A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU
My mother, who sent me with my grandmother to Balbec, but stayed behind alone in Paris, understood what despair it would cause me to leave her; so she decided to say goodbye to us on the platform much earlier rather than to wait until the time of our departure where, previously concealed by the comings and goings and preparations which promised nothing definite, a separation seemed harsh and impossible to endure when it was too late to avoid, wholly concentrated in an immense moment of supreme and powerless lucidity. She would come with us into the station, into that tragic and marvellous place where I now had to abandon all hope of returning home, but where a miracle was about to take place thanks to which those very places in which I would soon be living would be the very places which as yet had no existence outside my own imagination. Besides, the thought of Balbec did not seem to me to be any the less desirable because it had to be bought at a terrible cost and on the contrary symbolized the reality of the impression I was going there to seek, an impression which no....
These extracts are taken from the second volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, entitled Le côte de Guermantes, which is to be published shortly by Bernard Grasset.