In Search of Lost Time quotes

For a long time I used to go to bed early.

Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say “I’m going to sleep.” And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me;

and to the delightful prospect of being once again at home.

I would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my pillow, as plump and blooming as the cheeks of babyhood.

Or I would strike a match to look at my watch. Nearly midnight.

I remembered it again immediately I had succeeded in making myself wake up to escape my great-uncle’s fingers; still, as a measure of precaution, I would bury the whole of my head in the pillow before returning to the world of dreams.

Sometimes, too, just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some strain in the position of my limbs.

Formed by the appetite that I was on the point of gratifying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that gratification. My body, conscious that its own warmth was permeating hers, would strive to become one with her, and I would awake.

in a flash I would traverse and surmount centuries of civilisation, and out of a half-visualised succession of oil-lamps, followed by shirts with turned-down collars, would put together by degrees the component parts of my ego.

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.

For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me through the darkness: things, places, years.

… custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling.

Custom! that skilful but unhurrying manager who begins by torturing the mind for weeks on end with her provisional arrangements; whom the mind, for all that, is fortunate in discovering, for without the help of custom it would never contrive, by its own efforts, to make any room seem habitable.

Certainly I was now well awake;

that is, he passed his hand across his forehead, dried his eyes, and wiped his glasses. And he could never be consoled for the loss of his wife, but used to say to my grandfather, during the two years for which he survived her,

“It’s a funny thing, now; I very often think of my poor wife, but I cannot think of her very much at any one time.”

“Often, but a little at a time, like poor old Swann,” became one of my grandfather’s favourite phrases, which he would apply to all kinds of things.

our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.

Even the simple act which we describe as “seeing someone we know” is, to some extent, an intellectual process.

We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.

But we sat silent. My grandmother’s sisters having expressed a desire to mention to Swann this reference to him in the Figaro, my great-aunt dissuaded them.

Whenever she saw in others an advantage, however trivial, which she herself lacked, she would persuade herself that it was no advantage at all, but a drawback, and would pity so as not to have to envy them.

“I don’t think that would please him at all; I know very well, I should hate to see my name printed like that, as large as life, in the paper, and I shouldn’t feel at all flattered if anyone spoke to me about it.”

Alas! Swann had learned by experience that the good intentions of a third party are powerless to control a woman who is annoyed to find herself pursued even into a ballroom by a man whom she does not love.

Too often, the kind friend comes down again alone.

My mother did not appear, but with no attempt to safeguard my self-respect (which depended upon her keeping up the fiction that she had asked me to let her know the result of my search for something or other) made Françoise tell me, in so …

It is a long time, too, since my father has been able to tell Mamma to “Go with the child.”

Never again will such hours be possible for me.

But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father’s presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma.

But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father’s presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma.

Actually, their echo has never ceased: it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them afresh, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the streets that one would suppose them to have been stopped forever, until they sound out again through the silent evening air.

Mamma spent that night in my room:

I had the consolation that I need no longer mingle apprehensive scruples with the bitterness of my tears;

I could weep henceforward without sin.

I felt no small degree of pride, either, in Françoise’s presence at this return to humane conditions which, not an hour after Mamma had refused to come up to my room and had sent the snubbing message that I was to go to sleep, raised …

To me it was in reality all dead.

There is a large element of hazard in these matters, and a second hazard, that of our own death, often prevents us from awaiting for any length of time the favours of the first.

I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us …

Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile.

The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect.

or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself.

I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.

Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come?

What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing.

Seek? More than that: create.

It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.

… difficult enterprise, every work of importance, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of today and of my hopes for tomorrow, which let themselves be pondered over without effort or distress of mind.

And suddenly the memory returns.

The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give …

… saw of the church served to distinguish the whole from any other building by a kind of general feeling which pervaded it, but it was in the steeple that the church seemed to display a consciousness of itself, to affirm its individual and responsible existence.

It was the steeple which spoke for the church.

I think, too, that in a confused way my grandmother found in the steeple of Combray what she prized above anything else in the world, namely, a natural air and an air of distinction. Ignorant of architecture, she would say:

“

My dears, laugh at me if you like; it is not conventionally beautiful, but there is something in its quaint old face which pleases me. If it could play the piano, I am sure it would really play.

” And when she gazed on it, when her eyes followed the gentle tension, the fervent inclination of its stony slopes which drew together as they rose, like hands joined in prayer, she would absorb herself so utterly in the outpouring of the spire that …

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.

… of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the picture was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of “real” people would be a decided improvement.

A “real” person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift.

If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion;

“

Not caring for their lives, is it? Why, what in the world is there that we should care for if it’s not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers us a second time?

Oh dear, oh dear; you’re right all the same; it’s quite true, they don’t care! I can remember them in ’70; in those wretched wars they’ve no fear of death left in them; they’re nothing more nor less than madmen;

It was in an ostensible vein of sarcasm that he had asked me to call him, and that he himself called me, “my master.”

But, as a matter of fact, we each derived a certain amount of satisfaction from the mannerism, being still at the age in which one believes that one gives a thing real existence by giving it a name.

Unfortunately I was not able to set at rest, by further talks with Bloch, in which I might have insisted upon an explanation, the doubts he had engendered in me when he told me that fine lines of poetry (from which I, if you please, …

Which drew from Bloch nothing more instructive than “

Sir, I am absolutely incapable of telling you whether it has rained. I live so resolutely apart from physical contingencies that my senses no longer trouble to inform me of them.

”

But none of them had yet gone so far as to say “He is a great writer, he has great talent.” They did not even credit him with talent at all. They did not speak, because they were not aware of it.

We are very slow in recognising in the peculiar physiognomy of a new writer the type which is labelled “great talent” in our museum of general ideas.

Simply because that physiognomy is new and strange, we can find in it no resemblance to what we are accustomed to call talent. We say rather originality, charm, delicacy, strength;

Simply because that physiognomy is new and strange, we can find in it no resemblance to what we are accustomed to call talent.

We say rather originality, charm, delicacy, strength; and then one day we add up the sum of these, and find that it amounts simply to talent.

“Are there any books in which Bergotte has written about Berma?” I asked M. Swann.

“Three o’clock! It’s unbelievable how time flies.”

A little tap at the window, as though some missile had struck it, followed by a plentiful, falling sound, as light, though, as if a shower of sand were being sprinkled from a window overhead; then the fall spread, took on an order, a rhythm, became liquid, loud, drumming, musical, innumerable, universal. It was the rain.

“There, Françoise, what did I tell you? How it’s coming down! But I think I heard the bell at the garden gate: go along and see who can be outside in this weather.”

… joy, a pious act of thanksgiving to God, Who is pleased to grant that life shall be less cruel than our dreams, feebly illumined her face, and, with the habit she had formed of speaking to herself, half-aloud, when she thought herself alone, she murmured:

“The Lord be praised! We have nothing to disturb us here but the kitchen-maid’s baby. And I’ve been dreaming that my poor Octave had come back to life, and was trying to make me take a walk every day!”

She stretched out a hand towards her rosary, which was lying on the small table, but sleep was once again getting the mastery, and did not leave her the strength to reach it;

And from that instant I had not to take another step; the ground moved forward under my feet in that garden where, for so long, my actions had ceased to require any control, or even attention, from my will.

Custom came to take me in her arms, carried me all the way up to my bed, and laid me down there like a little child.

Although Saturday, by beginning an hour earlier, and by depriving her of the services of Françoise, passed more slowly than other days for my aunt, yet, the moment it was past, and a new week begun, she would look forward with impatience to its return, …

… the sum total of her virtues concealed many of these back-kitchen tragedies, just as history reveals to us that the reigns of the kings and queens who are portrayed as kneeling with clasped hands in the windows of churches, were stained by oppression and bloodshed.

I had taken note of the fact that, apart from her own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity inspired in her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance separating the sufferers from herself.

The tears which flowed from her in torrents when she read of the misfortunes of persons unknown to her, in a newspaper, were quickly stemmed once she had been able to form a more accurate mental picture of the victims.

His fringed eyelids darkened, and drooped.

His mouth, which had been stiffened and seared with bitter lines, was the first to recover, and smiled, while his eyes still seemed full of pain, like the eyes of a good-looking martyr whose body bristles with arrows.

“No, I do not know them,” he said, but instead of uttering so simple a piece of information, a reply in which there was so little that could astonish me, in the natural and conversational tone which would have befitted it, he recited it with …

… Legrandin had replied to me already in that wounded look, that stiffened smile, the undue gravity of his tone in uttering those few words, in the thousand arrows by which our own Legrandin had instantaneously been stabbed and sickened, like a Saint Sebastian of snobbery:

“Oh, how you hurt me! No, I do not know the Guermantes family. Do not remind me of the great sorrow of my life.”

And since this other, this irrepressible, dominant, despotic Legrandin, if he lacked our Legrandin’s charming vocabulary, showed an infinitely greater promptness in expressing himself, by means of what are called “reflexes,” it followed that, when Legrandin the talker attempted to silence him, he would already …

This was not to say that M. Legrandin was anything but sincere when he inveighed against snobs.

He could not (from his own knowledge, at least) be aware that he was one also, since it is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to find out about our own can be no more than what other people have shown us.

Upon ourselves they react but indirectly, through our imagination, which substitutes for our actual, primary motives other, secondary motives, less stark and therefore more decent. Never had Legrandin’s snobbishness impelled him to make a habit of visiting a duchess as such.

In a final and desperate effort the smiling gaze of Legrandin struggled to the extreme limits of its tenderness, vagueness, candour, and distraction; then feeling, no doubt, that there was nothing left for it now but to answer, he said to us:

“I have friends all the world over, wherever there are companies of trees, stricken but not defeated, which have come together to offer a common supplication, with pathetic obstinacy, to an inclement sky which has no mercy upon them.”

“That is not quite what I meant,” interrupted my father, obstinate as a tree and merciless as the sky.

… Good night to you, neighbours,” he added, moving away from us with that evasive abruptness to which we were accustomed; and then, turning towards us, with a physicianly finger raised in warning, he resumed the consultation:

“No Balbec before you are fifty!” he called out to me, “and even then it must depend on the state of the heart.”

My father spoke to him of it again, as often as we met him, and tortured him with questions, but it was labour in vain:

Guermantes, on the other hand, meant no more than the ultimate goal, ideal rather than real, of the “Guermantes way,” a sort of abstract geographical term like the North Pole or the Equator.

And so to “take the Guermantes way” in order to get to Méséglise, or vice versa, would have seemed to me as nonsensical a proceeding as to turn to the east in order to reach the west.

Since my father used always to speak of the “Méséglise way” as comprising the finest view of a plain that he knew anywhere, and of the “Guermantes way” as typical of river scenery, I had invested each of them, by conceiving them in this way …

the little girl’s smile abruptly faded, and, seizing her trowel, she made off without turning to look again in my direction, with an air of obedience, inscrutable and sly.

And so was wafted to my ears the name of Gilberte, bestowed on me like a talisman which might, perhaps, enable me some day to rediscover her whom its syllables had just endowed with a definite personality, whereas, a moment earlier, she had been only something vaguely seen.

So it came to me, uttered across the heads of the stocks and jasmines, pungent and cool as the drops which fell from the green watering-pipe;

… cast upon the sunlit ground, and also those impalpable threads of golden silk which the setting sun weaves slantingly downwards from beneath their leaves, and which I would see my father slash through with his stick without ever making them swerve from their straight path.

Sometimes in the afternoon sky a white moon would creep up like a little cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have to “come on” for a while, and so goes “in front” in her ordinary clothes to watch the rest of the company for a moment, but keeps in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself.

I was glad to find her image reproduced in books and paintings, though these works of art were very different—at least in my earlier years, before Bloch had attuned my eyes and mind to more subtle harmonies—from those in which the moon seems fair to …

But M. Vinteuil assured them that it was, and indeed it is remarkable that people never fail to arouse admiration of their normal qualities in the relatives of anyone with whom they are in physical intercourse.

Bodily passion, which has been so unjustly decried, compels its victims to display every vestige that is in them of unselfishness and generosity, and so effectively that they shine resplendent in the eyes of all beholders.

Dr.

… which exhilarated me, and which, not being developed to the point at which they might rest exposed to the light of day, rather than submit to a slow and difficult course of elucidation, found it easier and more pleasant to drift into an immediate outlet.

And so it is that the bulk of what appear to be the emotional renderings of our inmost sensations do no more than relieve us of the burden of those sensations by allowing them to escape from us in an indistinct form which does not teach us how it should be interpreted.

When I attempt to reckon up all that I owe to the “Méséglise way,” all the humble discoveries of which it was either the accidental setting or the direct inspiration and cause, I am reminded that it was in that same autumn, on one of …

good to be out walking!”—that I learned that identical emotions do not spring up in the hearts of all men simultaneously, by a preestablished order.

Later on I discovered that, whenever I had read for too long and was in a mood for conversation, the friend to whom I would be burning to say something would at that moment have finished indulging himself in the delights of conversation, and wanted nothing now but to be left to read undisturbed.

And if I had been thinking with affection of my parents, and forming the most sensible and proper plans for giving them pleasure, they would have been using the same interval of time to discover some misdeed that I had already forgotten, and would begin …

Indeed, that pleasure does not exist, isolated and formulated in the consciousness, as the ultimate object with which one seeks a woman’s company, or as the cause of the uneasiness which, in anticipation, one then feels.

Hardly even does one think of oneself, but only how to escape from oneself.

Obscurely awaited, immanent and concealed, it rouses to such a paroxysm, at the moment when at last it makes itself felt, those other pleasures which we find in the tender glance, in the kiss of her who is by our side, that it seems to …

Vinteuil and herself a phraseology, a mentality not designed for vice, which made her regard it as not in any way different from the numberless little social duties and courtesies to which she must devote herself every day.

It was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil.

And as, every time that she indulged in it, pleasure came to her attended by evil thoughts such as, ordinarily, had no place in her virtuous mind, she came at length to see in pleasure itself something diabolical, to identify it with Evil. Perhaps Mlle.

The longings by which I had just now been absorbed, to go to Guermantes, to travel, to live a life of happiness—I was now so remote from them that their fulfilment would have afforded me no pleasure.

How readily would I have sacrificed them all, just to be able to cry, all night long, in the arms of Mamma!

Shuddering with emotion, I could not take my agonised eyes from my mother’s face, which was not to appear that evening in the bedroom where I could see myself already lying, in imagination; and wished only that I were lying dead.

It is because I used to think of certain things, of certain people, while I was roaming along them, that the things, the people which they taught me to know, and these alone, I still take seriously, still give me joy.

Whether it be that the faith which creates has ceased to exist in me, or that reality will take shape in the memory alone, the flowers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers.

The “Méséglise way” with its lilacs, its hawthorns, its cornflowers, its poppies, its apple-trees, the “Guermantes way” with its river full of tadpoles, its water-lilies, and its buttercups have constituted for me for all time the picture of the land in which I fain would …

… money to other poor wretches, in order to have anyone at their dinner-parties, that if somebody had offered to procure them an invitation to the house of either of those great dames, the old doorkeeper and the woman of “easy virtue” would have contemptuously declined.

The Verdurins never invited you to dinner; you had your “place laid” there.

There was never any programme for the evening’s entertainment. The young pianist would play, but only if he felt inclined, for no one was forced to do anything, and, as M. Verdurin used to say: “We’re all friends here. Liberty Hall, you know!”

From the beginning of December it would make her quite ill to think that the “faithful” might fail her on Christmas and New Year’s Days. The pianist’s aunt insisted that he must accompany her, on the latter, to a family dinner at her mother’s.

“You don’t suppose she’ll die, your mother,” exclaimed Mme. Verdurin bitterly, “if you don’t have dinner with her on New Year’s Day, like people in the provinces!”

Her uneasiness was kindled again in Holy Week: “Now you, Doctor, you’re a sensible, broad-minded man; you’ll come, of course, on Good Friday, just like any other day?”

… it is not by other men of intelligence that an intelligent man is afraid of being thought a fool, so it is not by the great gentleman but by boors and “bounders” that a man of fashion is afraid of finding his social value underrated.

Three-fourths of the mental ingenuity displayed, of the social falsehoods scattered broadcast ever since the world began by people whose importance they have served only to diminish, have been aimed at inferiors.

And Swann, who behaved quite simply and was at his ease when with a duchess, would tremble for fear of being despised, and would instantly begin to pose, were he to meet her grace’s maid.

Three-fourths of the mental ingenuity displayed, of the social falsehoods scattered broadcast ever since the world began by people whose importance they have served only to diminish, have been aimed at inferiors.

And Swann, who behaved quite simply and was at his ease when with a duchess, would tremble for fear of being despised, and would instantly begin to pose, were he to meet her grace’s maid.

Unlike so many people, who, either from lack of energy or else from a resigned sense of the obligation laid upon them by their social grandeur to remain moored like houseboats to a certain point on the bank of the stream of life, abstain from …

… these were, as often as not, women whose beauty was of a distinctly “common” type, for the physical qualities which attracted him instinctively, and without reason, were the direct opposite of those that he admired in the women painted or sculptured by his favourite masters.

Depth of character, or a melancholy expression on a woman’s face would freeze his senses, which would, however, immediately melt at the sight of healthy, abundant, rosy human flesh.

If on his travels he met a family whom it would have been more correct for him to make no attempt to know, but among whom a woman caught his eye, adorned with a special charm that was new to him, to remain on his …

… of hearts, if it is no longer, as in early youth, the goal towards which love, of necessity, tends, still is bound to love by so strong an association of ideas that it may well become the cause of love if it presents itself first.

In his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses the heart of a woman may be enough to make him fall in love with her.

And so, at an age when it would appear—since one seeks in love before everything else a subjective pleasure—that the taste for feminine beauty must play the larger part in its procreation, love may come into being, love of the most physical order, without any …

He had sought an excuse in his fear of forming new friendships, which he gallantly described as his fear of a hopeless passion.

“You are afraid of falling in love? How funny that is, when I go about seeking nothing else, and would give my soul just to find a little love somewhere!”

she had said, so naturally and with such an air of conviction that he had been genuinely touched. “Some woman must have made you suffer. And you think that the rest are all like her. She can’t have understood you:

… mortal blow, burying her face in her hands, which completely engulfed it, and prevented her from seeing anything at all, she would appear to be struggling to suppress, to eradicate a laugh which, were she to give way to it, must inevitably leave her inanimate.

So, stupefied with the gaiety of the “faithful,” drunken with comradeship, scandal and asseveration, Mme. Verdurin, perched on her high seat like a cage-bird whose biscuit has been steeped in mulled wine, would sit aloft and sob with fellow-feeling.

Meanwhile M. Verdurin, after first asking Swann’s permission to light his pipe (“No ceremony here, you understand; we’re all pals!”), went and begged the young musician to sit down at the piano.

Anxiously he explored every one of these vaguely seen shapes, as though among the phantoms of the dead, in the realms of darkness, he had been searching for a lost Eurydice.

Among all the methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as the great gust of agitation which, now and then, sweeps over the human spirit.

For then the creature in whose company we are seeking amusement at the moment, her lot is cast, her fate and ours decided, that is the creature whom we shall henceforward love.

It is not necessary that she should have pleased us, up till then, any more, or even as much as others.

All that is necessary is that our taste for her should become exclusive.

And that condition is fulfilled so soon as—in the moment when she has failed to meet us—for the pleasure which we were on the point of enjoying in her charming company is abruptly substituted an anxious torturing desire, whose object is the creature herself, an …

In a restaurant, or in the country, his manner was deliberately and directly the opposite of that by which, only a few days earlier, his friends would have recognised him, that manner which had seemed permanently and unalterably his own.

To such an extent does passion manifest itself in us as a temporary and distinct character, which not only takes the place of our normal character but actually obliterates the signs by which that character has hitherto been discernible.

On the other hand, there was one thing that was, now, invariable, namely that wherever Swann might be spending the evening, he never failed to go on afterwards to Odette.

… true, but latent and ever ready to be reawakened, which he had felt on the evening when Odette had left the Verdurins’ before his arrival, an anguish the actual cessation of which was so agreeable that it might even be called a state of happiness.

Perhaps it was to that hour of anguish that there must be attributed the importance which Odette had since assumed in his life.

Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with …

Perhaps it was to that hour of anguish that there must be attributed the importance which Odette had since assumed in his life.

Other people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact.

Swann could not without anxiety ask himself what Odette would mean to him in the years that were to come.

He would make Odette play him the phrase again, ten, twenty times on end, insisting that, while she played, she must never cease to kiss him.

Every kiss provokes another.

Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life. How closely, in their abundance, are they pressed one against another;

He would make Odette play him the phrase again, ten, twenty times on end, insisting that, while she played, she must never cease to kiss him. Every kiss provokes another.

Ah, in those earliest days of love how naturally the kisses spring into life.

How closely, in their abundance, are they pressed one against another; until lovers would find it as hard to count the kisses exchanged in an hour, as to count the flowers in a meadow in May. Then she would pretend to stop, saying:

while the least indication of reserve on Swann’s part, undraped in any such conventional formula as “Of course, I don’t want to say anything—” to which he would have scorned to descend, appeared to them a deliberate act of treachery.

There are certain original and distinguished authors in whom the least “freedom of speech” is thought revolting because they have not begun by flattering the public taste, and serving up to it the commonplace expressions to which it is used; it was by the same process that Swann infuriated M. Verdurin.

In his case as in theirs it was the novelty of his language which led his audience to suspect the blackness of his designs.

… and so to scatter the “faithful” before their normal time—that on one occasion the Princesse des Laumes (at whose house dinner had been so late that Swann had left before the coffee came in, to join the Verdurins on the Island in the Bois) observed:

“Really, if Swann were thirty years older, and had diabetes, there might be some excuse for his running away like that. He seems to look upon us all as a joke.”

He persuaded himself that the springtime charm, which he could not go down to Combray to enjoy, he would find at least on the He des Cygnes or at Saint-Cloud.

What he was going to do would be extremely awkward, and she would detest him forever after, whereas now, for the moment, for so long as he refrained from knocking, perhaps even in the act of infidelity, she loved him still.

How often is not the prospect of future happiness thus sacrificed to one’s impatient insistence upon an immediate gratification.

But his desire to know the truth was stronger, and seemed to him nobler than his desire for her.

in the case of bodily pain, however, since it is independent of the mind, the mind can dwell upon it, can note that it has diminished, that it has momentarily ceased.

But with this mental pain, the mind, merely by recalling it, created it afresh. To determine not to think of it was but to think of it still, to suffer from it still.

And when, in conversation with his friends, he forgot his sufferings, suddenly a word casually uttered would make him change countenance as a wounded man does when a clumsy hand has touched his aching limb.

… window there had been disclosed to him, with the secret history of an incident which he had despaired of ever being able to learn, a fragment of the life of Odette, seen as through a narrow, luminous incision, cut into its surface without her knowledge.

Then his jealousy rejoiced at the discovery, as though that jealousy had had an independent existence, fiercely egotistical, gluttonous of everything that would feed its vitality, even at the expense of Swann himself.

Now it had food in store, and Swann could begin to grow uneasy afresh every evening, over the visits that Odette had received about five o’clock, and could seek to discover where Forcheville had been at that hour.

He was not jealous, at first, of the whole of Odette’s life, but of those moments only in which an incident, which he had perhaps misinterpreted, had led him to suppose that Odette might have played him false.

His jealousy, like an octopus which throws out a first, then a second, and finally a third tentacle, fastened itself irremovably first to that moment, five o’clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to another again.

But Swann was incapable of inventing his sufferings. They were only the memory, the perpetuation of a suffering that had come to him from without.

His jealousy, like an octopus which throws out a first, then a second, and finally a third tentacle, fastened itself irremovably first to that moment, five o’clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to another again.

But Swann was incapable of inventing his sufferings. They were only the memory, the perpetuation of a suffering that had come to him from without.

From without, however, everything brought him fresh suffering. He decided to separate Odette from Forcheville, by taking her away for a few days to the south.

For if you are such, how could anyone love you, for you are not even a person, a definite, imperfect, but at least perceptible entity.

You are a formless water that will trickle down any slope that it may come upon, a fish devoid of memory, incapable of thought, which all its life long in its aquarium will continue to dash itself, a hundred times a day, against a wall of glass, always mistaking it for water.

Do you realise that your answer will have the effect—I do not say of making me cease from that moment to love you, that goes without saying, but of making you less attractive to my eyes when I realise that you are not a person, …

The ways? More than that, the authority, the right to join her.

For, after all, the timetable, and the trains themselves, were not meant for dogs.

If the public were carefully informed, by means of printed advertisements, that at eight o’clock in the morning a train started for Pierrefonds which arrived there at ten, that could only be because going to Pierrefonds was a lawful act, for which permission from Odette …

It was only a servant coming in. He noticed the incessant rumble of passing carriages, to which he had never before paid any attention.

He could hear them, one after another, a long way off, coming nearer, passing his door without stopping, and bearing away into the distance a message which was not for him.

He waited all night, to no purpose, for the Verdurins had returned unexpectedly, and Odette had been in Paris since midday; it had not occurred to her to tell him;

it had not occurred to her to tell him; not knowing what to do with herself she had spent the evening alone at a theatre, had long since gone home to bed, and was peacefully asleep.

As a matter of fact, she had never given him a thought. And such moments as these, in which she forgot Swann’s very existence, were of more value to Odette, did more to attach him to her, than all her infidelities.

For in this way Swann was kept in that state of painful agitation which had once before been effective in making his interest blossom into love, on the night when he had failed to find Odette at the Verdurins’ and had hunted for her all …

These words had never appeared to him false except when, before hearing them, he had suspected that they were going to be.

For him to believe that she was lying, an anticipatory suspicion was indispensable. It was also, however, sufficient.

Given that, everything that Odette might say appeared to him suspect. Did she mention a name: it was obviously that of one of her lovers; once this supposition had taken shape, he would spend weeks in tormenting himself;

Examining his complaint with as much scientific detachment as if he had inoculated himself with it in order to study its effects, he told himself that, when he was cured of it, what Odette might or might not do would be indifferent to him.

But in his morbid state, to tell the truth, he feared death itself no more than such a recovery, which would, in fact, amount to the death of all that he then was.

After these quiet evenings, Swann’s suspicions would be temporarily lulled;

… everyone who possesses something precious, so as to know what would happen if he ceased for a moment to possess it, he had detached the precious object from his mind, leaving, as he thought, everything else in the same state as when it was there.

But the absence of one part from a whole is not only that, it is not simply a partial omission, it is a disturbance of all the other parts, a new state which it was impossible to foresee from the old.

But at other times—when Odette was on the point of going away for a holiday—it was after some trifling quarrel for which he had chosen the pretext, that he decided not to write to her and not to see her until her return, giving the …

The few words which someone had let fall, in his hearing, about a man who, it appeared, had been Odette’s lover, had left Swann dumbfounded.

But the very things which he would, before knowing them, have regarded as the most terrible to learn and the most impossible to believe, were, once he knew them, incorporated for all time in the general mass of his sorrow; he admitted them, he could no longer have understood their not existing.

Only, each one of them in its passage traced an indelible line, altering the picture that he had formed of his mistress.

It is true that Swann was little the wiser for such information as he did receive.

To know a thing does not enable us, always, to prevent its happening, but after all the things that we know we do hold, if not in our hands, at any rate in our minds, where we can dispose of them as we choose, which gives us the illusion of a sort of power to control them.

He was quite happy whenever M. de Charlus was with Odette. He knew that between M. de Charlus and her nothing untoward could ever happen, that when M.

but no sooner had he made himself ready to sleep, relaxing a self-control of which he was not even conscious, so habitual had it become, than an icy shudder convulsed his body and he burst into sobs.

He did not wish to know why, but dried his eyes, saying with a smile: “This is delightful; I’m becoming neurasthenic.”

After which he could not save himself from utter exhaustion at the thought that, next day, he must begin afresh his attempt to find out what Odette had been doing, must use all his influence to contrive to see her.

… joy in the idea that he had, perhaps, a tumour which would prove fatal, that he need not concern himself with anything further, that it was his malady which was going to govern his life, to make a plaything of him, until the not-distant end.

If indeed, at this period, it often happened that, though without admitting it even to himself, he longed for death, it was in order to escape not so much from the keenness of his sufferings as from the monotony of his struggle.

And yet he would have wished to live until the time came when he no longer loved her, when she would have no reason for lying to him, when at length he might learn from her whether, on the day when he had gone to …

(So, at least, she pretended, and a little of that emotion must have been sincere, or she would not have been anxious to enlarge and emphasise it.) So Swann had been pleasing to her then.

Our hands do not tremble except for ourselves, or for those whom we love.

When they have ceased to control our happiness how peaceful, how easy, how bold do we become in their presence!

… she flung her shoulders proudly back until they seemed to part company with her bust, while her head, which lay almost horizontally upon them, made one think of the “stuck-on” head of a pheasant which is brought to the table regally adorned with its feathers.

Not that she in the least degree resembled a pheasant, having been endowed by nature with a short and squat and masculine figure; but successive mortifications had given her a backward tilt, such as one may observe in trees which have taken root on the very edge of a precipice and are forced to grow backwards to preserve their balance.

Since she was obliged, in order to console herself for not being quite on a level with the rest of the Guermantes, to repeat to herself incessantly that it was owing to the uncompromising rigidity of her principles and pride that she saw so little …

The pianist, who was “down” to play two pieces by Chopin, after finishing the Prelude had at once attacked a Polonaise.

But once Mme. de Gallardon had informed her cousin that Swann was in the room, Chopin himself might have risen from the grave and played all his works in turn without Mme. des Laumes’s paying him the slightest attention.

She belonged to that one of the two divisions of the human race in which the untiring curiosity which the other half feels about the people whom it does not know is replaced by an unfailing interest in the people whom it does.

Swann that he’s the sort of man one can’t have in the house; is that true?”

“Why, you, of all people, ought to know that it’s true,” replied the Princesse des Laumes, “for you must have asked him a hundred times, and he’s never been to your house once.”

And leaving her cousin mortified afresh, she broke out again into a laugh which scandalised everyone who was trying to listen to the music, but attracted the attention of Mme.

“Ah! Princess, it’s easy to see you’re not a Guermantes for nothing. You have your share of it, all right, the ‘wit of the Guermantes’!”

“But people always talk about the wit of the Guermantes; I never could make out why. Do you really know any others who have it?”

she rallied him, with a rippling flow of laughter, her features concentrated, yoked to the service of her animation, her eyes sparkling, blazing with a radiant sunshine of gaiety which could be kindled only by such speeches—even if the Princess had to make them herself—as …

“I don’t know what the Chapter owes me, but I do know that I’m ‘touched’ for a hundred francs, every year, by the Curé, which is a due that I could very well do without. But surely these Cambremers have rather a startling name.

It ends just in time, but it ends badly!

” she said with a laugh.

Just imagine, I could not make that idiot Froberville see that there was anything funny about the name Cambremer.

Do agree that life is a dreadful business. It’s only when I see you that I stop feeling bored.

”

“Yes, life is a dreadful business! We must meet more often, my dear friend.

What is so nice about you is that you are not cheerful.

We could spend a most pleasant evening together.”

… perfume of a flower, telling him what she had to say, every word of which he closely scanned, sorry to see them fly away so fast, he made involuntarily with his lips the motion of kissing, as it went by him, the harmonious, fleeting form.

He felt that he was no longer in exile and alone since she, who addressed herself to him, spoke to him in a whisper of Odette.

For he had no longer, as of old, the impression that Odette and he were not known to the little phrase. Had it not often been the witness of their joys? True that, as often, it had warned him of their frailty.

Its destiny was linked, for the future, with that of the human soul, of which it was one of the special, the most distinctive ornaments.

Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is without existence; but, if so, we feel that it must be that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, are nothing either.

We shall perish, but we have for our hostages these divine captives who shall follow and share our fate. And death in their company is something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain.

Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is without existence; but, if so, we feel that it must be that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, are nothing either.

We shall perish, but we have for our hostages these divine captives who shall follow and share our fate. And death in their company is something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain.

So Swann was not mistaken in believing that the phrase of the sonata did, really, exist.

and he said to himself: “

People don’t know when they are happy. They’re never so unhappy as they think they are.

” But he reflected that this existence had lasted already for several years, that all that he could now hope for was that it should last forever, that he would sacrifice his work, his pleasures, his friends, in fact the whole of his life to …

but he himself, in order to extract that truth from her, was not afraid to have recourse to falsehood, that very falsehood which he never ceased to depict to Odette as leading every human creature down to utter degradation.

In a word, he lied as much as did Odette, because, while more unhappy than she, he was no less egotistical.

And she, when she heard him repeating thus to her the things that she had done, would stare at him with a look of distrust and, at all hazards, of indignation, so as not to appear to be humiliated, and to be blushing for her …

… a general truth, that human life is full of contrasts, but in the case of any one human being he imagined all that part of his or her life with which he was not familiar as being identical with the part with which he was.

He imagined what was kept secret from him in the light of what was revealed.

At such times as he spent with Odette, if their conversation turned upon an indelicate act committed, or an indelicate sentiment expressed by some third person, she would ruthlessly condemn the culprit by virtue of the same moral principles which Swann had always heard expressed …

He went to see Odette. He sat down, keeping at a distance from her. He did not dare to embrace her, not knowing whether in her, in himself, it would be affection or anger that a kiss would provoke.

He sat there silent, watching their love expire.

Suddenly he made up his mind.

I say it for your own sake, because then I shouldn’t bother you any more about it. It’s so soothing to be able to form a clear picture of things in one’s mind.

What is really terrible is what one cannot imagine.

But you’ve been so sweet to me; I don’t want to tire you. I do thank you, with all my heart, for all the good that you have done me. I’ve quite finished now. Only one word more: how many times?”

“

Life is indeed astonishing, and holds some fine surprises; it appears that vice is far more common than one has been led to believe.

Here is a woman in whom I had absolute confidence, who looks so simple, so honest, who, in any case, even allowing that her morals are not strict, seemed quite normal and healthy in her tastes and inclinations.

And these admissions he could never forget.

His spirit carried them along, cast them aside, then cradled them again in its bosom, like corpses in a river. And they poisoned it.

She spoke to him once of a visit that Forcheville had paid her on the day of the Paris-Murcie Fête. “What! you knew him as long ago as that?

de Saint-Euverte’s party, the good fortune which he long had lost, but a misfortune of which he was now first aware. Then it befell the Maison Dorée, as it had befallen the Island in the Bois, that gradually its name ceased to trouble him.

For what we suppose to be our love, our jealousy are, neither of them, single, continuous and individual passions.

They are composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multitude they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity.

Indeed, she used an expression which I thought very pretty at the time. M. Verdurin asked her, ‘How in the world can you see what he’s doing, when he’s a thousand miles away?’ And Odette answered, ‘

Nothing is impossible to the eye of a friend.

’

But now, to the faintness of his love there corresponded a simultaneous faintness in his desire to remain her lover.

For a man cannot change, that is to say become another person, while he continues to obey the dictates of the self which he has ceased to be.

Occasionally the name, if it caught his eye in a newspaper, of one of the men whom he supposed to have been Odette’s lovers, reawakened his jealousy.

And with that old, intermittent fatuity, which reappeared in him now that he was no longer unhappy, and lowered, at the same time, the average level of his morality, he cried out in his heart:

“To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love that I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!”

That (for all that I was still in Paris) was what I saw, and not what was actually round about me.

Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries for which we long occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our true life than the country in which we may happen to be.

Doubtless, if, at that time, I had paid more attention to what was in my mind when I pronounced the words “going to Florence, to Parma, to Pisa, to Venice,” I should have realised that what I saw was in no sense a town, but …

… saw nothing), as in an opera a fresh melody introduces a novel atmosphere which one could never have suspected if one had done no more than read the libretto, still less if one had remained outside the theatre, counting only the minutes as they passed.

And besides, even from the point of view of mere quantity, in our life the days are not all equal.

To reach the end of a day, natures that are slightly nervous, as mine was, make use, like motorcars, of different “speeds.”

And besides, even from the point of view of mere quantity, in our life the days are not all equal. To reach the end of a day, natures that are slightly nervous, as mine was, make use, like motorcars, of different “speeds.”

There are mountainous, uncomfortable days, up which one takes an infinite time to pass, and days downward sloping, through which one can go at full tilt, singing as one goes.

During this month—in which I went laboriously over, as over a tune, though never to my satisfaction, these visions of Florence, Venice, Pisa, from which the desire that they excited in me drew and kept something as profoundly personal as if it had been love, …

The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme. Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered.

The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience.

None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.

I should thus have obtained an effect of old-fashioned courtesy by the same process and at as little expense as that actor at the Palais-Royal who, when asked where on earth he managed to find his astounding hats, answered,

“I do not find my hats. I keep them.”

In a word, I suppose that my mother considered M.

… the crowd an emotion by which that man is surprised, and in which, once expert criticism has informed him of the actual military situation, he recognises the popular perception of that “aura” which surrounds momentous happenings, and which may be visible hundreds of miles away.

One learns of a victory either after the war is over, or at once, from the hilarious joy of one’s hall porter.

One discovers the touch of genius in Berma’s acting a week after one has heard her, in the criticism of some review, or else on the spot, from the thundering acclamation of the stalls.

“There is the case of the son of one of my friends, which, mutatis mutandis, is very much like yours.”

He adopted in speaking of our common tendency the same reassuring tone as if it had been a tendency not to literature but to rheumatics, and he had wished to assure me that it would not necessarily prove fatal.

“He too has chosen to leave the Quai d’Orsay, although the way had been paved for him there by his father, and without caring what people might say, he has settled down to write. And certainly, he’s had no reason to regret it.

Practically everyone was surprised at the marriage, and this, in itself, is surprising.

No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a fresh, a third, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourself, the lover.

And so there are very few who can regard as natural the enormous proportions that a creature comes to assume in our eyes who is not the same as the creature that they see.

… to correct, that it is because a woman comes in time to acquire an indulgent, an affectionately mocking familiarity, such as we ourselves have with them, or our relatives have, that amours of long standing have something of the sweetness and strength of family affection.

The bonds that unite us to another creature receive their consecration when that creature adopts the same point of view as ourself in judging one of our imperfections.

And among these special traits there were others, besides, which belonged as much to his intellect as to his character, which, all the same, because they had their roots in the latter, Odette had been able more easily to discern.

Besides, had he not been so detached, his marriage would have been all the more creditable.

It is because they imply the sacrifice of a more or less advantageous position to a purely private happiness that, as a general rule, “impossible” marriages are the happiest of all.

(One cannot very well include among the “impossible” marriages those that are made for money, there being no instance on record of a couple, of whom the wife or even the husband has thus sold himself, who have not sooner or later been admitted into …

I even sketched in the air an outline of that impulsive movement, but this I supposed that I alone had observed.

For it is difficult for any of us to calculate exactly on what scale his words or his gestures are apparent to others.

Partly from the fear of exaggerating our own importance, and also because we enlarge to enormous proportions the field over which the impressions formed by other people in the course of their lives are obliged to extend, we imagine that the accessories of our speech …

… somewhere outside the realm of Time, but was subject to its laws, just like the people in novels who, for that reason, used to plunge me in such depression when I read of their lives, down at Combray, in the fastness of my wicker sentry-box.

In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one’s life.

And to make its flight perceptible novelists are obliged, by wildly accelerating the beat of the pendulum, to transport the reader in a couple of minutes over ten, or twenty, or even thirty years.

Françoise assured me that it had passed away as peacefully as could be desired, and very swiftly.

“I have never seen a beast like it; it died without uttering a word; you would have thought it was dumb.”

Being but little versed in the language of beasts I suggested that the rabbit had not, perhaps, a cry like the chicken’s. “Just wait till you see,” said Françoise, filled with contempt for my ignorance, “if rabbits don’t cry every bit as much as chickens.

she said of M. de Norpois, with the friendliness due to a man who had taken her for a chef: “

He’s a good old soul, like me.

” She had indeed hoped to catch sight of him as he arrived, but knowing that Mamma hated their standing about behind doors and in windows, and thinking that Mamma would get to know from the other servants or from the porter that she had …

for she went on: “No, I mean a restaurant where they looked as if they kept a very good little family table. It’s a place of some consequence, too. Plenty of custom there. Oh, they raked in the coppers there, all right.”

Françoise, being an economist, reckoned in coppers, where your plunger would reckon in gold.

“Madame knows the place well enough, down there to the right along the main boulevards, a little way back.” The restaurant of which she spoke with this blend of pride and good-humoured tolerance was, it turned out, the Café Anglais.

I returned to the house.

I had spent the New Year’s Day of old men, who differ on that day from their juniors, not because people have ceased to give them presents but because they themselves have ceased to believe in the New Year.

Presents I had indeed received, but not that present which alone could bring me pleasure, namely a line from Gilberte.

I was young still, none the less, since I had been able to write her one, by means of which I hoped, in telling her of my solitary dreams of love and longing, to arouse similar dreams in her.

The sadness of men who have grown old lies in their no longer even thinking of writing such letters, the futility of which their experience has shown.

After I was in bed, the noises of the street, unduly prolonged upon this festive evening, kept me awake.

At that moment, a message from Gilberte would perhaps not have been what I wanted.

Our desires cut across one another’s paths, and in this confused existence it is but rarely that a piece of good fortune coincides with the desire that clamoured for it.

I continued to go to the Champs-Élysées on fine days, along streets whose stylish pink houses seemed to be washed (because exhibitions of watercolours were then at the height of fashion) in a lightly floating atmosphere.

just as those who have lost a dear friend whom they never see even while they are asleep, are exasperated at meeting incessantly in their dreams any number of insupportable creatures whom it is quite enough to have known in the waking world.

In their inability to form any image of the object of their grief they are almost led to assert that they feel no grief.

And I was not far from believing that, since I could not recall the features of Gilberte, I had forgotten Gilberte herself, and no longer loved her.

… learn from the visible aspect alone what lies behind it is overindulgent to the thousand forms, to the changing fragrance, to the movements of the living person whom as a rule, when we are not in love, we regard as fixed in one permanent position.

Whereas the beloved model does not stay still; and our mental photographs of her are always blurred.

I did not rightly know how Gilberte’s features were composed, save in the heavenly moments when she disclosed them to me; I could remember nothing but her smile.

… was really the matter with me at the moment was intoxication, and that by loosening my liver and washing out my kidneys he would get rid of the congestion of my bronchial tubes and thus give me back my breath, my sleep and my strength.

And we realised that this imbecile was a clinical genius.

At last I was able to get up. But they spoke of not letting me go any more to the Champs-Élysées. They said that it was because the air there was bad;

Then at last I was conscious of my happiness.

Life is strewn with these miracles, for which people who are in love can always hope.

It is possible that this one had been artificially brought about by my mother who, seeing that for some time past I had lost all interest in life, may have suggested to Gilberte to write to me, just as, when I was little and went …

Even the complimentary letters and telegrams received by Odette the Swanns were incapable of keeping to themselves. They spoke of them to their friends, passed them from hand to hand.

Thus the Swanns’ drawing-room reminded one of a seaside hotel where telegrams containing the latest news are posted up on a board.

Still, people who had known the old Swann not merely Outside society, as I had known him, but in society, in that Guermantes set which, with certain concessions to Highnesses and Duchesses, was almost infinitely exacting in the matter of wit and charm, from which …

And as though she found a similarity between the somewhat summary, rapid and violent manner in which Mme. Swann acquired her friends, as it were by conquest, and a Colonial expedition, Mamma went on to observe:

“Now that the Tromberts have surrendered, the neighbouring tribes will not be long in coming in.”

If she had passed Mme. Swann in the street, she would tell us when she came home: “I saw Mme. Swann in all her war-paint; she must have been embarking on some triumphant offensive against the Massachutoes, or the Cingalese, or the Tromberts.”

… it indulged, which seem to them to be the last word in corruption, but even the work of its artists and philosophers, which have no longer the least value in their eyes, as though they were indissolubly linked to the successive moods of fashionable frivolity.

The one thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been “great changes.”

At the time when I went to Mme. Swann’s the Dreyfus storm had not yet broken, and some of the more prominent Jews were extremely powerful. None more so than Sir Rufus Israels, whose wife, Lady Israels, was Swann’s aunt.

If one had indeed, as one supposes, received no impression from the first hearing, the second, the third would be equally “first hearings” and there would be no reason why one should understand it any better after the tenth.

Probably what is wanting, the first time, is not comprehension but memory.

For our memory, compared to the complexity of the impressions which it has to face while we are listening, is infinitesimal, as brief as the memory of a man who in his sleep thinks of a thousand things and at once forgets them, or as …

When the least obvious beauties of Vinteuil’s sonata were revealed to me, already, borne by the force of habit beyond the reach of my sensibility, those that I had from die first distinguished and preferred in it were beginning to escape, to avoid me.

Since I was able only in successive moments to enjoy all the pleasures that this sonata gave me, I never possessed it in its entirety: it was like life itself.

But, less disappointing than life is, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

Since I was able only in successive moments to enjoy all the pleasures that this sonata gave me, I never possessed it in its entirety: it was like life itself.

But, less disappointing than life is, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

In Vinteuil’s sonata the beauties that one discovers at once are those also of which one most soon grows tired, and for the same reason, no doubt, namely that they are less different from what one already knows.

But this also must be the last that we shall relinquish.

And we shall love it longer than the rest because we have taken longer to get to love it.

The time, moreover, that a person requires—as I required in the matter of this sonata—to penetrate a work of any depth is merely an epitome, a symbol, one might say, of the years, the centuries even that must elapse before the public can begin to …

… this way, like every great work of art, an advance if not in artistic merit at least in intellectual society, largely composed today of what was not to be found when the work first appeared, that is to say of persons capable of enjoying it.

What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

It is essential that the work (leaving out of account, for brevity’s sake, the contingency that several men of genius may at the same time be working along parallel lines to create a more instructed public in the future, a public from which other men …

Just as in pathology certain conditions similar in appearance are due, some to an excess others to an insufficiency of tension, of secretion and so forth, so there may be vice arising from supersensitiveness just as much as from the lack of it.

Perhaps it is only in really vicious lives that the moral problem can arise in all its disquieting strength.

And of this problem the artist finds a solution in the terms not of his own personal life but of what is for him the true life, a general, a literary solution.

de Norpois would have done. This does not prove that Bergotte’s opinions were of less value than the Ambassador’s; far from it.

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

Being itself a part of the riches of the universal Mind, it makes its way into, grafts itself upon the mind of him whom it is employed to refute, slips in among the ideas already there, with the help of which, gaining a little ground, …

… ideas which are not, properly speaking, ideas at all, to ideas which, founded upon nothing, can find no support, no kindred spirit among the ideas of the adversary, that he, grappling with something which, is not there, can find no word to say in answer.

The arguments of M. de Norpois (in the matter of art) were unanswerable simply because they were without reality.

Since Bergotte did not sweep aside my objections, I confessed to him that they had won the scorn of M. de Norpois. “But he’s an old parrot!” was the answer.

“The danger of that kind of love, however, is that the woman’s subjection calms the man’s jealousy for a time but also makes it more exacting.

After a little he will force his mistress to live like one of those prisoners whose cells they keep lighted day and night, to prevent their escaping. And that generally ends in trouble.

”

… upon them, keeping probably, in spite of what I supposed, before his mind’s eye a whole world of intelligence other than that an excerpt of which had passed into his books, an excerpt upon which I had based my imagination of his whole mental universe.

Just as priests, having the widest experience of the human heart, are best able to pardon the sins which they do not themselves commit, so genius, having the widest experience of the human intelligence, can best understand the ideas most directly in opposition to those which form the foundation of its own writings.

I ought to have told myself all this (though, for that matter, it was none too consoling a thought, for the benevolent condescension of great minds has as a corollary the incomprehension and hostility of small;

If they had not yet reached the open sea, they were certainly in the lagoon. “This is all between ourselves,” said Bergotte as he left me outside my own door. A few years later I should have answered: “I never repeat things.”

That is the ritual phrase of society, from which the slanderer always derives a false reassurance.

It is what I should have said then and there to Bergotte, for one does not invent all one’s speeches, especially when, one is acting merely as a card in the social pack. But I did not yet know the formula.

Similarly, it was with Gilberte in my mind, and so as not to be separated from her, that I had decided not to enter a career of diplomacy abroad.

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions.

I could scarcely imagine that that strange substance which was housed in Gilberte, and from her permeated her parents and her home, leaving me indifferent to all things else, could be liberated from her, could migrate into another person.

… that is to say from those who, at different times, had seemed bound to place obstacles in my way, any further opposition to that pleasant existence in which I might see Gilberte as often as I chose, with enjoyment if not with peace of mind.

There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for further desires.

So long as I had not been free to go to her, having my eyes fixed upon that inaccessible goal of happiness, I could not so much as imagine the fresh grounds for anxiety that lay in wait for me there.

In a language that we know, we have substituted for the opacity of sounds, the perspicuity of ideas.

But a language which we do not know is a fortress sealed, within whose walls she whom we love is free to play us false, while we, standing without, desperately alert in our impotence, can see, can prevent nothing.

So this conversation in English, at which, a month earlier, I should merely have smiled, interspersed with a few proper names in French which did not fail to accentuate, to give a point to my uneasiness, had, when conducted within a few feet of me …

… every nerve of me in the first weeks after our quarrel, before I had gone again to the Swanns’) did I not repeat to myself the words of the letter which, one day soon, Gilberte would surely send, would perhaps even bring to me herself.

The perpetual vision of that imagined happiness helped me to endure the desolation of my real happiness.

With women who do not love us, as with the “missing,” the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent our continuing to wait for news. We live on tenterhooks, starting at the slightest sound;

I was like a pauper who moistens his dry crust with fewer tears if he assures himself that, at any moment, a total stranger is perhaps going to leave him the whole of his fortune.

We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

Now my hope remained more intact—while at the same time our separation became more effectual—if I refrained from meeting Gilberte.

The things that one sees in the house of a “respectable” woman, things which may of course appear to her also to be of importance, are those which are in any event of the utmost importance to the courtesan.

The culminating point of her day is not the moment in which she dresses herself for all the world to see, but that in which she undresses herself for a man.

She must be as smart in her wrapper, in her nightgown, as in her outdoor attire. Other women display their jewels, but as for her, she lives in the intimacy of her pearls.

She must be as smart in her wrapper, in her nightgown, as in her outdoor attire.

Other women display their jewels, but as for her, she lives in the intimacy of her pearls.

This kind of existence imposes on her as an obligation and ends by giving her a fondness for luxury which is secret, that is to say which comes near to being disinterested. Mme. Swann extended this to include her flowers.

… men, notably Swann himself, who had followed her in her secession and into her retirement, according to a version for which one can understand that she had succeeded in gaining credit among her more recent friends, ignorant of what had passed, though without convincing herself.

But certain favourite parts are played by us so often before the public and rehearsed so carefully when we are alone that we find it easier to refer to their fictitious testimony than to that of a reality which we have almost entirely forgotten.

On days on which Mme.

It is confidence of this sort, and with as little foundation, that sustains the lover who is counting upon a reconciliation, upon a letter.

For me to cease to expect a letter it would have sufficed that I should have ceased to wish for one.

However unimportant one may know that one is in the eyes of her whom one still loves, one attributes to her a series of thoughts (though their sum total be indifference) the intention to express those thoughts, a complication of her inner life in which …

… when the attention or the silence or the affection or the coldness of Gilberte would pass almost unnoticed by me and I should not dream, should not even be able to dream of seeking a solution of problems which would have ceased to perplex me.

When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within us.

It radiates towards the beloved object, finds in her a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this shock of the repercussion of our own affection which we call the other’s regard for ourselves, and which pleases us …

… letters in which our friends ask whether they may pay us a visit before they finally leave the country, an offer which, like those made by tiresome women who are in love with us, we decline because we have pleasures of our own in prospect.

The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.

Besides, what good would it have done if I had spoken to Gilberte; she would not have understood me. We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind that are listening.

Besides, what good would it have done if I had spoken to Gilberte; she would not have understood me.

We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind that are listening.

My words would have come to her only in a distorted form, as though they had had to pass through the moving curtain of a waterfall before they reached my friend, unrecognisable, giving a foolish sound, having no longer any kind of meaning.

… tell me to reply directly to her, I was constantly writing to Gilberte, and in this correspondence I did not choose the expressions which might, I felt, have won her over, sought only to carve out the easiest channel for the torrent of my tears.

For, like desire, regret seeks not to be analysed but to be satisfied.

When one begins to love, one spends one’s time, not in getting to know what one’s love really is, but in making it possible to meet next day.

… figures and her flowerpots the ignorant handling of her servants who must expiate, every now and then, the anxiety that they had caused her by submitting to outbursts of rage at which Swann, the most courteous and considerate of masters, looked on without being shocked.

Not that the clear perception of certain weaknesses in those whom we love in any way diminishes our affection for them; rather that affection makes us find those weaknesses charming.

Rarely nowadays was it in one of those Japanese wrappers that Odette received her familiars, but rather in the bright and billowing silk of a Watteau gown whose flowering foam she made as though to caress where it covered her bosom, and in which she …

… seem meant to serve some more than utilitarian purpose, perhaps because of the traces they preserved of vanished years, or else because there was a sort of personality permeating this lady’s wardrobe, which gave to the most dissimilar of her costumes a distinct family likeness.

One felt that she did not dress simply for the comfort or the adornment of her body; she was surrounded by her garments as by the delicate and spiritualised machinery of a whole form of civilisation.

When Gilberte, who, as a rule, gave her tea-parties on the days when her mother was “at home,” had for some reason to go out, and I was therefore free to attend Mme.

Gained to no purpose, it might be, for presently they would be able to pronounce that I was healed.

Resignation, modulating our habits, allows certain elements of our strength to be indefinitely increased.

Those—so wretchedly inadequate—that I had had to support my grief, on the first evening of my rupture with Gilberte, had since multiplied to an incalculable power.

But if I had not called there, if my cabman had not taken the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, I should not have seen Gilberte with that young man.

Thus a single action may have two contradictory effects, and the misfortune that it engenders cancel the good fortune that it has already brought one.

There had befallen me the opposite of what so frequently happens. We desire some pleasure, and the material means of obtaining it are lacking. “It is a mistake,” Labruyère tells us, “to be in love without an ample fortune.”

Only yesterday, had I not been afraid of annoying Gilberte, I should have been content to ask for no more than occasional meetings, which now would no longer have contented me and for which I should now have substituted quite different terms.

For in this respect love is not like war; after the battle is ended we renew the fight with keener ardour, which we never cease to intensify the more thoroughly we are defeated, provided always that we are still in a position to give battle.

This was not my position with regard to Gilberte. Also I preferred, at first, not to see her mother again.

… of our indifference will have made us less exacting, and allow us in retrospect to feel convinced that we should have been in raptures over our good fortune had it come at a time when, very probably, it would have seemed to us miserably inadequate.

People are not very hard to satisfy nor are they very good judges of matters in which they take no interest.

The friendly overtures of a person whom we no longer love, overtures which strike us, in our indifference to her, as excessive, would perhaps have fallen a long way short of satisfying our love.

This idea, however, that it will be attainable, that what, when it no longer spells any good fortune to us, we shall ultimately secure is not good fortune, this idea embodies a part, but a part only of the truth.

Our good fortune accrues to us when we have grown indifferent to it.

But the very fact of our indifference will have made us less exacting, and allow us in retrospect to feel convinced that we should have been in raptures over our good fortune had it come at a time when, very probably, it would have seemed …

Those that people bear in a dream are apt to mislead us.

The person with whom we are in love is to be recognised only by the intensity of the pain that we suffer.

From mine I learned that, though transformed while I was asleep into a young man, the person whose recent betrayal still hurt me was Gilberte.

She had not returned it to me at once: I remembered now the whole of that scene behind the clump of laurels.

As soon as one is unhappy one becomes moral.

Gilberte’s recent antipathy for me seemed to me a judgment delivered on me by life for my conduct that afternoon. Such judgments one imagines one can escape because one looks out for carriages when one is crossing the street, and avoids obvious dangers.

Such judgments one imagines one can escape because one looks out for carriages when one is crossing the street, and avoids obvious dangers. But there are others that take effect within us.

The accident comes from the side to which one has not been looking, from inside, from the heart.

Gilberte’s words: “If you like, we might go on wrestling,” made me shudder. I imagined her behaving like that, at home perhaps, in the linen-room, with the young man whom I had seen escorting her along the Avenue des Champs-Élysées.

… in the past tense, as though it were of some dead friend, now almost forgotten, of this love of which in spite of myself I had never ceased to think as of a thing still alive, or one that at least might be born again.

Nothing can be more affectionate than this sort of correspondence between friends who do not wish to see one another any more.

Gilberte’s letters to me had all the delicate refinement of those which I used to write to people who did not matter, and showed me the same apparent marks of affection, which it was so pleasant for me to receive from her.

I regretted, at such moments, that I had abandoned the idea of diplomacy and had condemned myself to a sedentary existence, in order not to be separated from a girl whom I should not see again and had already almost forgotten.

We construct our house of life to suit another person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, a prisoner within the walls which were intended only for her.

If Venice seemed to my parents to be a long way off, and its climate treacherous, it was at least quite easy for me to go, without tiring myself, and settle down at Balbec.

… which I was going there to seek, an impression the place of which no spectacle of professedly equal value, no “panorama” which I might have gone to see without being thereby precluded from returning home to sleep in my own bed, could possibly have filled.

It was not for the first time that I felt that those who love and those who find pleasure are not always the same.

I believed myself to be longing fully as much for Balbec as the doctor who was treating me, when he said to me, surprised, on the morning of our departure, to see me look so unhappy;

… of nature and of life, had I been able for a moment to incarnate myself in a fish that sleeps in the sea, driven unheeding by the currents and the tides, or in an eagle outstretched upon the air, with no support but the storm.

Sunrise is a necessary concomitant of long railway journeys, just as are hard-boiled eggs, illustrated papers, packs of cards, rivers upon which boats strain but make no progress.

At a certain moment, when I was counting over the thoughts that had filled my mind, in the preceding minutes, so as to discover whether I had just been asleep or not (and when the very uncertainty which made me ask myself the question was …

She fastened on me her penetrating stare, but while the porters ran along the platform shutting doors the train had begun to move.

I saw her leave the station and go down the hill to her home; it was broad daylight now; I was speeding away from the dawn.

Whether my exaltation had been produced by this girl or had on the other hand been responsible for most of the pleasure that I had found in the sight of her, in the sense of her presence, in either event she was so closely associated …

But he vouchsafed no answer, whether from astonishment at my words, preoccupation with what he was doing, regard for convention, hardness of hearing, respect for holy ground, fear of danger, slowness of understanding, or by the manager’s orders.

There is perhaps nothing that gives us so strong an impression of the reality of the external world as the difference in the positions, relative to ourself, of even a quite unimportant person before we have met him and after.

I was the same man who had taken, that afternoon, the little train from Balbec to the coast, I carried in my body the same consciousness.

… and defensive guard, would have kept my sight, my hearing, all my senses in a position as cramped and comfortless (even if I had stretched out my legs) as that of Cardinal La Balue in the cage in which he could neither stand nor sit.

It is our noticing them that puts things in a room, our growing used to them that takes them away again and clears a space for us.

Space there was none for me in my bedroom (mine in name only) at Balbec;

… in the very heart of my inmost self, the smell of flowering grasses next launched its offensive against my last feeble line of trenches, where I stood up to it, not without tiring myself still further, with the futile incessant defence of an anxious sniffing.

Having no world, no room, no body now that was not menaced by the enemies thronging round me, invaded to the very bones by fever, I was utterly alone; I longed to die.

Then my grandmother came in, and to the expansion of my ebbing heart there opened at once an infinity of space.

Having no world, no room, no body now that was not menaced by the enemies thronging round me, invaded to the very bones by fever, I was utterly alone; I longed to die.

Then my grandmother came in, and to the expansion of my ebbing heart there opened at once an infinity of space.

She was wearing a loose cambric gown which she put on at home whenever any of us was ill (because she felt more comfortable in it, she used to say, for she always ascribed to her actions a selfish motive), and which was, for tending …

“

Mistake my poor chick’s knocking for anyone else! Why, Granny could tell it among a thousand!

Do you suppose there’s anyone else in the world who’s such a silly-billy, with such feverish little knuckles, so afraid of waking me up and of not making me understand?

She says, ‘I hope to be going home for the Assumption.’ ‘Home!’ says she! It isn’t just that it’s not her own place, they’re people who took her in from nowhere, and the creature says ‘home’ just as if it really was her home.

Poor girl! What a wretched state she must be in, not to know what it is to have a home.

” Still, if Françoise had associated only with the ladies’-maids brought to the hotel by other visitors, who fed with her in the “service” quarters and, seeing her grand lace cap and her handsome profile, took her perhaps for some lady of noble birth, whom …

Even if his gaoler or his nurse does not allow him to pluck those tempting fruits, still the world seems to him a better place and existence in it more clement.

For a desire seems to us more attractive, we repose on it with more confidence, when we know that outside ourself there is a reality which conforms to it, even if, for us, it is not to be realised.

And we think with more joy of a life in which (on condition that we eliminate for a moment from our mind the tiny obstacle, accidental and special, which prevents us personally from doing so) we can imagine ourself to be assuaging that desire.

(After which every effort to penetrate into her life would have seemed suddenly impossible.

For beauty is a sequence of hypotheses which ugliness cuts short when it bars the way that we could already see opening into the unknown.

) Perhaps a single word which she might have uttered, a smile would have furnished me with a key, a clue that I had not expected, to read the expression of her face, to interpret her bearing, which would at once have ceased to be …

Presently, at a crossroads, the carriage left them.

It was bearing me away from what alone I believed to be true, what would have made me truly happy; it was like my life.

I watched the trees gradually withdraw, waving their despairing arms, seeming to say to me: “What you fail to learn from us today, you will never know.

At the mention of Vigny she laughed: “The man who said: ‘I am the Comte Alfred de Vigny!’

One either is a Comte or one isn’t; it is not of the slightest importance.

” And then perhaps she discovered that it was after all, of some slight importance, for she went on:

… of the silly phase through which I was passing—a phase by no means irresponsive, indeed highly fertile—is that we do not consult our intelligence and that the most trivial attributes of other people seem to us then to form an inseparable part of their personality.

In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we are barely conscious of tranquillity.

There is hardly one of the actions which we performed in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to erase from our memory.

In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we are barely conscious of tranquillity. There is hardly one of the actions which we performed in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to erase from our memory.

Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but youth was the only time in which we learned anything.

This insolence which I surmised in M.

I had no difficulty in persuading myself that I ought to be happy in consequence, and I hoped all the more anxiously that this happiness might never be taken from me simply because I had not yet been conscious of it.

We fear more than the loss of everything else the disappearance of the “goods” that have remained beyond our reach, because our heart has not taken possession of them.

I felt that I was capable of exemplifying the virtues of friendship better than most people (because I should always place the good of my friends before those personal interests to which other people were devoted but which did not count for me), but not …

Each of us has his own, so much so that to continue loving him we are obliged not to take them into account but to ignore them and look only to the rest of his character.

The most perfect person in the world has a certain defect which shocks us or makes us angry.

One man is of rare intelligence, sees everything from an exalted angle, never speaks evil of anyone, but will pocket and forget letters of supreme importance which it was he himself who asked you to let him post for you, and will then miss a …

But what is called, in not too correct language, “ill breeding” was his defect, and therefore the defect which he was bound to overlook, all the more that by which he did not believe that other people could be shocked.

In the human race the frequency of the virtues that are identical in us all is not more wonderful than the multiplicity of the defects that are peculiar to each one of us.

Undoubtedly, it is not common sense that is “the commonest thing in the world”; but human kindness.

… people who do not wash to the streaks of dirt which they carry in their ears and the smell of sweat which emanates from their armpits, and assures them that they can with impunity carry both of these about a world that will notice nothing.

And those who wear artificial pearls, or give them as presents, imagine that people will take them to be genuine.

Bloch was ill-bred, neurotic, a snob, and, since he belonged to a family of little repute, had to support, as on the floor of ocean, the incalculable pressure that was imposed on him not only by the Christians upon the surface but by all the …

That is to say, my uncle’s a great friend of Swann, and has always stood up for him. But no one has ever suggested that he was his wife’s lover. You would make a great sensation in Paris society if people thought you believed that.”

I dared not reply that it would have caused an even greater sensation in Combray society if people had thought that I did not believe it.

My grandmother was delighted with M. de Charlus.

de Sévigné’s impatience for the moment when she will be alone with her daughter. It is so fine what she says when she leaves her: ‘This parting gives a pain to my soul which I feel like an ache in my body.

In absence one is liberal with the hours. One anticipates a time for which one is longing.

’ ” My grandmother was in ecstasies at hearing the Letters thus spoken of, exactly as she would have spoken of them herself. She was astonished that a man could understand them so thoroughly. She found in M.

“Most certainly she had: if it was only what she calls ‘things so slight that nobody else would notice them but you and me.’ And anyhow she was with her. And Labruyère tells us that that is everything. ‘

To be with the people one loves, to speak to them, not to speak to them, it is all the same.

’ He is right; that is the only form of happiness,” added M. de Charlus in a mournful voice, “and that happiness—alas, life is so ill arranged that one very rarely tastes it; Mme.

What Mme. de Sévigné felt for her daughter has a far better claim to rank with the passion that Racine described in Andromaque or Phèdre than the commonplace relations young Sévigné had with his mistresses. It’s the same with a mystic’s love for his God.

The hard and fast lines with which we circumscribe love arise solely from our complete ignorance of life.

”

Saint-Loup asked his uncle in a faintly contemptuous tone. “There is more truth in a single tragedy of Racine than in all the dramatic works of Monsieur Victor Hugo,” replied M. de Charlus. “People really are overwhelming,” Saint-Loup murmured in my ear.

“Preferring Racine to Victor, you may say what you like, it’s epoch-making!”

He was genuinely distressed by his uncle’s words, but the satisfaction of saying “you may say what you like” and, better still, “epoch-making” consoled him.

But I keep a photograph of the house, when it was still unspoiled, just as I keep one of the Princess before her large eyes had learned to gaze on anyone but my cousin.

A photograph acquires something of the dignity which it ordinarily lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist.

I could give you a copy, since you are interested in that style of architecture,” he said to my grandmother.

“No; why?” he answered, in a gentler voice. “You have not, perhaps, any personal merit; so few of us have! But for a time at least you have youth, and that is always a charm.

Besides, sir, the greatest folly of all is to laugh at or to condemn in others what one does not happen oneself to feel.

I love the night, and you tell me that you are afraid of it. I love the scent of roses, and I have a friend whom it throws into a fever.

“No; why?” he answered, in a gentler voice. “

You have not, perhaps, any personal merit; so few of us have! But for a time at least you have youth, and that is always a charm.

Besides, sir, the greatest folly of all is to laugh at or to condemn in others what one does not happen oneself to feel. I love the night, and you tell me that you are afraid of it.

I love the scent of roses, and I have a friend whom it throws into a fever. Do you suppose that I think, for that reason, that he is inferior to me?

I try to understand everything and I take care to condemn nothing.

After all, you must not be too sorry for yourself; I do not say that these moods of depression are not painful, I know that one can be made to suffer by things which the world would not understand.

He imagined, moreover, that his appearance, his name, his personality were not unknown to them, and that when they caught sight of him they had often to repress a stealthy inclination to bow.

People in society, because they know men of talent, original characters, and have them to dine in their houses, do not on that account understand them any better.

But when one has lived to some extent in society, the silliness of its inhabitants makes one too anxious to live, suppose too high a standard of intelligence in the obscure circles in which people know only “without actually knowing.”

and, like someone who has discovered that an historical character is not “up to” the level of his reputation, she repeated in an impressed tone, in which I could detect latent, for future growth, the seeds of a universal scepticism:

“What! Is that M. Bloch? Well, really, you would never think it, to look at him.”

She seemed also to bear me a grudge, as if I had always “overdone” the praise of Bloch to her. At the same time she was kind enough to add: “Well, he may be M. Bloch, and all that.

… us to put out from the harbour of life, in which the women whose society we frequent have all, in course of time, laid bare their blemishes, urges us into that state of pursuit in which there is no longer anything to arrest the imagination.

But to strip our pleasures of imagination is to reduce them to their own dimensions, that is to say to nothing.

Offered me by one of those procuresses (whose good offices, all the same, the reader has seen that I by no means scorned), withdrawn from the element which gave them so many fine shades and such vagueness, these girls would have enchanted me less.

… could get to know the Simonet family, get to know them, moreover, through people whom they considered superior to themselves (which ought not to be difficult if the girls were only common little “bounders”) so that they might not form a disdainful idea of me.

For one cannot have a perfect knowledge, one cannot effect the complete absorption of a person who disdains one, so long as one has not overcome her disdain.

And since, whenever the idea of women who are so different from us penetrates our senses, unless we are able to forget it or the competition of other ideas eliminates it, we know no rest until we have converted those aliens into something that is …

A privilege, obviously, that did not appear to be granted to all the world.

For aristocracy is a relative state.

And there are plenty of inexpensive little holes and corners where the son of an upholsterer is the arbiter of fashion and reigns over a court like any young Prince of Wales.

it may be only an accessory, one that is often to be found superadded to that value, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it.

Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written yawning.

” My grandmother set my doubts at rest by telling me that I should be able to work and should enjoy working as soon as my health improved.

… it beneath a grave and frozen mien, beneath a languid, casual gait, so as not to be like those music-hall “mashers” who, having wedded a ribald verse to a patriotic air, come running on to the stage with the martial countenance of a victorious general.

From that moment I was a new man, who was no longer my grandmother’s grandson and would remember her only when it was time to get up and go, but the brother, for the time being, of the waiters who were going to bring us our dinner.

The dose of beer—all the more, that of champagne—which at Balbec I should not have ventured to take in a week, albeit to my calm and lucid consciousness the flavour of those beverages represented a pleasure clearly appreciable, since it was also one that could …

… indeed still there and we shall find it, but in a different place, no longer weighing upon us, satisfied by the sensation which the present affords it, a sensation that is sufficient for us, since for what is not actually present we take no thought.

Unfortunately the coefficient which thus alters our values alters them only in the hour of intoxication.

The people who had lost all their importance, whom we scattered with our breath like soap-bubbles, will tomorrow resume their density; we shall have to try afresh to settle down to work which this evening had ceased to have any significance.

Beneath his fine skin the bold construction, the feudal architecture were apparent.

His head made one think of those old dungeon keeps on which the disused battlements are still to be seen, although inside they have been converted into libraries.

On our way back to Balbec, of those of the fair strangers to whom he had introduced me I would repeat to myself without a moment’s interruption, and yet almost unconsciously: “What a delightful woman!” as one chimes in with the refrain of a song.

Compared with that of a great artist, the friendliness of a great gentleman, charming as it may be, has the effect of an actor’s playing a part, of being feigned.

Saint-Loup sought to please; Elstir loved to give, to give himself.

Everything that he possessed, ideas, work, and the rest which he counted for far less, he would have given gladly to anyone who could understand him.

But when, even without knowing it, I thought of them, they, more unconsciously still, were for me the mountainous blue undulations of the sea, a troop seen passing in outline against the waves.

Our most intensive love for a person is always the love, really, of something else as well.

Meanwhile my grandmother was showing, because now I was keenly interested in golf and lawn-tennis and was letting slip an opportunity of seeing at work and hearing talk an artist whom she knew to be one of the greatest of his time, a disapproval which …

So long as you distract your mind from its dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will always be being taken in by the appearance of things, because you will not have grasped their true nature.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

One must have a thorough understanding of one’s dreams if one is not to be troubled by them;

Men who believe that their work will last—as was the case with Elstir—form the habit of placing that work in a period when they themselves will have crumbled into dust.

And thus, by obliging them to reflect on their own extinction, the thought of fame saddens them because it is inseparable from the thought of death.

I changed the conversation in the hope of driving away the cloud of ambitious melancholy with which unwittingly I had loaded Elstir’s brow.

Elstir, and her body began to lose its heaviness, for I filled it with an idea, the idea that she was an immaterial creature, a portrait by Elstir. She was one for me, and for him also I dare say.

The facts of life have no meaning for the artist, they are to him merely an opportunity for exposing the naked blaze of his genius.

One feels unmistakably, when one sees side by side ten portraits of different people painted by Elstir, that they are all, first and foremost, Elstirs.

“It runs in families. Did her mother have pretty hair like that?”

“I don’t know,” was the old man’s quaint answer, “I never saw her except with a hat on.”

But I must not keep Elstir waiting. I caught sight of myself in a glass.

A whole series of agonies develops and is sufficient to fix our love definitely upon her who is its almost unknown object.

Our love becomes immense; we never dream how small a place in it the real woman occupies.

And if suddenly, as at the moment when I had seen Elstir stop to talk to the girls, we cease to be uneasy, to suffer pain, since it is this pain that is the whole of our love, it seems to us as though love …

they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile.

We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.

The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything …

But is it not ever thus in the bustle of daily life, with every true happiness, every great sorrow.

In a room full of other people we receive from her whom we love the answer, propitious or fatal, which we have been awaiting for the last year.

But we must go on talking, ideas come, one after another, forming a smooth surface which is pricked, at the very most, now and then by a dull throb from within of the memory, deep-rooted enough but of very slender growth, that misfortune has come …

But so far as the pleasure was concerned, I was not conscious of it, naturally, until some time later, when, once more in the hotel, and in my room alone, I had become myself again.

Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative film; we develop it later, when we are at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner darkroom, the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people.

If my consciousness of the pleasure it had brought me was thus retarded by a few hours, the importance of this introduction I felt immediately.

In spite of which, as I had, in my conversations with Elstir, identified her with this other girl, I felt myself in honour bound to fulfil to the real the promises of love made to the imagined Albertine.

We betroth ourselves by proxy, and think ourselves obliged, in the sequel, to marry the person who has intervened.

Moreover, if there had disappeared, provisionally at any rate, from my life, an anguish that found adequate consolation in the memory of polite manners, of that expression “perfectly common” and of the glowing temple, that memory awakened in me desire of another kind which, for …

That shining cataract of hair at the back of her head had been for a moment or two all that I was able to see of her, and continued to be all that I saw in retrospect.

Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person.

And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.

… circumstances demand it from a nature anterior to that of the man himself, by means of which he thinks, lives, evolves, gains strength himself or dies, without ever being able to distinguish that nature from the successive phases which in turn he takes for it.

Even mentally, we depend a great deal more than we think upon natural laws, and our mind possesses already, like some cryptogamous plant, every little peculiarity that we imagine ourselves to be selecting.

For we can see only the derived ideas, without detecting the primary cause (Jewish blood, French birth or whatever it may be) that inevitably produced them, and which at a given moment we expose.

The eye rapturously follows a nose like a wavelet that deliciously curls the water’s face at daybreak and seems not to move, to be capturable by the pencil, because the sea is so calm then that one does not notice its tidal flow.

Human faces seem not to change while we are looking at them, because the revolution which they perform is too slow for us to perceive it.

But we have only to see, by the side of any of those girls, her mother or her aunt, to realise the distance over which, obeying the gravitation of a type that is, generally speaking, deplorable, her features will have travelled in less than thirty …

… similarity that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them, eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our complement, fitted that is to say to gratify our senses and to wring our heart.

They are, these women, a product of our temperament, an image inversely projected, a negative of our sensibility.

So that a novelist might, in relating the life of his hero, describe his successive love-affairs in almost exactly similar terms, and thereby give the impression not that he was repeating himself but that he was creating, since an artificial novelty is never so effective …

The object of our uneasy investigation is something more essential than those details of character comparable to the tiny particles of epidermis whose varied combinations form the florid originality of human flesh.

Our intuitive radiography pierces them, and the images which it photographs for us, so far from being those of any single face, present rather the joyless universality of a skeleton.

Andrée, being herself extremely rich while the other was penniless and an orphan, with real generosity lavished on Albertine the full benefit of her wealth. As for her feelings towards Gisèle, they were not quite what I had been led to suppose.

This was because, with the sandwiches of cheese or of green-stuff, a form of food that was novel to me and knew nothing of the past, I had nothing in common.

But the cakes understood, the tarts were gossips.

There were in the former an insipid taste of cream, in the latter a fresh taste of fruit which knew all about Combray, and about Gilberte, not only the Gilberte of Combray but her too of Paris, at whose tea-parties I had found them again.

People who enjoy the capacity—it is true that such people are artists, and I had long been convinced that I should never be that—are also under an obligation to live for themselves.

And friendship is a dispensation from this duty, an abdication of self.

Even conversation, which is the mode of expression of friendship, is a superficial digression which gives us no new acquisition.

People who enjoy the capacity—it is true that such people are artists, and I had long been convinced that I should never be that—are also under an obligation to live for themselves. And friendship is a dispensation from this duty, an abdication of self.

Even conversation, which is the mode of expression of friendship, is a superficial digression which gives us no new acquisition.

We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute, whereas the march of thought in the solitary travail of artistic creation proceeds downwards, into the depths, in the only direction that is not closed to us, along …

It was with ecstasy that I caught their pipings.

Love helps us to discern things, to discriminate.

Standing in a wood, the lover of birds at once distinguishes the notes of the different species, which to ordinary people sound the same. The lover of girls knows that human voices vary even more.

It was with ecstasy that I caught their pipings. Love helps us to discern things, to discriminate. Standing in a wood, the lover of birds at once distinguishes the notes of the different species, which to ordinary people sound the same.

The lover of girls knows that human voices vary even more.

Each one possesses more notes than the richest instrument of music. And the combinations in which the voice groups those notes are as inexhaustible as the infinite variety of personalities.

“She treats everything as a joke,” of another: “She jumps from assertion to assertion,” of a third: “She lives in a state of expectant hesitation.”

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit has made permanent.

Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement. Similarly, our intonations embody our philosophy of life, what a person says to himself about things at any given moment.

“She treats everything as a joke,” of another: “She jumps from assertion to assertion,” of a third: “She lives in a state of expectant hesitation.” The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit has made permanent.

Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.

Similarly, our intonations embody our philosophy of life, what a person says to himself about things at any given moment. No doubt these peculiarities were to be found not only in the girls. They were those of their parents.

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit has made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.

Similarly, our intonations embody our philosophy of life, what a person says to himself about things at any given moment.

No doubt these peculiarities were to be found not only in the girls. They were those of their parents. The individual is a part of something that is more generally diffused than himself.

… height, paling her cheeks, and substituting for what we have come to her solely to seek other peculiarities which we remember now that we did notice the first time, and fail to understand how we can so far have forgotten to look out for again.

We thought we remembered; it was a peahen, surely; we go to see it and find a peony.

And this inevitable astonishment is not the only one;

… side by side with it comes another, born of the difference, not now between the stereotyped forms of memory and reality, but between the person whom we saw last time and him who appears to us today from another angle and shows us another aspect.

The human face is indeed, like the face of the God of some Oriental theogony, a whole cluster of faces, crowded together but on different surfaces so that one does not see them all at once.

But to a great extent our astonishment springs from the other person’s presenting to us also a face that is the same as before.

That plotted course was forgotten, had ceased to exist, when I returned home buzzing like a hive of bees with remarks which had disquieted me when I heard them and were still echoing in my brain.

The other person is destroyed when we cease to see him; after which his next appearance means a fresh creation of him, different from that which immediately preceded it, if not from them all.

For the minimum variation that is to be found in these creations is duality.

So that every fresh encounter is a sort of rectification, which brings us back to what we really did see.

We have no longer any recollection of this, to such an extent does what we call remembering a person consist really in forgetting him.

But so long as we can still see at the moment when the forgotten aspect appears, we recognise it, we are obliged to correct the straying line;

In the week that followed I scarcely attempted to see Albertine. I made a show of preferring Andrée.

Love is born; one would like to remain, for her whom one loves, the unknown whom she may love in turn, but one has need of her, one requires contact not so much with her body as with her attention, her heart.

One slips into a letter some spiteful expression which will force the indifferent reader to ask for some little kindness in compensation, and love, following an unvarying procedure, sets going with an alternating movement the machinery in which one can no longer either refrain from …

emerging from the dust of memory, Albertine was built up afresh before my eyes.

Golf gives one a taste for solitary pleasures.

The pleasure to be derived from diabolo is undoubtedly one of these.

A feeling of this sort may be the cause of the keenest pain.

For in order really to suffer at the hands of a woman one must have believed in her completely.

For the moment, that embryo of moral esteem, of friendship, was left embedded in me like a stepping-stone in a stream.

… out of which the genius of a Bakst, according to the bloodred or moonlit effect in which he plunges his stage, makes a hard incrustation, like a turquoise on a palace wall, or a swooning softness, as of a Bengal rose in an eastern garden.

And so when acquiring a knowledge of faces we take careful measurements, but as painters, not as surveyors.

So it was with Albertine as with her friends. On certain days, slim, with grey cheeks, a sullen air, a violet transparency falling obliquely from her such as we notice sometimes on the sea, she seemed to be feeling the sorrows of exile.

Geographers, archaeologists may conduct us over Calypso’s island, may excavate the Palace of Minos.

Only Calypso becomes then nothing more than a woman, Minos than a king with no semblance of divinity.

Even the good and bad qualities which history teaches us to have been the attributes of those quite real personages, often differ widely from those which we had ascribed to the fabulous beings who bore the same names as they.

He was particularly annoyed when the little local railway company, finding the supply of passengers inadequate, discontinued its trains until the following spring.

“What is lacking here,” said the manager, “is the means of commotion.”

In spite of the deficit which his books showed, he was making plans for the future on a lavish scale.

then they must be kin to their cousin at Algiers, too.” My mother and I long asked ourselves who this cousin at Algiers could be until finally we discovered that Françoise meant by the name “Algiers” the town of Angers.

What is far off may be more familiar to us than what is quite near.

Françoise, who knew the name “Algiers” from some particularly unpleasant dates that used to be given us at the New Year, had never heard of Angers. Her language, like the French language itself, and especially that of place-names, was thickly strewn with errors.

Why wait till they’re dead? Ah, if I had only a crust of dry bread to eat and a faggot to keep me warm in winter, a fine time I’d have of it at home in my brother’s poor old house at Combray.

Down there you do feel you’re alive; you haven’t all these houses stuck up in front of you, there is so little noise at nighttime, you can hear the frogs singing five miles off and more.

”

… evening, between nine and eleven, on its iron chairs—endowed with a magic as potent as the leathern sofa—without inhaling the breezes peculiar to the Faubourg Saint-Germain was as impossible as to take a siesta in the oasis of Figuig without thereby being necessarily in Africa.

Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere.

Alas, those picturesque sites, those natural accidents, those local curiosities, those works of art of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, never probably should I be permitted to set my feet among them.

… was in the eyes of specialists in aristocracy the best possible certificate of the authenticity of the picture which her box presented, a sort of evocation of a scene in the ordinary private life of the Princess in her palaces in Munich and in Paris.

Our imagination being like a barrel organ out of order, which always plays some other tune than that shown on its card, every time that I had heard any mention of the Princesse de Guermantes-Bavière, a recollection of certain sixteenth century masterpieces had begun singing in my brain.

I was obliged to rid myself quickly of this association, now that I saw her engaged in offering crystallised fruit to a stout gentleman in a swallowtail coat.

Is that richness of colouring, nobility, strength?” And what answers it again is a shrill voice, a curiously questioning tone, the despotic impression caused by a person whom one does not know, wholly material, in which there is no room left for “breadth of interpretation.”

And for this reason it is the really beautiful works that, if we listen to them with sincerity, must disappoint us most keenly, because in the storehouse of our ideas there is none that corresponds to an individual impression.

This was precisely what Berma’s acting showed me. This was what was meant by nobility, by intelligence of diction.

Now I could appreciate the worth of a broad, poetical, powerful interpretation, or rather it was to this that those epithets were conventionally applied, but only as we give the names of Mars, Venus, Saturn to planets which have no place in classical mythology.

We feel in one world, we think, we give names to things in another; between the two we can establish a certain correspondence, but not bridge the interval.

It was quite narrow, this interval, this fault that I had had to cross when, that afternoon on which I went first to hear Berma, having strained my ears to catch every word, I had found some difficulty in correlating my ideas of “nobility of …

such was the life led by the King at Versailles among his courtiers, a life as strange as that of a Pharaoh or a Doge—and, far more even than his, the life of his courtiers.

The life led by our servants is probably of an even more monstrous abnormality, which only its familiarity can prevent us from seeing.

But it was actually in details more intimate still that I should have been obliged, if I had dismissed Françoise, to keep the same servant. For various others might, in years to come, enter my service;

Of these gaps I knew nothing, any more than of the salients to which they gave rise, precisely because they were gaps. But my servants, by gradually becoming spoiled, taught me of their existence.

It was from the defects which they invariably acquired that I learned what were my own natural and invariable shortcomings; their character offered me a sort of negative plate of my own.

We had always laughed, my mother and I, at Mme. Sazerat, who used, in speaking of her servants, expressions like “the lower orders” or “the servant class.”

To return to Françoise,

I never in my life experienced any humiliation without having seen beforehand on her face a store of condolences prepared and waiting

;

And what about your work; have you started yet? No? You are a quaint fellow! If I had your talent I’m sure I should be writing morning, noon and night. It amuses you more to do nothing?

What a pity it is that it’s the useless fellows like me who are always ready to work, and the ones who could if they wanted to, won’t.

There, and I’ve clean forgotten to ask you how your grandmother is. Her Proudhons are in safe keeping. I never part from them.”

he moved something, let fall something else; I felt that the room was not empty, that there must be somebody there. But it was only the freshly lighted fire beginning to burn.

It could not keep quiet, it kept shifting its faggots about, and very clumsily.

I entered the room; it let one roll into the fender and set another smoking.

Suddenly I caught sight of the watch on the table. Then I heard the tick in a fixed place from which it did not move again.

That is to say, I thought I heard it at this place; I did not hear it there; I saw it there, for sounds have no position in space.

Or rather we associate them with movements, and in that way they serve the purpose of warning us of those movements, of appearing to make them necessary and natural.

… crackling at that moment in Saint-Loup’s fireplace, labouring at the formation of brands and cinders, which it then lets fall into the fender, nor would he hear the passage of the tramway-cars whose music took its flight, at regular intervals, over the Grand’place of Doncières.

Let the sick man then read a book, and the pages will turn silently before him, as though they were moved by the fingers of a god.

The dull thunder of a bath which is being filled becomes thin, faint and distant as the twittering of birds in the sky. The withdrawal of sound, its dilution, take from it all its power to hurt us;

… mad a moment ago by hammer-blows which seemed to be shattering the ceiling above our head, it is with a quiet delight that we now gather in their sound, light, caressing, distant, like the murmur of leaves playing by the roadside with the passing breeze.

We play games of patience with cards which we do not hear, until we imagine that we have not touched them, that they are moving of their own accord, and, anticipating our desire to play with them, have begun to play with us.

And in this connection 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 …

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.

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.

… 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.

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 …

… 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.

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 forever.

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.

you say you will do it, and there you show the fineness of your mind and heart.

A stupid friend would have started a discussion.

”

I realised only after I had finished, amid general laughter, that it had struck him that this story would give his friends a good idea of my wit, and that it was for this reason that he had pretended not to know it.

Such is the stuff of friendship.

On the third evening, one of his friends, to whom I had not had an opportunity before of speaking, conversed with me at great length; and I overheard him telling Saint-Loup how much he had been enjoying himself.

d’Ambresac to someone who was not Saint-Loup and that of Saint-Loup to someone who was not Mlle. d’Ambresac. I should have surprised them greatly had I reminded them of their incompatible and still so recent predictions.

In order that this little game may continue, and multiply false reports by attaching the greatest possible number to every name in turn, nature has furnished those who play it with a memory as short as their credulity is long.

Saint-Loup had spoken to me of another of his friends who was present also, one with whom he was on particularly good terms just then, since they were the only two advocates in their mess of the retrial of Dreyfus.

… half towards Saint-Loup so as not to appear to be cutting myself off from him, as well as towards his friend, and so that we might all three join in the conversation, “that the influence we ascribe to environment is particularly true of intellectual environment.

One is the man of one’s idea. There are far fewer ideas than men, therefore all men with similar ideas are alike.

As there is nothing material in an idea, so the people who are only materially neighbours of the man with an idea can do nothing to alter it.”

And so what it has been it will continue to be.

A painter doesn’t make a studio out of any old room; so you don’t make a battlefield out of any old piece of ground.

There are places set apart for the purpose. But, once again, this is not what I was telling you about; it was the type of battle which one follows, in a sort of strategic tracing, a tactical imitation, if you like.

” It was not in the firmament alone that I enshrined the thought of Mme. de Guermantes. A passing breath of air, more fragrant than the rest, seemed to bring me a message from her, as, long ago, from Gilberte in the cornfields of Méséglise.

We do not change; we introduce into the feeling with which we regard a person many slumbering elements which that feeling revives but which are foreign to it.

Besides, with these feelings for particular people, there is always something in us that is trying to bring them nearer to the truth, that is to say, to absorb them in a more general feeling, common to the whole of humanity, with which people and …

… trying to bring them nearer to the truth, that is to say, to absorb them in a more general feeling, common to the whole of humanity, with which people and the suffering that they cause us are merely a means to enable us to communicate.

What brought a certain pleasure into my grief was that I knew it to be a tiny fragment of the universal love.

Simply because I thought that I recognised sorrows which I had felt on Gilberte’s account, or else when in the evenings at Combray Mamma would not stay in any room, and also the memory of certain pages of Bergotte, in the agony I now felt, …

As I made my way to the restaurant I said to myself: “A fortnight already since I last saw Mme. de Guermantes.”

A fortnight which did not appear so enormous an interval save to me, who, when Mme. de Guermantes was concerned, reckoned time by minutes.

For me it was no longer the stars and the breeze merely, but the arithmetical divisions of time that assumed a dolorous and poetic aspect.

de Guermantes was concerned, reckoned time by minutes. For me it was no longer the stars and the breeze merely, but the arithmetical divisions of time that assumed a dolorous and poetic aspect.

Each day now was like the loose crest of a crumbling mountain, down one side of which I felt that I could descend into oblivion, but down the other was borne by the necessity of seeing the Duchess again.

And I was continually inclining one way or the other, having no stable equilibrium. One day I said to myself: “Perhaps there will be a letter tonight;” and on entering the dining-room I found courage to ask Saint-Loup:

Among all these possibilities he was certain of nothing; his mistress preserved a silence which wrought him up to such a frenzy of grief that he began to ask himself whether she might not be in hiding at Doncières, or have sailed for the Indies.

It has been said that silence is a force; in another and widely different sense it is a tremendous force in the hands of those who are loved.

It increases the anxiety of the lover who has to wait. Nothing so tempts us to approach another person as what is keeping us apart; and what barrier is there so insurmountable as silence?

Besides, more cruel than the silence of prisons, that kind of silence is in itself a prison. An immaterial enclosure, I admit, but impenetrable, this interposed slice of empty atmosphere through which, despite its emptiness, the visual rays of the abandoned lover cannot pass.

Is there a more terrible illumination than that of silence which shows us not one absent love but a thousand, and shows us each of them in the act of indulging in some fresh betrayal?

Sometimes, in an abrupt relaxation of his strain, Robert would imagine that this period of silence was just coming to an end, that the long expected letter was on its way.

It has been said that silence is a force; in another and widely different sense it is a tremendous force in the hands of those who are loved. It increases the anxiety of the lover who has to wait.

Nothing so tempts us to approach another person as what is keeping us apart; and what barrier is there so insurmountable as silence?

It has been said also that silence is a torture, capable of goading to madness him who is condemned to it in a prison cell.

Robert asked himself: “What can she be doing, never to send me a single word, like this? She hates me, perhaps, and will always go on hating me.” And he reproached himself. Thus her silence did indeed drive him mad with jealousy and remorse.

Besides, more cruel than the silence of prisons, that kind of silence is in itself a prison.

An immaterial enclosure, I admit, but impenetrable, this interposed slice of empty atmosphere through which, despite its emptiness, the visual rays of the abandoned lover cannot pass.

… felt more clearly the sham and illusion of meetings apparently most pleasant, and at what a distance we may be from the people we love at the moment when it seems that we have only to stretch out our hand to seize and hold them.

A real presence indeed that voice so near⁠—in actual separation. But a premonition also of an eternal separation!

Over and again, as I listened in this way, without seeing her who spoke to me from so far away, it has seemed to me that the voice was crying to me from depths out of which one does not rise again, and I have …

My request to be allowed to inspect the Elstirs in Mme. de Guermantes’s collection had been met by Saint-Loup with: “I will answer for her.” And indeed, as ill luck would have it, it was he and he alone who did answer.

We answer readily enough for other people when, setting our mental stage with the little puppets that represent them, we manipulate these to suit our fancy.

No doubt even then we take into account the difficulties due to another person’s nature being different from our own, and we do not fail to have recourse to some plan of action likely to influence that nature, an appeal to his material interest, persuasion, …

That morning, I was surprised to find myself humming a music-hall tune which had never entered my head since the year in which I had been going to Florence and Venice.

So profoundly does the atmosphere, as good days and bad recur, act on our organism and draw from dim shelves where we had forgotten them, the melodies written there which our memory could not decipher.

Presently a more conscious dreamer accompanied this musician to whom I was listening inside myself, without having recognised at first what he was playing.

All this was quite enough to make Mme. Sazerat, who knew every incident of the disinterested and honourable careers of my father and grandfather, regard them as pillars of Injustice.

We pardon the crimes of individuals, but not their participation in a collective crime.

As soon as she knew my father to be an anti-Dreyfusard she set between him and herself continents and centuries.

It was not with any particular resentment against Legrandin that I parted from him.

Certain memories are like friends in common, they can bring about reconciliations; set down amid fields starred with buttercups, upon which were piled the ruins of feudal greatness, the little wooden bridge still joined us, Legrandin and me, as it joined the two banks of the Vivonne.

After coming out of a Paris in which, although spring had begun, the trees on the boulevards had hardly put on their first leaves, it was a marvel to Saint-Loup and myself, when the circle train had set us down at the suburban village in …

And indeed, when Robert and I were both looking at her we did not both see her from the same side of the mystery.

It was not “Rachel when from the Lord”⁠—who seemed to me a small matter⁠—it was the power of the human imagination, the illusion on which were based the pains of love; these I felt to be vast.

Robert noticed that I appeared moved. I turned my eyes to the pear and cherry trees of the garden opposite, so that he might think that it was their beauty that had touched me. And it did touch me in somewhat the same way;

I, who was so much afraid of the effect of wine on him, and felt the good influence of his mistress, was quite prepared to advise him to let his family go hang.

Tears sprang to the young woman’s eyes; I had been rash enough to refer to Dreyfus.

“The poor martyr!” she almost sobbed; “it will be the death of him in that dreadful place.”

She was in a hurry, she did not on this occasion say a single word to Saint-Loup, and it was only some days later that he finally contrived, by inducing her to leave her companions, to escort her home. He loved her already.

The need for dreams, the desire to be made happy by her of whom one has dreamed, bring it about that not much time is required before one entrusts all one’s chances of happiness to her who a few days since was but a fortuitous apparition, unknown, unmeaning, upon the boards of the theatre.

When, the curtain having fallen, we moved on to the stage, alarmed at finding myself there for the first time, I felt the need to begin a spirited conversation with Saint-Loup.

Rachel was playing a part which involved barely more than her walking on in the little play. But seen thus, she was another woman.

She had one of those faces to which distance⁠—and not necessarily that between stalls and stage, the world being in this respect only a larger theatre⁠—gives form and outline and which, seen close at hand, dissolve back into dust.

Standing beside her one saw only a nebula, a milky way of freckles, of tiny spots, nothing more.

… a neurasthenic lives may be woven by him from morning to night without therefore seeming endurable, and while he is hastening to add another mesh to the net which holds him captive, it is possible that he is dreaming only of dancing, sport and travel.

We are at work every moment upon giving its form to our life, but we do so by copying unintentionally, like the example in a book, the features of the person that we are and not of him who we should like to be.

The disdainful bow of Mme. Leroi might to some extent be expressive of the true nature of Mme. de Villeparisis; it in no way corresponded to her ambition.

But if we understood politeness we were not incapable of impertinence either. M. Decazes accepted, but the day before the ball it was given out that my grandfather felt indisposed and had cancelled his invitations.

He had obeyed the King, but he had not had M. Decazes at his ball.

… Yes, sir, I remember M. Molé very well, he was a clever man—he showed that in his reception of M.

“Love?” she had once replied to a pushing lady who had asked her: “What are your views on love?”—“

Love? I make it, constantly, but I never talk about it.

” When she had any of these literary or political lions in her house she contented herself, as did the Duchesse de Guermantes, with setting them down to play poker. They often preferred this to the serious conversations on general ideas in which Mme.

I heard Ristori in her great days, she’s a mere wreck now. Besides I detest Carmen Sylva’s poetry. Ristori came here once, the Duchess of Aosta brought her, to recite a canto of the Inferno, by Dante. In that sort of thing she’s incomparable.”

Alix bore the blow without flinching. She remained marble.

Her gaze was piercing and blank, her nose proudly arched. But the surface of one cheek was scaling. A faint, strange vegetation, green and pink, was invading her chin. Perhaps another winter would level her with the dust.

de Cambremer: “Why, of course,” she said, with a half-laugh which the last traces of her pretended ill humour kept in check, “everybody knows what it means; a plumitive is a writer, a person who holds a pen.

But it’s a dreadful word. It’s enough to make your wisdom teeth drop out.

Nothing will ever make me use words like that.

… hand and in a coarse and angry voice which I had never suspected him of possessing, a voice which bearing no traceable relation to what he ordinarily said did bear another more immediate and striking relation to something that he was feeling at the moment.

What happens is that since we are determined always to keep our feelings to ourselves, we have never given any thought to the manner in which we should express them.

And suddenly there is within us a strange and obscene animal making its voice heard, the tones of which may inspire as much terror in the listener who receives the involuntary elliptical irresistible communication of our defect or vice as would the sudden avowal indirectly …

Mme. de Guermantes, having asked him whether it would amuse him to come to luncheon to meet this or that famous poet, devoured by curiosity he would arrive at the appointed hour.

The Duchess was talking to the poet about the weather.

They sat down to luncheon. “Do you like this way of doing eggs?” she asked the poet. On hearing his approval, which she shared, for everything in her own house appeared to her exquisite, including a horrible cider which she imported from Guermantes:

“I don’t remember making such a charming comparison, but if she was one before, now she’s the frog that has succeeded in swelling to the size of the ox.

Or rather, it isn’t quite that, because all her swelling is concentrated in front of her waist, she’s more like a frog in an interesting condition.

”

You leave Pisanello and Van Huysun a long way behind, with their laborious, dead herbals.”

An artist, however modest, is always willing to hear himself preferred to his rivals, and tries only to see that justice is done them.

“What makes you think that is that they painted the flowers of their period, which we don’t have now, but they did it with great skill.”

“Really, you have the fingers of a fairy,” went on (to the Marquise) the historian who, having his back turned, to me at that moment, had not noticed Bloch’s clumsiness.

But Bloch took this for a sneer at himself, and to cover his shame in insolence retorted: “It’s not of the slightest importance; I’m not wet.”

Mme. de Villeparisis rang the bell and a footman came to wipe the carpet and pick up the fragments of glass. She invited the two young men to her theatricals, and also Mme. de Guermantes, with the injunction:

“She hasn’t the ghost of a notion what poetry is,” replied Mme. de Guermantes. “However, I didn’t need to listen to her to tell that. It was quite enough to see her come in with her lilies.

I knew at once that she couldn’t have any talent when I saw those lilies!

”

“

I admit she doesn’t look like a cow, she looks like a dozen,

” exclaimed Mme. de Guermantes. “I assure you, I didn’t know what to do when I saw a herd of cattle come marching into my drawing-room in a hat and heard them ask me how I was. I had half a mind to say:

But if his self-esteem had a tendency to exaggerate if anything the superiority of the title Duc de Guermantes over all others, it was perhaps not so much the rules of good taste as the laws of imagination that urged him thus to attenuate it.

Each of us sees in the brightest colours what he sees at a distance, what he sees in other people.

For the general laws which govern perspective in imagination apply just as much to dukes as to ordinary mortals. And not only the laws of imagination, but those of speech.

What idiotic, raving letters he writes from that island. I don’t know whether M. Esterhazy is any better, but he does show some skill in his choice of words, a different tone altogether. That can’t be very pleasant for the supporters of M. Dreyfus.

What a pity for them there’s no way of exchanging innocents.

” Everybody laughed. “You heard what Oriane said?” the Duc de Guermantes inquired eagerly of Mme. de Villeparisis. “Yes; I think it most amusing.” This was not enough for the Duke. “Well, I don’t know, I can’t say that I thought it amusing;

“It’s no good asking me,” answered the Duchess, “

I have never yet succeeded in finding out what a social solemnity is. Besides, society isn’t my strong point.

”

She never shrank from kissing a poor woman who was in trouble, and would tell her to come up to the castle for a cartload of wood. She was, people said, the perfect Christian. She was determined to find an immensely rich wife for Robert.

Being a great lady means playing the great lady, that is to say, to a certain extent, playing at simplicity.

It is a pastime which costs an extremely high price, all the more because simplicity charms people only on condition that they know that you are not bound to live simply, that is to say that you are very rich.

He knew of scarcely any of these infidelities. One could have told him of them without shaking his confidence in Rachel.

For it is a charming law of nature which manifests itself in the heart of the most complex social organisms, that we live in perfect ignorance of those we love.

On one side of the mirror the lover says to himself: “She is an angel, she will never yield herself to me, I may as well die—and yet she does care for me; she cares so much that perhaps—but no, it can never possibly happen.”

Such was the power that good breeding had over M. de Guermantes, over the body of M. de Guermantes at least, for it had not an equal mastery over the ducal mind.

M. de Guermantes laughed at his own jokes, but did not unbend to other people’s.

As I went downstairs I heard behind me a voice calling out to me:

“There is nothing so pleasant as to give oneself trouble for a person who is worth one’s while. For the best of us, the study of the arts, a taste for old things, collections, gardens are all mere ersatz, succedanea, alibis.

In the heart of our tub, like Diogenes, we cry out for a man. We cultivate begonias, we trim yews, as a last resort, because yews and begonias submit to treatment.

But we should like to give our time to a plant of human growth, if we were sure that he was worth the trouble. That is the whole question: you must know something about yourself. Are you worth my trouble or not?”

“That sort of politeness means nothing,” he rebuked me coldly. “

There is nothing so pleasant as to give oneself trouble for a person who is worth one’s while.

For the best of us, the study of the arts, a taste for old things, collections, gardens are all mere ersatz, succedanea, alibis. In the heart of our tub, like Diogenes, we cry out for a man.

“

That is absolutely as though you had asked me what the Nobody family was

,” replied M. de Charlus. “My aunt married, for love, a M. Thirion, who was extremely rich, for that matter, and whose sisters had married surprisingly well; and from that day onwards he called himself Marquis de Villeparisis.

I went upstairs, and found my grandmother not so well. For some time past, without knowing exactly what was wrong, she had been complaining of her health.

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognise that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourself understood: our body.

Say that we met a brigand by the way; we might yet convince him by an appeal to his personal interest, if not to our own plight.

… a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognised in a few years’ time.

So that to believe in medicine would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were not greater folly still, for from this mass of errors there have emerged in the course of time many truths.

Cottard had told us to take her temperature. A thermometer was fetched. Throughout almost all its length it was clear of mercury. Scarcely could one make out, crouching at the foot of the tube, in its little cell, the silver salamander. It seemed dead.

our body. Say that we met a brigand by the way; we might yet convince him by an appeal to his personal interest, if not to our own plight.

But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing before an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourself condemned to live.

My grandmother’s attacks passed, often enough, unnoticed by the attention which she kept always diverted to ourselves. When the pain was severe, in the hope of curing it, she would try in vain to understand what the trouble was.

That poor maniac is the most lofty intellect that I know. Submit to being called a neurotic. You belong to that splendid and pitiable family which is the salt of the earth.

All the greatest things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they and they only who have founded religions and created great works of art.

Never will the world be conscious of how much it owes to them, nor above all of what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

I will go farther, and say that, unless he himself is subject to nervous trouble, he is not, I won’t say a good doctor, but I do say the right doctor to treat nervous troubles.

In nervous pathology a doctor who doesn’t say too many foolish things is a patient half-cured, just as a critic is a poet who has stopped writing verse and a policeman a burglar who has retired from practice.

I, Madame, I do not, like you, fancy myself to be suffering from albuminuria, I have not your nervous fear of food, nor of fresh air, but I can never go to sleep without getting out of bed at least twenty times to see if …

You needn’t tell me that you are fatigued.

Fatigue is the organic realisation of a preconceived idea.

Begin by not thinking it. And if ever you have a slight indisposition, which is a thing that may happen to anyone, it will be just as if you hadn’t it, for your nervous energy will have endowed you with what M.

I could not have spoken of it to her in greater confidence than to a stranger. She had suddenly handed back to me the thoughts, the griefs which, from the days of my infancy, I had entrusted for all time to her keeping.

She was not yet dead. I was already alone.

And even those allusions which she had made to the Guermantes, to Mme.

The maid had forgotten to cut and hem the buttonhole for the decorations. This would take another ten minutes. The Professor continued to storm while I stood on the landing gazing at a grandmother for whom there was not the slightest hope.

Each of us is indeed alone.

We started for home.

The same individual phenomena are reproduced in the mass, in great crises.

In a war, the man who does not love his country says nothing against it, but regards it as lost, commiserates it, sees everything in the darkest colours.

Françoise was of infinite value to us owing to her faculty of doing without sleep, of performing the most arduous tasks.

… know what saint to invoke, as my grandmother was coughing and sneezing a good deal, we took the advice of a relative who assured us that if we sent for the specialist X⸺ he would get rid of all that in a couple of days.

People say that sort of thing about their own doctors, and their friends believe them just as Françoise always believed the advertisements in the newspapers.

The specialist came with his bag packed with all the colds and coughs of his other patients, like Aeolus’s bottle. My grandmother refused point-blank to let herself be examined.

But it was while he still lived, and during his slow progress towards a death that he had not yet reached that this writer was able to watch the progress of his works towards Renown.

A dead writer can at least be illustrious without any strain on himself.

The effulgence of his name is stopped short by the stone upon his grave. In the deafness of the eternal sleep he is not importuned by Glory. But for Bergotte the antithesis was still incomplete. He existed still sufficiently to suffer from the tumult.

A dead writer can at least be illustrious without any strain on himself.

The effulgence of his name is stopped short by the stone upon his grave.

In the deafness of the eternal sleep he is not importuned by Glory. But for Bergotte the antithesis was still incomplete. He existed still sufficiently to suffer from the tumult.

I felt nevertheless for the new writer the admiration which an awkward boy who never receives any marks for gymnastics feels when he watches another more nimble. And from then onwards I felt less admiration for Bergotte, whose limpidity began to strike me as insufficient.

There was a time at which people recognised things quite easily in pictures when it was Fromentin who had painted them, and could not recognise them at all when it was Renoir.

People of taste and refinement tell us nowadays that Renoir is one of the great painters of the last century.

… to go for a walk in the forest which reminds us of that other which when we first saw it looked like anything in the world except a forest, like for instance a tapestry of innumerable shades but lacking precisely the shades proper to forests.

Such is the new and perishable universe which has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe is precipitated by a new painter or writer of original talent.

This writer who had taken Bergotte’s place in my affections wearied me not by the incoherence but by the novelty of associations—perfectly coherent—which my mind was not trained to follow.

I was surprised to find that at this stage, when my grandmother was so ill, Françoise was constantly disappearing. The fact was that she had ordered herself a mourning dress, and did not wish to keep her dressmaker waiting.

In the lives of most women, everything, even the greatest sorrow, resolves itself into a question of “trying-on.”

A few days later, when I was in bed and sleeping, my mother came to call me in the early hours of the morning.

I have met him again since then, but never has any reference been made by either of us to that minute. It was tacitly agreed that I had not noticed that he was spying on me.

In the priest as in the alienist, there is always an element of the examining magistrate.

Besides, what friend is there, however cherished, in whose and our common past there has not been some such episode which we find it convenient to believe that he must have forgotten?

It was tacitly agreed that I had not noticed that he was spying on me. In the priest as in the alienist, there is always an element of the examining magistrate.

Besides, what friend is there, however cherished, in whose and our common past there has not been some such episode which we find it convenient to believe that he must have forgotten?

The doctor gave my grandmother an injection of morphine, and to make her breathing less troublesome ordered cylinders of oxygen. My mother, the doctor, the nursing sister held these in their hands; as soon as one was exhausted another was put in its place.

In the sable majesty of his frock coat the Professor entered the room, melancholy without affectation, uttered not the least word of condolence, which might have been thought insincere, nor was he guilty of the slightest infringement of the rules of tact.

At the foot of a deathbed it was he and not the Duc de Guermantes who was the great gentleman.

Having examined my grandmother, but not so as to tire her, and with an excess of reserve which was an act of courtesy to the doctor who was treating the case, he murmured a few words to my father, bowed respectfully to my mother to …

… the far-off time when her parents had chosen for her a bridegroom, she had the features delicately traced by purity and submission, the cheeks glowing with a chaste expectation, with a vision of happiness, with an innocent gaiety even, which the years had gradually destroyed.

Life in withdrawing from her had taken with it the disillusionments of life.

A smile seemed to be hovering on my grandmother’s lips. On that funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the Middle Ages, had laid her in the form of a young maiden.

Life in withdrawing from her had taken with it the disillusionments of life. A smile seemed to be hovering on my grandmother’s lips.

On that funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the Middle Ages, had laid her in the form of a young maiden.

Albeit it was simply a Sunday in autumn, I had been born again, life lay intact before me, for that morning, after a succession of mild days, there had been a cold mist which had not cleared until nearly midday.

A change in the weather is sufficient to create the world and oneself anew.

Formerly, when the wind howled in my chimney, I would listen to the blows which it struck on the iron trap with as keen an emotion as if, like the famous bow-taps with which the C Minor Symphony opens, they had been the irresistible appeal …

then he turned the conversation to something else. All this was not to say that he did not, a little later, see Rachel occasionally when he was in Paris.

The fellow-creatures who have played a leading part in one’s life very rarely disappear from it suddenly with any finality.

They return to take their old place in it at odd moments (so much so as to lead people to believe in a renewal of old love) before leaving it forever.

Saint-Loup’s breach with Rachel had very soon become less painful to him, thanks to the soothing pleasure that was given him by her incessant demands for money.

Jealousy, which prolongs the course of love, is not capable of containing many more ingredients than are the other forms of imagination.

If one takes with one, when one starts on a journey, three or four images which incidentally one is sure to lose on the way (such as the lilies and anemones heaped on the Ponte Vecchio, or the Persian church shrouded in mist), one’s trunk …

“And Madame de Villeparisis? And the dancing-master? And the pastrycook?” When she sat down her back seemed to be saying: “Gracious! There’s no cliff here; you don’t mind if I sit down beside you, all the same, as I used to do at Balbec?”

She was like an enchantress handing me a mirror that reflected time.

In this she was like all the people whom we seldom see now but with whom at one time we lived on more intimate terms. With Albertine, however, there was something more than this.

the things I was saying to her followed logically those that I had said during the hours before, and bore no relation to what I was thinking about, what I desired from her, remained indefinitely parallel.

There is nothing like desire for preventing the thing one says from bearing any resemblance to what one has in one’s mind.

Time presses, and yet it seems as though we were seeking to gain time by speaking of subjects absolutely alien to that by which we are obsessed.

… make fluctuate in form, in dimensions, in relief the human image, is an example of relativity in the appreciation of an image which it is delightful to see afresh when it has resumed the slender proportions of a silhouette in the setting of one’s life.

The women one meets first of all in a brothel are of no interest because they remain invariable.

In addition, Albertine preserved, inseparably attached to her, all my impressions of a series of seascapes of which I was particularly fond. I felt that it was possible for me, on the girl’s two cheeks, to kiss the whole of the beach at Balbec.

In the next it was the other way about. In another a hardworking mother, beaten black and blue by a drunkard son, was endeavouring to conceal her sufferings from the eyes of the neighbours.

Quite half of the human race was in tears.

And when I came to know the people who composed it I saw that they were;

Until then, the efforts of the entire world banded together to bring me into touch with her would have been powerless to counteract the evil spell that is cast by an ill-starred love.

Fairies more powerful than mankind have decreed that in such cases nothing can avail us until the day on which we have uttered sincerely and from our hearts the formula: “I am no longer in love.”

I had been vexed with Saint-Loup for not having taken me to see his aunt. But he was no more capable than anyone else of breaking an enchantment. So long as I was in love with Mme.

Indeed, among the lesser auxiliaries to success in love, an absence, the declining of an invitation to dinner, an unintentional, unconscious harshness are of more service than all the cosmetics and fine clothes in the world.

There would be plenty of social success, were people taught upon these lines the art of succeeding.

As she swept through the room in which I was sitting, her mind filled with thoughts of friends whom I did not know and whom she would perhaps be meeting presently at some other party, Mme.

This had, nevertheless, been the case, and ever since the mind of the Duchess had been at work trying to unravel the motives of a woman who was so hard to know, she was dying to be invited to call on her.

People in society are so accustomed to be sought after that the person who shuns them seems to them a phoenix and at once monopolises their attention.

Was the true motive in the mind of Mme. de Guermantes for thus inviting me (now that I was no longer in love with her) that I did not run after her relatives, although apparently run after myself by them? I cannot say.

de Stermaria was costing me now. The latter, I was determined, must go away with the best possible impression from our evening together. Accordingly I asked Albertine to come with me there and then to the island to order the food.

She to whom one gives everything is so quickly replaced by another that one is surprised to find oneself giving all that one has, afresh, at every moment, without any hope of future reward.

At my suggestion the smiling rosy face beneath Albertine’s flat cap, which came down very low, to her eyebrows, seemed to hesitate. She had probably other plans;

“Take care you don’t slip, Sir; they’re not tacked yet,” Françoise called to me. “I ought to have lighted up. Oh, dear, it’s the end of ‘Sectember’ already, the fine days are over.”

In no time, winter; at the corner of a window, as in a Gallé glass, a vein of crusted snow; and even in the Champs-Élysées, instead of the girls one waits to see, nothing but solitary sparrows.

What added to my distress at not seeing Mme. de Stermaria was that her answer led me to suppose that whereas, hour by hour, since Sunday, I had been living for this dinner alone, she had presumably never given it a second thought.

Circumstances decided against me; I did not see her again.

It was not she that I loved, but it might well have been.

And one of the things that made most cruel, perhaps, the great love which was presently to come to me was that when I thought of this evening I used to say to myself that my love might, given a slight modification of very ordinary …

But Robert having finished giving his instructions to the driver joined me now in the carriage. The ideas that had appeared before me took flight.

Ideas are goddesses who deign at times to make themselves visible to a solitary mortal, at a turning in the road, even in his bedroom while he sleeps, when they, standing framed in the doorway, bring him the annunciation of their tidings.

But as soon as a companion joins him they vanish, in the society of his fellows no man has ever beheld them. And I found myself cast back upon friendship.

Ideas are goddesses who deign at times to make themselves visible to a solitary mortal, at a turning in the road, even in his bedroom while he sleeps, when they, standing framed in the doorway, bring him the annunciation of their tidings.

But as soon as a companion joins him they vanish, in the society of his fellows no man has ever beheld them.

And I found myself cast back upon friendship. When he first appeared Robert had indeed warned me that there was a good deal of fog outside, but while we were indoors, talking, it had grown steadily thicker.

… true that, after the fashion of certain nervous affections the symptoms of which grow less pronounced in later life, this snobbishness was on the whole to cease to express itself in so offensive a form in these men who had been so intolerable when young.

Once youth is outgrown, it is seldom that anyone remains hidebound by insolence.

He had supposed it to be the only thing in the world; suddenly he discovers, for all the Prince that he is, that there also are such things as music, literature, even standing for parliament.

Every time that a man about town enters into relations, on this footing, with a banker, the latter leaves him the poorer by a hundred thousand francs, which does not prevent the man about town from at once repeating the process with another.

We continue to burn candles in churches and to consult doctors.

But the Prince de Foix, who was rich already, belonged not only to this fashionable set of fifteen or so young men, but to a more exclusive and inseparable group of four which included Saint-Loup.

An aggregation of German landlords, simply by being impressed by a customer or a newspaper when he or it said that France, England and Russia were “out to crush” Germany, made war, at the time of Agadir, possible, even if no war occurred.

Historians, if they have not been wrong to abandon the practice of attributing the actions of peoples to the will of kings, ought to substitute for the latter the psychology of the person of no importance.

In politics the proprietor of this particular café had for some time now concentrated his pupil-teacher’s mind on certain particular details of the Dreyfus case.

It was simply a doctor, whom I happened to know; and of whom another customer, taking advantage of the fog to buttonhole him here in the café, was asking his professional advice.

Like stockbrokers, doctors employ the first person singular.

Meanwhile I was studying Saint-Loup, and my thoughts took a line of their own.

This translator was capable only of a mediocre book, if that book had been published as his original work. Given out as a translation, it seems that of a masterpiece.

The past not merely is not fugitive, it remains present.

It is not within a few months only after the outbreak of a war that laws passed without haste can effectively influence its course, it is not within fifteen years only after a crime which has remained obscure that a magistrate can still find the …

… they had seen gradually, as the years bore them away from it, the unbridgeable gulf between what they considered a masterpiece by Ingres and what, they had supposed, must remain forever a “horror” (Manet’s Olympia, for example) shrink until the two canvases seemed like twins.

But we learn nothing from any lesson because we have not the wisdom to work backwards from the particular to the general, and imagine ourselves always to be going through an experience which is without precedents in the past.

I was moved by the discovery in two of the pictures (more realistic, these, and in an earlier manner) of the same person, in one in evening dress in his own drawing-room, in the other wearing a frock coat and tall hat at some popular …

de Guermantes was afraid that after looking at so many pictures I would find it tiring and would be hindered from taking my ease among them if her husband engaged me in a continuous flow of introductions.

So that it was the absence of grandeur in this gesture that disclosed its true grandeur.

As, also, did that indifference shown by the Duke to the splendour of his surroundings, in contrast to his deference towards a guest, however insignificant, whom he desired to honour.

Besides, even if politeness were to vanish, there is nothing to show that this would be a misfortune. Lastly, would not society become secretly more hierarchical as it became outwardly more democratic. This seems highly probable.

The political power of the Popes has grown enormously since they ceased to possess either States or an Army;

our cathedrals meant far less to a devout Catholic of the seventeenth century than they mean to an atheist of the twentieth, and if the Princesse de Parme had been the sovereign ruler of a State, no doubt I should have felt myself impelled to …

If there’s a Vicomte de Tours, he can’t have any too bad a time. Oriane, do you know what those eyebrows and the way her hair grows reminded me of? Your cousin Hedwige de Ligne.”

The Duchesse de Guermantes, who languished whenever people spoke of the beauty of any woman other than herself, let the conversation drop.

She had reckoned without the weakness her husband had for letting it be seen that he knew all about the people who did not come to his house, whereby he believed that he showed himself to be more seriously minded than his wife.

“What! Has Oriane been here?” “Yes, you ought to have come a little sooner,” the Princesse d’Epinay informed her, not in reproach but letting her understand all that her clumsiness had made her miss.

It was her fault alone if she had not been present at the Creation of the World or at Mme. Carvalho’s last performance.

“What do you think of Oriane’s latest?

… without any thought of following the Duchess’s example, derived nevertheless from her action that sense of relief which one has in reading Kant when after the most rigorous demonstration of determinism one finds that above the world of necessity there is the world of freedom.

Every invention of which no one has ever thought before excites the interest even of people who can derive no benefit from it.

That of steam navigation was a small thing compared with the employment of steam navigation at that sedentary time of year called “the season.”

And yet he found himself offering this as the price of far less, for a first kiss in fact, because a resistance upon which he had never reckoned had been brought into play or because there had been no resistance.

In love it often happens that gratitude, the desire to give pleasure, makes us generous beyond the limits of what the other person’s expectation and self-interest could have anticipated.

But then the realisation of this offer was hindered by conflicting circumstances. In the first place, all the women who had responded to M.

He made what excuses he could. His wife, had she been a Courvoisier, would have died of shame. But Mme. de Grouchy was not a Guermantes for nothing. As her husband was apologising for being late:

“I see,” she broke in, “that even in little things arriving late is a tradition in your family.”

“Sit down, Grouchy, and don’t let them pull your leg,” said the Duke.

With those fellows one has to be good but not too good.” “I admit I’m not a very dreadful mistress. He’ll have nothing to do all day but call for your pheasants, sit in the house doing nothing and eat his share of them.”

“There are plenty of people who would be glad to be in his place,” said M. de Grouchy, for envy makes men blind.

“Oriane,” began the Princesse de Parme, “I had a visit the other day from your cousin Heudicourt; of course she’s a highly intelligent woman; she’s a Guermantes, one can say no more, but they tell me she has a spiteful tongue.”

“Less wit?” asked the stupefied Princess. “Come now, Oriane,” broke in the Duke in a plaintive tone, casting to right and left of him a glance of amusement, “you heard the Princess tell you that she was a superior woman.” “But isn’t she?”

“Superior in chest measurement, at any rate.”

“Don’t listen to him, Ma’am, he’s not sincere; she’s as stupid as a (h’m) goose,” came in a loud and rasping voice from Mme.

‘You must come,’ Zénaïde insisted, boasting of all the good things there would be to eat. ‘You are going to have a purée of chestnuts, I need say no more than that, and there will be seven little bouchées à la reine.’

‘Seven little bouchées!’ cried Oriane, ‘that means that we shall be at least eight!’

” There was silence for a few seconds, and then the Princess having seen the point let her laughter explode like a peal of thunder. “Ah! ‘Then we shall be eight,’—it’s exquisite. How very well phrased!”

but even the second I preferred to the last. For, so long as Mme. de Guermantes was being, almost spontaneously, a Guermantes and nothing more; her Pailleronism, her taste for the younger Dumas were reflected and deliberate.

As this taste was the opposite of my own, she was productive, to my mind, of literature when she talked to me of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and never seemed to me so stupidly Faubourg Saint-Germain as when she was talking literature.

Moved by this last quotation, Mme. d’Arpajon exclaimed: “ ‘Ces relics du cœur ont aussi leur poussière!’—Sir, you must write that down for me on my fan,” she said to M. de Guermantes. “Poor woman, I feel sorry for her!”

… the height of the dancing season, and when a woman who was a snob, and consequently still without any definite position, began to go everywhere, he would put a savage obstinacy into his refusal to know her, to allow himself to be introduced to her.

His hatred of snobs was a derivative of his snobbishness, but made the simpletons (in other words, everyone) believe that he was immune from snobbishness.

“Babal always knows everything,” exclaimed the Duchesse de Guermantes. “I think it must be charming, a country where you can be quite sure that your dairyman will supply you with really rotten eggs, eggs of the year of the comet.

His hatred of snobs was a derivative of his snobbishness, but made the simpletons (in other words, everyone) believe that he was immune from snobbishness. “Babal always knows everything,” exclaimed the Duchesse de Guermantes. “

I think it must be charming, a country where you can be quite sure that your dairyman will supply you with really rotten eggs, eggs of the year of the comet.

I can see myself dipping my bread and butter in them. I must say, you get the same thing at aunt Madeleine’s” (Mme. de Villeparisis’s) “where everything’s served in a state of putrefaction, eggs included.” Then, as Mme.

“She is not very strong in her head,” the Duke confided to me, “and besides, she ought not to indulge in too many libations. I fancy, she’s slightly under the influence of Bacchus.”

As a matter of fact Mme. de Varambon had drunk nothing but water, but the Duke liked to find scope for his favourite figures of speech.

“But Zola is not a realist, Ma’am, he’s a poet!” said Mme. de Guermantes, drawing inspiration from the critical essays which she had read in recent years and adapting them to her own personal genius.

“Why, yes,” answered the Duchess with a laugh, entranced by this display of suffocation. “Your Highness must have remarked how he magnifies everything he touches. You will tell me that he touches just what—perish the thought! But he makes it into something colossal.

His is the epic dungheap. He is the Homer of the sewers!

He has not enough capitals to print Cambronne’s word.” Despite the extreme exhaustion which she was beginning to feel, the Princess was enchanted; never had she felt better.

Besides, even in the same country, whenever anybody begins to look at things in a way that is slightly novel, nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand are totally incapable of seeing what he puts before them.

It takes at least forty years before they can manage to make it out.

” “Forty years!” the Princess cried in alarm.

We never had time to go very far. Now that motorcars have come in, it would be delightful. Unfortunately, in the interval he himself has made an even more astonishing marriage, which makes everything very difficult.

Oh, Ma’am, life is a dreadful business, we spend our whole time doing things that bore us, and when by mere chance we come across somebody with whom we could go and look at something really interesting, he has to make a marriage like Swann’s.

Faced with the alternatives of giving up my botanical expeditions and being obliged to call upon a degrading person, I chose the former calamity. Besides, when it comes to that, there was no need to go quite so far.

… the women who had successively borne it, but also in the course of my own short life, which had already seen, in this single Duchesse de Guermantes, so many different women superimpose themselves, each one vanishing as soon as the next had acquired sufficient consistency.

Words do not change their meaning as much in centuries as names do for us in the space of a few years.

Our memory and our heart are not large enough to be able to remain faithful. We have not room enough, in our mental field, to keep the dead there as well as the living.

Words do not change their meaning as much in centuries as names do for us in the space of a few years.

Our memory and our heart are not large enough to be able to remain faithful.

We have not room enough, in our mental field, to keep the dead there as well as the living.

Words do not change their meaning as much in centuries as names do for us in the space of a few years. Our memory and our heart are not large enough to be able to remain faithful.

We have not room enough, in our mental field, to keep the dead there as well as the living.

We are obliged to build over what has gone before and is brought to light only by a chance excavation, such as the name Saintrailles had just wrought in my mind.

came witheringly from the excellent Princesse de Parme, who alone could succeed in piercing the thick skin of her lady in waiting. “I can assure your Royal Highness, it cannot snow again. It is a physical impossibility.” “But why?” “

It cannot snow any more, they have taken the necessary steps to prevent it, they have put down salt in the streets!

” The simple-minded lady did not observe either the anger of the Princess or the mirth of the rest of her audience, for instead of remaining silent she said to me with a genial smile, paying no heed to my repeated denials of any connection …

… noticed, in fact, that I had been twenty-five minutes—that they had perhaps forgotten about me—in this room of which, despite this long wait, I could at the most have said that it was very big, greenish in colour, and contained a large number of portraits.

The need to speak prevents one not merely from listening but from seeing things, and in this case the absence of any description of my external surroundings is tantamount to a description of my internal state.

I was preparing to leave the room to try to get hold of someone, and if I found no one to make my way back to the hall and have myself let out, when, just as I had risen from my chair and taken a …

I can see that on my part it was great foolishness, but

Saint Bonaventure preferred to believe that an ox could fly rather than that his brother was capable of lying.

Anyhow, that is all finished now, the idea did not attract you, there is no more to be said.

M. de Charlus roared.) “Do you suppose that it is within your power to insult me? You evidently are not aware to whom you are speaking?

Do you imagine that the envenomed spittle of five hundred little gentlemen of your type, heaped one upon another, would succeed in slobbering so much as the tips of my august toes?

” A moment before this my desire to persuade M.

“Ah, well, one doesn’t know. One never does know. They are unseen music. Pretty, ain’t it?” he said to me in a slightly impertinent tone, which, nevertheless, suggested somehow the influence and accent of Swann. “

But you care about as much for it as a fish does for little apples.

You want to go home, regardless of any want of respect for Beethoven or for me. You are uttering your own judgment and condemnation,” he added, with an affectionate and mournful air, when the moment had come for me to go.

“Come along,” he said abruptly, “jump in, in five minutes we shall be at your door. And I shall bid you a good night which will cut short our relations, and for all time.

It is better, since we must part forever, that we should do so, as in music, on a perfect chord.

” Despite these solemn affirmations that we should never see one another again, I could have sworn that M.

Then, regaining possession of himself: “I do not wish to part from you on these words.

No dissonance, before the eternal silence of the dominant.

” It was for his own nerves that he seemed to dread an immediate return home after harsh words of dissension. “You would not care to come to the Bois?”

Hoping for your next letter soon, receive my kisses like those of a brother.

We are attracted by every form of life which represents to us something unknown and strange, by a last illusion still unshattered.

In spite of this, the mysterious utterances by means of which M.

The old man of complete insignificance whom we met at dinner is the same who wrote that proud letter, which (in a book on the War of 1870) we read with emotion, to Prince Friedrich-Karl.

We are bored at a dinner-table because our imagination is absent, and because it is bearing us company we are interested in a book.

But the people in question are the same. We should like to have known Mme.

broke in M. de Guermantes. “Marie a fool? Why, she has read everything, she’s as musical as a fiddle.” “But, my poor little Basin, you’re as innocent as a newborn babe. As if one could not be all that, and rather an idiot as well.

Idiot is too strong a word; no, she’s in the clouds, she’s Hesse-Darmstadt, Holy Roman Empire, and wa-wa-wa.

Her pronunciation alone makes me tired. But I quite admit that she’s a charming looney. Simply the idea of stepping down from her German throne to go and marry, in the most middle-class way, a private citizen. It is true that she chose him!

“Not altogether, though,” replied the Duchess, apparently seeking for words that would give more novelty to the thought expressed. “Have you ever noticed with princes that the best-mannered among them are not really well-mannered? They must always have an opinion about everything.

Then, as they have none of their own, they spend the first half of their lives asking us ours and the other half serving it up to us secondhand.

They positively must be able to say that one piece has been well played and the next not so well. When there is no difference. Listen, this little Theodosius junior (I forget his name) asked me what one called an orchestral motif.

“ ‘One calls it an orchestral motif.’ I don’t think he was any too well pleased, really. Oh, my dear Charles,” she went on, “what a bore it can be, dining out.

There are evenings when one would sooner die! It is true that dying may be perhaps just as great a bore, because we don’t know what it’s like.

” A servant appeared. It was the young lover who used to have trouble with the porter, until the Duchess, in her kindness of heart, brought about an apparent peace between them. “Am I to go up this evening to inquire for M.

“You, now, don’t let yourself be taken in by the doctors’ nonsense, damn them. They’re donkeys.

You’re as strong as the Pont Neuf. You’ll live to bury us all!

”

“Yes, I am a little tired just now,” in asking her indiscreetly: “Why, what is the matter with you?” But let someone say to him: “She is expecting a child,” suddenly he catches sight of her abdomen and ceases to see anything else.

It is the explanation that opens our eyes; the dispelling of an error gives us an additional sense.

Those of my readers who do not care to refer, for examples of this law, to the Messieurs de Charlus of their acquaintance, whom for long years they had never suspected, until the day when, upon the smooth surface of the individual just like everyone …

From the beginning of this scene a revolution, in my unsealed eyes, had occurred in M. de Charlus, as complete, as immediate as if he had been touched by a magician’s wand.

Until then, because I had not understood, I had not seen.

The vice (we use the word for convenience only), the vice of each of us accompanies him through life after the manner of the familiar genius who was invisible to men so long as they were unaware of his presence.

The vice (we use the word for convenience only), the vice of each of us accompanies him through life after the manner of the familiar genius who was invisible to men so long as they were unaware of his presence.

Our goodness, our meanness, our name, our social relations do not disclose themselves to the eye, we carry them hidden within us.

Even Ulysses did not at once recognise Athena. But the gods are immediately perceptible to one another, as quickly like to like, and so too had M. de Charlus been to Jupien. Until that moment I had been, in the presence of M.

I no longer remembered that half an hour earlier I had still been persecuted by the fear—which, for that matter, was speedily to grip me again—that I might be entering the house uninvited.

We grow uneasy, and it is sometimes long after the hour of danger, which a subsequent distraction has made us forget, that we remember our uneasiness.

I greeted the young Duke and made my way into the house. But here I must first of all record a trifling incident, which will enable us to understand something that was presently to occur.

In reality, I had imagined nothing sensual, nothing sentimental even, underlying the Baron’s offers. I had said this to my parents with entire irresponsibility.

But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowledge, and our words which we suppose to be false forecast an imminent reality.

M. de Charlus would doubtless have forgiven me my want of gratitude. But what made him furious was that my presence this evening at the Princesse de Guermantes’s, as for some time past at her cousin’s, seemed to be a defiance of his solemn declaration:

He spoke to me of the great heat through which we were passing, but, albeit he was a well-read man and capable of expressing himself in good French, said to me: “You are none the worse for this hyperthermia?”

The fact is that medicine has made some slight advance in knowledge since Molière’s days, but none in its vocabulary.

My companion went on: “The great thing is to avoid the sudations that are caused by weather like this, especially in superheated rooms.

The mistakes made by doctors are innumerable.

They err habitually on the side of optimism as to treatment, of pessimism as to the outcome.

“Wine? In moderation, it can do you no harm, it is always a tonic. … Sexual enjoyment? After all it is a natural function. I allow you to use, but not to abuse it, you understand. Excess in anything is wrong.”

I did not mention this to Dr. E⸺, but of his own accord he said to me: “The advantage of this very hot weather in which perspiration is abundant is that the kidney is correspondingly relieved.”

Medicine is not an exact science.

Keeping me engaged in talk, Professor E⸺ asked only not to be forced to leave me. But I had just seen, making a series of sweeping bows to right and left of the Princesse de Guermantes, stepping back a pace first, the Marquis de Vaugoubert.

In the alternative case, if the woman has not originally these masculine characteristics, she adopts them by degrees, to please her husband, and even unconsciously, by that sort of mimicry which makes certain flowers assume the appearance of the insects which they seek to attract.

Her regret that she is not loved, that she is not a man, virilises her.

Indeed, quite apart from the case that we are now considering, who has not remarked how often the most normal couples end by resembling each other, at times even by an exchange of qualities? A former German Chancellor, Prince von Bülow, married an Italian.

… direction, laid a motherly hand on my shoulder, and, smiling at the averted face of the Prince who was unable to see her, thrust me towards him with a gesture of feigned protection, but deliberately ineffective, which left me stranded almost at my starting point.

Such is the cowardice of people in society.

That of a lady who came to greet me, addressing me by my name, was greater still. I tried to recall her own name as I talked to her;

He barely knows that he does sleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.

A memory without fault is not a very powerful incentive to studying the phenomena of memory.

“In a word, did Mme. d’Arpajon introduce you to the Prince?” No, but be quiet and let me go on with my story.

“It is not that.” Certainly my mind would have been capable of creating the most difficult names. Unfortunately, it had not to create but to reproduce.

All action by the mind is easy, if it is not subjected to the test of reality.

Here, I was forced to own myself beaten. Finally, in a flash, the name came back to me as a whole: “Madame d’Arpajon.” I am wrong in saying that it came, for it did not, I think, appear to me by a spontaneous propulsion.

Bréauté will tell you that it was a mistake to put lamps round it, to try and make people forget that it was he who was responsible for that absurd idea. But after all he has only managed to spoil it a very little.

It is far more difficult to deface a great work of art than to create one.

Not that we had not a vague suspicion all the time that Bréauté was not quite a match for Hubert Robert.”

There is no need, in accounting for three out of four of the opinions that we hold about other people, to go so far as crossed love or exclusion from public office.

Our judgment remains uncertain: the withholding or bestowal of an invitation determines it.

Anyhow, the Turkish Ambassadress, as the Baronne de Guermantes remarked while making a tour of inspection through the rooms with me, “was all right.” She was, above all, extremely useful. The real stars of society are tired of appearing there.

de Guermantes, I could hear a voice of a sort which, for the future, I was to be able to classify without the possibility of error. It was, in this particular instance, the voice of M. de Vaugoubert talking to M. de Charlus.

A skilled physician need not even make his patient unbutton his shirt, nor listen to his breathing, the sound of his voice is enough.

How often, in time to come, was my ear to be caught in a drawing-room by the intonation or laughter of some man, who, for all that, was copying exactly the language of his profession or the manners of his class, affecting a stern aloofness …

The Duc de Guermantes was not overpleased by these offers. Uncertain whether Ibsen and D’Annunzio were dead or alive, he could see in his mind’s eye a tribe of authors, playwrights, coming to call upon his wife and putting her in their works.

People in society are too apt to think of a book as a sort of cube one side of which has been removed, so that the author can at once “put in” the people he meets.

This is obviously disloyal, and authors are a pretty low class.

“Goodbye, I’ve barely said a word to you, it is always like that at parties, we never see the people, we never say the things we should like to say, but it is the same everywhere in this life.

Let us hope that when we are dead things will be better arranged. At any rate, we shall not always be having to put on low dresses.

And yet, one never knows. We may perhaps have to display our bones and worms on great occasions. Why not? Look, there goes old Rampillon, do you see any great difference between her and a skeleton in an open dress?

Presently, everything became boring. “Beautiful things are such a bore. Oh! Pictures! They’re enough to drive one mad. How right you are, it is such a bore having to write letters!”

Finally it was life itself that she declared to be rasante, leaving her hearers to wonder where she applied the term.

I do not know whether it was the effect of what the Duchesse de Guermantes, on the evening when I first dined at her house, had said of this interior, but the card, or smoking-room, with its pictorial floor, its tripods, its figures of gods …

Besides, while completely mistaken about his uncle, whom he supposed to be devoted to women, Robert, in his rancour, spoke too lightly of M. de Charlus.

We are not always somebody’s nephew with impunity.

It is often through him that a hereditary habit is transmitted to us sooner or later. We might indeed arrange a whole gallery of portraits, named like the German comedy:

For my part, I was furious at the abominable little speech that M. de Charlus had just made. I would have liked to shower blessings upon the giver of garden-parties.

Unfortunately, in the social as in the political world, the victims are such cowards that one cannot for long remain indignant with their tormentors.

Mme.

the first, by the fault of my own nature, which is incapable of sustained reflection; the second, by force of circumstances, by the fault of the woman, I should say the women, of whom I have been jealous. But that makes no difference.

Even when one is no longer interested in things, it is still something to have been interested in them; because it was always for reasons which other people did not grasp.

The memory of those sentiments is, we feel, to be found only in ourselves; we must go back into ourselves to study it.

Very well! Now that I am a little too weary to live with other people, those old sentiments, so personal and individual, that I felt in the past, seem to me—it is the mania of all collectors—very precious.

I open my heart to myself like a sort of showcase, and examine one by one ever so many love affairs of which the rest of the world can have known nothing.

And of this collection, to which I am now even more attached than to my others, I say to myself, rather as Mazarin said of his library, but still without any keen regret, that it will be very tiresome to have to leave it all.

This was because, in the most genuine exhaustion, there is, especially in neurotic people, an element that depends upon attracting their attention and is kept going only by an act of memory.

We at once feel tired as soon as we are afraid of feeling tired, and, to throw off our fatigue, it suffices us to forget about it.

To be sure, Swann was far from being one of those indefatigable invalids who, entering a room worn out and ready to drop, revive in conversation like a flower in water and are able for hours on end to draw from their own words a …

And so I declined the invitation to supper. This does not mean that I was not enjoying myself at the Princesse de Guermantes’s.

The truth is that men can have several sorts of pleasure. The true pleasure is that for which they abandon the other.

But the latter, if it is apparent, or rather if it alone is apparent, may put people off the scent of the other, reassure or mislead the jealous, create a false impression.

… suspected (or to introduce, from inclination, moderation, love of accuracy, an element of truth which he was alone in regarding as insignificant), he removed the last doubts of some of his hearers, inspired others, who had not yet begun to doubt him, with their first.

For the most dangerous of all forms of concealment is that of the crime itself in the mind of the guilty party.

His permanent consciousness of it prevents him from imagining how generally it is unknown, how readily a complete lie would be accepted, and on the other hand from realising at what degree of truth other people will detect, in words which he believes to be …

d’Osmond. But he quickly recovered himself and flung at his cousins a retort into which he introduced, with his determination not to forego a pleasure, his incapacity to assimilate exactly the niceties of the French language: “

He is dead! No, no, they exaggerate, they exaggerate!

” And without giving a further thought to his two relatives who, armed with their alpenstocks, were preparing to make their nocturnal ascent, he fired off a string of questions at his valet:

“It would have been better to let me take it than to go and spoil it like that.” But anything that she might say exasperated me.

When we are kept waiting, we suffer so keenly from the absence of the person for whom we are longing that we cannot endure the presence of anyone else.

When Françoise had left my room, it occurred to me that, if it only meant that now I wanted to look my best before Albertine, it was a pity that I had so many times let her see me unshaved, with several days’ growth of …

A receiver in the little passage on which Françoise’s room opened would have been simpler, less inconvenient, but useless.

The advance of civilisation enables each of us to display unsuspected merits or fresh defects which make him dearer or more insupportable to his friends.

Thus Dr. Bell’s invention had enabled Françoise to acquire an additional defect, which was that of refusing, however important, however urgent the occasion might be, to make use of the telephone.

“Another?” “Why, you know it’s a great, great pleasure to me.” “And a thousand times greater to me,” she replied. “Oh! What a pretty book-cover you have there!” “Take it, I give it to you as a keepsake.” “You are too kind …”

People would be cured forever of romanticism if they could make up their minds, in thinking of the girl they love, to try to be the man they will be when they are no longer in love with her.

Gilberte’s book-cover, her agate marble, must have derived their importance in the past from some purely inward distinction, since now they were to me a book-cover, a marble like any others.

Swann. A stage nearer to death, he was not quite so feeble as at the time when he used to come and inquire after my grandmother. This was because intense physical suffering had enforced a regime on him.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed: to kindness, to knowledge we make promises only; pain we obey.

It is true that the Verdurins and their little clan had at this time a far more vital interest than the drawing-room, faintly nationalist, more markedly literary, and preeminently Bergottic, of Mme. Swann.

Swann, would turn away their heads, deeming it impossible to bow, beneath the very nose of Mme. de Rochechouart, to a woman who was perfectly capable of having been to Bayreuth, which was as good as saying that she would stick at nothing.

Everybody becomes different upon entering another person’s house.

Not to speak of the marvellous metamorphoses that were accomplished thus in the faery palaces, in Mme. Swann’s drawing-room, M.

they were to prove deceitful nevertheless. The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as intangible as those which imagination had formed and reality has destroyed.

There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than to those in our dreams.

And besides, a fresh reality will perhaps make us forget, detest even, the desires that led us forth upon our journey.

There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than to those in our dreams.

And besides, a fresh reality will perhaps make us forget, detest even, the desires that led us forth upon our journey.

Those that had led me forth to Balbec sprang to some extent from my discovery that the Verdurins (whose invitations I had invariably declined, and who would certainly be delighted to see me, if I went to call upon them in the country with apologies …

They were very different from those of the earlier time, the vision in quest of which I came was as dazzlingly clear as the former had been clouded; they were to prove deceitful nevertheless.

The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as intangible as those which imagination had formed and reality has destroyed.

There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than to those in our dreams.

(

For if habit is a second nature, it prevents us from knowing our original nature, whose cruelties it lacks and also its enchantments.

) Now this illusion I might perhaps feel in a strange place, where one’s sensibility is revived by a ray of sunshine, and where my ardour would be raised to a climax by the lady’s maid whom I desired:

It is true that those same servants who cannot bear our tears will have no hesitation in letting us catch pneumonia, because the maid downstairs likes draughts and it would not be polite to her to shut the windows.

For it is necessary that even those who are right, like Françoise, should be wrong also, so that Justice may be made an impossible thing.

Even the humble pleasures of servants provoke either the refusal or the ridicule of their masters. For it is always a mere nothing, but foolishly sentimental, unhygienic. And so, they are in a position to say:

I saw her an invalid still, but on the road to recovery, I found her in better health. And if she made any allusion to what she had suffered, I stopped her mouth with my kisses and assured her that she was now permanently cured.

I should have liked to call the sceptics to witness that death is indeed a malady from which one recovers.

Only, I no longer found in my grandmother the rich spontaneity of old times. Her words were no more than a feeble, docile response, almost a mere echo of mine; she was nothing more than the reflection of my own thoughts.

and as it was also less pressing than that desire I would gladly have postponed its realisation until the following winter, without seeking to see Albertine again at Balbec, before her departure.

But even in the midst of a grief that is still keen physical desire will revive.

From my bed, where I was made to spend hours every day resting, I longed for Albertine to come and resume our former amusements.

But even in the midst of a grief that is still keen physical desire will revive. From my bed, where I was made to spend hours every day resting, I longed for Albertine to come and resume our former amusements.

Do we not see, in the very room in which they have lost a child, its parents soon come together again to give the little angel a baby brother?

I tried to distract my mind from this desire by going to the window to look at that day’s sea. As in the former year, the seas, from one day to another, were rarely the same.

I went upstairs again to my room, but I was not alone there. I could hear someone softly playing Schumann. No doubt it happens at times that people, even those whom we love best, become saturated with the melancholy or irritation that emanates from us.

There is nevertheless an inanimate object which is capable of a power of exasperation to which no human being will ever attain: to wit, a piano.

Albertine had made me take a note of the dates on which she would be going away for a few days to visit various girl friends, and had made me write down their addresses as well, in case I should want her on one of …

And so he said “you know” to ward off the terror which menaced him as he uttered the words that were to bring me the knowledge.

We ought never to lose our tempers with people who, when we find fault with them, begin to titter. They do so not because they are laughing at us, but because they are trembling lest we should be angry.

Let us show all pity and tenderness to those who laugh. For all the world like a stroke, the lift-boy’s anxiety had wrought in him not merely an apoplectic flush but an alteration in his speech which had suddenly become familiar.

We ought never to lose our tempers with people who, when we find fault with them, begin to titter. They do so not because they are laughing at us, but because they are trembling lest we should be angry.

Let us show all pity and tenderness to those who laugh.

For all the world like a stroke, the lift-boy’s anxiety had wrought in him not merely an apoplectic flush but an alteration in his speech which had suddenly become familiar.

And so the whole of Cottard’s rage was heaped upon du Boulbon. But I soon bade goodbye to the Verdurins’ professional friend, and returned to Balbec, after promising him that I would pay them a visit before long.

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

Albertine, on the night after the lift-boy had gone in search of her, did not appear, notwithstanding his assurances. Certainly, personal charm is a less frequent cause of love than a speech such as: “No, this evening I shall not be free.”

Albertine, on the night after the lift-boy had gone in search of her, did not appear, notwithstanding his assurances.

Certainly, personal charm is a less frequent cause of love than a speech such as: “No, this evening I shall not be free.”

We barely notice this speech if we are with friends; we are gay all the evening, a certain image never enters our mind; during those hours it remains dipped in the necessary solution; when we return home we find the plate developed and perfectly clear.

Sometimes, during these nights of waiting, our anguish is due to a drug which we have taken. The sufferer, misinterpreting his own symptoms, thinks that he is anxious about the woman who fails to appear.

Love is engendered in these cases, as are certain nervous maladies, by the inaccurate explanation of a state of discomfort.

An explanation which it is useless to correct, at any rate so far as love is concerned, a sentiment which (whatever its cause) is invariably in error.

Besides, the day was to come when, for a season, Debussy would be pronounced as trivial as Massenet, and the trills of Mélisande degraded to the level of Manon’s.

For theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their warfare ensure the continuity of existence.

But that time was still to come.

They will interest you all the more, coming from Balbec, since they are marine subjects, for the most part, at least.”

The wife and son, blessed with a vegetable nature, listened composedly.

One felt that their house in Paris was a sort of temple of Le Sidaner. Temples of this sort are not without their use.

The wife and son, blessed with a vegetable nature, listened composedly. One felt that their house in Paris was a sort of temple of Le Sidaner.

Temples of this sort are not without their use. When the god has doubts as to his own merits, he can easily stop the cracks in his opinion of himself with the irrefutable testimony of people who have devoted their lives to his work.

At a signal from her daughter-in-law, Mme. de Cambremer prepared to depart, and said to me: “Since you won’t come and stay at Féterne, won’t you at least come to luncheon, one day this week, tomorrow for instance?”

Albertine gave me merely her word, a peremptory word unsupported by proof. But this was just what was best calculated to calm me, jealousy belonging to that family of sickly doubts which are better purged by the energy than by the probability of an affirmation.

It is moreover the property of love to make us at once more distrustful and more credulous, to make us suspect, more readily than we should suspect anyone else, her whom we love, and be convinced more easily by her denials.

We must be in love before we can care that all women are not virtuous, which is to say before we can be aware of the fact, and we must be in love too before we can hope, that is to say assure ourselves that …

… be in love before we can care that all women are not virtuous, which is to say before we can be aware of the fact, and we must be in love too before we can hope, that is to say assure ourselves that some are.

It is human to seek out what hurts us and then at once to seek to get rid of it.

The statements that are capable of so relieving us seem quite naturally true, we are not inclined to cavil at a sedative that acts.

The former of these personalities possesses the peculiar power which prevents us from believing in the reality of the other, the secret remedy to heal the sufferings that this latter has caused us.

The beloved object is successively the malady and the remedy that suspends and aggravates it.

No doubt, I had long since been prepared, by the strong impression made on my imagination and my faculty for emotion by the example of Swann, to believe in the truth of what I feared rather than of what I should have wished.

At first I kept them tight shut. “You are a great bear!” she informed me.

I ought to have left the place that evening and never set eyes on her again.

I felt even then that in a love which is not reciprocated—I might as well say, in love, for there are people for whom there is no such thing as reciprocated love—we can enjoy only that simulacrum of happiness which had been given me at …

“Ah! You see, Monsieur, one can never tell what there may be in a person’s life.” To change the subject, I spoke to her of the life led by my father, who toiled night and day. “

Ah! Monsieur, there are people who keep nothing of their life for themselves, not one minute, not one pleasure, the whole thing is a sacrifice for others, they are lives that are given away.

” “Look, Marie, he has only to put his hand on the counterpane and take his crescent, what distinction.

They had nevertheless all the gifts of a poet with more modesty than poets generally show. For if Céleste had said something noteworthy and, unable to remember it correctly, I asked her to repeat it, she would assure me that she had forgotten.

They will never read any books, but neither will they ever write any.

Françoise was considerably impressed when she learned that the two brothers of these humble women had married, one the niece of the Archbishop of Tours, the other a relative of the Bishop of Rodez. To the manager, this would have conveyed nothing.

she had literally run dry. Nothing could then have revived her. Then all of a sudden the circulation was restored in her large body, splendid and light. The water flowed in the opaline transparence of her bluish skin.

She smiled at the sun and became bluer still. At such moments she was truly celestial.

Bloch’s family might never have suspected the reason which made their uncle never take his luncheon at home and have accepted it from the first as the mania of an elderly bachelor, due perhaps to the demands of his intimacy with some actress;

Swann in my presence how brazen her niece Albertine was, as though that were a merit, and told her how Albertine had reminded some official’s wife that her father had been employed in a kitchen.

But a thing said by her whom we love does not long retain its purity; it withers, it decays.

An evening or two later, I thought again of Albertine’s remark, and it was no longer the ill breeding of which she was so proud—and which could only make me smile—that it seemed to me to signify, it was something else, to wit that Albertine, …

I declined his offer, for I did not wish to run any risk of being parted from Albertine, but also because now I was detached from them. From them, which is to say from myself.

We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below.

But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally.

In this respect, and because I preferred not to go there in search of what had pleased me there in the past, a stroll through Doncières might have seemed to me a prefiguration of an arrival in Paradise.

We dream much of Paradise, or rather of a number of successive Paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a Paradise lost, in which we should feel ourselves lost also.

He left us at the station. “But you may have about an hour to wait,” he told me. “If you spend it here, you will probably see my uncle Charlus, who is going by the train to Paris, ten minutes before yours.

the idea of Albertine’s having relations with women seemed no longer possible since the occasion, forty-eight hours earlier, when the advances that my mistress had made to Saint-Loup had excited in me a fresh jealousy which had made me forget the old.

I was simple enough to suppose that one taste of necessity excludes another.

At Harambouville, as the tram was full, a farmer in a blue blouse who had only a third class ticket got into our compartment.

One Wednesday their old cook having opened a vein in her arm, Cottard, already in his dinner-jacket to go to the Verdurins’, had shrugged his shoulders when his wife had timidly inquired whether he could not bandage the cut:

“Of course I can’t, Léontine,” he had groaned; “can’t you see I’ve got my white waistcoat on?”

So as not to annoy her husband, Mme. Cottard had sent post haste for his chief dresser.

But these recurrences of desire oblige us to reflect that if we wish to rediscover these girls with the same pleasure we must also return to the year which has since been followed by ten others in the course of which her bloom has faded.

We can sometimes find a person again, but we cannot abolish time.

And so on until the unforeseen day, gloomy as a winter night, when we no longer seek for that girl, or for any other, when to find her would actually frighten us.

“Nor did it do him any good,” I added, “for he came here with neurasthenia and went away again with rheumatism.” “Ah, his neurasthenia is to blame.

He has lapsed from neurasthenia to philology, as my worthy master Pocquelin would have said.

Tell us, Cottard, do you suppose that neurasthenia can have a disturbing effect on philology, philology a soothing effect on neurasthenia and the relief from neurasthenia lead to rheumatism?” “Undoubtedly, rheumatism and neurasthenia are subordinate forms of neuro-arthritism.

To discover two days later who the person is with whom one has travelled in the train is a far more amusing surprise than to read in the next number of a magazine the clue to the problem set in the previous number.

Big restaurants, casinos, local trains, are the family portrait galleries of these social enigmas.

“Princess, we must have missed you at Maineville! May we come and sit in your compartment?” “Why, of course,” said the Princess who, upon hearing Cottard address her, but only then, raised from her magazine a pair of eyes which, like the eyes of M.

The docile Cottard had said to the Mistress: “Upset yourself like that, and tomorrow you will give me a temperature of 102,” as he might have said to the cook: “Tomorrow you will give me a riz de veau.”

Medicine, when it fails to cure the sick, busies itself with changing the sense of verbs and pronouns.

M. Verdurin was glad to find that Saniette, notwithstanding the snubs that he had had to endure two days earlier, had not deserted the little nucleus. And indeed Mme.

He was a tall, stout man, very dark, with a studious and somewhat cutting air.

He reminded one of an ebony paper-knife.

Mme.

Let us state briefly that Mme. Verdurin, quite apart from the inevitable changes due to increasing years, no longer resembled what she had been at the time when Swann and Odette used to listen to the little phrase in her house.

Even when she heard it played, she was no longer obliged to assume the air of attenuated admiration which she used to assume then, for that had become her normal expression.

Under the influence of the countless neuralgias which the music of Bach, Wagner, Vinteuil, Debussy had given her, Mme. Verdurin’s brow had assumed enormous proportions, like limbs that are finally crippled by rheumatism.

By dint of supposing yourself to be ill you become ill, grow thin, are too weak to rise from your bed, suffer from nervous enteritis.

By dint of thinking tenderly of men you become a woman, and an imaginary spirit hampers your movements.

The obsession, just as in the other instance it affects your health, may in this instance alter your sex. Morel, who accompanied him, came to shake hands with me.

I concluded all the same from this first evening that his must be a vile nature, that he would not, at a pinch, shrink from any act of meanness, was incapable of gratitude.

In which he resembled the majority of mankind.

But inasmuch as I had inherited a strain of my grandmother’s nature, and enjoyed the diversity of other people without expecting anything of them or resenting anything that they did, I overlooked his baseness, rejoiced in his gaiety when it was in evidence, and indeed …

… oneself, even before one knew who he was, in the presence of a man of supreme distinction, of a man of perfect breeding, a change from the sort of person one saw at Balbec, a man in short in whose company one could breathe freely.

He was to her, stifled by all those Balbec tourists who did not know her world, like a bottle of smelling salts.

It seemed to me on the contrary that he was one of the people whom my grandmother would at once have set down as “all wrong,” and that, as she had no conception of snobbishness, she would no doubt have been stupefied that he could …

I was seized by a fear that I might have spoken unfeelingly to Robert about the girl in question, a girl full of sham originality, whose mind was as mediocre as her actions were violent.

Hardly ever do we hear anything that does not make us regret something that we have said.

I replied to Mme. de Cambremer, truthfully as it happened, that I knew nothing about it, and that anyhow I thought that the girl was still too young to be engaged.

de Cambremer’s own distinction which was, in the fullest sense, imitated and acquired. But it so happened that one of the things which one had to know at that moment was that knowledge is nothing, and is not worth a straw when compared with originality.

Mme. de Cambremer had learned, with everything else, that one ought not to learn anything.

“That is why,” she explained to me, “Brichot, who has an interesting side to him, for I am not one to despise a certain spicy erudition, interests me far less.” But Brichot, at that moment, was occupied with one thing only;

Verdurin, notwithstanding the formality of so grand a dinner-party, tell the butler to put a decanter of water in front of M. Saniette who never drank anything else.

(The generals responsible for the death of most soldiers insist upon their being well fed.)

Moreover, Mme. Verdurin had actually smiled once at Saniette. Decidedly, they were kind people. He was not going to be tortured any more.

Certainly, people’s follies are insupportable. But a want of balance which we discover only in course of time is the consequence of the entering into a human brain of delicacies for which it is not regularly adapted.

So that the oddities of charming people exasperate us, but there are few if any charming people who are not, at the same time, odd.

“Look, I shall be able to show you his flowers now,” she said to me, seeing that her husband was making signals to her to rise. And she took M. de Cambremer’s arm again. M. Verdurin tried to apologise for this to M.

However, it is not of the slightest importance. Please do not distress yourself,” he concluded, resuming his subtle smile which spread itself over these final words: “

I could see at a glance that you were not accustomed to society.

”

Verdurin, “I can’t understand a word you say.” Almost without exception, the faithful burst out laughing and they suggested a band of cannibals in whom the sight of a wound on a white man’s skin has aroused the thirst for blood.

For the instinct of imitation and absence of courage govern society and the mob alike.

And we all of us laugh at a person whom we see being made fun of, which does not prevent us from venerating him ten years later in a circle where he is admired.

For the instinct of imitation and absence of courage govern society and the mob alike.

And we all of us laugh at a person whom we see being made fun of, which does not prevent us from venerating him ten years later in a circle where he is admired.

It is in like manner that the populace banishes or acclaims its kings. “Come, now, it is not his fault,” said Mme. Verdurin. “It is not mine either, people ought not to dine out if they can’t speak properly.”

And we all of us laugh at a person whom we see being made fun of, which does not prevent us from venerating him ten years later in a circle where he is admired.

It is in like manner that the populace banishes or acclaims its kings.

“Come, now, it is not his fault,” said Mme. Verdurin. “It is not mine either, people ought not to dine out if they can’t speak properly.” “I was at the Chercheuse d’Esprit by Favart.” “What! It’s the Chercheuse d’Esprit that you call the Chercheuse?

“And I can put up with anything, except being bored. That, I cannot and will not stand!” Her horror of boredom was now the reason upon which Mme. Verdurin relied to explain the composition of the little group.

She did not yet entertain duchesses because she was incapable of enduring boredom, just as she was unable to go for a cruise, because of seasickness.

I thought to myself that what Mme.

As the Marquis had a squint—a blemish which gives an effect of wit to the mirth even of imbeciles—the effect of this laughter was to bring a segment of pupil into the otherwise complete whiteness of his eye.

So a sudden rift brings a patch of blue into an otherwise clouded sky.

His monocle moreover protected, like the glass over a valuable picture, this delicate operation. As for the actual intention of his laughter, it was hard to say whether it was friendly: “Ah! You rascal! You’re in an enviable position, aren’t you.

If everybody had as kind a heart as you, there wouldn’t be any poor people left. But, as my sister says, ‘there will always have to be the poor so that now I’m rich I can s⸺t on them.’ You’ll pardon the expression. Goodnight, Sir.”

Perhaps every night we accept the risk of facing, while we are asleep, sufferings which we regard as unreal and unimportant because they will be felt in the course of a sleep which we suppose to be unconscious.

And indeed on these evenings when I came back late from la Raspelière I was very sleepy.

… to make it swing sharply round, return towards reality, travel without pause, traverse the regions bordering on life in which presently the sleeper will hear the sounds that come from life, quite vague still, but already perceptible, albeit corrupted—and come to earth suddenly and awake.

Then from those profound slumbers we awake in a dawn, not knowing who we are, being nobody, newly born, ready for anything, our brain being emptied of that past which was previously our life.

And perhaps it is more pleasant still when our landing at the waking-point is abrupt and the thoughts of our sleep, hidden by a cloak of oblivion, have not time to return to us in order, before sleep ceases.

I have always said—and have proved by experiment—that the most powerful soporific is sleep itself.

After having slept profoundly for two hours, having fought against so many giants, and formed so many lifelong friendships, it is far more difficult to awake than after taking several grams of veronal.

And so, reasoning from one thing to the other, I was surprised to hear from the Norwegian philosopher, who had it from M. Boutroux, “my eminent colleague—pardon me, my brother,” what M. Bergson thought of the peculiar effects upon the memory of soporific drugs.

The lofty thought remains in its place; what the soporific has put out of action is the power to act in little things, in everything that demands activity in order to seize at the right moment, to grasp some memory of everyday life.

In spite of all that may be said about survival after the destruction of the brain, I observe that each alteration of the brain is a partial death.

We possess all our memories, but not the faculty of recalling them, said, echoing M. Bergson, the eminent Norwegian philosopher whose language I have made no attempt to imitate in order not to prolong my story unduly. But not the faculty of recalling them.

A common oblivion effaces all. But what, in that case, signifies that immortality of the soul the reality of which the Norwegian philosopher affirmed?

The person that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man whom I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.

The waiter came in. I did not mention to him that I had rung several times, for I was beginning to realise that hitherto I had only dreamed that I was ringing.

I did not mention to him that I had rung several times, for I was beginning to realise that hitherto I had only dreamed that I was ringing. I was alarmed nevertheless by the thought that this dream had had the clear precision of experience.

Experience would, reciprocally, have the irreality of a dream.

Instead I asked him who it was that had been ringing so often during the night. He told me: “Nobody,” and could prove his statement, for the bell-board would have registered any ring.

We realised this as soon as the vehicle, starting off, covered in one bound twenty paces of an excellent horse.

Distances are only the relation of space to time and vary with that relation.

We express the difficulty that we have in getting to a place in a system of miles or kilometres which becomes false as soon as that difficulty decreases.

But at that moment I heard Albertine as she left me say to her aunt or to a girl friend: “Then tomorrow at eight-thirty. We mustn’t be late, the others will be ready at a quarter past.”

The conversation of a woman one loves is like the soil that covers a subterranean and dangerous water; one feels at every moment beneath the words the presence, the penetrating chill of an invisible pool; one perceives here and there its treacherous percolation, but the water itself remains hidden.

The moment I heard these words of Albertine, my calm was destroyed.

I looked at her, I looked at that charming body, that blushing head of Albertine, rearing in front of me the enigma of her intentions, the unknown decision which was to create the happiness or misery of my afternoon.

It was a whole state of the soul, a whole future existence that had assumed before my eyes the allegorical and fatal form of a girl.

And when at last I made up my mind, when with the most indifferent air that I could muster, I asked: “Are we to go out together now, and again this evening?” and she replied:

In the past, when I thought with longing of the hours that Mme. de Guermantes passed in his company, how I valued the privilege of seeing him!

Other people never cease to change places in relation to ourselves.

In the imperceptible but eternal march of the world, we regard them as motionless in a moment of vision, too short for us to perceive the motion that is sweeping them on.

Probably if Saniette had frankly admitted this boredom which he was afraid of causing, one would not have dreaded his visits.

Boredom is one of the least of the evils that we have to endure, his boringness existed perhaps only in the imagination of other people, or had been inoculated into him by them by some process of suggestion which had taken root in his charming modesty.

But he was so anxious not to let it be seen that he was not sought after, that he dared not offer himself.

I had pointed out to him more than once, but in vain, that I was staying not at Incarville but at Balbec, he always repeated the mistake, for it was by the name of Incarville or Balbec-Incarville that he described this section of the coast.

There are people like that, who speak of the same things as ourselves but call them by a slightly different name.

A certain lady of the Faubourg Saint-Germain used invariably to ask me, when she meant to refer to the Duchesse de Guermantes, whether I had seen Zénaïde lately, or Oriane-Zénaïde, the effect of which was that at first I did not understand her.

He succeeded only in arousing the furious indignation of the young man. “There was a time when my ancestors were proud of the title of groom, of butler to the King.”

“There was also a time,” replied Morel haughtily, “when my ancestors cut off your ancestors’ heads.”

M.

“That’s all right. I’ll see to it, dearie,” Jupien assured the Baron. It is hard to imagine to what extent this anxiety was agitating, and by so doing had momentarily enriched the mind of M. de Charlus.

Love is responsible in this way for regular volcanic upheavals of the mind.

In his, which, a few days earlier, resembled a plain so uniform that as far as the eye could reach it would have been impossible to make out an idea rising above the level surface, there had suddenly sprung into being, hard as stone, a …

Besides Albertine would not have answered me at all, or would have answered me only with a “no” of which the n would have been too hesitating and the o too emphatic.

Albertine never related facts that were capable of injuring her, but always other facts which could be explained only by them, the truth being rather a current which flows from what people say to us, and which we apprehend, invisible as it may be, than the actual thing that they say.

And so when I assured her that a woman whom she had known at Vichy had a bad reputation, she swore to me that this woman was not at all what I supposed, and had never attempted to make her do anything improper.

… suppose that it was on the contrary the presence of people of distinction, the only effect of which, had they been a hundred times more distinguished, would have been to make me devote my attention exclusively to Bloch and reserve all my civility for him.

It is sufficient that accidentally, absurdly, an incident (in this case the juxtaposition of Albertine and Saint-Loup) be interposed between two destinies whose lines have been converging towards one another, for them to deviate, stretch farther and farther apart, and never converge again.

And there are friendships more precious than Bloch’s for myself which have been destroyed without the involuntary author of the offence having any opportunity to explain to the offended party what would no doubt have healed the injury to his self-esteem and called back his …

I remembered how thrilled I had been when I had seen from the railway on the day of my first arrival at Balbec, this same image of an evening which preceded not the night but a new day.

But no day now would be new to me any more, would arouse in me the desire for an unknown happiness; it would only prolong my sufferings, until the point when I should no longer have the strength to endure them.

The truth of what Cottard had said to me in the casino at Parville was now confirmed beyond a shadow of doubt.

But here the rival was not similar to myself, bore different weapons, I could not compete upon the same ground, give Albertine the same pleasures, nor indeed conceive what those pleasures might be.

In many moments of our life, we would barter the whole of our future for a power that in itself is insignificant.

I would at one time have foregone all the good things in life to make the acquaintance of Mme. Blatin, because she was a friend of Mme. Swann.

Mamma had no love for her aunt, because she had not been to my grandmother, who was so loving to her, what a sister should be.

So, when they grow up, children remember with resentment the people who have been unkind to them.

But Mamma, having become my grandmother, was incapable of resentment; her mother’s life was to her like a pure and innocent childhood from which she would extract those memories whose sweetness or bitterness regulated her actions towards other people.

“What musician?” “My dear child, when I have told you that his name is Vinteuil, will you be any the wiser?”

We may have revolved every possible idea in our minds, and yet the truth has never occurred to us, and it is from without, when we are least expecting it, that it gives us its cruel stab and wounds us for all time.

“You can’t think how you amuse me,” replied Albertine as she rose, for the train was slowing down. “Not only does it mean a great deal more to me than you suppose, but even without Mme.

Vinteuil, something which my mind would never have been capable of inventing, but which I obscurely apprehended when I became uneasy at the sight of Albertine and Andrée together.

It is often simply from want of the creative spirit that we do not go to the full extent of suffering.

And the most terrible reality brings us, with our suffering, the joy of a great discovery, because it merely gives a new and clear form to what we have long been ruminating without suspecting it.

It is often simply from want of the creative spirit that we do not go to the full extent of suffering.

And the most terrible reality brings us, with our suffering, the joy of a great discovery, because it merely gives a new and clear form to what we have long been ruminating without suspecting it.

The train had stopped at Parville, and, as we were the only passengers in it, it was in a voice lowered by a sense of the futility of his task, by the force of habit which nevertheless made him perform it, and inspired in him …

But from this, the beauty, or the intelligence, or the kindness of these women was entirely distinct.

As by an electric current that gives us a shock, I have been shaken by my love affairs, I have lived them, I have felt them: never have I succeeded in arriving at the stage of seeing or thinking them.

Indeed I am inclined to believe that in these love affairs (I leave out of account the physical pleasure which is their habitual accompaniment but is not enough in itself to constitute them), beneath the form of the woman, it is to those invisible forces …

Now would the woman herself, if she were not completed by these occult forces, make us give ourselves so much trouble, when, once she has left us, we are unable to say how she was dressed and realise that we never even looked at her?

As our vision is a deceiving sense, a human body, even when it is loved as Albertine’s was, seems to us to be at a few yards’, at a few inches’ distance from us.

And similarly with the soul that inhabits it.

Within us, in regions more or less superficial. But the words: “That friend is Mlle. Vinteuil” had been the Open sesame which I should have been incapable of discovering by myself, which had made Albertine penetrate to the depths of my shattered heart.

And the door that had closed behind her, I might seek for a hundred years without learning how it might be opened.

I had ceased for a moment to hear these words ringing in my ears while Albertine was with me just now.

For some moments, knowing that he would make me happier than Albertine, I remained closeted with the little person inside me, hymning the rising sun, of whom I have already spoken.

Of those elements which compose our personality, it is not the most obvious that are most essential.

In myself, when ill health has succeeded in uprooting them one after another, there will still remain two or three, endowed with a hardier constitution than the rest, notably a certain philosopher who is happy only when he has discovered in two works of art, …

… week to week, not that he knew my aunt at all well, but simply, first of all, because she had been his mother’s friend, and also because he knew that the invalid, condemned to die, valued his attentions and could not get on without him.

Snobbishness is a serious malady of the spirit, but one that is localised and does not taint it as a whole.

I, on the other hand, unlike Mamma, was extremely glad of her absence at Combray, but for which I should have been afraid (being unable to warn Albertine not to mention it) of her learning of the girl’s friendship with Mlle. Vinteuil.

… said, and apart from any question of propriety, I doubt whether Albertine could have put up with Mamma who had acquired from Combray, from my aunt Léonie, from all her kindred, habits of punctuality and order of which my mistress had not the remotest conception.

She would never think of shutting a door and, on the other hand, would no more hesitate to enter a room if the door stood open than would a dog or a cat.

Her somewhat disturbing charm was, in fact, that of taking the place in the household not so much of a girl as of a domestic animal which comes into a room, goes out, is to be found wherever one does not expect to find it …

“I consider that ominous.” And I am not sure that it was not about this time that she learned to say, when she meant that she felt a book to be written in a bad style:

“It is interesting, but really, it might have been written by a pig.”

The rule that she must not enter my room until I had rung amused her greatly.

And lo, these identical lying words had become true within the space of three weeks. Perhaps, Andrée had believed in Paris that it was indeed a lie and that I was in love with her, as she would doubtless have believed at Balbec.

For the truth is so variable for each of us, that other people have difficulty in recognising themselves in it.

And as I knew that she would tell me everything that she and Albertine had done, I had asked her, and she had agreed to come and call for Albertine almost every day. In this way I might without anxiety remain at home.

It was certainly not, as I was well aware, because I was the least bit in love with Albertine.

Love is nothing more perhaps than the stimulation of those eddies which, in the wake of an emotion, stir the soul.

Certain such eddies had indeed stirred my soul through and through when Albertine spoke to me at Balbec about Mlle. Vinteuil, but these were now stilled.

But everywhere my uncertainty as to what she might be doing was the same; the possibility that it was something wrong as abundant, vigilance even more difficult, with the result that I returned with her to Paris.

In leaving Balbec, I had imagined that I was leaving Gomorrah, plucking Albertine from it; in reality, alas, Gomorrah was dispersed to all the ends of the earth.

And partly out of jealousy, partly out of ignorance of such joys (a case which is rare indeed), I had arranged unawares this game of hide and seek in which Albertine was always to escape me.

If she was not in the best of tempers, I thought that I was causing her to miss or to postpone some appointment.

Reality is never more than an allurement to an unknown element in quest of which we can never progress very far.

It is better not to know, to think as little as possible, not to feed our jealousy with the slightest concrete detail. Unfortunately, even when we eliminate the outward life, incidents are created by the inward life also;

If she was not in the best of tempers, I thought that I was causing her to miss or to postpone some appointment. Reality is never more than an allurement to an unknown element in quest of which we can never progress very far.

It is better not to know, to think as little as possible, not to feed our jealousy with the slightest concrete detail.

Unfortunately, even when we eliminate the outward life, incidents are created by the inward life also;

… old winter that stole into my room, often variegated moreover with this perfume or that light, as though with a sequence of different years, in which I found myself plunged, overwhelmed, even before I had identified them, by the eagerness of hopes long since abandoned.

The sun’s rays fell upon my bed and passed through the transparent shell of my attenuated body, warmed me, made me as hot as a sheet of scorching crystal.

Whereupon, a famished convalescent who has already begun to batten upon all the dishes that are still forbidden him, I asked myself whether marriage with Albertine would not spoil my life, as well by making me assume the burden, too heavy for my shoulders, of …

… gaze which kept pace with her, and falling upon her as though shot from the embrasure of my window by an arquebus, arrest the flight of the face that held out for me the offer of a happiness which, cloistered thus, I should never know.

Of Albertine, on the other hand, I had nothing more to learn. Every day, she seemed to me less attractive.

Only, the desire that she aroused in other people, when, upon hearing of it, I began to suffer afresh and was impelled to challenge their possession of her, raised her in my sight to a lofty pinnacle. Pain, she was capable of causing me;

Every day, she seemed to me less attractive. Only, the desire that she aroused in other people, when, upon hearing of it, I began to suffer afresh and was impelled to challenge their possession of her, raised her in my sight to a lofty pinnacle.

Pain, she was capable of causing me; joy, never.

Pain alone kept my tedious attachment alive.

In saying this M. de Norpois was not being untruthful, he had simply forgotten.

We quickly forget what we have not deeply considered, what has been dictated to us by the spirit of imitation, by the passions of our neighbours.

These change, and with them our memory undergoes alteration.

de Norpois was not being untruthful, he had simply forgotten. We quickly forget what we have not deeply considered, what has been dictated to us by the spirit of imitation, by the passions of our neighbours. These change, and with them our memory undergoes alteration.

Even more than diplomats, politicians are unable to remember the point of view which they adopted at a certain moment, and some of their palinodes are due less to a surfeit of ambition than to a shortage of memory.

As for people in society, there are very few things that they remember.

de Charlus and Morel on their way to take tea at Jupien’s, a supreme favour for the Baron. I did not encounter them every day but they went there every day.

Here we may perhaps remark that the regularity of a habit is generally in proportion to its absurdity.

The sensational things, we do as a rule only by fits and starts. But the senseless life, in which the maniac deprives himself of all pleasure and inflicts the greatest discomforts upon himself, is the type that alters least.

This testimony in the eyes of the world and in his own pleased M. de Charlus more than anything.

For the possession of what we love is an even greater joy than love itself.

Very often those people who conceal this possession from the world do so only from the fear that the beloved object may be taken from them. And their happiness is diminished by this prudent reticence.

And so it was with a song on my lips that, after bidding my friend goodbye, I climbed the stair again and entered the flat.

Summer had flown, carrying the birds with it. But other musicians, invisible, internal, had taken their place.

And the icy blast against which Bloch had inveighed, which was whistling delightfully through the ill fitting doors of our apartment was (as the fine days of summer by the woodland birds) passionately greeted with snatches, irrepressibly hummed, from Fragson, Mayol or Paulus.

the faculty of dreaming which I possessed only in her absence I recovered at such moments in her presence, as though by falling asleep she had become a plant.

In this way her sleep did to a certain extent make love possible.

When she was present, I spoke to her, but I was too far absent from myself to be able to think.

Then, seeing that her sleep would not be disturbed, I advanced cautiously, sat down upon the chair that stood by the bedside, then upon the bed itself.

I have spent charming evenings talking, playing games with Albertine, but never any so pleasant as when I was watching her sleep.

Granted that she might have, as she chatted with me, or played cards, that spontaneity which no actress could have imitated, it was a spontaneity carried to the second degree that was offered me by her sleep.

At the same time those drooping lids introduced into her face that perfect continuity, unbroken by any intrusion of eyes.

There are people whose faces assume a quite unusual beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.

I measured with my own Albertine outstretched at my feet. Now and then a slight, unaccountable tremor ran through her body, as the leaves of a tree are shaken for a few moments by a sudden breath of wind.

I myself was gently rocked by its regular motion:

I had embarked upon the tide of Albertine’s sleep.

Sometimes it made me taste a pleasure that was less pure.

I, who was acquainted with many Albertines in one person, seemed now to see many more again, reposing by my side. Her eyebrows, arched as I had never seen them, enclosed the globes of her eyelids like a halcyon’s downy nest.

Races, atavisms, vices reposed upon her face.

Whenever she moved her head, she created a fresh woman, often one whose existence I had never suspected. I seemed to possess not one, but innumerable girls.

Her eyebrows, arched as I had never seen them, enclosed the globes of her eyelids like a halcyon’s downy nest. Races, atavisms, vices reposed upon her face. Whenever she moved her head, she created a fresh woman, often one whose existence I had never suspected.

I seemed to possess not one, but innumerable girls.

Her breathing, as it became gradually deeper, was now regularly stirring her bosom and, through it, her folded hands, her pearls, displaced in a different way by the same movement, like the boats, the anchor chains that are set swaying by the movement of the …

I relished her sleep with a disinterested, soothing love, just as I would remain for hours listening to the unfurling of the waves.

Perhaps it is laid down that people must be capable of making us suffer intensely before, in the hours of respite, they can procure for us the same soothing calm as Nature.

I had not to answer her as when we were engaged in conversation, and even if I could have remained silent, as for that matter I did when it was she that was talking, still while listening to her voice I did not penetrate so …

Ambition, fame would have left me unmoved. Even more was I incapable of feeling hatred. And yet to me to love in a carnal sense was at any rate to enjoy a triumph over countless rivals.

I can never repeat it often enough; it was first and foremost a sedative.

For all that I might, before Albertine returned, have doubted her loyalty, have imagined her in the room at Montjouvain, once she was in her dressing-gown and seated facing my chair, or (if, as was more frequent, I had remained in bed) at the foot …

Thus my whole past from my earliest years, and earlier still the past of my parents and relatives, blended with my impure love for Albertine the charm of an affection at once filial and maternal.

We have to give hospitality, at a certain stage in our life, to all our relatives who have journeyed so far and gathered round us.

Before Albertine obeyed and allowed me to take off her shoes, I opened her chemise. Her two little upstanding breasts were so round that they seemed not so much to be an integral part of her body as to have ripened there like fruit;

… incalculable rain of sulphur and brimstone falls after the most radiant moments, after which, without having the courage to derive its lesson from our mishap, we set to work immediately to rebuild upon the slopes of the crater from which nothing but catastrophe can emerge.

I was as careless as everyone who imagines that his happiness will endure.

It is precisely because this comfort has been necessary to bring grief to birth—and will return moreover at intervals to calm it—that men can be sincere with each other, and even with themselves, when they pride themselves upon a woman’s kindness to them, although, taking …

… and by a survival of the instinct of self-preservation, that the same jealous man does not hesitate to form the most terrible suspicions upon a basis of innocuous details, provided that, whenever any proof is brought to him, he may decline to accept its evidence.

Anyhow, love is an incurable malady, like those diathetic states in which rheumatism affords the sufferer a brief respite only to be replaced by epileptiform headaches.

Was my jealous suspicion calmed, I then felt a grudge against Albertine for not having been gentle with me, perhaps for having made fun of me to Andrée.

… was impossible for me to reproach her, or to ply her with questions about things which she would have declared to be so petty, so trivial, things that I had stored up in my mind simply for the pleasure of making mountains out of molehills.

It is hard enough to say: “Why did you stare at that girl who went past?” but a great deal harder to say: “Why did you not stare at her?”

And yet I knew quite well, or at least I should have known, if I had not chosen to believe Albertine’s assertions rather than all the trivialities contained in a glance, proved by it and by some contradiction or other in her speech, a contradiction …

… old acquaintance, or else some girl who had simply been mentioned to her, and of whom, when I heard about it, I was astonished that anybody could have spoken to her, so utterly unlike was she to anyone that Albertine could possibly wish to know.

But the Gomorrah of today is a dissected puzzle made up of fragments which are picked up in the places where we least expected to find them.

Thus I once saw at Rivebelle a big dinner-party of ten women, all of whom I happened to know—at least by name—women as unlike one another as possible, perfectly united nevertheless, so much so that I never saw a party so homogeneous, albeit so composite.

To return to the girls whom we passed in the street, never did Albertine gaze at an old person, man or woman, with such fixity, or on the other hand with such reserve, and as though she saw nothing.

The cuckolded husbands who know nothing know everything all the same.

But it requires more accurate and abundant evidence to create a scene of jealousy.

Albertine always adopted a tone of uncertainty in speaking of her irrevocable decisions. Mine was no less irrevocable. I took steps to arrange that this visit to Mme. Verdurin should not take place.

Jealousy is often only an uneasy need to be tyrannical, applied to matters of love.

I had doubtless inherited from my father this abrupt, arbitrary desire to threaten the people whom I loved best in the hopes with which they were lulling themselves with a security that I determined to expose to them as false;

… to be traversed before they reach the determined, the implacably determined meeting-place, eyes that are not so much smiling at the pleasure which tempts them as they are shadowed with melancholy and discouragement because there may be a difficulty in their getting to the meeting-place.

Even when you hold them in your hands, these people are fugitives.

To understand the emotions which they arouse, and which other people, even better looking, do not arouse, we must take into account that they are not immobile but in motion, and add to their person a sign corresponding to what in physics is the sign …

anxiety is born afresh, and love. It is such people more than any others who inspire love in us, for our destruction. For every fresh anxiety that we feel on their account strips them in our eyes of some of their personality.

We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow, and that its object is, to a very small extent only, the girl with the raven tresses.

But, when all is said, it is these people more than any others who inspire love.

But, when all is said, it is these people more than any others who inspire love.

Generally speaking, love has not as its object a human body, except when an emotion, the fear of losing it, the uncertainty of finding it again have been infused into it.

This sort of anxiety has a great affinity for bodies. It adds to them a quality which surpasses beauty even;

The proof of this beauty, surpassing the beauty added by the wings, is that very often the same person is, in our eyes, alternately wingless and winged.

Afraid of losing her, we forget all the others. Sure of keeping her, we compare her with those others whom at once we prefer to her.

And as these emotions and these certainties may vary from week to week, a person may one week see sacrificed to her everything that gave us pleasure, in the following week be sacrificed herself, and so for weeks and months on end.

But as a rule, all that we do is to change our anxiety. One of the words of the sentence that was meant to calm us sets our suspicions running upon another trail.

The demands of our jealousy and the blindness of our credulity are greater than the woman whom we love could ever suppose.

When, of her own accord, she swears to us that some man is nothing more to her than a friend, she appalls us by informing us—a thing we never suspected—that he has been her friend.

But we cannot touch all these points. If only they were indicated to us, we might perhaps contrive to reach out to them. But we grope for them without finding them. Hence mistrust, jealousy, persecutions.

We waste precious time upon absurd clues and pass by the truth without suspecting it.

But already one of the irascible deities, whose servants speed with the agility of lightning, was annoyed, not because I was speaking, but because I was saying nothing. “Come along, I’ve been holding the line for you all this time; I shall cut you off.”

But I do know that, for my own part, even if I had invariably come to the opposite conclusion, I had so strong an impression that Andrée was trying to rap Albertine’s knuckles that my mistress at once regained my affection and my anger subsided.

Suffering, when we are in love, ceases now and then for a moment, but only to recur in a different form.

We weep to see her whom we love no longer respond to us with those outbursts of sympathy, the amorous advances of former days, we suffer more keenly still when, having lost them with us, she recovers them for the benefit of others;

… she still goes perhaps at the hours when we are not with her, if indeed she is not planning to live there altogether, those places in which she is parted from us, does not belong to us, is happier than when she is with us.

Such are the revolving searchlights of jealousy.

Jealousy is moreover a demon that cannot be exorcised, but always returns to assume a fresh incarnation.

Such are the revolving searchlights of jealousy.

Jealousy is moreover a demon that cannot be exorcised, but always returns to assume a fresh incarnation.

Even if we could succeed in exterminating them all, in keeping forever her whom we love, the Spirit of Evil would then adopt another form, more pathetic still, despair at having obtained fidelity only by force, despair at not being loved.

… loved, cut short their own hours of sleep, deprived themselves of rest, feeling that her own personal desires, the world, so vast and so secret, time, are stronger than they, allow her to go out without them, then to travel, and finally separate from her.

Jealousy thus perishes for want of nourishment and has survived so long only by clamouring incessantly for fresh food.

I was still a long way from this state.

I must choose, either to cease from suffering, or to cease from loving. For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety. I felt that part of Albertine’s life was escaping me.

Love, in the painful anxiety as in the blissful desire, is the insistence upon a whole.

It is born, it survives only if some part remains for it to conquer. We love only what we do not wholly possess.

I felt that part of Albertine’s life was escaping me. Love, in the painful anxiety as in the blissful desire, is the insistence upon a whole. It is born, it survives only if some part remains for it to conquer.

We love only what we do not wholly possess.

Albertine was lying when she told me that she probably would not go to the Verdurins’, as I was lying when I said that I wished to go there.

On the other hand the coupling of contrary elements is the law of life, the principle of fertilisation, and, as we shall see, the cause of many disasters.

As a general rule, we detest what resembles ourself, and our own faults when observed in another person infuriate us.

How much the more does a man who has passed the age at which we instinctively display them, a man who, for instance, has gone through the most burning moments with an icy countenance, execrate those same faults, if it is another man, younger or …

Well, there are also pathological families, kindred sensibilities, fraternal temperaments, initiated into that mute language which enables people in the family circle to make themselves understood without speaking.

And who can be more nerve-wracking than a neurotic?

Besides, my conduct, in these cases, may have had a more general, a more profound cause.

I did not remind her of her lie. But it appalled me. And once again I postponed our rupture to another day.

A person has no need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved.

I here give the name of love to a mutual torment.

I did not remind her of her lie. But it appalled me. And once again I postponed our rupture to another day. A person has no need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved.

I here give the name of love to a mutual torment.

I saw nothing reprehensible this evening in speaking to her as my grandmother—that mirror of perfection—used to speak to me, nor, when I told her that I would escort her to the Verdurins’, in having adopted my father’s abrupt manner, who would never inform us …

But the confession of that love, apart from the fact that it could not have told Albertine anything new, would perhaps have made her colder to myself than the harshness and deceit for which love was the sole excuse.

To be harsh and deceitful to the person whom we love is so natural!

If the interest that we show in other people does not prevent us from being kind to them and complying with their wishes, then our interest is not sincere. A stranger leaves us indifferent, and indifference does not prompt us to unkind actions.

“But where are you off to, my darling ⸻” calling me by my Christian name, and at once fell asleep again.

Her sleep was only a sort of obliteration of the rest of her life, a continuous silence over which from time to time would pass in their flight words of intimate affection.

By putting these words together, you would have arrived at the unalloyed conversation, the secret intimacy of a pure love. This calm slumber delighted me, as a mother is delighted, reckoning it among his virtues, by the sound sleep of her child.

… the horn of the mender of porcelain, or the trumpet of the chair weaver, to the flute of the goat driver who seemed, on a fine morning, to be a Sicilian goatherd, were lightly orchestrating the matutinal air, with an “Overture for a Public Holiday.”

Our hearing, that delicious sense, brings us the company of the street, every line of which it traces for us, sketches all the figures that pass along it, showing us their colours.

The iron shutters of the baker’s shop, of the dairy, which had been lowered last night over every possibility of feminine bliss, were rising now like the canvas of a ship which is setting sail and about to proceed, crossing the transparent sea, over a …

He runs for a moment because the environment that he has just left was one animated by great velocity, and utterly unlike the inert soil upon which his feet find it difficult to keep their balance.

Because the dream world is not the waking world, it does not follow that the waking world is less genuine, far from it.

In the world of sleep, our perceptions are so overcharged, each of them increased by a counterpart which doubles its bulk and blinds it to no purpose, that we are not able even to distinguish what is happening in the bewilderment of awakening;

When we alter thus the conditions in which we go to sleep, it is not our dreams alone that fade, but, for days on end, for years it may be, the faculty not merely of dreaming but of going to sleep.

Sleep is divine but by no means stable; the slightest shock makes it volatile.

A lover of habits, they retain it every night, being more fixed than itself, in the place set apart for it, they preserve it from all injury, but if we displace it, if it is no longer subordinated, it melts away like a vapour.

A lover of habits, they retain it every night, being more fixed than itself, in the place set apart for it, they preserve it from all injury, but if we displace it, if it is no longer subordinated, it melts away like a vapour.

It is like youth and love, never to be recaptured.

In these various forms of sleep, as likewise in music, it was the lengthening or shortening of the interval that created beauty.

These alternative suppositions which I had formed, in an instant, with regard to her, had condensed round about her the troubled atmosphere in which she disappeared, like a goddess in the cloud that is shaken by thunder.

For moral uncertainty is a greater obstacle to an exact visual perception than any defect of vision would be.

In this too skinny young person, who moreover attracted undue attention, the excess of what another person would perhaps have called her charms was precisely what was calculated to repel me, but had nevertheless had the effect of preventing me from perceiving even, far more …

… should never have wished to see her again, had not Françoise told me that, child as she was, she had all her wits about her and would shortly be leaving her employer, since she had been going too fast and owed money among the neighbours.

It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Inversely, the possibility of pleasure may be a beginning of beauty.

I began to read Mamma’s letter. Beneath her quotations from Madame de Sévigné:

it is because they are not conquests. The difference there is at a minimum. A harlot smiles at us already in the street as she will smile when she is in our room.

We are sculptors. We are anxious to obtain of a woman a statue entirely different from that which she has presented to us.

We have seen a girl strolling, indifferent, insolent, along the seashore, we have seen a shop-assistant, serious and active, behind her counter, who will answer us stiffly, if only so as to escape the sarcasm of her comrades, a fruit seller who barely answers us …

It does not so much matter that the illusion still persists; we wish to see whether we can convert it into reality, and then we think of the laundress whose coldness we remarked.

Amorous curiosity is like that which is aroused in us by the names of places; perpetually disappointed, it revives and remains forever insatiable.

Alas! As soon as she stood before me, the fair dairymaid with the ribbed tresses, stripped of all that I had imagined and of the desire that had been aroused in me, was reduced to her own proportions.

Still, that makes no difference. I am obliged to give her credit for the genuine respect she has always shown for me. It is easy to see she knew the sort of person she had to deal with.”

We remember the truth because it has a name, is rooted in the past, but a makeshift lie is quickly forgotten.

Albertine forgot this latest lie, her fourth, and, one day when she was anxious to gain my confidence by confiding in me, went so far as to tell me, with regard to the same person who at the outset had been so respectable and whom …

They pain us, coming from a person whom we love, and thereby enable us to penetrate a little deeper in our knowledge of human nature instead of being content to play upon the surface.

Grief penetrates into us and forces us out of painful curiosity to penetrate other people.

Whence emerge truths which we feel that we have no right to keep hidden, so much so that a dying atheist who has discovered them, certain of his own extinction, indifferent to fame, will nevertheless devote his last hours on earth to an attempt to …

her natural tendency.

For there is no one who will willingly deliver up his soul.

Notwithstanding the grief that these memories were causing me, could I have denied that it was the programme of the matinée at the Trocadéro that had revived my need of Albertine?

But, even if we should succeed in destroying that crystallisation, it would at once be replaced by another. Yesterday I was afraid lest Albertine should go to see Mme. Verdurin. Now my only thought was of Léa.

Jealousy, which wears a bandage over its eyes, is not merely powerless to discover anything in the darkness that enshrouds it, it is also one of those torments where the task must be incessantly repeated, like that of the Danaids, or of Ixion.

Even if her friends were not there, what impression might she not form of Léa, beautified by her stage attire, haloed with success, what thoughts would she leave in Albertine’s mind, what desires which, even if she repressed them, would in my house disgust her …

and, even if Léa did not know her, who could assure me that, having certainly seen her at Balbec, she would not recognise her and make a signal to her from the stage that would entitle Albertine to seek admission behind the scenes?

A danger seems easy to avoid after it has been conjured away.

This one was not yet conjured, I was afraid that it might never be, and it seemed to me all the more terrible.

“It is one” or “it is three o’clock,” I have never been able to understand whether the phenomenon that occurred was situated in her vision or in her thought or in her speech; the one thing certain is that the phenomenon never failed to occur.

Humanity is a very old institution.

Heredity, crossbreeding have given an irresistible force to bad habits, to vicious reflexes.

I was more of a master than I had supposed.

More of a master, in other words more of a slave.

I no longer felt the slightest impatience to see Albertine.

For I could not ask Albertine to let me stop, and already the young women were no longer visible whose features my eyes had barely distinguished, barely caressed their fresh complexions in the golden vapour in which they were bathed.

The emotion that I felt grip me when I caught sight of a wine-merchant’s girl at her desk or a laundress chatting in the street was the emotion that we feel on recognising a goddess.

Now that Olympus no longer exists, its inhabitants dwell upon the earth.

The emotion that I felt grip me when I caught sight of a wine-merchant’s girl at her desk or a laundress chatting in the street was the emotion that we feel on recognising a goddess.

Now that Olympus no longer exists, its inhabitants dwell upon the earth.

And when, in composing a mythological scene, painters have engaged to pose as Venus or Ceres young women of humble birth, who follow the most sordid callings, so far from committing sacrilege, they have merely added, restored to them the quality, the various attributes which …

… much so if it had been directed at young men), I fastened, without thinking myself reprehensible for an instant, almost deciding indeed that Albertine was reprehensible for preventing me, by her presence, from stopping the car and going to join them, upon all the midinettes.

We consider it innocent to desire a thing and atrocious that the other person should desire it.

And this contrast between what concerns ourselves on the one hand, and on the other the person with whom we are in love, is not confined only to desire, but extends also to falsehood.

Unfortunately, she seemed to feel herself a prisoner there, and to share the opinion of that Mme. de La Rochefoucauld who, when somebody asked her whether she was not glad to live in so beautiful a home as Liancourt, replied: “

There is no such thing as a beautiful prison

”; if I was to judge by her miserable, weary expression that evening as we dined together in my room. I did not notice it at first;

“Oh, girls she knew years ago, I don’t remember their names,” Gisèle replied vaguely, and beat a retreat. She left me, supposing herself to have spoken with such prudence that the whole story must seem to me perfectly straightforward.

But falsehood is so unexacting, needs so little help to make itself manifest!

If it had been a question of friends of long ago, whose very names she no longer remembered, why must she speak about them to Albertine? This “must,” akin to an expression dear to Mme. Cottard:

… which we have already observed in the course of this narrative, but especially by this, that, when she was lying, her story broke down either from inadequacy, omission, improbability, or on the contrary from a surfeit of petty details intended to make it seem probable.

Probability, notwithstanding the idea that the liar has formed of it, is by no means the same as truth.

Whenever, while listening to something that is true, we hear something that is only probable, which is perhaps more so than the truth, which is perhaps too probable, the ear that is at all sensitive feels that it is not correct, as with a line …

This object the artist does sometimes enable us to see in his work. Whence it arises that the admirers of his work are disappointed in its author, upon whose face that internal beauty is imperfectly reflected.

Every person whom we love, indeed to a certain extent every person is to us like Janus, presenting to us the face that we like if that person leaves us, the repellent face if we know him or her to be perpetually at our disposal.

In the case of Albertine, the prospect of her continued society was painful to me in another fashion which I cannot explain in this narrative.

In the case of Albertine, the prospect of her continued society was painful to me in another fashion which I cannot explain in this narrative.

It is terrible to have the life of another person attached to our own like a bomb which we hold in our hands, unable to get rid of it without committing a crime.

But let us take as a parallel the ups and downs, the dangers, the anxieties, the fear of seeing believed in time to come false and probable things which one will not be able then to explain, feelings that one experiences if one lives in …

It was known that he had been ill for a long time past. Not, of course, with the illness from which he had suffered originally and which was natural.

Nature hardly seems capable of giving us any but quite short illnesses.

But medicine has annexed to itself the art of prolonging them.

We do not succeed in being happy but we make observation of the reasons which prevent us from being happy and which would have remained invisible to us but for these loopholes opened by disappointment.

Dreams are not to be converted into reality, that we know; we would not form any, perhaps, were it not for desire, and it is useful to us to form them in order to see them fail and to be instructed by their failure.

And so Bergotte said to himself: “I am spending more than a multimillionaire would spend upon girls, but the pleasures or disappointments that they give me make me write a book which brings me money.”

His giddiness increased; he fixed his eyes, like a child upon a yellow butterfly which it is trying to catch, upon the precious little patch of wall.

“That is how I ought to have written,” he said. “My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with several coats of paint, made my language exquisite in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.”

Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition. In a celestial balance there appeared to him, upon one of its scales, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow.

So that the idea that Bergotte was not wholly and permanently dead is by no means improbable.

They buried him, but all through the night of mourning, in the lighted windows, his books arranged three by three kept watch like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.

I learned, I have said, that day that Bergotte was dead. And I marvelled at the carelessness of the newspapers which—each of them reproducing the same paragraph—stated that he had died the day before.

For how many years on end can they not allow our apathetic love to believe that they have in some foreign country a sister, a brother, a sister-in-law who have never existed!

The evidence of the senses is also an operation of the mind in which conviction creates the evidence.

We have often seen her sense of hearing convey to Françoise not the word that was uttered but what she thought to be its correct form, which was enough to prevent her from hearing the correction implied in a superior pronunciation.

But for reasons unknown, which were most probably of a social nature, this desire had not come into play. There is moreover ample room for discussion.

The universe is true for us all and dissimilar to each of us.

If we were not obliged, to preserve the continuity of our story, to confine ourselves to frivolous reasons, how many more serious reasons would permit us to demonstrate the falsehood and flimsiness of the opening pages of this volume in which, from my bed, I …

… confine ourselves to frivolous reasons, how many more serious reasons would permit us to demonstrate the falsehood and flimsiness of the opening pages of this volume in which, from my bed, I hear the world awake, now to one sort of weather, now to another.

Yes, I have been forced to whittle down the facts, and to be a liar, but it is not one universe, there are millions, almost as many as the number of human eyes and brains in existence, that awake every morning.

To return to Albertine, I have never known any woman more amply endowed than herself with the happy aptitude for a lie that is animated, coloured with the selfsame tints of life, unless it be one of her friends—one of my blossoming girls also, rose-pink …

de Rambuteau had been so annoyed to hear the Duc de Guermantes call a Rambuteau stall) was really pistière, never once in the whole of his life heard a single person say pissotière, albeit the word was frequently pronounced thus in his hearing.

But error is more obstinate than faith and does not examine the grounds of its belief.

Constantly the butler would say: “I’m sure M. le Baron de Charlus must have caught a disease to stand about as long as he does in a pistière. That’s what comes of running after the girls at his age.

The death of Swann! Swann, in this phrase, is something more than a noun in the possessive case. I mean by it his own particular death, the death allotted by destiny to the service of Swann.

For we talk of “death” for convenience, but there are almost as many different deaths as there are people.

We are not equipped with a sense that would enable us to see, moving at every speed in every direction, these deaths, the active deaths aimed by destiny at this person or that.

For the former is not suffering from a malady, he is conforming to the customs of his time.

It is the homosexuality that survives in spite of obstacles, a thing of scorn and loathing, that is the only true form, the only form that can be found conjoined in a person with an enhancement of his moral qualities.

We are appalled at the apparently close relation between these and our bodily attributes, when we think of the slight dislocation of a purely physical taste, the slight blemish in one of the senses, which explain why the world of poets and musicians, so firmly …

de Charlus from the last vestiges of social constraint than the time that he spent at the Verdurins’.

No banishment, indeed, to the South Pole, or to the summit of Mont Blanc, can separate us so entirely from our fellow creatures as a prolonged residence in the seclusion of a secret vice, that is to say of a state of mind that is different from theirs.

A vice (so M. de Charlus used at one time to style it) to which the Baron now gave the genial aspect of a mere failing, extremely common, attractive on the whole and almost amusing, like laziness, absentmindedness or greed.

even if we assure ourself almost immediately: “I shall deal with this, there must be some method by which I need not suffer, it cannot be true,” nevertheless there has been a first moment in which we suffered as though we believed it.

If we had merely members, such as legs and arms, life would be endurable; unfortunately we carry inside us that little organ which we call the heart, which is subject to certain maladies in the course of which it is infinitely impressionable by everything that concerns the life of a certain person

, so that a lie—that most harmless of things, in the midst of which we live so unconcernedly, if the lie be told by ourselves or by strangers—coming from that person, causes the little heart, which surgeons ought really to be able to excise from …

That day, the day upon which the heart has become so frail, our friends who respect us are pained that such trifles, that certain persons, can so affect us, can bring us to death’s door. But what are they to do?

If a poet is dying of septic pneumonia, can one imagine his friends explaining to the pneumococcus that the poet is a man of talent and that it ought to let him recover?

My doubt, in so far as it referred to Mlle. Vinteuil, was not entirely novel. But to a certain extent, my jealousy of the afternoon, inspired by Léa and her friends, had abolished it.

de Charlus. His face, so far from spreading, dissipated every scandalous rumour. For we form so extravagant an idea of certain characters that we would be incapable of identifying one of them with the familiar features of a person of our acquaintance.

And we find it difficult to believe in such a person’s vices, just as we can never believe in the genius of a person with whom we went to the Opera last night.

M. de Charlus was engaged in handing over his greatcoat with the instructions of a familiar guest. But the footman to whom he was handing it was a newcomer, and quite young. Now M.

Come and get warm in the drawing-room. ‘Charged with the cloakroom,’ indeed, what an idiot!” “He is inclined to be a little precious, but he’s not a bad fellow,” said Brichot.

“I never said that he was a bad fellow, I said that he was an idiot,” was M. Verdurin’s harsh retort.

Meanwhile Mme. Verdurin was busily engaged with Cottard and Ski. Morel had just declined (because M. de Charlus could not be present) an invitation from some friends of hers to whom she had promised the services of the violinist.

But that upstart little frog trying to blow herself out to the magnitude of two great ladies who, at all events, always reveal the incomparable distinction of blood, it is enough, as the saying is, to make a cat laugh.

The Molé! That is a name which must not be uttered in my hearing, or else I must simply withdraw,

” he concluded with a smile, in the tone of a doctor, who, thinking of his patient’s interests in spite of that same patient’s opposition, lets it be understood that he will not tolerate the collaboration of a homoeopath.

But there it certainly has broken down the hedges. The social leaders who refuse to allow politics into society are as foreseeing as the soldiers who refuse to allow politics to permeate the army.

Society is like the sexual appetite; one does not know at what forms of perversion it may not arrive, once we have allowed our choice to be dictated by aesthetic considerations.

The reason that they were Nationalists gave the Faubourg Saint-Germain the habit of entertaining ladies from another class of society; the reason vanished with Nationalism, the habit remained. Mme.

Mme. Verdurin was furious and determined to “enlighten” Morel as to the ridiculous and detestable part that M. de Charlus was making him play. “I must add,” she went on (

Mme. Verdurin, when she felt that she owed anyone a debt of gratitude which would be a burden to him, and was unable to rid herself of it by killing him, would discover a serious defect in him which would honourably dispense her from showing her gratitude

), “I must add that he gives himself airs in my house which I do not at all like.” The truth was that Mme. Verdurin had another more serious reason than Morel’s refusal to play at her friends’ party for picking a quarrel with M.

whereas the indifference of the friend was something more shocking, more immoral, but less humiliating, and consequently easier to confess than the frivolity of the hostess. In matters of crime, where the culprit is in danger, it is his material interest that prompts the confession.

Where the fault incurs no penalty, it is self-esteem.

Whether it was that, doubtless feeling the pretext to be too hackneyed of the people who, so as not to allow a bereavement to interrupt their life of pleasure, go about saying that it seems to them useless to display the outward signs of a …

For albeit the little clan included few girls, on the other hand girls were abundantly invited on the big evenings. There were a number present, and very pretty girls too, whom I knew. They wafted smiles of greeting to me across the room.

The air was thus decorated at every moment with the charming smile of some girl.

That is the manifold, occasional ornament of evening parties, as it is of days. We remember an atmosphere because girls were smiling in it.

They wafted smiles of greeting to me across the room. The air was thus decorated at every moment with the charming smile of some girl. That is the manifold, occasional ornament of evening parties, as it is of days.

We remember an atmosphere because girls were smiling in it.

Many people might have been greatly surprised had they overheard the furtive remarks which M. de Charlus exchanged with a number of important gentlemen at this party. These were two Dukes, a distinguished General, a great writer, a great physician, a great barrister.

This song, different from those of other singers, similar to all his own, where had Vinteuil learned, where had he heard it?

Each artist seems thus to be the native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten, different from that from which will emerge, making for the earth, another great artist.

When all is said, Vinteuil, in his latest works, seemed to have drawn nearer to that unknown country. The atmosphere was no longer the same as in the sonata, the questioning phrases became more pressing, more uneasy, the answers more mysterious;

Indeed, without pausing to consider relations of so special a nature, do we not find every day that adultery, when it is based upon genuine love, does not upset the family sentiment, the duties of kinship, but rather revivifies them.

Adultery brings the spirit into what marriage would often have left a dead letter.

A good-natured girl who merely from convention will wear mourning for her mother’s second husband has not tears enough to shed for the man whom her mother has chosen out of all the world as her lover. Anyhow, Mlle.

“No, no, even if we are kept waiting an hour, we cannot go away without thanking Palamède, who has taken so much trouble. There is nobody else left now who can give entertainments like this.”

Nobody would have thought of asking to be introduced to Mme. Verdurin any more than to the attendant in a theatre to which some great lady has for one evening brought the whole aristocracy.

“Were you at Eliane de Montmorency’s yesterday, cousin?” asked Mme. de Mortemart, seeking an excuse to prolong their conversation. “Good gracious, no; I like Eliane, but I never can understand her invitations.

Nobody paid the slightest attention to Mme. Verdurin. Some pretended not to know which was she and said good night by mistake to Mme. Cottard, appealing to me for confirmation with a “That is Mme. Verdurin, ain’t it?”

Mme. d’Arpajon asked me, in the hearing of our hostess: “Tell me, has there ever been a Monsieur Verdurin?”

The Duchesses, finding none of the oddities that they expected in this place which they had hoped to find more different from anything that they already knew, made the best of a bad job by going into fits of laughter in front of Elstir’s paintings;

This said, he did not hesitate to commit it, but, taking him by the arm, began:

“Come, Baron, let us go and smoke a cigarette, this young man has not yet seen all the marvels of the house.”

I made the excuse that I was obliged to go home. “Just wait a moment,” said Brichot. “You remember, you are giving me a lift, and I have not forgotten your promise.”

Verdurin and her faithful. But it was evident that in her the need to preserve their friendship was more and more dominated by the requirement that this friendship should never be challenged by that which they might feel for one another.

Homosexuality did not disgust her so long as it did not tamper with orthodoxy, but like the Church she preferred any sacrifice rather than a concession of orthodoxy.

I was beginning to be afraid lest her irritation with myself might be due to her having heard that I had prevented Albertine from going to her that afternoon, and that she might presently set to work, if she had not already begun, upon the …

His laugh was not, like M. Verdurin’s, the stifled gasp of a smoker.

Ski first of all assumed a subtle air, then allowed to escape, as though against his will, a single note of laughter, like the first clang from a belfry

, followed by a silence in which the subtle gaze seemed to be making a competent examination of the absurdity of what had been said, then a second peal of laughter shook the air, followed presently by a merry angelus.

After all, a man is free to try on a shoe, all the more a woman, and if she doesn’t fit him …” He lost his temper once only, because she cried, which he considered cowardly, unworthy of her.

People are not always very tolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked.

But we have looked too far ahead, for all this did not happen until after the Verdurins’ party which we have interrupted, and we must go back to the point at which we left off.

It is true that he might have learned this by asking him for a few minutes’ conversation. But he felt that this would injure his dignity and would be against the interests of his love. He had been insulted, he awaited an explanation.

There is, for that matter, almost invariably, attached to the idea of a conversation which might clear up a misunderstanding, another idea which, whatever the reason, prevents us from agreeing to that conversation.

The man who is abased and has shown his weakness on a score of occasions, will furnish proofs of pride on the twenty-first, the only occasion on which it would serve him not to adopt a headstrong and arrogant attitude but to dispel an error …

de Charlus. He had imagined that the realisation of his great desire that Morel should be presented to the Queen of Naples could be prevented only by the improbable demise of that lady.

But we picture the future as a reflection of the present projected into empty space, whereas it is the result, often almost immediate, of causes which for the most part escape our notice.

Not an hour had passed, and now M. de Charlus would have given everything he possessed in order that Morel should not be presented to the Queen. Mme. Verdurin made the Queen a curtsey. Seeing that the other appeared not to recognise her:

So that as I raised my eyes to look for the last time from outside at the window of the room in which I should presently find myself,

I seemed to behold the luminous gates which were about to close behind me and of which I myself had forged, for an eternal slavery, the unyielding bars of gold.

Our engagement had assumed the form of a criminal trial and gave Albertine the timidity of a guilty party. Now she changed the conversation whenever it turned upon people, men or women, who were not of mature years.

She met me at least twice at my friend’s house. But of course, I am not smart enough for people like that who have become celebrities. They prefer to say that they have never met me.”

Poor Albertine, when she imagined that to tell me that she had been so intimate with Mlle. Vinteuil’s friend would postpone her own dismissal, would draw her nearer to me, she had, as so often happens, attained the truth by a different road from that which she had intended to take.

Her showing herself better informed about music than I had supposed would never have prevented me from breaking with her that evening, on the little tram;

… in the past, was that she should not in her irritation ask me for a greater freedom, which I intended to give her one day, but which at this moment, when I was afraid of her cravings for independence, would have made me too jealous.

After a certain age, from self-esteem and from sagacity, it is to the things which we most desire that we pretend to attach no importance.

But in love, our mere sagacity—which for that matter is probably not the true wisdom—forces us speedily enough to this genius for duplicity.

I succeeded in establishing them only a little later when I had guessed what was in her mind.

We hear things retrospectively when we have understood them.

“Thank you for nothing!

“It was before Balbec?” “Before the second time, yes.” And that very morning, she had told me that she did not know Léa, and, only a moment ago, that she had met her once only in her dressing-room!

I watched a tongue of flame seize and devour in an instant a romance which I had spent millions of minutes in writing.

To what end? To what end? Of course I understood that Albertine had revealed these facts to me because she thought that I had learned them indirectly from Léa; and that there was no reason why a hundred similar facts should not exist.

And what a lie! For, from the moment when she had acquired those tastes until the day when she had been shut up in my house, how many times, in how many places, on how many excursions must she have gratified them!

The daughters of Gomorrah are at once so rare and so frequent that, in any crowd of people, one does not pass unperceived by the other.

From that moment a meeting becomes easy.

Everything depends upon this battle, but such battles are less like those of old days which lasted for a few hours than a battle of today which does not end on the morrow, nor on the day after, nor in the following week.

We give all our strength, because we steadfastly believe that we shall never need any strength again.

And more than a year passes without bringing a “decisive” victory. Perhaps an unconscious reminiscence of lying scenes enacted by M. de Charlus, in whose company I was when the fear of Albertine’s leaving me had seized hold of me, was added to the rest.

perhaps because we do not realise that, by feigning farewells, we evoke by anticipation an hour which must inevitably come later on; then we cannot be certain that we have not released the mechanism which will make it strike.

In every bluff there is an element, however small, of uncertainty as to what the person whom we are deceiving is going to do.

If this make-believe of parting should lead to a parting! We cannot consider the possibility, however unlikely it may seem, without a clutching of the heart.

It was not only from her, moreover, that I received them in such profusion. Certainly, she and many other women had always been extremely kind to me. But my seclusion had undoubtedly multiplied their hospitality tenfold.

It seems that in our social life, a minor echo of what occurs in love, the best way for a man to make himself sought-after is to withhold himself.

A man calculates everything that he can possibly cite to his credit, in order to find favour with a woman, changes his clothes all day long, pays attention to his appearance, she does not pay him a single one of the attentions which he receives …

Now the knowledge that I had of them was internal, immediate, spasmodic, painful.

Love, what is it but space and time rendered perceptible by the heart.

And yet perhaps, had I myself been entirely faithful, I should have suffered because of infidelities which I would have been incapable of conceiving, whereas what it tortured me to imagine in Albertine was my own perpetual desire to find favour with fresh ladies, to …

… with fresh ladies, to plan fresh romances, was to suppose her guilty of the glance which I had been unable to resist casting, the other day, even when I was by her side, at the young bicyclists seated at tables in the Bois de Boulogne.

As we have no personal knowledge, one might almost say that we can feel no jealousy save of ourselves. Observation counts for little.

It is only from the pleasure that we ourselves have felt that we can derive knowledge and grief.

Three years ago, for instance, she simply had to go, every day, to the Buttes-Chaumont.” At the name Buttes-Chaumont, a place where Albertine had told me that she had never been, my breath stopped for a moment.

The truth is the most cunning of enemies. It launches its attacks upon the points of our heart at which we were not expecting them, and have prepared no defence.

Had Albertine been lying to her aunt, then, when she said that she went every day to the Buttes-Chaumont, or to myself, more recently, when she told me that she did not know the place? “Fortunately,” Mme.

I had never before given a thought to that apartment which now possessed for me a horrible beauty.

The unknown element in the lives of other people is like that in nature, which each fresh scientific discovery merely reduces, but does not abolish.

A jealous lover exasperates the woman with whom he is in love by depriving her of a thousand unimportant pleasures, but those pleasures which are the keystone of her life she conceals in a place where, in the moments in which he thinks that he …

“Mademoiselle Albertine has gone!”

How much farther does anguish penetrate in psychology than psychology itself!

A moment ago, as I lay analysing my feelings, I had supposed that this separation without a final meeting was precisely what I wished, and, as I compared the mediocrity of the pleasures that Albertine afforded me with the richness of the desires which she …

And so what I had supposed to mean nothing to me was the only thing in my whole life.

How ignorant we are of ourselves.

The first thing to be done was to make my anguish cease at once. Tender towards myself as my mother had been towards my dying grandmother, I said to myself with that anxiety which we feel to prevent a person whom we love from suffering:

… leave behind her, to rend asunder the net of weariness, of indifference which she has felt being woven about her—to be sure, this blow at our heart, we had vowed that we would avoid it, had assured ourselves that we would make a good finish.

But it is rarely indeed that we do finish well, for, if all was well, we would never finish!

And besides, the woman to whom we show the utmost indifference feels nevertheless in an obscure fashion that while we have been growing tired of her, by virtue of an identical force of habit, we have grown more and more attached to her, and she …

But she is afraid, if she warns us, of preventing her own departure.

Every woman feels that, if her power over a man is great, the only way to leave him is sudden flight. A fugitive because a queen, precisely.

To be sure, there is an unspeakable interval between the boredom which she inspired a moment ago and, because she has gone, this furious desire to have her back again.

This calamity was the greatest that I had experienced in my life. And, when all was said, the suffering that it caused me was perhaps even exceeded by my curiosity to learn the causes of this calamity which Albertine had deliberately brought about.

But the sources of great events are like those of rivers, in vain do we explore the earth’s surface, we can never find them.

So Albertine had for a long time past been planning her flight;

… some idea bound up—with my suffering, it would have been alternately, on the one hand my doubt as to the intention with which she had left me, with or without any thought of returning, and on the other hand the means of bringing her back.

Perhaps there is something symbolical and true in the minute place occupied in our anxiety by the person who is its cause.

The fact is that the person counts for little or nothing; what is almost everything is the series of emotions, of agonies which similar mishaps have made us feel in the past in connection with her and which habit has attached to her.

I say my reason, not myself. The hypothesis of a feint became all the more necessary to me the more improbable it was, and gained in strength what it lost in probability.

When we find ourselves on the brink of the abyss, and it seems as though God has forsaken us, we no longer hesitate to expect a miracle of Him.

I realise that in all this I was the most apathetic, albeit the most anxious of detectives. But Albertine’s flight had not restored to myself the faculties of which the habit of having her watched by other people had deprived me.

… a thing that was quite natural, and I succeeded, albeit it was the greatest grief that I had ever yet felt in my life, in seeming to find quite natural the thing which in my worst suppositions I had never had the audacity to imagine.

(It is astonishing what a want of imagination jealousy, which spends its time in weaving little suppositions of what is untrue, shows when it is a question of discovering the truth.)

Now this love, born first and foremost of a need to prevent Albertine from doing wrong, this love had preserved in the sequel the marks of its origin.

… our character which naturally reappears, and reappears all the more markedly because we have already brought it into prominence once of our own accord, so that the spontaneous impulse which guided us on the first occasion finds itself reinforced by all the suggestions of memory.

The human plagiarism which it is most difficult to avoid, for individuals (and even for nations which persevere in their faults and continue to aggravate them) is the plagiarism of ourselves.

Knowing that Saint-Loup was in Paris I had sent for him immediately; he came in haste to my rescue, swift and efficient as he had been long ago at Doncières, and agreed to set off at once for Touraine.

And I was not unduly distressed.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

I recalled that tragic explanation of so many of us which is furnished by an inspired but not lifelike portrait, such as Elstir’s portrait of Odette, which is a portrait not so much of a mistress as of our degrading love for her.

Since then, other more profound, more pleasant, more indefinable sensations had been added to them, and afterwards painful sensations.

In short, Albertine was merely, like a stone round which snow has gathered, the generating centre of an immense structure which rose above the plane of my heart.

Robert, to whom all this stratification of sensations was invisible, grasped only a residue of it which it prevented me, on the contrary, from perceiving.

“my decision is irrevocable,” that was another matter, it was like taking a dangerous drug which might give me a heart attack which I could not survive.

There is in inanimate objects, in events, in farewell letters a special danger which amplifies and even alters the nature of the grief that people are capable of causing us.

But this pain did not last long. I was, when all was said, so sure of Saint-Loup’s skill, of his eventual success, Albertine’s return seemed to me so certain that I asked myself whether I had had any reason to hope for it.

… received the warning, was, for a moment only, what would in time to come be my permanent state, a life in which I should no longer be able to suffer on account of Albertine, in which I should no longer be in love with her.

And my love, which had just seen and recognised the one enemy by whom it could be conquered, forgetfulness, began to tremble, like a lion which in the cage in which it has been confined has suddenly caught sight of the python that is about to devour it.

I thought of Albertine all the time and never was Françoise, when she came into my room, quick enough in saying: “There are no letters,” to curtail my anguish.

I thought all the time of Albertine while I was asleep. It was a special sleep of her own that she gave me, and one in which, moreover, I should no longer have been at liberty, as when awake, to think of other things.

Sleep and the memory of her were the two substances which I must mix together and take at one draught in order to put myself to sleep.

When I was awake, moreover, my suffering went on increasing day by day instead of diminishing, not that oblivion was not performing its task, but because by the very fact of its doing so it favoured the idealisation of the regretted image and thereby the …

… joy at the moment of her return, I felt that very soon the same difficulties would crop up again and that to seek happiness in the satisfaction of a moral desire was as fatuous as to attempt to reach the horizon by walking straight ahead.

The farther the desire advances, the farther does true possession withdraw.

So that if happiness or at least freedom from suffering can be found it is not the satisfaction, but the gradual reduction, the eventual extinction of our desire that we must seek.

The farther the desire advances, the farther does true possession withdraw. So that if happiness or at least freedom from suffering can be found it is not the satisfaction, but the gradual reduction, the eventual extinction of our desire that we must seek.

We attempt to see the person whom we love, we ought to attempt not to see her, oblivion alone brings about an ultimate extinction of desire.

And I imagine that if an author were to publish truths of this sort he would dedicate the book that contained them to a woman to whom he would thus take pleasure in returning, saying to her: “This book is yours.”

Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone.

Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

And I should have been in such terror (had there been anyone capable of taking it) of somebody’s robbing me of this need of her, this love for her, that I convinced myself that it had a value in my life.

Albertine’s absence. We believe that according to our desire we are able to change the things around about us, we believe this because otherwise we can see no favourable solution.

We forget the solution that generally comes to pass and is also favourable: we do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.

The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant.

By repeating her name incessantly I sought in short to introduce, like a breath of air, something of herself into that room in which her departure had left a vacuum, in which I could no longer breathe.

Then, moreover, we seek to reduce the dimensions of our grief by making it enter into our everyday speech between ordering a suit of clothes and ordering dinner.

While she was doing Albertine’s room, Françoise, out of curiosity, opened the drawer of a little rosewood table in which my mistress used to put away the ornaments which she discarded when she went to bed. “Oh!

… as the person upon whom it depends reveals more clearly the immensity of the place that she occupies in our life, leaving nothing in the world which is not overthrown by her, so the image of that person diminishes until it is not longer perceptible.

In everything we find the effect of her presence in the emotion that we feel; herself, the cause, we do not find anywhere.

I was during these days so incapable of forming any picture of Albertine that I could almost have believed that I was not in love with her, just as my mother, in the moments of desperation in which she was incapable of ever forming any …

Did I believe this? He had believed it, that subtlest of men who thought that he knew himself well.

How little do we know what we have in our heart.

How clearly, a little later, had he been still alive, I could have proved to him that his wish was not only criminal but absurd, that the death of her whom he loved would have set him free from nothing.

And had she confined me to once a week, I would have accepted the restriction. She did not, ever, return. My telegram had just gone to her when I myself received one. It was from Mme. Bontemps.

The world is not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.

Alas! it was not a suppression of suffering that was wrought in me by the first two lines of the telegram:

this moment which it has registered endures still, lives still, and with it the person whose form is outlined in it. And moreover, this disintegration does not only make the dead man live, it multiplies him.

To find consolation, it was not one, it was innumerable Albertines that I must first forget.

When I had reached the stage of enduring the grief of losing this Albertine, I must begin afresh with another, with a hundred others.

And she went on: “It was bound to happen; she was too happy, poor creature, she never knew how happy she was.”

How slow the day is in dying on these interminable summer evenings.

A pallid ghost of the house opposite continued indefinitely to sketch upon the sky its persistent whiteness. At last it was dark indoors;

I knew that I should one day forget her; I had quite forgotten Gilberte, Mme. de Guermantes; I had quite forgotten my grandmother.

And it is our most fitting and most cruel punishment, for that so complete oblivion, as tranquil as the oblivion of the graveyard, by which we have detached ourself from those whom we no longer love, that we can see this same oblivion to be inevitable in the case of those whom we love still.

To tell the truth, we know it to be a state not painful, a state of indifference.

It had been in the same way that, in the past, when some friend had called to see me and had prevented me from working, if on the following day I was left undisturbed, I did not work any better.

Let an illness, a duel, a runaway horse make us see death face to face, how richly we should have enjoyed the life of pleasure, the travels in unknown lands which are about to be snatched from us.

And no sooner is the danger past than what we find once again before us is the same dull life in which none of those delights had any existence for us.

… the future, the possibility or the illusion of influencing it, and also because it unrolled itself to the full extent of my own life without my companion’s being present to soothe the anguish that it caused me—was no longer Albertine’s Future, it was her Past.

Her Past? That is the wrong word, since for jealousy there can be neither past nor future, and what it imagines is invariably the present.

Atmospheric changes, provoking other changes in the inner man, awaken forgotten variants of himself, upset the somnolent course of habit, restore their old force to certain memories, to certain sufferings.

Now the curtains, the chairs, the books, had ceased to be unimportant.

Art is not alone in imparting charm and mystery to the most insignificant things; the same power of bringing them into intimate relation with ourselves is committed also to grief.

At the moment I had paid no attention to the dinner which we had eaten together after our return from the Bois, before I went to the Verdurins’, and towards the beauty, the solemn sweetness of which I now turned, my eyes filled with tears.

At the moment I had paid no attention to the dinner which we had eaten together after our return from the Bois, before I went to the Verdurins’, and towards the beauty, the solemn sweetness of which I now turned, my eyes filled with tears.

An impression of love is out of proportion to the other impressions of life, but it is not when it is lost in their midst that we can take account of it.

It is not from its foot, in the tumult of the street and amid the thronging houses, it is when we are far away, that from the slope of a neighbouring hill, at a distance from which the whole town has disappeared, or appears only …

I had dreamed of being understood by Albertine, of not being scorned by her, thinking that it was for the great happiness of being understood, of not being scorned, when so many other people might have served me better.

We wish to be understood, because we wish to be loved, and we wish to be loved because we are in love. The understanding of other people is immaterial and their love importunate.

My joy at having possessed a little of Albertine’s intelligence and of her heart arose not from their intrinsic worth, but from the fact that this possession was a stage farther towards the complete possession of Albertine, a possession which had been my goal and …

When we speak of the “kindness” of a woman, we do no more perhaps than project outside ourselves the pleasure that we feel in seeing her, like children when they say: “My dear little bed, my dear little pillow, my dear little hawthorns.”

Which explains incidentally why men never say of a woman who is not unfaithful to them: “She is so kind,” and say it so often of a woman by whom they are betrayed.

Mme. de Cambremer was right in thinking that Elstir’s intellectual charm was greater.

Furthermore, our mistake is our failure to value the intelligence, the kindness of a woman whom we love, however slight they may be. Our mistake is our remaining indifferent to the kindness, the intelligence of others.

Falsehood begins to cause us the indignation, and kindness the gratitude which they ought always to arouse in us, only if they proceed from a woman with whom we are in love, and bodily desire has the marvellous faculty of restoring its value to intelligence and a solid base to the moral life.

Never should I find again that divine thing, a person with whom I might talk freely of everything, in whom I might confide. Confide? But did not other people offer me greater confidence than Albertine? Had I not had with others more unrestricted conversations?

Albertine had been penniless, obscure, she must have been anxious to marry me. And yet I had not been able to possess her exclusively.

Whatever be our social position, however wise our precautions, when the truth is confessed we have no hold over the life of another person.

Why had she not said to me: “I have those tastes,” I would have yielded, would have allowed her to gratify them.

had I been the hero, I assured myself, I would first of all have forced the woman to speak, then we could have come to an understanding; what was the good of all this unnecessary misery?

But I saw now that we are not free to abstain from forging the chains of our own misery, and that however well we may know our own will, other people do not obey it.

And yet those painful, those ineluctable truths which dominated us and to which we were blind, the truth of our sentiments, the truth of our destiny, how often without knowing it, without meaning it, we have expressed them in words in which we ourselves doubtless …

… have been another woman that would now be unique to us if we had been in another town than that in which we made her acquaintance, if we had explored other quarters of the town, if we had frequented the house of a different hostess.

Unique, we suppose; she is innumerable.

And yet she is compact, indestructible in our loving eyes, irreplaceable for a long time to come by any other.

… which she loved, I tried to raise up to her my affection so that it might be a consolation to her for being no longer alive, and this love for a being so remote was like a religion, my thoughts rose towards her like prayers.

Desire is very powerful, it engenders belief; I had believed that Albertine would not leave me because I desired that she might not.

Because I desired it, I began to believe that she was not dead; I took to reading books upon table-turning, I began to believe in the possibility of the immortality of the soul. But that did not suffice me.

I might have sent Aimé to many other places in Balbec, to many other towns than Balbec. But these other days, precisely because I did not know how she had spent them, did not represent themselves to my imagination. They had no existence.

Things, people, did not begin to exist for me until they assumed in my imagination an individual existence.

If there were thousands of others like them, they became for me representative of all the rest.

Furnished with this preservative belief, I could without danger allow my mind to play sadly with suppositions to which it gave a form but added no faith.

I said to myself, “She is perhaps a woman-lover,” as we say, “I may die tonight”; we say it, but we do not believe it, we make plans for the morrow.

This explains why, believing mistakenly that I was uncertain whether Albertine did or did not love women, and believing in consequence that a proof of Albertine’s guilt would not give me anything that I had not already taken into account, I was able to feel …

… to the second, must often have ridden on her bicycle to the first, they aroused in me an anxiety more cruel than on the first occasion, when I beheld the places with such misgivings, before arriving at a Balbec which I did not yet know.

It is one of the faculties of jealousy to reveal to us the extent to which the reality of external facts and the sentiments of the heart are an unknown element which lends itself to endless suppositions.

We suppose that we know exactly what things are and what people think, for the simple reason that we do not care about them.

It is one of the faculties of jealousy to reveal to us the extent to which the reality of external facts and the sentiments of the heart are an unknown element which lends itself to endless suppositions.

We suppose that we know exactly what things are and what people think, for the simple reason that we do not care about them.

But as soon as we feel the desire to know, which the jealous man feels, then it becomes a dizzy kaleidoscope in which we can no longer make out anything. Had Albertine been unfaithful to me? With whom? In what house? Upon what day?

But at once my grief had reacted upon them: an objective fact, such as an image, differs according to the internal state in which we approach it.

And grief is as potent in altering reality as is drunkenness.

Combined with these images, suffering had at once made of them something absolutely different from what might be for anyone else a lady in grey, a gratuity, a bath, the street which had witnessed the deliberate arrival of Albertine with the lady in grey.

… ceased to be present in my thoughts and all-powerful over my heart, I was stabbed at once if I had occasion, as in the time when she was there, to go into her room, to grope for the light, to sit down by the pianola.

Divided among a number of little household gods, she dwelt for a long time in the flame of the candle, the doorbell, the back of a chair, and other domains more immaterial such as a night of insomnia or the emotion that was caused me by the first visit of a woman who had attracted me.

In spite of this the few sentences which I read in the course of a day or which my mind recalled that I had read, often aroused in me a cruel jealousy.

If the story was true, and if Albertine had concealed her tastes from me, it was in order not to make me unhappy. I had the pleasure of hearing this Albertine say so. Besides, had I ever known any other?

The two chief causes of error in our relations with another person are, having ourselves a good heart, or else being in love with the other person.

We fall in love for a smile, a glance, a bare shoulder. That is enough; then, in the long hours of hope or sorrow, we fabricate a person, we compose a character.

I had the pleasure of hearing this Albertine say so. Besides, had I ever known any other? The two chief causes of error in our relations with another person are, having ourselves a good heart, or else being in love with the other person.

We fall in love for a smile, a glance, a bare shoulder. That is enough; then, in the long hours of hope or sorrow, we fabricate a person, we compose a character.

And when later on we see much of the beloved person, we can no longer, whatever the cruel reality that confronts us, strip off that good character, that nature of a woman who loves us, from the person who bestows that glance, bares that shoulder, …

… had done my grandmother, the harm that Albertine had done me was a last bond between her and myself which outlived memory even, for with the conservation of energy which belongs to everything that is physical, suffering has no need of the lessons of memory.

Thus a man who has forgotten the charming night spent by moonlight in the woods, suffers still from the rheumatism which he then contracted.

Those tastes which she had denied but which were hers, those tastes the discovery of which had come to me not by a cold process of reasoning but in the burning anguish that I had felt on reading the words:

But no more is she telling herself that I do not know, since she tells herself nothing.” But this line of reasoning convinced me less than the visual image of her pleasure which brought me back to the moment in which she had tasted it.

What we feel is the only thing that exists for us, and we project it into the past, into the future, without letting ourselves be stopped by the fictitious barriers of death.

If my regret that she was dead was subjected at such moments to the influence of my jealousy and assumed this so peculiar form, that influence extended over my dreams of occultism, of immortality, which were no more than an effort to realise what I …

I must have suffered intensely during this period, but I realise that it was inevitable.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

By protecting Albertine from any contact with the outer world, by forging the illusion that she was innocent, just as later on when I adopted as the basis of my reasoning the thought that she was alive, I was merely postponing the hour of my …

our memory of dreams may become lasting, if they repeat themselves sufficiently often. And long after my dream had ended, I remained tormented by that kiss which Albertine had told me that she had bestowed in words which I thought that I could still hear.

And indeed, they must have passed very close to my ear since it was I myself that had uttered them.

All day long, I continued to converse with Albertine, I questioned her, I forgave her, I made up for my forgetfulness of the things which I had always meant to say to her during her life.

Chaumont had made me think of the Buttes-Chaumont to which Mme. Bontemps had told me that Andrée used often to go with Albertine, whereas Albertine had told me that she had never seen the Buttes-Chaumont.

After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that the thing of which we are thinking, the book that we are reading are of scarcely any importance.

We have put something of ourself everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal’s Pensées in an advertisement of soap.

After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that the thing of which we are thinking, the book that we are reading are of scarcely any importance.

We have put something of ourself everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal’s Pensées in an advertisement of soap.

No doubt an incident such as this of the Buttes-Chaumont which at the time had appeared to me futile was in itself far less serious, far less decisive evidence against Albertine than the story of the bath-woman or the laundress.

I found myself once more coming away from the party at the Princesse de Guermantes’s and awaiting the coming of Albertine.

Days in the past cover up little by little those that preceded them and are themselves buried beneath those that follow them. But each past day has remained deposited in us, as, in a vast library in which there are older books, a volume which, doubtless, nobody will ever ask to see.

And yet should this day from the past, traversing the lucidity of the subsequent epochs, rise to the surface and spread itself over us whom it entirely covers, then for a moment the names resume their former meaning, people their former aspect, we ourselves our …

… former aspect, we ourselves our state of mind at the time, and we feel, with a vague suffering which however is endurable and will not last for long, the problems which have long ago become insoluble and which caused us such anguish at the time.

Our ego is composed of the superimposition of our successive states. But this superimposition is not unalterable like the stratification of a mountain.

Incessant upheavals raise to the surface ancient deposits. I found myself as I had been after the party at the Princesse de Guermantes’s, awaiting the coming of Albertine. What had she been doing that evening? Had she been unfaithful to me? With whom?

But even the importance which this desire must have had for her and the reserve with which she surrounded it could not reveal to me what, qualitatively, it had been, still less how she qualified it when she spoke of it to herself.

In bodily suffering, at least we do not have ourselves to choose our pain. The malady decides it and imposes it on us.

But in jealousy we have to some extent to make trial of sufferings of every sort and degree, before we arrive at the one which seems appropriate.