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their own accord, and, anticipating our desire to play with them,
have begun to play with us. And in this connexion we may ask
ourselves whether, in the case of love (to which indeed we may add
the love of life and the love of fame, since there are, it appears,
persons who are acquainted with these latter sentiments), we ought
not to act like those who, when a noise disturbs them, instead of
praying that it may cease, stop their ears; and, with them for our
pattern, bring our attention, our defensive strength to bear on
ourselves, give ourselves as an objective to capture not the “other
person” with whom we are in love but our capacity for suffering at
that person’s hands.
To return to the problem of sounds, we have only to thicken the
wads which close the aural passages, and they confine to a
pianissimo the girl who has just been playing a boisterous tune
overhead; if we go farther, and steep the wad in grease, at once the
whole household must obey its despotic rule; its laws extend even
beyond our portals. Pianissimo is not enough; the wad instantly
orders the piano to be shut, and the music lesson is abruptly ended;
the gentleman who was walking up and down in the room above
breaks off in the middle of his beat; the movement of carriages and
tramways is interrupted as though a Sovereign were expected to
pass. And indeed this attenuation of sounds sometimes disturbs our
slumbers instead of guarding them. Only yesterday the incessant
noise in our ears, by describing to us in a continuous narrative all
that was happening in the street and in the house, succeeded at
length in making us sleep, like a boring book; to-night, through the
sheet of silence that is spread over our sleep a shock, louder than
the rest, manages to make itself heard, gentle as a sigh, unrelated
to any other sound, mysterious; and the call for an explanation
which it emits is sufficient to awaken us. Take away for a moment
from the sick man the cotton-wool that has been stopping his ears
and in a flash the full daylight, the sun of sound dawns afresh,
dazzling him, is born again in his universe; in all haste returns the
multitude of exiled sounds; we are present, as though it were the
chanting of choirs of angels, at the resurrection of the voice. The
empty streets are filled for a moment with the whirr of the swift,
consecutive wings of the singing tramway-cars. In the bedroom
itself, the sick man has created, not, like Prometheus, fire, but the
sound of fire. And when we increase or reduce the wads of cotton-
wool, it is as though we were pressing alternately one and the other
of the two pedals with which we have extended the resonant
compass of the outer world.
Only there are also suppressions of sound which are not
temporary. The man who has grown completely deaf cannot even
heat a pan of milk by his bedside, but he must keep an eye open to
watch, on the tilted lid, for the white, arctic reflexion, like that of a
coming snow-storm, which is the warning sign which he is wise to
obey, by cutting off (as Our Lord bade the waves be still) the electric
current; for already the swelling, jerkily climbing egg of boiling milk-
film is reaching its climax in a series of sidelong movements, has
filled and set bellying the drooping sails with which the cream has
skimmed its surface, sends in a sudden storm a scud of pearly
substance flying overboard—sails which the cutting off of the
current, if the electric storm is hushed in time, will fold back upon
themselves and let fall with the ebbing tide, changed now to
magnolia petals. But if the sick man should not be quick enough in
taking the necessary precautions, presently, when his drowned
books and watch are seen barely emerging from the milky tide, he
will be obliged to call the old nurse who, though he be himself an
eminent statesman or a famous writer, will tell him that he has no
more sense than a child of five. At other times in the magic chamber,
between us and the closed door, a person who was not there a
moment ago makes his appearance; it is a visitor whom we did not
hear coming in, and who merely gesticulates, like a figure in one of
those little puppet theatres, so restful for those who have taken a
dislike to the spoken tongue. And for this totally deaf man, since the
loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition,
it is with ecstasy that he walks now upon an earth grown almost an
Eden, in which sound has not yet been created. The highest
waterfalls unfold for his eyes alone their ribbons of crystal, stiller
than the glassy sea, like the cascades of Paradise. As sound was for
him before his deafness the perceptible form in which the cause of a
movement was draped, objects moved without sound seemed to be
being moved also without cause; deprived of all resonant quality,
they shew a spontaneous activity, seem to be alive. They move, halt,
become alight of their own accord. Of their own accord they vanish
in the air like the winged monsters of prehistoric days. In the solitary
and unneighboured home of the deaf man the service which, before
his infirmity was complete, was already shewing an increased
discretion, was being carried on in silence, is now assured him with a
sort of surreptitious deftness, by mutes, as at the court of a fairy-
tale king. And, as upon the stage, the building on which the deaf
man looks from his window—be it barracks, church, or town hall—is
only so much scenery. If one day it should fall to the ground, it may
emit a cloud of dust and leave visible ruins; but, less material even
than a palace on the stage, though it has not the same exiguity, it
will subside in the magic universe without letting the fall of its heavy
blocks of stone tarnish, with anything so vulgar as sound, the
chastity of the prevailing silence.
The silence, though only relative, which reigned in the little
barrack-room where I sat waiting was now broken. The door opened
and Saint-Loup, dropping his eyeglass, dashed in.
“Ah, my dear Robert, you make yourself very comfortable here;” I
said to him; “how jolly it would be if one were allowed to dine and
sleep here.”
And to be sure, had it not been against the regulations, what
repose untinged by sadness I could have tasted there, guarded by
that atmosphere of tranquillity, vigilance and gaiety which was
maintained by a thousand wills controlled and free from care, a
thousand heedless spirits, in that great community called a barracks
where, time having taken the form of action, the sad bell that tolled
the hours outside was replaced by the same joyous clarion of those
martial calls, the ringing memory of which was kept perpetually alive
in the paved streets of the town, like the dust that floats in a
sunbeam;—a voice sure of being heard, and musical because it was
the command not only of authority to obedience but of wisdom to
happiness.
 “So you’ld rather stay with me and sleep here, would you, than go
to the hotel by yourself?” Saint-Loup asked me, smiling.
“Oh, Robert, it is cruel of you to be sarcastic about it,” I pleaded;
“you know it’s not possible, and you know how wretched I shall be
over there.”
“Good! You flatter me!” he replied. “It occurred to me just now
that you would rather stay here to-night. And that is precisely what I
stopped to ask the Captain.”
“And he has given you leave?” I cried.
“He hadn’t the slightest objection.”
“Oh! I adore him!”
“No; that would be going too far. But now, let me just get hold of
my batman and tell him to see about our dinner,” he went on, while I
turned away so as to hide my tears.
We were several times interrupted by one or other of Saint-Loup’s
friends’ coming in. He drove them all out again.
“Get out of here. Buzz off!”
I begged him to let them stay.
“No, really; they would bore you stiff; they are absolutely
uncultured; all they can talk about is racing, or stables shop.
Besides, I don’t want them here either; they would spoil these
precious moments I’ve been looking forward to. But you mustn’t
think, when I tell you that these fellows are brainless, that
everything military is devoid of intellectuality. Far from it. We have a
major here who is a splendid chap. He’s given us a course in which
military history is treated like a demonstration, like a problem in
algebra. Even from the aesthetic point of view there is a curious
beauty, alternately inductive and deductive, about it which you
couldn’t fail to appreciate.”
“That’s not the officer who’s given me leave to stay here to-
night?”
“No; thank God! The man you ‘adore’ for so very trifling a service
is the biggest fool that ever walked the face of the earth. He is
perfect at looking after messing, and at kit inspections; he spends
hours with the serjeant major and the master tailor. There you have
his mentality. Apart from that he has a vast contempt, like everyone
here, for the excellent major I was telling you about. No one will
speak to him because he’s a free-mason and doesn’t go to
confession. The Prince de Borodino would never have an outsider
like that in his house. Which is pretty fair cheek, when all’s said and
done, from a man whose great-grandfather was a small farmer, and
who would probably be a small farmer himself if it hadn’t been for
the Napoleonic wars. Not that he hasn’t a lurking sense of his own
rather ambiguous position in society, where he’s neither flesh nor
fowl. He hardly ever shews his face at the Jockey, it makes him feel
so deuced awkward, this so-called Prince,” added Robert, who,
having been led by the same spirit of imitation to adopt the social
theories of his teachers and the worldly prejudices of his relatives,
had unconsciously wedded the democratic love of humanity to a
contempt for the nobility of the Empire.
I was looking at the photograph of his aunt, and the thought that,
since Saint-Loup had this photograph in his possession, he might
perhaps give it to me, made me feel all the fonder of him and hope
to do him a thousand services, which seemed to me a very small
exchange for it. For this photograph was like one encounter more,
added to all those that I had already had, with Mme. de
Guermantes; better still, a prolonged encounter, as if, by some
sudden stride forward in our relations, she had stopped beside me,
in a garden hat, and had allowed me for the first time to gaze at my
leisure at that plump cheek, that arched neck, that tapering eyebrow
(veiled from me hitherto by the swiftness of her passage, the
bewilderment of my impressions, the imperfection of memory); and
the contemplation of them, as well as of the bare bosom and arms
of a woman whom I had never seen save in a high-necked and long-
sleeved bodice, was to me a voluptuous discovery, a priceless favour.
Those lines, which had seemed to me almost a forbidden spectacle,
I could study there, as in a text-book of the only geometry that had
any value for me. Later on, when I looked at Robert, I noticed that
he too was a little like the photograph of his aunt, and by a
mysterious process which I found almost as moving, since, if his face
had not been directly created by hers, the two had nevertheless a
common origin. The features of the Duchesse de Guermantes, which
were pinned to my vision of Combray, the nose like a falcon’s beak,
the piercing eyes, seemed to have served also as a pattern for the
cutting out—in another copy analogous and slender, with too
delicate a skin—of Robert’s face, which might almost be
superimposed upon his aunt’s. I saw in him, with a keen longing,
those features characteristic of the Guermantes, of that race which
had remained so individual in the midst of a world with which it was
not confounded, in which it remained isolated in the glory of an
ornithomorphic divinity, for it seemed to have been the issue, in the
age of mythology, of the union of a goddess with a bird.
Robert, without being aware of its cause, was touched by my
evident affection. This was moreover increased by the sense of
comfort inspired in me by the heat of the fire and by the champagne
which bedewed at the same time my brow with beads of sweat and
my cheeks with tears; it washed down the partridges; I ate mine
with the dumb wonder of a profane mortal of any sort when he finds
in a form of life with which he is not familiar what he has supposed
that form of life to exclude—the wonder, for instance, of an atheist
who sits down to an exquisitely cooked dinner in a presbytery. And
next morning, when I awoke, I rose and went to cast from Saint-
Loup’s window, which being at a great height overlooked the whole
countryside, a curious scrutiny to make the acquaintance of my new
neighbour, the landscape which I had not been able to distinguish
the day before, having arrived too late, at an hour when it was
already sleeping beneath the outspread cloak of night. And yet, early
as it had awoken from its sleep, I could see the ground, when I
opened the window and looked out, only as one sees it from the
window of a country house, overlooking the lake, shrouded still in its
soft white morning gown of mist which scarcely allowed me to make
out anything at all. But I knew that, before the troopers who were
busy with their horses in the square had finished grooming them, it
would have cast its gown aside. In the meantime, I could see only a
meagre hill, rearing close up against the side of the barracks a back
already swept clear of darkness, rough and wrinkled. Through the
transparent curtain of frost I could not take my eyes from this
stranger who, too, was looking at me for the first time. But when I
had formed the habit of coming to the barracks, my consciousness
that the hill was there, more real, consequently, even when I did not
see it, than the hotel at Balbec, than our house in Paris, of which I
thought as of absent—or dead—friends, that is to say without any
strong belief in their existence, brought it about that, even although
I was not aware of it myself, its reflected shape outlined itself on the
slightest impressions that I formed at Doncières, and among them,
to begin with this first morning, on the pleasing impression of
warmth given me by the cup of chocolate prepared by Saint-Loup’s
batman in this comfortable room, which had the effect of being an
optical centre from which to look out at the hill—the idea of there
being anything else to do but just gaze at it, the idea of actually
climbing it being rendered impossible by this same mist. Imbibing
the shape of the hill, associated with the taste of hot chocolate and
with the whole web of my fancies at that particular time, this mist,
without my having thought at all about it, succeeded in moistening
all my subsequent thoughts about that period, just as a massive and
unmelting lump of gold had remained allied to my impressions of
Balbec, or as the proximity of the outside stairs of blackish
sandstone gave a grey background to my impressions of Combray. It
did not, however, persist late into the day; the sun began by hurling
at it, in vain, a few darts which sprinkled it with brilliants before they
finally overcame it. The hill might expose its grizzled rump to the
sun’s rays, which, an hour later, when I went down to the town,
gave to the russet tints of the autumn leaves, to the reds and blues
of the election posters pasted on the walls an exaltation which raised
my spirits also and made me stamp, singing as I went, on the
pavements from which I could hardly keep myself from jumping in
the air for joy.
But after that first night I had to sleep at the hotel. And I knew
beforehand that I was doomed to find there sorrow. It was like an
unbreathable aroma which all my life long had been exhaled for me
by every new bedroom, that is to say by every bedroom; in the one
which I usually occupied I was not present, my mind remained
elsewhere, and in its place sent only the sense of familiarity. But I
could not employ this servant, less sensitive than myself, to look
after things for me in a new place, where I preceded him, where I
arrived by myself, where I must bring into contact with its
environment that “Self” which I rediscovered only at year-long
intervals, but always the same, having not grown at all since
Combray, since my first arrival at Balbec, weeping, without any
possibility of consolation, on the edge of an unpacked trunk.
As it happened, I was mistaken. I had no time to be sad, for I was
not left alone for an instant. The fact of the matter was that there
remained of the old palace a superfluous refinement of structure and
decoration, out of place in a modern hotel, which, released from the
service of any practical purpose, had in its long spell of leisure
acquired a sort of life: passages winding about in all directions,
which one was continually crossing in their aimless wanderings,
lobbies as long as corridors and as ornate as drawing-rooms, which
had the air rather of being dwellers there themselves than of
forming part of a dwelling, which could not be induced to enter and
settle down in any of the rooms but wandered about outside mine
and came up at once to offer me their company—neighbours of a
sort, idle but never noisy, menial ghosts of the past who had been
granted the privilege of staying, provided they kept quiet, by the
doors of the rooms which were let to visitors; and who, every time
that I came across them, greeted me with a silent deference. In
short, the idea of a lodging, of simply a case for our existence from
day to day which shields us only from the cold and from being
overlooked by other people, was absolutely inapplicable to this
house, an assembly of rooms as real as a colony of people, living, it
was true, in silence, but things which one was obliged to meet, to
avoid, to appreciate, as one came in. One tried not to disturb them,
and one could not look without respect at the great drawing-room
which had formed, far back in the eighteenth century, the habit of
stretching itself at its ease, among its hangings of old gold and
beneath the clouds of its painted ceiling. And one was seized with a
more personal curiosity as to the smaller rooms which, without any
regard for symmetry, ran all round it, innumerable, startled, fleeing
in disorder as far as the garden, to which they had so easy an
access down three broken steps.
 If I wished to go out or to come in without taking the lift or being
seen from the main staircase, a smaller private staircase, no longer
in use, offered me its steps so skilfully arranged, one close above
another, that there seemed to exist in their gradation a perfect
proportion of the same kind as those which, in colours, scents,
savours, often arouse in us a peculiar, sensuous pleasure. But the
pleasure to be found in going up and downstairs I had had to come
here to learn, as once before to a health resort in the Alps to find
that the act—as a rule not noticed—of drawing breath could be a
perpetual delight. I received that dispensation from effort which is
granted to us only by the things to which long use has accustomed
us, when I set my feet for the first time on those steps, familiar
before ever I knew them, as if they possessed, deposited on them,
perhaps, embodied in them by the masters of long ago whom they
used to welcome every day, the prospective charm of habits which I
had not yet contracted and which indeed could only grow weaker
once they had become my own. I looked into a room; the double
doors closed themselves behind me, the hangings let in a silence in
which I felt myself invested with a sort of exhilarating royalty; a
marble mantelpiece with ornaments of wrought brass—of which one
would have been wrong to think that its sole idea was to represent
the art of the Directory—offered me a fire, and a little easy chair on
short legs helped me to warm myself as comfortably as if I had been
sitting on the hearthrug. The walls held the room in a close
embrace, separating it from the rest of the world and, to let in, to
enclose what made it complete, parted to make way for the
bookcase, reserved a place for the bed, on either side of which a
column airily upheld the raised ceiling of the alcove. And the room
was prolonged in depth by two closets as large as itself, the latter of
which had hanging from its wall, to scent the occasion on which one
had recourse to it, a voluptuous rosary of orris-roots; the doors, if I
left them open when I withdrew into this innermost retreat, were
not content with tripling its dimensions without its ceasing to be
well-proportioned, and not only allowed my eyes to enjoy the
delights of extension after those of concentration, but added further
to the pleasure of my solitude, which, while still inviolable, was no
longer shut in, the sense of liberty. This closet looked out upon a
courtyard, a fair solitary stranger whom I was glad to have for a
neighbour when next morning my eyes fell on her, a captive
between her high walls in which no other window opened, with
nothing but two yellowing trees which were enough, to give a
pinkish softness to the pure sky above.
Before going to bed I decided to leave the room in order to
explore the whole of my fairy kingdom. I walked down a long gallery
which did me homage successively with all that it had to offer me if I
could not sleep, an armchair placed waiting in a corner, a spinet, on
a table against the wall, a bowl of blue crockery filled with cinerarias,
and, in an old frame, the phantom of a lady of long ago whose
powdered hair was starred with blue flowers, holding in her hand a
bunch of carnations. When I came to the end, the bare wall in which
no door opened said to me simply: “Now you must turn and go
back, but, you see, you are at home here, the house is yours,” while
the soft carpet, not to be left out, added that if I did not sleep that
night I could easily come in barefoot, and the unshuttered windows,
looking out over the open country, assured me that they would hold
a sleepless vigil and that, at whatever hour I chose to come in, I
need not be afraid of disturbing anyone. And behind a hanging
curtain I surprised only a little closet which, stopped by the wall and
unable to escape any farther, had hidden itself there with a guilty
conscience and gave me a frightened stare from its little round
window, glowing blue in the moonlight. I went to bed, but the
presence of the eiderdown quilt, of the pillars, of the neat fireplace,
by straining my attention to a pitch beyond that of Paris, prevented
me from letting myself go upon my habitual train of fancies. And as
it is this particular state of strained attention that enfolds our
slumbers, acts upon them, modifies them, brings them into line with
this or that series of past impressions, the images that filled my
dreams that first night were borrowed from a memory entirely
distinct from that on which I was in the habit of drawing. If I had
been tempted while asleep to let myself be swept back upon my
ordinary current of remembrance, the bed to which I was not
accustomed, the comfortable attention which I was obliged to pay to
the position of my various limbs when I turned over were sufficient
to correct my error, to disentangle and to keep running the new
thread of my dreams. It is the same with sleep as with our
perception of the external world. It needs only a modification in our
habits to make it poetic, it is enough that while undressing we
should have dozed off unconsciously upon the bed, for the
dimensions of our dream-world to be altered and its beauty felt. We
awake, look at our watch, see “four o’clock”; it is only four o’clock in
the morning, but we imagine that the whole day has gone by, so
vividly does this nap of a few minutes, unsought by us, appear to
have come down to us from the skies, by virtue of some divine right,
full-bodied, vast, like an Emperor’s orb of gold. In the morning, while
worrying over the thought that my grandfather was ready, and was
waiting for me to start on our walk along the Méséglise way, I was
awakened by the blare of a regimental band which passed every day
beneath my windows. But on several occasions—and I mention
these because one cannot properly describe human life unless one
shews it soaked in the sleep in which it plunges, which, night after
night, sweeps round it as a promontory is encircled by the sea—the
intervening layer of sleep was strong enough to bear the shock of
the music and I heard nothing. On the other mornings it gave way
for a moment; but, still velvety with the refreshment of having slept,
my consciousness (like those organs by which, after a local
anaesthetic, a cauterisation, not perceived at first, is felt only at the
very end and then as a faint burning smart) was touched only gently
by the shrill points of the fifes which caressed it with a vague, cool,
matutinal warbling; and after this brief interruption in which the
silence had turned to music it relapsed into my slumber before even
the dragoons had finished passing, depriving me of the latest
opening buds of the sparkling clangorous nosegay. And the zone of
my consciousness which its springing stems had brushed was so
narrow, so circumscribed with sleep that later on, when Saint-Loup
asked me whether I had heard the band, I was no longer certain
that the sound of its brasses had not been as imaginary as that
which I heard during the day echo, after the slightest noise, from
the paved streets of the town. Perhaps I had heard it only in a
dream, prompted by my fear of being awakened, or else of not
being awakened and so not seeing the regiment march past. For
often, when I was still asleep at the moment when, on the contrary,
I had supposed that the noise would awaken me, for the next hour I
imagined that I was awake, while still drowsing, and I enacted to
myself with tenuous shadow-shapes on the screen of my slumber
the various scenes of which it deprived me but at which I had the
illusion of looking on.
What one has meant to do during the day, as it turns out, sleep
intervening, one accomplishes only in one’s dreams, that is to say
after it has been distorted by sleep into following another line than
one would have chosen when awake. The same story branches off
and has a different ending. When all is said, the world in which we
live when we are asleep is so different that people who have
difficulty in going to sleep seek first of all to escape from the waking
world. After having desperately, for hours on end, with shut eyes,
revolved in their minds thoughts similar to those which they would
have had with their eyes open, they take heart again on noticing
that the last minute has been crawling under the weight of an
argument in formal contradiction of the laws of thought, and their
realisation of this, and the brief “absence” to which it points, indicate
that the door is now open through which they will perhaps be able,
presently, to escape from the perception of the real, to advance to a
resting-place more or less remote on the other side, which will mean
their having a more or less “good” night. But already a great stride
has been made when we turn our back on the real, when we reach
the cave in which “auto-suggestions” prepare—like witches—the
hell-broth of imaginary maladies or of the recurrence of nervous
disorders, and watch for the hour at which the storm that has been
gathering during our unconscious sleep will break with sufficient
force to make sleep cease.
Not far thence is the secret garden in which grow like strange
flowers the kinds of sleep, so different one from another, the sleep
induced by datura, by the multiple extracts of ether, the sleep of
belladonna, of opium, of valerian, flowers whose petals remain shut
until the day when the predestined visitor shall come and, touching
them, bid them open, and for long hours inhale the aroma of their
peculiar dreams into a marvelling and bewildered being. At the end
of the garden stands the convent with open windows through which
we hear voices repeating the lessons learned before we went to
sleep, which we shall know only at the moment of awakening; while,
a presage of that moment, sounds the resonant tick of that inward
alarum which our preoccupation has so effectively regulated that
when our housekeeper comes in with the warning: “It is seven
o’clock,” she will find us awake and ready. On the dim walls of that
chamber which opens upon our dreams, within which toils without
ceasing that oblivion of the sorrows of love whose task, interrupted
and brought to nought at times by a nightmare big with
reminiscence, is ever speedily resumed, hang, even after we are
awake, the memories of our dreams, but so overshadowed that
often we catch sight of them for the first time only in the broad light
of the afternoon when the ray of a similar idea happens by chance
to strike them; some of them brilliant and harmonious while we
slept, but already so distorted that, having failed to recognise them,
we can but hasten to lay them in the earth like dead bodies too
quickly decomposed or relics so seriously damaged, so nearly
crumbling into dust that the most skilful restorer could not bring
them back to their true form or make anything of them. Near the
gate is the quarry to which our heavier slumbers repair in search of
substances which coat the brain with so unbreakable a glaze that, to
awaken the sleeper, his own will is obliged, even on a golden
morning, to smite him with mighty blows, like a young Siegfried.
Beyond this, again, are the nightmares of which the doctors foolishly
assert that they tire us more than does insomnia, whereas on the
contrary they enable the thinker to escape from the strain of
thought; those nightmares with their fantastic picture-books in which
our relatives who are dead are shewn meeting with a serious
accident which at the same time does not preclude their speedy
recovery. Until then we keep them in a little rat-cage, in which they
are smaller than white mice and, covered with big red spots, out of
each of which a feather sprouts, engage us in Ciceronian dialogues.
Next to this picture-book is the revolving disc of awakening, by
virtue of which we submit for a moment to the tedium of having to
return at once to a house which was pulled down fifty years ago, the
memory of which is gradually effaced as sleep grows more distant
by a number of others, until we arrive at that memory which the disc
presents only when it has ceased to revolve and which coincides
with what we shall see with opened eyes.
Sometimes I had heard nothing, being in one of those slumbers
into which we fall as into a pit from which we are heartily glad to be
drawn up a little later, heavy, overfed, digesting all that has been
brought to us (as by the nymphs who fed the infant Hercules) by
those agile, vegetative powers whose activity is doubled while we
sleep.
That kind of sleep is called “sleeping like lead”, and it seems as
though one has become, oneself, and remains for a few moments
after such a sleep is ended, simply a leaden image. One is no longer
a person. How then, seeking for one’s mind, one’s personality, as
one seeks for a thing that is lost, does one recover one’s own self
rather than any other? Why, when one begins again to think, is it not
another personality than yesterday’s that is incarnate in one? One
fails to see what can dictate the choice, or why, among the millions
of human beings any one of whom one might be, it is on him who
one was overnight that unerringly one lays one’s hand? What is it
that guides us, when there has been an actual interruption—whether
it be that our unconsciousness has been complete or our dreams
entirely different from ourself? There has indeed been death, as
when the heart has ceased to beat and a rhythmical friction of the
tongue revives us. No doubt the room, even if we have seen it only
once before, awakens memories to which other, older memories
cling. Or were some memories also asleep in us of which we now
become conscious? The resurrection at our awakening—after that
healing attack of mental alienation which is sleep—must after all be
similar to what occurs when we recapture a name, a line, a refrain
that we had forgotten. And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after
death is to be conceived as a phenomenon of memory.
When I had finished sleeping, tempted by the sunlit sky—but
discouraged by the chill—of those last autumn mornings, so
luminous and so cold, in which winter begins, to get up and look at
the trees on which the leaves were indicated now only by a few
strokes, golden or rosy, which seemed to have been left in the air, on
an invisible web, I raised my head from the pillow and stretched my
neck, keeping my body still hidden beneath the bedclothes; like a
chrysalis in the process of change I was a dual creature, with the
different parts of which a single environment did not agree; for my
eyes colour was sufficient, without warmth; my chest on the other
hand was anxious for warmth and not for colour. I rose only after my
fire had been lighted, and studied the picture, so delicate and
transparent, of the pink and golden morning, to which I had now
added by artificial means the element of warmth that it lacked,
poking my fire which burned and smoked like a good pipe and gave
me, as a pipe would have given me, a pleasure at once coarse
because it was based upon a material comfort and delicate because
beyond it was printed a pure vision. The walls of my dressing-room
were covered with a paper on which a violent red background was
patterned with black and white flowers, to which it seemed that I
should have some difficulty in growing accustomed. But they
succeeded only in striking me as novel, in forcing me to enter not
into conflict but into contact with them, in modulating the gaiety, the
songs of my morning toilet, they succeeded only in imprisoning me
in the heart of a sort of poppy, out of which to look at a world which
I saw quite differently from in Paris, from the gay screen which was
this new dwelling-place, of a different aspect from the house of my
parents, and into which flowed a purer air. On certain days, I was
agitated by the desire to see my grandmother again, or by the fear
that she might be ill, or else it was the memory of some undertaking
which I had left half-finished in Paris, and which seemed to have
made no progress; sometimes again it was some difficulty in which,
even here, I had managed to become involved. One or other of
these anxieties had kept me from sleeping, and I was without
strength to face my sorrow which in a moment grew to fill the whole
of my existence. Then from the hotel I sent a messenger to the
barracks, with a line to Saint-Loup: I told him that, should it be
materially possible—I knew that it was extremely difficult for him—I
should be most grateful if he would look in for a minute. An hour
later he arrived; and on hearing his ring at the door I felt myself
liberated from my obsessions. I knew that, if they were stronger
than I, he was stronger than they, and my attention was diverted
from them and concentrated on him who would have to settle them.
He had come into the room, and already he had enveloped me in
the gust of fresh air in which from before dawn he had been
displaying so much activity, a vital atmosphere very different from
that of my room, to which I at once adapted myself by appropriate
reactions.
“I hope you weren’t angry with me for bothering you; there is
something that is worrying me, as you probably guessed.”
“Not at all; I just supposed you wanted to see me, and I thought
it very nice of you. I was delighted that you should have sent for
me. But what is the trouble? Things not going well? What can I do
to help?”
He listened to my explanations, and gave careful answers; but
before he had uttered a word he had transformed me to his own
likeness; compared with the important occupations which kept him
so busy, so alert, so happy, the worries which, a moment ago, I had
been unable to endure for another instant seemed to me as to him
negligible; I was like a man who, not having been able to open his
eyes for some days, sends for a doctor, who neatly and gently raises
his eyelid, removes from beneath it and shews him a grain of sand;
the sufferer is healed and comforted. All my cares resolved
themselves into a telegram which Saint-Loup undertook to dispatch.
Life seemed to me so different, so delightful; I was flooded with
such a surfeit of strength that I longed for action.
“What are you doing now?” I asked him.
“I must leave you, I’m afraid; we’re going on a route march in
three quarters of an hour, and I have to be on parade.”
“Then it’s been a great bother to you, coming here?”
“No, no bother at all, the Captain was very good about it; he told
me that if it was for you I must go at once; but you understand, I
don’t like to seem to be abusing the privilege.”
 “But if I got up and dressed quickly and went by myself to the
place where you’ll be training, it would interest me immensely, and I
could perhaps talk to you during the breaks.”
“I shouldn’t advise you to do that; you have been lying awake,
racking your brains over a thing which, I assure you, is not of the
slightest importance, but now that it has ceased to worry you, lay
your head down on the pillow and go to sleep, which you will find an
excellent antidote to the demineralisation of your nerve-cells; only
you mustn’t go to sleep too soon, because our band-boys will be
coming along under your windows; but as soon as they’ve passed I
think you’ll be left in peace, and we shall meet again this evening, at
dinner.”
But soon I was constantly going to see the regiment being trained
in field operations, when I began to take an interest in the military
theories which Saint-Loup’s friends used to expound over the dinner-
table, and when it had become the chief desire of my life to see at
close quarters their various leaders, just as a person who makes
music his principal study and spends his life in the concert halls finds
pleasure in frequenting the cafés in which one mingles with the life
of the members of the orchestra. To reach the training ground I
used to have to take tremendously long walks. In the evening after
dinner the longing for sleep made my head drop every now and then
as in a swoon. Next morning I realised that I had no more heard the
band than, at Balbec, after the evenings on which Saint-Loup had
taken me to dinner at Rivebelle, I used to hear the concert on the
beach. And at the moment when I wished to rise I had a delicious
feeling of incapacity; I felt myself fastened to a deep, invisible
ground by the articulations (of which my tiredness made me
conscious) of muscular and nutritious roots. I felt myself full of
strength; life seemed to extend more amply before me; this was
because I had reverted to the good tiredness of my childhood at
Combray on the mornings following days on which we had taken the
Guermantes walk. Poets make out that we recapture for a moment
the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or
garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most
hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in
success. The fixed places, contemporary with different years, it is in
ourselves that we should rather seek to find them. This is where the
advantage comes in, to a certain extent, of great exhaustion
followed by a good night’s rest. Good nights, to make us descend
into the most subterranean galleries of sleep, where no reflexion
from overnight, no gleam of memory comes to lighten the inward
monologue (if so be that it cease not also), turn so effectively the
soil and break through the surface stone of our body that we
discover there, where our muscles dive down and throw out their
twisted roots and breathe the air of the new life, the garden in which
as a child we used to play. There is no need to travel in order to see
it again; we must dig down inwardly to discover it. What once
covered the earth is no longer upon it but beneath; a mere
excursion does not suffice for a visit to the dead city, excavation is
necessary also. But we shall see how certain impressions, fugitive
and fortuitous, carry us back even more effectively to the past, with
a more delicate precision, with a flight more light-winged, more
immaterial, more headlong, more unerring, more immortal than
these organic dislocations.
Sometimes my exhaustion was greater still; I had, without any
opportunity of going to bed, been following the operations for
several days on end. How blessed then was my return to the hotel!
As I got into bed I seemed to have escaped at last from the hands
of enchanters, sorcerers like those who people the “romances”
beloved of our forebears in the seventeenth century. My sleep that
night and the lazy morning that followed it were no more than a
charming fairy tale. Charming; beneficent perhaps also. I reminded
myself that the keenest sufferings have their place of sanctuary, that
one can always, when all else fails, find repose. These thoughts
carried me far.
On days when, although there was no parade, Saint-Loup had to
stay in barracks, I used often to go and visit him there. It was a long
way; I had to leave the town and cross the viaduct, from either side
of which I had an immense view. A strong breeze blew almost
always over this high ground, and filled all the buildings erected on
three sides of the barrack-square, which howled incessantly like a
cave of the winds. While I waited for Robert—he being engaged on
some duty or other—outside the door of his room or in the mess,
talking to some of his friends to whom he had introduced me (and
whom later on I came now and then to see, even when he was not
to be there), looking down from the window three hundred feet to
the country below, bare now except where recently sown fields,
often still soaked with rain and glittering in the sun, shewed a few
stripes of green, of the brilliance and translucent limpidity of enamel,
I could hear him discussed by the others, and I soon learned what a
popular favourite he was. Among many of the volunteers, belonging
to other squadrons, sons of rich business or professional men who
looked at the higher aristocratic society only from outside and
without penetrating its enclosure, the attraction which they naturally
felt towards what they knew of Saint-Loup’s character was reinforced
by the distinction that attached in their eyes to the young man
whom, on Saturday evenings, when they went on pass to Paris, they
had seen supping in the Café de la Paix with the Duc d’Uzès and the
Prince d’Orléans. And on that account, into his handsome face, his
casual way of walking and saluting officers, the perpetual dance of
his eyeglass, the affectation shewn in the cut of his service dress—
the caps always too high, the breeches of too fine a cloth and too
pink a shade—they had introduced the idea of a “tone” which, they
were positive, was lacking in the best turned-out officers in the
regiment, even the majestic Captain to whom I had been indebted
for the privilege of sleeping in barracks, who seemed, in comparison,
too pompous and almost common.
One of them said that the Captain had bought a new horse. “He
can buy as many horses as he likes. I passed Saint-Loup on Sunday
morning in the Allée des Acacias; now he’s got some style on a
horse!” replied his companion, and knew what he was talking about,
for these young fellows belonged to a class which, if it does not
frequent the same houses and know the same people, yet, thanks to
money and leisure, does not differ from the nobility in its experience
of all those refinements of life which money can procure. At any rate
their refinement had, in the matter of clothes, for instance,
something about it more studied, more impeccable than that free
and easy negligence which had so delighted my grandmother in
Saint-Loup. It gave quite a thrill to these sons of big stockbrokers or
bankers, as they sat eating oysters after the theatre, to see at an
adjoining table Serjeant Saint-Loup. And what a tale there was to tell
in barracks on Monday night, after a week-end leave, by one of
them who was in Robert’s squadron, and to whom he had said how
d’ye do “most civilly”, while another, who was not in the same
squadron, was quite positive that, in spite of this, Saint-Loup had
recognised him, for two or three times he had put up his eyeglass
and stared in the speaker’s direction.
“Yes, my brother saw him at the Paix,” said another, who had been
spending the day with his mistress; “my brother says his dress coat
was cut too loose and didn’t fit him.”
“What was the waistcoat like?”
“He wasn’t wearing a white waistcoat; it was purple, with sort of
palms on it; stunning!”
To the “old soldiers” (sons of the soil who had never heard of the
Jockey Club and simply put Saint-Loup in the category of ultra-rich
non-commissioned officers, in which they included all those who,
whether bankrupt or not, lived in a certain style, whose income or
debts ran into several figures, and who were generous towards their
men), the gait, the eyeglass, the breeches, the caps of Saint-Loup,
even if they saw in them nothing particularly aristocratic, furnished
nevertheless just as much interest and meaning. They recognized in
these peculiarities the character, the style which they had assigned
once and for all time to this most popular of the “stripes” in the
regiment, manners like no one’s else, scornful indifference to what
his superior officers might think, which seemed to them the natural
corollary of his goodness to his subordinates. The morning cup of
coffee in the canteen, the afternoon “lay-down” in the barrack-room
seemed pleasanter, somehow, when some old soldier fed the
hungering, lazy section with some savoury tit-bit as to a cap in
which Saint-Loup had appeared on parade.
“It was the height of my pack.”
“Come off it, old chap, you don’t expect us to believe that; it
couldn’t have been the height of your pack,” interrupted a young
college graduate who hoped by using these slang terms not to
appear a “learned beggar”, and by venturing on this contradiction to
obtain confirmation of a fact the thought of which enchanted him.
“Oh, so it wasn’t the height of my pack, wasn’t it? You measured
it, I suppose! I tell you this much, the C. O. glared at it as if he’ld
have liked to put him in clink. But you needn’t think the great Saint-
Loup felt squashed; no, he went and he came, and down with his
head and up with his head, and that blinking glass screwed in his
eye all the time. We’ll see what the ‘Capstan’ has to say when he
hears. Oh, very likely he’ll say nothing, but you may be sure he
won’t be pleased. But there’s nothing so wonderful about that cap. I
hear he’s got thirty of ’em and more at home, at his house in town.”
“Where did you hear that, old man? From our blasted corporal-
dog?” asked the young graduate, pedantically displaying the new
forms of speech which he had only recently acquired and with which
he took a pride in garnishing his conversation.
“Where did I hear it? From his batman; what d’you think?”
“Ah! Now you’re talking. That’s a chap who knows when he’s well
off!”
“I should say so! He’s got more in his pocket than I have, certain
sure! And besides he gives him all his own things, and everything.
He wasn’t getting his grub properly, he says. Along comes de Saint-
Loup, and gives cooky hell: ‘I want him to be properly fed, d’you
hear,’ he says, ‘and I don’t care what it costs.’”
The old soldier made up for the triviality of the words quoted by
the emphasis of his tone, in a feeble imitation of the speaker which
had an immense success.
On leaving the barracks I would take a stroll, and then, to fill up
the time before I went, as I did every evening, to dine with Saint-
Loup at the hotel in which he and his friends had established their
mess, I made for my own, as soon as the sun had set, so as to have
a couple of hours in which to rest and read. In the square, the
evening light bedecked the pepper-pot turrets of the castle with little
pink clouds which matched the colour of the bricks, and completed
the harmony by softening the tone of the latter where it bathed
them. So strong a current of vitality coursed through my nerves that
no amount of movement on my part could exhaust it; each step I
took, after touching a stone of the pavement, rebounded off it. I
seemed to have growing on my heels the wings of Mercury. One of
the fountains was filled with a ruddy glow, while in the other the
moonlight had already begun to turn the water opalescent. Between
them were children at play, uttering shrill cries, wheeling in circles,
obeying some necessity of the hour, like swifts or bats. Next door to
the hotel, the old National Courts and the Louis XVI orangery, in
which were installed now the savings-bank and the Army Corps
headquarters, were lighted from within by the palely gilded globes of
their gas-jets which, seen in the still clear daylight outside, suited
those vast, tall, eighteenth-century windows from which the last rays
of the setting sun had not yet departed, as would have suited a
complexion heightened with rouge a headdress of yellow tortoise-
shell, and persuaded me to seek out my fireside and the lamp which,
alone in the shadowy front of my hotel, was striving to resist the
gathering darkness, and for the sake of which I went indoors before
it was quite dark, for pleasure, as to an appetising meal. I kept,
when I was in my room, the same fulness of sensation that I had
felt outside. It gave such an apparent convexity of surface to things
which as a rule seem flat and empty, to the yellow flame of the fire,
the coarse blue paper on the ceiling, on which the setting sun had
scribbled corkscrews and whirligigs, like a schoolboy with a piece of
red chalk, the curiously patterned cloth on the round table, on which
a ream of essay paper and an inkpot lay in readiness for me, with
one of Bergotte’s novels, that ever since then these things have
continued to seem to me to be enriched with a whole form of
existence which I feel that I should be able to extract from them if it
were granted me to set eyes on them again. I thought with joy of
the barracks that I had just left and of their weather-cock turning
with every wind that blew. Like a diver breathing through a pipe
which rises above the surface of the water, I felt that I was in a
sense maintaining contact with a healthy, open-air life when I kept
as a baiting-place those barracks, that towering observatory,
dominating a country-side furrowed with canals of green enamel,
into whose various buildings I esteemed as a priceless privilege,
which I hoped would last, my freedom to go whenever I chose,
always certain of a welcome.
At seven o’clock I dressed myself and went out again to dine with
Saint-Loup at the hotel where he took his meals. I liked to go there
on foot. It was by now pitch dark, and after the third day of my visit
there began to blow, as soon as night had fallen, an icy wind which
seemed a harbinger of snow. As I walked, I ought not, strictly
speaking, to have ceased for a moment to think of Mme. de
Guermantes; it was only in the attempt to draw nearer to her that I
had come to visit Robert’s garrison. But a memory, a grief, are
fleeting things. There are days when they remove so far that we are
barely conscious of them, we think that they have gone for ever.
Then we pay attention to other things. And the streets of this town
had not yet become for me what streets are in the place where one
is accustomed to live, simply means of communication between one
part and another. The life led by the inhabitants of this unknown
world must, it seemed to me, be a marvellous thing; and often the
lighted windows of some dwelling-house kept me standing for a long
while motionless in the darkness by laying before my eyes the actual
and mysterious scenes of an existence into which I might not
penetrate. Here the fire-spirit displayed to me in purple colouring the
booth of a chestnut seller in which a couple of serjeants, their belts
slung over the backs of chairs, were playing cards, never dreaming
that a magician’s wand was making them emerge from the night,
like a transparency on the stage, and presenting them in their true
lineaments at that very moment to the eyes of an arrested passer-by
whom they could not see. In a little curiosity shop a candle, burned
almost to its socket, projecting its warm glow over an engraving
reprinted it in sanguine, while, battling against the darkness, the
light of the big lamp tanned a scrap of leather, inlaid a dagger with
fiery spangles, on pictures which were only bad copies spread a
priceless film of gold like the patina of time or the varnish used by a
master, made in fact of the whole hovel, in which there was nothing
but pinchbeck rubbish, a marvellous composition by Rembrandt.
Sometimes I lifted my gaze to some huge old dwelling-house on
which the shutters had not been closed and in which amphibious
men and women floated slowly to and fro in the rich liquid that after
nightfall rose incessantly from the wells of the lamps to fill the rooms
to the very brink of the outer walls of stone and glass, the
movement of their bodies sending through it long unctuous golden
ripples. I proceeded on my way, and often, in the dark alley that ran
past the cathedral, as long ago on the road to Méséglise, the force
of my desire caught and held me; it seemed that a woman must be
on the point of appearing, to satisfy it; if, in the darkness, I felt
suddenly brush past me a skirt, the violence of the pleasure which I
then felt made it impossible for me to believe that the contact was
accidental and I attempted to seize in my arms a terrified stranger.
This gothic alley meant for me something so real that if I had been
successful in raising and enjoying a woman there, it would have
been impossible for me not to believe that it was the ancient charm
of the place that was bringing us together, and even though she
were no more than a common street-walker, stationed there every
evening, still the wintry night, the strange place, the darkness, the
mediaeval atmosphere would have lent her their mysterious glamour.
I thought of what might be in store for me; to try to forget Mme. de
Guermantes seemed to me a dreadful thing, but reasonable, and for
the first time possible, easy perhaps even. In the absolute quiet of
this neighbourhood I could hear ahead of me shouted words and
laughter which must come from tipsy revellers staggering home. I
waited to see them, I stood peering in the direction from which I
had heard the sound. But I was obliged to wait for some time, for
the surrounding silence was so intense that it allowed to travel with
the utmost clearness and strength sounds that were still a long way
off. Finally the revellers did appear; not, as I had supposed, in front
of me, but ever so far behind. Whether the intersection of side-
streets, the interposition of buildings had, by reverberation, brought
about this acoustic error, or because it is very difficult to locate a
sound when the place from which it comes is not known, I had been
as far wrong over direction as over distance.
The wind grew stronger. It was thick and bristling with coming
snow. I returned to the main street and jumped on board the little
tramway-car on which, from its platform, an officer, without
apparently seeing them, was acknowledging the salutes of the
loutish soldiers who trudged past along the pavement, their faces
daubed crimson by the cold, reminding me, in this little town which
the sudden leap from autumn into early winter seemed to have
transported farther north, of the rubicund faces which Breughel
gives to his merry, junketing, frostbound peasants.
And sure enough at the hotel where I was to meet Saint-Loup and
his friends and to which the fair now beginning had attracted a
number of people from near and far, I found, as I hurried across the
courtyard with its glimpses of glowing kitchens in which chickens
were turning on spits, pigs were roasting, lobsters being flung, alive,
into what the landlord called the “everlasting fire”, an influx (worthy
of some Numbering of the People before Bethlehem such as the old
Flemish masters used to paint) of new arrivals who assembled there
in groups, asking the landlord or one of his staff (who, if he did not
like the look of them, would recommend lodgings elsewhere in the
town) whether they could have dinner and beds, while a scullion
hurried past holding a struggling fowl by the neck. And similarly, in
the big dining-room which I crossed the first day before coming to
the smaller room in which my friend was waiting for me, it was of
some feast in the Gospels portrayed with a mediaeval simplicity and
an exaggeration typically Flemish that one was reminded by the
quantity of fish, pullets, grouse, woodcock, pigeons, brought in
dressed and garnished and piping hot by breathless waiters who slid
over the polished floor to gain speed and set them down on the
huge carving table where they were at once cut up but where—for
most of the people had nearly finished dinner when I arrived—they
accumulated untouched, as though their profusion and the haste of
those who brought them in were due not so much to the
requirements of the diners as to respect for the sacred text,
scrupulously followed in the letter but quaintly illustrated by real
details borrowed from local custom, and to an aesthetic and religious
scruple for making evident to the eye the solemnity of the feast by
the profusion of the victuals and the assiduity of the servers. One of
these stood lost in thought at the far end of the room by a
sideboard; and to find out from him, who alone appeared calm
enough to be capable of answering me, in which room our table had
been laid, making my way forward among the chafing-dishes that
had been lighted here and there to keep the late comers’ plates from
growing cold (which did not, however, prevent the dessert, in the
centre of the room, from being piled on the outstretched hands of a
huge mannikin, sometimes supported on the wings of a duck,
apparently of crystal, but really of ice, carved afresh every day with
a hot iron by a sculptor-cook, quite in the Flemish manner), I went
straight—at the risk of being knocked down by his colleagues—
towards this servitor, in whom I felt that I recognised a character
who is traditionally present in all these sacred subjects, for he
reproduced with scrupulous accuracy the blunt features, fatuous and
ill-drawn, the musing expression, already half aware of the miracle
of a divine presence which the others have not yet begun to
suspect. I should add that, in view probably of the coming fair, this
presentation was strengthened by a celestial contingent, recruited in
mass, of cherubim and seraphim. A young angel musician, whose
fair hair enclosed a fourteen-year-old face, was not, it was true,
playing on any instrument, but stood musing before a gong or a pile
of plates, while other less infantile angels flew swiftly across the
boundless expanse of the room, beating the air with the ceaseless
fluttering of the napkins which fell along the lines of their bodies like
the wings in “primitive” paintings, with pointed ends. Fleeing those
ill-defined regions, screened by a hedge of palms through which the
angelic servitors looked, from a distance, as though they had floated
down out of the empyrean, I explored my way to the smaller room
in which Saint-Loup’s table was laid. I found there several of his
friends who dined with him regularly, nobles except for one or two
commoners in whom the young nobles had, in their school days,
detected likely friends, and with whom they readily associated,
proving thereby that they were not on principle hostile to the middle
class, even though it were Republican, provided it had clean hands
and went to mass. On the first of these evenings, before we sat
down to dinner, I drew Saint-Loup into a corner and, in front of all
the rest but so that they should not hear me, said to him:
 “Robert, this is hardly the time or the place for what I am going to
say, but I shan’t be a second. I keep on forgetting to ask you when
I’m in the barracks; isn’t that Mme. de Guermantes’s photograph
that you have on your table?”
“Why, yes; my good aunt.”
“Of course she is; what a fool I am; you told me before that she
was; I’d forgotten all about her being your aunt. I say, your friends
will be getting impatient, we must be quick, they’re looking at us;
another time will do; it isn’t at all important.”
“That’s all right; go on as long as you like. They can wait.”
“No, no; I do want to be polite to them; they’re so nice; besides, it
doesn’t really matter in the least, I assure you.”
“Do you know that worthy Oriane, then?”
This “worthy Oriane,” as he might have said, “that good Oriane,”
did not imply that Saint-Loup regarded Mme. de Guermantes as
especially good. In this instance the words “good”, “excellent”,
“worthy” are mere reinforcements of the demonstrative “that”,
indicating a person who is known to both parties and of whom the
speaker does not quite know what to say to someone outside the
intimate circle. The word “good” does duty as a stop-gap and keeps
the conversation going for a moment until the speaker has hit upon
“Do you see much of her?” or “I haven’t set eyes on her for months,”
or “I shall be seeing her on Tuesday,” or “She must be getting on,
now, you know.”
“I can’t tell you how funny it is that it should be her photograph,
because we’re living in her house now, in Paris, and I’ve been
hearing the most astounding things” (I should have been hard put to
it to say what) “about her, which have made me immensely
interested in her, only from a literary point of view, don’t you know,
from a—how shall I put it—from a Balzacian point of view; but
you’re so clever you can see what I mean; I don’t need to explain
things to you; but we must hurry up; what on earth will your friends
think of my manners?”
“They will think absolutely nothing; I have told them that you are
sublime, and they are a great deal more alarmed than you are.”
 “You are too kind. But listen, what I want to say is this: I suppose
Mme. de Guermantes hasn’t any idea that I know you, has she?”
“I can’t say; I haven’t seen her since the summer, because I
haven’t had any leave since she’s been in town.”
“What I was going to say is this: I’ve been told that she looks on
me as an absolute idiot.”
“That I do not believe; Oriane is not exactly an eagle, but all the
same she’s by no means stupid.”
“You know that, as a rule, I don’t care about your advertising the
good opinion you’re kind enough to hold of me; I’m not conceited.
That’s why I’m sorry you should have said flattering things about me
to your friends here (we will go back to them in two seconds). But
Mme. de Guermantes is different; if you could let her know—if you
would even exaggerate a trifle—what you think of me, you would
give me great pleasure.”
“Why, of course I will, if that’s all you want me to do; it’s not very
difficult; but what difference can it possibly make to you what she
thinks of you? I suppose you think her no end of a joke, really;
anyhow, if that’s all you want we can discuss it in front of the others
or when we are by ourselves; I’m afraid of your tiring yourself if you
stand talking, and it’s so inconvenient too, when we have heaps of
opportunities of being alone together.”
It was precisely this inconvenience that had given me courage to
approach Robert; the presence of the others was for me a pretext
that justified my giving my remarks a curt and incoherent form,
under cover of which I could more easily dissemble the falsehood of
my saying to my friend that I had forgotten his connexion with the
Duchess, and also did not give him time to frame—with regard to my
reasons for wishing that Mme. de Guermantes should know that I
was his friend, was clever, and so forth—questions which would have
been all the more disturbing in that I should not have been able to
answer them.
“Robert, I’m surprised that a man of your intelligence should fail
to understand that one doesn’t discuss the things that will give one’s
friends pleasure; one does them. Now I, if you were to ask me no
matter what, and indeed I only wish you would ask me to do
something for you, I can assure you I shouldn’t want any
explanations. I may ask you for more than I really want; I have no
desire to know Mme. de Guermantes, but just to test you I ought to
have said that I was anxious to dine with Mme. de Guermantes; I
am sure you would never have done it.”
“Not only should I have done it, I will do it.”
“When?”
“Next time I’m in Paris, three weeks from now, I expect.”
“We shall see; I dare say she won’t want to see me, though. I
can’t tell you how grateful I am.”
“Not at all; it’s nothing.”
“Don’t say that; it’s everything in the world, because now I can
see what sort of friend you are; whether what I ask you to do is
important or not, disagreeable or not, whether I am really keen
about it or ask you only as a test, it makes no difference; you say
you will do it, and there you shew the fineness of your mind and
heart. A stupid friend would have started a discussion.”
Which was exactly what he had just been doing; but perhaps I
wanted to flatter his self-esteem; perhaps also I was sincere, the
sole touchstone of merit seeming to me to be the extent to which a
friend could be useful in respect of the one thing that seemed to me
to have any importance, namely my love. Then I went on, perhaps
from cunning, possibly from a genuine increase of affection inspired
by gratitude, expectancy, and the copy of Mme. de Guermantes’s
very features which nature had made in producing her nephew
Robert: “But, I say, we mustn’t keep them waiting any longer, and
I’ve mentioned only one of the two things I wanted to ask you, the
less important; the other is more important to me, but I’m afraid you
will never consent. Would it bore you if we were to call each other
tu?”
“Bore me? My dear fellow! Joy! Tears of joy! Undreamed-of
happiness!”
“Thank you—tu I mean; you begin first—ever so much. It is such
a pleasure to me that you needn’t do anything about Mme. de
Guermantes if you’ld rather not, this is quite enough for me.”
“I can do both.”
 “I say, Robert! Listen to me a minute,” I said to him later while we
were at dinner. “Oh, it’s really too absurd the way our conversation is
always being interrupted, I can’t think why—you remember the lady
I was speaking to you about just now.”
“Yes.”
“You’re quite sure you know who’ I mean?”
“Why, what do you take me for, a village idiot?”
“You wouldn’t care to give me her photograph, I suppose?”
I had meant to ask him only for the loan of it. But when the time
came to speak I felt shy, I decided that the request was indiscreet,
and in order to hide my confusion I put the question more bluntly,
and increased my demand, as if it had been quite natural.
“No; I should have to ask her permission first,” was his answer.
He blushed as he spoke. I could see that he had a reservation in
his mind, that he credited me also with one, that he would give only
a partial service to my love, under the restraint of certain moral
principles, and for this I hated him.
At the same time I was touched to see how differently Saint-Loup
behaved towards me now that I was no longer alone with him, and
that his friends formed an audience. His increased affability would
have left me cold had I thought that it was deliberately assumed;
but I could feel that it was spontaneous and consisted only of all
that he had to say about me in my absence and refrained as a rule
from saying when we were together by ourselves. In our private
conversations I might certainly suspect the pleasure that he found in
talking to me, but that pleasure he almost always left unexpressed.
Now, at the same remarks from me which, as a rule, he enjoyed
without shewing it, he watched from the corner of his eye to see
whether they produced on his friends the effect on which he had
counted, an effect corresponding to what he had promised them
beforehand. The mother of a girl in her first season could be no
more unrelaxing in her attention to her daughter’s responses and to
the attitude of the public. If I had made some remark at which,
alone in my company, he would merely have smiled, he was afraid
that the others might not have seen the point, and put in a “What’s
that?” to make me repeat what I had said, to attract attention, and