Title:     Time Regained
            (Le Temps retrouvé )
            [Vol. 7 of Remembrance of Things Past--
            (À la Recherche du temps perdu)]
Author:     Marcel Proust
  Translated from the French by Stephen Hudson [Sydney Schiff] (1868-1944)
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Edition:    1
Language:   English
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Date first posted:          April 2003
Date most recently updated: April 2003

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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:     Time Regained
            (Le Temps retrouvé )
            [Vol. 7 of Remembrance of Things Past--
            (À la Recherche du temps perdu)]
Author:     Marcel Proust
  Translated from the French by Stephen Hudson [Sydney Schiff] (1868-1944)



"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past...."



"Oui, si le souvenir grâce à l'oubli, n'a pu
contracter aucun lien, jeter aucun chaînon entre
lui et la minute présente, s'il est resté à sa
place, à sa date, s'il a gardé ses distances, son
isolement dans le creux d'une vallée, où à la
pointe d'un sommet, il nous fait tout à coup
respirer un air nouveau, précisément parce que
c'est un air qu'on a respiré autrefois, cet air
plus pur que les poètes ont vainement essayé de
faire régner dans le Paradis et qui ne pourrait
donner cette sensation profonde de renouvellement
que s'il avait été respiré déjà, car les vrais
paradis sont les paradis qu'on a perdus."



[PUBLISHER'S NOTE]

TIME REGAINED is a translation of "Le Temps
Retrouvé" the eighth part of Marcel Proust's continuous
novel "À la Recherche du Temps Perdu" (Remembrance
of Things Past). The titles of the parts
are:

Du Coté de Chez Swann (1913)
l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs
     (awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1919) (1918)
Le Côté de Guermantes I (1920)
Le Côté de Guermantes II (1921).
Sodome et Gomorrhe I
Sodome et Gomorrhe II (1922)
La Prisonnière (1923)
Albertine Disparue (1925)
Le Temps Retrouvé (1927)

'Du Côté de Chez Swann' has been published in England and America...

'A l'Ombre des Jeunes' as SWANN'S WAY,
'Filles en Fleurs' as WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE,
'Le Côté de Guermantes' as THE GUERMANTES WAY,
'Sodome et Gomorrhe' as CITIES OF THE PLAIN,
'La Prisonnière' as THE CAPTIVE, and
'Albertine Disparue' as THE SWEET CHEAT GONE.
'Le Temps retrouvé' as TIME REGAINED

All but this, the final, part were translated by C. K. SCOTT MONCRIEFF.




TRANSLATOR'S DEDICATION

To the memory of my friend

CHARLES SCOTT MONCRIEFF

Marcel Proust's incomparable translator




TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

Baffled by the phrases on page 244 of the volume
of the French edition: 'La vie humaine et
pensante... dans une forteresse,' an appeal to my
friend Aldous Huxley brought me the reading I have
almost integrally adopted.  Both of us are
conscious that this rendering is only approximate,
the obscurity being only partly due to the
elliptical nature of the passage.  My belief is
that there has either been an editorial misreading
of Proust's manuscript or a mistake on the part of
the printer, neither of which occurrences are
infrequent in the series.

I have also gratefully to acknowledge valuable
emendations of the text suggested by Mr. A. G.
Chater.

STEPHEN HUDSON




CONTENTS

Chapter I
Tansonville

Chapter II
M. de Charlus during the war, his
opinions, his pleasures

Chapter III
An afternoon party at the house of the
Princesse de Guermantes




CHAPTER I

TANSONVILLE


Tansonville seemed little more than a place to rest in between two
walks or a refuge during a shower.  Rather too countrified, it was one
of those rural dwellings where every sitting-room is a cabinet of
greenery, and where the roses and the birds out in the garden keep you
company in the curtains; for they were old and each rose stood out so
clearly that it might have been picked like a real one and each bird
put in a cage, unlike those pretentious modern decorations in which,
against a silver background, all the apple trees in Normandy are
outlined in the Japanese manner, to trick the hours you lie in bed. I
spent the whole day in my room, the windows of which opened upon the
beautiful verdure of the park, upon the lilacs of the entrance, upon
the green leaves of the great trees beside the water and in the forest
of Méséglise. It was a pleasure to contemplate all this, I was saying
to myself: "How charming to have all this greenery in my window" until
suddenly in the midst of the great green picture I recognised the
clock tower of the Church of Combray toned in contrast to a sombre
blue as though it were far distant, not a reproduction of the clock
tower but its very self which, defying time and space, thrust itself
into the midst of the luminous greenery as if it were engraved upon my
wndow-pane. And if I left my room, at the end of the passage, set
towards me like a band of scarlet, I perceived the hangings of a
little sitting-room which though only made of muslin, were of a
scarlet so vivid that they would catch fire if a single sun-ray
touched them.

During our walks Gilberte alluded to Robert as though he were turning
away from her but to other women. It was true that his life was
encumbered with women as masculine attachments encumber that of
women-loving men, both having that character of forbidden fruit, of a
place vainly usurped, which unwanted objects have in most houses.

Once I left Gilberte early and in the middle of the night, while still
half-asleep, I called Albertine. I had not been thinking or dreaming
of her, nor had I mistaken her for Gilberte. My memory had lost its
love for Albertine but it seems there must be an involuntary memory of
the limbs, pale and sterile imitation of the other, which lives longer
as certain mindless animals or plants live longer than man.  The legs,
the arms are full of blunted memories; a reminiscence germinating in
my arm had made me seek the bell behind my back, as I used to in my
room in Paris and I had called Albertine, imagining my dead friend
lying beside me as she so often did at evening when we fell asleep
together, counting the time it would take Françoise to reach us, so
that Albertine might without imprudence pull the bell I could not
find.

Robert came to Tansonville several times while I was there. He was
very different from the man I had known before. His life had not
coarsened him as it had M. de Charlus, but, on the contrary, had given
him more than ever the easy carriage of a cavalry officer although at
his marriage he had resigned his commission. As gradually M. de
Charlus had got heavier, Robert (of course he was much younger, yet
one felt he was bound to approximate to that type with age like
certain women who resolutely sacrifice their faces to their figures
and never abandon Marienbad, believing, as they cannot hope to keep
all their youthful charms, that of the outline to represent best the
others) had become slimmer, swifter, the contrary effect of the same
vice. This velocity had other psychological causes; the fear of being
seen, the desire not to seem to have that fear, the feverishness born
of dissatisfaction with oneself and of boredom. He had the habit of
going into certain haunts of ill-fame, where as he did not wish to be
seen entering or coming out, he effaced himself so as to expose the
least possible surface to the malevolent gaze of hypothetical
passers-by, and that gust-like motion had remained and perhaps
signified the apparent intrepidity of one who wants to show he is
unafraid and does not take time to think.

To complete the picture one must reckon with the desire, the older he
got, to appear young, and also the impatience of those who are always
bored and _blasés_, yet being too intelligent for a relatively idle
life, do not suffici-.  ently use their faculties. Doubtless the very
idleness of such people may display itself by indifference but
especially since idleness, owing to the favour now accorded to
physical exercise, has taken the form of sport, even when the latter
cannot be practised, feverish activity leaves boredom neither time nor
space to develop in.

He had become dried up and gave friends like myself no evidence of
sensibility. On the other hand, he affected with Gilberte an
unpleasant sensitiveness which he pushed to the point of comedy. It
was not that Robert was indifferent to Gilberte; no, he loved her. But
he always lied to her and this spirit of duplicity, if it was not the
actual source of his lies, was constantly emerging. At such times he
believed he could only extricate himself by exaggerating to a
ridiculous degree the real pain he felt in giving pain to her. When he
arrived at Tansonville he was obliged, he said, to leave the next
morning on business with a certain gentleman of those parts, who was
expecting him in Paris and who, encountered that very evening near
Combray, unhappily revealed the lie, Robert, having failed to warn
him, by the statement that he was back for a month's holiday and would
not be in Paris before. Robert blushed, saw Gilberte's faint
melancholy smile, and after revenging himself on the unfortunate
culprit by an insult, returned earlier than his wife and sent her a
desperate note telling her he had lied in order not to pain her, for
fear that when he left for a reason he could not tell her, she should
think that he had ceased to love her; and all this, written as though
it were a lie, was actually true. Then he sent to ask if he could come
to her room, and there, partly in real sorrow, partly in disgust with
the life he was living, partly through the increasing audacity of his
successive pretences, he sobbed and talked of his approaching death,
sometimes throwing himself on the floor as though he were ill.
Gilberte, not knowing to what extent to believe him, thought him a
liar on each occasion, but, disquieted by the presentiment of his
approaching death and believing in a general way that he loved her,
that perhaps he had some illness she knew nothing about, did not dare
to oppose him or ask him to relinquish his journeys. I was unable to
understand how he came to have Morel received as though he were a son
of the house wherever the Saint-Loups were, whether in Paris or at
Tansonville.

Françoise, knowing all that M. de Charlus had done for Jupien and
Robert Saint-Loup for Morel, did not conclude that this was a trait
which reappeared in certain generations of the Guermantes, but
rather--seeing that Legrandin much loved Théodore--came to believe,
prudish and narrow-minded as she was, that it was a custom which
universality made respectable. She would say of a young man, were it
Morel or Théodore: "He is fond of the gentleman who is interested in
him and who has so much helped him." And as in such cases it is the
protectors who love, who suffer, who forgive, Françoise did not
hesitate between them and the youths they debauched, to give the
former the _beau role_, to discover they had a "great deal of heart".
She did not hesitate to blame Théodore who had played a great many
tricks on Legrandin, yet seemed to have scarcely a doubt as to the
nature of their relationship, for she added, "The young man
understands he's got to do his share as he says: 'take me away with
you, I will be fond of you and pet you,' and, _ma foi_, the gentleman
has so much heart that Théodore is sure to find him kinder than he
deserves, for he's a hot head while the gentleman is so good that I
often say to Jeannette (Theodore's fiancée), 'My dear, if ever you're
in trouble go and see that gentleman, he would lie on the ground to
give you his bed, he is too fond of Théodore to throw him out and he
will never abandon him'." It was in the course of one of these
colloquies that, having inquired the name of the family with whom
Théodore was living in the south, I suddenly grasped that he was the
person unknown to me who had asked me to send him my article in the
_Figaro_ in a letter the caligraphy of which was of the people but
charmingly expressed.

In the same fashion Françoise esteemed Saint-Loup more than Morel and
expressed the opinion, in spite of the ignoble behaviour of the
latter, that the marquis had too good a heart ever to desert him
unless great reverses happened to himself.

Saint-Loup insisted I should remain at Tansonville and once let fall,
although plainly he was not seeking to please me, that my visit was so
great a happiness for his wife that she had assured him, though she
had been wretched the whole day, that she was transported with joy the
evening I unexpectedly arrived, that, in fact, I had miraculously
saved her from despair, "perhaps from something worse." He begged me
to try and persuade her that he loved her, assuring me that the other
woman he loved was less to him than Gilberte and that he intended to
break with her very soon. "And yet," he added, in such a feline way
and with so great a longing to confide that I expected the name of
Charlie to pop out at any moment, in spite of himself, like a lottery
number, "I had something to be proud of. This woman, who has proved
her devotion to me and whom I must sacrifice for Gilberte's sake,
never accepted attention from a man, she believed herself incapable of
love; I am the first. I knew she had refused herself to everyone, so
much so that when I received an adorable letter from her, telling me
there could be no happiness for her without me, I could not resist it.
Wouldn't it be natural for me to be infatuated with her, were it not
intolerable for me to see poor little Gilberte in tears? Don't you
think there is something of Rachel in her?" As a matter of fact, it
had struck me that there was a vague resemblance between them. This
may have been due to a certain similarity of feature, owing to their
common Jewish origin, which was little marked in Gilberte, and yet
when his family wanted him to marry, drew Robert towards her. The
likeness was perhaps due also to Gilberte coming across photographs of
Rachel and wanting to please Robert by imitating certain of the
actress's habits, such as always wearing red bows in her hair, a black
ribbon on her arm and dyeing her hair to appear dark. Then, fearing
her sorrows affected her appearance, she tried to remedy it by
occasionally exaggerating the artifice. One day, when Robert was to
come to Tansonville for twenty-four hours, I was amazed to see her
come to table looking so strangely different from her present as well
as from her former self, that I was as bewildered as if I were facing
an actress, a sort of Theodora. I felt that in my curiosity to know
what it was that was changed about her, I was looking at her too
fixedly. My curiosity was soon satisfied when she blew her nose, for
in spite of all her precautions, the assortment of colours upon the
handkerchief would have constituted a varied palette and I saw that
she was completely painted. To this was due the bleeding appearance of
her mouth which she forced into a smile, thinking it suited her, while
the knowledge that the hour was approaching when her husband ought to
arrive without knowing whether or not he would send one of those
telegrams of which the model had been wittily invented by M. de
Guermantes: "Impossible to come, lie follows," paled her cheeks and
ringed her eyes.

"Ah, you see," Robert said to me with a deliberately tender accent
which contrasted with his former spontaneous affection, with an
alcoholic voice and the inflection of an actor. "To make Gilberte
happy! What wouldn't I do to secure that? You can never know how much
she has done for me." The most unpleasant of all was his vanity, for
Saint-Loup, flattered that Gilberte loved him, without daring to say
that he loved Morel, gave her details about the devotion the violinist
pretended to have for him, which he well knew were exaggerated if not
altogether invented seeing that Morel demanded more money of him every
day. Then confiding Gilberte to my care, he left again for Paris. To
anticipate somewhat (for I am still at Tansonville), I had the
opportunity of seeing him once again in society, though at a distance,
when his words, in spite of all this, were so lively and charming that
they enabled me to recapture the past. I was struck to see how much he
was changing. He resembled his mother more and more, but the proud and
well-bred manner he inherited from her and which she possessed to
perfection, had become, owing to his highly accomplished education,
exaggerated and stilted; the penetrating look common to the
Guermantes, gave him, from a peculiar animal-like habit, a
half-unconscious air of inspecting every place he passed through. Even
when motionless, that colouring which was his even more than it was
the other Guermantes', a colouring which seemed to have a whole golden
day's sunshine in it, gave him so strange a plumage, made of him so
rare a creature, so unique, that one wanted to own him for an
ornithological collection; but when, besides, this bird of golden
sunlight put itself in motion, when, for instance, I saw Robert de
Saint-Loup at a party, he had a way of throwing back his head so
joyously and so proudly, under the golden plumage of his slightly
ruffled hair, the movement of his neck was so much more supple, proud
and charming than that of other men, that, between the curiosity and
the half-social, half-zoological admiration he inspired, one asked
oneself whether one had found him in the faubourg Saint-Germain or in
the Jardin des Plantes and whether one was looking at a _grand
seigneur_ crossing a drawing-room or a marvellous bird walking about
in its cage. With a little imagination the warbling no less than the
plumage lent itself to that interpretation. He spoke in what he
believed the _grand-siècle_ style and thus imitated the manners of the
Guermantes, but an indefinable trifle caused them to become those of
M. de Charlus. "I must leave you an instant," he said during that
party, when M. de Marsantes was some distance away, "to pay court to
my niece a moment." As to that love of which he never ceased telling
me, there were others besides Charlie, although he was the only one
that mattered to him. Whatever kind of love a man may have, one is
always wrong about the number of his _liaisons_, because one
interprets friendships as _liaisons_, which is an error of addition,
and also because it is believed that one proved _liaison_ excludes
another, which is a different sort of mistake. Two people may say, "I
know X's mistress," and each be pronouncing a different name, yet
neither be wrong. A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs,
so we deceive her with another whom we do not love. As to the kind of
love which Saint-Loup had inherited from M. de Charlus, the husband
who is inclined that way generally makes his wife happy. This is a
general law, to which the Guermantes were exceptions, because those of
them who had that taste wanted people to believe they were
women-lovers and, advertising themselves with one or another, caused
the despair of their wives. The Courvoisiers acted more sensibly. The
young Vicomte de Courvoisier believed himself the only person on earth
and since the beginning of the world to be tempted by one of his own
sex. Imagining that the preference came to him from the devil, he
fought against it and married a charming woman by whom he had several
children. Then one of his cousins taught him that the practice was
fairly common, even went to the length of taking him to places where
he could satisfy it. M. de Courvoisier only loved his wife the more
for this and redoubled his uxorious zeal so that the couple were cited
as the best _ménage_ in Paris. As much could not be said for
Saint-Loup, because Robert, not content with invertion, caused his
wife endless jealousy by running after mistresses without getting any
pleasure from them.

It is possible that Morel, being exceedingly dark, was necessary to
Saint-Loup, as shadow is to sunlight. In this ancient family, one
could well imagine a _grand seigneur_, blonde, golden, intelligent,
dowered with every prestige, acquiring and retaining in the depths of
his being, a secret taste, unknown to everyone, for negroes. Robert,
moreover, never allowed conversation to touch his peculiar kind of
love affair. If I said a word he would answer, with a detachment that
caused his eye-glass to fall, "Oh! I don't know, I haven't an idea
about such things. If you want information about them, my dear fellow,
I advise you to go to someone else. I am a soldier, nothing more. I'm
as indifferent to matters of that kind as I am passionately interested
in the Balkan Wars. Formerly the history of battles interested you. In
those days I told you we should again witness typical battles, even
though the conditions were completely different, such, for instance,
as the great attempt of envelopment by the wing in the Battle of Ulm.
Well, special as those Balkan Wars may be, Lullé Burgas is again Ulm,
envelopment by the wing. Those are matters you can talk to me about.
But I know no more about the sort of thing you are alluding to than I
do about Sanscrit." On the other hand, when he had gone, Gilberte
referred voluntarily to the subjects Robert thus disdained when we
talked together. Certainly not in connection with her husband, for she
was unaware, or pretended to be unaware, of everything. But she
enlarged willingly upon them when they concerned other people, whether
because she saw in their case a sort of indirect excuse for Robert or
whether, divided like his uncle between a severe silence on these
subjects and an urge to pour himself out and to slander, he had been
able to instruct her very thoroughly about them. Amongst those alluded
to, no one was less spared than M. de Charlus; doubtless this was
because Robert, without talking to Gilberte about Morel, could not
help repeating to her in one form or another what had been told him by
the violinist who pursued his former benefactor with his hatred. These
conversations which Gilberte affected, permitted me to ask her if in
similar fashion Albertine, whose name I had for the first time heard
on her lips when the two were school friends, had the same tastes.
Gilberte refused to give me this information.  For that matter, it had
for a long time ceased to afford me the slightest interest. Yet I
continued to concern myself mechanically about it, just like an old
man who has lost his memory now and then wants news of his dead son.

Another day I returned to the charge and asked Gilberte again if
Albertine loved women. "Oh, not at all," she answered. "But you
formerly said that she was very bad form." "I said that? You must be
mistaken. In any case, if I did say it--but you are mistaken--I was on
the contrary speaking of little love affairs with boys and, at that
age, those don't go very far."

Did Gilberte say this to hide that she herself, according to
Albertine, loved women and had made proposals to her, or (for others
are often better informed about our life than we think) did Gilberte
know that I had loved and been jealous of Albertine and (others being
apt to know more of the truth than we believe, exaggerating it and so
erring by excessive suppositions, while we were hoping they were
mistaken through lack of any supposition at all) did she imagine that
I was so still, and was she, out of kindness, blind-folding me which
one is always ready to do to jealous people? In any case, Gilberte's
words, since the "bad form" of former days leading to the certificate
of moral life and habits of to-day, followed an inverse course to the
affirmations of Albertine, who had almost come to avowing
half-relationship with Gilberte herself. Albertine had astonished me
in this, as had also what Andrée told me, for, respecting the whole of
that little band, I had at first, before knowing its perversity,
convinced myself that my suspicions were unjustified, as happens so
often when one discovers an innocent girl, almost ignorant of the
realities of life, in a milieu which one had wrongly supposed the most
depraved. Afterwards I retraced my steps in the contrary sense,
accepting my original suspicions as true. And perhaps Albertine told
me all this so as to appear more experienced than she was and to
astonish me with the prestige of her perversity in Paris, as at first
by the prestige of her virtue at Balbec. So, quite simply, when I
spoke to her about women who loved women, she answered as she did, in
order not to seem to be unaware of what I meant, as in a conversation
one assumes an understanding air when somebody talks of Fourrier or of
Tobolsk without even knowing what these names mean.  She had perhaps
associated with the friend of Mlle Vinteuil and with Andrée, isolated
from them by an air-tight partition and, while they believed she was
not one of them, she only informed herself afterwards (as a woman who
marries a man of letters seeks to cultivate herself) in order to
please me, by enabling herself to answer my questions, until she
realised that the questions were inspired by jealousy when, unless
Gilberte was lying to me, she reversed the engine.  The idea came to
me, that it was because Robert had learnt from her in the course of a
flirtation of the kind that interested him, that she, Gilberte, did
not dislike women, that he married her, hoping for pleasures which he
ought not to have looked for at home since he obtained them elsewhere.
None of these hypotheses were absurd, for in the case of women such as
Odette's daughter or of the girls of the little band there is such a
diversity, such an accumulation of alternating tastes, that if they
are not simultaneous, they pass easily from a _liaison_ with a woman
to a passion for a man, so much so that it becomes difficult to define
their real and dominant taste. Thus Albertine had sought to please me
in order to make me marry her but she had abandoned the project
herself because of my undecided and worrying disposition. It was in
this too simple form that I j udged my affair with Albertine at a time
when I only saw it from the outside.

What is curious and what I am unable wholly to grasp, is that about
that period all those who had loved Albertine, all those who would
have been able to make her do what they wanted, asked, entreated, I
would even say, implored me, failing my friendship, at least, to have
some sort of relations with them. It would have been no longer
necessary to offer money to Mme Bontemps to send me Alber-tine.  This
return of life, coming when it was no longer any use, profoundly
saddened me, not on account of Albertine whom I would have received
without pleasure if she had been brought to me, not only from Touraine
but from the other world, but because of a young woman whom I loved
and whom I could not manage to see. I said to myself that if she died
or if I did not love her any more, all those who would have been able
to bring her to me would have fallen at my feet. Meanwhile, I
attempted in vain to work upon them, not being cured by experience
which ought to have taught me, if it ever taught anyone anything, that
to love is a bad fate like that in fairy stories, against which
nothing avails until the enchantment has ceased.

"I've just reached a point," Gilberte continued, "in the book which I
have here where it speaks of these things.  It's an old Balzac I'm
raking over to be on equal terms with my uncles, _La Fille aux yeux
d'Or_, but it's incredible, a beautiful nightmare. Maybe a woman can
be controlled in that way by another woman, but never by a man." "You
are mistaken, I knew a woman who was loved by a man who veritably
succeeded in isolating her; she could never see anyone and only went
out with trusted servants." "Indeed!  How that must have horrified you
who are so kind.  Just recently Robert and I were saying you ought to
get married, your wife would cure you and make you happy." "No, I've
got too bad a disposition." "What nonsense." "I assure you I have. For
that matter I have been engaged, but I could not marry."

I did not want to borrow _La Fille aux yeux d'Or_ from Gilberte
because she was reading it, but on the last evening that I stayed with
her, she lent me a book which produced a lively and mingled impression
upon me. It was a volume of the unpublished diary of the Goncourts. I
was sad that last evening, in going up to my room, to think that I had
never gone back one single time to see the Church of Combray which
seemed to be awaiting me in the midst of greenery framed in the
violet-hued window. I said to myself, "Well, it must be another year,
if I do not die between this and then," seeing no other obstacle but
my death and not imagining that of the church, which, it seemed to me,
must last long after my death as it had lasted long before' my birth.
When, before blowing out my candle, I read the passage which I
transcribe further on, my lack of aptitude for writing--presaged
formerly during my walks on the Guermantes side, confirmed during the
visit of which this was the last evening, those eyes of departure,
when the routine of habits which are about to end is ceasing and
one begins to judge oneself--seemed to me less regrettable; it was as
though literature revealed no profound truth while at the same time it
seemed sad that it was not what I believed it. The infirm state which
was to confine me in a sanatorium seemed less regrettable to me if the
beautiful things of which books speak were no more beautiful than
those I had seen. But, by a strange contradiction, now that this book
spoke of them, I longed to see them. Here are the pages which I read
until fatigue closed my eyes.


"The day before yesterday, who should drop in here, to take me to
dinner with him but Verdurin, the former critic of the _Revue_, author
of that book on Whistler in which truly the doings, the artistic
atmosphere of that highly original American are often rendered with
great delicacy by that lover of all the refinements, of all the
prettinesses of the thing painted which Verdurin is. And while I dress
myself to follow him, every now and then, he gives vent to a regular
recitation, like the frightened spelling out of a confession by
Fromentin on his renunciation of writing immediately after his
marriage with 'Madeleine', a renunciation which was said to be due to
his habit of taking morphine, the result of which, according to
Verdurin, was that the majority of the habitués of his wife's salon,
not even knowing that her husband had ever written, spoke to him of
Charles Blanc, St.  Victor, St. Beuve, and Burty, to whom they
believed him completely inferior. 'You Goncourt, you well know, and
Gautier knew also that my "Salons" was a very different thing from
those pitiable "Maîtres d'autrefois" believed to be masterpieces in my
wife's family.' Then, by twilight, while the towers of the Trocadero
were lit up with the last gleams of the setting sun which made them
look just like those covered with currant jelly of the old-style
confectioners, the conversation continues in the carriage on our way
to the Quai Conti where their mansion is, which its owner claims to be
the ancient palace of the Ambassadors of Venice and where there is
said to be a smoking-room of which Verdurin talks as though it were
the drawing-room, transported just as it was in the fashion of the
_Thousand and One Nights_, of a celebrated Palazzo, of which I forget
the name, a Palazzo with a well-head representing the crowning of the
Virgin which Verdurin asserts to be absolutely the finest of
Sansovinos and which is used by their guests to throw their cigar
ashes into.  And, _ma foi_, when we arrive, the dull green diffusion
of moonlight, verily like that under which classical painting shelters
Venice and under which the silhouetted cupola of the Institute makes
one think of the Salute in the pictures of Guardi, I have somewhat the
illusion of being beside the Grand Canal, the illusion reinforced by
the construction of the mansion, where from the first floor, one does
not see the quay, and by the effective remark of the master of the
house, who affirms that the name of the rue du Bac--I am hanged if I
had ever thought of it--came from the ferry upon which the religious
of former days, the Miramiones, went to mass at Notre Dame. I took to
reloving the whole quarter where I wandered in my youth when my Aunt
de Courmont lived there on finding almost contiguous to the mansion of
Verdurin, the sign of 'Petit Dunkerque', one of those rare shops
surviving otherwise than vignetted in the chalks and rubbings of
Gabriel de St. Aubin in which that curious eighteenth century
individual came in and seated himself during his moments of idleness
to bargain about pretty little French and foreign 'trifles' and the
newest of everything produced by Art as a bill-head of the 'Petit
Dunkerque' has it, a bill-head of which I believe we alone, Verdurin
and I, possess an example and which is one of those shuttle-cock
masterpieces of ornamented paper upon which, in the reign of Louis XV
accounts were delivered, with its title-head representing a raging sea
swarming with ships, a sea with waves which had the appearance of an
illustration in the _Edition des Fermiers Généraux de l'Huître et des
Plaideurs_. The mistress of the house, who places me beside her, says
amiably that she has decorated her table with nothing but Japanese
chrysanthemums but these chrysanthemums are disposed in vases which
are the rarest works of art, one of them of bronze upon which petals
of red copper seemed to be the living eflorescence of the flower.
There is Cottard the doctor, and his wife, the Polish sculptor
Viradobetski, Swann the collector, a Russian _grande dame_, a Princess
with a golden name which escapes me, and Cottard whispers in my ear
that it is she who had shot point blank at the Archduke Rudolf.
According to her I have an absolutely exceptional literary position in
Galicia and in the whole north of Poland, a girl in those parts never
consenting to promise her hand without knowing if her betrothed is an
admirer of La Faustin.

"'You cannot understand, you western people,' exclaims by way of
conclusion the princess who gives me the impression, _ma foi_, of an
altogether superior intelligence, 'that penetration by a writer into
the intimate life of a woman.' A man with shaven chin and lips, with
whiskers like a butler, beginning with that tone of condescension of a
secondary professor preparing first form boys for the
Saint-Charlemagne, that is Brichot, the university don. When my name
was mentioned by Verdurin he did not say a word to show that he knew
our books, which means for me anger, discouragement aroused by this
conspiracy the Sorbonne organises against us, bringing contradiction
and hostile silence even into the charming house where I am being
entertained. We proceed to table and there is then an extraordinary
procession of plates which are simply masterpieces of the art of the
porcelain-maker. The connoisseur, whose attention is delicately
tickled during the dainty repast, listens all the more complacently to
the artistic chatter--while before him pass plates of Yung Tsching
with their nasturtium rims yielding to the bluish centre with its rich
flowering of the water-iris, a really decorative passage with its
dawn-flight of kingfishers and cranes, a dawn with just that matutinal
tone which I gaze at lazily when I awake daily at the Boulevard
Montmorency--Dresden plates more finical in the grace of their
fashioning, whether in the sleepy anemia of their roses turning to
violet in the crushed wine-lees of a tulip or with their rococo design
of carnation and myosotis. Plates of Sevres trellissed by the delicate
vermiculation of their white fluting, ver-ticillated in gold or bound
upon the creamy plane of their _pâte tendre_ by the gay relief of a
golden ribbon, finally a whole service of silver on which are
displayed those Lucinian myrtles which Dubarry would recognise. And
what is perhaps equally rare is the really altogether remarkable
quality of the things which are served in it, food delicately
manipulated, a stew such as the Parisians, one can shout that aloud,
never have at their grandest dinners and which reminds me of certain
_cordons bleus_ of Jean d'Heurs. Even the _foie gras_ has no relation
to the tasteless froth which is generally served under that name, and
I do not know many places where a simple potato salad is thus made
with potatoes having the firmness of a Japanese ivory button and the
patina of those little ivory spoons with which the Chinese pour water
on the fish that they have just caught. A rich red bejewelling is
given to the Venetian goblet which stands before me by an amazing
Léoville bought at the sale of M. Montalivet and it is a delight for
the imagination and for the eye, I do not fear to say it, for the
imagination of what one formerly called the jaw, to have served to one
a brill which has nothing in common with that kind of stale brill
served on the most luxurious tables which has received on its back the
imprint of its bones during the delay of the journey, a brill not
accompanied by that sticky glue generally called _sauce blanche_ by so
many of the chefs in great houses, but by a veritable _sauce blanche_
made out of butter at five francs the pound; to see this brill in a
wonderful Tching Hon dish graced by the purple rays of a setting sun
on a sea which an amusing band of lobsters is navigating, their rough
tentacles so realistically pictured that they seem to have been
modelled upon the living carapace, a dish of which the handle is a
little Chinaman catching with his line a fish which makes the silvery
azure of his stomach an enchantment of mother o' pearl. As I speak to
Verdurin of the delicate satisfaction it must be for him to have this
refined repast amidst a collection which no prince possesses at the
present time, the mistress of the house throws me the melancholy
remark: 'One sees how little you know him,' and she speaks of her
husband as a whimsical oddity, indifferent to all these beauties, 'an
oddity' she repeats, 'that's the word, who has more gusto for a bottle
of cider drunk in the rough coolness of a Norman farm.' And the
charming woman, in a tone which is really in love with the colours of
the country, speaks to us with overflowing enthusiasm of that Normandy
where they have lived, a Normandy which must be like an enormous
English park, with the fragrance of its high woodlands _à la_
Lawrence, with its velvet cryptomeria in their enamelled borders of
pink hortensia, with its natural lawns diversified by sulphur-coloured
roses falling over a rustic gateway flanked by two intertwined
pear-trees resembling with its free-falling and flowering branches the
highly ornamental insignia of a bronze applique by Gauthier, a
Normandy which must be absolutely unsuspected by Parisians on holiday,
protected as it is by the barrier of each of its enclosures, barriers
which the Verdurins confess to me they did not commit the crime of
removing. At the close of day, as the riot of colour was sleepily
extinguished and light only came from the sea curdled almost to a
skim-milk blue. 'Ah! Not the sea you know--' protests my hostess
energetically in answer to my remark that Flaubert had taken my
brother and me to Trouville, 'That is nothing, absolutely nothing. You
must come with me, without that you will never know'--they would go
back through real forests of pink-tulle flowers of the rhododendrons,
intoxicated with the scent of the gardens, which gave her husband
abominable attacks of asthma.  'Yes,' she insisted, 'it is true, real
crises of asthma.' Afterwards, the following summer, they returned,
housing a whole colony of artists in an admirable dwelling of the
Middle Ages, an ancient cloister leased by them for nothing, and _ma
foi_, listening to this woman who after moving in so many
distinguished circles, had yet kept some of that freedom of speech of
a woman of the people, a speech which shows you things with the colour
imagination gives to them, my mouth watered at the thought of the life
which she confessed to living down there, each one working in his cell
or in the salon which was so large that it had two fireplaces.
Everyone came in before luncheon for altogether superior conversation
interspersed with parlour games, reminding me of those evoked by that
masterpiece of Diderot, his letters to Mlle Volland. Then after
luncheon everyone went out, even on days of sunny showers, when the
sparkling of the raindrops luminously filtering through the knots of a
magnificent avenue of centenarian beechtrees which offered in front of
the gates the vista of growth dear to the eighteenth century, and
shrubs bearing drops of rain on their flowering buds suspended on
their boughs, lingering to watch the delicate dabbling of a bullfinch
enamoured of coolness, bathing itself in the tiny nymphembourg basin
shaped like the corolla of a white rose. And as I talk to Mme Verdurin
of the landscapes and of the flowers down there, so delicately
pastelled by Elstir: 'But it is I who made all that known to him,' she
exclaims with an indignant lifting of the head, 'everything, you
understand; wonder-provoking nooks, all his themes; I threw them in
his face when he left us, didn't I, Auguste? All those themes he has
painted. Objects he always knew, to be fair, one must admit that. But
flowers he had never seen; no, he did not know the difference between
a marsh-mallow and a hollyhock. It was I who taught him, you will
hardly believe me, to recognise the jasmine.' And it is, one must
admit, a strange reflection that the painter of flowers, whom the
connoisseurs of to-day cite to us as the greatest, superior even to
Fantin-Latour, would perhaps never have known how to paint jasmine
without the woman who was beside me. 'Yes, upon my word, the jasmine;
all the roses he produced were painted while he was staying with me,
if I did not bring them to him myself. At our house we just called him
"M. Tiche". Ask Cottard or Brichot or any of them if he was ever
treated here as a great man. He would have laughed at it himself. I
taught him how to arrange his flowers; at the beginning he had no idea
of it. He never knew how to make a bouquet. He had no natural taste
for selection. I had to say to him, "No, do not paint that; it is not
worth while, paint this." Oh! If he had listened to us for the
arrangement of his life as he did for the arrangement of his flowers,
and if he had not made that horrible marriage!' And abruptly, with
eyes fevered by their absorption in a reverie of the past, with a
nerve-racked gesture, she stretched forth her arms with a frenzied
cracking of the joints from the silk sleeves of her bodice, and
twisted her body into a suffering pose like some admirable picture
which I believe has never been painted, wherein all the pent-up
revolt, all the enraged susceptibilities of a friend outraged in her
delicacy and in her womanly modesty can be read. Upon that she talks
to us about the admirable portrait which Elstir made for her, a
portrait of the Collard family, a portrait given by her to the
Luxembourg when she quarrelled with the painter, confessing that it
was she who had given him the idea of painting the man in evening
dress in order to obtain that beautiful expanse of linen, and she who
chose the velvet dress of the woman, a dress offering support in the
midst of all the fluttering of the light shades of the curtains, of
the flowers, of the fruit, of the gauze dresses of the little girls
like ballet-dancers' skirts. It was she, too, who gave him the idea of
painting her in the act of arranging her hair, an idea for which the
artist was afterwards honoured, which consisted, in short, in painting
the woman, not as though on show, but surprised in the intimacy of her
everyday life. 'I said to him, "When a woman is doing her hair or
wiping her face, or warming her feet, she knows she is not being seen,
she executes a number of interesting movements, movements of an
altogether Leonardolike grace."' But upon a sign from Verdurin,
indicating that the arousing of this state of indignation was
unhealthy for that highly-strung creature which his wife was, Swann
drew my admiring attention to the necklace of black pearls worn by the
mistress of the house and bought by her quite white at the sale of a
descendant of Mme de La Fayette to whom they had been given by
Henrietta of England, pearls which had become black as the result of a
fire which destroyed part of the house in which the Verdurins were
living in a street the name of which I can no longer remember, a fire
after which the casket containing the pearls was found but they had
become entirely black.  'And I know the portrait of those pearls on
the very shoulders of Mme de La Fayette, yes, exactly so, their
portrait,' insisted Swann in the face of the somewhat wonderstruck
exclamations of the guests. 'Their authentic portrait, in the
collection of the Duc de Guermantes.  A collection which has not its
equal in the world,' he asserts and that I ought to go and see it, a
collection inherited by the celebrated Duc who was the favourite
nephew of Mme de Beausergent his aunt, of that Mme de Beausergent who
afterwards became Mme d'Hayfeld, sister of the Marquise de
Villeparisis and of the Princess of Hanover. My brother and I used to
be so fond of him in old days when he was a charming boy called Basin,
which as a matter of fact, is the first name of the Duc.  Upon that,
Doctor Cottard, with that delicacy which reveals the man of
distinction, returns to the history of the pearls and informs us that
catastrophes of that kind produce in the mind of people distortions
similar to those one remarks in organic matter and relates in really
more philosophical terms than most physicians can command, how the
footman of Mme Verdurin herself, through the horror of this fire where
he nearly perished, had become a different man, his hand-writing
having so changed that on seeing the first letter which his masters,
then in Normandy, received from him, announcing the event, they
believed it was the invention of a practical joker. And not only was
his handwriting different, Cottard asserts that from having been a
completely sober man he had become an abominable drunkard whom Mme
Verdurin had been obliged to discharge. This suggestive dissertation
continued, on a gracious sign from the mistress of the house, from the
dining-room into the Venetian smoking-room where Cottard told me he
had witnessed actual duplications of personality, giving as example
the case of one of his patients whom he amiably offers to bring to see
me, in whose case Cottard has merely to touch his temples to usher him
into a second life, a life in which he remembers nothing of the other,
so much so that, a very honest man in this one, he had actually been
arrested several times for thefts committed in the other during which
he had been nothing less than a disgraceful scamp. Upon which Mme
Verdurin acutely remarks that medicine could furnish subjects truer
than a theatre where the humour of an imbroglio is founded upon
pathological mistakes, which from thread to needle brought Mme Cottard
to relate that a similar notion had been made use of by an amateur who
is the prime favourite at her children's evening parties, the
Scotchman Stevenson, a name which forced from Swann the peremptory
affirmation: 'But Stevenson is a great writer, I can assure you, M. de
Goncourt, a very great one, equal to the greatest.' And upon my
marvelling at the escutcheoned panels of the ceiling in the room where
we are smoking, panels which came from the ancient Palazzo Barberini,
I express my regret at the progressive darkening of a certain vase
through the ashes of our _londrès_, Swann having recounted that
similar stains on the leaves of certain books attest their having
belonged to Napoleon I, books owned, despite his anti-Bonapartist
opinions by the Duc de Guermantes, owing to the fact that the Emperor
chewed tobacco, Cottard, who reveals himself as a man of penetrating
curiosity in all matters, declares that these stains do not come at
all from that: 'Believe me, not at all,' he insists with authority,
'but from his habit of having always near at hand, even on the field
of battle, some pastilles of Spanish liquorice to calm his liver
pains. For he had a disease of the liver and it is of that he died,'
concluded the doctor."


I stopped my reading there for I was leaving the following day,
moreover, it was an hour when the other master claimed me, he under
whose orders we are for half our time. We accomplish the task to which
he obliges us with our eyes closed. Every morning he surrenders us to
our other master knowing that otherwise we should be unable to yield
ourselves to his service. It would be curious, when our spirit has
reopened its eyes, to know what we could have been doing under that
master who clouds the minds of his slaves before putting them to his
immediate business. The most cunning, before their task is finished,
try to peep out surreptitiously. But slumber speedily struggles to
efface the traces of what they long to see. And, after all these
centuries we know little about it. So I closed the Goncourt journal.
Glamour of literature! I wanted to see the Cottards again, to ask them
so many details about Elstir, I wanted to go and see if the "Petit
Dunkerque" shop still existed, to ask permission to visit that mansion
of the Verdurins where I had dined. But I experienced a vague
apprehension.  Certainly I did not disguise from myself that I had
never known how to listen nor, when I was with others, to observe; to
my eyes no old woman exhibited a pearl necklace and my ears heard
nothing that was said about it.  Nevertheless, I had known these
people in my ordinary life, I had often dined with them; whether it
was the Verdurins, or the Guermantes, or the Cottards, each had seemed
to me as commonplace as did that Basin to my grandmother who little
supposed he was the beloved nephew, the charming young hero, of Mme de
Beausergent.  All had seemed to me insipid; I remembered the
numberless vulgarities of which each one was composed.... "_Et que
tout cela fît un astre dans la nuit_!"


I resolved to put aside provisionally the objections against
literature which these pages of Goncourt had aroused in me. Apart from
the peculiarly striking naivete of the memoir-writer, I was able to
reassure myself from different points of view. To begin with, in
regard to myself, the inability to observe and to listen of which the
journal I have quoted had so painfully reminded me was not complete.
There was in me a personage who more or less knew how to observe but
he was an intermittent personage who only came to life when some
general essence common to many things which are its nourishment and
its delight, manifested itself. Then the personage remarked and
listened, but only at a certain depth and in such a manner that
observation did not profit. Like a geometrician who in divesting
things of their material qualities, only sees their linear substratum,
what people said escaped me, for that which interested me was not what
they wanted to say but the manner in which they said it in so far as
it revealed their characters or their absurdities. Or rather that was
an object which had always been my particular aim because I derived
specific pleasure from identifying the denominator common to one
person and another. It was only when I perceived it that my
mind--until then dozing even behind the apparent activity of my
conversation the animation of which masked to the outside world a
complete mental torpor--started all at once joyously in chase, but
that which it then pursued--for example the identity of the Verdurin's
salon at diverse places and periods--was situated at half-depth,
beyond actual appearance, in a zone somewhat withdrawn.  Also the
obvious transferable charm of people escaped me because I no longer
retained the faculty of confining myself to it, like the surgeon who,
beneath the lustre of a female abdomen, sees the internal disease
which is consuming it. It was all very well for me to go out to
dinner.  I did not see the guests because when I thought I was
observing them I was radiographing them. From that it resulted that in
collating all the observations I had been able to make about the
guests in the course of a dinner, the design of the lines traced by me
would form a unity of psychological laws in which the interest
pertaining to the discourse of a particular guest occupied no place
whatever.  But were my portraits denuded of all merit because I did
not compose them merely as portraits? If in the domain of painting one
portrait represents truths relative to volume, to light, to movement,
does that necessarily make it inferior to another quite dissimilar
portrait of the same person in which, a thousand details omitted in
the first will be minutely related to each other, a second portrait
from which it would be concluded that the model was beautiful while
that of the first would be considered ugly, which might have a
documentary and even historical importance but might not necessarily
be an artistic truth. Again my frivolity the moment when I was with
others, made me anxious to please and I desired more to amuse people
with my chatter than to learn from listening unless I went out to
interrogate someone upon a point of art or unless some jealous
suspicion preoccupied me. But I was incapable of seeing a thing unless
a desire to do so had been aroused in me by reading; unless it was a
thing of which I wanted a previous sketch to confront later with
reality. Even had that page of the Goncourts not enlightened me, I
knew how often I had been unable to give my attention to things or to
people, whom afterwards, once their image had been presented to me in
solitude by an artist, I would have gone leagues and risked death to
rediscover. Then my imagination started to work, had begun to paint.
And the very thing I had yawned at the year before I desired when I
again contemplated it and with anguish said to myself, "Can I never
see it again? What would I not give for it?" When one reads articles
about people, even about mere society people, qualifying them as "the
last representatives of a society of which there is no other living
witness", doubtless some may exclaim, "to think that he says so much
about so insignificant a person and praises him as he does", but it is
precisely such a man I should have deplored not having known if I had
only read papers and reviews and if I had never seen the man himself
and I was more inclined, in reading such passages in the papers, to
think, "What a pity! And all I cared about then was getting hold of
Gilberte and Albertine and I paid no attention to that gentleman whom
I simply took for a society bore, for a pure façade, a marionnette."
The pages of the Goncourt Journal that I had read made me regret that
attitude.  For perhaps I might have concluded from them that life
teaches one to minimise the value of reading and shows us that what
the writer exalts for us is not worth much; but I could equally well
conclude the contrary, that reading enhances the value of life, a
value we have not realised until books make us aware of how great that
value is. Strictly, we can console ourselves for not having much
enjoyed the society of a Vinteuil or of a Bergotte, because the
awkward middleclassness of the one, the unbearable defects of the
other prove nothing against them, since their genius is manifested by
their works; and the same applies to the pretentious vulgarity of an
Elstir in early days. Thus the journal of the Goncourts made me
discover that Elstir was none other than the "M. Tiche" who had once
inflicted upon Swann such exasperating lectures at the Verdurins. But
what man of genius has not adopted the irritating conversational
manner of artists of his own circle before acquiring (as Elstir did,
though it happens rarely) superior taste. Are not the letters of
Balzac, for instance, smeared with vulgar terms which Swann would
rather have died than use? And yet, it is probable that Swann, so
sensitive, so completely exempt from every dislikeable idiosyncrasy,
would have been incapable of writing _Cousine Bette_ and _Le Curé de
Tours_. Therefore, whether or no memoirs are wrong to endow with charm
a society which has displeased us, is a problem of small importance,
since, even if the writer of these memoirs is mistaken, that proves
nothing against the value of a society which produces such genius and
which existed no less in the works of Vinteuil, of Elstir and of
Bergotte.

Quite at the other extremity of experience, when I remarked that the
very curious anecdotes which are the inexhaustible material of the
journal of the Goncourts and a diversion for solitary evenings, had
been related to him by those guests whom in reading his pages we
should have envied him knowing, it was not so very difficult to
explain why they had left no trace of interesting memory in my mind.
In spite of the ingenuousness of Goncourt, who supposed that the
interest of these anecdotes lay in the distinction of the man who told
them, it can very well be that mediocre people might have experienced
during their lives or heard tell of curious things which they related
in their turn. Goncourt knew how to listen as he knew how to observe,
and I do not. Moreover, it was necessary to judge all these happenings
one by one.  M. de Guermantes certainly had not given me the
impression of that adorable model of juvenile grace whom my
grandmother so much wanted to know and set before my eyes as
inimitable according to the _Mémoires of Mme de Beausergent_. One must
remember that Basin was at that time seven years old, that the writer
was his aunt and that even husbands who are going to divorce their
wives a few months later are loud in praise of them. One of the most
charming poems of Sainte-Beuve is consecrated to the apparition beside
a fountain of a young child crowned with gifts and graces, the
youthful Mlle de Champlâtreux who was not more than ten years old. In
spite of all the tender veneration felt by that poet of genius, the
Comtesse de Noailles, for her mother-in-law the Duchesse de Noailles,
born Champlâtreux, it is possible, if she were to paint her portrait,
that it would contrast rather piquantly with the one Sainte-Beuve drew
fifty years earlier.

What may perhaps be regarded as more disturbing, is something in
between, personages in whose case what is said implies more than a
memory which is able to retain a curious anecdote yet without one's
having, as in the case of the Vinteuils, the Bergottes, the resource
of judging them by their work; they have not created, they have
only--to our great astonishment, for we found them so
mediocre--inspired. Again it happens that the salon > which, in public
galleries, gives the greatest impression of elegance in great
paintings of the Renaissance and onwards, is that of a little
ridiculous bourgeoise whom after seeing the picture, I might, if I had
not known her, have yearned to approach in the flesh, hoping to learn
from her precious secrets that the painter's art did not reveal to me
in his canvas, though her majestic velvet train and laces formed a
passage of painting comparable to the most splendid of Titians. If
only in bygone days I had understood that it is not the wittiest man,
the best educated, the man with the best social relationships who
becomes a Bergotte but he who knows how to become a mirror and is
thereby enabled to reflect his own life, however commonplace, (though
his contemporaries might consider him less gifted than Swann and less
erudite than Bréauté) and one can say the same, with still more
reason, of an artist's models.  The awakening of love of beauty in the
artist who can paint everything may be stimulated, the elegance in
which he could find such beautiful motifs may be supplied, by people
rather richer than himself--at whose houses he would find what he was
not accustomed to in his studio of an unknown genius selling his
canvases for fifty francs; for instance, a drawing-room upholstered in
old silk, many lamps, beautiful flowers and fruit, handsome
dresses--relatively modest folk, (or who would appear that to people
of fashion who are not even aware of the others' existence) who for
that very reason are more in a position to make the acquaintance of an
obscure artist, to appreciate him, to invite him and buy his pictures,
than aristocrats who get themselves painted like a Pope or a Prime
Minister by academic painters. Would not the poetry of an elegant
interior and of the beautiful dresses of our period be discovered by
posterity in the drawing-room of the publisher Charpentier by Renoir
rather than in the portrait of the Princesse de Sagan or of the
Comtesse de La Rochefoucauld by Cotte or Chaplin? The artists who have
given us the most resplendent visions of elegance have collected the
elements at the homes of people who were rarely the leaders of fashion
of their period; for the latter are seldom painted by the unknown
depositary of a beauty they are unable to distinguish on his canvases,
disguised as it is by the interposition of a vulgar burlesque of
superannuated grace which floats before the public eye in the same way
as the subjective visions which an invalid believes are actually
before him. But that these mediocre models whom I had known could have
inspired, advised certain arrangements which had enchanted me, that
the presence of such an one of them in the picture was less that of a
model, than of a friend whom a painter wishes to figure in his canvas,
was like asking oneself whether we regret not having known all these
personages because Balzac painted them in his books or dedicated his
books to them as the homage of his admiration, to whom Sainte-Beuve or
Baudelaire wrote their loveliest verses, still more if all the
Récamiers, all the Pompadours would not have seemed to me
insignificant people, whether owing to a temperamental defect which
made me resent being ill and unable to return and see the people I had
misjudged, or because they might only owe their prestige to the
illusory magic of literature which forced me to change my standard of
values and consoled me for being obliged from one day to the other, on
account of the progress which my illness was making, to break with
society, renounce travel and going to galleries and museums in order
that I could be nursed in a sanatorium. Perhaps, however, this
deceptive side, this artificial illumination, only exists in memoirs
when they are too recent, too close to reputations, whether
intellectual or fashionable, which will quickly vanish, (and if
erudition then tries to react against this burial, will it succeed in
dispelling one out of a thousand of these oblivions which keep on
accumulating?)

These ideas tending some to diminish, others to increase my regret
that I had no gift for literature, no longer occupied my mind during
the long years I spent as an invalid in a sanatorium far from Paris
and I had altogether renounced the project of writing until the
sanatorium was unable to find a medical staff at the beginning of
1916. I then returned, as will be seen, to a very different Paris from
the Paris where I returned in August, 1914, when I underwent medical
examination, after which I went back to the sanatorium.




CHAPTER II

M. DE CHARLUS DURING THE WAR, HIS OPINIONS, HIS PLEASURES


On one of the first evenings after my return to Paris in 1916, wanting
to hear about the only thing that interested me, the war, I went out
after dinner to see Mme Verdurin, for she was, together with Mme
Bontemps, one of the queens of that Paris of the war which reminded
one of the Directory. As the leavening by a small quantity of yeast
appears to be a spontaneous germination, young women were running
about all day wearing cylindrical turbans on their heads as though
they were contemporaries of Mme Tallien, As a proof of public spirit
they wore straight Egyptian tunics, dark and very "warlike" above
their short skirts, they were shod in sandals, recalling Talma's
buskin or high leggings like those of our beloved combatants. It was,
they said, because they did not forget it was their duty to rejoice
the eyes of those combatants that they still adorned themselves not
only with _flou_ dresses but also with jewels evoking the armies by
their decorative theme if indeed their material did not come from the
armies and had not been worked by them. Instead of Egyptian ornaments
recalling the campaign of Egypt, they wore rings or bracelets made out
of fragments of shell or beltings of the "seventy-fives",
cigarette-lighters consisting of two English half-pennies to which a
soldier in his dug-out had succeeded in giving a patina so beautiful
that the profile of Queen Victoria might have been traced on it by
Pisanello. It was again, they said, because they never ceased thinking
of their own people, that they hardly wore mourning when one of them
fell, the pretext being that he was proud to die, which enabled them
to wear a close bonnet of white English crêpe (graceful of effect and
encouraging to aspirants) while the invincible certainty of final
triumph enabled them to replace the earlier cashmire by satins and
silk muslins and even to wear their pearls "while observing that tact
and discretion of which it is unnecessary to remind French women."

The Louvre and all the museums were closed and when one read at the
head of an article "Sensational Exhibition" one might be certain it
was not an exhibition of pictures but of dresses destined to quicken
"those delicate artistic delights of which Parisian women have been
too long deprived." It was thus that elegance and pleasure had
regained their hold; fashion, in default of art, sought to excuse
itself, just as artists exhibiting at the revolutionary salon in 1793
proclaimed that it would be a mistake if it were regarded as
"inappropriate by austere Republicans that we should be engaged in art
when coalesced Europe is besieging the territory of liberty." The
dressmakers acted in the same spirit in 1916 and asserted with the
self-conscious conceit of the artist, that "to seek what was new, to
avoid banality, to prepare for victory, by disengaging a new formula
of beauty for the generations after the war, was their absorbing
ambition, the chimera they were pursuing as would be discovered by
those who came to visit their salons delightfully situated in such and
such a street, where the exclusion of the mournful preoccupations of
the moment with the restraint imposed by circumstances and the
substitution of cheerfulness and brightness was the order of the day.
The sorrows of the hour might, it is true, have got the better of
feminine» energy if we had not such lofty examples of courage and
endurance to meditate. So, thinking of our combatants in the trenches
who dream of more comfort and coquetry for the dear one at home, let
us unceasingly labour to introduce into the creation of dresses that
novelty which responds to the needs of the moment. Fashion, it must be
conceded, is especially associated with the English, consequently with
allied firms and this year the really smart thing is the
_robe-tonneau_ the charming freedom of which gives to all our young
women an amusing and distinguished _cachet_. 'It will indeed be one of
the happiest consequences of this sad war' the delightful chronicler
added (while awaiting the recapture of the lost provinces and the
rekindling of national sentiment)'to have secured such charming
results in the way of dress with so little material and to have
created coquetry out of nothing without ill-timed luxury and bad
style. At the present time dresses made at home are preferred to those
made in several series by great dress-makers, because each one is
evidence of the intelligence, taste and individuality of the maker.'"
As to charity, when we remember all the unhappiness born of the
invasion, of the many wounded and mutilated, obviously it should
become "ever more ingenious" and compel the ladies in the high turbans
to spend the afternoon taking tea at the bridge-table commenting on
the news from the front while their automobiles await them at the door
with a handsome soldier on the seat conversing with the _chasseur_.
For that matter it was not only the high cylindrical hats which were
new but also the faces they surmounted. The ladies in the new hats
were young women come one hardly knew whence, who had become the
flower of fashion, some during the last six months, others during the
last two years, others again during the last four. These differences
were as important for them as, when I made my first appearance in
society, were those between two families like the Guer-mantes and the
Rochefoucaulds with three or four centuries of ancient lineage. The
lady who had known the Guer-mantes since 1914 considered another who
had been introduced to them in 1916 a parvenue, gave her the nod of a
dowager duchess while inspecting her through her _lorgnon_, and avowed
with a significant gesture that no one in society knew whether the
lady was even married. "All this is rather sickening," concluded the
lady of 1914, who would have liked the cycle of the newly-admitted to
end with herself. These newcomers whom young men considered decidedly
elderly and whom certain old men who had not been exclusively in the
best society, seemed to recognise as not being so new as all that, did
something more than offer society the diversions of political
conversation and music in suitable intimacy; it had to be they who
supplied such diversions for, so that things should seem new, whether
they are so or not, in art or in medicine as in society, new names are
necessary (in certain respects they were very new indeed). Thus Mme
Verdurin went to Venice during the war and like those who want at any
cost to avoid sorrow and sentiment, when she said it was "épatant",
what she admired was not Venice nor St. Mark's nor the palaces, all
that had given, me delight and which she cheapened, but the effect of
the search-lights in the sky, searchlights about which she gave
information supported by figures. (Thus from age to age a sort of
realism is reborn out of reaction against the art which has been
admired till then.)

The Sainte-Euverte salon was a back number and the presence there of
the greatest artists or the most influential ministers attracted no
one. On the other hand, people rushed to hear a word uttered by the
Secretary of one Government, by the Under-Secretary of another, at the
houses of the new ladies in turbans whose winged and chattering
invasions filled Paris. The ladies of the first Directory had a queen
who was young and beautiful called Mme Tallien; those of the second
had two who were old and ugly and who were called Mme Verdurin and Mme
Bontemps. Who reproached Mme Bontemps because her husband had been
bitterly criticised by the _Echo de Paris_ for the part he played in
the Dreyfus affair? As the whole Chamber had at an earlier period
become revisionist, it was necessarily among the old revisionists and
the former socialists that the party of social order, of religious
toleration and of military efficiency had to be recruited. M.
Bontemps would have been detested in former days because the
anti-patriots were then given the name of Dreyfusards, but that name
had soon been forgotten and had been replaced by that of the adversary
of the three-year law. M.  Bontemps on the other hand, was one of the
authors of that law, therefore he was a patriot. In society (and this
social phenomenon is only the application of a much more general
psychological law) whether novelties are reprehensible or not, they
only excite consternation until they have been assimilated and
defended by reassuring elements. As it had been with Dreyfusism, so it
was with the marriage of Saint-Loup and Odette's daughter, a marriage
people protested against at first. Now that people met everyone they
knew at the Saint-Loups', Gilberte might have had the morals of Odette
herself, people would have gone there just the same and would have
agreed with Gilberte in condemning undigested moral novelties like a
dowager-duchess.  Dreyfusism was now integrated in a series of highly
respectable and customary things. As to asking what it amounted to in
itself, people now thought as little about accepting as formerly about
condemning it. It no longer shocked anyone and that was all about it.
People remembered it as little as they do whether the father of a
young girl they know was once a thief or not. At most they might say:
"The man you're talking about is the brother-in-law or somebody of the
same name, there was never anything against this one." In the same way
there had been different kinds of Dreyfusism and the man who went to
the Duchesse de Montmorency's and got the Three-Year Law passed could
not be a bad sort of man. In any case, let us be merciful to sinners.
The oblivion allotted to Dreyfus was _a fortiori_ extended to
Dreyfusards. Besides, there was no one else in politics, since
everyone had to be Dreyfusards at one time or another if they wanted
to be in the Government, even those who represented the contrary of
what Dreyfusism had incarnated when it was new and dreadful (at the
time that Saint-Loup was considered to be going wrong) namely,
anti-patriotism, irreligion, anarchy, etc.  Thus M. Bontemps'
Dreyfusism, invisible and contemplative like that of all politicians,
was as little observable as the bones under his skin. No one
remembered he had been Dreyfusard, for people of fashion are
absentminded and forgetful and also because time had passed which they
affected to believe longer than it was and it had become fashionable
to say that the pre-war period was separated from the war-period by a
gulf as deep, implying as much duration, as a geological period; and
even Brichot the nationalist in; alluding to the Dreyfus affair spoke
of "those pre-historic days". The truth is that the great change
brought about by the war was in inverse ratio to the value of the
minds it touched, at all events, up to a certain point; for, quite at
the bottom, the utter fools, the voluptuaries, did not bother about
whether there was a war or not; while quite at the top, those who
create their own world, their own interior life, are little concerned
with the importance of events.  What profoundly modifies the course of
their thought is rather something of no apparent importance which
overthrows the order of time and makes them live in another period of
their lives. The song of a bird in the Park of Montboissier, or a
breeze laden with the scent of mignonette, are obviously matters of
less importance than the great events of the Revolution and of the
Empire; nevertheless they inspired in Chateaubriand's _Mémoires
d'outre tombe_ pages of infinitely greater value.

M. Bontemps did not want to hear peace spoken of until Germany had
been divided up as it was during the Middle Ages, the doom of the
house of Hohenzollern pronounced, and William II sentenced to be shot.
In a word, he was what Brichot called a Diehard; this was the finest
brevet of citizenship one could give him. Doubtless, for the three
first days Mme Bontemps had been somewhat bewildered to find herself
among people who asked Mme Verdurin to present her to them, and it was
in a slightly acid tone that Mme Verdurin replied: "the Comte, my
dear," when Mme Bontemps said to her, "Was that not the Duc
d'Haussonville you just introduced to me?" whether through entire
ignorance and failure to associate the name of Haussonville with any
sort of tide, or whether, on the contrary, by excess of knowledge and
the association of her ideas with the _Parti des Ducs_ of which she
had been told M. d'Haussonville was one of the Academic members.
After the fourth day she began to be firmly established in the
faubourg Saint-Germain. Sometimes she could be observed among the
fragments of an obscure society which as little surprised those who
knew the egg from which Mme Bontemps had been hatched as the debris of
a shell around a chick. But after a fortnight, she shook them off and
by the end of the first month, when she said, "I am going to the
Lévi's," everyone knew, without her being more precise, that she was
referring to the Lévis-Mirepoix and not a single duchesse who was
there would have gone to bed without having first asked her or Mme
Verdurin, at least by telephone, what was in the evening's communiqué,
how things were going with Greece, what offensive was being prepared,
in a word, all that the public would only know the following day or
later and of which, in this way, they had a sort of dress rehearsal.
Mme Verdurin, in conversation, when she communicated news, used "we"
in speaking of France: "Now, you see, we exact of the King of Greece
that he should retire from the Pelopon-nesse, etc. We shall send him
etc." And in all her discourses G.H.Q. occurred constantly ("I have
telephoned to G.H.Q., etc.") an abbreviation in which she took as much
pleasure as women did formerly who, not knowing the Prince of
Agrigente, asked if it was "Grigri" people were speaking of, to show
they were _au courant_, a pleasure known only to society in less
troubled times but equally enjoyed by the masses at times of great
crisis. Our butler, for instance, when the King of Greece was
discussed, was able, thanks to the papers, to allude to him like
William II, as "Tino", while until now his familiarity with kings had
been more ordinary and invented by himself when he called the King of
Spain "Fonfonse". One may further observe that the number of people
Mme Verdurin named "bores" diminished in direct ratio with the social
importance of those who made advances to her. By a sort of magical
transformation, every bore who came to pay her a visit and solicited
an invitation, suddenly became agreeable and intelligent. In brief, at
the end of a year the number of "bores" was reduced to such
proportions that "the dread and unendurableness of being bored" which
occurred so often in Mme Verdurin's conversation and had played such
an important part in her life, almost entirely disappeared.  Of late,
one would have said that this unendurableness of boredom (which she
had formerly assured me she never felt in her first youth) caused her
less pain, like headaches and nervous asthmas, which lose their
strength as one grows older; and the fear of being bored would
doubtless have entirely abandoned Mme Verdurin owing to lack of bores,
if she had not in some measure replaced them by other recruits amongst
the old "faithfuls". Finally, to have done with the duchesses who now
frequented Mme Verdurin, they came there, though they were unaware of
it, in search of exactly the same thing as during the Dreyfus period,
a fashionable amusement so constituted that its enjoyment satisfied
political curiosity and the need of commenting privately upon the
incidents read in the newspapers.  Mme Verdurin would say, "Come in at
five o'clock to talk about the war," as she would have formerly said
"to talk about _l'affaire_ and in the interval you shall hear Morel."
Now Morel had no business to be there for he had not been in any way
exempted. He had simply not joined up and was a deserter, but nobody
knew it.  Another star of the Salon, "Dans-les-choux", had, in spite
of his sporting tastes, got himself exempted. He had become for me so
exclusively the author of an admirable work about which I was
constantly thinking, that it was only when, by chance, I established a
transversal current between two series of souvenirs, that I realised
it was he who had brought about Albertine's departure from my house.
And again this transversal current ended, so far as those reminiscent
relics of Albertine were concerned, in a channel which was dammed in
full flow several years back.  For I never thought any more about her.
It was a channel unfrequented by memories, a line I no longer needed
to follow. On the other hand the works of "Dans-les-choux" were recent
and that line of souvenirs was constantly frequented and utilised by
my mind.

I must add that acquaintance with the husband* of Andrée was neither
very easy nor very agreeable and that the friendship one offered him
was doomed to many disappointments.  Indeed he was even then very ill
and spared himself fatigues other than those which seemed likely to
give him pleasure. He only thus classified meeting people as yet
unknown to him whom his vivid imagination represented as being
potentially different from the rest. He knew his old friends too well,
was aware of what could be expected of them and to him they were no
longer worth a dangerous and perhaps fatal fatigue. He was in short a
very bad friend. Perhaps, in his taste for new acquaintances, he
regained some of the mad daring which he used to display in sport,
gambling and the excesses of the table in the old days at Balbec. Each
time I saw Mme Verdurin, she wanted to introduce me to Andrée,
apparently unable to admit that I had known her long before. As it
happened, Andrée rarely came with her husband but she remained my
excellent and sincere friend.  Faithful to the aesthetic of her
husband, who reacted against Russian ballets, she remarked of the
Marquis de Polignac, "He has had his house decorated by Bakst. How can
one sleep in it? I should prefer Dubufe."

Moreover the Verdurins, through that inevitable progress of
asstheticism which ends in biting one's own tail, declared that they
could not stand the modern style (besides, it came from Munich) nor
white walls and they only liked old French furniture in a sombre
setting.

It was very surprising at this period when Mme Verdurin could have
whom she pleased at her house, to see her making indirect advances to
a person she had completely lost sight of, Odette, One thought the
latter could add nothing to the brilliant circle which the little
group had become. But a prolonged separation, in soothing rancour,
sometimes revives friendship. And the phenomenon which makes the dying
utter only names formerly familiar to them and causes old people's
complaisance with childish memories, has its social equivalent. To
succeed in the enterprise of bringing Odette back to her, it must be
understood that Mme Verdurin did not employ the "ultras" but the less
faithful _habitués_ who had kept a foot in each salon. To them she
said, "I don't know why she doesn't come here any more. Perhaps she
has quarrelled with me, I haven't quarrelled with her. What have I
ever done to her? It was at my house she met both her husbands. If she
wants to come back, let her know that my doors are open to her." These
words, which might have cost the pride of "_the patronne_" a good deal
if they had not been dictated by her imagination, were passed on but
without success. Mme Verdurin awaited Odette but the latter did not
come until certain events which will be seen later brought her there
for quite other reasons than those which could have been put forward
by the embassy of the faithless, zealous as it was; few successes are
easy, many checks are decisive.

Things were so much the same, although apparently different, that one
came across the former expressions "right thinking" and "ill-thinking"
quite naturally. And just as the former communards had been
anti-revisionist, so the strongest Dreyfusards wanted everybody to be
shot with the full support of the generals just as at the time of the
Affaire they had been against Galliffet. Mme Verdurin invited to such
parties some rather recent ladies, known for their charitable works,
who at first came strikingly dressed, with great pearl necklaces.
Odette possessed one as fine as any and formerly had rather overdone
exhibiting it but now she was in war dress, and imitating the ladies
of the faubourg, she eyed them severely. But women know how to adapt
themselves. After wearing them three or four times, these ladies
observed that the dresses they considered _chic_ were for that very
reason proscribed by the people who were _chic_ and they laid aside
their golden gowns and resigned themselves to simplicity.

Mme Verdurin said, "It is deplorable, I shall telephone to Bontemps to
do what is necessary to-morrow. They have again 'censored' the whole
end of Norpois' article simply because he let it be understood that
they had '_limogé_' Percin." For all these women got glory out of
using the shibboleth current at the moment and believed they were in
the fashion, just as a middle-class woman, when M. de Bréauté or M. de
Charlus was mentioned, exclaimed: "Who's that you're talking about?
Babel de Bréauté, Même de Charlus?" For that matter, duchesses got the
same pleasure out of saying "_limogé_", for like _roturiers un peu
poètes_ in that respect, it is the name that matters but they express
themselves in accordance with their mental category in which there is
a great deal that is middle-class. Those who have minds have no regard
for birth.

All those telephonings of Mme Verdurin were not without ill-effects.
We had forgotten to say that the Verdurin salon though continuing in
spirit, had been provisionally transferred to one of the largest
hotels in Paris, the lack of coal and light having rendered the
Verdurin receptions somewhat difficult in the former very damp abode
of the Venetian ambassadors. Nevertheless, the new salon was by no
means unpleasant. As in Venice the site selected for its water supply
dictates the form the palace shall take, as a bit of garden in Paris
delights one more than a park in the country, the narrow dining-room
which Mme Verdurin had at the hotel was a sort of lozenge with the
radiant white of its screen-like walls against which every Wednesday,
and indeed every day, the most various and interesting people and the
smartest women in Paris stood out, happy to avail themselves of the
luxury of the Verdurins, thanks to their fortune increasing at a time
when the richest were restricting their expenditure owing to
difficulty in getting their incomes. This somewhat modified style of
reception enchanted Brichot who, as the social relations of the
Verdurins developed, obtained additional satisfaction from their
concentration in a small area, like surprises in a Christmas stocking.
On certain days guests were so numerous that the dining-room of the
private apartment was too small and dinner had to be served in the
enormous dining-room of the hotel below where the "faithful", while
hypocritically pretending to miss the intimacy of the upper floor,
were in reality delighted (constituting a select group as formerly in
the little railway) to be a spectacular object of envy to neighbouring
tables. In peace-time a society paragraph, surreptitiously sent to the
_Figaro_ or the _Gaulois_, would doubtless have announced to a larger
audience than the dining-room of the Majestic could hold that Brichot
had dined with the Duchesse de Duras, but since the war, society
reporters having discontinued that sort of news (they got home on
funerals, investitures and Franco-American banquets), the only
publicity attainable was that primitive and restricted one, worthy of
the dark ages prior to the discovery of Gutenberg, of being seen at
the table of Mme Verdurin. After dinner, people went up to the
Pattonne's suite and the telephoning began again. Many of the large
hotels were at that time full of spies, who daily took note of the
news telephoned by M. Bontemps with an indiscretion fortunately
counterbalanced by the complete inaccuracy of his information which
was always contradicted by the event.

Before the hour when afternoon-teas had finished, at the decline of
day, one could see from afar in the still, clear sky, little brown
spots which, in the twilight, one might have taken for gnats or birds.
Just as, when we see a mountain far away which we might take for a
cloud, we are impressed because we know it really to be solid, immense
and resistant, so I was moved because the brown spots in the sky were
neither gnats nor birds but aeroplanes piloted by men who were keeping
watch over Paris. It was not the recollection of the aeroplanes I had
seen with Albertine in our last walk near Versailles that affected me
for the memory of that walk had become indifferent to me.

At dinner-time the restaurants were full and if, passing in the
street, I saw a poor fellow home on leave, freed for six days from the
constant risk of death, fix his eyes an instant upon the brilliantly
illuminated windows, I suffered as at the hotel at Balbec when the
fishermen looked at us while we dined. But I suffered more because I
knew that the misery of a soldier is greater than that of the poor for
it unites all the miseries and is still more moving because it is more
resigned, more noble, and it was with a philosophical nod of his head,
without resentment, that he who was ready to return to the trenches,
observing the _embusqués_ elbowing each other to reserve their tables,
remarked: "One would not say there was a war going on here."

At half-past nine, before people had time to finish their dinner, the
lights were suddenly put out on account--of police regulations and at
nine-thirty-five there was a renewed hustling of _embusqués_ seizing
their overcoats from the hands of the _chasseurs_ of the restaurant
where I had dined with Saint-Loup one evening of his leave, in a
mysterious interior twilight like that in which magic lantern slides
are shown or films at one of those cinemas towards which men and women
diners were now hurrying. But after that hour, for those who, like
myself, on the evening of which I am speaking, had remained at home
for dinner and went out later to see friends, certain quarters of
Paris were darker than the Combray of my youth; visits were like those
one made to neighbours in the country. Ah! if Albertine had lived, how
sweet it would have been, on the evenings when I dined out, to make an
appointment with her under the arcades. At first I should have seen
nobody, I should have had the emotion of believing she would not come,
when all at once I should have seen one of her dear grey dresses in
relief against the black wall, her smiling eyes would have perceived
me and we should have been able to walk arm-in-arm without anyone
recognising or interfering with us and to have gone home together.
Alas, I was alone and it was as though I were making a visit to a
neighbour in the country, one of those calls such as Swann used to pay
us after dinner, without meeting more passers-by in the obscurity of
Tansonville as he walked down that little twisting path to the street
of St. Esprit, than I encountered this evening in the alley between
the rue Clothilde and the rue Bonaparte, now a sinuous, rustic path.
And as sections of countryside played upon by rough weather are
unspoiled by a change in their setting, on evenings swept by icy
winds, I felt myself more vividly on the shore of an angry sea than
when I was at that Balbec of which I so often dreamed. And there were
other elements which had not before existed in Paris and made one feel
as though one had arrived from the train for a holiday in the open
country, such as the contrast of light and shade at one's feet on
moonlit evenings. Moonlight produces effects unknown to towns even in
full winter; its rays played on the snow of the Boulevard Haussman
unswept by workmen as on an Alpine glacier. The outlines of the trees
were sharply reflected against the golden-blue snow as delicately as
in certain Japanese pictures or in some backgrounds by Raphael. They
lengthened on the ground at the foot of the trees as in nature when
the setting sun reflects the trees which rise at regular intervals in
the fields.  But by a refinement of exquisite delicacy, the meadow
upon which these shadows of ethereal trees were cast, was a field of
Paradise, not green but of a white so brilliant on account of the moon
shedding its rays on the jade-coloured snow, that one would have said
it was woven of petals from the blossoms of pear-trees. And in the
squares the divinities of the public fountains holding a jet of ice in
their hands seemed made of a two-fold substance and, as though the
artist had married bronze to crystal to produce it. On such rare days
all the houses were black; but in spring, braving the police
regulation once in a while, a particular house, perhaps only one floor
of a particular house, or even only one room on that floor, did not
close its shutters and seemed suspended by itself on impalpable
shadows like a luminous projection, like an apparition without
consistency.  And the woman one's raised eyes perceived, isolated in
the golden penumbra of the night in which oneself seemed lost, in
which she too seemed abandoned, was endowed with the veiled,
mysterious charm of an Eastern vision. At length one passed on and no
living thing interrupted the rhythm of monotonous and hygienic
tramping in the darkness.

* * *

I was reflecting that it was a long time since I had seen any of the
personages with whom this work has been concerned.  In 1914, during
the two months I passed in Paris, I had once perceived M. de Charlus
and had met Bloch and Saint-Loup, the latter only twice. It was
certainly on the second occasion that he seemed to be most himself,
and to have overcome that unpleasant lack of sincerity I had noticed
at Tansonville to which I referred earlier. On this occasion, I
recognised all his lovable qualities of former days. The first time I
had seen him was at the beginning of the week that followed the
declaration of war and while Bloch displayed extremely chauvinistic
sentiments, Saint-Loup alluded to his own failure to join up with an
irony that rather shocked me. Saint-Loup was just back from Balbec.
"All who don't go and fight," he exclaimed with forced gaiety,
"whatever reason they give, simply don't want to be killed, it's
nothing but funk." And with a more emphatic gesture than when he
alluded to others, "And if I don't rejoin my regiment, it's for the
same reason." Before that, I had noticed in different people that the
affectation of laudable sentiments is not the only disguise of
unworthy ones, that a more original way is to exhibit the latter so
that, at least, one does not seem to be disguising them. In Saint-Loup
this tendency was strengthened by his habit, when he had done
something for which he might have been censured, of proclaiming it as
though it had been done on purpose, a habit he must have acquired from
some professor at the War School with whom he had lived on terms of
intimacy and for whom he professed great admiration. So I interpreted
this outbreak as the affirmation of sentiments he wanted to exhibit as
having inspired his evasion of military service in the war now
beginning. "Have you heard," he asked as he left me, "that my Aunt
Oriane is about to sue for divorce? I know nothing about it myself.
People have often said it before and I've heard it announced so often
that I shall wait until the divorce is granted before I believe it. I
may add that it isn't surprising; my uncle is a charming man socially
and to his friends and relations and in one way he has more heart than
my aunt. She's a saint, but she takes good care to make him feel it.
But he's an awful husband; he has never ceased being unfaithful to his
wife, insulting her, ill-treating her and depriving her of money into
the bargain.  It would be so natural if she left him that it's a
reason for its being true and also for its not being true just because
people keep on saying so. And after all, she has stood it for so
long.... Of course, I know there are ever so many false reports which
are denied and afterwards turn out to be true." That made me ask him
whether, before he married Gilberte, there had ever been any question
of his marrying Mlle de Guermantes. He started at this and assured me
it was not so, that it was only one of those society rumours born, no
one knows how, which disappear as they come, the falsity of which does
not make those who believe them more cautious, for no sooner does
another rumour of an engagement, of a divorce or of a political nature
arise than they give it immediate credence and pass it on. Forty-eight
hours had not passed before certain facts proved that my
interpretation of Robert's words was completely wrong when he said,
"All those who are not at the front are in a funk." Saint-Loup had
only said this to show off and appear psychologically original while
he was uncertain whether his services would be accepted. But at that
very moment he was moving heaven and earth to be accepted, showing
less originality in the sense he had given to that word, but that he
was more profoundly French, more in conformity with all that was best
in the French of St. André-des-Champs, gentlemen, bourgeois,
respectable servants of gentlemen, or those in revolt against
gentlemen, two equally French divisions of the same family, a
Françoise offshoot and a Sauton offshoot, from which two arrows flew
once more to the same target which was the frontier. Bloch was
delighted to hear this avowal of cowardice by a Nationalist (who, in
truth, was not much of a Nationalist) and when Saint-Loup asked him if
he was going to join up, he made a grimace like a high-priest and
replied "shortsighted." But Bloch had completely changed his opinion
about the war when he came to see me in despair some days later for,
although he was shortsighted, he had been passed for service. I was
taking him back to his house when we met Saint-Loup. The latter had an
appointment with a former officer, M. de Cambremer, who was to present
him to a colonel at the Ministry of War, he told me. "Cambremer is an
old acquaintance of yours, you know Cancan as well as I do." I replied
that, as a fact, I did know him and his wife too, but that I did not
greatly appreciate them. Yet I was so accustomed, ever since I first
made their acquaintance, to consider his wife an unusual person with a
thorough knowledge of Schopenhauer who had access to an intellectual
_milieu_ closed to her vulgar husband, that I was at first surprised
when Saint-Loup remarked: "His wife is an idiot, you can have her; but
he's an excellent fellow, gifted and extremely agreeable," By the
idiocy of the wife, no doubt Saint-Loup meant her mad longing to get
into the best society which that society severely condemned and, by
the qualities of the husband, those his niece implied when she called
him the best of the family. Anyhow, he did not bother himself about
duchesses but that sort of intelligence is as far removed from the
kind that characterises thinkers as is the intelligence the public
respects because it has enabled a rich man "to make his pile." But the
words of Saint-Loup did not displease me since they recalled that
pretentiousness is closely allied to stupidity and that simplicity has
a subtle but agreeable flavour. It is true I had no occasion to savour
that of M. de Cambremer. But that is exactly why one being is so many
different beings apart from differences of opinion. I had only known
the shell of M. de Cambre-mer and his charm, attested by others, was
unknown to me.  Bloch left us in front of his door, overflowing with
bitterness against Saint-Loup, telling him that those "beautiful red
tabs" parading about at Staff Headquarters run no risk and that he, an
ordinary second class private had no wish to "get a bullet through his
skin for the sake of William." "It seems that the Emperor William is
seriously ill," Saint-Loup answered. Bloch, like all those people who
have something to do with the Stock Exchange, received any sensational
news with peculiar credulity added, "it is said even that he is dead."
On the Stock Exchange every, sovereign who is ill, whether Edward VII
or William II, is dead; every city on the point of being besieged, is
taken.  "It is only kept secret," Bloch went on, "so that German
public opinion should not be depressed. But he died last night. My
father has it from 'the best sources'." "The best sources" were the
only ones of which M. Bloch senior took notice, when, through the luck
of possessing certain "influential connections" he received the as yet
secret news that the Exterior Debt was going to rise or de Beers fall.
Moreover, if at that very moment there was a rise in de Beers or there
were offers of Exterior Debt, if the market of the first was "firm and
active" and that of the second "hesitating and weak", "the best
sources" remained nevertheless "the best sources." Bloch too announced
the death of the Kaiser with a mysteriously important air, but also
with rage. He was particularly exasperated to hear Robert say the
"Emperor William." I believe under the knife of the guillotine
Saint-Loup and M. de Guermantes would not have spoken of him
otherwise.  Two men in society who were the only living souls on a
desert island where they would not have to give proof of good breeding
to anyone, would recognise each other by those marks of breeding just
as two Latinists would recognise each other's qualifications through
correct quotations from Virgil. Saint-Loup would never, even under
torture, have said other than "Emperor William"; yet the _savoir
vivre_ is all the same a bondage for the mind. He who cannot reject it
remains a mere man of society. Yet elegant mediocrity is
charming--especially for the generosity and unexpressed heroism that
go with it--in comparison with the vulgarity of Bloch, at once
braggart and mountebank, who shouted at Saint-Loup: "Can't you say
simply 'William'? That's it, you're in a funk, even here you're ready
to crawl on your stomach to him. Pshaw! they'll make nice soldiers at
the front, they'll lick the boots of the Boches. You red-tabs are fit
to parade in a circus, that's all."

"That poor Bloch will have it that I can do nothing but parade,"
Saint-Loup remarked with a smile when we left our friend. And I felt
that parading was not at all what Robert was after, though I did not
then realise his intention as I did later when the cavalry being out
of action, he applied to serve as an infantry officer, then as a
_Chasseur á pied_ and finally when the sequel came which will be read
later. But Bloch had no idea of Robert's patriotism simply because the
latter did not express it. Though Bloch made professions of nefarious
anti-militarism once he had been passed for service, he had declared
the most chauvinistic opinions when he believed he would be exempted
for shortsightedness. Saint-Loup would have been incapable of making
such declarations, because of a certain moral delicacy which prevents
one from expressing the depth of sentiments which are natural to us.
My mother would not have hesitated a second to sacrifice her life for
my grandmother's and would have suffered intensely from being unable
to do so. Nevertheless I cannot imagine retrospectively a phrase on
her lips such as "I would give my life for my mother." Robert was
equally silent about his love for France and in that he seemed to me
much more Saint-Loup (as I imagined his father to have been) than
Guermantes. He would also have been incapable of such expressions
owing to his mind having a certain moral bias. Men who do their work
intelligently and earnestly have an aversion to those who want to make
literature out of what they do, to make it important.  Saint-Loup and
I had not been either at the Lycée or at the Sorbonne together, but
each of us had separately attended certain lectures by the same
masters and I remember his smile when he alluded to those who,
because, undeniably, their lectures were exceptional tried to make
themselves out men of genius by giving ambitious names to their
theories.  Little as we spoke of it, Robert laughed heartily. Our
natural predilection was not for the Cottards or Brichots, though we
had a certain respect for those who had a thorough knowledge of Greek
or medicine and did not for that reason consider they need play the
charlatan. Just as all my mother's actions were based upon the feeling
that she would have given her life for her mother, as she had never
formulated this sentiment which in any case she would have considered
not only useless and ridiculous but indecent and shameful to express
to others, so it was impossible to imagine Saint-Loup (speaking to me
of his equipment, of the different things he had to attend to, of our
chances of victory, of the little value of the Russian army, of what
England would do) enunciating one of those eloquent periods to which
even the most sympathetic minister is inclined to give vent when he
addresses deputies and enthusiasts.  I cannot, however, deny, on this
negative side which prevented his expressing the beautiful sentiments
he felt that there was a certain effect of the "Guermantes spirit" of
which so many examples were afforded by Swann. For if I found him a
Saint-Loup more than anything else, he remained a Guermantes as well
and owing to that, among the many motives which excited his courage
there were some dissimilar to those of his Doncières friends, those
young men with a passion for their profession with whom I had dined
every evening and of whom so many were killed leading their men at the
Battle of the Marne or elsewhere. Such young socialists as might have
been at Doncières when I was there, whom I did not know because they
were not in Saint-Loup's set, were able to satisfy themselves that the
officers in that set were in no way "aristos" in the arrogantly proud
and basely pleasure-loving sense which the "populo" officers from the
ranks, and the Freemasons, gave to the word. And equally, the
aristocratic officer discovered the same patriotism amongst those
Socialists whom when I was at Doncières in the midst of the Affair
Dreyfus, I heard them accuse of being anti-patriotic. The deep and
sincere patriotism of soldiers had taken a definite form which they
believed intangible and which it enraged them to see aspersed, whereas
the Radical-Socialists who were, in a sense, unconscious patriots,
independents, without a defined religion of patriotism, did not
realise what a profound reality underlay what they believed to be vain
and hateful formulas. Without doubt, Saint-Loup, like them, had grown
accustomed to developing as the truest part of himself, the
exploration and the conception of better schemes in view of greater
strategic and tactical success, so that for him as for them the life
of the body was of relatively small importance and could be lightly
sacrificed to that inner life, the vital kernel around which personal
existence had only the value of a protective epidermis. I told
Saint-Loup about his friend, the director of the Balbec Grand Hotel,
who, it appeared had, at the outbreak of war, alleged that there had
been disaffection in certain French regiments which he called
"defec-tuosity" and had accused what he termed "Prussian militarists"
of provoking it, remarking with a laugh, "My brother's in the
trenches. They're only thirty meters from the Boches" until it was
discovered that he was a Boche himself and they put him in a
concentration camp.  "Apropos of Balbec, do you remember the former
lift-boy of the hotel?" Saint-Loup asked me in the tone of one who
seems not to know much about the person concerned and was counting
upon me for enlightenment. "He's joining up and wrote me to get him
entered in the aviation corps." Doubtless the lift-boy was tired of
going up and down in the closed cage of the lift and the heights of
the staircase of the Grand Hotel no longer sufficed for him. He was
going to "get his stripes" otherwise than as a concierge, for our
destiny is not always what we had believed. "I shall certainly support
his application," Saint-Loup said, "I told Gilberte again this
morning, we shall never have enough aeroplanes. It is through them we
shall observe what the enemy is up to; they will deprive him of the
chief advantage m an attack, surprise; the best army will perhaps be
the one that has the best eyes. Has poor Françoise succeeded in
getting her nephew exempted?" Françoise who had for a long while done
everything in her power to get her nephew exempted, on a
recommendation through the Guermantes to General de St. Joseph being
proposed to her, had replied despairingly: "Oh! That would be no use
there's nothing to be done with that old fellow, he's the worst sort
of all, he's patriotic!" From the beginning of the war, Françoise
whatever sorrow it had brought her, was of opinion that the "poor
Russians" must not be abandoned since we were "allianced". The butler,
persuaded that the war would not last more than ten days and would end
by the signal victory of France, would not have dared, for fear of
being contradicted by events, to predict a long and indecisive one,
nor would he have had enough imagination. But, out of this complete
and immediate victory he tried to extract beforehand whatever might
cause anxiety to Françoise. "It may turn out pretty rotten; it appears
there are many who don't want to go to the front, boys of sixteen are
crying about it." He also tried to provoke her by saying all sorts of
disagreeable things, what he called "pulling her leg" by "pitching an
apostrophe at her" or "flinging her a pun." "Sixteen years old!
Sainted Mary!" exclaimed Françoise, and then, with momentary
suspicion, "But they said they only took them after they were twenty,
they're only children at sixteen." "Naturally, the papers are ordered
to say that.  For that matter, the whole youth of the country will be
at the front and not many will come back. In one way that will be a
good thing, a good bleeding is useful from time to time, it makes
business better. Yes, indeed, if some of these boys are a bit soft and
chicken-hearted and hesitate, they shoot them immediately, a dozen
bullets through the skin and that's that. In a way it's got to be done
and what does it matter to the officers? They get their _pesetas_ all
the same and that's all they care about." Françoise got so pale during
these conversations that one might well fear the butler would cause
her death from heart disease. But she did not on that account lose her
defects. When a girl came to see me, however much the old servant's
legs hurt her, if ever I went out of my room for a moment I saw her on
the top of the steps, in the hanging cupboard, in the act, she
pretended, of looking for one of my coats to see if the moths had got
into it, in reality to spy upon us. In spite of all my remonstrances,
she kept up her insidious manner of asking indirect questions and for
some time had been making use of the phrase "because doubtless." Not
daring to ask me, "Has that lady a house of her own?" she would say
with her eyes lifted timidly like those of a gentle dog, "Because
doubtless that lady has a house of her own," avoiding the flagrant
interrogation in order to be polite and not to seem inquisitive. And
further, since those servants we most care for--especially if they can
no longer render us much service or even do their work--remain, alas,
servants and mark more clearly the limits (which we should like to
efface) of their caste in proportion to the extent to which they
believe they are penetrating ours, Françoise often gave vent to
strange comments about my person (in order to tease me, the butler
would have said) which people in our own world would not make. For
instance, with a delight as dissimulated but also as deep as if it had
been a case of serious illness, if I happened to be hot and the
perspiration (to which I paid no attention) was trickling down my
forehead, she would say, "My word! You're drenched" as though she were
astonished by a strange phenomenon, smiling with that contempt for
something indecorous with which she might have remarked, "Why, you're
going out without your collar!" while adopting a concerned tone
intended to cause one discomfort. One would have thought I was the
only person in the universe who had ever been "drenched". For, in her
humility, in her tender admiration for beings infinitely inferior to
her, she adopted their ugly forms of expression. Her daughter
complained of her to me, "She's always got something to say, that I
don't close the doors properly and _patatipatali et patatapatala_."
Françoise doubtless thought it was only her insufficient education
that had deprived her until now of this beautiful expression. And on
her lips, on which formerly flowered the purest French, I heard
several times a day, "_Et patati patall patata patala_." As to that it
is curious how little variation there is not only in the expressions
but in the thoughts of the same individual. The butler, being
accustomed to declare that M. Poincaré had evil motives, not of a
venal kind but because he had absolutely willed the war, repeated this
seven or eight times a day before the same ever interested audience,
without modifying a single word or gesture or intonation. Although it
only lasted about two minutes, it was invariable like a performance.
His mistakes in French corrupted the language of Françoise quite as
much as the mistakes of her daughter.

She hardly slept, she hardly ate, she had the communiqués read to her,
though she did not understand them, by the butler who understood them
little better and in whom the desire to torment Françoise was often
dominated by a superficial sort of patriotism; he remarked with a
sympathetic chuckle when speaking of the Germans, "That will stir them
up a bit, our old Joffre is planning a comet to fall on them."
Françoise did not understand what comet he was talking about but felt
none the less that this phrase was one of those charming and original
extravagances to which a well-bred person must reply, so with good
humour and urbanity, shrugging her shoulders with the air of saying
"He's always the same," she tempered her tears with a smile. At all
events she was happy that her new butcher boy who in spite of his
calling was somewhat timorous, (although he had begun in the
slaughter-house) was too young to join up; otherwise, she would have
been capable of going to the Minister of War about him. The butler
could not believe the communiqués were other than excellent and that
the troops were not approaching Berlin, as he had read, "We have
repulsed the enemy with heavy losses on their side," actions that he
celebrated as though they were new victories. For my part, I was
horrified by the rapidity with which the theatre of these victories
approached Paris and I was astonished that even the butler, who had
seen in a communiqué that an action had taken place close to Lens, had
not been alarmed by reading in the next day's paper that the result of
this action had turned to our advantage at Jouy-le-Vicomte to which we
firmly held the approaches. The butler very well knew the name of
Jouy-le-Vicomte which was not far from Combray. But one reads the
papers as one wants to with a bandage over one's eyes without trying
to understand the facts, listening to the soothing words of the editor
as to the words of one's mistress. We are beaten and happy because we
believe ourselves unbeaten and victorious.

I did not stay long in Paris and returned fairly soon to my
sanatorium. Though in principle the doctor treated his patients by
isolation, I had received on two different occasions letters from
Gilberte and from Robert. Gilberte wrote me (about September, 1914)
that much as she would have liked to remain in Paris in order to get
news from Robert more easily, the perpetual "taube" raids over Paris
had given her such a fright, especially on her little girl's account,
that she had fled from Paris by the last train which left for Combray,
that the train did not even reach Com-bray and it was only thanks to a
peasant's cart upon which she had made a ten hours journey in
atrocious discomfort that she had at last been able to get to
Tansonville. "And what do you think awaited your old friend there?"
Gilberte closed her letter by saying. "I had left Paris to get away
from the German aeroplanes, imagining that at Tansonville I should be
sheltered from everything. I had not been there two days when what do
you think happened!  The Germans were invading the region after
beating our troops near La Fere and a German staff, followed by a
regiment, presented themselves at the gate of Tansonville and I was
obliged to take them in without a chance of escaping, not a train,
nothing." Had the German staff behaved well or was one supposed to
read into the letter of Gilberte the contagious effect of the spirit
of the Guermantes who were of Bavarian stock and related to the
highest aristocracy in Germany, for Gilberte was inexhaustible about
the perfect behaviour of the staff and of the soldiers who had only
asked "permission to pick one of the forget-me-nots which grew at the
side of the lake," good behaviour she contrasted with the unbridled
violence of the French fugitives who had traversed the estate and
sacked everything before the arrival of the German generals. Anyhow,
if Gilberte's letter was, in certain respects, impregnated with the
"Guermantes spirit,"--others would say it was her Jewish
internationalism, which would probably not be true, as we shall
see--the letter I received some months later from Robert was much more
Saint-Loup than Guermantes for it reflected all the liberal culture he
had acquired and was altogether sympathetic. Unhappily he told me
nothing about the strategy as he used to in our conversations at
Doncières and did not mention to what extent he considered the war had
confirmed or disproved the principles which he then exposed to me. The
most he told me was that since 1914, several wars had succeeded each
other, the lessons of each influencing the conduct of the following
one. For instance, the theory of the "break through" had been
completed by the thesis that before the "break through" it was
necessary to overwhelm the ground occupied by the enemy with
artillery. Later it was discovered, on the contrary, that this
destruction made the advance of infantry and artillery impossible over
ground so pitted with thousands of shell-holes that they became so
many obstacles. "War," he said, "does not escape the laws of our old
Hegel. It is a state of perpetual becoming." This was little enough of
all I wanted to know. But what disappointed me more was that he had no
right to give me the names of the generals. And indeed, from what
little I could glean from the papers, it was not those of whom I was
so much concerned to know the value in war, who were conducting this
one. Geslin de Bourgogne, Galliffet, Négrier were dead, Pau had
retired from active service almost at the beginning of the war. We had
never talked about Joffre or Foch or Castlenau or Pétain. "My dear
boy," Robert wrote, "if you saw what these soldiers are like,
especially those of the people, the working class, small shopkeepers
who little knew the heroism of which they were capable and would have
died in their beds without ever being suspected of it, facing the
bullets to succour a comrade, to carry off a wounded officer and,
themselves struck, smile at the moment they are going to die because
the staff surgeon tells them that the trench had been re-captured from
the Germans; I can assure you, my dear boy, that it gives one a
wonderful idea of what a Frenchman is and makes us understand the
historic epochs which seemed rather extraordinary to us when we were
at school. The epic is so splendid that, like myself, you would find
words useless to describe it. In contact with such grandeur the word
"poilu" has become for me something which I can no more regard as
implying an allusion or a joke than when we read the word "chouans". I
feel that the word "poilu" is awaiting great poets like such words as
"Deluge" or "Christ" or "Barbarians" which were saturated with
grandeur before Hugo, Vigny and the rest used them. To my mind, the
sons of the people are the best of all but everyone is fine. Poor
Vaugoubert, the son of the Ambassador, was wounded seven times before
being killed and each time he came back from an expedition without
being "scooped," he seemed to be excusing himself and saying that it
was not his fault. He was a charming creature. We had seen a great
deal of each other and his poor parents obtained permission to come to
his funeral on condition that they didn't wear mourning nor stop more
than five minutes on account of the bombardment. The mother, a great
horse of a woman, whom you perhaps know, may have been very unhappy
but one would not have thought so. But the father was in such a state,
I assure you, that I, who have become almost insensible through
getting accustomed to seeing the head of a comrade I was talking to
shattered by a bomb or severed from his trunk, could hardly bear it
when I saw the collapse of poor Vaugoubert who was reduced to a rag.
It was all very well for the general to tell him it was for France
that his son died a hero's death, that only redoubled the sobs of the
poor man who could not tear himself away from his son's body.  Well,
that is why we can say, 'they will not get through.' Such men as
these, my poor valet or Vaugoubert, have prevented the Germans from
getting through. Perhaps you have thought we do not advance much, but
that is not the way to reason; an army feels itself victorious by
intuition as a dying man knows he is done for. And we know that we are
going to be the victors and we will it so that we may dictate a just
peace, not only for ourselves, but a really just peace, just for the
French and just for the Germans".  As heroes of mediocre and banal
mind, writing poems during their convalescence, placed themselves, in
order to describe the war, not on the level of the events which in
themselves are nothing, but on the level of the banal aesthetic of
which they had until then followed the rules, speaking as they might
have done ten years earlier of the "bloody dawn," of the "shuddering
flight of victory," Saint-Loup, himself much more intelligent and
artistic, remained intelligent and artistic and for my benefit noted
with taste the landscapes while he was immobilised at the edge of a
swampy forest, just as though he had been shooting duck. To make me
grasp contrasts of shade and light which had been "the enchantment of
the morning," he referred to certain pictures we both of us loved and
alluded to a page of Romain Rolland or of Nietzsche with the
independence of those at the front who unlike those at the rear, were
not afraid to utter a German name, and with much the same coquetry
that caused Colonel du Paty de Clam to declaim in the witnesses' room
during the Zola affair as he passed by Pierre Quillard, a Dreyfusard
poet of the extremest violence whom he did not know, verses from the
latter's symbolic drama "La Fille aux Mains coupées," Saint-Loup, when
he spoke to me of a melody of Schumann gave it its German title and
made no circumlocution to tell me, when he had heard the first warble
at the edge of a forest, that he had been intoxicated as though the
bird of that "sublime Siegfried" which he hoped to hear again after
the war, had sung to him. And now on my second return to Paris I had
received on the day following my arrival another letter from Gilberte
who without doubt had forgotten the one she had previously written me,
to which I have alluded above, for her departure from Paris at the end
of 1914 was represented retrospectively in quite different fashion.
"Perhaps you do not realise, my dear friend," she wrote me, "that I
have now been at Tansonville two years. I arrived there at the same
time as the Germans.  Everybody wanted to prevent me going, I was
treated as though I were mad. 'What,' they said to me, 'you are safe
in Paris and you want to leave for those invaded regions just as
everybody else is trying to get away from them?' I recognised the
justice of this reasoning but what was to be done? I have only one
quality, I am not a coward or, if you prefer, I am faithful, and when
I knew that my dear Tansonville was menaced I did not want to leave
our old steward there to defend it alone; it seemed to me that my
place was by his side. And it is, in fact, thanks to that resolution
that I was able to save the Château almost completely--when all the
others in the neighbourhood, abandoned by their terrified proprietors,
were destroyed from roof to cellar--and not only was I able to save
the Château but also the precious collections which my dear father so
much loved." In a word, Gilberte was now persuaded that she had not
gone to Tansonville, as she wrote me in 1914, to fly from the Germans
and to be in safety, but, on the contrary, in order to meet them and
to defend her Château from them. As a matter of fact, they (the
Germans) had not remained at Tansonville, but she did not cease to
have at her house a constant coming and going of officers which much
exceeded that which reduced Françoise to tears in the streets of
Combray and to live, as she said this time with complete truth, the
life of the front.  Also she was referred to eulogistically in the
papers because of her admirable conduct and there was a proposal to
give her a decoration. The end of her letter was perfectly accurate:
"You have no idea of what this war is, my dear friend, the importance
of a road, a bridge or a height. How many times, during these days in
this ravaged countryside, have I thought of you, of our walks you made
so delightful, while tremendous fights were going on for the capture
of a hillock you loved and where so often we had been together.
Probably you, like myself, are unable to imagine that obscure
Roussainville and tiresome Méséglise, whence our letters were brought
and where one went to fetch the doctor when you were ill, are now
celebrated places. Well, my dear friend, they have for ever entered
into glory in the same way as Austerlitz or Valmy. The Battle of
Méséglise lasted more than eight months, the Germans lost more than
one hundred thousand men there, they destroyed Méséglise but they have
not taken it. The little road you so loved, the one we called the
stiff hawthorn climb, where you professed to be in love with me when
you were a child, when all the time I was in love with you, I cannot
tell you how important that position is. The great wheatfield in which
it ended is the famous 'slope 307' the name you have so often seen
recorded in the communiqués.  The French blew up the little bridge
over the Vivonne which, you remember, did not bring back your
childhood to you as much as you would have liked. The Germans threw
others across; during a year and a half, they held one half of Combray
and the French the other." The day following that on which I received
this letter, that is to say the evening before the one when, walking
in the darkness, I heard the sound of my foot-steps while reflecting
on all these memories, Saint-Loup, back from the front and on the
point of returning there,