will talk for hours on end."
"That must be delightful," sighed my grandfather, in whose mind
nature had unfortunately forgotten to include any capacity whatsoever
for becoming passionately interested in the co-operative movement
among the ladies of Sweden or in the methods employed by Maubant to
get up his parts, just as it had forgotten to endow my grandmother's two
sisters with a grain of that precious salt which one has oneself to 'add to
taste' in order to extract any savour from a narrative of the private life of
Mole or of the Comte de Paris.
"I say!" exclaimed Swann to my grandfather, "what I was going to tell you has more to do than you might think with what you were asking me
just now, for in some respects there has been very little change. I came
across a passage in Saint-Simon this morning which would have amused
you. It is in the volume which covers his mission to Spain; not one of the
best, little more in fact than a journal, but at least it is a journal wonder-
fully well written, which fairly distinguishes it from the devastating
journalism that we feel bound to read in these days, morning, noon and
night."
25
"I do not agree with you: there are some days when I find reading the
papers very pleasant indeed!" my aunt Flora broke in, to show Swann
that she had read the note about his Corot in the Figaro.
"Yes," aunt Céline went one better. "When they write about things or people in whom we are interested."
"I don't deny it," answered Swann in some bewilderment. "The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some
fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a
lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every
morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a
transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it—oh! I
don't know; shall we say Pascal's Pensées?" He articulated the title with an ironic emphasis so as not to appear pedantic. "And then, in the gilt
and tooled volumes which we open once in ten years," he went on, shew-
ing that contempt for the things of this world which some men of the
world like to affect, "we should read that the Queen of the Hellenes had
arrived at Cannes, or that the Princesse de Léon had given a fancy dress
ball. In that way we should arrive at the right proportion between
'information' and 'publicity.'" But at once regretting that he had allowed himself to speak, even in jest, of serious matters, he added ironically:
"We are having a most entertaining conversation; I cannot think why we
climb to these lofty summits," and then, turning to my grandfather:
"Well, Saint-Simon tells how Maulevrier had had the audacity to offer his
hand to his sons. You remember how he says of Maulevrier, 'Never did I
find in that coarse bottle anything but ill-humour, boorishness, and
folly.'"
"Coarse or not, I know bottles in which there is something very differ-
ent!" said Flora briskly, feeling bound to thank Swann as well as her sis-
ter, since the present of Asti had been addressed to them both. Céline
began to laugh.
Swann was puzzled, but went on: "'I cannot say whether it was his ig-
norance or a trap,' writes Saint-Simon; 'he wished to give his hand to my
children. I noticed it in time to prevent him.'"
My grandfather was already in ecstasies over "ignorance or a trap," but Miss Céline—the name of Saint-Simon, a 'man of letters,' having arrested
the complete paralysis of her sense of hearing—had grown angry.
"What! You admire that, do you? Well, it is clever enough! But what is
the point of it? Does he mean that one man isn't as good as another?
What difference can it make whether he is a duke or a groom so long as
he is intelligent and good? He had a fine way of bringing up his children,
26
your Saint-Simon, if he didn't teach them to shake hands with all honest
men. Really and truly, it's abominable. And you dare to quote it!"
And my grandfather, utterly depressed, realising how futile it would
be for him, against this opposition, to attempt to get Swann to tell him
the stories which would have amused him, murmured to my mother:
"Just tell me again that line of yours which always comforts me so much
on these occasions. Oh, yes:
What virtues, Lord, Thou makest us abhor!
Good, that is, very good."
I never took my eyes off my mother. I knew that when they were at
table I should not be permitted to stay there for the whole of dinner-time,
and that Mamma, for fear of annoying my father, would not allow me to
give her in public the series of kisses that she would have had in my
room. And so I promised myself that in the dining-room, as they began
to eat and drink and as I felt the hour approach, I would put beforehand
into this kiss, which was bound to be so brief and stealthy in execution,
everything that my own efforts could put into it: would look out very
carefully first the exact spot on her cheek where I would imprint it, and
would so prepare my thoughts that I might be able, thanks to these men-
tal preliminaries, to consecrate the whole of the minute Mamma would
allow me to the sensation of her cheek against my lips, as a painter who
can have his subject for short sittings only prepares his palette, and from
what he remembers and from rough notes does in advance everything
which he possibly can do in the sitter's absence. But to-night, before the
dinner-bell had sounded, my grandfather said with unconscious cruelty:
"The little man looks tired; he'd better go up to bed. Besides, we are dining late to-night."
And my father, who was less scrupulous than my grandmother or
mother in observing the letter of a treaty, went on: "Yes, run along; to
bed with you."
I would have kissed Mamma then and there, but at that moment the
dinner-bell rang.
"No, no, leave your mother alone. You've said good night quite
enough. These exhibitions are absurd. Go on upstairs."
And so I must set forth without viaticum; must climb each step of the
staircase 'against my heart,' as the saying is, climbing in opposition to my
heart's desire, which was to return to my mother, since she had not, by
her kiss, given my heart leave to accompany me forth. That hateful stair-
case, up which I always passed with such dismay, gave out a smell of
varnish which had to some extent absorbed, made definite and fixed the
27
special quality of sorrow that I felt each evening, and made it perhaps
even more cruel to my sensibility because, when it assumed this olfact-
ory guise, my intellect was powerless to resist it. When we have gone to
sleep with a maddening toothache and are conscious of it only as a little
girl whom we attempt, time after time, to pull out of the water, or as a
line of Molière which we repeat incessantly to ourselves, it is a great re-
lief to wake up, so that our intelligence can disentangle the idea of
toothache from any artificial semblance of heroism or rhythmic cadence.
It was the precise converse of this relief which I felt when my anguish at
having to go up to my room invaded my consciousness in a manner in-
finitely more rapid, instantaneous almost, a manner at once insidious
and brutal as I breathed in—a far more poisonous thing than any moral
penetration—the peculiar smell of the varnish upon that staircase.
Once in my room I had to stop every loophole, to close the shutters, to
dig my own grave as I turned down the bed-clothes, to wrap myself in
the shroud of my nightshirt. But before burying myself in the iron bed
which had been placed there because, on summer nights, I was too hot
among the rep curtains of the four-poster, I was stirred to revolt, and at-
tempted the desperate stratagem of a condemned prisoner. I wrote to my
mother begging her to come upstairs for an important reason which I
could not put in writing. My fear was that Françoise, my aunt's cook
who used to be put in charge of me when I was at Combray, might re-
fuse to take my note. I had a suspicion that, in her eyes, to carry a mes-
sage to my mother when there was a stranger in the room would appear
flatly inconceivable, just as it would be for the door-keeper of a theatre to
hand a letter to an actor upon the stage. For things which might or might
not be done she possessed a code at once imperious, abundant, subtle,
and uncompromising on points themselves imperceptible or irrelevant,
which gave it a resemblance to those ancient laws which combine such
cruel ordinances as the massacre of infants at the breast with prohibi-
tions, of exaggerated refinement, against "seething the kid in his
mother's milk," or "eating of the sinew which is upon the hollow of the thigh." This code, if one could judge it by the sudden obstinacy which
she would put into her refusal to carry out certain of our instructions,
seemed to have foreseen such social complications and refinements of
fashion as nothing in Françoise's surroundings or in her career as a ser-
vant in a village household could have put into her head; and we were
obliged to assume that there was latent in her some past existence in the
ancient history of France, noble and little understood, just as there is in
those manufacturing towns where old mansions still testify to their
28
former courtly days, and chemical workers toil among delicately sculp-
tured scenes of the Miracle of Theophilus or the Quatre Fils Aymon.
In this particular instance, the article of her code which made it highly
improbable that—barring an outbreak of fire—Françoise would go down
and disturb Mamma when M. Swann was there for so unimportant a
person as myself was one embodying the respect she shewed not only
for the family (as for the dead, for the clergy, or for royalty), but also for
the stranger within our gates; a respect which I should perhaps have
found touching in a book, but which never failed to irritate me on her
lips, because of the solemn and gentle tones in which she would utter it,
and which irritated me more than usual this evening when the sacred
character in which she invested the dinner-party might have the effect of
making her decline to disturb its ceremonial. But to give myself one
chance of success I lied without hesitation, telling her that it was not in
the least myself who had wanted to write to Mamma, but Mamma who,
on saying good night to me, had begged me not to forget to send her an
answer about something she had asked me to find, and that she would
certainly be very angry if this note were not taken to her. I think that
Françoise disbelieved me, for, like those primitive men whose senses
were so much keener than our own, she could immediately detect, by
signs imperceptible by the rest of us, the truth or falsehood of anything
that we might wish to conceal from her. She studied the envelope for five
minutes as though an examination of the paper itself and the look of my
handwriting could enlighten her as to the nature of the contents, or tell
her to which article of her code she ought to refer the matter. Then she
went out with an air of resignation which seemed to imply: "What a
dreadful thing for parents to have a child like this!"
A moment later she returned to say that they were still at the ice stage
and that it was impossible for the butler to deliver the note at once, in
front of everybody; but that when the finger-bowls were put round he
would find a way of slipping it into Mamma's hand. At once my anxiety
subsided; it was now no longer (as it had been a moment ago) until to-
morrow that I had lost my mother, for my little line was going—to annoy
her, no doubt, and doubly so because this contrivance would make me
ridiculous in Swann's eyes—but was going all the same to admit me, in-
visibly and by stealth, into the same room as herself, was going to whis-
per from me into her ear; for that forbidden and unfriendly dining-room,
where but a moment ago the ice itself—with burned nuts in it—and the
finger-bowls seemed to me to be concealing pleasures that were mis-
chievous and of a mortal sadness because Mamma was tasting of them
29
and I was far away, had opened its doors to me and, like a ripe fruit
which bursts through its skin, was going to pour out into my intoxicated
heart the gushing sweetness of Mamma's attention while she was read-
ing what I had written. Now I was no longer separated from her; the bar-
riers were down; an exquisite thread was binding us. Besides, that was
not all, for surely Mamma would come.
As for the agony through which I had just passed, I imagined that
Swann would have laughed heartily at it if he had read my letter and
had guessed its purpose; whereas, on the contrary, as I was to learn in
due course, a similar anguish had been the bane of his life for many
years, and no one perhaps could have understood my feelings at that
moment so well as himself; to him, that anguish which lies in knowing
that the creature one adores is in some place of enjoyment where oneself
is not and cannot follow—to him that anguish came through Love, to
which it is in a sense predestined, by which it must be equipped and ad-
apted; but when, as had befallen me, such an anguish possesses one's
soul before Love has yet entered into one's life, then it must drift, await-
ing Love's coming, vague and free, without precise attachment, at the
disposal of one sentiment to-day, of another to-morrow, of filial piety or
affection for a comrade. And the joy with which I first bound myself ap-
prentice, when Françoise returned to tell me that my letter would be de-
livered; Swann, too, had known well that false joy which a friend can
give us, or some relative of the woman we love, when on his arrival at
the house or theatre where she is to be found, for some ball or party or
'first-night' at which he is to meet her, he sees us wandering outside, des-
perately awaiting some opportunity of communicating with her. He re-
cognises us, greets us familiarly, and asks what we are doing there. And
when we invent a story of having some urgent message to give to his rel-
ative or friend, he assures us that nothing could be more simple, takes us
in at the door, and promises to send her down to us in five minutes.
How much we love him—as at that moment I loved Françoise—the
good-natured intermediary who by a single word has made supportable,
human, almost propitious the inconceivable, infernal scene of gaiety in
the thick of which we had been imagining swarms of enemies, perverse
and seductive, beguiling away from us, even making laugh at us, the
woman whom we love. If we are to judge of them by him, this relative
who has accosted us and who is himself an initiate in those cruel myster-
ies, then the other guests cannot be so very demoniacal. Those inaccess-
ible and torturing hours into which she had gone to taste of unknown
pleasures—behold, a breach in the wall, and we are through it. Behold,
30
one of the moments whose series will go to make up their sum, a mo-
ment as genuine as the rest, if not actually more important to ourself be-
cause our mistress is more intensely a part of it; we picture it to
ourselves, we possess it, we intervene upon it, almost we have created it:
namely, the moment in which he goes to tell her that we are waiting
there below. And very probably the other moments of the party will not
be essentially different, will contain nothing else so exquisite or so well
able to make us suffer, since this kind friend has assured us that "Of
course, she will be delighted to come down! It will be far more amusing
for her to talk to you than to be bored up there." Alas! Swann had
learned by experience that the good intentions of a third party are
powerless to control a woman who is annoyed to find herself pursued
even into a ball-room by a man whom she does not love. Too often, the
kind friend comes down again alone.
My mother did not appear, but with no attempt to safeguard my self-
respect (which depended upon her keeping up the fiction that she had
asked me to let her know the result of my search for something or other)
made Françoise tell me, in so many words "There is no answer"—words I have so often, since then, heard the hall-porters in 'mansions' and the
flunkeys in gambling-clubs and the like, repeat to some poor girl, who
replies in bewilderment: "What! he's said nothing? It's not possible. You
did give him my letter, didn't you? Very well, I shall wait a little longer."
And just as she invariably protests that she does not need the extra gas
which the porter offers to light for her, and sits on there, hearing nothing
further, except an occasional remark on the weather which the porter ex-
changes with a messenger whom he will send off suddenly, when he no-
tices the time, to put some customer's wine on the ice; so, having de-
clined Françoise's offer to make me some tea or to stay beside me, I let
her go off again to the servants' hall, and lay down and shut my eyes,
and tried not to hear the voices of my family who were drinking their
coffee in the garden.
But after a few seconds I realised that, by writing that line to Mamma,
by approaching—at the risk of making her angry—so near to her that I
felt I could reach out and grasp the moment in which I should see her
again, I had cut myself off from the possibility of going to sleep until I
actually had seen her, and my heart began to beat more and more pain-
fully as I increased my agitation by ordering myself to keep calm and to
acquiesce in my ill-fortune. Then, suddenly, my anxiety subsided, a feel-
ing of intense happiness coursed through me, as when a strong medicine
begins to take effect and one's pain vanishes: I had formed a resolution
31
to abandon all attempts to go to sleep without seeing Mamma, and had
decided to kiss her at all costs, even with the certainty of being in dis-
grace with her for long afterwards, when she herself came up to bed. The
tranquillity which followed my anguish made me extremely alert, no less
than my sense of expectation, my thirst for and my fear of danger.
Noiselessly I opened the window and sat down on the foot of my bed;
hardly daring to move in case they should hear me from below. Things
outside seemed also fixed in mute expectation, so as not to disturb the
moonlight which, duplicating each of them and throwing it back by the
extension, forwards, of a shadow denser and more concrete than its sub-
stance, had made the whole landscape seem at once thinner and longer,
like a map which, after being folded up, is spread out upon the ground.
What had to move—a leaf of the chestnut-tree, for instance—moved. But
its minute shuddering, complete, finished to the least detail and with ut-
most delicacy of gesture, made no discord with the rest of the scene, and
yet was not merged in it, remaining clearly outlined. Exposed upon this
surface of silence, which absorbed nothing from them, the most distant
sounds, those which must have come from gardens at the far end of the
town, could be distinguished with such exact 'finish' that the impression
they gave of coming from a distance seemed due only to their
'pianissimo' execution, like those movements on muted strings so well
performed by the orchestra of the Conservatoire that, although one does
not lose a single note, one thinks all the same that they are being played
somewhere outside, a long way from the concert hall, so that all the old
subscribers, and my grandmother's sisters too, when Swann had given
them his seats, used to strain their ears as if they had caught the distant
approach of an army on the march, which had not yet rounded the
corner of the Rue de Trévise.
I was well aware that I had placed myself in a position than which
none could be counted upon to involve me in graver consequences at my
parents' hands; consequences far graver, indeed, than a stranger would
have imagined, and such as (he would have thought) could follow only
some really shameful fault. But in the system of education which they
had given me faults were not classified in the same order as in that of
other children, and I had been taught to place at the head of the list
(doubtless because there was no other class of faults from which I
needed to be more carefully protected) those in which I can now distin-
guish the common feature that one succumbs to them by yielding to a
nervous impulse. But such words as these last had never been uttered in
my hearing; no one had yet accounted for my temptations in a way
32
which might have led me to believe that there was some excuse for my
giving in to them, or that I was actually incapable of holding out against
them. Yet I could easily recognise this class of transgressions by the an-
guish of mind which preceded, as well as by the rigour of the punish-
ment which followed them; and I knew that what I had just done was in
the same category as certain other sins for which I had been severely
chastised, though infinitely more serious than they. When I went out to
meet my mother as she herself came up to bed, and when she saw that I
had remained up so as to say good night to her again in the passage, I
should not be allowed to stay in the house a day longer, I should be
packed off to school next morning; so much was certain. Very good: had
I been obliged, the next moment, to hurl myself out of the window, I
should still have preferred such a fate. For what I wanted now was
Mamma, and to say good night to her. I had gone too far along the road
which led to the realisation of this desire to be able to retrace my steps.
I could hear my parents' footsteps as they went with Swann; and,
when the rattle of the gate assured me that he had really gone, I crept to
the window. Mamma was asking my father if he had thought the lobster
good, and whether M. Swann had had some of the coffee-and-pistachio
ice. "I thought it rather so-so," she was saying; "next time we shall have to try another flavour."
"I can't tell you," said my great-aunt, "what a change I find in Swann.
He is quite antiquated!" She had grown so accustomed to seeing Swann
always in the same stage of adolescence that it was a shock to her to find
him suddenly less young than the age she still attributed to him. And the
others too were beginning to remark in Swann that abnormal, excessive,
scandalous senescence, meet only in a celibate, in one of that class for
whom it seems that the great day which knows no morrow must be
longer than for other men, since for such a one it is void of promise, and
from its dawn the moments steadily accumulate without any subsequent
partition among his offspring.
"I fancy he has a lot of trouble with that wretched wife of his, who
'lives' with a certain Monsieur de Charlus, as all Combray knows. It's the
talk of the town."
My mother observed that, in spite of this, he had looked much less un-
happy of late. "And he doesn't nearly so often do that trick of his, so like his father, of wiping his eyes and passing his hand across his forehead. I
think myself that in his heart of hearts he doesn't love his wife any
more."
33
"Why, of course he doesn't," answered my grandfather. "He wrote me a letter about it, ages ago, to which I took care to pay no attention, but it
left no doubt as to his feelings, let alone his love for his wife. Hullo! you
two; you never thanked him for the Asti!" he went on, turning to his
sisters-in-law.
"What! we never thanked him? I think, between you and me, that I put
it to him quite neatly," replied my aunt Flora.
"Yes, you managed it very well; I admired you for it," said my aunt
Céline.
"But you did it very prettily, too."
"Yes; I liked my expression about 'nice neighbours.'"
"What! Do you call that thanking him?" shouted my grandfather. "I heard that all right, but devil take me if I guessed it was meant for
Swann. You may be quite sure he never noticed it."
"Come, come; Swann is not a fool. I am positive he appreciated the
compliment. You didn't expect me to tell him the number of bottles, or to
guess what he paid for them."
My father and mother were left alone a