ran low again beyond the farther, descending slope, and one knew that it
would be the second turning after the steeple; or yet again, if pressing
further afield one went to the station, one saw it obliquely, shewing in
profile fresh angles and surfaces, like a solid body surprised at some un-
known point in its revolution; or, from the banks of the Vivonne, the
apse, drawn muscularly together and heightened in perspective, seemed
to spring upwards with the effort which the steeple made to hurl its
spire-point into the heart of heaven: it was always to the steeple that one
must return, always it which dominated everything else, summing up
the houses with an unexpected pinnacle, raised before me like the Finger
of God, Whose Body might have been concealed below among the crowd
of human bodies without fear of my confounding It, for that reason, with
them. And so even to-day in any large provincial town, or in a quarter of
Paris which I do not know well, if a passer-by who is 'putting me on the
right road' shews me from afar, as a point to aim at, some belfry of a hos-
pital, or a convent steeple lifting the peak of its ecclesiastical cap at the
corner of the street which I am to take, my memory need only find in it
some dim resemblance to that dear and vanished outline, and the passer-
by, should he turn round to make sure that I have not gone astray,
would see me, to his astonishment, oblivious of the walk that I had
planned to take or the place where I was obliged to call, standing still on
the spot, before that steeple, for hours on end, motionless, trying to re-
member, feeling deep within myself a tract of soil reclaimed from the
64
waters of Lethe slowly drying until the buildings rise on it again; and
then no doubt, and then more uneasily than when, just now, I asked him
for a direction, I will seek my way again, I will turn a corner… but… the
goal is in my heart…
On our way home from mass we would often meet M. Legrandin,
who, detained in Paris by his professional duties as an engineer, could
only (except in the regular holiday seasons) visit his home at Combray
between Saturday evenings and Monday mornings. He was one of that
class of men who, apart from a scientific career in which they may well
have proved brilliantly successful, have acquired an entirely different
kind of culture, literary or artistic, of which they make no use in the spe-
cialised work of their profession, but by which their conversation profits.
More 'literary' than many 'men of letters' (we were not aware at this peri-
od that M. Legrandin had a distinct reputation as a writer, and so were
greatly astonished to find that a well-known composer had set some
verses of his to music), endowed with a greater ease in execution than
many painters, they imagine that the life they are obliged to lead is not
that for which they are really fitted, and they bring to their regular occu-
pations either a fantastic indifference or a sustained and lofty applica-
tion, scornful, bitter, and conscientious. Tall, with a good figure, a fine,
thoughtful face, drooping fair moustaches, a look of disillusionment in
his blue eyes, an almost exaggerated refinement of courtesy; a talker
such as we had never heard; he was in the sight of my family, who never
ceased to quote him as an example, the very pattern of a gentleman, who
took life in the noblest and most delicate manner. My grandmother alone
found fault with him for speaking a little too well, a little too much like a
book, for not using a vocabulary as natural as his loosely knotted Laval-
lière neckties, his short, straight, almost schoolboyish coat. She was as-
tonished, too, at the furious invective which he was always launching at
the aristocracy, at fashionable life, and 'snobbishness'—"undoubtedly,"
he would say, "the sin of which Saint Paul is thinking when he speaks of
the sin for which there is no forgiveness."
Worldly ambition was a thing which my grandmother was so little
capable of feeling, or indeed of understanding, that it seemed to her fu-
tile to apply so much heat to its condemnation. Besides, she thought it in
not very good taste that M. Legrandin, whose sister was married to a
country gentleman of Lower Normandy near Balbec, should deliver him-
self of such violent attacks upon the nobles, going so far as to blame the
Revolution for not having guillotined them all.
65
"Well met, my friends!" he would say as he came towards us. "You are lucky to spend so much time here; to-morrow I have to go back to Paris,
to squeeze back into my niche.
"Oh, I admit," he went on, with his own peculiar smile, gently ironical, disillusioned and vague, "I have every useless thing in the world in my
house there. The only thing wanting is the necessary thing, a great patch
of open sky like this. Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life,
little boy," he added, turning to me. "You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist's nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs."
When, on our reaching the house, my aunt would send to ask us
whether Mme. Goupil had indeed arrived late for mass, not one of us
could inform her. Instead, we increased her anxiety by telling her that
there was a painter at work in the church copying the window of Gilbert
the Bad. Françoise was at once dispatched to the grocer's, but returned
empty-handed owing to the absence of Théodore, whose dual profession
of choirman, with a part in the maintenance of the fabric, and of grocer's
assistant gave him not only relations with all sections of society, but an
encyclopaedic knowledge of their affairs.
"Ah!" my aunt would sigh, "I wish it were time for Eulalie to come. She is really the only person who will be able to tell me."
Eulalie was a limping, energetic, deaf spinster who had 'retired' after
the death of Mme. de la Bretonnerie, with whom she had been in service
from her childhood, and had then taken a room beside the church, from
which she would incessantly emerge, either to attend some service, or,
when there was no service, to say a prayer by herself or to give Théodore
a hand; the rest of her time she spent in visiting sick persons like my
aunt Léonie, to whom she would relate everything that had occurred at
mass or vespers. She was not above adding occasional pocket-money to
the little income which was found for her by the family of her old em-
ployers by going from time to time to look after the Curé's linen, or that
of some other person of note in the clerical world of Combray. Above a
mantle of black cloth she wore a little white coif that seemed almost to
attach her to some Order, and an infirmity of the skin had stained part of
her cheeks and her crooked nose the bright red colour of balsam. Her
visits were the one great distraction in the life of my aunt Léonie, who
now saw hardly anyone else, except the reverend Curé. My aunt had by
degrees erased every other visitor's name from her list, because they all
committed the fatal error, in her eyes, of falling into one or other of the
two categories of people she most detested. One group, the worse of the
two, and the one of which she rid herself first, consisted of those who
66
advised her not to take so much care of herself, and preached (even if
only negatively and with no outward signs beyond an occasional disap-
proving silence or doubting smile) the subversive doctrine that a sharp
walk in the sun and a good red beefsteak would do her more good (her,
who had had two dreadful sips of Vichy water on her stomach for four-
teen hours!) than all her medicine bottles and her bed. The other cat-
egory was composed of people who appeared to believe that she was
more seriously ill than she thought, in fact that she was as seriously ill as
she said. And so none of those whom she had allowed upstairs to her
room, after considerable hesitation and at Franchise's urgent request,
and who in the course of their visit had shewn how unworthy they were
of the honour which had been done them by venturing a timid: "Don't
you think that if you were just to stir out a little on really fine days… ?"
or who, on the other hand, when she said to them: "I am very low, very
low; nearing the end, dear friends!" had replied: "Ah, yes, when one has no strength left! Still, you may last a while yet"; each party alike might be certain that her doors would never open to them again. And if Françoise
was amused by the look of consternation on my aunt's face whenever
she saw, from her bed, any of these people in the Rue du Saint-Esprit,
who looked as if they were coming to see her, or heard her own door-
bell ring, she would laugh far more heartily, as at a clever trick, at my
aunt's devices (which never failed) for having them sent away, and at
their look of discomfiture when they had to turn back without having
seen her; and would be filled with secret admiration for her mistress,
whom she felt to be superior to all these other people, inasmuch as she
could and did contrive not to see them. In short, my aunt stipulated, at
one and the same time, that whoever came to see her must approve of
her way of life, commiserate with her in her sufferings, and assure her of
an ultimate recovery.
In all this Eulalie excelled. My aunt might say to her twenty times in a
minute: "The end is come at last, my poor Eulalie!", twenty times Eulalie would retort with: "Knowing your illness as you do, Mme. Octave, you
will live to be a hundred, as Mme. Sazerin said to me only yesterday."
For one of Eulalie's most rooted beliefs, and one that the formidable list
of corrections which her experience must have compiled was powerless
to eradicate, was that Mme. Sazerat's name was really Mme. Sazerin.
"I do not ask to live to a hundred," my aunt would say, for she pre-
ferred to have no definite limit fixed to the number of her days.
And since, besides this, Eulalie knew, as no one else knew, how to dis-
tract my aunt without tiring her, her visits, which took place regularly
67
every Sunday, unless something unforeseen occurred to prevent them,
were for my aunt a pleasure the prospect of which kept her on those
days in a state of expectation, appetising enough to begin with, but at
once changing to the agony of a hunger too long unsatisfied if Eulalie
were a minute late in coming. For, if unduly prolonged, the rapture of
waiting for Eulalie became a torture, and my aunt would never cease
from looking at the time, and yawning, and complaining of each of her
symptoms in turn. Eulalie's ring, if it sounded from the front door at the
very end of the day, when she was no longer expecting it, would almost
make her ill. For the fact was that on Sundays she thought of nothing
else than this visit, and the moment that our luncheon was ended
Françoise would become impatient for us to leave the dining-room so
that she might go upstairs to 'occupy' my aunt. But—and this more than
ever from the day on which fine weather definitely set in at Com-
bray—the proud hour °f noon, descending from the steeple of Saint-Hil-
aire which it blazoned for a moment with the twelve points of its sonor-
ous crown, would long have echoed about our table, beside the 'holy
bread,' which too had come in, after church, in its familiar way; and we
would still be found seated in front of our Arabian Nights plates,
weighed down by the heat of the day, and even more by our heavy meal.
For upon the permanent foundation of eggs, cutlets, potatoes, preserves,
and biscuits, whose appearance on the table she no longer announced to
us, Françoise would add—as the labour of fields and orchards, the har-
vest of the tides, the luck of the markets, the kindness of neighbours, and
her own genius might provide; and so effectively that our bill of fare, like
the quatrefoils that were carved on the porches of cathedrals in the thir-
teenth century, reflected to some extent the march of the seasons and the
incidents of human life—a brill, because the fish-woman had guaranteed
its freshness; a turkey, because she had seen a beauty in the market at
Roussainville-le-Pin; cardoons with marrow, because she had never done
them for us in that way before; a roast leg of mutton, because the fresh
air made one hungry and there would be plenty of time for it to 'settle
down' in the seven hours before dinner; spinach, by way of a change;
apricots, because they were still hard to get; gooseberries, because in an-
other fortnight there would be none left; raspberries, which M. Swann
had brought specially; cherries, the first to come from the cherry-tree,
which had yielded none for the last two years; a cream cheese, of which
in those days I was extremely fond; an almond cake, because she had
ordered one the evening before; a fancy loaf, because it was our turn to
'offer' the holy bread. And when all these had been eaten, a work
68
composed expressly for ourselves, but dedicated more particularly to my
father, who had a fondness for such things, a cream of chocolate, in-
spired in the mind, created by the hand of Françoise, would be laid be-
fore us, light and fleeting as an 'occasional piece' of music, into which she
had poured the whole of her talent. Anyone who refused to partake of it,
saying: "No, thank you, I have finished; I am not hungry," would at once have been lowered to the level of the Philistines who, when an artist
makes them a present of one of his works, examine its weight and mater-
ial, whereas what is of value is the creator's intention and his signature.
To have left even the tiniest morsel in the dish would have shewn as
much discourtesy as to rise and leave a concert hall while the 'piece' was
still being played, and under the composer's-very eyes.
At length my mother would say to me: "Now, don't stay here all day;
you can go up to your room if you are too hot outside, but get a little
fresh air first; don't start reading immediately after your food."
And I would go and sit down beside the pump and its trough, orna-
mented here and there, like a gothic font, with a salamander, which
modelled upon a background of crumbling stone the quick relief of its
slender, allegorical body; on the bench without a back, in the shade of a
lilac-tree, in that little corner of the garden which communicated, by a
service door, with the Rue du Saint-Esprit, and from whose neglected
soil rose, in two stages, an outcrop from the house itself and apparently a
separate building, my aunt's back-kitchen. One could see its red-tiled
floor gleaming like porphyry. It seemed not so much the cave of
Françoise as a little temple of Venus. It would be overflowing with the
offerings of the milkman, the fruiterer, the greengrocer, come sometimes
from distant villages to dedicate here the first-fruits of their fields. And
its roof was always surmounted by the cooing of a dove.
In earlier days I would not have lingered in the sacred grove which
surrounded this temple, for, before going upstairs to read, I would steal
into the little sitting-room which my uncle Adolphe, a brother of my
grandfather and an old soldier who had retired from the service as a ma-
jor, used to occupy on the ground floor, a room which, even when its
opened windows let in the heat, if not actually the rays of the sun which
seldom penetrated so far, would never fail to emit that vague and yet
fresh odour, suggesting at once an open-air and an old-fashioned kind of
existence, which sets and keeps the nostrils dreaming when one goes in-
to a disused gun-room. But for some years now I had not gone into my
uncle Adolphe's room, since he no longer came to Combray on account
of a quarrel which had arisen between him and my family, by my fault,
69
and in the following circumstances: Once or twice every month, in Paris,
I used to be sent to pay him a. visit, as he was finishing his luncheon,
wearing a plain alpaca coat, and waited upon by his servant in a
working-jacket of striped linen, purple and white. He would complain
that I had not been to see him for a long time; that he was being neg-
lected; he would offer me a marchpane or a tangerine, and we would
cross a room in which no one ever sat, whose fire was never lighted,
whose walls were picked out with gilded mouldings, its ceiling painted
blue in imitation of the sky, and its furniture upholstered in satin, as at
my grandparents', only yellow; then we would enter what he called his
'study,' a room whose walls were hung with prints which shewed,
against a dark background, a plump and rosy goddess driving a car, or
standing upon a globe, or wearing a star on her brow; pictures which
were popular under the Second Empire because there was thought to be
something about them that suggested Pompeii, which were then gener-
ally despised, and which now people are beginning to collect again for
one single and consistent reason (despite any others which they may ad-
vance), namely, that they suggest the Second Empire. And there I would
stay with my uncle until his man came, with a message from the coach-
man, to ask him at what time he would like the carriage. My uncle
would then be lost in meditation, while his astonished servant stood
there, not daring to disturb him by the least movement, wondering and
waiting for his answer, which never varied. For in the end, after a su-
preme crisis of hesitation, my uncle would utter, infallibly, the words: "A quarter past two," which the servant would echo with amazement, but
without disputing them: "A quarter past two! Very good, sir… I will go
and tell him… ."
At this date I was a lover of the theatre: a Platonic lover, of necessity,
since my parents had not yet allowed me to enter one, and so incorrect
was the picture I drew for myself of the pleasures to be enjoyed there
that I almost believed that each of the spectators looked, as into a stereo-
scope, upon a stage and scenery which existed for himself alone, though
closely resembling the thousand other spectacles presented to the rest of
the audience individually.
Every morning I would hasten to the Moriss column to see what new
plays it announced. Nothing could be more disinterested or happier than
the dreams with which these announcements filled my mind, dreams
which took their form from the inevitable associations of the words
forming the title of the play, and also from the colour of the bills, still
damp and wrinkled with paste, on which those words stood out.
70
Nothing, unless it were such strange titles as the Testament de César Giro-
dot, or Oedipe-Roi, inscribed not on the green bills of the Opéra-Comique, but on the wine-coloured bills of the Comédie-Française, nothing seemed
to me to differ more profoundly from the sparkling white plume of the
Diamants de la Couronne than the sleek, mysterious satin of the Domino Noir; and since my parents had told me that, for my first visit to the
theatre, I should have to choose between these two pieces, I would study
exhaustively and in turn the title of one and the title of the other (for
those were all that I knew of either), attempting to snatch from each a
foretaste of the pleasure which it offered me, and to compare this pleas-
ure with that latent in the other title, until in the end I had shewn myself
such vivid, such compelling pictures of, on the one hand, a play of
dazzling arrogance, and on the other a gentle, velvety play, that I was as
little capable of deciding which play I should prefer to see as if, at the
dinner-table, they had obliged me to choose between rice à l'Impératrice
and the famous cream of chocolate.
All my conversations with my playfellows bore upon actors, whose
art, although as yet I had no experience of it, was the first of all its num-
berless forms in which Art itself allowed me to anticipate its enjoyment.
Between one actor's tricks of intonation and inflection and another's, the
most trifling differences would strike me as being of an incalculable im-
portance. And from what I had been told of them I would arrange them
in the order of their talent in lists which I used to murmur to myself all
day long: lists which in the end became petrified in my brain and were a
source of annoyance to it, being irremovable.
And later, in my schooldays, whenever I ventured in class, when the
master's head was turned, to communicate with some new friend, I
would always begin by asking him whether he had begun yet to go to
theatres, and if he agreed that our greatest actor was undoubtedly Got,
our second Delaunay, and so on. And if, in his judgment, Febvre came
below Thiron, or Delaunay below Coquelin, the sudden volatility which
the name of Coquelin, forsaking its stony rigidity, would engender in my
mind, in which it moved upwards to the second place, the rich vitality
with which the name of Delaunay would suddenly be furnished, to en-
able it to slip down to fourth, would stimulate and fertilise my brain
with a sense of bradding and blossoming life.
But if the thought of actors weighed so upon me, if the sight of
Maubant, coming out one afternoon from the Théâtre-Français, had
plunged me in the throes and sufferings of hopeless love, how much
more did the name of a 'star,' blazing outside the doors of a theatre, how
71
much more, seen through the window of a brougham which passed me
in the street, the hair over her forehead abloom with roses, did the face of
a woman who, I would think, was perhaps an actress, leave with me a
lasting disturbance, a futile and painful effort to form a picture of her
private life.
I classified, in order of talent, the most distinguished: Sarah Bernhardt,
Berma, Bartet, Madeleine Brohan, Jeanne Samary; but I was interested in
them all. Now my uncle knew many of them personally, and also ladies
of another class, not clearly distinguished from actresses in my mind. He
used to entertain them at his house. And if we went to see him on certain
days only, that was because on the other days ladies might come whom
his family could not very well have met. So we at least thought; as for
my uncle, his fatal readiness to pay pretty widows (who had perhaps
never been married) and countesses (whose high-sounding titles were
probably no more than noms de guerre) the compliment of presenting
them to my grandmother or even of presenting to them some of our fam-
ily jewels, had already embroiled him more than once with my grand-
father. Often, if the name of some actress were mentioned in conversa-
tion, I would hear my father say, with a smile, to my mother: "One of
your uncle's friends," and I would think of the weary novitiate through
which, perhaps for years on end, a grown man, even a man of real im-
portance, might have to pass, waiting on the doorstep of some such lady,
while she refused to answer his letters and made her hall-porter drive
him away; and imagine that my uncle was able to dispense a little jack-
anapes like myself from all these sufferings by introducing me in his
own home to the actress, unapproachable by all the world, but for him
an intimate friend.
And so—on the pretext that some lesson, the hour of which had been
altered, now came at such an awkward time that it had already more
than once prevented me, and would continue to prevent me, from seeing
my uncle—one day, not one of the days which he set apart for our visits,
I took advantage of the fact that my parents had had luncheon earlier
than usual; I slipped out and, instead of going to read the playbills on
their column, for which purpose I was allowed to go out unaccompan-
ied, I ran all the way to his house. I noticed before his door a carriage
and pair, with red carnations on the horses' blinkers and in the
coachman's buttonhole. As I climbed the staircase I could hear laughter
and a woman's voice, and, as soon as I had rung, silence and the sound
of shutting doors. The man-servant who let me in appeared embar-
rassed, and said that my uncle was extremely busy and probably could
72
not see me; he went in, however, to announce my arrival, and the same
voice I had heard before said: "Oh, yes! Do let him come in; just for a moment; it will be so amusing. Is that his photograph there, on your desk?