a
young secretary with a particularly intelligent air, M. de Vaugoubert
fastened on M. de Charlus a smile upon which there bloomed visibly one
question only. M. de Charlus would, no doubt, readily have compromised
some one else, but to feel himself compromised by this smile formed on
another person's lips, which, moreover, could have but one meaning,
exasperated him. "I know absolutely nothing about the matter, I beg
you to keep your curiosity to yourself. It leaves me more than cold.
Besides, in this instance, you are making a mistake of the first
order. I believe this young man to be absolutely the opposite." Here
M. de Charlus, irritated at being thus given away by a fool, was not
speaking the truth. The secretary would, had the Baron been correct,
have formed an exception to the rule of his Embassy. It was, as a
matter of fact, composed of widely different personalities, many of
them extremely second-rate, so that, if one sought to discover what
could have been the motive of the selection that had brought them
together, the only one possible seemed to be inversion. By setting at
the head of this little diplomatic Sodom an Ambassador who on the
contrary ran after women with the comic exaggeration of an old buffer
in a revue, who made his battalion of male impersonators toe the line,
the authorities seemed to have been obeying the law of contrasts. In
spite of what he had beneath his nose, he did not believe in
inversion. He gave an immediate proof of this by marrying his sister
to a Chargé d'Affaires whom he believed, quite mistakenly, to be a
womaniser. After this he became rather a nuisance and was soon
replaced by a fresh Excellency who ensured the homogeneity of the
party. Other Embassies sought to rival this one, but could never
dispute the prize (as in the matriculation examinations, where a
certain school always heads the list), and more than ten years had to
pass before, heterogeneous attachés having been introduced into this
too perfect whole, another might at last wrest the grim trophy from it
and march at the head.

Reassured as to her fear of having to talk to Swann, Mme. de
Guermantes felt now merely curious as to the subject of the
conversation he had had with their host. "Do you know what it was
about?" the Duke asked M. de Bréauté. "I did hear," the other replied,
"that it was about a little play which the writer Bergotte produced at
their house. It was a delightful show, as it happens. But it seems the
actor made up as Gilbert, whom, as it happens, Master Bergotte had
intended to take off." "Oh, I should have loved to see Gilbert taken
off," said the Duchess, with a dreamy smile. "It was about this little
performance," M. de Bréauté went on, thrusting forward his rodent jaw,
"that Gilbert demanded an explanation from Swann, who merely replied
what everyone thought very witty: 'Why, not at all, it wasn't the
least bit like you, you are far funnier!' It appears, though," M. de
Bréauté continued, "that the little play was quite delightful.  Mme.
Molé was there, she was immensely amused." "What, does Mme.  Molé go
there?" said the Duchess in astonishment. "Ah! That must be Mémé's
doing. That is what always happens, in the end, to that sort of house.
One fine day everybody begins to flock to it, and I, who have
deliberately remained aloof, upon principle, find myself left to mope
alone in my corner." Already, since M. de Bréauté's speech, the
Duchesse de Guermantes (with regard if not to Swann's house, at least
to the hypothesis of encountering him at any moment) had, as we see,
adopted a fresh point of view. "The explanation that you have given
us," said Colonel de Fro-berville to M. de Bréauté, "is entirely
unfounded. I have good reason to know. The Prince purely and simply
gave Swann a dressing down and would have him to know, as our
forebears used to say, that he was not to shew his face in the house
again, seeing the opinions he flaunts. And, to my mind, my uncle
Gilbert was right a thousand times over, not only in giving Swann a
piece of his mind, he ought to have finished six months ago with an
out-and-out Dreyfusard."

Poor M. de Vaugoubert, changed now from a too cautious tennis-player
to a mere inert tennis ball which is tossed to and fro without
compunction, found himself projected towards the Duchesse de
Guermantes to whom he made obeisance. He was none too well received,
Oriane living in the belief that all the diplomats--or politicians--of
her world were nincompoops.

M. de Froberville had greatly benefited by the social privileges that
had of late been accorded to military men. Unfortunately, if the wife
of his bosom was a quite authentic relative of the Guermantes, she was
also an extremely poor one, and, as he himself had lost his fortune,
they went scarcely anywhere, and were the sort of people who were apt
to be overlooked except on great occasions, when they had the good
fortune to bury or marry a relative. Then, they did really enter into
communion with the world of fashion, like those nominal Catholics who
approach the holy table but once in the year. Their material situation
would indeed have been deplorable had not Mme. de Saint-Euverte,
faithful to her affection for the late General de Froberville, done
everything to help the household, providing frocks and entertainments
for the two girls. But the Colonel, though generally considered a good
fellow, had not the spirit of gratitude.  He was envious of the
splendours of a benefactress who extolled them herself without pause
or measure. The annual garden party was for him, his wife and children
a marvellous pleasure which they would not have missed for all the
gold in the world, but a pleasure poisoned by the thought of the joys
of satisfied pride that Mme. de Saint-Euverte derived from it. The
accounts of this garden party in the newspapers, which, after giving
detailed reports, would add with Machiavellian guile: "We shall refer
again to this brilliant gathering," the complementary details of the
women's costume, appearing for several days in succession, all this
was so obnoxious to the Frobervilles, that they, cut off from most
pleasures and knowing that they could count upon the pleasure of this
one afternoon, were moved every year to hope that bad weather would
spoil the success of the party, to consult the barometer and to
anticipate with ecstasy the threatenings of a storm that might ruin
everything.

"I shall not discuss politics with you, Froberville," said M. de
Guermantes, "but, so far as Swann is concerned, I can tell you frankly
that his conduct towards ourselves has been beyond words. Introduced
into society, in the past, by ourselves, by the Duc de Chartres, they
tell me now that he is openly a Dreyfusard. I should never have
believed it of him, an epicure, a man of practical judgment, a
collector, who goes in for old books, a member of the Jockey, a man
who enjoys the respect of all that know him, who knows all the good
addresses, and used to send us the best port wine you could wish to
drink, a dilettante, the father of a family. Oh! I have been greatly
deceived. I do not complain for myself, it is understood that I am
only an old fool, whose opinion counts for nothing, mere rag tag and
bobtail, but if only for Oriane's sake, he ought to have openly
disavowed the Jews and the partisans of the man Dreyfus.

"Yes, after the friendship my wife has always shewn him," went on the
Duke, who evidently considered that to denounce Dreyfus as guilty of
high treason, whatever opinion one might hold in one's own conscience
as to his guilt, constituted a sort of thank-offering for the manner
in which one had been received in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, "he
ought to have disassociated himself. For, you can ask Oriane, she had
a real friendship for him." The Duchess, thinking that an ingenuous,
calm tone would give a more dramatic and sincere value to her words,
said in a schoolgirl voice, as though she were simply letting the
truth fall from her lips, merely giving a slightly melancholy
expression to her eyes: "It is quite true, I have no reason to conceal
the fact that I did feel a sincere affection for Charles!" "There, you
see, I don't have to make her say it. And after that, he carries his
ingratitude to the point of being a Dreyfusard!"

"Talking of Dreyfusards," I said, "it appears, Prince Von is one."
"Ah, I am glad you reminded me of him," exclaimed M. de Guermantes, "I
was forgetting that he had asked me to dine with him on Monday. But
whether he is a Dreyfusard or not is entirely immaterial, since he is
a foreigner. I don't give two straws for his opinion. With a
Frenchman, it is another matter. It is true that Swann is a Jew. But,
until to-day--forgive me, Fro-berville--I have always been foolish
enough to believe that a Jew can be a Frenchman, that is to say, an
honourable Jew, a man of the world. Now, Swann was that in every sense
of the word. Ah, well! He forces me to admit that I have been
mistaken, since he has taken the side of this Dreyfus (who, guilty or
not, never moved in his world, he cannot ever have met him) against a
society that had adopted him, had treated him as one of ourselves.  It
goes without saying, we were all of us prepared to vouch for Swann, I
would have answered for his patriotism as for my own. Ah! He is
rewarding us very badly: I must confess that I should never have
expected such a thing from him. I thought better of him. He was a man
of intelligence (in his own line, of course). I know that he had
already made that insane, disgraceful marriage. By which token, shall
I tell you some one who was really hurt by Swann's marriage: my wife.
Oriane often has what I might call an affectation of insensibility.
But at heart she feels things with extraordinary keenness." Mme. de
Guermantes, delighted by this analysis of her character, listened to
it with a modest air but did not utter a word, from a scrupulous
reluctance to acquiesce in it, but principally from fear of cutting it
short. M. de Guermantes might have gone on talking for an hour on this
subject, she would have sat as still, or even stiller than if she had
been listening to music. "Very well! I remember, when she heard of
Swann's marriage, she felt hurt; she considered that it was wrong in a
person to whom we had given so much friendship. She was very fond of
Swann; she was deeply grieved. Am I not right, Oriane?" Mme. de
Guermantes felt that she ought to reply to so direct a challenge, upon
a point of fact, which would allow her, unobtrusively, to confirm the
tribute which, she felt, had come to an end. In a shy and simple tone,
and with an air all the more studied in that it sought to shew genuine
'feeling,' she said with a meek reserve, "It is true, Basin is quite
right." "Still, that was not quite the same. After all, love is love,
although, in my opinion, it ought to confine itself within certain
limits. I might excuse a young fellow, a mere boy, for letting himself
be caught by an infatuation. But Swann, a man of intelligence, of
proved refinement, a good judge of pictures, an intimate friend of the
Duc de Chartres, of Gilbert himself!" The tone in which M. de
Guermantes said this was, for that matter, quite inoffensive, without
a trace of the vulgarity which he too often shewed. He spoke with a
slightly indignant melancholy, but everything about him was steeped in
that gentle gravity which constitutes the broad and unctuous charm of
certain portraits by Rembrandt, that of the Burgomaster Six, for
example.  One felt that the question of the immorality of Swann's
conduct with regard to 'the Case' never even presented itself to the
Duke, so confident was he of the answer; it caused him the grief of a
father who sees one of his sons, for whose education he has made the
utmost sacrifices, deliberately ruin the magnificent position he has
created for him and dishonour, by pranks which the principles or
prejudices of his family cannot allow, a respected name. It is true
that M. de Guermantes had not displayed so profound and pained an
astonishment when he learned that Saint-Loup was a Dreyfusard. But,
for one thing, he regarded his nephew as a young man gone astray, as
to whom nothing, until he began to mend his ways, could be surprising,
whereas Swann was what M. de Guermantes called 'a man of weight, a man
occupying a position in the front rank.' Moreover and above all, a
considerable interval of time had elapsed during which, if, from the
historical point of view, events had, to some extent, seemed to
justify the Dreyfusard argument, the anti-Dreyfusard opposition had
doubled its violence, and, from being purely political, had become
social. It was now a question of militarism, of patriotism, and the
waves of anger that had been stirred up in society had had time to
gather the force which they never have at the beginning of a storm.
"Don't you see," M. de Guermantes went on, "even from the point of
view of his beloved Jews, since he is absolutely determined to stand
by them, Swann has made a blunder of an incalculable magnitude. He has
shewn that they are to some extent forced to give their support to
anyone of their own race, even if they do not know him personally. It
is a public danger. We have evidently been too easy going, and the
mistake Swann is making will create all the more stir since he was
respected, not to say received, and was almost the only Jew that
anyone knew. People will say: _Ab uno disce omnes_." (His satisfaction
at having hit, at the right moment, in his memory, upon so apt a
quotation, alone brightened with a proud smile the melancholy of the
great nobleman conscious of betrayal.)

I was longing to know what exactly had happened between the Prince and
Swann, and to catch the latter, if he had not already gone home. "I
don't mind telling you," the Duchess answered me when I spoke to her
of this desire, "that I for my part am not overanxious to see him,
because it appears, by what I was told just now at Mme. de
Saint-Euverte's, that he would like me before he dies to make the
acquaintance of his wife and daughter. Good heavens, it distresses me
terribly that he should be ill, but, I must say, I hope it is not so
serious as all that. And besides, it is not really a reason at all,
because if it were it would be so childishly simple. A writer with no
talent would have only to say: 'Vote for me at the Academy because my
wife is dying and I wish to give her this last happiness.' There would
be no more entertaining if one was obliged to make friends with all
the dying people. My coachman might come to me with: 'My daughter is
seriously ill, get me an invitation to the Princesse de Parme's.' I
adore Charles, and I should hate having to refuse him, and so that is
why I prefer to avoid the risk of his asking me. I hope with all my
heart that he is not dying, as he says, but really, if it has to
happen, it would not be the moment for me to make the acquaintance of
those two creatures who have deprived me of the most amusing of my
friends for the last fifteen years, with the additional disadvantage
that I should not even be able to make use of their society to see
him, since he would be dead!"

Meanwhile M. de Bréauté had not ceased to ruminate the contradiction
of his story by Colonel de Froberville. "I do not question the
accuracy of your version, my dear fellow," he said, "but I had mine
from a good source. It was the Prince de la Tour d'Auvergne who told
me."

"I am surprised that an educated man like yourself should still say
'Prince de la Tour d'Auvergne,'" the Duc de Guermantes broke in, "you
know that he is nothing of the kind. There is only one member of that
family left. Oriane's uncle, the Duc de Bouillon."

"The brother of Mme. de Villeparisis?" I asked, remembering that she
had been Mlle, de Bouillon. "Precisely. Oriane, Mme. de Lambresac is
bowing to you." And indeed, one saw at certain moments form and fade
like a shooting star a faint smile directed by the Duchesse de
Lambresac at somebody whom she had recognised. But this smile, instead
of taking definite shape in an active affirmation, in a language mute
but clear, was drowned almost immediately in a sort of ideal ecstasy
which expressed nothing, while her head drooped in a gesture of
blissful benediction, recalling the inclination towards the crowd of
communicants of the head of a somewhat senile prelate. There was not
the least trace of senility about Mme. de Lambresac. But I was
acquainted already with this special type of old-fashioned
distinction. At Combray and in Paris, all my grandmother's friends
were in the habit of greeting one another at a social gathering with
as seraphic an air as if they had caught sight of some one of their
acquaintance in church, at the moment of the Elevation or during a
funeral, and were casting him a gentle 'Good morning' which ended in
prayer. At this point a remark made by M. de Guermantes was to
complete the likeness that I was tracing. "But you have seen the Duc
de Bouillon," he said to me. "He was just going out of my library this
afternoon as you came in, a short person with white hair." It was the
person whom I had taken for a man of business from Combray, and yet,
now that I came to think it over, I could see the resemblance to Mme.
de Villeparisis. The similarity between the evanescent greetings of
the Duchesse de Lambresac and those of my grandmother's friends had
first aroused my interest, by shewing me how in all narrow and
exclusive societies, be they those of the minor gentry or of the great
nobility, the old manners persist, allowing us to recapture, like an
archaeologist, what might have been the standard of upbringing, and
the side of life which it reflects, in the days of the Vicomte
d'Arlincourt and Loïsa Puget. Better still now, the perfect conformity
in appearance between a man of business from Combray of his generation
and the Duc de Bouillon reminded me of what had already struck me so
forcibly when I had seen Saint-Loup's maternal grandfather, the Duc de
La Rochefoucauld, in a daguerreotype in which he was exactly similar,
in dress, air and manner, to my great-uncle, that social, and even
individual differences are merged when seen from a distance in the
uniformity of an epoch. The truth is that the similarity of dress, and
also the reflexion, from a person's face, of the spirit of his age
occupy so much more space than his caste, which bulks largely only in
his own self-esteem and the imagination of other people, that in order
to discover that a great nobleman of the time of Louis Philippe
differs less from a citizen of the time of Louis Philippe than from a
great nobleman of the time of Louis XV, it is not necessary to visit
the galleries of the Louvre.

At that moment, a Bavarian musician with long hair, whom the Princesse
de Guermantes had taken under her wing, bowed to Oriane. She responded
with an inclination of her head, but the Duke, furious at seeing his
wife bow to a person whom he did not know, who had a curious style,
and, so far as M. de Guermantes understood, an extremely bad
reputation, turned upon his wife with a terrible inquisitorial air, as
much as to say: "Who in the world is that Ostrogoth?" Poor Mme. de
Guermantes's position was already distinctly complicated, and if the
musician had felt a little pity for this martyred wife, he would have
made off as quickly as possible. But, whether from a desire not to
remain under the humiliation that had just been inflicted on him in
public, before the eyes of the Duke's oldest and most intimate
friends, whose presence there had perhaps been responsible to some
extent for his silent bow, and to shew that it was on the best of
grounds and not without knowing her already that he had greeted the
Duchesse de Guermantes, or else in obedience to the obscure but
irresistible impulse to commit a blunder which drove him--at a moment
when he ought to have trusted to the spirit--to apply the whole letter
of the law, the musician came closer to Mme. de Guermantes and said to
her: "Madame la Duchesse, I should like to request the honour of being
presented to the Duke." Mme. de Guermantes was indeed in a quandary.
But after all, she might well be a forsaken wife, she was still
Duchesse de Guermantes and could not let herself appear to have
forfeited the right to introduce to her husband the people whom she
knew. "Basin," she said, "allow me to present to you M. d'Herweck."

"I need not ask whether you are going to Madame de Saint-Euverte's
to-morrow," Colonel de Froberville said to Mme. de Guermantes, to
dispel the painful impression produced by M. d'Herweck's ill-timed
request.  "The whole of Paris will be there." Meanwhile, turning with
a single movement and as though he were carved out of a solid block
towards the indiscreet musician, the Duc de Guermantes, fronting his
suppliant, monumental, mute, wroth, like Jupiter Tonans, remained
motionless like this for some seconds, his eyes ablaze with anger and
astonishment, his waving locks seeming to issue from a crater. Then,
as though carried away by an impulse which alone enabled him to
perform the act of politeness that was demanded of him, and after
appearing by his attitude of defiance to be calling the entire company
to witness that he did not know the Bavarian musician, clasping his
white-gloved hands behind his back, he jerked his body forward and
bestowed upon the musician a bow so profound, instinct with such
stupefaction and rage, so abrupt, so violent, that the trembling
artist recoiled, stooping as he went, so as not to receive a
formidable butt in the stomach. "Well, the fact is, I shall not be in
Paris," the Duchess answered Colonel de Froberville. "I may as well
tell you (though I ought to be ashamed to confess such a thing) that I
have lived all these years without seeing the windows at
Montfort-l'Amaury.  It is shocking, but there it is. And so, to make
amends for my shameful ignorance, I decided that I would go and see
them to-morrow." M. de Bréauté smiled a subtle smile. He quite
understood that, if the Duchess had been able to live all these years
without seeing the windows at Montfort-l'Amaury, this artistic
excursion did not all of a sudden take on the urgent character of an
expedition 'hot-foot' and might without danger, after having been put
off for more than twenty-five years, be retarded for twenty-four
hours. The plan that the Duchess had formed was simply the Guermantes
way of issuing the decree that the Saint-Euverte establishment was
definitely not a 'really nice' house, but a house to which you were
invited that you might be utilised afterwards in the account in the
Gaulois, a house that would set the seal of supreme smartness upon
those, or at any rate upon her (should there be but one) who did not
go to it. The delicate amusement of M. de Bréauté, enhanced by that
poetical pleasure which people in society felt when they saw Mme. de
Guermantes do things which their own inferior position did not allow
them to imitate, but the mere sight of which brought to their lips the
smile of the peasant thirled to the soil when he sees freer and more
fortunate men pass by above his head, this delicate pleasure could in
no way be compared with the concealed but frantic ecstasy that was at
once felt by M. de Froberville.

The efforts that this gentleman was making so that people should not
hear his laughter had made him turn as red as a turkey-cock, in spite
of which it was only with a running interruption of hiccoughs of joy
that he exclaimed in a pitying tone: "Oh! Poor Aunt Saint-Euverte, she
will take to her bed! No! The unhappy woman is not to have her
Duchess, what a blow, why, it is enough to kill her!" he went on,
convulsed with laughter.  And in his exhilaration he could not help
stamping his feet and rubbing his hands. Smiling out of one eye and
with the corner of her lips at M. de Froberville, whose amiable
intention she appreciated, but found the deadly boredom of his society
quite intolerable, Mme. de Guermantes decided finally to leave him.

"Listen, I shall be obliged to bid you good night," she said to him as
she rose with an air of melancholy resignation, and as though it had
been a bitter grief to her. Beneath the magic spell of her blue eyes
her gently musical voice made one think of the poetical lament of a
fairy. "Basin wants me to go and talk to Marie for a little." In
reality, she was tired of listening to Froberville, who did not cease
to envy her her going to Montfort-l'Amaury, when she knew quite well
that he had never heard of the windows before in his life, nor for
that matter would he for anything in the world have missed going to
the Saint-Euverte party. "Good-bye, I've barely said a word to you, it
is always like that at parties, we never see the people, we never say
the things we should like to say, but it is the same everywhere in
this life. Let us hope that when we are dead things will be better
arranged. At any rate, we shall not always be having to put on low
dresses. And yet, one never knows. We may perhaps have to display our
bones and worms on great occasions. Why not? Look, there goes old
Rampillon, do you see any great difference between her and a skeleton
in an open dress? It is true that she has every right to look like
that, for she must be at least a hundred. She was already one of those
sacred monsters before whom I refused to bow the knee when I made my
first appearance in society. I thought she had been dead for years;
which for that matter would be the only possible explanation of the
spectacle she presents. It is impressive and liturgical; quite
_Camposanto_!" The Duchess had moved away from Froberville; he came
after her: "Just one word in your ear." Slightly annoyed: "Well, what
is it now?" she said to him stiffly. And he, having been afraid lest,
at the last moment, she might change her mind about Montfort-l'Amaury:
"I did not like to mention it for Mme. de Saint-Euverte's sake, so as
not to get her into trouble, but since you don't intend to be there, I
may tell you that I am glad for your sake, for she has measles in the
house!" "Oh, good gracious!" said Oriane, who had a horror of
illnesses. "But that wouldn't matter to me, I've had them already.
You can't get them twice." "So the doctors say; I know people who've
had them four times. Anyhow, you are warned." As for himself, these
fictitious measles would have needed to attack him in reality and to
chain him to his bed before he would have resigned himself to missing
the Saint-Euverte party to which he had looked forward for so many
months. He would have the pleasure of seeing so many smart people
there! The still greater pleasure of remarking that certain things had
gone wrong, and the supreme pleasures of being able for long
afterwards to boast that he had mingled with the former and, while
exaggerating or inventing them, of deploring the latter.

I took advantage of the Duchess's moving to rise also in order to make
my way to the smoking-room and find out the truth about Swann. "Do not
believe a word of what Babal told us," she said to me. "Little Molé
would never poke her nose into a place like that. They tell us that to
draw us.  Nobody ever goes to them and they are never asked anywhere
either.  He admits it himself: 'We spend the evenings alone by our own
fireside.' As he always says we, not like royalty, but to include his
wife, I do not press him. But I know all about it," the Duchess added.
We passed two young men whose great and dissimilar beauty took its
origin from one and the same woman. They were the two sons of Mme. de
Surgis, the latest mistress of the Duc de Guermantes. Both were
resplendent with their mother's perfections, but each in his own way.
To one had passed, rippling through a virile body, the royal presence
of Mme. de Surgis and the same pallor, ardent, flushed and sacred,
flooded the marble cheeks of mother and son; but his brother had
received the Grecian brow, the perfect nose, the statuesque throat,
the eyes of infinite depth; composed thus of separate gifts, which the
goddess had shared between them, their twofold beauty offered one the
abstract pleasure of thinking that the cause of that beauty was
something outside themselves; one would have said that the principal
attributes of their mother were incarnate in two different bodies;
that one of the young men was his mother's stature and her complexion,
the other her gaze, like those divine beings who were no more than the
strength and beauty of Jupiter or Minerva. Full of respect for M. de
Guermantes, of whom they said: "He is a great friend of our parents,"
the elder nevertheless thought that it would be wiser not to come up
and greet the Duchess, of whose hostility towards his mother he was
aware, though without perhaps understanding the reason for it, and at
the sight of us he slightly averted his head. The younger, who copied
his brother in everything, because, being stupid and short-sighted to
boot, he did not venture to own a personal opinion, inclined his head
at the same angle, and the pair slipped past us towards the card-room,
one behind the other, like a pair of allegorical figures.

Just as I reached this room, I was stopped by the Marquise de Citri,
still beautiful but almost foaming at the mouth. Of decently noble
birth, she had sought and made a brilliant match in marrying M. de
Citri, whose great-grandmother had been an Aumale-Lorraine. But no
sooner had she tasted this satisfaction than her natural
cantankerousness gave her a horror of people in society which did not
cut her off absolutely from social life.  Not only, at a party, did
she deride everyone present, her derision of them was so violent that
mere laughter was not sufficiently bitter, and changed into a guttural
hiss. "Ah!" she said to me, pointing to the Duchesse de Guermantes who
had now left my side and was already some way off, "what defeats me is
that she can lead this sort of existence." Was this the speech of a
righteously indignant Saint, astonished that the Gentiles did not come
of their own accord to perceive the Truth, or that of an anarchist
athirst for carnage? In any case there could be no possible
justification for this apostrophe. In the first place, the 'existence
led' by Mme. de Guermantes differed hardly perceptibly (except in
indignation) from that led by Mme. de Citri. Mme. de Citri was
stupefied when she saw the Duchess capable of that mortal sacrifice:
attendance at one of Marie-Gilbert's parties. It must be said in this
particular instance that Mme. de Citri was genuinely fond of the
Princess, who was indeed the kindest of women, and knew that, by
attending her party, she was giving her great pleasure. And so she had
put off, in order to come to the party, a dancer whom she regarded as
a genius, and who was to have initiated her into the mysteries of
Russian choreography. Another reason which to some extent stultified
the concentrated rage which Mme. de Citri felt on seeing Oriane greet
one or other of the guests was that Mme. de Guermantes, albeit at a
far less advanced stage, shewed the symptoms of the malady that was
devouring Mme. de Citri. We have seen, moreover, that she had carried
the germs of it from her birth. In fact, being more intelligent than
Mme. de Citri, Mme.  de Guermantes would have had better right than
she to this nihilism (which was more than merely social), but it is
true that certain good qualities help us rather to endure the defects
of our neighbour than they make us suffer from them; and a man of
great talent will normally pay less attention to other people's folly
than would a fool. We have already described at sufficient length the
nature of the Duchess's wit to convince the reader that, if it had
nothing in common with great intellect, it was at least wit, a wit
adroit in making use (like a translator) of different grammatical
forms.  Now nothing of this sort seemed to entitle Mme. de Citri to
look down upon qualities so closely akin to her own. She found
everyone idiotic, but in her conversation, in her letters, shewed
herself distinctly inferior to the people whom she treated with such
disdain. She had moreover such a thirst for destruction that, when she
had almost given up society, the pleasures that she then sought were
subjected, each in turn, to her terrible disintegrating force. After
she had given up parties for musical evenings, she used to say: "You
like listening to that sort of thing, to music?  Good gracious, it all
depends on what it is. It can be simply deadly! Oh!  Beethoven! What a
bore!" With Wagner, then with Franck, Debussy, she did not even take
the trouble to say the word _barbe_, but merely passed her hand over
her face with a tonsorial gesture.

Presently, everything became boring. "Beautiful things are such a
bore.  Oh! Pictures! They're enough to drive one mad. How right you
are, it is such a bore having to write letters!" Finally it was life
itself that she declared to be _rasante_, leaving her hearers to
wonder where she applied the term.

I do not know whether it was the effect of what the Duchesse de
Guermantes, on the evening when I first dined at her house, had said
of this interior, but the card--or smoking-room, with its pictorial
floor, its tripods, its figures of gods and animals that gazed at you,
the sphinxes stretched out along the arms of the chairs, and most of
all the huge table, of marble or enamelled mosaic, covered with
symbolical signs more or less imitated from Etruscan and Egyptian art,
gave me the impression of a magician's cell. And, on a chair drawn up
to the glittering, augural table, M. de Charlus, in person, never
touching a card, unconscious of what was going on round about him,
incapable of observing that I had entered the room, seemed precisely a
magician applying all the force of his will and reason to drawing a
horoscope. Not only that, but, like the eyes of a Pythian on her
tripod, his eyes were starting from his head, and that nothing might
distract him from labours which required the cessation of the most
simple movements, he had (like a calculator who will do nothing else
until he has solved his problem) laid down beside him the cigar which
he had previously been holding between his lips, but had no longer the
necessary detachment of mind to think of smoking. Seeing the two
crouching deities borne upon the arms of the chair that stood facing
him, one might have thought that the Baron was endeavouring to solve
the enigma of the Sphinx, had it not been that, rather, of a young and
living Oedipus, seated in that very armchair, where he had come to
join in the game. Now, the figure to which M. de Charlus was applying
with such concentration all his mental powers, and which was not, to
tell the truth, one of the sort that are commonly studied _more
geometrico_, was that of the proposition set him by the lineaments of
the young Comte de Surgis; it appeared, so profound was M. de
Charlus's absorption in front of it, to be some rebus, some riddle,
some algebraical problem, of which he must try to penetrate the
mystery or to work out the formula. In front of him the sibylline
signs and the figures inscribed upon that Table of the Law seemed the
gramarye which would enable the old sorcerer to tell in what direction
the young man's destiny was shaping. Suddenly he became aware that I
was watching him, raised his head as though he were waking from a
dream, smiled at me and blushed. At that moment Mme. de Surgis's other
son came up behind the one who was playing, to look at his cards. When
M. de Charlus had learned from me that they were brothers, his
features could not conceal the admiration that he felt for a family
which could create masterpieces so splendid and so diverse. And what
added to the Baron's enthusiasm was the discovery that the two sons of
Mme. de Surgis-le-Duc were sons not only of the same mother but of the
same father. The children of Jupiter are dissimilar, but that is
because he married first Metis, whose destiny was to bring into the
world wise children, then Themis, and after her Eurynome, and
Mnemosyne, and Leto, and only as a last resort Juno.  But to a single
father Mme. de Surgis had borne these two sons who had each received
beauty from her, but a different beauty.

I had at length the pleasure of seeing Swann come into this room,
which was very big, so big that he did not at first catch sight of me.
A pleasure mingled with sorrow, with a sorrow which the other guests
did not, perhaps, feel, their feeling consisting rather in that sort
of fascination which is exercised by the strange and unexpected forms
of an approaching death, a death that a man already has, in the
popular saying, written on his face.  And it was with a stupefaction
that was almost offensive, into which entered indiscreet curiosity,
cruelty, a scrutiny at once quiet and anxious (a blend of _suave mari
magno_ and _memento quia pulvis_, Robert would have said), that all
eyes were fastened upon that face the cheeks of which had been so
eaten away by disease, like a waning moon, that, except at a certain
angle, the angle doubtless at which Swann looked at himself, they
stopped short like a flimsy piece of scenery to which only an optical
illusion can add the appearance of solidity. Whether because of the
absence of those cheeks, no longer there to modify it, or because
arteriosclerosis, which also is a form of intoxication, had reddened
it, as would drunkenness, or deformed it, as would morphine, Swann's
punchinello nose, absorbed for long years in an attractive face,
seemed now enormous, tumid, crimson, the nose of an old Hebrew rather
than of a dilettante Valois.  Perhaps too in him, in these last days,
the race was making appear more pronounced the physical type that
characterises it, at the same time as the sentiment of a moral
solidarity with the rest of the Jews, a solidarity which Swann seemed
to have forgotten throughout his life, and which, one after another,
his mortal illness, the Dreyfus case and the anti-semitic propaganda
had revived. There are certain Israelites, superior people for all
that and refined men of the world, in whom there remain in reserve and
in the wings, ready to enter at a given moment in their lives, as in a
play, a bounder and a prophet. Swann had arrived at the age of the
prophet. Certainly, with his face from which, by the action of his
disease, whole segments had vanished, as when a block of ice melts and
slabs of it fall off bodily, he had greatly altered. But I could not
help being struck by the discovery how far more he had altered in
relation to myself. This man, excellent, cultivated, whom I was far
from annoyed at meeting, I could not bring myself to understand how I
had been able to invest him long ago in a mystery so great that his
appearance in the Champs-Elysées used to make my heart beat so
violently that I was too bashful to approach his silk-lined cape, that
at the door of the flat in which such a being dwelt I could not ring
the bell without being overcome by boundless emotion and dismay; all
this had vanished not only from his home, but from his person, and the
idea of talking to him might or might not be agreeable to me, but had
no effect whatever upon my nervous system.

And besides, how he had altered since that very afternoon, when I had
met him--after all, only a few hours earlier--in the Duc de
Guermantes's study. Had he really had a scene with the Prince, and had
it left him crushed? The supposition was not necessary. The slightest
efforts that are demanded of a person who is very ill quickly become
for him an excessive strain. He has only to be exposed, when already
tired, to the heat of a crowded drawing-room, for his countenance to
decompose and turn blue, as happens in a few hours with an overripe
pear or milk that is ready to turn. Besides, Swann's hair was worn
thin in patches, and, as Mme. de Guermantes remarked, needed attention
from the furrier, looked as if it had been camphored, and camphored
badly. I was just crossing the room to speak to Swann when
unfortunately a hand fell upon my shoulder.

"Hallo, old boy, I am in Paris for forty-eight hours. I called at your
house, they told me you were here, so that it is to you that my aunt
is indebted for the honour of my company at her party." It was
Saint-Loup.  I told him how greatly I admired the house. "Yes, it
makes quite a historic edifice. Personally, I think it appalling. We
mustn't go near my uncle Palamède, or we shall be caught. Now that
Mme. Molé has gone (for it is she that is ruling the roost just now),
he is quite at a loose end. It seems it was as good as a play, he
never let her out of his sight for a moment, and only left her when he
had put her safely into her carriage. I bear my uncle no ill will,
only I do think it odd that my family council, which has always been
so hard on me, should be composed of the very ones who have led giddy
lives themselves, beginning with the giddiest of the lot, my uncle
Charlus, who is my official guardian, has had more women than Don
Juan, and is still carrying on in spite of his age. There was a talk
at one time of having me made a ward of court. I bet, when all those
gay old dogs met to consider the question, and had me up to preach to
me and tell me that I was breaking my mother's heart, they dared not
look one another in the face for fear of laughing. Just think of the
fellows who formed the council, you would think they had deliberately
chosen the biggest womanisers." Leaving out of account M. de Charlus,
with regard to whom my friend's astonishment no longer seemed to me to
be justified, but for different reasons, and reasons which, moreover,
were afterwards to undergo modification in my mind, Robert was quite
wrong in finding it extraordinary that lessons in worldly wisdom
should be given to a young man by people who had done foolish things,
or were still doing them.

Even if we take into account only atavism, family likenesses, it is
inevitable that the uncle who delivers the lecture should have more or
less the same faults as the nephew whom he has been deputed to scold.
Nor is the uncle in the least hypocritical in so doing, taken in as he
is by the faculty that people have of believing, in every fresh
experience, that 'this is quite different,' a faculty which allows
them to adopt artistic, political and other errors without perceiving
that they are the same errors which they exposed, ten years ago, in
another school of painters, whom they condemned, another political
affair which, they considered, merited a loathing that they no longer
feel, and espouse those errors without recognising them in a fresh
disguise. Besides, even if the faults of the uncle are different from
those of the nephew, heredity may none the less be responsible, for
the effect does not always resemble the cause, as a copy resembles its
original, and even if the uncle's faults are worse, he may easily
believe them to be less serious.

When M. de Charlus made indignant remonstrances to Robert, who
moreover was unaware of his uncle's true inclinations, at that time,
and indeed if it had still been the time when the Baron used to
scarify his own inclinations, he might perfectly well have been
sincere in considering, from the point of view of a man of the world,
that Robert was infinitely more to blame than himself. Had not Robert,
at the very moment when his uncle had been deputed to make him listen
to reason, come within an inch of getting himself ostracised by
society, had he not very nearly been blackballed at the Jockey, had he
not made himself a public laughing stock by the vast sums that he
threw away upon a woman of the lowest order, by his friendships with
people--authors, actors, Jews--not one of whom moved in society, by
his opinions, which were indistinguishable from those held by
traitors, by the grief he was causing to all his relatives? In what
respect could it be compared, this scandalous existence, with that of
M.  de Charlus who had managed, so far, not only to retain but to
enhance still further his position as a Guermantes, being in society
an absolutely privileged person, sought after, adulated in the most
exclusive circles, and a man who, married to a Bourbon Princess, a
woman of eminence, had been able to ensure her happiness, had shewn a
devotion to her memory more fervent, more scrupulous than is customary
in society, and had thus been as good a husband as a son!

"But are you sure that M. de Charlus has had all those mistresses?" I
asked, not, of course, with any diabolical intent of revealing to
Robert the secret that I had surprised, but irritated, nevertheless,
at hearing him maintain an erroneous theory with so much certainty and
assurance. He merely shrugged his shoulders in response to what he
took for ingenuousness on my part. "Not that I blame him in the least,
I consider that he is perfectly right." And he began to sketch in
outline a theory of conduct that would have horrified him at Balbec
(where he was not content with denouncing seducers, death seeming to
him then the only punishment adequate to their crime). Then, however,
he had still been in love and jealous.  He went so far as to sing me
the praises of houses of assignation. "They're the only places where
you can find a shoe to fit you, sheath your weapon, as we say in the
regiment." He no longer felt for places of that sort the disgust that
had inflamed him at Balbec when I made an allusion to them, and,
hearing what he now said, I told him that Bloch had introduced me to
one, but Robert replied that the one which Bloch frequented must be
"extremely mixed, the poor man's paradise!--It all depends, though:
where is it?" I remained vague, for I had just remembered that it was
the same house at which one used to have for a louis that Rachel whom
Robert had so passionately loved. "Anyhow, I can take you to some far
better ones, full of stunning women." Hearing me express the desire
that he would take me as soon as possible to the ones he knew, which
must indeed be far superior to the house to which Bloch had taken me,
he expressed a sincere regret that he could not, on this occasion, as
he would have to leave Paris next day. "It will have to be my next
leave," he said. "You'll see, there are young girls there, even," he
added with an air of mystery. "There is a little Mademoiselle de... I
think it's d'Orgeville, I can let you have the exact name, who is the
daughter of quite tip-top people; her mother was by way of being a La
Croix-l'Evêque, and they're a really decent family, in fact they're
more or less related, if I'm not mistaken, to my aunt Oriane. Anyhow,
you have only to see the child, you can tell at once that she comes of
decent people" (I could detect, hovering for a moment over Robert's
voice, the shadow of the genius of the Guermantes, which passed like a
cloud, but at a great height and without stopping). "It seems to me to
promise marvellous developments. The parents are always ill and can't
look after her. Gad, the child must have some amusement, and I count
upon you to provide it!" "Oh! When are you coming back?" "I don't
know, if you don't absolutely insist upon Duchesses" (Duchess being in
aristocracy the only title that denotes a particularly brilliant rank,
as the lower orders talk of 'Princesses'), "in a different class of
goods, there is Mme. Putbus's maid."

At this moment, Mme. de Surgis entered the room in search of her sons.
As soon as he saw her M. de Charlus went up to her with a friendliness
by which the Marquise was all the more agreeably surprised, in that an
icy frigidity was what she had expected from the Baron, who had always
posed as Oriane's protector and alone of the family--the rest being
too often inclined to forgive the Duke his irregularities by the
glamour of his position and their own jealousy of the Duchess--kept
his brother's mistresses pitilessly at a distance. And so Mme. de
Surgis had fully understood the motives of the attitude that she
dreaded to find in the Baron, but never for a moment suspected those
of the wholly different welcome that she did receive from him. He
spoke to her with admiration of the portrait that Jacquet had painted
of her years before. This admiration waxed indeed to an enthusiasm
which, if it was partly deliberate, with the object of preventing the
Marquise from going away, of 'hooking' her, as Robert used to say of
enemy armies when you seek to keep their effective strength engaged at
one point, might also be sincere. For, if everyone was delighted to
admire in her sons the regal bearing and eyes of Mme. de Surgis, the
Baron could taste an inverse but no less keen pleasure in finding
those charms combined in the mother, as in a portrait which does not
by itself excite desire, but feeds with the aesthetic admiration that
it does excite the desires that it revives. These came now to give, in
retrospect, a voluptuous charm to Jacquet's portrait itself, and at
that moment the Baron would gladly have purchased it to study upon its
surface the physiognomic pedigree of the two young Surgis.

"You see, I wasn't exaggerating," Robert said in my ear. "Just look at
the way my uncle is running after Mme. de Surgis. Though I must say,
that does surprise me. If Oriane knew, she would be furious. Really,
there are enough women in the world without his having to go and
sprawl over that one," he went on; like everybody who is not in love,
he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless
deliberations and on the strength of various qualities and advantages.
Besides, while completely mistaken about his uncle, whom he supposed
to be devoted to women, Robert, in his rancour, spoke too lightly of
M. de Charlus. We are not always somebody's nephew with impunity. It
is often through him that a hereditary habit is transmitted to us
sooner or later. We might indeed arrange a whole gallery of portraits,
named like the German comedy: _Uncle and Nephew_, in which we should
see the uncle watching jealously, albeit unconsciously, for his nephew
to end by becoming like himself.

I go so far as to say that this gallery would be incomplete were we
not to include in it the uncles who are not really related by blood,
being the uncles only of their nephews' wives. The Messieurs de
Charlus are indeed so convinced that they themselves are the only good
husbands, what is more the only husbands of whom their wives are not
jealous, that generally, out of affection for their niece, they make
her marry another Charlus.  Which tangles the skein of family
likenesses. And, to affection for the niece, is added at times
affection for her betrothed as well. Such marriages are not uncommon,
and are often what are called happy.

"What were we talking about? Oh yes, that big, fair girl, Mme.
Put-bus's maid. She goes with women too, but I don't suppose you mind
that, I can tell you frankly, I have never seen such a gorgeous
creature." "I imagine her rather Giorgione?" "Wildly Giorgione! Oh, if
I only had a little time in Paris, what wonderful things there are to
be done! And then, one goes on to the next. For love is all rot, mind
you, I've finished with all that." I soon discovered, to my surprise,
that he had equally finished with literature, whereas it was merely
with regard to literary men that he had struck me as being
disillusioned at our last meeting. ("They're practically all a pack of
scoundrels," he had said to me, a saying that might be explained by
his justified resentment towards certain of Rachel's friends.  They
had indeed persuaded her that she would never have any talent if she
allowed 'Robert, scion of an alien race' to acquire an influence over
her, and with her used to make fun of him, to his face, at the dinners
to which he entertained them.) But in reality Robert's love of Letters
was in no sense profound, did not spring from his true nature, was
only a by-product of his love of Rachel, and he had got rid of it, at
the same time as of his horror of voluptuaries and his religious
respect for the virtue of women.

"There is something very strange about those two young men. Look at
that curious passion for gambling, Marquise," said M. de Charlus,
drawing Mme. de Surgis's attention to her own sons, as though he were
completely unaware of their identity. "They must be a pair of
Orientals, they have certain characteristic features, they are perhaps
Turks," he went on, so as both to give further support to his feint of
innocence and to exhibit a vague antipathy, which, when in due course
it gave place to affability, would prove that the latter was addressed
to the young men solely in their capacity as sons of Mme. de Surgis,
having begun only when the Baron discovered who they were. Perhaps too
M. de Charlus, whose insolence was a natural gift which he delighted
in exercising, took advantage of the few moments in which he was
supposed not to know the name of these two young men to have a little
fun at Mme. de Surgis's expense, and to indulge in his habitual
sarcasm, as Scapin takes advantage of his master's disguise to give
him a sound drubbing.

"They are my sons," said Mme. de Surgis, with a blush which would not
have coloured her cheeks had she been more discerning, without
necessarily being more virtuous. She would then have understood that
the air of absolute indifference or of sarcasm which M. de Charlus
displayed towards a young man was no more sincere than the wholly
superficial admiration which he shewed for a woman, did not express
his true nature. The woman to whom he could go on indefinitely paying
the prettiest compliments might well be jealous of the look which,
while talking to her, he shot at a man whom he would pretend
afterwards not to have noticed. For that look was not of the sort
which M. de Charlus kept for women; a special look, springing from the
depths, which even at a party could not help straying innocently in
the direction of the young men, like the look in a tailor's eye which
betrays his profession by immediately fastening upon your attire.

"Oh, how very strange!" replied M. de Charlus, not without insolence,
as though his mind had to make a long journey to arrive at a reality
so different from what he had pretended to suppose. "But I don't know
them!" he added, fearing lest he might have gone a little too far in
the expression of his antipathy, and have thus paralysed the
Marquise's intention to let him make their acquaintance. "Would you
allow me to introduce them to you?" Mme. de Surgis inquired timidly.
"Why, good gracious, just as you please, I shall be delighted, I am
perhaps not very entertaining company for such young people," M. de
Charlus intoned with the air of hesitation and coldness of a person
who is letting himself be forced into an act of politeness.

"Arnulphe, Victurnien, come here at once," said Mme. de Surgis.
Vic-turnien rose with decision. Arnulphe, though he could not see
where his brother was going, followed him meekly.

"It's the sons' turn, now," muttered Saint-Loup. "It's enough to make
one die with laughing. He tries to curry favour with every one, down
to the dog in the yard. It is all the funnier, as my uncle detests
pretty boys.  And just look how seriously he is listening to them. If
it had been I who tried to introduce them to him, he would have given
me what for. Listen, I shall have to go and say how d'ye do to Oriane.
I have so little time in Paris that I want to try and see all the
people here that I ought to leave cards on."

"What a well-bred air they have, what charming manners," M. de Charlus
was saying. "You think so?" Mme. de Surgis replied, highly delighted.

Swann having caught sight of me came over to Saint-Loup and myself.
His Jewish gaiety was less refined than his witticisms as a man of the
world. "Good evening," he said to us. "Heavens! All three of us
together, people will think it is a meeting of the Syndicate. In
another minute they'll be looking for the safe!" He had not observed
that M. de Beaucerfeuil was just behind his back and could hear what
he said. The General could not help wincing. We heard the voice of M.
de Charlus close beside us: "What, you are called Victurnien, after
the _Cabinet des Antiques_," the Baron was saying, to prolong his
conversation with the two young men.  "By Balzac, yes," replied the
elder Surgis, who had never read a line of that novelist's work, but
to whom his tutor had remarked, a few days earlier, upon the
similarity of his Christian name and d'Esgrignon's. Mme.  de Surgis
was delighted to see her son shine, and at M. de Charlus's ecstasy
before such a display of learning.

"It appears that Loubet is entirely on our side, I have it from an
absolutely trustworthy source," Swann informed Saint-Loup, but this
time in a lower tone so as not to be overheard by the General. Swann
had begun to find his wife's Republican connexions more interesting
now that the Dreyfus case had become his chief preoccupation. "I tell
you this because I know that your heart is with us."

"Not quite to that extent; you are entirely mistaken," was Robert's
answer. "It's a bad business, and I'm sorry I ever had a finger in it.
It was no affair of mine. If it were to begin over again, I should
keep well clear of it. I am a soldier, and my first duty is to support
the Army. If you will stay with M. Swann for a moment, I shall be back
presently, I must go and talk to my aunt." But I saw that it was with
Mlle. d'Ambresac that he went to talk, and was distressed by the
thought that he had lied to me about the possibility of their
engagement. My mind was set at rest when I learned that he had been
introduced to her half an hour earlier by Mme. de Marsantés, who was
anxious for the marriage, the Ambresacs being extremely rich.

"At last," said M. de Charlus to Mme. de Surgis, "I find a young man
with some education, who has read, who knows what is meant by Balzac.
And it gives me all the more pleasure to meet him where that sort of
thing has become most rare, in the house of one of my peers, one of
ourselves," he added, laying stress upon the words. It was all very
well for the Guermantes to profess to regard all men as equal; on the
great occasions when they found themselves among people who were
'born,' especially if they were not quite so well born as themselves,
whom they were anxious and able to flatter, they did not hesitate to
trot out old family memories.  "At one time," the Baron went on, "the
word aristocrat meant the best people, in intellect, in heart. Now,
here is the first person I find among pur-selves who has ever heard of
Victurnien d'Esgrignon. I am wrong in saying the first. There are also
a Polignac and a Montesquieu," added M. de Charlus, who knew that this
twofold association must inevitably thrill the Marquise. "However,
your sons have every reason to be learned, their maternal grandfather
had a famous collection of eighteenth century stuff.  I will shew you
mine if you will do me the pleasure of coming to luncheon with me one
day," he said to the young Victurnien. "I can shew you an interesting
edition of the _Cabinet des Antiques_ with corrections in Balzac's own
hand. I shall be charmed to bring the two Victurniens face to face."

I could not bring myself to leave Swann. He had arrived at that stage
of exhaustion in which a sick man's body becomes a mere retort in
which we study chemical reactions. His face was mottled with tiny
spots of Prussian blue, which seemed not to belong to the world of
living things, and emitted the sort of odour which, at school, after
the 'experiments,' makes it so unpleasant to have to remain in a
'science' classroom. I asked him whether he had not had a long
conversation with the Prince de Guermantes and if he would tell me
what it had been about. "Yes," he said, "but go for a moment first
with M. de Charlus and Mme. de Surgis, I shall wait for you here."

Indeed, M. de Charlus, having suggested to Mme. de Surgis that they
should leave this room which was too hot, and go and sit for a little
in another, had invited not the two sons to accompany their mother,
but myself. In this way he made himself appear, after he had
successfully hooked them, to have lost all interest in the two young
men. He was moreover paying me an inexpensive compliment, Mme. de
Surgis being in distinctly bad odour.

Unfortunately, no sooner had we sat down in an alcove from which there
was no way of escape than Mme. de Saint-Euverte, a butt for the
Baron's jibes, came past. She, perhaps to mask or else openly to shew
her contempt for the ill will which she inspired in M. de Charlus, and
above all to shew that she was on intimate terms with a woman who was
talking so familiarly to him, gave a disdainfully friendly greeting to
the famous beauty, who acknowledged it, peeping out of the corner of
her eye at M. de Charlus with a mocking smile. But the alcove was so
narrow that Mme. de Saint-Euverte, when she tried to continue, behind
our backs, her canvass of her guests for the morrow, found herself a
prisoner, and had some difficulty in escaping, a precious moment which
M. de Charlus, anxious that his insolent wit should shine before the
mother of the two young men, took good care not to let slip. A silly
question which I had put to him, without malice aforethought, gave him
the opportunity for a hymn of triumph of which the poor Saint-Euverte,
almost immobilised behind us, could not have lost a word. "Would you
believe it, this impertinent young man," he said, indicating me to
Mme. de Surgis, "asked me just now, without any sign of that modesty
which makes us keep such expeditions private, if I was going to Mme.
de Saint-Euverte's, which is to say, I suppose, if I was suffering
from the colic. I should endeavour, in any case, to relieve myself in
some more comfortable place than the house of a person who, if my
memory serves me, was celebrating her centenary when I first began to
go about town, though not, of course, to her house. And yet who could
be more interesting to listen to? What a host of historic memories,
seen and lived through in the days of the First Empire and the
Restoration, and secret history too, which could certainly have
nothing of the 'saint' about it, but must be decidedly 'verdant' if we
are to judge by the amount of kick still left in the old trot's
shanks. What would prevent me from questioning her about those
passionate times is the acuteness of my olfactory organ. The proximity
of the lady is enough. I say to myself all at once: oh, good lord,
some one has broken the lid of my cesspool, when it is simply the
Marquise opening her mouth to emit some invitation. And you can
understand that if I had the misfortune to go to her house, the
cesspool would be magnified into a formidable sewage-cart. She bears a
mystic name, though, which has always made me think with jubilation,
although she has long since passed the date of her jubilee, of that
stupid line of poetry called deliquescent: 'Ah, green, how green my
soul was on that day....' But I require a cleaner sort of verdure.
They tell me that the indefatigable old streetwalker gives
'garden-parties,' I should describe them as 'invitations to explore
the sewers.' Are you going to wallow there?" he asked Mme. de Surgis,
who this time was annoyed. Wishing to pretend for the Baron's benefit
that she was not going, and knowing that she would give days of her
life rather than miss the Saint-Euverte party, she got out of it by
taking a middle course, that is to say uncertainty. This uncertainty
took so clumsily amateurish, so sordidly material a form, that M. de
Charlus, with no fear of offending Mme. de Surgis, whom nevertheless
he was anxious to please, began to laugh to shew her that 'it cut no
ice with him.'

"I always admire people who make plans," she said; "I often change
mine at the last moment. There is a question of a summer frock which
may alter everything. I shall act upon the inspiration of the moment."

For my part, I was furious at the abominable little speech that M. de
Charlus had just made. I would have liked to shower blessings upon the
giver of garden-parties. Unfortunately, in the social as in the
political world, the victims are such cowards that one cannot for long
remain indignant with their tormentors. Mme. de Saint-Euverte, who had
succeeded in escaping from the alcove to which we were barring the
entry, brushed against the Baron inadvertently as she passed him, and,
by a reflex action of snobbishness which wiped out all her anger,
perhaps even in the hope of securing an opening, at which this could
not be the first attempt, exclaimed: "Oh! I beg your pardon, Monsieur
de Charlus, I hope I did not hurt you," as though she were kneeling
before her lord and master. The latter did not deign to reply save by
a broad ironical smile, and conceded only a "Good evening," which,
uttered as though he were only now made aware of the Marquise's
presence after she had greeted him, was an insult the more. Lastly,
with a supreme want of spirit which pained me for her sake, Mme. de
Saint-Euverte came up to me and, drawing me aside, said in my ear:
"Tell me, what have I done to offend M. de Charlus? They say that he
doesn't consider me smart enough for him," she said, laughing from ear
to ear. I remained serious. For one thing, I thought it stupid of her
to appear to believe or to wish other people to believe that nobody,
really, was as smart as herself. For another thing, people who laugh
so heartily at what they themselves have said, when it is not funny,
dispense us accordingly, by taking upon themselves the responsibility
for the mirth, from joining in it.

"Other people assure me that he is cross because I do not invite him.
But he does not give me much encouragement. He seems to avoid me."
(This expression struck me as inadequate.) "Try to find out, and come
and tell me to-morrow. And if he feels remorseful and wishes to come
too, bring him. I shall forgive and forget. Indeed, I shall be quite
glad to see him, because it will annoy Mme. de Surgis. I give you a
free hand. You have the most perfect judgment in these matters and I
do not wish to appear to be begging my guests to come. In any case, I
count upon you absolutely."

It occurred to me that Swann must be getting tired of waiting for me.
I did not wish, moreover, to be too late in returning home, because of
Albertine, and, taking leave of Mme. de Surgis and M. de Charlus, I
went in search of my sick man in the card-room. I asked him whether
what he had said to the Prince in their conversation in the garden was
really what M. de Bréauté (whom I did not name) had reported to us,
about a little play by Bergotte. He burst out laughing: "There is not
a word of truth in it, not one, it is entirely made up and would have
been an utterly stupid thing to say. Really, it is unheard of, this
spontaneous generation of falsehood.  I do not ask who it was that
told you, but it would be really interesting, in a field as limited as
this, to work back from one person to another and find out how the
story arose. Anyhow, what concern can it be of other people, what the
Prince said to me? People are very inquisitive. I have never been
inquisitive, except when I was in love, and when I was jealous. And a
lot I ever learned! Are you jealous?" I told Swann that I had never
experienced jealousy, that I did not even know what it was. "Indeed! I
congratulate you. A little jealousy is not at all a bad thing, from
two points of view. For one thing, because it enables people who are
not inquisitive to take an interest in the lives of others, or of one
other at any rate. And besides, it makes one feel the pleasure of
possession, of getting into a carriage with a woman, of not allowing
her to go about by herself. But that occurs only in the very first
stages of the disease, or when the cure is almost complete.  In the
interval, it is the most agonising torment. However, even the two
pleasures I have mentioned, I must own to you that I have tasted very
little of them: the first, by the fault of my own nature, which is
incapable of sustained reflexion; the second, by force of
circumstances, by the fault of the woman, I should say the women, of
whom I have been jealous. But that makes no difference. Even when one
is no longer interested in things, it is still something to have been
interested in them; because it was always for reasons which other
people did not grasp. The memory of those sentiments is, we feel, to
be found only in ourselves; we must go back into ourselves to study
it. You mustn't laugh at this idealistic jargon, what I mean to say is
that I have been very fond of life and very fond of art. Very well!
Now that I am a little too weary to live with other people, those old
sentiments, so personal and individual, that I felt in the past, seem
to me--it is the mania of all collectors--very precious. I open my
heart to myself like a sort of showcase, and examine one by one ever
so many love affairs of which the rest of the world can have known
nothing. And of this collection, to which I am now even more attached
than to my others, I say to myself, rather as Mazarin said of his
library, but still without any keen regret, that it will be very
tiresome to have to leave it all. But, to come back to my conversation
with the Prince, I shall repeat it to one person only, and that person
is going to be yourself." My attention was distracted by the
conversation that M. de Charlus, who had returned to the card-room,
was prolonging indefinitely close beside us. "And are you a reader
too?  What do you do?" he asked Comte Arnulphe, who had never heard
even the name of Balzac. But his short-sightedness, as he saw
everything very small, gave him the appearance of seeing to great
distances, so that, rare poetry in a sculptural Greek god, there
seemed to be engraved upon his pupils remote, mysterious stars.

"Suppose we took a turn in the garden, Sir," I said to Swann, while
Comte Arnulphe, in a lisping voice which seemed to indicate that
mentally at least his development was incomplete, replied to M. de
Charlus with an artlessly obliging precision: "I, oh, golf chiefly,
tennis, football, running, polo I'm really keen on." So Minerva, being
subdivided, ceased in certain cities to be the goddess of wisdom, and
incarnated part of herself in a purely sporting, horse-loving deity,
Athene Hippia. And he went to Saint Moritz also to ski, for Pallas
Trilogeneia frequents the high peaks and outruns swift horsemen. "Ah!"
replied M. de Charlus with the transcendent smile of the intellectual
who does not even take the trouble to conceal his derision, but, on
the other hand, feels himself so superior to other people and so far
despises the intelligence of those who are the least stupid, that he
barely differentiates between them and the most stupid, the moment
they can be attractive to him in some other way. While talking to
Arnulphe, M.  de Charlus felt that by the mere act of addressing him
he was conferring upon him a superiority which everyone else must
recognise and envy. "No," Swann replied, "I am too tired to walk
about, let us sit down somewhere in a corner, I cannot remain on my
feet any longer." This was true, and yet the act of beginning to talk
had already given him back a certain vivacity. This was because, in
the most genuine exhaustion, there is, especially in neurotic people,
an element that depends upon attracting their attention and is kept
going only by an act of memory. We at once feel tired as soon as we
are afraid of feeling tired, and, to throw off our fatigue, it
suffices us to forget about it. To be sure, Swann was far from being
one of those indefatigable invalids who, entering a room worn out and
ready to drop, revive in conversation like a flower in water and are
able for hours on end to draw from their own words a reserve of
strength which they do not, alas, communicate to their hearers, who
appear more and more exhausted the more the talker comes back to life.
But Swann belonged to that stout Jewish race, in whose vital energy,
its resistance to death, its individual members seem to share.
Stricken severally by their own diseases, as it is stricken itself by
persecution, they continue indefinitely to struggle against terrible
suffering which may be prolonged beyond every apparently possible
limit, when already one sees nothing more than a prophet's beard
surmounted by a huge nose which dilates to inhale its last breath,
before the hour strikes for the ritual prayers and the punctual
procession begins of distant relatives advancing with mechanical
movements, as upon an Assyrian frieze.

We went to sit down, but, before moving away from the group formed by
M. de Charlus with the two young Surgis and their mother, Swann could
not resist fastening upon the lady's bosom the slow expansive
concupiscent gaze of a connoisseur. He put up his monocle, for a
better view, and, while he talked to me, kept glancing in the
direction of the lady. "This is, word for word," he said to me when we
were seated, "my conversation with the Prince, and if you remember
what I said to you just now, you will see why I choose you as my
confidant. There is another reason as well, which you shall one day
learn.--'My dear Swann,' the Prince de Guermantes said to me, 'you
must forgive me if I have appeared to be avoiding you for some time
past.' (I had never even noticed it, having been ill and avoiding
society myself.) 'In the first place, I had heard it said that, as I
fully expected, in the unhappy affair which is splitting the country
in two your views were diametrically opposed to mine. Now, it would
have been extremely painful to me to have to hear you express them. So
sensitive were my nerves that when the Princess, two years ago, heard
her brother-in-law, the Grand Duke of Hesse, say that Dreyfus was
innocent, she was not content with promptly denying the assertion but
refrained from repeating it to me in order not to upset me. About the
same time, the Crown Prince of Sweden came to Paris and, having
probably heard some one say that the Empress Eugénie was a Dreyfusist,
confused her with the Princess (a strange confusion, you will admit,
between a woman of the rank of my wife and a Spaniard, a great deal
less well born than people make out, and married to a mere Bonaparte),
and said to her: Princess, I am doubly glad to meet you, for I know
that you hold the same view as myself of the Dreyfus case, which does
not surprise me since Your Highness is Bavarian. Which drew down upon
the Prince the answer: Sir, I am nothing now but a French Princess,
and I share the views of all my fellow-countrymen. Now, my dear Swann,
about eighteen months ago, a conversation I had with General de
Beaucerfeuil made me suspect that not an error, but grave illegalities
had been committed in the procedure of the trial.'"

We were interrupted (Swann did not wish people to overhear his story)
by the voice of M. de Charlus who (without, as it happened, paying us
the slightest attention) came past escorting Mme. de Surgis, and
stopped in the hope of detaining her for a moment longer, whether on
account of her sons or from that reluctance common to all the
Guermantes to bring anything to an end, which kept them plunged in a
sort of anxious inertia.  Swann informed me, in this connexion, a
little later, of something that stripped the name Surgis-le-Duc, for
me, of all the poetry that I had found in it. The Marquise de
Surgis-le-Duc boasted a far higher social position, far finer
connexions by marriage than her cousin the Comte de Surgis, who had no
money and lived on his estate in the country. But the words that ended
her title "le Duc" had not at all the origin which I ascribed to them,
and which had made me associate it in my imagination with
Bourg-l'Abbé, Bois-le-Roi, etc. AH that had happened was that a Comte
de Surgis had married, during the Restoration, the daughter of an
immensely rich industrial magnate, M. Leduc, or Le Duc, himself the
son of a chemical manufacturer, the richest man of his day, and a Peer
of France. King Charles X had created for the son born of this
marriage the Marquisate of Surgis-le-Duc, a Marquisate of Surgis
existing already in the family. The addition of the plebeian surname
had not prevented this branch from allying itself, on the strength of
its enormous fortune, with the first families of the realm.  And the
present Marquise de Surgis-le-Duc, herself of exalted birth, might
have moved in the very highest circles. A demon of perversity had
driven her, scorning the position ready made for her, to flee from the
conjugal roof, to live a life of open scandal. Whereupon the world
which she had scorned at twenty, when it was at her feet, had cruelly
failed her at thirty, when, after ten years, everybody, except a few
faithful friends, had ceased to bow to her, and she set to work to
reconquer laboriously, inch by inch, what she had possessed as a
birthright. (An outward and return journey which are not uncommon.)

As for the great nobles, her kinsmen, whom she had disowned in the
past, and who in their turn had now disowned her, she found an excuse
for the joy that she would feel in gathering them again to her bosom
in the memories of childhood that they would be able to recall. And in
so saying, to cloak her snobbishness, she was perhaps less untruthful
than she supposed.  "Basin is all my girlhood!" she said on the day on
which he came back to her. And as a matter of fact there was a grain
of truth in the statement. But she had miscalculated when she chose
him for her lover. For all the women friends of the Duchesse de
Guermantes were to rally round her, and so Mme. de Surgis must descend
for the second time that slope up which she had so laboriously toiled.
"Well!" M. de Charlus was saying to her, in his attempt to prolong the
conversation. "You will lay my tribute at the feet of the beautiful
portrait. How is it? What has become of it?" "Why," replied Mme. de
Surgis, "you know I haven't got it now; my husband wasn't pleased with
it." "Not pleased! With one of the greatest works of art of our time,
equal to Nattier's Duchesse de Châteauroux, and, moreover,
perpetuating no less majestic and heart-shattering a goddess. Oh! That
little blue collar! I swear, Vermeer himself never painted a fabric
more consummately, but we must not say it too loud or Swann will fall
upon us to avenge his favourite painter, the Master of Delft." The
Marquise, turning round, addressed a smile and held out her hand to
Swann, who had risen to greet her. But almost without concealment,
whether in his declining days he had lost all wish for concealment, by
indifference to opinion, or the physical power, by the excitement of
his desire and the weakening of the control that helps us to conceal
it, as soon as Swann, on taking the Marquise's hand, saw her bosom at
close range and from above, he plunged an attentive, serious,
absorbed, almost anxious gaze into the cavity of her bodice, and his
nostrils, drugged by the lady's perfume, quivered like the wings of a
butterfly about to alight upon a half-hidden flower. He checked
himself abruptly on the edge of the precipice, and Mme. de Surgis
herself, albeit annoyed, stifled a deep sigh, so contagious can desire
prove at times.  "The painter was cross," she said to M. de Charlus,
"and took it back. I have heard that it is now at Diane de
Saint-Euverte's." "I decline to believe," said the Baron, "that a
great picture can have such bad taste."

"He is talking to her about her portrait. I could talk to her about
that portrait just as well as Charlus," said Swann, affecting a
drawling, slangy tone as he followed the retreating couple with his
gaze. "And I should certainly enjoy talking about it more than
Charlus," he added. I asked him whether the things that were said
about M. de Charlus were true, in doing which I was lying twice over,
for, if I had no proof that anybody ever had said anything, I had on
the other hand been perfectly aware for some hours past that what I
was hinting at was true. Swann shrugged his shoulders, as though I had
suggested something quite absurd. "It's quite true that he's a
charming friend. But, need I add, his friendship is purely platonic.
He is more sentimental than other men, that is all; on the other hand,
as he never goes very far with women, that has given a sort of
plausibility to the idiotic rumours to which you refer. Charlus is
perhaps greatly attached to his men friends, but you may be quite
certain that the attachment is only in his head and in his heart. At
last, we may perhaps be left in peace for a moment. Well, the Prince
de Guermantes went on to say: 'I don't mind telling you that this idea
of a possible illegality in the procedure of the trial was extremely
painful to me, because I have always, as you know, worshipped the
army; I discussed the matter again with the General, and, alas, there
could be no two ways of looking at it. I don't mind telling you
frankly that, all this time, the idea that an innocent man might be
undergoing the most degrading punishment had never even entered my
mind.  But, starting from this idea of illegality, I began to study
what I had always declined to read, and then the possibility not, this
time, of illegal procedure but of the prisoner's innocence began to
haunt me. I did not feel that I could talk about it to the Princess.
Heaven knows that she has become just as French as myself. You may say
what you like, from the day of our marriage, I took such pride in
shewing her our country in all its beauty, and what to me is the most
splendid thing in it, our Army, that it would have been too painful to
me to tell her of my suspicions, which involved, it is true, a few
officers only. But I come of a family of soldiers, I did not like to
think that officers could be mistaken. I discussed the case again with
Beaucerfeuil, he admitted that there had been culpable intrigues, that
the _bordereau_ was possibly not in Dreyfus's writing, but that an
overwhelming proof of his guilt did exist. This was the Henry
document.  And, a few days later, we learned that it was a forgery.
After that, without letting the Princess see me, I began to read the
_Siècle_ and the _Aurore_ every day; soon I had no doubt left, it kept
me awake all night. I confided my distress to our friend, the abbé
Poiré, who, I was astonished to find, held the same conviction, and I
got him to say masses for the intention of Dreyfus, his unfortunate
wife and their children. Meanwhile, one morning as I was going to the
Princess's room, I saw her maid trying to hide something from me that
she had in her hand. I asked her, chaffingly, what it was, she blushed
and refused to tell me. I had the fullest confidence in my wife, but
this incident disturbed me considerably (and the Princess too, no
doubt, who must have heard of it from her woman), for my dear Marie
barely uttered a word to me that day at luncheon. I asked the abbé
Poiré whether he could say my mass for Dreyfus on the following
morning....' And so much for that!" exclaimed Swann, breaking off his
narrative. I looked up, and saw the Duc de Guermantes bearing down
upon us. "Forgive me for interrupting you, boys. My lad," he went on,
addressing myself, "I am instructed to give you a message from Oriane.
Marie and Gilbert have asked her to stay and have supper at their
table with only five or six other people: the Princess of Hesse, Mme.
de Ligné, Mme. de Tarente, Mme. de Chevreuse, the Duchesse d'Arenberg.
Unfortunately, we can't wait, we are going on to a little ball of
sorts." I was listening, but whenever we have something definite to do
at a given moment, we depute a certain person who is accustomed to
that sort of duty to keep an eye on the clock and warn us in time.
This indwelling servant reminded me, as I had asked him to remind me a
few hours before, that Albertine, who at the moment was far from my
thoughts, was to come and see me immediately after the theatre. And so
I declined the invitation to supper. This does not mean that I was not
enjoying myself at the Princesse de Guermantes's. The truth is that
men can have several sorts of pleasure. The true pleasure is that for
which they abandon the other. But the latter, if it is apparent, or
rather if it alone is apparent, may put people off the scent of the
other, reassure or mislead the jealous, create a false impression. And
yet, all that is needed to make us sacrifice it to the other is a
little happiness or a little suffering.  Sometimes a third order of
pleasures, more serious but more essential, does not yet exist for us,
in whom its potential existence is indicated only by its arousing
regrets, discouragement. And yet it is to these pleasures that we
shall devote ourselves in time to come. To give an example of quite
secondary importance, a soldier in time of peace will sacrifice a
social existence to love, but, once war is declared (and without there
being any need to introduce the idea of a patriotic duty), will
sacrifice love to the passion, stronger than love, for fighting. It
was all very well Swann's saying that he enjoyed telling me his story,
I could feel that his conversation with me, because of the lateness of
the hour, and because he himself was too ill, was one of those
fatigues at which those who know that they are killing themselves by
sitting up late, by overexerting themselves, feel when they return
home an angry regret, similar to that felt at the wild extravagance of
which they have again been guilty by the spendthrifts who will not,
for all that, be able to restrain themselves to-morrow from throwing
money out of the windows.  After we have passed a certain degree of
enfeeblement, whether it be caused by age or by ill health, all
pleasure taken at the expense of sleep, in departure from our habits,
every breach of the rules becomes a nuisance.  The talker continues to
talk, out of politeness, from excitement, but he knows that the hour
at which he might still have been able to go to sleep has already
passed, and he knows also the reproaches that he will heap upon
himself during the insomnia and fatigue that must ensue. Already,
moreover, even the momentary pleasure has come to an end, body and
brain are too far drained of their strength to welcome with any
readiness what seems to the other person entertaining. They are like a
house on the morning before a journey or removal, where visitors
become a perfect plague, to be received sitting upon locked trunks,
with our eyes on the clock. "At last we are alone," he said; "I quite
forget where I was. Oh yes, I had just told you, hadn't I, that the
Prince asked the abbé Poiré if he could say his mass next day for
Dreyfus. 'No, the abbé informed me' (I say _me_ to you," Swann
explained to me, "because it is the Prince who is speaking, you
understand?), 'for I have another mass that I have been asked to say
for him to-morrow as well.--What, I said to him, is there another
Catholic as well as myself who is convinced of his innocence?--It
appears so.--But this other supporter's conviction must be of more
recent growth than mine.--Maybe, but this other was making me say
masses when you still believed Dreyfus guilty.--Ah, I can see that it
is not anyone in our world.--On the contrary!--Indeed! There are
Dreyfusists among us, are there? You intrigue me; I should like to
unbosom myself to this rare bird, if I know him.--You do know
him.--His name?--The Princesse de Guermantes. While I was afraid of
shocking the Nationalist opinions, the French faith of my dear wife,
she had been afraid of alarming my religious opinions, my patriotic
sentiments. But privately she had been thinking as I did, though for
longer than I had. And what her maid had been hiding as she went into
her room, what she went out to buy for her every morning, was the
_Aurore_. My dear Swann, from that moment I thought of the pleasure
that I should give you when I told you how closely akin my views upon
this matter were to yours; forgive me for not having done so sooner.
If you bear in mind that I had never said a word to the Princess, it
will not surprise you to be told that thinking the same as yourself
must at that time have kept me farther apart from you than thinking
differently.  For it was an extremely painful topic for me to
approach. The more I believe that an error, that crimes even have been
committed, the more my heart bleeds for the Army. It had never
occurred to me that opinions like mine could possibly cause you
similar pain, until I was told the other day that you were
emphatically protesting against the insults to the Army and against
the Dreyfusists for consenting to ally themselves with those who
insulted it. That settled it, I admit that it has been most painful
for me to confess to you what I think of certain officers, few in
number fortunately, but it is a relief to me not to have to keep at
arms' length from you any longer, and especially that you should quite
understand that if I was able to entertain other sentiments, it was
because I had not a shadow of doubt as to the soundness of the
verdict. As soon as my doubts began, I could wish for only one thing,
that the mistake should be rectified.' I must tell you that this
speech of the Prince de Guermantes moved me profoundly.  If you knew
him as I do, if you could realise the distance he has had to traverse
in order to reach his present position, you would admire him as he
deserves. Not that his opinion surprises me, his is such a
straightforward nature!" Swann was forgetting that in the afternoon he
had on the contrary told me that people's opinions as to the Dreyfus
case were dictated by atavism. At the most he had made an exception in
favour of intelligence, because in Saint-Loup it had managed to
overcome atavism and had made a Dreyfusard of him. Now he had just
seen that this victory had been of short duration and that Saint-Loup
had passed into the opposite camp.  And so it was to
straightforwardness now that he assigned the part which had previously
devolved upon intelligence. In reality we always discover afterwards
that our adversaries had a reason for being on the side they espoused,
which has nothing to do with any element of right that there may be on
that side, and that those who think as we do do so because their
intelligence, if their moral nature is too base to be invoked, or
their straightforwardness, if their penetration is feeble, has
compelled them.

Swann now found equally intelligent anybody who was of his opinion,
his old friend the Prince de Guermantes and my schoolfellow Bloch,
whom previously he had avoided and whom he now invited to luncheon.
Swann interested Bloch greatly by telling him that the Prince de
Guermantes was a Dreyfusard. "We must ask him to sign our appeal for
Picquart; a name like his would have a tremendous effect." But Swann,
blending with his ardent conviction as an Israelite the diplomatic
moderation of a man of the world, whose habits he had too thoroughly
acquired to be able to shed them at this late hour, refused to allow
Bloch to send the Prince a circular to sign, even on his own
initiative. "He cannot do such a thing, we must not expect the
impossible," Swann repeated. "There you have a charming man who has
travelled thousands of miles to come over to our side. He can be very
useful to us. If he were to sign your list, he would simply be
compromising himself with his own people, would be made to suffer on
our account, might even repent of his confidences and not confide in
us again." Nor was this all, Swann refused his own signature. He felt
that his name was too Hebraic not to create a bad effect. Besides,
even if he approved of all the attempts to secure a fresh trial, he
did not wish to be mixed up in any way in the antimilitarist campaign.
He wore, a thing he had never done previously, the decoration he had
won as a young militiaman, in '70, and added a codicil to his will
asking that, contrary to his previous dispositions, he might be buried
with the military honours due to his rank as Chevalier of the Legion
of Honour. A request which assembled round the church of Combray a
whole squadron of those troopers over whose fate Françoise used to
weep in days gone by, when she envisaged the prospect of a war. In
short, Swann refused to sign Bloch's circular, with the result that,
if he passed in the eyes of many people as a fanatical Dreyfusard, my
friend found him lukewarm, infected with Nationalism, and a
militarist.  Swann left me without shaking hands so as not to be
forced into a general leave-taking in this room which swarmed with his
friends, but said to me: "You ought to come and see your friend
Gilberte. She has really grown up now and altered, you would not know
her. She would be so pleased!" I was no longer in love with Gilberte.
She was for me like a dead person for whom one has long mourned, then
forgetfulness has come, and if she were to be resuscitated, she could
no longer find any place in a life which has ceased to be fashioned
for her. I had no desire now to see her, not even that desire to shew
her that I did not wish to see her which, every day, when I was in
love with her, I vowed to myself that I would flaunt before her, when
I should be in love with her no longer.

And so, seeking now only to give myself, in Gilberte's eyes, the air
of having longed with all my heart to meet her again and of having
been prevented by circumstances of the kind called "beyond our
control" albeit they only occur, with any certainty at least, when we
have done nothing to prevent them, so far from accepting Swann's
invitation with reserve, I would not let him go until he had promised
to explain in detail to his daughter the mischances that had prevented
and would continue to prevent me from going to see her. "Anyhow, I am
going to write to her as soon as I go home," I added. "But be sure you
tell her it will be a threatening letter, for in a month or two I
shall be quite free, and then let her tremble, for I shall be coming
to your house as regularly as in the old days."

Before parting from Swann, I said a word to him about his health. "No,
it is not as bad as all that," he told me. "Still, as I was saying, I
am quite worn out, and I accept with resignation whatever may be in
store for me.  Only, I must say that it would be most annoying to die
before the end of the Dreyfus case. Those scoundrels have more than
one card up their sleeves. I have no doubt of their being defeated in
the end, but still they are very powerful, they have supporters
everywhere. Just as everything is going on splendidly, it all
collapses. I should like to live long enough to see Dreyfus
rehabilitated and Picquart a colonel."

When Swann had left, I returned to the great drawing-room in which was
to be found that Princesse de Guermantes with whom I did not then know
that I was one day to be so intimate. Her passion for M. de Charlus
did not reveal itself to me at first. I noticed only that the Baron,
after a certain date, and without having taken one of those sudden
dislikes, which were not surprising in him, to the Princesse de
Guermantes, while continuing to feel for her just as strong an
affection, a stronger affection perhaps than ever, appeared worried
and annoyed whenever anyone mentioned her name to him. He never
included it now in his list of the people whom he wished to meet at
dinner.

It is true that before this time I had heard an extremely malicious
man about town say that the Princess had completely changed, that she
was in love with M. de Charlus, but this slander had appeared to me
absurd and had made me angry. I had indeed remarked with astonishment
that, when I was telling her something that concerned myself, if M. de
Charlus's name cropped up in the middle, the Princess immediately
screwed up her attention to the narrower focus of a sick man who,
hearing us talk about ourselves, and listening, in consequence, in a
careless and distracted fashion, suddenly realises that a name we have
mentioned is that of the disease from which he is suffering, which at
once interests and delights him. So, if I said to her: "Why, M. de
Charlus told me..." the Princess at once gathered up the slackened
reins of her attention. And having on one occasion said in her hearing
that M. de Charlus had at that moment a warm regard for a certain
person, I was astonished to see appear in the Princess's eyes that
momentary change of colour, like the line of a fissure in the pupil,
which is due to a thought which our words have unconsciously aroused
in the mind of the person to whom we are talking, a secret thought
that will not find expression in words, but will rise from the depths
which we have stirred to the surface--altered for an instant--of his
gaze. But if my remark had moved the Princess, I did not then suspect
in what fashion.

Anyhow, shortly after this, she began to talk to me about M. de
Charlus, and almost without ambiguity. If she made any allusion to the
rumours which a few people here and there were spreading about the
Baron, it was merely as though to absurd and scandalous inventions.
But, on the other hand, she said: "I feel that any woman who fell in
love with a man of such priceless worth as Palamède ought to have
sufficient breadth of mind, enough devotion, to accept him and
understand him as a whole, for what he is, to respect his freedom,
humour his fancies, seek only to smooth out his difficulties and
console him in his griefs." Now, by such a speech, vague as it was,
the Princesse de Guermantes revealed the weakness of the character she
was seeking to extol, just as M. de Charlus himself did at times.
Have I not heard him, over and again, say to people who until then had
been uncertain whether or not he was being slandered: "I, who have
climbed many hills and crossed many valleys in my life, who have known
all manner of people, burglars as well as kings, and indeed, I must
confess, with a slight preference for the burglars, who have pursued
beauty in all its forms," and so forth; and by these words which he
thought adroit, and in contradicting rumours the currency of which no
one suspected (or to introduce, from inclination, moderation, love of
accuracy, an element of truth which he was alone in regarding as
insignificant), he removed the last doubts of some of his hearers,
inspired others, who had not yet begun to doubt him, with their first.
For the most dangerous of all forms of concealment is that of the
crime itself in the mind of the guilty party. His permanent
consciousness of it prevents him from imagining how generally it is
unknown, how readily a complete lie would be accepted, and on the
other hand from realising at what degree of truth other people will
detect, in words which he believes to be innocent, a confession. Not
that he would not be entirely wrong in seeking to hush it up, for
there is no vice that does not find ready support in the best society,
and one has seen a country house turned upside down in order that two
sisters might sleep in adjoining rooms as soon as their hostess
learned that theirs was a more than sisterly affection. But what
revealed to me all of a sudden the Princess's love was a trifling
incident upon which I shall not dwell here, for it forms part of quite
another story, in which M. de Charlus allowed a Queen to die rather
than miss an appointment with the hairdresser who was to singe his
hair for the benefit of an omnibus conductor who filled him with
alarm. However, to be done with the Princess's love, let us say what
the trifle was that opened my eyes. I was, on the day in question,
alone with her in her carriage.  As we were passing a post office she
stopped the coachman. She had come out without a footman. She half
drew a letter from her muff and was preparing to step down from the
carriage to put it into the box. I tried to stop her, she made a show
of resistance, and we both realised that our instinctive movements had
been, hers compromising, in appearing to be guarding a secret, mine
indiscreet, in attempting to pass that guard. She was the first to
recover. Suddenly turning very red, she gave me the letter.  I no
longer dared not to take it, but, as I slipped it into the box, I
could not help seeing that it was addressed to M. de Charlus.

To return to this first evening at the Princesse de Guermantes's, I
went to bid her good-night, for her cousins, who had promised to take
me home, were in a hurry to be gone. M. de Guermantes wished, however,
to say good-bye to his brother, Mme. de Surgis having found time to
mention to the Duke as she left that M. de Charlus had been charming
to her and to her sons. This great courtesy on his brother's part, the
first moreover that he had ever shewn in that line, touched Basin
deeply and aroused in him old family sentiments which were never
asleep for long. At the moment when we were saying good-bye to the
Princess he was attempting, without actually thanking M. de Charlus,
to give expression to his fondness for him, whether because he really
found a difficulty in controlling it or in order that the Baron might
remember that actions of the sort that he had performed this evening
did not escape the eyes of a brother, just as, with the object of
creating a chain of pleasant associations in the future, we give sugar
to a dog that has done its trick. "Well, little brother!" said the
Duke, stopping M. de Charlus and taking him lovingly by the arm, "so
this is how one walks past one's elders and betters without so much as
a word. I never see you now, Mémé, and you can't think how I miss you.
I was turning over some old letters just now and came upon some from
poor Mamma, which are all so full of love for you." "Thank you,
Basin," replied M. de Charlus in a broken voice, for he could never
speak without emotion of their mother.  "You must make up your mind to
let me fix up bachelor quarters for you at Guermantes," the Duke went
on. "It is nice to see the two brothers so affectionate towards each
other," the Princess said to Oriane. "Yes, indeed!  I don't suppose
you could find many brothers like that. I shall invite you to meet
him," she promised me. "You've not quarrelled with him?...  But what
can they be talking about?" she added in an anxious tone, for she
could catch only an occasional word of what they were saying. She had
always felt a certain jealousy of the pleasure that M. de Guermantes
found in talking to his brother of a past from which he was inclined
to keep his wife shut out. She felt that, when they were happy at
being together like this, and she, unable to restrain her impatient
curiosity, came and joined them, her coming did not add to their
pleasure. But this evening, this habitual jealousy was reinforced by
another. For if Mme. de Surgis had told M. de Guermantes how kind his
brother had been to her so that the Duke might thank his brother, at
the same time certain devoted female friends of the Guermantes couple
had felt it their duty to warn the Duchess that her husband's mistress
had been seen in close conversation with his brother. And this
information was torture to Mme. de Guermantes. "Think of the fun we
used to have at Guermantes long ago," the Duke went on.  "If you came
down sometimes in summer we could take up our old life again. Do you
remember old Father Courveau: 'Why is Pascal vexing?  Because he is
vec... vec...'" "_Said_!" put in M. de Charlus as though he were still
answering his tutor's question. "And why is Pascal vexed; because he
is vec... because he is vec... _Sing_! Very good, you will pass, you
are certain to be mentioned, and Madame la Duchesse will give you a
Chinese dictionary." "How it all comes back to me, young Même, and the
old china vase Hervey brought you from Saint-Denis, I can see it now.
You used to threaten us that you would go and spend your life in
China, you were so fond of the country; even then you used to love
wandering about all night. Ah! You were a peculiar type, for I can
honestly say that never in anything did you have the same tastes as
other people...." But no sooner had he uttered these words than the
Duke flamed up, as the saying is, for he was aware of his brother's
reputation, if not of his actual habits. As he never made any allusion
to them before his brother, he was all the more annoyed at having said
something which might be taken to refer to them, and more still at
having shewn his annoyance. After a moment's silence: "Who knows," he
said, to cancel the effect of his previous speech, "you were perhaps
in love with a Chinese girl, before loving so many white ones and
finding favour with them, if I am to judge by a certain lady to whom
you have given great pleasure this evening by talking to her.  She was
delighted with you." The Duke had vowed that he would not mention Mme.
de Surgis, but, in the confusion that the blunder he had just made had
wrought in his ideas, he had fallen upon the first that occurred to
him, which happened to be precisely the one that ought not to have
appeared in the conversation, although it had started it. But M. de
Charlus had observed his brother's blush. And, like guilty persons who
do not wish to appear embarrassed that you should talk in their
presence of the crime which they are supposed not to have committed,
and feel that they ought to prolong a dangerous conversation: "I am
charmed to hear it," he replied, "but I should like to go back to what
you were saying before, which struck me as being profoundly true. You
were saying that I never had the same ideas as other people, how right
you are, you said that I had peculiar tastes." "No," protested M. de
Guermantes who, as a matter of fact, had not used those words, and may
not have believed that their meaning was applicable to his brother.
Besides, what right had he to bully him about eccentricities which in
any case were vague enough or secret enough to have in no way impaired
the Baron's tremendous position in society? What was more, feeling
that the resources of his brother's position were about to be placed
at the service of his mistresses, the Duke told himself that this was
well worth a little tolerance in exchange; had he at that moment known
of some "peculiar" intimacy of his brother, M. de Guermantes would, in
the hope of the support that the other was going to give him, have
passed it over, shutting his eyes to it, and if need be lending a
hand. "Come along, Basin; good night, Palamède," said the Duchess,
who, devoured by rage and curiosity, could endure no more, "if you
have made up your minds to spend the night here, we might just as well
have stayed to supper. You have been keeping Marie and me standing for
the last half-hour." The Duke parted from his brother after a
significant pressure of his hand, and the three of us began to descend
the immense staircase of the Princess's house.

On either side of us, on the topmost steps, were scattered couples who
were waiting for their carriages to come to the door. Erect, isolated,
flanked by her husband and myself, the Duchess kept to the left of the
staircase, already wrapped in her Tiepolo cloak, her throat clasped in
its band of rubies, devoured by the eyes of women and men alike, who
sought to divine the secret of her beauty and distinction. Waiting for
her carriage upon the same step of the stair as Mme. de Guermantes,
but at the opposite side of it, Mme. de Gallardon, who had long
abandoned all hope of ever receiving a visit from her cousin, turned
her back so as not to appear to have seen her, and, what was more
important, so as not to furnish a proof of the fact that the other did
not greet her. Mme. de Gallardon was in an extremely bad temper
because some gentlemen in her company had taken it upon themselves to
speak to her of Oriane: "I have not the slightest desire to see her,"
she had replied to them, "I did see her, as a matter of fact, just
now, she is beginning to shew her age; it seems she can't get over it.
Basin says so himself. And, good lord, I can understand that, for, as
she has no brains, is as mischievous as a weevil, and has shocking
manners, she must know very well that, once her looks go, she will
have nothing left to fall back upon."

I had put on my greatcoat, for which M. de Guermantes, who dreaded
chills, reproached me, as we went down together, because of the heated
atmosphere indoors. And the generation of noblemen which more or less
passed through the hands of Mgr. Dupanloup speaks such bad French
(except the Castellane brothers) that the Duke expressed what was in
his mind thus: "It is better not to put on your coat before going out
of doors, at least _as a general rule_." I can see all that departing
crowd now, I can see, if I be not mistaken in placing him upon that
staircase, a portrait detached from its frame, the Prince de Sagan,
whose last appearance in society this must have been, baring his head
to offer his homage to the Duchess, with so sweeping a revolution of
his tall hat in his white-gloved hand (harmonising with the gardenia
in his buttonhole), that one felt surprised that it was not a plumed
felt hat of the old regime, several ancestral faces from which were
exactly reproduced in the face of this great gentleman. He stopped for
but a short time in front of her, but even his momentary attitudes
were sufficient to compose a complete tableau vivant, and, as it were,
an historical scene. Moreover, as he has since then died, and as I
never had more than a glimpse of him in his lifetime, he has so far
become for me a character in history, social history at least, that I
am quite astonished when I think that a woman and a man whom I know
are his sister and nephew.

While we were going downstairs, there came up, with an air of
weariness that became her, a woman who appeared to be about forty, but
was really older. This was the Princesse d'Orvillers, a natural
daughter, it was said, of the Duke of Parma, whose pleasant voice rang
with a vaguely Austrian accent. She advanced, tall, stooping, in a
gown of white flowered silk, her exquisite, throbbing, cankered bosom
heaving beneath a harness of diamonds and sapphires. Tossing her head
like a royal palfrey embarrassed by its halter of pearls, of an
incalculable value but an inconvenient weight, she let fall here and
there a gentle, charming gaze, of an azure which, as time began to
fade it, became more caressing than ever, and greeted most of the
departing guests with a friendly nod. "You choose a nice time to
arrive, Paulette!" said the Duchess. "Yes, I am so sorry! But really
it was a physical impossibility," replied the Princesse d'Orvillers,
who had acquired this sort of expression from the Duchesse de
Guermantes, but added to it her own natural sweetness and the air of
sincerity conveyed by the force of a remotely Teutonic accent in so
tender a voice. She appeared to be alluding to complications of life
too elaborate to be related, and not merely to evening parties,
although she had just come on from a succession of these. But it was
not they that obliged her to come so late. As the Prince de Guermantes
had for many years forbidden his wife to receive Mme.  d'Orvillers,
that lady, when the ban was withdrawn, contented herself with replying
to the other's invitations, so as not to appear to be thirsting after
them, by simply leaving cards. After two or three years of this
method, she came in person, but very late, as though after the
theatre. In this way she gave herself the appearance of attaching no
importance to the party, nor to being seen at it, but simply of having
come to pay the Prince and Princess a visit, for their own sakes,
because she liked them, at an hour when, the great majority of their
guests having already gone, she would "have them more to herself."

"Oriane has really sunk very low," muttered Mme. de Gallardon. "I
cannot understand Basin's allowing her to speak to Mme. d'Orvillers. I
am sure M. de Gallardon would never have allowed me." For my part, I
had recognised in Mme. d'Orvillers the woman who, outside the Hôtel
Guermantes, used to cast languishing glances at me, turn round, stop
and gaze into shop windows. Mme. de Guermantes introduced me, Mme.
d'Orvillers was charming, neither too friendly nor annoyed. She gazed
at me as at everyone else out of her gentle eyes.... But I was never
again, when I met her, to receive from her one of those overtures with
which she had seemed to be offering herself. There is a special kind
of glance, apparently of recognition, which a young man never receives
from certain women--nor from certain men--after the day on which they
have made his acquaintance and have learned that he is the friend of
people with whom they too are intimate.

We were told that the carriage was at the door. Mme. de Guermantes
gathered up her red skirt as though to go downstairs and get into the
carriage, but, seized perhaps by remorse, or by the desire to give
pleasure, and above all to profit by the brevity which the material
obstacle to prolonging it imposed upon so boring an action, looked at
Mme. de Gallardon; then, as though she had only just caught sight of
her, acting upon a sudden inspiration, before going down tripped
across the whole width of the step and, upon reaching her delighted
cousin, held out her hand. "Such a long time," said the Duchess who
then, so as not to have to develop all the regrets and legitimate
excuses that this formula might be supposed to contain, turned with a
look of alarm towards the Duke, who as a matter of fact, having gone
down with me to the carriage, was storming with rage when he saw that
his wife had gone over to Mme. de Gallardon and was holding up the
stream of carriages behind. "Oriane is still very good looking, after
all!" said Mme. de Gallardon. "People amuse me when they say that we
have quarrelled; we may (for reasons which we have no need to tell
other people) go for years without seeing one another, we have too
many memories in common ever to be separated, and in her heart she
must know that she cares far more for me than for all sorts of people
whom she sees every day and who are not of her rank." Mme. de
Gallardon was in fact like those scorned lovers who try desperately to
make people believe that they are better loved than those, whom their
fair one cherishes. And (by the praises which, without heeding their
contradiction of what she had been saying a moment earlier, she now
lavished in speaking of the Duchesse de Guermantes) she proved
indirectly that the other was thoroughly conversant with the maxims
that ought to guide in her career a great lady of fashion who, at the
selfsame moment when her most marvellous gown is exciting an
admiration not unmixed with envy, must be able to cross the whole
width of a staircase to disarm it. "Do at least take care not to wet
your shoes" (a brief but heavy shower of rain had fallen), said the
Duke, who was still furious at having been kept waiting.

On our homeward drive, in the confined space of the coupé, the red
shoes were of necessity very close to mine, and Mme. de Guermantes,
fearing that she might actually have touched me, said to the Duke:
"This young man will have to say to me, like the person in the
caricature: 'Madame, tell me at once that you love me, but don't tread
on my feet like that.'" My thoughts, however, were far from Mme. de
Guermantes. Ever since Saint-Loup had spoken to me of a young girl of
good family who frequented a house of ill-fame, and of the Baroness
Putbus's maid, it was in these two persons that were coalesced and
embodied the desires inspired in me day by day by countless beauties
of two classes, on the one hand the plebeian and magnificent, the
majestic lady's maids of great bouses, swollen with pride and saying
'we' when they spoke of Duchesses, on the other hand those girls of
whom it was enough for me sometimes, without even having seen them go
past in carriages or on foot, to have read the names in the account of
a ball for me to fall in love with them and, having conscientiously
searched the year-book for the country houses in which they spent the
summer (as often as not letting myself be led astray by a similarity
of names), to dream alternately of going to live amid the plains of
the West, the sandhills of the North, the pine-forests of the South.
But in vain might I fuse together all the most exquisite fleshly
matter to compose, after the ideal outline traced for me by
Saint-Loup, the young girl of easy virtue and Mme. Putbus's maid, my
two possessible beauties still lacked what I should never know until I
had seen them: individual character. I was to wear myself out in
seeking to form a mental picture, during the months in which I would
have preferred a lady's maid, of the maid of Mme. Putbus. But what
peace of mind after having been perpetually troubled by my restless
desires, for so many fugitive creatures whose very names I often did
not know, who were in any case so hard to find again, harder still to
become acquainted with, impossible perhaps to captivate, to have
subtracted from all that scattered, fugitive, anonymous beauty, two
choice specimens duly labelled, whom I was at least certain of being
able to procure when I chose. I kept putting off the hour for devoting
myself to this twofold pleasure, as I put off that for beginning to
work, but the certainty of having it whenever I chose dispensed me
almost from the necessity of taking it, like those soporific tablets
which one has only to have within reach of one's hand not to need them
and to fall asleep. In the whole universe I desired only two women, of
whose faces I could not, it is true, form any picture, but whose names
Saint-Loup had told me and had guaranteed their consent. So that, if
he had, by what he had said this evening, set my imagination a heavy
task, he had at the same time procured an appreciable relaxation, a
prolonged rest for my will.

"Well!" said the Duchess to me, "apart from your balls, can't I be of
any use to you? Have you found a house where you would like me to
introduce you?" I replied that I was afraid the only one that tempted
me was hardly fashionable enough for her. "Whose is that?" she asked
in a hoarse and menacing voice, scarcely opening her lips. "Baroness
Putbus." This time she pretended to be really angry. "No, not that! I
believe you're trying to make a fool of me. I don't even know how I
come to have heard the creature's name. But she is the dregs of
society. It's just as though you were to ask me for an introduction to
my milliner. And worse than that, for my milliner is charming. You are
a little bit cracked, my poor boy. In any case, I beg that you will be
polite to the people to whom I have introduced you, leave cards on
them, and go and see them, and not talk to them about Baroness Putbus
of whom they have never heard." I asked whether Mme.  d'Orvillers was
not inclined to be flighty. "Oh, not in the least, you are thinking of
some one else, why, she's rather a prude, if anything. Ain't she,
Basin?" "Yes, in any case I don't think there has ever been anything
to be said about her," said the Duke.

"You won't come with us to the ball?" he asked me. "I can lend you a
Venetian cloak and I know some one who will be damned glad to see you
there--Oriane for one, that I needn't say--but the Princesse de Parme.
She's never tired of singing your praises, and swears by you alone.
It's fortunate for you--since she is a trifle mature--that she is the
model of virtue. Otherwise she would certainly have chosen you as a
sigisbee, as it was called in my young days, a sort of _cavalière
servente_."

I was interested not in the ball but in my appointment with Albertine.
And so I refused. The carriage had stopped, the footman was shouting
for the gate to be opened, the horses pawing the ground until it was
flung apart and the carriage passed into the courtyard. "Till we meet
again," said the Duke. "I have sometimes regretted living so close to
Marie," the Duchess said to me, "because I may be very fond of her,
but I am not quite so fond of her company. But have never regretted it
so much as to-night, since it has allowed me so little of yours."
"Come, Oriane, no speechmaking." The Duchess would have liked me to
come inside for a minute. She laughed heartily, as did the Duke, when
I said that I could not because I was expecting a girl to call at any
moment. "You choose a funny time to receive visitors," she said to me.

"Come along, my child, there is no time to waste," said M. de
Guermantes to his wife. "It is a quarter to twelve, and time we were
dressed...." He came in collision, outside his front door which they
were grimly guarding, with the two ladies of the walking-sticks, who
had not been afraid to descend at dead of night from their
mountain-top to prevent a scandal.  "Basin, we felt we must warn you,
in case you were seen at that ball: poor Amanien has just passed away,
an hour ago." The Duke felt a momentary alarm. He saw the delights of
the famous ball snatched from him as soon as these accursed
mountaineers had informed him of the death of M.  d'Osmond. But he
quickly recovered himself and flung at his cousins a retort into which
he introduced, with his determination not to forego a pleasure, his
incapacity to assimilate exactly the niceties of the French language:
"He is dead! No, no, they exaggerate, they exaggerate!" And without
giving a further thought to his two relatives who, armed with their
alpenstocks, were preparing to make their nocturnal ascent, he fired
off a string of questions at his valet:

"Are you sure my helmet has come?" "Yes, Monsieur le Duc." "You're
sure there's a hole in it I can breathe through? I don't want to be
suffocated, damn it!" "Yes, Monsieur le Duc." "Oh, thunder of heaven,
this is an unlucky evening. Oriane, I forgot to ask Babal whether the
shoes with pointed toes were for you!" "But, my dear, the dresser from
the Opéra-Comique is here, he will tell us. I don't see how they could
go with your spurs." "Let us go and find the dresser," said the Duke.
"Good-bye, my boy, I should ask you to come in while we are trying on,
it would amuse you. But we should only waste time talking, it is
nearly midnight and we must not be late in getting there or we shall
spoil the set."

I too was in a hurry to get away from M. and Mme. de Guermantes as
quickly as possible. _Phèdre_ finished at about half past eleven.
Albertine must have arrived by now. I went straight to Françoise: "Is
Mlle. Albertine in the house?" "No one has called."

Good God, that meant that no one would call! I was in torment,
Al-bertine's visit seeming to me now all the more desirable, the less
certain it had become.

Françoise was cross too, but for quite a different reason. She had
just installed her daughter at the table for a succulent repast. But,
on hearing me come in, and seeing that there was not time to whip away
the dishes and put out needles and thread as though it were a work
party and not a supper party: "She has just been taking a spoonful of
soup," Françoise explained to me, "I forced her to gnaw a bit of
bone," to reduce thus to nothing her daughter's supper, as though the
crime lay in its abundance.  Even at luncheon or dinner, if I
committed the error of entering the kitchen, Françoise would pretend
that they had finished, and would even excuse herself with "I just
felt I could eat a _scrap_," or 'a _mouthjul_.' But I was speedily
reassured on seeing the multitude of the plates that covered the
table, which Françoise, surprised by my sudden entry, like a thief in
the night which she was not, had not had time to conjure out of sight.
Then she added: "Go along to your bed now, you have done enough work
today" (for she wished to make it appear that her daughter not only
cost us nothing, lived by privations, but was actually working herself
to death in our service). "You are only crowding up the kitchen, and
disturbing Master, who is expecting a visitor. Go on, upstairs," she
repeated, as though she were obliged to use her authority to send her
daughter to bed, who, the moment supper was out of the question,
remained in the kitchen only for appearance's sake, and if I had
stayed five minutes longer would have withdrawn of her own accord. And
turning to me, in that charming popular and yet, somehow, personal
French which was her spoken language: "Master doesn't see that her
face is just cut in two with want of sleep." I remained, delighted at
not having to talk to Françoise's daughter.

I have said that she came from a small village which was quite close
to her mother's, and yet different from it in the nature of the soil,
its cultivation, in dialect; above all in certain characteristics of
the inhabitants.  Thus the 'butcheress' and Françoise's niece did not
get on at all well together, but had this point in common, that, when
they went out on an errand, they would linger for hours at 'the
sister's' or 'the cousin's,' being themselves incapable of finishing a
conversation, in the course of which the purpose with which they had
set out faded so completely from their minds that, if we said to them
on their return:

"Well! Will M. le Marquis de Norpois be at home at a quarter past
six?" they did not even beat their brows and say: "Oh, I forgot all
about it," but "Oh! I didn't understand that Master wanted to know
that, I thought I had just to go and bid him good day." If they 'lost
their heads' in this manner about a thing that had been said to them
an hour earlier, it was on the other hand impossible to get out of
their heads what they had once heard said, by 'the' sister or cousin.
Thus, if the butcheress had heard it said that the English made war
upon us in '70 at the same time as the Prussians, and I had explained
to her until I was tired that this was not the case, every three weeks
the butcheress would repeat to me in the course of conversation: "It's
all because of that war the English made on us in '70, with the
Prussians." "But I've told you a hundred times that you are
wrong."--She would then answer, implying that her conviction was in no
way shaken: "In any case, that's no reason for wishing them any harm.
Plenty of water has run under the bridges since '70," and so forth. On
another occasion, advocating a war with England which I opposed, she
said: "To be sure, it's always better not to go to war; but when you
must, it's best to do it at once. As the sister was explaining just
now, ever since that war the English made on us in '70, the commercial
treaties have ruined us. After we've beaten them, we won't allow one
Englishman into France, unless he pays three hundred francs to come
in, as we have to pay now to land in England."

Such was, in addition to great honesty and, when they were speaking,
an obstinate refusal to allow any interruption, going back twenty
times over to the point at which they had been interrupted, which
ended by giving to their talk the unshakable solidity of a Bach fugue,
the character of the inhabitants of this tiny village which did not
boast five hundred, set among its chestnuts, its willows, and its
fields of potatoes and beetroot.

Franchise's daughter, on the other hand, spoke (regarding herself as
an up-to-date woman who had got out of the old ruts) Parisian slang
and •was well versed in all the jokes of the day. Françoise having
told her that I had come from the house of a Princess: "Oh, indeed!
The Princess of Brazil, I suppose, where the nuts come from." Seeing
that I was expecting a visitor, she pretended to suppose that my name
was Charles. I replied innocently that it was not, which enabled her
to get in: "Oh, I thought it was! And I was just saying to myself,
_Charles attend_ (charlatan)." This was not in the best of taste. But
I was less unmoved when, to console me for Albertine's delay, she said
to me: "I expect you'll go on waiting till doomsday. She's never
coming. Oh! Those modern flappers!"

And so her speech differed from her mother's; but, what is more
curious, her mother's speech was not the same as that of her
grandmother, a native of Bailleau-le-Pin, which was so close to
Franchise's village. And yet the dialects differed slightly, like the
scenery. Franchise's mother's village, scrambling down a steep bank
into a ravine, was overgrown with willows.  And, miles away from
either of them, there was, on the contrary, a small district of France
where the people spoke almost precisely the same dialect as at
Méséglise. I made this discovery only to feel its drawbacks. In fact,
I once came upon Françoise eagerly conversing with a neighbour's
housemaid, who came from this village and spoke its dialect. They
could more or less understand one another, I did not understand a
word, they knew this but did not however cease (excused, they felt, by
the joy of being fellow-countrywomen although born so far apart) to
converse in this strange tongue in front of me, like people who do not
wish to be understood.  These picturesque studies in linguistic
geography and comradeship be-lowstairs were continued weekly in the
kitchen, without my deriving any pleasure from them.

Since, whenever the outer gate opened, the doorkeeper pressed an
electric button which lighted the stairs, and since all the occupants
of the building had already come in, I left the kitchen immediately
and went to sit down in the hall, keeping watch, at a point where the
curtains did not quite meet over the glass panel of the outer door,
leaving visible a vertical strip of semi-darkness on the stair. If,
all of a sudden, this strip turned to a golden yellow, that would mean
that Albertine had just entered the building and would be with me in a
minute; nobody else could be coming at that time of night. And I sat
there, unable to take my eyes from the strip which persisted in
remaining dark; I bent my whole body forward to make certain of
noticing any change; but, gaze as I might, the vertical black band,
despite my impassioned longing, did not give me the intoxicating
delight that I should have felt had I seen it changed by a sudden and
significant magic to a luminous bar of gold. This was a great to do to
make about that Albertine to whom I had not given three minutes'
thought during the Guermantes party! But, reviving my feelings when in
the past I had been kept waiting by other girls, Gilberte especially,
when she delayed her coming, the prospect of having to forego a simple
bodily pleasure caused me an intense mental suffering.

I was obliged to retire to my room. Françoise followed me. She felt
that, as I had come away from my party, there was no point in my
keeping the rose that I had in my buttonhole, and approached to take
it from me.  Her action, by reminding me that Albertine was perhaps
not coming, and by obliging me also to confess that I wished to look
smart for her benefit, caused an irritation that was increased by the
fact that, in tugging myself free, I crushed the flower and Françoise
said to me: "It would have been better to let me take it than to go
and spoil it like that." But anything that she might say exasperated
me. When we are kept waiting, we suffer so keenly from the absence of
the person for whom we are longing that we cannot endure the presence
of anyone else.

When Françoise had left my room, it occurred to me that, if it only
meant that now I wanted to look my best before Albertine, it was a
pity that I had so many times let her see me unshaved, with several
days' growth of beard, on the evenings when I let her come in to renew
our caresses. I felt that she took no interest in me and was giving me
the cold shoulder.  To make my room look a little brighter, in case
Albertine should still come, and because it was one of the prettiest
things that I possessed, I set out, for the first time for years, on
the table by my bed, the turquoise-studded cover which Gilberte had
had made for me to hold Bergotte's pamphlet, and which, for so long a
time, I had insisted on keeping by me while I slept, with the agate
marble. Besides, as much perhaps as Albertine herself, who still did
not come, her presence at that moment in an 'alibi' which she had
evidently found more attractive, and of which I knew nothing, gave me
a painful feeling which, in spite of what I had said, barely an hour
before, to Swann, as to my incapacity for being jealous, might, if I
had seen my friend at less protracted intervals, have changed into an
anxious need to know where, with whom, she was spending her time. I
dared not send round to Albertine's house, it was too late, but in the
hope that, having supper perhaps with some other girls, in a café, she
might take it into her head to telephone to me, I turned the switch
and, restoring the connexion to my own room, cut it off between the
post office and the porter's lodge to which it was generally switched
at that hour. A receiver in the little passage on which Françoise's
room opened would have been simpler, less inconvenient, but useless.
The advance of civilisation enables each of us to display unsuspected
merits or fresh defects which make him dearer or more insupportable to
his friends. Thus Dr. Bell's invention had enabled Françoise to
acquire an additional defect, which was that of refusing, however
important, however urgent the occasion might be, to make use of the
telephone. She would manage to disappear whenever anybody was going to
teach her how to use it, as people disappear when it is time for them
to be vaccinated. And so the telephone was installed in my bedroom,
and, that it might not disturb my parents, a rattle had been
substituted for the bell. I did not move, for fear of not hearing it
sound. So motionless did I remain that, for the first time for months,
I noticed the tick of the clock. Françoise came in to make the room
tidy. She began talking to me, but I hated her conversation, beneath
the uniformly trivial continuity of which my feelings were changing
from one minute to another, passing from fear to anxiety; from anxiety
to complete disappointment. Belying the words of vague satisfaction
which I thought myself obliged to address to her, I could feel that my
face was so wretched that I pretended to be suffering from rheumatism,
to account for the discrepancy between my feigned indifference and my
woebegone expression; besides, I was afraid that her talk, which, for
that matter, Françoise carried on in an undertone (not on account of
Albertine, for she considered that all possibility of her coming was
long past), might prevent me from hearing the saving call which now
would not sound. At length Françoise went off to bed; I dismissed her
with an abrupt civility, so that the noise she made in leaving the
room should not drown that of the telephone. And I settled down again
to listen, to suffer; when we are kept waiting, from the ear which
takes in sounds to the mind which dissects and analyses them, and from
the mind to the heart, to which it transmits its results, the double
journey is so rapid that we cannot even detect its course, and imagine
that we have been listening directly with our heart.

I was tortured by the incessant recurrence of my longing, ever more
anxious and never to be gratified, for the sound of a call; arrived at
the culminating point of a tortuous ascent through the coils of my
lonely anguish, from the heart of the populous, nocturnal Paris that
had suddenly come close to me, there beside my bookcase, I heard all
at once, mechanical and sublime, like, in _Tristan_, the fluttering
veil or the shepherd's pipe, the purr of the telephone. I sprang to
the instrument, it was Albertine. "I'm not disturbing you, ringing you
up at this hour?" "Not at all..." I said, restraining my joy, for her
remark about the lateness of the hour was doubtless meant as an
apology for coming, in a moment, so late, and did not mean that she
was not coming. "Are you coming round?" I asked in a tone of
indifference. "Why... no, unless you absolutely must see me."

Part of me which the other part sought to join was in Albertine. It
was essential that she come, but I did not tell her so at first; now
that we were in communication, I said to myself that I could always
oblige her at the last moment either to come to me or to let me hasten
to her. "Yes, I am near home," she said, "and miles away from you; I
hadn't read your note properly. I have just found it again and was
afraid you might be waiting up for me." I felt sure that she was
lying, and it was now, in my fury, from a desire not so much to see
her as to upset her plans that I determined to make her come. But I
felt it better to refuse at first what in a few moments I should try
to obtain from her. But where was she? With the sound of her voice
were blended other sounds: the braying of a bicyclist's horn, a
woman's voice singing, a brass band in the distance rang out as
distinctly as the beloved voice, as though to shew me that it was
indeed Albertine in her actual surroundings who was beside me at that
moment, like a clod of earth with which we have carried away all the
grass that was growing from it. The same sounds that I heard were
striking her ear also, and were distracting her attention: details of
truth, extraneous to the subject under discussion, valueless in
themselves, all the more necessary to our perception of the miracle
for what it was; elements sober and charming, descriptive of some
street in Paris, elements heart-rending also and cruel of some unknown
festivity which, after she came away from _Phèdre_, had prevented
Albertine from coming to me. "I must warn you first of all that I
don't in the least want you to come, because, at this time of night,
it will be a frightful nuisance..." I said to her, "I'm dropping with
sleep. Besides, oh, well, there are endless complications. I am bound
to say that there was no possibility of your misunderstanding my
letter. You answered that it was all right. Very well, if you hadn't
understood, what did you mean by that?" "I said it was all right, only
I couldn't quite remember what we had arranged. But I see you're cross
with me, I'm sorry. I wish now I'd never gone to _Phèdre_. If I'd
known there was going to be all this fuss about it..." she went on, as
people invariably do when, being in the wrong over one thing, they
pretend to suppose that they are being blamed for another. "I am not
in the least annoyed about _Phèdre_, seeing it was I that asked you to
go to it." "Then you are angry with me; it's a nuisance it's so late
now, otherwise I should have come to you, but I shall call tomorrow or
the day after and make it up." "Oh, please, Albertine, I beg of you
not to, after making me waste an entire evening, the least you can do
is to leave me in peace for the next few days. I shan't be free for a
fortnight or three weeks. Listen, if it worries you to think that we
seem to be parting in anger, and perhaps you are right, after all,
then I greatly prefer, all things considered, since I have been
waiting for you all this time and you have not gone home yet, that you
should come at once. I shall take a cup of coffee to keep myself
awake." "Couldn't you possibly put it off till tomorrow?  Because the
trouble is...." As I listened to these words of deprecation, uttered
as though she did not intend to come, I felt that, with the longing to
see again the velvet-blooming face which in the past, at Balbec, used
to point all my days to the moment when, by the mauve September sea, I
should be walking by the side of that roseate flower, a very different
element was painfully endeavouring to combine. This terrible need of a
person, at Combray I had learned to know it in the case of my mother,
and to the pitch of wanting to die if she sent word to me by Françoise
that she could not come upstairs. This effort on the part of the old
sentiment, to combine and form but a single element with the other,
more recent, which had for its voluptuous object only the coloured
surface, the rosy complexion of a flower of the beach, this effort
results often only in creating (in the chemical sense) a new body,
which can last for but a few moments. This evening, at any rate, and
for long afterwards, the two elements remained apart. But already,
from the last words that had reached me over the telephone, I was
beginning to understand that Albertine's life was situated (not in a
material sense, of course) at so great a distance from mine that I
should always have to make a strenuous exploration before I could lay
my hand on her, and, what was more, organised like a system of
earthworks, and, for greater security, after the fashion which, at a
later period, we learned to call camouflaged. Albertine, in fact,
belonged, although at a slightly higher social level, to that class of
persons to whom their door-keeper promises your messenger that she
will deliver your letter when she comes in (until the day when you
realise that it is precisely she, the person whom you met out of
doors, and to whom you have allowed yourself to write, who is the
door-keeper. So that she does indeed live (but in the lodge, only) at
the address she has given you, which for that matter is that of a
private brothel, in which the door-keeper acts as pander), or who
gives as her address a house where she is known to accomplices who
will not betray her secret to you, from which your letters will be
forwarded to her, but in which she does not live, keeps at the most a
few articles of toilet. Lives entrenched behind five or six lines of
defence, so that when you try to see the woman, or to find out about
her, you invariably arrive too far to the right, or to the left, or
too early, or too late, and may remain for months on end, for years
even, knowing nothing. About Albertine, I felt that I should never
find out anything, that, out of that tangled mass of details of fact
and falsehood, I should never unravel the truth: and that it would
always be so, unless I were to shut her up in prison (but prisoners
escape) until the end. This evening, this conviction gave me only a
vague uneasiness, in which however I could detect a shuddering
anticipation of long periods of suffering to come.

"No," I replied, "I told you a moment ago that I should not be free
for the next three weeks--no more to-morrow than any other day." "Very
well, in that case... I shall come this very instant... it's a
nuisance, because I am at a friend's house, and she...." I saw that
she had not believed that I would accept her offer to come, which
therefore was not sincere, and I decided to force her hand. "What do
you suppose I care about your friend, either come or don't, it's for
you to decide, it wasn't I that asked you to come, it was you who
suggested it to me." "Don't be angry with me, I am going to jump into
a cab now and shall be with you in ten minutes." And so from that
Paris out of whose murky depths there had already emanated as far as
my room, delimiting the sphere of action of an absent person, a voice
which was now about to emerge and appear, after this preliminary
announcement, it was that Albertine whom I had known long ago beneath
the sky of Balbec, when the waiters of the Grand Hotel, as they laid
the tables, were blinded by the glow of the setting sun, when, the
glass having been removed from all the windows, every faintest murmur
of the evening passed freely from the beach where the last strolling
couples still lingered, into the vast dining-room in which the first
diners had not yet taken their places, and, across the mirror placed
behind the cashier's desk, there passed the red reflexion of the hull,
and lingered long after it the grey reflexion of the smoke of the last
steamer for Rivebelle. I no longer asked myself what could have made
Albertine late, and, when Françoise came into my room to inform me:
"Mademoiselle Albertine is here," if I answered without even turning
my head, that was only to conceal my emotion: "What in the world makes
Mademoiselle Albertine come at this time of night!" But then, raising
my eyes to look at Françoise, as though curious to hear her answer
which must corroborate the apparent sincerity of my question, I
perceived, with admiration and wrath, that, capable of rivalling Berma
herself in the art of endowing with speech inanimate garments and the
lines of her face, Françoise had taught their part to her bodice, her
hair--the whitest threads of which had been brought to the surface,
were displayed there like a birth-certificate--her neck bowed by
weariness and obedience. They commiserated her for having been dragged
from her sleep and from her warm bed, in the middle of the night, at
her age, obliged to bundle into her clothes in haste, at the risk of
catching pneumonia. And so, afraid that I might have seemed to be
apologising for Albertine's late arrival: "Anyhow, I'm very glad she
has come, it's just what I wanted," and I gave free vent to my
profound joy. It did not long remain unclouded, when I had heard
Françoise's reply. Without uttering a word of complaint, seeming
indeed to be doing her best to stifle an irrepressible cough, and
simply folding her shawl over her bosom as though she were feeling
cold, she began by telling me everything that she had said to
Albertine, whom she had not forgotten to ask after her aunt's health.
"I was just saying, Monsieur must have been afraid that Mademoiselle
was not coming, because this is no time to pay visits, it's nearly
morning. But she must have been in some place where she was enjoying
herself, because she never even said as much as that she was sorry she
had kept Monsieur waiting, she answered me with a devil-may-care look,
'Better late than never!'" And Françoise added, in words that pierced
my heart: "When she spoke like that she gave herself away. She would
have liked to hide what she was thinking, perhaps, but...."

I had no cause for astonishment. I said, a few pages back, that
Françoise rarely paid attention, when she was sent with a message, if
not to what she herself had said, which she would willingly relate in
detail, at any rate to the answer that we were awaiting. But if,
making an exception, she repeated to us the things that our friends
had said, however short they might be, she generally arranged,
appealing if need be to the expression, the tone that, she assured us,
had accompanied them, to make them in some way or other wounding. At a
pinch, she would bow her head beneath an insult (probably quite
imaginary) which she had received from a tradesman to whom we had sent
her, provided that, being addressed to her as our representative, who
was speaking in our name, the insult might indirectly injure us. The
only thing would have been to tell her that she had misunderstood the
man, that she was suffering from persecution mania and that the
shopkeepers were not at all in league against her. However, their
sentiments affected me little. It was a very different matter, what
Albertine's sentiments were. And, as she repeated the ironical words:
"Better late than never!" Françoise at once made me see the friends in
whose company Albertine had finished the evening, preferring their
company, therefore, to mine. "She's a comical sight, she has a little
flat hat on, with those big eyes of hers, it does make her look funny,
especially with her cloak which she did ought to have sent to the
amender's, for it's all in holes. She amuses me," added, as though
laughing at Albertine, Françoise who rarely shared my impressions, but
felt a need to communicate her own. I refused even to appear to
understand that this laugh was indicative of scorn, but, to give tit
for tat, replied, although I had never seen the little hat to which
she referred: "What you call a 'little flat hat' is a simply
charming...." "That is to say, it's just nothing at all," said
Françoise, giving expression, frankly this time, to her genuine
contempt. Then (in a mild and leisurely tone so that my mendacious
answer might appear to be the expression not of my anger but of the
truth), wasting no time, however, so as not to keep Albertine waiting,
I heaped upon Françoise these cruel words: "You are excellent," I said
to her in a honeyed voice, "you are kind, you have a thousand merits,
but you have never learned a single thing since the day when you first
came to Paris, either about ladies' clothes or about how to pronounce
words without making silly blunders." And this reproach was
particularly stupid, for those French words which We are so proud of
pronouncing accurately are themselves only blunders made by the Gallic
lips which mispronounced Latin or Saxon, our language being merely a
defective pronunciation of several others.

The genius of language in a living state, the future and past of
French, that is what ought to have interested me in Françoise's
mistakes. Her 'amender' for 'mender' was not so curious as those
animals that survive from remote ages, such as the whale or the
giraffe, and shew us the states through which animal life has passed.
"And," I went on, "since you haven't managed to learn in all these
years, you never will. But don't let that distress you, it doesn't
prevent you from being a very good soul, and making spiced beef with
jelly to perfection, and lots of other things as well. The hat that
you think so simple is copied from a hat belonging to the Princesse de
Guermantes which cost five hundred francs. However, I mean to give
Mlle. Albertine an even finer one very soon." I knew that what would
annoy Françoise more than anything was the thought of my spending
money upon people whom she disliked. She answered me in a few words
which were made almost unintelligible by a sudden attack of
breathless-ness.  When I discovered afterwards that she had a weak
heart, how remorseful I felt that I had never denied myself the fierce
and sterile pleasure of making these retorts to her speeches.
Françoise detested Albertine, moreover, because, being poor, Albertine
could not enhance what Françoise regarded as my superior position. She
smiled benevolently whenever I was invited by Mme. de Villeparisis. On
the other hand, she was indignant that Albertine did not practice
reciprocity. It came to my being obliged to invent fictitious presents
which she was supposed to have given me, in the existence of which
Françoise never for an instant believed. This want of reciprocity
shocked her most of all in the matter of food. That Albertine should
accept dinners from Mamma, when we were not invited to Mme.
Bontemps's (who for that matter spent half her time out of Paris, her
husband accepting 'posts' as in the old days when he had had enough of
the Ministry), seemed to her an indelicacy on the part of my friend
which she rebuked indirectly by repeating a saying current at Combray:

  "Let's eat my bread."
  "Ay, that's the stuff."
  "Let's eat thy bread."
  "I've had enough."

I pretended that I was obliged to write a letter. "To whom were you
writing?" Albertine asked me as she entered the room. "To a pretty
little friend of mine, Gilberte Swann. Don't you know her?" "No." I
decided not to question Albertine as to how she had spent the evening,
I felt that I should only find fault with her and that we should not
have any time left, seeing how late it was already, to be reconciled
sufficiently to pass to kisses and caresses. And so it was with these
that I chose to begin from the first moment. Besides, if I was a
little calmer, I was not feeling happy.  The loss of all orientation,
of all sense of direction that we feel when we are kept waiting, still
continues, after the coming of the person awaited, and, taking the
place, inside us, of the calm spirit in which we were picturing her
coming as so great a pleasure, prevents us from deriving any from it.
Albertine was in the room: my unstrung nerves, continuing to flutter,
were still expecting her. "I want a nice kiss, Albertine." "As many as
you like," she said to me in her kindest manner. I had never seen her
looking so pretty. "Another?" "Why, you know it's a great, great
pleasure to me." "And a thousand times greater to me," she replied.
"Oh! What a pretty book-cover you have there!" "Take it, I give it to
you as a keepsake." "You are too kind...." People would be cured for
ever of romanticism if they could make up their minds, in thinking of
the girl they love, to try to be the man they will be when they are no
longer in love with her.  Gilberte's book-cover, her agate marble,
must have derived their importance in the past from some purely inward
distinction, since now they were to me a book-cover, a marble like any
others.

I asked Albertine if she would like something to drink. "I seem to see
oranges over there and water," she said. "That will be perfect." I was
thus able to taste with her kisses that refreshing coolness which had
seemed to me to be better than they, at the Princesse de Guermantes's.
And the orange squeezed into the water seemed to yield to me, as I
drank, the secret life of its ripening growth, its beneficent action
upon certain states of that human body which belongs to so different a
kingdom, its powerlessness to make that body live, but on the other
hand the process of irrigation by which it was able to benefit it, a
hundred mysteries concealed by the fruit from my senses, but not from
my intellect.

When Albertine had gone, I remembered that I had promised Swann that I
would write to Gilberte, and courtesy, I felt, demanded that I should
do so at once. It was without emotion and as though drawing a line at
the foot of a boring school essay, that I traced upon the envelope the
name _Gilberte Swann_, with which at one time I used to cover my
exercise-books to give myself the illusion that I was corresponding
with her. For if, in the past, it had been I who wrote that name, now
the task had been deputed by Habit to one of the many secretaries whom
she employs. He could write down Gilberte's name with all the more
calm, in that, placed with me only recently by Habit, having but
recently entered my service, he had never known Gilberte, and knew
only, without attaching any reality to the words, because he had heard
me speak of her, that she was a girl with whom I had once been in
love.

I could not accuse her of hardness. The person that I now was in
relation to her was the clearest possible proof of what she herself
had been: the book-cover, the agate marble had simply become for me in
relation to Albertine what they had been for Gilberte, what they would
have been to anybody who had not suffused them with the glow of an
internal flame.  But now I felt a fresh disturbance which in its turn
destroyed the very real power of things and words. And when Albertine
said to me, in a further outburst of gratitude: "I do love
turquoises!" I answered her: "Do not let them die," entrusting to them
as to some precious jewel the future of our friendship which however
was no more capable of inspiring a sentiment in Albertine than it had
been of preserving the sentiment that had bound me in the past to
Gilberte.

There appeared about this time a phenomenon which deserves mention
only because it recurs in every important period of history. At the
same moment when I was writing to Gilberte, M. de Guermantes, just
home from his ball, still wearing his helmet, was thinking that next
day he would be compelled to go into formal mourning, and decided to
proceed a week earlier to the cure that he had been ordered to take.
When he returned from it three weeks later (to anticipate for a
moment, since I am still finishing my letter to Gilberte), those
friends of the Duke who had seen him, so indifferent at the start,
turn into a raving anti-Dreyfusard, were left speechless with
amazement when they heard him (as though the action of the cure had
not been confined to his bladder) answer: "Oh, well, there'll be a
fresh trial and he'll be acquitted; you can't sentence a fellow
without any evidence against him. Did you ever see anyone so gaga as
Forcheville? An officer, leading the French people to the shambles,
heading straight for war. Strange times we live in." The fact was
that, in the interval, the Duke had met, at the spa, three charming
ladies (an Italian princess and her two sisters-in-law). After hearing
them make a few remarks about the books they were reading, a play that
was being given at the Casino, the Duke had at once understood that he
was dealing with women of superior intellect, by whom, as he expressed
it, he would be knocked out in the first round. He was all the more
delighted to be asked to play bridge by the Princess. But, the moment
he entered her sitting room, as he began, in the fervour of his
double-dyed anti-Dreyfusism: "Well, we don't hear very much more of
the famous Dreyfus and his appeal," his stupefaction had been great
when he heard the Princess and her sisters-in-law say: "It's becoming
more certain every day. They can't keep a man in prison who has done
nothing." "Eh? Eh?" the Duke had gasped at first, as at the discovery
of a fantastic nickname employed in this household to turn to ridicule
a person whom he had always regarded as intelligent.  But, after a few
days, as, from cowardice and the spirit of imitation, we shout 'Hallo,
Jojotte' without knowing why at a great artist whom we hear so
addressed by the rest of the household, the Duke, still greatly
embarrassed by the novelty of this attitude, began nevertheless to
say: "After all, if there is no evidence against him." The three
charming ladies decided that he was not progressing rapidly enough and
began to bully him: "But really, nobody with a grain of intelligence
can ever have believed for a moment that there was anything." Whenever
any revelation came out that was 'damning' to Dreyfus, and the Duke,
supposing that now he was going to convert the three charming ladies,
came to inform them of it, they burst out laughing and had no
difficulty in proving to him, with great dialectic subtlety, that his
argument was worthless and quite absurd. The Duke had returned to
Paris a frantic Dreyfusard. And certainly we do not suggest that the
three charming ladies were not, in this instance, messengers of truth.
But it is to be observed that, every ten years or so, when we have
left a man filled with a genuine conviction, it so happens that an
intelligent couple, or simply a charming lady, come in touch with him
and after a few months he is won over to the opposite camp. And in
this respect there are plenty of countries that behave like the
sincere man, plenty of countries which we have left full of hatred for
another race, and which, six months later, have changed their attitude
and broken off all their alliances.

I ceased for some time to see Albertine, but continued, failing Mme.
de Guermantes who no longer spoke to my imagination, to visit other
fairies and their dwellings, as inseparable from themselves as is from
the mollusc that fashioned it and takes shelter within it the pearly
or enamelled valve or crenellated turret of its shell. I should not
have been able to classify these ladies, the difficulty being that the
problem was so vague in its terms and impossible not merely to solve
but to set. Before coming to the lady, one had first to approach the
faery mansion. Now as one of them was always at home after luncheon in
the summer months, before I reached her house I was obliged to close
the hood of my cab, so scorching were the sun's rays, the memory of
which was, without my realising it, to enter into my general
impression. I supposed that I was merely being driven to the
Cours-la-Reine; in reality, before arriving at the gathering which a
man of wider experience would perhaps have despised, I received, as
though on a journey through Italy, a delicious, dazzled sensation from
which the house was never afterwards to be separated in my memory.
What was more, in view of the heat of the season and the hour, the
lady had hermetically closed the shutters of the vast rectangular
saloons on the ground floor in which she entertained her friends. I
had difficulty at first in recognising my hostess and her guests, even
the Duchesse de Guermantes, who in her hoarse voice bade me come and
sit down next to her, in a Beauvais armchair illustrating the Rape of
Europa. Then I began to make out on the walls the huge eighteenth
century tapestries representing vessels whose masts were hollyhocks in
blossom, beneath which I sat as though in the palace not of the Seine
but of Neptune, by the brink of the river Oceanus, where the Duchesse
de Guermantes became a sort of goddess of the waters. I should never
stop if I began to describe all the different types of drawing-room.
This example is sufficient to shew that I introduced into my social
judgments poetical impressions which I never included among the items
when I came to add up the sum, so that, when I was calculating the
importance of a drawing-room, my total was never correct.

Certainly, these were by no means the only sources of error, but I
have no time left now, before my departure for Balbec (where to my
sorrow I am going to make a second stay which will also be my last),
to start upon a series of pictures of society which will find their
place in due course. I need here say only that to this first erroneous
reason (my relatively frivolous existence which made people suppose
that I was fond of society) for my letter to Gilberte, and for that
reconciliation with the Swann family to which it seemed to point,
Odette might very well, and with equal inaccuracy, have added a
second. I have suggested hitherto the different aspects that the
social world assumes in the eyes of a single person only by supposing
that, if a woman who, the other day, knew nobody now goes everywhere,
and another who occupied a commanding position is ostracised, one is
inclined to regard these changes merely as those purely personal ups
and downs of fortune which from time to time bring about in a given
section of society, in consequence of speculations on the stock
exchange, a crashing downfall or enrichment beyond the dreams of
avarice. But there is more in it than that. To a certain extent social
manifestations (vastly less important than artistic movements,
political crises, the evolution that sweeps the public taste in the
direction of the theatre of ideas, then of impressionist painting,
then of music that is German and complicated, then of music that is
Russian and simple, or of ideas of social service, justice, religious
reaction, patriotic outbursts) are nevertheless an echo of them,
remote, broken, uncertain, disturbed, changing. So that even
drawing-rooms cannot be portrayed in a static immobility which has
been conventionally employed up to this point for the study of
characters, though these too must be carried along in an almost
historical flow. The thirst for novelty that leads men of the world
who are more or less sincere in their eagerness for information as to
intellectual evolution to frequent the circles in which they can trace
its development makes them prefer as a rule some hostess as yet
undiscovered, who represents still in their first freshness the hopes
of a superior culture so faded and tarnished in the women who for long
years have wielded the social sceptre and who, having no secrets from
these men, no longer appeal to their imagination. And every age finds
itself personified thus in fresh women, in a fresh group of women,
who, closely adhering to whatever may at that moment be the latest
object of interest, seem, in their attire, to be at that moment making
their first public appearance, like an unknown species, born of the
last deluge, irresistible beauties of each new Consulate, each new
Directory.  But very often the new hostess is simply like certain
statesmen who may be in office for the first time but have for the
last forty years been knocking at every door without seeing any open,
women who were not known in society but who nevertheless had been
receiving, for years past, and failing anything better, a few 'chosen
friends' from its ranks. To be sure, this is not always the case, and
when, with the prodigious flowering of the Russian Ballet, revealing
one after another Bakst, Nijinski, Benoist, the genius of Stravinski,
Princess Yourbeletieff, the youthful sponsor of all these new great
men, appeared bearing on her head an immense, quivering egret, unknown
to the women of Paris, which they all sought to copy, one might have
supposed that this marvellous creature had been imported in their
innumerable baggage, and as their most priceless treasure, by the
Russian dancers; but when presently, by her side, in her stage box, we
see, at every performance of the 'Russians,' seated like a true fairy
godmother, unknown until that moment to the aristocracy, Mme.
Verdurin, we shall be able to tell the society people who naturally
supposed that Mme. Verdurin had recently entered the country with
Diaghileff's troupe, that this lady had already existed in different
periods, and had passed through various avatars of which this is
remarkable only in being the first that is bringing to pass at last,
assured henceforth, and at an increasingly rapid pace, the success so
long awaited by the Mistress. In Mme. Swann's case, it is true, the
novelty she represented had not the same collective character. Her
drawing-room was crystallised round a man, a dying man, who had almost
in an instant passed, at the moment when his talent was exhausted,
from obscurity to a blaze of glory. The passion for Bergotte's works
was unbounded.  He spent the whole day, on show, at Mme. Swann's, who
would whisper to some influential man: "I shall say a word to him, he
will write an article for you." He was, for that matter, quite capable
of doing so and even of writing a little play for Mme. Swann. A stage
nearer to death, he was not quite so feeble as at the time when he
used to come and inquire after my grandmother. This was because
intense physical suffering had enforced a regime on him. Illness is
the doctor to whom we pay most heed: to kindness, to knowledge we make
promises only; pain we obey.

It is true that the Verdurins and their little clan had at this time a
far more vital interest than the drawing-room, faintly nationalist,
more markedly literary, and pre-eminently Bergottic, of Mme. Swann.
The little clan was in fact the active centre of a long political
crisis which had reached its maximum of intensity: Dreyfusism. But
society people were for the most part so violently opposed to the
appeal that a Dreyfusian house seemed to them as inconceivable a thing
as, at an earlier period, a Communard house. The Principessa di
Caprarola, who had made Mme. Verdurin's acquaintance over a big
exhibition which she had organised, had indeed been to pay her a long
call, in the hope of seducing a few interesting specimens of the
little clan and incorporating them in her own drawing-room, a call in
the course of which the Princess (playing the Duchesse de Guermantes
in miniature) had made a stand against current ideas, declared that
the people in her world were idiots, all of which, thought Mme.
Verdurin, shewed great courage. But this courage was not, in the
sequel, to go the length of venturing, under fire of the gaze of
nationalist ladies, to bow to Mme. Verdurin at the Balbec races. With
Mme. Swann, on the contrary, the anti-Dreyfusards gave her credit for
being 'sound,' which, in a woman married to a Jew, was doubly
meritorious. Nevertheless, the people who had never been to her house
imagined her as visited only by a few obscure Israelites and disciples
of Bergotte. In this way we place women far more outstanding than Mme.
Swann on the lowest rung of the social ladder, whether on account of
their origin, or because they do not care about dinner parties and
receptions at which we never see them, and suppose this, erroneously,
to be due to their not having been invited, or because they never
speak of their social connexions, but only of literature and art, or
because people conceal the fact that they go to their houses, or they,
to avoid impoliteness to yet other people, conceal the fact that they
open their doors to these, in short for a thousand reasons which,
added together, make of one or other of them in certain people's eyes,
the sort of woman whom one does not know. So it was with Odette. Mme.
d'Epinoy, when busy collecting some subscription for the 'Patrie
Française,' having been obliged to go and see her, as she would have
gone to her dressmaker, convinced moreover that she would find only a
lot of faces that were not so much impossible as completely unknown,
stood rooted to the ground when the door opened not upon the
drawing-room she imagined but upon a magic hall in which, as in the
transformation scene of a pantomime, she recognised in the dazzling
chorus, half reclining upon divans, seated in armchairs, addressing
their hostess by her Christian name, the royalties, the duchesses,
whom she, the Princesse d'Epinoy, had the greatest difficulty in
enticing into her own drawing-room, and to whom at that moment,
beneath the benevolent eyes of Odette, the Marquis du Lau, Comte Louis
de Turenne, Prince Borghese, the Duc d'Estrées, carrying orangeade and
cakes, were acting as cupbearers and henchmen. The Princesse d'Epinoy,
as she instinctively made people's social value inherent in
themselves, was obliged to disincarnate Mme. Swann and reincarnate her
in a fashionable woman. Our ignorance of the real existence led by the
women who do not advertise it in the newspapers draws thus over
certain situations (thereby helping to differentiate one house from
another) a veil of mystery. In Odette's case, at the start, a few men
of the highest society, anxious to meet Bergotte, had gone to dine,
quite quietly, at her house. She had had the tact, recently acquired,
not to advertise their presence, they found when they went there, a
memory perhaps of the little nucleus, whose traditions Odette had
preserved in spite of the schism, a place laid for them at table, and
so forth. Odette took them with Bergotte (whom these excursions,
incidentally, finished off) to interesting first nights. They spoke of
her to various women of their own world who were capable of taking an
interest in such a novelty. These women were convinced that Odette, an
intimate friend of Bergotte, had more or less collaborated in his
works, and believed her to be a thousand times more intelligent than
the most outstanding women of the Faubourg, for the same reason that
made them pin all their political faith to certain Republicans of the
right shade such as M. Doumer and M. Deschanel, whereas they saw
France doomed to destruction were her destinies entrusted to the
Monarchy men who were in the habit of dining with them, men like
Charette or Doudeauville.  This change in Odette's status was carried
out, so far as she was concerned, with a discretion that made it more
secure and more rapid but allowed no suspicion to filter through to
the public that is prone to refer to the social columns of the
_Gaulois_ for evidence as to the advance or decline of a house, with
the result that one day, at the dress rehearsal of a play by Bergotte,
given in one of the most fashionable theatres in aid of a charity, the
really dramatic moment was when people saw enter the box opposite,
which was that reserved for the author, and sit down by the side of
Mme.  Swann, Mme. de Marsantes and her who, by the gradual
self-effacement of the Duchesse de Guermantes (glutted with fame, and
retiring to save the trouble of going on), was on the way to becoming
the lion, the queen of the age, Comtesse Mole. "We never even supposed
that she had begun to climb," people said of Odette as they saw
Comtesse Molé enter her box, "and look, she has reached the top of the
ladder."

So that Mme. Swann might suppose that it was from snobbishness that I
was taking up again with her daughter.

Odette, notwithstanding her brilliant escort, listened with close
attention to the play, as though she had come there solely to see it
performed, just as in the past she used to walk across the Bois for
her health, as a form of exercise. Men who in the past had shewn less
interest in her came to the edge of the box, disturbing the whole
audience, to reach up to her hand and so approach the imposing circle
that surrounded her. She, with a smile that was still more friendly
than ironical, replied patiently to their questions, affecting greater
calm than might have been expected, a calm which was, perhaps,
sincere, this exhibition being only the belated revelation of a
habitual and discreetly hidden intimacy. Behind these three ladies to
whom every eye was drawn was Bergotte flanked by the Prince
d'Agrigente, Comte Louis de Turenne, and the Marquis de Bréauté. And
it is easy to understand that, to men who were received everywhere and
could not expect any further advancement save as a reward for original
research, this demonstration of their merit which they considered that
they were making in letting themselves succumb to a hostess with a
reputation for profound intellectuality, in whose house they expected
to meet all the dramatists and novelists of the day, was more
exciting, more lively than those evenings at the Princesse de
Guermantes's, which, without any change of programme or fresh
attraction, had been going on year after year, all more or less like
the one we have described in such detail. In that exalted sphere, the
sphere of the Guermantes, in which people were beginning to lose
interest, the latest intellectual fashions were not incarnate in
entertainments fashioned in their image, as in those sketches that
Bergotte used to write for Mme. Swann, or those positive committees of
public safety (had society been capable of taking an interest in the
Dreyfus case) at which, in Mme. Verdurin's drawing-room, used to
assemble Picquart, Clemenceau, Zola, Reinach and Labori.

Gilberte, too, helped to strengthen her mother's position, for an
uncle of Swann had just left nearly twenty-four million francs to the
girl, which meant that the Faubourg Saint-Germain was beginning to
take notice of her. The reverse of the medal was that Swann (who,
however, was dying) held Dreyfusard opinions, though this as a matter
of fact did not injure his wife, but was actually of service to her.
It did not injure her because people said: "He is dotty, his mind has
quite gone, nobody pays any attention to him, his wife is the only
person who counts and she is charming." But even Swann's Dreyfusism
was useful to Odette. Left to herself, she would quite possibly have
allowed herself to make advances to fashionable women which would have
been her undoing. Whereas on the evenings when she dragged her husband
out to dine in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Swann, sitting sullenly in
his corner, would not hesitate, if he saw Odette seeking an
introduction to some Nationalist lady, to exclaim aloud: "Really,
Odette, you are mad. Why can't you keep yourself to yourself.  It is
idiotic of you to get yourself introduced to anti-Semites, I forbid
you." People in society whom everyone else runs after are not
accustomed either to such pride or to such ill-breeding. For the first
time they beheld some one who thought himself 'superior' to them. The
fame of Swann's mut-terings was spread abroad, and cards with
turned-down corners rained upon Odette. When she came to call upon
Mme. d'Arpajon there was a brisk movement of friendly curiosity. "You
didn't mind my introducing her to you," said Mme. d'Arpajon. "She is
so nice. It was Marie de Mar-santes that told me about her." "No, not
at all, I hear she's so wonderfully clever, and she is charming. I had
been longing to meet her; do tell me where she lives." Mme. d'Arpajon
told Mme. Swann that she had enjoyed herself hugely at the latter's
house the other evening, and had joyfully forsaken Mme. de
Saint-Euverte for her. And it was true, for to prefer Mme. Swann was
to shew that one was intelligent, like going to concerts instead of to
tea-parties. But when Mme. de Saint-Euverte called on Mme.  d'Arpajon
at the same time as Odette, as Mme. de Saint-Euverte was a great snob
and Mme. d'Arpajon, albeit she treated her without ceremony, valued
her invitations, she did not introduce Odette, so that Mme. de
Saint-Euverte should not know who it was. The Marquise imagined that
it must be some Princess who never went anywhere, since she had never
seen her before, prolonged her call, replied indirectly to what Odette
was saying, but Mme. d'Arpajon remained adamant. And when Mme.
Saint-Euverte owned herself defeated and took her leave: "I did not
introduce you," her hostess told Odette, "because people don't much
care about going to her parties and she is always inviting one; you
would never hear the last of her." "Oh, that is all right," said
Odette with a pang of regret. But she retained the idea that people
did not care about going to Mme. de Saint-Euverte's, which was to a
certain extent true, and concluded that she herself held a position in
society vastly superior to Mme. de Saint-Euverte's, albeit that lady
held a very high position, and Odette, so far, had none at all.

That made no difference to her, and, albeit all Mme. de Guermantes's
friends were friends also of Mme. d'Arpajon, whenever the latter
invited Mme. Swann, Odette would say with an air of compunction: "I am
going to Mme. d'Arpajon's; you will think me dreadfully old-fashioned,
I know, but I hate going, for Mme. de Guermantes's sake" (whom, as it
happened, she had never met). The distinguished men thought that the
fact that Mme.  Swann knew hardly anyone in good society meant that
she must be a superior woman, probably a great musician, and that it
would be a sort of extra distinction, as for a Duke to be a Doctor of
Science, to go to her house. The completely unintelligent women were
attracted by Odette for a diametrically opposite reason; hearing that
she attended the Colonne concerts and professed herself a Wagnerian,
they concluded from this that she must be 'rather a lark,' and were
greatly excited by the idea of getting to know her. But, being
themselves none too firmly established, they were afraid of
compromising themselves in public if they appeared to be on friendly
terms with Odette, and if, at a charity concert, they caught sight of
Mme. Swann, would turn away their heads, deeming it impossible to bow,
beneath the very nose of Mme. de Rochechouart, to a woman who was
perfectly capable of having been to Bayreuth, which was as good as
saying that she would stick at nothing. Everybody becomes different
upon entering another person's house. Not to speak of the marvellous
metamorphoses that were accomplished thus in the faery palaces, in
Mme. Swann's drawing-room, M. de Bréauté, acquiring a sudden
importance from the absence of the people by whom he was normally
surrounded, by his air of satisfaction at finding himself there, just
as if instead of going out to a party he had slipped on his spectacles
to shut himself up in his study and read the _Revue des Deux Mondes_,
the mystic rite that he appeared to be performing in coming to see
Odette, M. de Bréauté himself seemed another man. I would have given
anything to see what alterations the Duchesse de
Montmorency-Luxembourg would undergo in this new environment.  But she
was one of the people who could never be induced to meet Odette.  Mme.
de Montmorency, a great deal kinder to Oriane than Oriane was to her,
surprised me greatly by saying, with regard to Mme. de Guermantes:
"She knows some quite clever people, everybody likes her, I believe
that if she had just had a slightly more coherent mind, she would have
succeeded in forming a salon. The fact is, she never bothered about
it, she is quite right, she is very well off as she is, with everybody
running after her." If Mme. de Guermantes had not a 'salon,' what in
the world could a 'salon' be? The stupefaction in which this speech
plunged me was no greater than that which I caused Mme. de Guermantes
when I told her that I should like to be invited to Mme. de
Montmorency's. Oriane thought her an old idiot. "I go there," she
said, "because I'm forced to, she's my aunt, but you! She doesn't even
know how to get nice people to come to her house." Mme. de Guermantes
did not realise that nice people left me cold, that when she spoke to
me of the Arpajon drawing-room I saw a yellow butterfly, and the Swann
drawing-room (Mme. Swann was at home in the winter months between 6
and 7) a black butterfly, its wings powdered with snow. Even this last
drawing-room, which was not a 'salon' at all, she considered, albeit
out of bounds for herself, permissible to me, on account of the
'clever people' to be found there. But Mme. de Luxembourg! Had I
already produced something that had attracted attention, she would
have concluded that an element of snobbishness may be combined with
talent.  But I put the finishing touch to her disillusionment; I
confessed to her that I did not go to Mme. de Montmorency's (as she
supposed) to 'take notes' and 'make a study.' Mme. de Guermantes was
in this respect no more in error than the social novelists who analyse
mercilessly from outside the actions of a snob or supposed snob, but
never place themselves in his position, at the moment when a whole
social springtime is bursting into blossom in his imagination. I
myself, when I sought to discover what was the great pleasure that I
found in going to Mme. de Montmorency's, was somewhat taken aback. She
occupied, in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, an old mansion ramifying into
pavilions which were separated by small gardens. In the outer hall a
statuette, said to be by Falconnet, represented a spring which did, as
it happened, exude a perpetual moisture. A little farther on the
doorkeeper, her eyes always red, whether from grief or neurasthenia, a
headache or a cold in the head, never answered your inquiry, waved her
arm vaguely to indicate that the Duchess was at home, and let a drop
or two trickle from her eyelids into a bowl filled with
forget-me-nots.  The pleasure that I felt on seeing the statuette,
because it reminded me of a 'little gardener' in plaster that stood in
one of the Combray gardens, was nothing to that which was given me by
the great staircase, damp and resonant, full of echoes, like the
stairs in certain old-fashioned bathing establishments, with the vases
filled with cinerarias--blue against blue--in the entrance hall and
most of all the tinkle of the bell, which was exactly that of the bell
in Eulalie's room. This tinkle raised my enthusiasm to a climax, but
seemed to me too humble a matter for me to be able to explain it to
Mme. de Montmorency, with the result that she invariably saw me in a
state of rapture of which she might never guess the cause.




THE HEART'S INTERMISSIONS


My second arrival at Balbec was very different from the other. The
manager had come in person to meet me at Pont-a-Couleuvre, reiterating
how greatly he valued his titled patrons, which made me afraid that he
had ennobled me, until I realised that, in the obscurity of his
grammatical memory, _titré_ meant simply _attitré_, or accredited. In
fact, the more new languages he learned the worse he spoke the others.
He informed me that he had placed me at the very top of the hotel. "I
hope," he said, "that you will not interpolate this as a want of
discourtesy, I was sorry to give you a room of which you are unworthy,
but I did it in connexion with the noise, because in that room you
will not have anyone above your head to disturb your trapanum
(tympanum). Don't be alarmed, I shall have the windows closed, so that
they shan't bang. Upon that point, I am intolerable" (the last word
expressing not his own thought, which was that he would always be
found inexorable in that respect, but, quite possibly, the thoughts of
his underlings). The rooms were, as it proved, those we had had
before.  They were no humbler, but I had risen in the manager's
esteem. I could light a fire if I liked (for, by the doctors' orders,
I had left Paris at Easter), but he was afraid there might be
'fixtures' in the ceiling. "See that you always wait before alighting
a fire until the preceding one is extenuated" (extinct). "The
important thing is to take care not to avoid setting fire to the
chimney, especially as, to cheer things up a bit, I have put an old
china pottage on the mantelpiece which might become insured."

He informed me with great sorrow of the death of the leader of the
Cherbourg bar. "He was an old retainer," he said (meaning probably
'campaigner') and gave me to understand that his end had been hastened
by the quickness, otherwise the fastness, of his life. "For some time
past I noticed that after dinner he would take a doss in the
reading-room" (take a doze, presumably). "The last times, he was so
changed that if you hadn't known who it was, to look at him, he was
barely recognisant" (presumably, recognisable).

A happy compensation: the chief magistrate of Caen had just received
his 'bags' (badge) as Commander of the Legion of Honour. "Surely to
goodness, he has capacities, but seems they gave him it principally
because of his general 'impotence.'" There was a mention of this
decoration, as it happened, in the previous day's _Echo de Paris_, of
which the manager had as yet read only 'the first paradox' (meaning
paragraph). The paper dealt admirably with M. Caillaux's policy. "I
consider, they're quite right," he said. "He is putting us too much
under the thimble of Germany" (under the thumb). As the discussion of
a subject of this sort with a hotel-keeper seemed to me boring, I
ceased to listen. I thought of the visual images that had made me
decide to return to Balbec. They were very different from those of the
earlier time, the vision in quest of which I came was as dazzlingly
clear as the former had been clouded; they were to prove deceitful
nevertheless. The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as
narrow, as intangible as those which imagination had formed and
reality has destroyed.  There is no reason why, existing outside
ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory
rather than to those in our dreams. And besides, a fresh reality will
perhaps make us forget, detest even, the desires that led us forth
upon our journey.

Those that had led me forth to Balbec sprang to some extent from my
discovery that the Verdurins (whose invitations I had invariably
declined, and who would certainly be delighted to see me, if I went to
call upon them in the country with apologies for never having been
able to call upon them in Paris), knowing that several of the faithful
would be spending the holidays upon that part of the coast, and
having, for that reason, taken for the whole season one of M. de
Cambremer's houses (la Raspelière), had invited Mme. Putbus to stay
with them. The evening on which I learned this (in Paris) I lost my
head completely and sent our young footman to find out whether the
lady would be taking her Abigail to Balbec with her.  It was eleven
o'clock. Her porter was a long time in opening the front door, and,
for a wonder, did not send my messenger packing, did not call the
police, merely gave him a dressing down, but with it the information
that I desired. He said that the head lady's maid would indeed be
accompanying her mistress, first of all to the waters in Germany, then
to Biarritz, and at the end of the season to Mme. Verdurin's. From
that moment my mind had been at rest, and glad to have this iron in
the fire, I had been able to dispense with those pursuits in the
streets, in which I had not that letter of introduction to the
beauties I encountered which I should have to the 'Giorgione' in the
fact of my having dined that very evening, at the Verdurins', with her
mistress. Besides, she might form a still better opinion of me perhaps
when she learned that I knew not merely the middle class tenants of la
Raspelière but its owners, and above all Saint-Loup who, prevented
from commending me personally to the maid (who did not know him by
name), had written an enthusiastic letter about me to the Cambremers.
He believed that, quite apart from any service that they might be able
to render me, Mme. de Cambremer, the Legrandin daughter-in-law, would
interest me by her conversation. "She is an intelligent woman," he had
assured me. "She won't say anything final" (_final_ having taken the
place of _sublime_ things with Robert, who, every five or six years,
would modify a few of his favourite expressions, while preserving the
more important intact), "but it is an interesting nature, she has a
personality, intuition; she has the right word for everything. Every
now and then she is maddening, she says stupid things on purpose, to
seem smart, which is all the more ridiculous as nobody could be less
smart than the Cambremers, she is not always in the picture, but,
taking her all round, she is one of the people it is more or less
possible to talk to."

No sooner had Robert's letter of introduction reached them than the
Cambremers, whether from a snobbishness that made them anxious to
oblige Saint-Loup, even indirectly, or from gratitude for what he had
done for one of their nephews at Doncières, or (what was most likely)
from kindness of heart and traditions of hospitality, had written long
letters insisting that I should stay with them, or, if I preferred to
be more independent, offering to find me lodgings. When Saint-Loup had
pointed out that I should be staying at the Grand Hotel, Balbec, they
replied that at least they would expect a call from me as soon as I
arrived and, if I did not appear, would come without fail to hunt me
out and invite me to their garden parties.

No doubt there was no essential connexion between Mme. Putbus's maid
and the country round Balbec; she would not be for me like the peasant
girl whom, as I strayed alone along the Méséglise way, I had so often
sought in vain to evoke, with all the force of my desire.

But I had long since given up trying to extract from a woman as it
might be the square root of her unknown quantity, the mystery of which
a mere introduction was generally enough to dispel. Anyhow at Balbec,
where I had not been for so long, I should have this advantage,
failing the necessary connexion which did not exist between the place
and this particular woman, that my sense of reality would not be
destroyed by familiarity, as in Paris, where, whether in my own home
or in a bedroom that I already knew, pleasure indulged in with a woman
could not give me for one instant, amid everyday surroundings, the
illusion that it was opening the door for me to a new life. (For if
habit is a second nature, it prevents us from knowing our original
nature, whose cruelties it lacks and also its enchantments.) Now this
illusion I might perhaps feel in a strange place, where one's
sensibility is revived by a ray of sunshine, and where my ardour would
be raised to a climax by the lady's maid whom I desired: we shall see,
in the course of events, not only that this woman did not come to
Balbec, but that I dreaded nothing so much as the possibility of her
coming, so that the principal object of my expedition was neither
attained, nor indeed pursued. It was true that Mme. Putbus was not to
be at the Verdurins' so early in the season; but these pleasures which
we have chosen beforehand may be remote, if their coming is assured,
and if, in the interval of waiting, we can devote ourselves to the
pastime of seeking to attract, while powerless to love. Moreover, I
was not going to Balbec in the same practical frame of mind as before;
there is always less egoism in pure imagination than in recollection;
and I knew that I was going to find myself in one of those very places
where fair strangers most abound; a beach presents them as numerously
as a ball-room, and I looked forward to strolling up and down outside
the hotel, on the front, with the same sort of pleasure that Mme. de
Guermantes would have procured me if, instead of making other
hostesses invite me to brilliant dinner-parties, she had given my name
more frequently for their lists of partners to those of them who gave
dances.  To make female acquaintances at Balbec would be as easy for
me now as it had been difficult before, for I was now as well supplied
with friends and resources there as I had been destitute of them on my
former visit.

I was roused from my meditations by the voice of the manager, to whose
political dissertations I had not been listening. Changing the
subject, he told me of the chief magistrate's joy on hearing of my
arrival, and that he was coming to pay me a visit in my room, that
very evening. The thought of this visit so alarmed me (for I was
beginning to feel tired) that I begged him to prevent it (which he
promised to do, and, as a further precaution, to post members of his
staff on guard, for the first night, on my landing).  He did not seem
overfond of his staff. "I am obliged to keep running after them all
the time because they are lacking in inertia. If I was not there they
would never stir. I shall post the lift-boy on sentry outside your
door." I asked him if the boy had yet become 'head page.' "He is not
old enough yet in the house," was the answer. "He has comrades more
aged than he is. It would cause an outcry. We must act with
granulation in everything.  I quite admit that he strikes a good
aptitude" (meaning attitude) "at the door of his lift. But he is still
a trifle young for such positions. With others in the place of longer
standing, it would make a contrast. He is a little wanting in
seriousness, which is the primitive quality" (doubtless, the
primordial, the most important quality). "He needs his leg screwed on
a.  bit tighter" (my informant meant to say his head). "Anyhow, he can
leave it all to me. I know what I'm about. Before I won my stripes as
manager of the Grand Hotel, I smelt powder under M. Paillard." I was
impressed by this simile, and thanked the manager for having come in
person as far as Pont-à-Couleuvre. "Oh, that's nothing! The loss of
time has been quite infinite" (for infinitesimal). Meanwhile, we had
arrived.

Complete physical collapse. On the first night, as I was suffering
from cardiac exhaustion, trying to master my pain, I bent down slowly
and cautiously to take off my boots. But no sooner had I touched the
topmost button than my bosom swelled, filled with an unknown, a divine
presence, I shook with sobs, tears streamed from my eyes. The person
who came to my rescue, who saved me from barrenness of spirit, was the
same who, years before, in a moment of identical distress and
loneliness, in a moment when I was no longer in any way myself, had
come in, and had restored me to myself, for that person was myself and
more than myself (the container that is greater than the contents,
which it was bringing to me). I had just perceived, in my memory,
bending over my weariness, the tender, preoccupied, dejected face of
my grandmother, as she had been on that first evening of our arrival,
the face not of that grandmother whom I was astonished--and reproached
myself--to find that I regretted so little and who was no more of her
than just her name, but of my own true grandmother, of whom, for the
first time since that afternoon in the Champs-Elysées on which she had
had her stroke, I now recaptured, by an instinctive and complete act
of recollection, the living reality. That reality has no existence for
us, so long as it has not been created anew by our mind (otherwise the
men who have been engaged in a Titanic conflict would all of them be
great epic poets); and so, in my insane desire to fling myself into
her arms, it was not until this moment, more than a year after her
burial, because of that anachronism which so often prevents the
calendar of facts from corresponding to that of our feelings, that I
became conscious that she was dead. I had often spoken about her in
the interval, and thought of her also, but behind my words and
thoughts, those of an ungrateful, selfish, cruel youngster, there had
never been anything that resembled my grandmother, because, in my
frivolity, my love of pleasure, my familiarity with the spectacle of
her ill health, I retained only in a potential state the memory of
what she had been. At whatever moment we estimate it, the total value
of our spiritual nature is more or less fictitious, notwithstanding
the long inventory of its treasures, for now one, now another of these
is unrealisable, whether we are considering actual treasures or those
of the imagination, and, in my own case, fully as much as the ancient
name of Guermantes, this other, how far more important item, my real
memory of my grandmother. For with the troubles of memory are closely
linked the heart's intermissions. It is, no doubt, the existence of
our body, which we may compare to a jar containing our spiritual
nature, that leads us to suppose that all our inward wealth, our past
joys, all our sorrows, are perpetually in our possession. Perhaps it
is equally inexact to suppose that they escape or return. In any case,
if they remain within us, it is, for most of the time, in an unknown
region where they are of no service to us, and where even the most
ordinary are crowded out by memories of a different kind, which
preclude any simultaneous occurrence of them in our consciousness.
But if the setting of sensations in which they are preserved be
recaptured, they acquire in turn the same power of expelling
everything that is incompatible with them, of installing alone in us
the self that originally lived them. Now, inasmuch as the self that I
had just suddenly become once again had not existed since that evening
long ago when my grandmother undressed me after my arrival at Balbec,
it was quite naturally, not at the end of the day that had just
passed, of which that self knew nothing, but--as though there were in
time different and parallel series--without loss of continuity,
immediately after the first evening at Balbec long ago, that I clung
to the minute in which my grandmother had leaned over me.  The self
that I then was, that had so long disappeared, was once again so close
to me that I seemed still to hear the words that had just been spoken,
albeit they were nothing more now than illusion, as a man who is half
awake thinks he can still make out close at hand the sounds of his
receding dream.  I was nothing now but the person who sought a refuge
in his grandmother's arms, sought to wipe away the traces of his
suffering by giving her kisses, that person whom I should have had as
great difficulty in imagining when I was one or other of those persons
which, for some time past, I had successively been, as the efforts,
doomed in any event to sterility, that I should now have had to make
to feel the desires and joys of any of those which, for a time at
least, I no longer was. I reminded myself how, an hour before the
moment at which my grandmother had stooped down like that, in her
dressing gown, to unfasten my boots, as I wandered along the
stiflingly hot street, past the pastry-cook's, I had felt that I could
never, in my need to feel her arms round me, live through the hour
that I had still to spend without her. And now that this same need was
reviving in me, I knew that I might wait hour after hour, that she
would never again be by my side, I had only just discovered this
because I had only just, on feeling her for the first time, alive,
authentic, making my heart swell to breaking-point, on finding her at
last, learned that I had lost her for ever. Lost for ever; I could not
understand and was struggling to bear the anguish of this
contradiction: on the one hand an existence, an affection, surviving
in me as I had known them, that is to say created for me, a love in
whose eyes everything found in me so entirely its complement, its
goal, its constant lodestar, that the genius of great men, all the
genius that might have existed from the beginning of the world would
have been less precious to my grandmother than a single one of my
defects; and on the other hand, as soon as I had lived over again that
bliss, as though it were present, feeling it shot through by the
certainty, throbbing like a physical anguish, of an annihilation that
had effaced my image of that affection, had destroyed that existence,
abolished in retrospect our interwoven destiny, made of my grandmother
at the moment when I found her again as in a mirror, a mere stranger
whom chance had allowed to spend a few years in my company, as it
might have been in anyone's else, but to whom, before and after those
years, I was, I could be nothing.

Instead of the pleasures that I had been experiencing of late, the
only pleasure that it would have been possible for me to enjoy at that
moment would have been, by modifying the past, to diminish the sorrows
and sufferings of my grandmother's life. Now, I did not recall her
only in that dressing-gown, a garment so appropriate as to have become
almost their symbol to the labours, foolish no doubt but so lovable
also, that she performed for me, gradually I began to remember all the
opportunities that I had seized, by letting her perceive, by
exaggerating if necessary my sufferings, to cause her a grief which I
imagined as being obliterated immediately by my kisses, as though my
affection had been as capable as my happiness of creating hers; and,
what was worse, I, who could conceive no other happiness now than in
finding happiness shed in my memory over the contours of that face,
moulded and bowed by love, had set to work with frantic efforts, in
the past, to destroy even its most modest pleasures, as on the day
when Saint-Loup had taken my grandmother's photograph and I, unable to
conceal from her what I thought of the ridiculous childishness of the
coquetry with which she posed for him, with her wide-brimmed hat, in a
flattering half light, had allowed myself to mutter a few impatient,
wounding words, which, I had perceived from a contraction of her
features, had carried, had pierced her; it was I whose heart they were
rending now that there was no longer possible, ever again, the
consolation of a thousand kisses.

But never should I be able to wipe out of my memory that contraction
of her face, that anguish of her heart, or rather of my own: for as
the dead exist only in us, it is ourselves that we strike without
ceasing when we persist in recalling the blows that we have dealt
them. To these griefs, cruel as they were. I clung with all my might
and main, for I realised that they were the effect of my memory of my
grandmother, the proof that this memory which I had of her was really
present within me. I felt that I did not really recall her save by
grief and should have liked to feel driven yet deeper into me these
nails which fastened the memory of her to my consciousness. I did not
seek to mitigate my suffering, to set it off, to pretend that my
grandmother was only somewhere else and momentarily invisible, by
addressing to her photograph (the one taken by Saint-Loup, which I had
beside me) words and prayers as to a person who is separated from us
but, retaining his personality, knows us and remains bound to us by an
indissoluble harmony. Never did I do this, for I was determined not
merely to suffer, but to respect the original form of my suffering, as
it had suddenly come upon me unawares, and I wished to continue to
feel it, according to its own laws, whenever those strange
contradictory impressions of survival and obliteration crossed one
another again in my mind.  This painful and, at the moment,
incomprehensible impression, I knew--not, forsooth, whether I should
one day distil a grain of truth from it--but that if I ever should
succeed in extracting that grain of truth, it could only be from it,
from so singular, so spontaneous an impression, which had been neither
traced by my intellect nor attenuated by my pusillanimity, but which
death itself, the sudden revelation of death, had, like a stroke of
lightning, carved upon me, along a supernatural, inhuman channel, a
two-fold and mysterious furrow. (As for the state of forgetfulness of
my grandmother in which I had been living until that moment, I could
not even think of turning to it to extract truth from it; since in
itself it was nothing but a negation, a weakening of the mind
incapable of recreating a real moment of life and obliged to
substitute for it conventional and neutral images.) Perhaps, however,
as the instinct of preservation, the ingenuity of the mind in
safeguarding us from grief, had begun already to build upon still
smouldering ruins, to lay the first courses of its serviceable and
ill-omened structure, I relished too keenly the delight of recalling
this or that opinion held by my dear one, recalling them as though she
had been able to hold them still, as though she existed, as though I
continued to exist for her. But as soon as I had succeeded in falling
asleep, at that more truthful hour when my eyes closed to the things
of the outer world, the world of sleep (on whose frontier intellect
and will, momentarily paralysed, could no longer strive to rescue me
from the cruelty of my real impressions) reflected, refracted the
agonising synthesis of survival and annihilation, in the mysteriously
lightened darkness of my organs.  World of sleep in which our inner
consciousness, placed in bondage to the disturbances of our organs,
quickens the rhythm of heart or breath because a similar dose of
terror, sorrow, remorse acts with a strength magnified an hundredfold
if it is thus injected into our veins; as soon as, to traverse the
arteries of the subterranean city, we have embarked upon the dark
current of our own blood as upon an inward Lethe meandering sixfold,
huge solemn forms appear to us, approach and glide away, leaving us in
tears. I sought in vain for my grandmother's form when I had stepped
ashore beneath the sombre portals; I knew, indeed, that she did still
exist, but with a diminished vitality, as pale as that of memory; the
darkness was increasing, and the wind; my father, who was to take me
where she was, did not appear. Suddenly my breath failed me, I felt my
heart turn to stone; I had just remembered that for week after week I
had forgotten to write to my grandmother. What must she be thinking of
me? "Great God!" I said to myself, "how wretched she must be in that
little room which they have taken for her, no bigger than what one
would take for an old servant, where she is all alone with the nurse
they have put there to look after her, from which she cannot stir, for
she is still slightly paralysed and has always refused to rise from
her bed. She must be thinking that I have forgotten her now that she
is dead; how lonely she must be feeling, how deserted! Oh, I must run
to see her, I mustn't lose a minute, I mustn't wait for my father to
come, even--but where is it, how can I have forgotten the address,
will she know me again, I wonder? How can I have forgotten her all
these months?" It is so dark, I shall not find her; the wind is
keeping me back; but look I there is my father walking ahead of me; I
call out to him: "Where is grandmother? Tell me her address.  Is she
all right? Are you quite sure she has everything she wants?" "Why,"
says my father, "you need not alarm yourself. Her nurse is well
trained.  We send her a trifle, from time to time, so that she can get
your grandmother anything she may need. She asks, sometimes, how you
are getting on. She was told that you were going to write a book. She
seemed pleased.  She wiped away a tear." And then I fancied I could
remember that, a little time after her death, my grandmother had said
to me, crying, with a humble expression, like an old servant who has
been given notice to leave, like a stranger, in fact: "You will let me
see something of you occasionally, won't you; don't let too many years
go by without visiting me. Remember that you were my grandson, once,
and that grandmothers never forget." And seeing again that face, so
submissive, so sad, so tender, which was hers, I wanted to run to her
at once and say to her, as I ought to have said to her then: "Why,
grandmother, you can see me as often as you like, I have only you in
the world, I shall never leave you any more." What tears my silence
must have made her shed through all those months in which I have never
been to the place where she lies, what can she have been saying to
herself about me? And it is in a voice choked with tears that I too
shout to my father: "Quick, quick, her address, take me to her." But
he says: "Well... I don't know whether you will be able to see her.
Besides, you know, she is very frail now, very frail, she is not at
all herself, I am afraid you would find it rather painful. And I can't
be quite certain of the number of the avenue." "But tell me, you who
know, it is not true that the dead have ceased to exist. It can't
possibly be true, in spite of what they say, because grandmother does
exist still." My father smiled a mournful smile: "Oh, hardly at all,
you know, hardly at all. I think that it would be better if you did
not go. She has everything that she wants. They come and keep the
place tidy for her." "But she is often left alone?" "Yes, but that is
better for her. It is better for her not to think, which could only be
bad for her. It often hurts her, when she tries to think. Besides, you
know, she is quite lifeless now. I shall leave a note of the exact
address, so that you can go to her; but I don't see what good you can
do there, and I don't suppose the nurse will allow you to see her."
"You know quite well I shall always stay beside her, dear, deer, deer,
Francis Jammes, fork." But already I had retraced the dark meanderings
of the stream, had ascended to the surface where the world of living
people opens, so that if I still repeated: "Francis Jammes, deer,
deer," the sequence of these words no longer offered me the limpid
meaning and logic which they had expressed to me so naturally an
instant earlier and which I could not now recall. I could not even
understand why the word 'Aias' which my father had just said to me,
had immediately signified: "Take care you don't catch cold," without
any possible doubt. I had forgotten to close the shutters, and so
probably the daylight had awakened me. But I could not bear to have
before my eyes those waves of the sea which my grandmother could
formerly contemplate for hours on end; the fresh image of their
heedless beauty was at once supplemented by the thought that she did
not see them; I should have liked to stop my ears against their sound,
for now the luminous plenitude of the beach carved out an emptiness in
my heart; everything seemed to be saying to me, like those paths and
lawns of a public garden in which I had once lost her, long ago, when
I was still a child: "We have not seen her," and beneath the
hemisphere of the pale vault of heaven I felt myself crushed as though
beneath a huge bell of bluish glass, enclosing an horizon within which
my grandmother was not. To escape from the sight of it, I turned to
the wall, but alas what was now facing me was that partition which
used to serve us as a morning messenger, that partition which, as
responsive as a violin in rendering every fine shade of sentiment,
reported so exactly to my grandmother my fear at once of waking her
and, if she were already awake, of not being heard by her and so of
her not coming, then immediately, like a second instrument taking up
the melody, informed me that she was coming and bade me be calm. I
dared not put out my hand to that wall, any more than to a piano on
which my grandmother had played and which still throbbed from her
touch. I knew that I might knock now, even louder, that I should hear
no response, that my grandmother would never come again. And I asked
nothing better of God, if a Paradise exists, than to be able, there,
to knock upon that wall the three little raps which my grandmother
would know among a thousand, and to which she would reply with those
other raps which said: "Don't be alarmed, little mouse, I know you are
impatient, but I am just coming," and that He would let me remain with
her throughout eternity which would not be too long for us.

The manager came in to ask whether I would not like to come down.  He
had most carefully supervised my 'placement' in the dining-room. As he
had seen no sign of me, he had been afraid that I might have had
another of my choking fits. He hoped that it might be only a little
'sore throats' and assured me that he had heard it said that they
could be soothed with what he called 'calyptus.'

He brought me a message from Albertine. She was not supposed to be
coming to Balbec that year but, having changed her plans, had been for
the last three days not in Balbec itself but ten minutes away by the
tram at a neighbouring watering-place. Fearing that I might be tired
after the journey, she had stayed away the first evening, but sent
word now to ask when I could see her. I inquired whether she had
called in person, not that I wished to see her, but so that I might
arrange not to see her. "Yes," replied the manager. "But she would
like it to be as soon as possible, unless you have not some quite
necessitous reasons. You see," he concluded, "that everybody here
desires you, definitively." But for my part, I wished to see nobody.

And yet the day before, on my arrival, I had felt myself recaptured by
the indolent charm of a seaside existence. The same taciturn lift-boy,
silent this time from respect and not from scorn, and glowing with
pleasure, had set the lift in motion. As I rose upon the ascending
column, I had passed once again through what had formerly been for me
the mystery of a strange hotel, in which when you arrive, a tourist
without protection or position, each old resident returning to his
room, each chambermaid passing along the eery perspective of a
corridor, not to mention the young lady from America with her
companion, on their way down to dinner, give you a look in which you
can read nothing that you would have liked to see. This time on the
contrary I had felt the entirely soothing pleasure of passing up
through an hotel that I knew, where I felt myself at home, where I had
performed once again that operation which we must always start afresh,
longer, more difficult than the turning outside in of an eyelid, which
consists in investing things with the spirit that is familiar to us
instead of their own which we found alarming. Must I always, I had
asked myself, little thinking of the sudden change of mood that was in
store for me, be going to strange hotels where I should be dining for
the first time, where Habit would not yet have killed upon each
landing, outside every door, the terrible dragon that seemed to be
watching over an enchanted life, where I should have to approach those
strange women whom fashionable hotels, casinos, watering-places, seem
to draw together and endow with a common existence.

I had found pleasure even in the thought that the boring chief
magistrate was so eager to see me, I could see, on that first evening,
the waves, the azure mountain ranges of the sea, its glaciers and its
cataracts, its elevation and its careless majesty--merely upon
smelling for the first time after so long an interval, as I washed my
hands, that peculiar odour of the over-scented soaps of the Grand
Hotel--which, seeming to belong at once to the present moment and to
my past visit, floated between them like the real charm of a
particular form of existence to which one returns only to change one's
necktie. The sheets on my bed, too fine, too light, too large,
impossible to tuck in, to keep in position, which billowed out from
beneath the blankets in moving whorls had distressed me before.  Now
they merely cradled upon the awkward, swelling fulness of their sails
the glorious sunrise, big with hopes, of my first morning. But that
sun had not time to appear. In the dead of night, the awful, godlike
presence had returned to life. I asked the manager to leave me, and to
give orders that no one was to enter my room. I told him that I should
remain in bed and rejected his offer to send to the chemist's for the
excellent drug. He was delighted by my refusal for he was afraid that
other visitors might be annoyed by the smell of the 'calyptus.' It
earned me the compliment: "You are in the movement" (he meant: 'in the
right'), and the warning: "take care you don't defile yourself at the
door, I've had the lock 'elucidated' with oil; if any of the servants
dares to knock at your door, he'll be beaten 'black and white.' And
they can mark my words, for I'm not a repeater" (this evidently meant
that he did not say a thing twice). "But wouldn't you care for a drop
of old wine, just to set you up; I have a pig's head of it downstairs"
(presumably hogshead). "I shan't bring it to you on a silver dish like
the head of Jonathan, and I warn you that it is not Château-Lafite,
but it is virtuously equivocal" (virtually equivalent).  "And as it's
quite light, they might fry you a little sole." I declined everything,
but was surprised to hear the name of the fish (sole) pronounced like
that of the King of Israel, Saul, by a man who must have ordered so
many in his life.

Despite the manager's promises, they brought me in a little later the
turned down card of the Marquise de Cambremer. Having come over to see
me, the old lady had sent to inquire whether I was there and when she
heard that I had arrived only the day before, and was unwell, had not
insisted, but (not without stopping, doubtless, at the chemist's or
the haberdasher's, while the footman jumped down from the box and went
in to pay a bill or to give an order) had driven back to Féterne, in
her old barouche upon eight springs, drawn by a pair of horses. Not
infrequently did one hear the rumble and admire the pomp of this
carriage in the streets of Balbec and of various other little places
along the coast, between Balbec and Féterne. Not that these halts
outside shops were the object of these excursions. It was on the
contrary some tea-party or garden-party at the house of some squire or
functionary, socially quite unworthy of the Marquise.  But she,
although completely overshadowing, by her birth and wealth, the petty
nobility of the district, was in her perfect goodness and simplicity
of heart so afraid of disappointing anyone who had sent her an
invitation that she would attend all the most insignificant social
gatherings in the neighbourhood. Certainly, rather than travel such a
distance to listen, in the stifling heat of a tiny drawing-room, to a
singer who generally had no voice and whom in her capacity as the lady
bountiful of the countryside and as a famous musician she would
afterwards be compelled to congratulate with exaggerated warmth, Mme.
de Cambremer would have preferred to go for a drive or to remain in
her marvellous gardens at Féterne, at the foot of which the drowsy
waters of a little bay float in to die amid the flowers. But she knew
that the probability of her coming had been announced by the host,
whether he was a noble or a free burgess of Maineville-la Teinturière
or of Chattoncourt-l'Orgueilleux. And if Mme.  de Cambremer had driven
out that afternoon without making a formal appearance at the party,
any of the guests who had come from one or other of the little places
that lined the coast might have seen and heard the Marquise's
barouche, which would deprive her of the excuse that she had not been
able to get away from Féterne. On the other hand, these hosts might
have seen Mme. de Cambremer, time and again, appear at concerts given
in houses which, they considered, were no place for her; the slight
depreciation caused thereby, in their eyes, to the position of the too
obliging Marquise vanished as soon as it was they who were
entertaining her, and it was with feverish anxiety that they kept
asking themselves whether or not they were going to have her at their
'small party.' What an allaying of the doubts and fears of days if,
after the first song had been sung by the daughter of the house or by
some amateur on holiday in the neighbourhood, one of the guests
announced (an infallible sign that the Marquise was coming to the
party) that he had seen the famous barouche and pair drawn up outside
the watchmaker's or the chemist's! Thereupon Mme. de Cambremer (who
indeed was to enter before long followed by her daughter-in-law, the
guests who were staying with her at the moment and whom she had asked
permission, granted with such joy, to bring) shone once more with
undiminished lustre in the eyes of her host and hostess, to whom the
hoped-for reward of her coming had perhaps been the determining if
unavowed cause of the decision they had made a month earlier: to
burden themselves with the trouble and expense of an afternoon party.
Seeing the Marquise present at their gathering, they remembered no
longer her readiness to attend those given by their less deserving
neighbours, but the antiquity of her family, the splendour of her
house, the rudeness of her daughter-in-law, born Legrandin, who by her
arrogance emphasised the slightly insipid good-nature of the dowager.
Already they could see in their mind's eye, in the social column of
the _Gaulois_, the paragraph which they would draft themselves in the
family circle, with all the doors shut and barred, upon 'the little
corner of Brittany which is at present a whirl of gaiety, the select
party from which the guests could hardly tear themselves away,
promising their charming host and hostess that they would soon pay
them another visit.' Day after day they watched for the newspaper to
arrive, worried that they had not yet seen any notice in it of their
party, and afraid lest they should have had Mme. de Cambremer for
their other guests alone and not for the whole reading public. At
length the blessed day arrived: "The season is exceptionally brilliant
this year at Balbec. Small afternoon concerts are the fashion...."
Heaven be praised, Mme. de Cambremer's name was spelt correctly, and
included 'among others we may mention' but at the head of the list.
All that remained was to appear annoyed at this journalistic
indiscretion which might get them into difficulties with people whom
they had not been able to invite, and to ask hypocritically in Mme. de
Cambremer's hearing who could have been so treacherous as to send the
notice, upon which the Marquise, every inch the lady bountiful, said:
"I can understand your being annoyed, but I must say I am only too
delighted that people should know I was at your party."

On the card that was brought me, Mme. de Cambremer had scribbled the
message that she was giving an afternoon party 'the day after
tomorrow.' To be sure, as recently as the day before yesterday, tired
as I was of the social round, it would have been a real pleasure to me
to taste it, transplanted amid those gardens in which there grew in
the open air, thanks to the exposure of Féterne, fig trees, palms,
rose bushes extending down to a sea as blue and calm often as the
Mediterranean, upon which the host's little yacht sped across, before
the party began, to fetch from the places on the other side of the bay
the most important guests, served, with its awnings spread to shut out
the sun, after the party had assembled, as an open air refreshment
room, and set sail again in the evening to take back those whom it had
brought. A charming luxury, but so costly that it was partly to meet
the expenditure that it entailed that Mme. de Cambremer had sought to
increase her income in various ways, and notably by letting, for the
first time, one of her properties very different from Féterne: la
Raspelière. Yes, two days earlier, how welcome such a party, peopled
with minor nobles all unknown to me, would have been to me as a change
from the 'high life' of Paris. But now pleasures had no longer any
meaning for me. And so I wrote to Mme. de Cambremer to decline, just
as, an hour ago, I had put off Albertine: grief had destroyed in me
the possibility of desire as completely as a high fever takes away
one's appetite.... My mother was to arrive on the morrow. I felt that
I was less unworthy to live in her company, that I should understand
her better, now that an alien and degrading existence had wholly given
place to the resurging, heartrending memories that wreathed and
ennobled my soul, like her own, with their crown of thorns. I thought
so: in reality there is a world of difference between real griefs,
like my mother's, which literally crush out our life for years if not
for ever, when we have lost the person we love--and those other
griefs, transitory when all is said, as mine was to be, which pass as
quickly as they have been slow in coming, which we do not realise
until long after the event, because, in order to feel them, we need
first to understand them; griefs such as so many people feel, from
which the grief that was torturing me at this moment differed only in
assuming the form of unconscious memory.

That I was one day to experience a grief as profound as that of my
mother, we shall find in the course of this narrative, but it was
neither then nor thus that I imagined it. Nevertheless, like a
principal actor who ought to have learned his part and to have been in
his place long beforehand but has arrived only at the last moment and,
having read over once only what he has to say, manages to 'gag' so
skilfully when his cue comes that nobody notices his unpunctuality, my
new-found grief enabled me, when my mother came, to talk to her as
though it had existed always. She supposed merely that the sight of
these places which I had visited with my grandmother (which was not at
all the case) had revived it. For the first time then, and because I
felt a sorrow which was nothing compared with hers, but which opened
my eyes, I realised and was appalled to think what she must be
suffering. For the first time I understood that the fixed and tearless
gaze (which made Françoise withhold her sympathy) that she had worn
since my grandmother's death had been arrested by that
incomprehensible contradiction of memory and nonexistence. Besides,
since she was, although still in deep mourning, more fashionably
dressed in this strange place, I was more struck by the transformation
that had occurred in her. It is not enough to say that she had lost
all her gaiety; melted, congealed into a sort of imploring image, she
seemed to be afraid of shocking by too sudden a movement, by too loud
a tone, the sorrowful presence that never parted from her. But, what
struck me most of all, when I saw her cloak of crape, was--what had
never occurred to me in Paris--that it was no longer my mother that I
saw before me, but my grandmother.  As, in royal and princely
families, upon the death of the head of the house his son takes his
title and, from being Duc d'Orléans, Prince de Tarente or Prince des
Laumes, becomes King of France, Duc de la Trémoïlle, Duc de
Guermantes, so by an accession of a different order and more remote
origin, the dead man takes possession of the living who becomes his
image and successor, carries on his interrupted life. Perhaps the
great sorrow that follows, in a daughter such as Mamma, the death of
her mother only makes the chrysalis break open a little sooner,
hastens the metamorphosis and the appearance of a person whom we carry
within us and who, but for this crisis which annihilates time and
space, would have come more gradually to the surface. Perhaps, in our
regret for her who is no more, there is a sort of auto-suggestion
which ends by bringing out on our features resemblances which
potentially we already bore, and above all a cessation of our most
characteristically personal activity (in my mother, her common sense,
the sarcastic gaiety that she inherited from her father) which we did
not shrink, so long as the beloved was alive, from exercising, even at
her expense, and which counterbalanced the traits that we derived
exclusively from her. Once she is dead, we should hesitate to be
different, we begin to admire only what she was, what we ouiselves
already were only blended with something else, and what in future we
are to be exclusively. It is in this sense (and not in that other, so
vague, so false, in which the phrase is generally used) that we may
say that death is not in vain, that the dead man continues to react
upon us. He reacts even more than a living man because, true reality
being discoverable only by the mind, being the object of a spiritual
operation, we acquire a true knowledge only of things that we are
obliged to create anew by thought, things that are hidden' from us in
everyday life.... Lastly, in our mourning for our dead we pay an
idolatrous worship to the things that they liked. Not only could not
my mother bear to be parted from my grandmother's bag, become more
precious than if it had been studded with sapphires and diamonds, from
her muff, from all those garments which served to enhance their
personal resemblance, but even from the volumes of Mme. de Sévigné
which my grandmother took with her everywhere, copies which my mother
would not have exchanged for the original manuscript of the letters.
She had often teased my grandmother who could never write to her
without quoting some phrase of Mme. de Sévigné or Mme. de Beausergent.
In each of the three letters that I received from Mamma before her
arrival at Balbec, she quoted Mme. de Sévigné to me, as though those
three letters had been written not by her to me but by my grandmother
and to her. She must at once go out upon the front to see that beach
of which my grandmother had spoken to her every day in her letters.
Carrying her mother's sunshade, I saw her from my window advance, a
sable figure, with timid, pious steps, over the sands that beloved
feet had trodden before her, and she looked as though she were going
down to find a corpse which the waves would cast up at her feet. So
that she should not have to dine by herself, I was to join her
downstairs. The chief magistrate and the barrister's widow asked to be
introduced to her. And everything that was in any way connected with
my grandmother was so precious to her that she was deeply touched,
remembered ever afterwards with gratitude what the chief magistrate
had said to her, just as she was hurt and indignant that, the
barrister's wife had not a word to say in memory of the dead. In
reality, the chief magistrate was no more concerned about my
grandmother than the barrister's wife. The heartfelt words of the one
and the other's silence, for all that my mother imagined so vast a
difference between them, were but alternative ways of expressing that
indifference which we feel towards the dead. But I think that my
mother found most comfort in the words in which, quite involuntarily,
I conveyed to her a little of my own anguish. It could not but make
Mamma happy (notwithstanding all her affection for myself), like
everything else that guaranteed my grandmother survival in our hearts.
Daily after this my mother went down and sat upon the beach, so as to
do exactly what her mother had done, and read her mother's two
favourite books, the _Memoirs_ of Madame de Beausergent and the
_Letters_ of Madame de Sévigné. She, like all the rest of us, could
not bear to hear the latter lady called the 'spirituelle Marquise' any
more than to hear La Fontaine called 'le Bonhomme.' But when, in
reading the _Letters_, she came upon the words: 'My daughter,' she
seemed to be listening to her mother's voice.

She had the misfortune, upon one of these pilgrimages during which she
did not like to be disturbed, to meet upon the beach a lady from
Combray, accompanied by her daughters. Her name was, I think, Madame
Poussin.  But among ourselves we always referred to her as the 'Pretty
Kettle of Fish,' for it was by the perpetual repetition of this phrase
that she warned her daughters of the evils that they were laying up
for themselves, saying for instance if one of them was rubbing her
eyes: "When you go and get ophthalmia, that will be a pretty kettle of
fish." She greeted my mother from afar with slow and melancholy bows,
a sign not of condolence but of the nature of her social training. We
might never have lost my grandmother, or had any reason to be anything
but happy. Living in comparative retirement at Combray within the
walls of her large garden, she could never find anything soft enough
to her liking, and subjected to a softening process the words and even
the proper names of the French language. She felt 'spoon' to be too
hard a word to apply to the piece of silver which measured out her
syrups, and said, in consequence, 'spune'; she would have been afraid
of hurting the feelings of the sweet singer of Télémaque by calling
him bluntly Fénelon--as I myself said with a clear conscience, having
had as a friend the dearest and cleverest of men, good and gallant,
never to be forgotten by any that knew him, Bertrand de Fénelon--and
never said anything but 'Fénelon,' feeling that the acute accent added
a certain softness. The far from soft son-in-law of this Madame
Poussin, whose name I have forgotten, having been a lawyer at Combray,
ran off with the contents of the safe, and relieved my uncle among
others of a considerable sum of money. But most of the people of
Combray were on such friendly terms with the rest of the family that
no coolness ensued and her neighbours said merely that they were sorry
for Madame Poussin.  She never entertained, but whenever people passed
by her railings they would stop to admire the delicious shade of her
trees', which was the only thing that could be made out. She gave us
no trouble at Balbec, where I encountered her only once, at a moment
when she was saying to a daughter who was biting her nails: "When they
begin to fester, that will be a pretty kettle of fish."

While Mamma sat reading on the beach I remained in my room by myself.
I recalled the last weeks of my grandmother's life, and everything
connected with them, the outer door of the flat which had been propped
open when I went out with her for the last time. In contrast to all
this the rest of the world seemed scarcely real and my anguish
poisoned everything in it. Finally my mother insisted upon my going
out. But at every step, some forgotten view of the casino, of the
street along which, as I waited until she was ready, that first
evening, I had walked as far as the monument to Duguay-Trouin,
prevented me, like a wind against which it is hopeless to struggle,
from going farther; I lowered my eyes in order not to see. And after I
had recovered my strength a little I turned back towards the hotel,
the hotel in which I knew that it was henceforth impossible that,
however long I might wait, I should find my grandmother, whom I had
found there before, on the evening of our arrival. As it was the first
time that I had gone out of doors, a number of servants whom I had not
yet seen were gazing at me curiously. Upon the very threshold of the
hotel a young page took off his cap to greet me and at once put it on
again. I supposed that Aimé had, to borrow his own expression, 'given
him the office' to treat me with respect. But I saw a moment later
that, as some one else entered the hotel, he doffed it again. The fact
of the matter was that this young man had no other occupation in life
than to take off and put on his cap, and did it to perfection. Having
realised that he was incapable of doing anything else and that in this
art he excelled, he practised it as often as was possible daily, which
won him a discreet but widespread regard from the visitors, coupled
with great regard from the hall porter upon whom devolved the duty of
engaging the boys and who, until this rare bird alighted, had never
succeeded in finding one who did not receive notice within a week,
greatly to the astonishment of Aimé who used to say: "After all, in
that job they've only got to be polite, which can't be so very
difficult." The manager required in addition that they should have
what he called a good 'presence,' meaning thereby that they should not
be absent from their posts, or perhaps having heard the word
'presence' used of personal appearance. The appearance of the lawn
behind the hotel had been altered by the creation of several
flower-beds and by the removal not only of an exotic shrub but of the
page who, at the time of my former visit, used to provide an external
decoration with the supple stem of his figure crowned by the curious
colouring of his hair. He had gone with a Polish countess who had
taken him as her secretary, following the example of his two elder
brothers and their typist sister, torn from the hotel by persons of
different race and sex who had been attracted by their charm.  The
only one remaining was the youngest, whom nobody wanted, because he
squinted. He was highly delighted when the Polish countess or the
protectors of the other two brothers came on a visit to the hotel at
Balbec. For, albeit he was jealous of his brothers, he was fond of
them and could in this way cultivate his family affections for a few
weeks in the year. Was not the Abbess of Fontevrault accustomed,
deserting her nuns for the occasion, to come and partake of the
hospitality which Louis XIV offered to that other Mortemart, his
mistress, Madame de Montespan? The boy was still in his first year at
Balbec; he did not as yet know me, but having heard his comrades of
longer standing supplement the word 'Monsieur,' when they addressed
me, with my surname, he copied them from the first with an air of
satisfaction, whether at shewing his familiarity with a person whom he
supposed to be well-known, or at conforming with a custom of which
five minutes earlier he had never heard but which he felt it to be
indispensable that he should not fail to observe. I could quite well
appreciate the charm that this great 'Palace' might have for certain
persons. It was arranged like a theatre, and a numerous cast filled it
to the doors with animation. For all that the visitor was only a sort
of spectator, he was perpetually taking part in the performance, and
that not as in one of those theatres where the actors perform a play
among the audience, but as though the life of the spectator were going
on amid the sumptuous fittings of the stage. The lawn-tennis player
might come in wearing a white flannel blazer, the porter would have
put on a blue frock coat with silver braid before handing him his
letters. If this lawn-tennis player did not choose to walk upstairs,
he was equally involved with the actors in having by his side, to
propel the lift, its attendant no less richly attired. The corridors
on each landing engulfed a flying band of nymphlike chambermaids, fair
visions against the sea, at whose modest chambers the admirers of
feminine beauty arrived by cunning detours. Downstairs, it was the
masculine element that predominated and made this hotel, in view of
the extreme and effortless youth of the servants, a sort of
Judaeo-Christian tragedy given bodily form and perpetually in
performance. And so I could not help repeating to myself, when I saw
them, not indeed the lines of Racine that had come into my head at the
Princesse de Guermantes's while M. de Vaugoubert stood watching young
secretaries of embassy greet M. de Charlus, but other lines of Racine,
taken this time not from _Esther_ but from _Athalie_: for in the
doorway of the hall, what in the seventeenth century was called the
portico, 'a flourishing race' of young pages clustered, especially at
tea-time, like the young Israelites of Racine's choruses. But I do not
believe that one of them could have given even the vague answer that
Joas finds to satisfy Athalie when she inquires of the infant Prince:
"What is your office, then?" for they had none. At the most, if one
had asked of any of them, like the new Queen: "But all this race, what
do they then, imprisoned in this place?" he might have said: "I watch
the solemn pomp and bear my part." Now and then one of the young
supers would approach some more important personage, then this young
beauty would rejoin the chorus, and, unless it were the moment for a
spell of contemplative relaxation, they would proceed with their
useless, reverent, decorative, daily evolutions. For, except on their
'day off,' 'reared in seclusion from the world' and never crossing the
threshold, they led the same ecclesiastical existence as the Levites
in _Athalie_, and as I gazed at that 'young and faithful troop'
playing at the foot of the steps draped with sumptuous carpets, I felt
inclined to ask myself whether I were entering the Grand Hotel at
Balbec or the Temple of Solomon.

I went straight up to my room. My thoughts kept constantly turning to
the last days of my grandmother's illness, to her sufferings which I
lived over again, intensifying them with that element which is even
harder to endure than the sufferings of other people, and is added to
them by our merciless pity; when we think that we are merely reviving
the pains of a beloved friend, our pity exaggerates them; but perhaps
it is our pity that is in the right, more than the sufferers' own
consciousness of their pains, they being blind to that tragedy of
their own existence which pity sees and deplores. Certainly my pity
would have taken fresh strength and far exceeded my grandmother's
sufferings had I known then what I did not know until long afterwards,
that my grandmother, on the eve of her death, in a moment of
consciousness and after making sure that I was not in the room, had
taken Mamma's hand, and, after pressing her fevered lips to it, had
said: "Farewell, my child, farewell for ever." And this may perhaps
have been the memory upon which my mother never ceased to gaze so
fixedly. Then more pleasant memories returned to me. She was my
grandmother and I was her grandson. Her facial expressions seemed
written in a language intended for me alone; she was everything in my
life, other people existed merely in relation to her, to the judgment
that she would pass upon them; but no, our relations were too fleeting
to have been anything but accidental. She no longer knew me, I should
never see her again. We had not been created solely for one another,
she was a stranger to me. This stranger was before my eyes at the
moment in the photograph taken of her by Saint-Loup. Mamma, who had
met Albertine, insisted upon my seeing her, because of the nice things
that she had said about my grandmother and myself. I had accordingly
made an appointment with her. I told the manager that she was coming,
and asked him to let her wait for me in the drawing-room. He informed
me that he had known her for years, her and her friends, long before
they had attained 'the age of purity' but that he was annoyed with
them because of certain things that they had said about the hotel.
"They can't be very 'gentlemanly' if they talk like that. Unless
people have been slandering them." I had no difficulty in guessing
that 'purity' here meant 'puberty.' As I waited until it should be
time to go down and meet Albertine, I was keeping my eyes fixed, as
upon a picture which one ceases to see by dint of staring at it, upon
the photograph that Saint-Loup had taken, when all of a sudden I
thought once again: "It's grandmother, I am her grandson" as a man who
has lost his memory remembers his name, as a sick man changes his
personality. Françoise came in to tell me that Albertine was there,
and, catching sight of the photograph: "Poor Madame; it's the very
image of her, even the beauty spot on her cheek; that day the Marquis
took her picture, she was very poorly, she had been taken bad twice.
'Whatever happens, Françoise,' she said, 'you must never let my
grandson know.' And she kept it to herself, she was always bright with
other people. When she was by herself, though, I used to find that she
seemed to be in rather monotonous spirits now and then. But that soon
passed away. And then she said to me, she said: 'If anything were to
happen to me, he ought to have a picture of me to keep. And I have
never had one done in my life.' So then she sent me along with a
message to the Marquis, and he was never to let you know that it was
she who had asked him, but could he take her photograph. But when I
came back and told her that he would, she had changed her mind again,
because she was looking so poorly. 'It would be even worse,' she said
to me, 'than no picture at all.' But she was a clever one, she was,
and in the end she got herself up so well in that big shady hat that
it didn't shew at all when she was out of the sun. She was very glad
to have that photograph, because at that time she didn't think she
would ever leave Balbec alive. It was no use my saying to her:
'Madame, it's wrong to talk like that, I don't like to hear Madame
talk like that,' she had got it into her head. And, lord, there were
plenty days when she couldn't eat a thing. That was why she used to
make Monsieur go and dine away out in the country with M. le Marquis.
Then, instead of going in to dinner, she would pretend to be reading a
book, and as soon as the Marquis's carriage had started, up she would
go to bed. Some days she wanted to send word to Madame, to come down
and see her in time. And then she was afraid of alarming her, as she
had said nothing to her about it. 'It will be better for her to stay
with her husband, don't you see, Françoise.'" Looking me in the face,
Françoise asked me all of a sudden if I was 'feeling indisposed.' I
said that I was not; whereupon she: "And you make me waste my time
talking to you. Your visitor has been here all this time. I must go
down and tell her. She is not the sort of person to have here. Why, a
fast one like that, she may be gone again by now. She doesn't like to
be kept waiting. Oh, nowadays, Mademoiselle Albertine, she's
somebody!" "You are quite wrong, she is a very respectable person, too
respectable for this place. But go and tell her that I shan't be able
to see her to-day."

What compassionate declamations I should have provoked from Françoise
if she had seen me cry. I carefully hid myself from her. Otherwise I
should have had her sympathy. But I gave her mine. We do not put
ourselves sufficiently in the place of these poor maidservants who
cannot bear to see us cry, as though crying were bad for us; or bad,
perhaps, for them, for Françoise used to say to me when I was a child:
"Don't cry like that, I don't like to see you crying like that." We
dislike highfalutin language, asseverations, we are wrong, we close
our hearts to the pathos of the countryside, to the legend which the
poor servant girl, dismissed, unjustly perhaps, for theft, pale as
death, grown suddenly more humble than if it were a crime merely to be
accused, unfolds, invoking her father's honesty, her mother's
principles, her grandam's counsels. It is true that those same
servants who cannot bear our tears will have no hesitation in letting
us catch pneumonia, because the maid downstairs likes draughts and it
would not be polite to her to shut the windows. For it is necessary
that even those who are right, like Françoise, should be wrong also,
so that Justice may be made an impossible thing. Even the humble
pleasures of servants provoke either the refusal or the ridicule of
their masters. For it is always a mere nothing, but foolishly
sentimental, unhygienic. And so, they are in a position to say: "How
is it that I ask for only this one thing in the whole year, and am not
allowed it." And yet the masters will allow them something far more
difficult, which was not stupid and dangerous for the servants--or for
themselves. To be sure, the humility of the wretched maid, trembling,
ready to confess the crime that she has not committed, saying "I shall
leave to-night if you wish it," is a thing that nobody can resist.
But we must learn also not to remain unmoved, despite the solemn,
menacing fatuity of the things that she says, her maternal heritage
and the dignity of the family 'kailyard,' before an old cook draped in
the honour of her life and of her ancestry, wielding her broom like a
sceptre, donning the tragic buskin, stifling her speech with sobs,
drawing herself up with majesty. That afternoon, I remembered or
imagined scenes of this sort which I associated with our old servant,
and from then onwards, in spite of all the harm that she might do to
Albertine, I loved Françoise with an affection, intermittent it is
true, but of the strongest kind, the kind that is founded upon pity.

To be sure, I suffered agonies all that day, as I sat gazing at my
grandmother's photograph. It tortured me. Not so acutely, though, as
the visit I received that evening from the manager. After I had spoken
to him about my grandmother, and he had reiterated his condolences, I
heard him say (for he enjoyed using the words that he pronounced
wrongly): "Like the day when Madame your grandmother had that sincup,
I wanted to tell you about it, because of the other visitors, don't
you know, it might have given the place a bad name. She ought really
to have left that evening. But she begged me to say nothing about it
and promised me that she wouldn't have another sincup, or the first
time she had one, she would go. The floor waiter reported to me that
she had had another. But, lord, you were old friends that we try to
please, and so long as nobody made any complaint." And so my
grandmother had had syncopes which she had never mentioned to me.
Perhaps at the very moment when I was being most beastly to her, when
she was obliged, amid her pain, to see that she kept her temper, so as
not to anger me, and her looks, so as not to be turned out of the
hotel. 'Sincup' was a word which, so pronounced, I should never have
imagined, which might perhaps, applied to other people, have struck me
as ridiculous, but which in its strange sonorous novelty, like that of
an original discord, long retained the faculty of arousing in me the
most painful sensations.

Next day I went, at Mamma's request, to lie down for a little on the
sands, or rather among the dunes, where one is hidden by their folds,
and I knew that Albertine and her friends would not be able to find
me. My drooping eyelids allowed but one kind of light to pass, all
rosy, the light of the inner walls of the eyes. Then they shut
altogether. Whereupon my grandmother appeared to me, seated in an
armchair. So feeble she was, she seemed to be less alive than other
people. And yet I could hear her breathe; now and again she made a
sign to shew that she had understood what we were saying, my father
and I. But in vain might I take her in my arms, I failed utterly to
kindle a spark of affection in her eyes, a flush of colour in her
cheeks. Absent from herself, she appeared somehow not to love me, not
to know me, perhaps not to see me. I could not interpret the secret of
her indifference, of her dejection, of her silent resentment. I drew
my father aside. "You can see, all the same," I said to him, "there's
no doubt about it, she understands everything perfectly. It is a
perfect imitation of life. If we could have your cousin here, who
maintains that the dead don't live. Why, she's been dead for more than
a year now, and she's still alive. But why won't she give me a kiss?"
"Look her poor head is drooping again." "But she wants to go, now, to
the Champs-Elysées." "It's madness!" "You really think it can do her
any harm, that she can die any further? It isn't possible that she no
longer loves me. I keep on hugging her, won't she ever smile at me
again?" "What can you expect, when people are dead they are dead."

A few days later I was able to look with pleasure at the photograph
that Saint-Loup had taken of her; it did not revive the memory of what
Françoise had told me, because that memory had never left me and I was
growing used to it. But with regard to the idea that I had received of
the state of her health--so grave, so painful--on that day, the
photograph, still profiting by the ruses that my grandmother had
adopted, which succeeded in taking me in even after they had been
disclosed to me, shewed me her so smart, so care-free, beneath the hat
which partly hid her face, that I saw her looking less unhappy and in
better health than I had imagined.  And yet, her cheeks having
unconsciously assumed an expression of their own, livid, haggard, like
the expression of an animal that feels that it has been marked down
for slaughter, my grandmother had an air of being under sentence of
death, an air involuntarily sombre, unconsciously tragic, which passed
unperceived by me but prevented Mamma from ever looking at that
photograph, that photograph which seemed to her a photograph not so
much of her mother as of her mother's disease, of an insult that the
disease was offering to the brutally buffeted face of my grandmother.

Then one day I decided to send word to Albertine that I would see her
presently. This was because, on a morning of intense and premature
heat, the myriad cries of children at play, of bathers disporting
themselves, of newsvendors, had traced for me in lines of fire, in
wheeling, interlacing flashes, the scorching beach which the little
waves came up one after another to sprinkle with their coolness; then
had begun the symphonic concert mingled with the splashing of the
water, through which the violins hummed like a swarm of bees that had
strayed out over the sea. At once I had longed to hear again
Albertine's laughter, to see her friends, those girls outlined against
the waves who had remained in my memory the inseparable charm, the
typical flora of Balbec; and I had determined to send a line by
Françoise to Albertine, making an appointment for the following week,
while, gently rising, the sea as each wave uncurled completely buried
in layers of crystal the melody whose phrases appeared to be separated
from one another like those angel lutanists which on the roof of the
Italian cathedral rise between the peaks of blue porphyry and foaming
jasper. But on the day on which Albertine came, the weather had turned
dull and cold again, and moreover I had no opportunity of hearing her
laugh; she was in a very bad temper. "Balbec is deadly dull this
year," she said to me. "I don't mean to stay any longer than I can
help. You know I've been here since Easter, that's more than a month.
There's not a soul here. You can imagine what fun it is."
Notwithstanding the recent rain and a sky that changed every moment,
after escorting Albertine as far as Epreville, for she was, to borrow
her expression, 'on the run' between that little watering-place, where
Mme. Bontemps had her villa, and Incarville, where she had been taken
'en pension' by Rosemonde's family, I went off by myself in the
direction of the highroad that Mme. de Villeparisis's carriage had
taken when we went for a drive with my grandmother; pools of water
which the sun, now bright again, had not dried made a regular quagmire
of the ground, and I thought of my grandmother who, in the old days,
could not walk a yard without covering herself with mud. But on
reaching the road I found a dazzling spectacle. Where I had seen with
my grandmother in the month of August only the green leaves and, so to
speak, the disposition of the apple-trees, as far as the eye could
reach they were in full bloom, marvellous in their splendour, their
feet in the mire beneath their ball-dresses, taking no precaution not
to spoil the most marvellous pink satin that was ever seen, which
glittered in the sunlight; the distant horizon of the sea gave the
trees the background of a Japanese print; if I raised my head to gaze
at the sky through the blossom, which made its serene blue appear
almost violent, the trees seemed to be drawing apart to reveal the
immensity of their paradise. Beneath that azure a faint but cold
breeze set the blushing bouquets gently trembling. Blue tits came and
perched upon the branches and fluttered among the flowers, indulgent,
as though it had been an amateur of exotic art and colours who had
artificially created this living beauty. But it moved one to tears
because, to whatever lengths the artist went in the refinement of his
creation, one felt that it was natural, that these apple-trees were
there in the heart of the country, like peasants, upon one of the
highroads of France. Then the rays of the sun gave place suddenly to
those of the rain; they streaked the whole horizon, caught the line of
apple-trees in their grey net. But they continued to hold aloft their
beauty, pink and blooming, in the wind that had turned icy beneath the
drenching rain: it was a day in spring.




CHAPTER TWO


The mysteries of Albertine--The girls whom she sees reflected in the
glass--The other woman--The lift-boy--Madame de Cambremer--The
pleasures of M. Nissim Bernard--Outline of the strange character of
Morel--M. de Charlus dines with the Verdurins.


In my fear lest the pleasure I found in this solitary excursion might
weaken my memory of my grandmother, I sought to revive this by
thinking of some great mental suffering that she had undergone; in
response to my appeal that suffering tried to build itself in my
heart, threw up vast pillars there; but my heart was doubtless too
small for it, I had not the strength to bear so great a grief, my
attention was distracted at the moment when it was approaching
completion, and its arches collapsed before joining as, before they
have perfected their curve, the waves of the sea totter and break.

And yet, if only from my dreams when I was asleep, I might have
learned that my grief for my grandmother's death was diminishing, for
she appeared in them less crushed by the idea that I had formed of her
non-existence.  I saw her an invalid still, but on the road to
recovery, I found her in better health. And if she made any allusion
to what she had suffered, I stopped her mouth with my kisses and
assured her that she was now permanently cured. I should have liked to
call the sceptics to witness that death is indeed a malady from which
one recovers. Only, I no longer found in my grandmother the rich
spontaneity of old times. Her words were no more than a feeble, docile
response, almost a mere echo of mine; she was nothing more than the
reflexion of my own thoughts.

Incapable as I still was of feeling any fresh physical desire,
Albertine was beginning nevertheless to inspire in me a desire for
happiness. Certain dreams of shared affection, always floating on the
surface of our minds, ally themselves readily by a sort of affinity
with the memory (provided that this has already become slightly vague)
of a woman with whom we have taken our pleasure. This sentiment
recalled to me aspects of Albertine's face, more gentle, less gay,
quite different from those that would have been evoked by physical
desire; and as it was also less pressing than that desire I would
gladly have postponed its realisation until the following winter,
without seeking to see Albertine again at Balbec, before her
departure. But even in the midst of a grief that is still keen
physical desire will revive. From my bed, where I was made to spend
hours every day resting, I longed for Albertine to come and resume our
former amusements.  Do we not see, in the very room in which they have
lost a child, its parents soon come together again to give the little
angel a baby brother?  I tried to distract my mind from this desire by
going to the window to look at that day's sea. As in the former year,
the seas, from one day to another, were rarely the same. Nor, however,
did they at all resemble those of that first year, whether because we
were now in spring with its storms, or because even if I had come down
at the same time as before, the different, more changeable weather
might have discouraged from visiting this coast certain seas,
indolent, vaporous and fragile, which I had seen throughout long,
scorching days, asleep upon the beach, their bluish bosoms, only,
faintly stirring, with a soft palpitation, or, as was most probable,
because my eyes, taught by Elstir to retain precisely those elements
that before I had deliberately rejected, would now gaze for hours at
what in the former year they had been incapable of seeing. The
contrast that used then to strike me so forcibly between the country
drives that I took with Mme. de Villeparisis and this proximity,
fluid, inaccessible, mythological, of the eternal Ocean, no longer
existed for me. And there were days now when, on the contrary, the sea
itself seemed almost rural. On the days, few and far between, of
really fine weather, the heat had traced upon the waters, as it might
be across country, a dusty white track, at the end of which the
pointed mast of a fishing-boat stood up like a village steeple. A tug,
of which one could see only the funnel, was smoking in the distance
like a factory amid the fields, while alone against the horizon a
convex patch of white, sketched there doubtless by a sail but
apparently a solid plastered surface, made one think of the sunlit
wall of some isolated building, an hospital or a school. And the
clouds and the wind, on days when these were added to the sun,
completed if not the error of judgment, at any rate the illusion of
the first glance, the suggestion that it aroused in the imagination.
For the alternation of sharply defined patches of colour like those
produced in the country by the proximity of different crops, the
rough, yellow, almost muddy irregularities of the marine surface, the
banks, the slopes that hid from sight a vessel upon which a crew of
nimble sailors seemed to be reaping a harvest, all this upon stormy
days made the ocean a thing as varied, as solid, as broken, as
populous, as civilised as the earth with its carriage roads over which
I used to travel, and was soon to be travelling again. And once,
unable any longer to hold out against my desire, instead of going back
to bed I put on my clothes and started off to Incarville, to find
Albertine. I would ask her to come with me to Douville, where I would
pay calls at Féterne upon Mme. de Cambremer and at la Raspelière upon
Mme. Verdurin. Albertine would wait for me meanwhile upon the beach
and we would return together after dark. I went to take the train on
the local light railway, of which I had picked up, the time before,
from Albertine and her friends all the nicknames current in the
district, where it was known as the _Twister_ because of its
numberless windings, the _Crawler_ because the train never seemed to
move, the _Transatlantic_ because of a horrible siren which it sounded
to clear people off the line, the _Decauville_ and the _Funi_, albeit
there was nothing funicular about it but because it climbed the cliff,
and, although not, strictly speaking, a Decauville, had a 60
centimetre gauge, the _B. A. G._ because it ran between Balbec and
Grattevast _via_ Angerville, the _Tram_ and the _T. S. N._ because it
was a branch of the Tramways of Southern Normandy. I took my seat in a
compartment in which I was alone; it was a day of glorious sunshine,
and stiflingly hot; I drew down the blue blind which shut off all but
a single ray of sunlight. But immediately I beheld my grandmother, as
she had appeared sitting in the train, on our leaving Paris for
Balbec, when, in her sorrow at seeing me drink beer, she had preferred
not to look, to shut her eyes and pretend to be asleep. I, who in my
childhood had been unable to endure her anguish when my grandfather
tasted brandy, I had inflicted this anguish upon her, not merely of
seeing me accept, at the invitation of another, a drink which she
regarded as bad for me, I had forced her to leave me free to swill it
down to my heart's content, worse still, by my bursts of passion, my
choking fits, I had forced her to help, to advise me to do so, with a
supreme resignation of which I saw now in my memory the mute,
despairing image, her eyes closed to shut out the sight. So vivid a
memory had, like the stroke of a magic wand, restored the mood that I
had been gradually outgrowing for some time past; what had I to do
with Rosemondé when my lips were wholly possessed by the desperate
longing to kiss a dead woman, what had I to say to the Cambremers and
Verdurins when my heart was beating so violently because at every
moment there was being renewed in it the pain that my grandmother had
suffered. I could not remain in the compartment.  As soon as the train
stopped at Maineville-la-Teinturiere, abandoning all my plans, I
alighted. Maineville had of late acquired considerable importance and
a reputation all its own, because a director of various casinos, a
caterer in pleasure, had set up, just outside it, with a luxurious
display of bad taste that could vie with that of any smart hotel, an
establishment to which we shall return anon, and which was, to put it
briefly, the first brothel for 'exclusive' people that it had occurred
to anyone to build upon the coast of France. It was the only one.
True, every port has its own, but intended for sailors only, and for
lovers of the picturesque whom it amuses to see, next door to the
primeval parish church, the bawd, hardly less ancient, venerable and
moss-grown, standing outside her ill-famed door, waiting for the
return of the fishing fleet.

Hurrying past the glittering house of 'pleasure,' insolently erected
there despite the protests which the heads of families had addressed
in vain to the mayor, I reached the cliff and followed its winding
paths in the direction of Balbec. I heard, without responding to it,
the appeal of the hawthorns.  Neighbours, in humbler circumstances, of
the blossoming apple trees, they found them very coarse, without
denying the fresh complexion of the rosy-petalled daughters of those
wealthy brewers of cider. They knew that, with a lesser dowry, they
were more sought after, and were attractive enough by themselves in
their tattered whiteness.

On my return, the hotel porter handed me a black-bordered letter in
which the Marquis and the Marquise de Gonneville, the Vicomte and the
Vicomtesse d'Amfreville, the Comte and the Comtesse de Berneville, the
Marquis and the Marquise de Graincourt, the Comte d'Amenoncourt, the
Comtesse de Maineville, the Comte and the Comtesse de Franquetot, the
Comtesse de Chaverny _née_ d'Aigleville, begged to announce, and from
which I understood at length why it had been sent to me when I caught
sight of the names of the Marquise de Cambremer née du Mesnil la
Guichard, the Marquis and the Marquise de Cambremer, and saw that the
deceased, a cousin of the Cambremers, was named
Eléonore-Euphrasie-Humbertine de Cambremer, Comtesse de Criquetot. In
the whole extent of this provincial family, the enumeration of which
filled the closely printed lines, not a single commoner, and on the
other hand not a single title that one knew, but the entire
muster-roll of the nobles of the region who made their names--those of
all the interesting spots in the neighbourhood--ring out their joyous
endings in _ville_, in _court_, sometimes on a duller note (in _tot_).
Garbed in the roof-tiles of their castle or in the roughcast of their
parish church, their nodding heads barely reaching above the vault of
the nave or banqueting hall, and then only to cap themselves with the
Norman lantern or the dovecot of the pepperpot turret, they gave the
impression of having sounded the rallying call to all the charming
villages straggling or scattered over a radius of fifty leagues, and
to have paraded them in massed formation, without one absentee, one
intruder, on the compact, rectangular draught-board of the
aristocratic letter edged with black.

My mother had gone upstairs to her room, meditating the phrase of
Madame de Sévigné: "I see nothing of the people who seek to distract
me from you; the truth of the matter is that they are seeking to
prevent me from thinking of you, and that annoys me."--because the
chief magistrate had told her that she ought to find some distraction.
To me he whispered: "That's the Princesse de Parme!" My fears were
dispelled when I saw that the woman whom the magistrate pointed out to
me bore not the slightest resemblance to Her Royal Highness. But as
she had engaged a room in which to spend the night after paying a
visit to Mme.  de Luxembourg, the report of her coming had the effect
upon many people of making them take each newcomer for the Princesse
de Parme--and upon me of making me go and shut myself up in my attic.

I had no wish to remain there by myself. It was barely four o'clock. I
asked Françoise to go and find Albertine, so that she might spend the
rest of the afternoon with me.

It would be untrue, I think, to say that there were already symptoms
of that painful and perpetual mistrust which Albertine was to inspire
in me, not to mention the special character, emphatically Gomorrhan,
which that mistrust was to assume. Certainly, even that afternoon--but
this was not the first time--I grew anxious as I was kept waiting.
Françoise, once she had started, stayed away so long that I began to
despair. I had not lighted the lamp. The daylight had almost gone. The
wind was making the flag over the casino flap. And, fainter still in
the silence of the beach over which the tide was rising, and like a
voice rendering and enhancing the troubling emptiness of this
restless, unnatural hour, a little barrel organ that had stopped
outside the hotel was playing Viennese waltzes. At length Françoise
arrived, but unaccompanied. "I have been as quick as I could but she
wouldn't come because she didn't think she was looking smart enough.
If she was five minutes painting herself and powdering herself, she
was an hour by the clock. You'll be having a regular scentshop in
here. She's coming, she stayed behind to tidy herself at the glass. I
thought I should find her here." There was still a long time to wait
before Albertine appeared. But the gaiety, the charm that she shewed
on this occasion dispelled my sorrow. She informed me (in
contradiction of what she had said the other day) that she would be
staying for the whole season and asked me whether we could not
arrange, as in the former year, to meet daily.  I told her that at the
moment I was too melancholy and that I would rather send for her from
time to time at the last moment, as I did in Paris. "If ever you're
feeling worried, or feel that you want me, do not hesitate," she told
me, "to send for me, I shall come immediately, and if you are not
afraid of its creating a scandal in the hotel, I shall stay as long as
you like." Françoise, in bringing her to me, had assumed the joyous
air she wore whenever she had gone out of her way to please me and had
been successful.  But Albertine herself contributed nothing to her
joy, and the very next day Françoise was to greet me with the profound
observation: "Monsieur ought not to see that young lady. I know quite
well the sort she is, she'll land you in trouble." As I escorted
Albertine to the door I saw in the lighted dining-room the Princesse
de Parme. I merely gave her a glance, taking care not to be seen. But
I must say that I found a certain grandeur in the royal politeness
which had made me smile at the Guermantes'. It is a fundamental rule
that sovereign princes are at home wherever they are, and this rule is
conventionally expressed in obsolete and useless customs such as that
which requires the host to carry his hat in his hand, in his own
house, to shew that he is not in his own home but in the Prince's. Now
the Princesse de Parme may not have formulated this idea to herself,
but she was so imbued with it that all her actions, spontaneously
invented to suit the circumstances, pointed to it. When she rose from
table she handed a lavish tip to Aimé, as though he had been there
solely for her and she were rewarding, before leaving a country house,
a footman who had been detailed to wait upon her. Nor did she stop at
the tip, but with a gracious smile bestowed on him a few friendly,
flattering words, with a store of which her mother had provided her.
Another moment, and she would have told him that, just as the hotel
was perfectly managed, so Normandy was a garden of roses and that she
preferred France to any other country in the world. Another coin
slipped from the Princess's fingers, for the wine waiter, for whom she
had sent and to whom she made a point of expressing her satisfaction
like a general after an inspection. The lift-boy had come up at that
moment with a message for her; he too received a little speech, a
smile and a tip, all this interspersed with encouraging and humble
words intended to prove to them that she was only one of themselves.
As Aimé, the wine waiter, the lift-boy and the rest felt that it would
be impolite not to grin from ear to ear at a person who smiled at
them, she was presently surrounded by a cluster of servants with whom
she chatted kindly; such ways being unfamiliar in smart hotels, the
people who passed by, not knowing who she was, thought they beheld a
permanent resident at Balbec, who, because of her humble origin, or
for professional reasons (she was perhaps the wife of an agent for
champagne) was less different from the domestics than the really smart
visitors. As for me, I thought of the palace at Parma, of the
counsels, partly religious, partly political, given to this Princess,
who behaved towards the lower orders as though she had been obliged to
conciliate them in order to reign over them one day. All the more, as
if she were already reigning.

I went upstairs again to my room, but I was not alone there. I could
hear some one softly playing Schumann. No doubt it happens at times
that people, even those whom we love best, become saturated with the
melancholy or irritation that emanates from us. There is nevertheless
an inanimate object which is capable of a power of exasperation to
which no human being will ever attain: to wit, a piano.

Albertine had made me take a note of the dates on which she would be
going away for a few days to visit various girl friends, and had made
me write down their addresses as well, in case I should want her on
one of those evenings, for none of them lived very far away. This
meant that when I tried to find her, going from one girl to another,
she became more and more entwined in ropes of flowers. I must confess
that many of her friends--I was not yet in love with her--gave me, at
one watering-place or another, moments of pleasure. These obliging
young comrades did not seem to me to be very many. But recently I have
thought it over, their names have recurred to me. I counted that, in
that one season, a dozen conferred on me their ephemeral favours. A
name came back to me later, which made thirteen. I then, with almost a
child's delight in cruelty, dwelt upon that number. Alas, I realised
that I had forgotten the first of them all, Albertine who no longer
existed and who made the fourteenth.

I had, to resume the thread of my narrative, written down the names
and addresses of the girls with whom I should find her upon the days
when she was not to be at Incarville, but privately had decided that I
would devote those days rather to calling upon Mme. Verdurin. In any
case, our desire for different women varies in intensity. One evening
we cannot bear to let one out of our sight who, after that, for the
next month or two, will never enter our mind. Then there is the law of
change, for a study of which this is not the place, under which, after
an over-exertion of the flesh, the woman whose image haunts our
momentary senility is one to whom we would barely give more than a
kiss on the brow. As for Albertine, I saw her seldom, and only upon
the very infrequent evenings when I felt that I could not live without
her. If this desire seized me when she was too far from Balbec for
Françoise to be able to go and fetch her, I used to send the lift-boy
to Egreville, to La Sogne, to Saint-Frichoux, asking him to finish his
work a little earlier than usual. He would come into my room, but
would leave the door open for, albeit he was conscientious at his
'job' which was pretty hard, consisting in endless cleanings from five
o'clock in the morning, he could never bring himself to make the
effort to shut a door, and, if one were to remark to him that it was
open, would turn back and, summoning up all his strength, give it a
gentle push. With the democratic pride that marked him, a pride to
which, in more liberal careers, the members of a profession that is at
all numerous never attain, barristers, doctors and men of letters
speaking simply of a 'brother' barrister, doctor or man of letters,
he, employing, and rightly, a term that is confined to close
corporations like the Academy, would say to me in speaking of a page
who was in charge of the lift upon alternate days: "I shall get my
_colleague_ to take my place." This pride did not prevent him from
accepting, with a view to increasing what he called his 'salary,'
remuneration for his errands, a fact which had made Françoise take a
dislike to him: "Yes, the first time you see him you would give him
the sacrament without confession, but there are days when his tongue
is as smooth as a prison door. It's your money he's after." This was
the category in which she had so often in-cluded Eulalie, and in
which, alas (when I think of all the trouble that was one day to come
of it), she already placed Albertine, because she saw me often asking
Mamma, on behalf of my impecunious friend, for trinkets and other
little presents, which Françoise held to be inexcusable because Mme.
Bontemps had only a general servant. A moment later the lift-boy,
having removed what I should have called his livery and he called his
tunic, appeared wearing a straw hat, carrying a cane, holding himself
stiffly erect, for his mother had warned him never to adopt the
'working-class' or 'pageboy' style. Just as, thanks to books, all
knowledge is open to a work-ing man, who ceases to be such when he has
finished his work, so, thanks to a 'boater' hat and a pair of gloves,
elegance became accessible to the lift-boy who, having ceased for the
evening to take the visitors upstairs, imagined himself, like a young
surgeon who has taken off his overall, or Serjeant Saint-Loup out of
uniform, a typical young man about town. He was not for that matter
lacking in ambition, or in talent either in manipu-lating his machine
and not bringing you to a standstill between two floors.  But his
vocabulary was defective. I credited him with ambition because he said
in speaking of the porter, under whom he served: "My porter," in the
same tone in which a man who owned what the page would have called a
'private mansion' in Paris would have referred to his footman. As for
the lift-boy's vocabulary, it is curious that anybody who heard
people, fifty times a day, calling for the 'lift,' should never
himself call it anything but a 'left.' There were certain things about
this boy that were extremely annoying: whatever I might be saying to
him he would interrupt with a phrase: "I should say so!" or "I say!"
which seemed either to imply that my remark was so obvious that
anybody would have thought of it, or else to take all the credit for
it to himself, as though it were he that was drawing my attention to
the subject. "I should say so!" or "I say!" exclaimed with the utmost
emphasis, issued from his lips every other minute, over matters to
which he had never given a thought, a trick which irritated me so much
that I immediately began to say the opposite to shew him that he knew
nothing about it. But to my second assertion, albeit it was
incompatible with the first, he replied none the less stoutly: "I
should say so!" "I say!" as though these words were inevitable. I
found it difficult, also, to forgive him the trick of employing
certain terms proper to his calling, which would therefore have
sounded perfectly correct in their literal sense, in a figurative
sense only, which gave them an air of feeble witticism, for instance
the verb to pedal. He never used it when he had gone anywhere on his
bicycle. But if, on foot, he had hurried to arrive somewhere in time,
then, to indicate that he had walked fast, he would exclaim: "I should
say I didn't half pedal!" The lift-boy was on the small side, clumsily
built and by no means good looking. This did not prevent him, whenever
one spoke to him of some tall, slim, handsome young man, from saying:
"Oh, yes, I know, a fellow who is just my height." And one day when I
was expecting him to bring me the answer to a message, hearing
somebody come upstairs, I had in my impatience opened the door of my
room and caught sight of a page as beautiful as Endymion, with
incredibly perfect features, who was bringing a message to a lady whom
I did not know. When the lift-boy returned, in telling him how
impatiently I had waited for the answer, I mentioned to him that I had
thought I heard him come upstairs but that it had turned out to be a
page from the Hôtel de Normandie. "Oh, yes, I know," he said, "they
have only the one, a boy about my build. He's so like me in face, too,
that we're always being mistaken; anybody would think he was my
brother." Lastly, he always wanted to appear to have understood you
perfectly from the first second, which meant that as soon as you asked
him to do anything he would say: "Yes, yes, yes, yes, I understand all
that," with a precision and a tone of intelligence which for some time
deceived me; but other people, as we get to know them, are like a
metal dipped in an acid bath, and we see them gradually lose their
good qualities (and their bad qualities too, at times). Before giving
him my instructions, I saw that he had left the door open; I pointed
this out to him, I was afraid that people might hear us; he acceded to
my request and returned, having reduced the gap. "Anything to oblige.
But there's nobody on this floor except us two." Immediately I heard
one, then a second, then a third person go by. This annoyed me partly
because of the risk of my being overheard, but more still because I
could see that it did not in the least surprise him and was a
perfectly normal occurrence. "Yes, that'll be the maid next door going
for her things. Oh, that's of no importance, it's the bottler putting
away his keys. No, no, it's nothing, you can say what you want, it's
my colleague just going on duty." Then, as the reasons that all these
people had for passing did not diminish my dislike of the thought that
they might overhear me, at a formal order from me he went, not to shut
the door, which was beyond the strength of this bicyclist who longed
for a 'motor,' but to push it a little closer to. "Now we shall be
quite quiet." So quiet were we that an American lady burst in and
withdrew with apologies for having mistaken the number of her room.
"You are going to bring this young lady back with you," I told him,
after first going and banging the door with all my might (which
brought in another page to see whether a window had been left open).
"You remember the name: Mlle. Albertine Simonet. Anyhow, it's on the
envelope. You need only say to her that it's from me. She will be
delighted to come," I added, to encourage him and preserve a scrap of
my own self-esteem.  "I should say so!" "Not at all, there is not the
slightest reason to suppose that she will be glad to come. It's a
great nuisance getting here from Berneville." "I understand!" "You
will tell her to come with you." "Yes, yes, yes, yes, I understand
perfectly," he replied, in that sharp, precise tone which had long
ceased to make a 'good impression' upon me because I knew that it was
almost mechanical and covered with its apparent clearness plenty of
uncertainty and stupidity. "When will you be back?" "Haven't any too
much time," said the lift-boy, who, carrying to extremes the
grammatical rule that forbids the repetition of personal pronouns
before coordinate verbs, omitted the pronoun altogether. "Can go there
all right. Leave was stopped this afternoon, because there was a
dinner for twenty at luncheon. And it was my turn off duty to-day. So
it's all right if I go out a bit this evening. Take my bike with me.
Get there in no time." And an hour later he reappeared and said:
"Monsieur's had to wait, but the young lady's come with me. She's down
below." "Oh, thanks very much; the porter won't be cross with me?"
"Monsieur Paul? Doesn't even know where I've been. The head of the
door himself can't say a word." But once, after I had told him: "You
absolutely must bring her back with you," he reported to me with a
smile: "You know, I couldn't find her. She's not there. Couldn't wait
any longer; was afraid of getting it like my colleague who was 'missed
from the hotel" (for the lift-boy, who used the word 'rejoin' of a
profession which one joined for the first time, "I should like to
rejoin the post-office," to make up for this, or to mitigate the
calamity, were his own career at stake, or to insinuate it more
delicately and treacherously were the victim some one else, elided the
prefix and said: "I know he's been 'missed"). It was not with any evil
intent that he smiled, but from sheer timidity. He thought that he was
diminishing the magnitude of his crime by making a joke of it. In the
same way, if he had said to me: "_You know_, I couldn't find her,"
this did not mean that he really thought that I knew it already. On
the contrary, he was all too certain that I did not know it, and, what
was more, was afraid to tell me. And so he said 'you know' to ward off
the terror which menaced him as he uttered the words that were to
bring me the knowledge. We ought never to lose our tempers with people
who, when we find fault with them, begin to titter.  They do so not
because they are laughing at us, but because they are trembling lest
we should be angry. Let us shew all pity and tenderness to those who
laugh. For all the world like a stroke, the lift-boy's anxiety had
wrought in him not merely an apoplectic flush but an alteration in his
speech which had suddenly become familiar. He wound up by telling me
that Albertine was not at Egreville, that she would not be coming back
there before nine o'clock, and that if betimes (which meant, by
chance) she came back earlier, my message would be given her, and in
any case she would be with me before one o'clock in the morning.

[Translator's note: In the French text of _Sodome et Gomorrhe_, Volume
I ends at this point.]



It was not this evening, however, that my cruel mistrust began to take
solid form. No, to make no mystery about it, although the incident did
not occur until some weeks later, it arose out of a remark made by
Cottard.  Albertine and her friends had insisted that day upon
dragging me to the casino at Incarville where, as luck would have it,
I should not have joined them (having intended to go and see Mme.
Verdurin who had invited me again and again), had I not been held up
at Incarville itself by a breakdown of the tram which it would take a
considerable time to repair. As I strolled up and down waiting for the
men to finish working at it, I found myself all of a sudden face to
face with Doctor Cottard, who had come to Incarville to see a patient.
I almost hesitated to greet him as he had not answered any of my
letters. But friendship does not express itself in the same way in
different people. Not having been brought up to observe the same fixed
rules of behaviour as well-bred people, Cottard was full of good
intentions of which one knew nothing, even denying their existence,
until the day when he had an opportunity of displaying them. He
apologised, had indeed received my letters, had reported my
whereabouts to the Verdurins who were most anxious to see me and whom
he urged me to go and see. He even proposed to take me to them there
and then, for he was waiting for the little local train to take him
back there for dinner. As I hesitated and he had still some time
before his train ( for there was bound to be still a considerable
delay), I made him come with me to the little casino, one of those
that had struck me as being so gloomy on the evening of my first
arrival, now filled with the tumult of the girls, who, in the absence
of male partners, were dancing together. Andrée came sliding along the
floor towards me; I was meaning to go off with Cottard in a moment to
the Verdurins', when I definitely declined his offer, seized by an
irresistible desire to stay with Albertine. The fact was, I had just
heard her laugh. And her laugh at once suggested the rosy flesh, the
fragrant portals between which it had just made its way, seeming also,
as strong, sensual and revealing as the scent of geraniums, to carry
with it some microscopic particles of their substance, irritant and
secret.

One of the girls, a stranger to me, sat down at the piano, and Andrée
invited Albertine to waltz with her. Happy in the thought that I was
going to remain in this little casino with these girls, I remarked to
Cottard how well they danced together. But he, taking the professional
point of view of a doctor and with an ill-breeding which overlooked
the fact that they were my friends, although he must have seen me
shaking hands with them, replied: "Yes, but parents are very rash to
allow their daughters to form such habits. I should certainly never
let mine come here. Are they nice-looking, though? I can't see their
faces. There now, look," he went on, pointing to Albertine and Andrée
who were waltzing slowly, tightly clasped together, "I have left my
glasses behind and I don't see very well, but they are certainly
keenly roused. It is not sufficiently known that women derive most
excitement from their breasts. And theirs, as you see, are completely
touching." And indeed the contact had been unbroken between the
breasts of Andrée and of Albertine. I do not know whether they heard
or guessed Cottard's observation, but they gently broke the contact
while continuing to waltz. At that moment Andrée said something to
Albertine, who laughed, the same deep and penetrating laugh that I had
heard before. But all that it wafted to me this time was a feeling of
pain; Albertine appeared to be revealing by it, to be making Andrée
share some exquisite, secret thrill. It rang out like the first or the
last strains of a ball to which one has not been invited. I left the
place with Cottard, distracted by his conversation, thinking only at
odd moments of the scene I had just witnessed. This does not mean that
Cottard's conversation was interesting. It had indeed, at that moment,
become bitter, for we had just seen Doctor du Boulbon go past without
noticing us. He had come down to spend some time on the other side of
Balbec bay, where he was greatly in demand. Now, albeit Cottard was in
the habit of declaring that he did no professional work during the
holidays, he had hoped to build up a select practice along the coast,
a hope which du Boulbon's presence there doomed to disappointment.
Certainly, the Balbec doctor could not stand in Cottard's way. He was
merely a thoroughly conscientious doctor who knew everything, and to
whom you could not mention the slightest irritation of the skin
without his immediately prescribing, in a complicated formula, the
ointment, lotion or liniment that would put you right. As Marie
Gineste used to say, in her charming speech, he knew how to 'charm'
cuts and sores. But he was in no way eminent. He had indeed caused
Cottard some slight annoyance. The latter, now that he was anxious to
exchange his Chair for that of Therapeutics, had begun to specialise
in toxic actions. These, a perilous innovation in medicine, give an
excuse for changing the labels in the chemists' shops, where every
preparation is declared to be in no way toxic, unlike its substitutes,
and indeed to be disintoxicant. It is the fashionable cry; at the most
there may survive below in illegible lettering, like the faint trace
of an older fashion, the assurance that the preparation has been
carefully disinfected. Toxic actions serve also to reassure the
patient, who learns with joy that his paralysis is merely a toxic
disturbance. Now, a Grand Duke who had come for a few days to Balbec
and whose eye was extremely swollen had sent for Cottard who, in
return for a wad of hundred-franc notes (the Professor refused to see
anyone for less), had put down the inflammation to a toxic condition
and prescribed a disintoxicant treatment. As the swelling did not go
down, the Grand Duke fell back upon the general practitioner of
Balbec, who in five minutes had removed a speck of dust. The following
day, the swelling had gone. A celebrated specialist in nervous
diseases was, however, a more dangerous rival. He was a rubicund,
jovial person, since, for one thing, the constant society of nervous
wrecks did not prevent him from enjoying excellent health, but also so
as to reassure his patients by the hearty merriment of his 'Good
morning' and 'Good-bye,' while quite ready to lend the strength of his
muscular arms to fastening them in strait-waistcoats later on.
Nevertheless, whenever you spoke to him at a party, whether of
politics or of literature, he would listen to you with a kindly
attention, as though he were saying: "What is it all about?" without
at once giving an opinion, as though it were a matter for
consultation. But anyhow he, whatever his talent might be, was a
specialist. And so the whole of Cottard's rage was heaped upon du
Boulbon. But I soon bade good-bye to the Verdurins' professional
friend, and returned to Balbec, after promising him that I would pay
them a visit before long.

The mischief that his remarks about Albertine and Andrée had done me
was extreme, but its worst effects were not immediately felt by me, as
happens with those forms of poisoning which begin to act only after a
certain time.

Albertine, on the night after the lift-boy had gone in search of her,
did not appear, notwithstanding his assurances. Certainly, personal
charm is a less frequent cause of love than a speech such as: "No,
this evening I shall not be free." We barely notice this speech if we
are with friends; we are gay all the evening, a certain image never
enters our mind; during those hours it remains dipped in the necessary
solution; when we return home we find the plate developed and
perfectly clear. We become aware that life is no longer the life which
we would have surrendered for a trifle the day before, because, even
if we continue not to fear death, we no longer dare think of a
parting.

From, however, not one o'clock in the morning (the limit fixed by the
lift-boy), but three o'clock, I no longer felt as in former times the
anguish of seeing the chance of her coming diminish. The certainty
that she would not now come brought me a complete, refreshing calm;
this night was simply a night like all the rest during which I did not
see her, such was the idea from which I started. After which, the
thought that I should see her in the morning, or some other day,
outlining itself upon the blank which I submissively accepted, became
pleasant. Sometimes, during these nights of waiting, our anguish is
due to a drug which we have taken. The sufferer, misinterpreting his
own symptoms, thinks that he is anxious about the woman who fails to
appear. Love is engendered in these cases, as are certain nervous
maladies, by the inaccurate explanation of a state of discomfort.  An
explanation which it is useless to correct, at any rate so far as love
is concerned, a sentiment which (whatever its cause) is invariably in
error.

Next day, when Albertine wrote to me that she had only just got back
to Epreville, and so had not received my note in time, and was coming,
if she might, to see me that evening, behind the words of her letter,
as behind those that she had said to me once over the telephone, I
thought I could detect the presence of pleasures, of people whom she
had preferred to me.  Once again, I was stirred from head to foot by
the painful longing to know what she could have been doing, by the
latent love which we always carry within us; I almost thought for a
moment that it was going to attach me to Albertine, but it confined
itself to a stationary throbbing, the last echo of which died away
without the machine's having been set in motion.

I had failed during my first visit to Balbec--and perhaps, for that
matter, Andrée had failed equally--to understand Albertine's
character. I had put it down as frivolous, but had not known whether
our combined supplications might not succeed in keeping her with us
and making her forego a garden-party, a donkey ride, a picnic. During
my second visit to Balbec, I began to suspect that this frivolity was
only for show, the garden-party a mere screen, if not an invention.
She shewed herself in various colours in the following incident (by
which I mean the incident as seen by me, from my side of the glass
which was by no means transparent, and without my having any means of
determining what reality there was on the other side).  Albertine was
making me the most passionate protestations of affection.  She looked
at the time because she had to go and call upon a lady who was at
home, it appeared, every afternoon at five o'clock, at Infreville.
Tormented by suspicion, and feeling at the same time far from well, I
asked Albertine, I implored her to remain with me. It was impossible
(and indeed she could wait only five minutes longer) because it would
annoy the lady who was far from hospitable, highly susceptible and,
said Albertine, a perfect nuisance. "But one can easily cut a call."
"No, my aunt has always told me that the chief thing is politeness."
"But I have so often seen you being impolite." "It's not the same
thing, the lady would be angry with me and would say nasty things
about me to my aunt. I'm pretty well in her bad books already. She
expects me to go and see her." "But if she's at home every day?" Here
Albertine, feeling that she was caught, changed her line of argument.
"So she is at home every day. But to-day I've made arrangements to
meet some other girls there. It will be less boring that way." "So
then, Albertine, you prefer this lady and your friends to me, since,
rather than miss paying an admittedly boring call, you prefer to leave
me here alone, sick and wretched?" "I don't care if it is boring. I'm
going for their sake. I shall bring them home in my trap. Otherwise
they won't have any way of getting back." I pointed out to Albertine
that there were trains from Infreville up to ten o'clock at night.
"Quite true, but don't you see, it is possible that we may be asked to
stay to dinner. She is very hospitable." "Very well then, you won't."
"I should only make my aunt angry." "Besides, you can dine with her
and catch the ten o'clock train." "It's cutting it rather fine." "Then
I can never go and dine in town and come back by train. But listen,
Albertine. We are going to do something quite simple, I feel that^the
fresh air will do me good; since you can't give up your lady, I am
going to come with you to Infreville. Don't be alarmed, I shan't go as
far as the Tour Elisabeth" (the lady's villa), "I shall see neither
the lady nor your friends." Albertine started as though she had
received a violent blow. For a moment, she was unable to speak. She
explained that the sea bathing was not doing her any good. "If you
don't want me to come with you?" "How can you say such a thing, you
know there's nothing I enjoy more than going out with you." A sudden
change of tactics had occurred.  "Since we are going for a drive
together," she said to me, "why not go out in the other direction, we
might dine together. It would be so nice. After all, that side of
Balbec is much the prettier. I'm getting sick of Infreville and all
those little spinach-bed places." "But your aunt's friend will be
annoyed if you don't go and see her." "Very well, let her be." "No, it
is wrong to annoy people." "But she won't even notice that I'm not
there, she has people every day; I can go to-morrow, the next day,
next week, the week after, it's exactly the same." "And what about
your friends?" "Oh, they've cut me often enough. It's my turn now."
"But from the side you suggest there's no train back after nine."
"Well, what's the matter with that? Nine will do perfectly. Besides,
one need never think about getting back. We can always find a cart, a
bike, if the worse comes to the worst, we have legs." "We can always
find, Albertine, how you go on! Out Infreville way, where the villages
run into one another, well and good. But the other way, it's a very
different matter." "That way too. I promise to bring you back safe and
sound." I felt that Albertine was giving up for my sake some plan
arranged beforehand of which she refused to tell me, and that there
was some one else who would be as unhappy as I was. Seeing that what
she had intended to do was out of the question, since I insisted upon
accompanying her, she gave it up altogether. She knew that the loss
was not irremediable. For, like all women who have a number of irons
in the fire, she had one resource that never failed: suspicion and
jealousy. Of course she did not seek to arouse them, quite the
contrary. But lovers are so suspicious that they instantly scent out
falsehood. With the result that Albertine, being no better than anyone
else, knew by experience (without for a moment imagining that she owed
her experience to jealousy) that she could always be certain of
meeting people again after she had failed to keep an appointment. The
stranger whom she was deserting for me would be hurt, would love her
all the more for that (though Albertine did not know that this was the
reason), and, so as not to prolong the agony, would return to her of
his own accord, as I should have done. But I had no desire either to
give pain to another, or to tire myself, or to enter upon the terrible
course of investigation, of multiform, unending vigilance. "No,
Albertine, I do not wish to spoil your pleasure, go to your lady at
Infreville, or rather to the person you really mean to see, it is all
the same to me. The real reason why I am not coming with you is that
you do not wish it, the outing you would be taking with me is not the
one you meant to take, which is proved by your having contradicted
yourself at least five times without noticing it." Poor Albertine was
afraid that her contradictions, which she had not noticed, had been
more serious than they were. Not knowing exactly what fibs she had
told me: "It is quite on the cards that I did contradict myself.  The
sea air makes me lose my head altogether. I'm always calling things by
the wrong names." And (what proved to me that she would not, now,
require many tender affirmations to make me believe her) I felt a stab
in my heart as I listened to this admission of what I had but faintly
imagined.  "Very well, that's settled, I'm off," she said in a tragic
tone, not without looking at the time to see whether she was making
herself late for the other person, now that I had provided her with an
excuse for not spending the evening with myself. "It's too bad of you.
I alter all my plans to spend a nice, long evening with you, and it's
you that won't have it, and you accuse me of telling lies. I've never
known you to be so cruel. The sea shall be my tomb. I will never see
you any more." (My heart leaped at these words, albeit I was certain
that she would come again next day, as she did.) "I shall drown
myself, I shall throw myself into the water." "Like Sappho." "There
you go, insulting me again. You suspect not only what I say but what I
do." "But, my lamb, I didn't mean anything, I swear to you, you know
Sappho flung herself into the sea." "Yes, yes, you have no faith in
me." She saw that it was twenty minutes to the hour by the clock; she
was afraid of missing her appointment, and choosing the shortest form
of farewell (for which as it happened she apologised by coming to see
me again next day, the other person presumably not being free then),
she dashed from the room, crying: "Good-bye for ever," in a
heartbroken tone. And perhaps she was heartbroken. For knowing what
she was about at that moment better than I, being at the same time
more strict and more indulgent towards herself than I was towards her,
she may all the same have had a fear that I might refuse to see her
again after the way in which she had left me. And I believe that she
was attached to me, so much so that the other person was more jealous
than I was.

Some days later, at Balbec, while we were in the ballroom of the
casino, there entered Bloch's sister and cousin, who had both turned
out quite pretty, but whom I refrained from greeting on account of my
girl friends, because the younger one, the cousin, was notoriously
living with the actress whose acquaintance she had made during my
first visit. Andrée, at a murmured allusion to this scandal, said to
me: "Oh! About that sort of thing I'm like Albertine; there's nothing
we both loathe so much as that sort of thing." As for Albertine, on
sitting down to talk to me upon the sofa, she had turned her back on
the disreputable pair. I had noticed, however, that, before she
changed her position, at the moment when Mlle. Bloch and her cousin
appeared, my friend's eyes had flashed with that sudden, close
attention which now and again imparted to the face of this frivolous
girl a serious, indeed a grave air, and left her pensive afterwards.
But Albertine had at once turned towards myself a gaze which
nevertheless remained singularly fixed and meditative. Mlle. Bloch and
her cousin having finally left the room after laughing and shouting in
a loud and vulgar manner, I asked Albertine whether the little fair
one (the one who was so intimate with the actress) was not the girl
who had won the prize the day before in the procession of flowers. "I
don't know," said Albertine, "is one of them fair? I must confess they
don't interest me particularly, I have never looked at them. Is one of
them fair?" she asked her three girl friends with a detached air of
inquiry. When applied to people whom Albertine passed every day on the
front, this ignorance seemed to me too profound to be genuine. "They
didn't appear to be looking at us much either," I said to Albertine,
perhaps (on the assumption, which I did not however consciously form,
that Albertine loved her own sex), to free her from any regret by
pointing out to her that she had not attracted the attention of these
girls and that, generally speaking, it is not customary even for the
most vicious of women to take an interest in girls whom they do not
know.  "They weren't looking at us!" was Albertine's astonished reply.
"Why, they did nothing else the whole time." "But you can't possibly
tell," I said to her, "you had your back to them." "Very well, and
what about that?" she replied, pointing out to me, set in the wall in
front of us, a large mirror which I had not noticed and upon which I
now realised that my friend, while talking to me, had never ceased to
fix her troubled, preoccupied eyes.

Ever since the day when Cottard had accompanied me into the little
casino at Incarville, albeit I did not share the opinion that he had
expressed, Albertine had seemed to me different; the sight of her made
me lose my temper. I myself had changed, quite as much as she had
changed in my eyes. I had ceased to bear her any good will; to her
face, behind her back when there was a chance of my words being
repeated to her, I spoke of her in the most insulting language. There
were, however, intervals of calmer feeling. One day I learned that
Albertine and Andrée had both accepted an invitation to Elstir's.
Feeling certain that this was in order that they might, on the return
journey, amuse themselves like schoolgirls on holiday by imitating the
manners of fast young women, and in so doing find an unmaidenly
pleasure the thought of which wrung my heart, without announcing my
intention, to embarrass them and to deprive Albertine of the pleasure
on which she was reckoning, I paid an unexpected call at his studio.
But I found only Andrée there. Albertine had chosen another day when
her aunt was to go there with her. Then I said to myself that Cottard
must have been mistaken; the favourable impression that I received
from Andrée's presence there without her friend remained with me and
made me feel more kindly disposed towards Albertine. But this feeling
lasted no longer than the healthy moments of delicate people subject
to passing maladies, who are prostrated again by the merest trifle.
Albertine incited Andrée to actions which, without going very far,
were perhaps not altogether innocent; pained by this suspicion, I
managed in the end to repel it. No sooner was I healed of it than it
revived under another form. I had just seen Andrée, with one of those
graceful gestures that came naturally to her, lay her head coaxingly
on Albertine's shoulder, kiss her on the throat, half shutting her
eyes; or else they had exchanged a glance; a remark had been made by
somebody who had seen them going down together to bathe: little
trifles such as habitually float in the surrounding atmosphere where
the majority of people absorb them all day long without injury to
their health or alteration of their mood, but which have a morbid
effect and breed fresh sufferings in a nature predisposed to receive
them. Sometimes even without my having seen Albertine again, without
anyone's having spoken to me about her, there would flash from my
memory some vision of her with Gisèle in an attitude which had seemed
to me innocent at the time; it was enough now to destroy the peace of
mind that I had managed to recover, I had no longer any need to go and
breathe dangerous germs outside, I had, as Cottard would have said,
supplied my own toxin. I thought then of all that I had been told
about Swann's love for Odette, of the way in which Swann had been
tricked all his life. Indeed, when I come to think of it, the
hypothesis that made me gradually build up the whole of Albertine's
character and give a painful interpretation to every moment of a life
that I could not control in its entirety, was the memory, the rooted
idea of Mme.  Swann's character, as it had been described to me. These
accounts helped my imagination, in after years, to take the line of
supposing that Albertine might, instead of being a good girl, have had
the same immorality, the same faculty of deception as a reformed
prostitute, and I thought of all the sufferings that would in that
case have been in store for me had I ever really been her lover.

One day, outside the Grand Hotel, where we were gathered on the front,
I had just been addressing Albertine in the harshest, most humiliating
language, and Rosemonde was saying: "Oh, how you have changed your
mind about her; why, she used to be everything, it was she who ruled
the roost, and now she isn't even fit to be thrown to the dogs." I was
beginning, in order to make my attitude towards Albertine still more
marked, to say all the nicest things I could think of to Andrée, who,
if she was tainted with the same vice, seemed to me to have more
excuse for it since she was sickly and neurasthenic, when we saw
emerging at the steady trot of its pair of horses into the street at
right angles to the front, at the corner of which we were standing,
Mme. de Cambremer's barouche. The chief magistrate who, at that
moment, was advancing towards us, sprang back upon recognising the
carriage, in order not to be seen in our company; then, when he
thought that the Marquise's eye might catch his, bowed to her with an
immense sweep of his hat. But the carriage, instead of continuing, as
might have been expected, along the Rue de la Mer, disappeared through
the gate of the hotel. It was quite ten minutes later when the
lift-boy, out of breath, came to announce to me: "It's the Marquise de
Camembert, she's come here to see Monsieur. I've been up to the room,
I looked in the reading-room, I couldn't find Monsieur anywhere.
Luckily I thought of looking on the beach." He had barely ended this
speech when, followed by her daughter-in-law and by an extremely
ceremonious gentleman, the Marquise advanced towards me, coming on
probably from some afternoon tea-party in the neighbourhood, and bowed
down not so much by age as by the mass of costly trinkets with which
she felt it more sociable and more befitting her rank to cover
herself, in order to appear as 'well dressed' as possible to the
people whom she went to visit. It was in fact that 'landing' of the
Cambremers at the hotel which my grandmother had so greatly dreaded
long ago when she wanted us not to let Legrandin know that we might
perhaps be going to Balbec. Then Mamma used to laugh at these fears
inspired by an event which she considered impossible. And here it was
actually happening, but by different channels and without Legrandin's
having had any part in it. "Do you mind my staying here, if I shan't
be in your way?" asked Albertine (in whose eyes there lingered,
brought there by the cruel things I had just been saying to her, a
pair of tears which I observed without seeming to see them, but not
without rejoicing inwardly at the sight), "there is something I want
to say to you." A hat with feathers, itself surmounted by a sapphire
pin, was perched haphazard upon Mme. de Cambremer's wig, like a badge
the display of which was necessary but sufficient, its place
immaterial, its elegance conventional and its stability superfluous.
Notwithstanding the heat, the good lady had put on a jet cloak, like a
dalmatic, over which hung an ermine stole the wearing of which seemed
to depend not upon the temperature and season, but upon the nature of
the ceremony. And on Mme. de Cambremer's bosom a baronial torse,
fastened to a chain, dangled like a pectoral cross. The gentleman was
an eminent lawyer from Paris, of noble family, who had come down to
spend a few days with the Cambremers. He was one of those men whom
their vast professional experience inclines to look down upon their
profession, and who say, for instance: "I know that I am a good
pleader, so it no longer amuses me to plead," or: "I'm no longer
interested in operating, I know that I'm a good operator." Men of
intelligence, _artists_, they see themselves in their maturity, richly
endowed by success, shining with that intellect, that artistic nature
which their professional brethren recognise in them and which confer
upon them a kind of taste and discernment. They form a passion for the
paintings not of a great artist, but of an artist who nevertheless is
highly distinguished, and spend upon the purchase of his work the
large sums that their career procures for them. Le Sidaner was the
artist chosen by the Cambremers' friend, who incidentally was a
delightful person. He talked well about books, but not about the books
of the true masters, those who have mastered themselves. The only
irritating habit that this amateur displayed was his constant use of
certain ready made expressions, such as 'for the most part,' which
gave an air of importance and incompleteness to the matter of which he
was speaking. Madame de Cambremer had taken the opportunity, she told
me, of a party which some friends of hers had been giving that
afternoon in the Balbec direction to come and call upon me, as she had
promised Robert de Saint-Loup. "You know he's coming down to these
parts quite soon for a few days: His uncle Charlus is staying near
here with his sister-in-law, the Duchesse de Luxembourg, and M. de
Saint-Loup means to take the opportunity of paying his aunt a visit
and going to see his old regiment, where he is very popular, highly
respected. We often have visits from officers who are never tired of
singing his praises.  How nice it would be if you and he would give us
the pleasure of coming together to Féterne." I presented Albertine and
her friends. Mme. de Cambremer introduced us all to her
daughter-in-law. The latter, so frigid towards the petty nobility with
whom her seclusion at Féterne forced her to associate, so reserved, so
afraid of compromising herself, held out her hand to me with a radiant
smile, safe as she felt herself and delighted at seeing a friend of
Robert de Saint-Loup, whom he, possessing a sharper social intuition
than he allowed to appear, had mentioned to her as being a great
friend of the Guermantes. So, unlike her mother-in-law, Mme. de
Cambremer employed two vastly different forms of politeness. It was at
the most the former kind, dry, insupportable, that she would have
conceded me had I met her through her brother Legrandin. But for a
friend of the Guermantes she had not smiles enough. The most
convenient room in the hotel for entertaining visitors was the
reading-room, that place once so terrible into which I now went a
dozen times every day, emerging freely, my own master, like those
mildly afflicted lunatics who have so long been inmates of an asylum
that the superintendent trusts them with a latchkey. And so I offered
to take Mme. de Cambremer there. And as this room no longer filled me
with shyness and no longer held any charm for me, since the faces of
things change for us like the faces of people, it was without the
slightest emotion that I made this suggestion. But she declined it,
preferring to remain out of doors, and we sat down in the open air, on
the terrace of the hotel. I found there and rescued a volume of Madame
de Sévigné which Mamma had not had time to carry off in her
precipitate flight, when she heard that visitors had called for me.
No less than my grandmother, she dreaded these invasions of strangers,
and, in her fear of being too late to escape if she let herself be
seen, would fly from the room with a rapidity which always made my
father and me laugh at her. Madame de Cambremer carried in her hand,
with the handle of a sunshade, a number of embroidered bags, a
hold-all, a gold purse from which there dangled strings of garnets,
and a lace handkerchief. I could not help thinking that it would be
more convenient for her to deposit them on a chair; but I felt that it
would be unbecoming and useless to ask her to lay aside the ornaments
of her pastoral visitation and her social priesthood.  We gazed at the
calm sea upon which, here and there, a few gulls floated like white
petals. Because of the 'mean level' to which social conversation
reduces us and also of our desire to attract not by means of those
qualities of which we are ourselves unaware but of those which, we
suppose, ought to be appreciated by the people who are with us, I
began instinctively to talk to Mme. de Cambremer née Legrandin in the
strain in which her brother might have talked. "They appear," I said,
referring to the gulls, "as motionless and as white as water-lilies."
And indeed they did appear to be offering a lifeless object to the
little waves which tossed them about, so much so that the waves, by
contrast, seemed in their pursuit of them to be animated by a
deliberate intention, to have acquired life. The dowager Marquise
could not find words enough to do justice to the superb view of the
sea that we had from Balbec, or to say how she envied it, she who from
la Raspelière (where for that matter she was not living that year) had
only such a distant glimpse of the waves. She had two remarkable
habits, due at once to her exalted passion for the arts (especially
for the art of music), and to her want of teeth. Whenever she talked
of aesthetic subjects her salivary glands--like those of certain
animals when in rut--became so overcharged that the old lady's
edentulous mouth allowed to escape from the corners of her faintly
moustached lips a trickle of moisture for which that was not the
proper place. Immediately she drew it in again with a deep sigh, like
a person recovering his breath. Secondly, if her subject were some
piece of music of surpassing beauty, in her enthusiasm she would raise
her arms and utter a few decisive opinions, vigorously chewed and at a
pinch issuing from her nose. Now it had never occurred to me that the
vulgar beach at Balbec could indeed offer a 'seascape,' and Mme. de
Cambremer's simple words changed my ideas in that respect. On the
other hand, as I told her, I had always heard people praise the
matchless view from la Raspelière, perched on the summit of the hill,
where, in a great drawing-room with two fireplaces, one whole row of
windows swept the gardens, and, through the branches of the trees, the
sea as far as Balbec and beyond it, and the other row the valley. "How
nice of you to say so, and how well you put it: the sea through the
branches. It is exquisite, one would say ... a painted fan." And I
gathered from a deep breath intended to catch the falling spittle and
dry the moustaches, that the compliment was sincere.  But the Marquise
_née_ Legrandin remained cold, to shew her contempt not for my words
but for those of her mother-in-law. Besides, she not only despised the
other's intellect but deplored her affability, being always afraid
that people might not form a sufficiently high idea of the Cambremers.
"And how charming the name is," said I. "One would like to know the
origin of all those names." "That one I can tell you," the old lady
answered modestly. "It is a family place, it came from my grandmother
Arrachepel, not an illustrious family, but a decent and very old
country stock." "What!  Not illustrious!" her daughter-in-law tartly
interrupted her. "A whole window in Bayeux cathedral is filled with
their arms, and the principal church at Avranches has their tombs. If
these old names interest you," she added, "you've come a year too
late. We managed to appoint to the living of Criquetot, in spite of
all the difficulties about changing from one diocese to another, the
parish priest of a place where I myself have some land, a long way
from here, Combray, where the worthy cleric felt that he was becoming
neurasthenic. Unfortunately, the sea air was no good to him at his
age; his neurasthenia grew worse and he has returned to Combray. But
he amused himself while he was our neighbour in going about looking up
all the old charters, and he compiled quite an interesting little
pamphlet on the place names of the district. It has given him a fresh
interest, too, for it seems he is spending his last years in writing a
great work upon Combray and its surroundings. I shall send you his
pamphlet on the surroundings of Féterne. It is worthy of a
Benedictine. You will find the most interesting things in it about our
old Raspelière, of which my mother-in-law speaks far too modestly."
"In any case, this year," replied the dowager Mme. de Cambremer, "la
Raspelière is no longer ours and does not belong to me. But I can see
that you have a painter's instincts; I am sure you sketch, and I
should so like to shew you Féterne, which is far finer than la
Raspelière." For as soon as the Cambremers had let this latter
residence to the Verdurins, its commanding situation had at once
ceased to appear to them as it had appeared for so many years past,
that is to say to offer the advantage, without parallel in the
neighbourhood, of looking out over both sea and valley, and had on the
other hand, suddenly and retrospectively, presented the drawback that
one had always to go up or down hill to get to or from it. In short,
one might have supposed that if Mme. de Cambremer had let it, it was
not so much to add to her income as to spare her horses.  And she
proclaimed herself delighted at being able at last to have the sea
always so close at hand, at Féterne, she who for so many years
(forgetting the two months that she spent there) had seen it only from
up above and as though in a panorama. "I am discovering it at my age,"
she said, "and how I enjoy it! It does me a world of good. I would let
la Raspelière for nothing so as to be obliged to live at Féterne."

"To return to more interesting topics," went on Legrandin's sister,
who addressed the old Marquise as 'Mother,' but with the passage of
years had come to treat her with insolence, "you mentioned
water-lilies: I suppose you know Claude Monet's pictures of them. What
a genius! They interest me particularly because near Combray, that
place where I told you I had some land...." But she preferred not to
talk too much about Combray.  "Why! That must be the series that
Elstir told us about, the greatest painter of this generation,"
exclaimed Albertine, who had said nothing so far. "Ah! I can see that
this young lady loves the arts," cried Mme. de Cambremer and, drawing
a long breath, recaptured a trail of spittle. "You will allow me to
put Le Sidaner before him, Mademoiselle," said the lawyer, smiling
with the air of an expert. And, as he had enjoyed, or seen people
enjoy, years ago, certain 'daring' work by Elstir, he added: "Elstir
was gifted, indeed he was one of the advance guard, but for some
reason or other he never kept up, he has wasted his life." Mme. de
Cambremer disagreed with the lawyer, so far as Elstir was concerned,
but, greatly to the annoyance of her guest, bracketed Monet with Le
Sidaner. It would be untrue to say that she was a fool; she was
overflowing with a kind of intelligence that meant nothing to me. As
the sun was beginning to set, the seagulls were now yellow, like the
water-lilies on another canvas of that series by Monet. I said that I
knew it, and (continuing to copy the diction of her brother, whom I
had not yet dared to name) added that it was a pity that she had not
thought of coming a day earlier, for, at the same hour, there would
have been a Poussin light for her to admire. Had some Norman squireen,
unknown to the Guermantes, told her that she ought to have come a day
earlier, Mme. de Cambremer-Legrandin would doubtless have drawn
herself up with an offended air. But I might have been far more
familiar still, and she would have been all smiles and sweetness; I
might in the warmth of that fine afternoon devour my fill of that rich
honey cake which Mme. de Cambremer so rarely was and which took the
place of the dish of pastry that it had not occurred to me to offer my
guests. But the name of Poussin, without altering the amenity of the
society lady, called forth the protests of the connoisseur. On hearing
that name, she produced six times in almost continuous succession that
little smack of the tongue against the lips which serves to convey to
a child who is misbehaving at once a reproach for having begun and a
warning not to continue. "In heaven's name, after a painter like
Monet, who is an absolute genius, don't go and mention an old hack
without a vestige of talent, like Poussin. I don't mind telling you
frankly that I find him the deadliest bore. I mean to say, you can't
really call that sort of thing painting. Monet, Degas, Manet, yes,
there are painters if you like! It is a curious thing," she went on,
fixing a scrutinous and ecstatic gaze upon a vague point in space
where she could see what was in her mind, "it is a curious thing, I
used at one time to prefer Manet. Nowadays, I still admire Manet, of
course, but I believe I like Monet even more.  Oh! The _Cathedrals_!"
She was as scrupulous as she was condescending in informing me of the
evolution of her taste. And one felt that the phases through which
that taste had evolved were not, in her eyes, any less important than
the different manners of Monet himself. Not that I had any reason to
feel flattered by her taking me into her confidence as to her
preferences, for even in the presence of the narrowest of provincial
ladies she could not remain for five minutes without feeling the need
to confess them. When a noble dame of Avranches, who would have been
incapable of distinguishing between Mozart and Wagner, said in Mme. de
Cambremer's hearing: "We saw nothing of any interest while we were in
Paris, we went once to the Opéra-Comique, they were doing _Pelléas et
Mélisande_, it's dreadful stuff," Mme. de Cambremer not only boiled
with rage but felt obliged to exclaim: "Not at all, it's a little
gem," and to 'argue the point.' It was perhaps a Combray habit which
she had picked up from my grandmother's sisters, who called it
'fighting in the good cause,' and loved the dinner-parties at which
they knew all through the week that they would have to defend their
idols against the Philistines. Similarly, Mme. de Cambremer liked to
'fly into a passion' and wrangle about art, as other people do about
politics. She stood up for Debussy as she would have stood up for a
woman friend whose conduct had been criticised. She must however have
known very well that when she said: "Not at all, it's a little gem,"
she could not improvise in the other lady, whom she was putting in her
place, the whole progressive development of artistic culture on the
completion of which they would come naturally to an agreement without
any need of discussion. "I must ask Le Sidaner what he thinks of
Poussin," the lawyer remarked to me. "He's a regular recluse, never
opens his mouth, but I know how to get things out of him."

"Anyhow," Mme. de Cambremer went on, "I have a horror of sunsets,
they're so romantic, so operatic. That is why I can't abide my
mother-in-law's house, with its tropical plants. You will see it, it's
just like a public garden at Monte-Carlo. That's why I prefer your
coast, here. It is more sombre, more sincere; there's a little lane
from which one doesn't see the sea. On rainy days, there's nothing but
mud, it's a little world apart. It's just the same at Venice, I detest
the Grand Canal and I don't know anything so touching as the little
alleys. But it's all a question of one's surroundings." "But," I
remarked to her, feeling that the only way to rehabilitate Poussin in
Mme. de Cambremer's eyes was to inform her that he was once more in
fashion, "M. Degas assures us that he knows nothing more beautiful
than the Poussins at Chantilly." "Indeed? I don't know the ones at
Chantilly," said Mme. de Cambremer who had no wish to differ from
Degas, "but I can speak about the ones in the Louvre, which are
appalling." "He admires them immensely too." "I must look at them
again. My impressions of them are rather distant," she replied after a
moment's silence, and as though the favourable opinion which she was
certain, before very long, to form of Poussin would depend, not upon
the information that I had just communicated to her, but upon the
supplementary and, this time, final examination that she intended to
make of the Poussins in the Louvre in order to be in a position to
change her mind. Contenting myself with what was a first step towards
retraction since, if she did not yet admire the Poussins, she was
adjourning the matter for further consideration, in order not to keep
her on tenterhooks any longer, I told her mother-in-law how much I had
heard of the wonderful flowers at Féterne. In modest terms she spoke
of the little presbytery garden that she had behind the house, into
which in the mornings, by simply pushing open a door, she went in her
wrapper to feed her peacocks, hunt for new-laid eggs, and gather the
zinnias or roses which, on the sideboard, framing the creamed eggs or
fried fish in a border of flowers, reminded her of her garden paths.
"It is true, we have a great many roses," she told me, "our rose
garden is almost too near the house, there are days when it makes my
head ache. It is nicer on the terrace at la Raspelière where the
breeze carries the scent of the roses, but it is not so heady." I
turned to her daughter-in-law. "It is just like _Pelléas_," I said to
her, to gratify her taste for the modern, "that scent of roses wafted
up to the terraces. It is so strong in the score that, as I suffer
from hay-fever and rose-fever, it sets me sneezing every time I listen
to that scene."

"What a marvellous thing _Pelléas_ is," cried Mme. de Cambremer, "I'm
mad about it;" and, drawing closer to me with the gestures of a savage
woman seeking to captivate me, using her fingers to pick out imaginary
notes, she began to hum something which, I supposed, represented to
her the farewells of _Pelléas_, and continued with a vehement
persistence as though it had been important that Mme. de Cambremer
should at that moment remind me of that scene or rather should prove
to me that she herself remembered it. "I think it is even finer than
_Parsifal_," she added, "because in _Parsifal_ the most beautiful
things are surrounded with a sort of halo of melodious phrases, which
are bad simply because they are melodious." "I know, you are a great
musician, Madame," I said to the dowager. "I should so much like to
hear you play." Mme. de Cambremer-Legrandin gazed at the sea so as not
to be drawn into the conversation. Being of the opinion that what her
mother-in-law liked was not music at all, she regarded the talent, a
sham talent according to her, though in reality of the very highest
order that the other was admitted to possess as a technical
accomplishment devoid of interest. It was true that Chopin's only
surviving pupil declared, and with justice, that the Master's style of
playing, his 'feeling' had been transmitted, through herself, to Mme.
de Cambremer alone, but to play like Chopin was far from being a
recommendation in the eyes of Legran-din's sister, who despised nobody
so much as the Polish composer. "Oh!  They are flying away," exclaimed
Albertine, pointing to the gulls which, casting aside for a moment
their flowery incognito, were rising in a body towards the sun. "Their
giant wings from walking hinder them," quoted Mme. de Cambremer,
confusing the seagull with the albatross. "I do love them; I used to
see them at Amsterdam," said Albertine. "They smell of the sea, they
come and breathe the salt air through the paving stones even." "Oh! So
you have been in Holland, you know the Vermeers?" Mme. de Cambremer
asked imperiously, in the tone in which she would