"Bricquebec" (continued)

   Mme de Villeparisis used to order her carriage early, so that we should have time to reach Couliville, or the rocks of Erméez, or some other goal which, for a somewhat lumbering vehicle, was far enough off to require the whole day. In my joy at the thought of the long drive we were going to take I would hum some tune that I had heard recently as I strolled up and down in front of the hotel until Mme de Villeparisis was ready. If it was Sunday, hers would not be the only carriage drawn up outside the hotel; several hired cabs would be waiting there, not only for the people who had been invited to Mme de Chemisey's, but for those who had not been invited who, rather than giving the appearance of children in disgrace who had to stay at home all day, declared that Sunday was always quite impossible at Bricquebec and set off immediately after lunch to hide themselves at some neighbouring watering-place or to visit one of the nearby "sights". And indeed whenever (which was often) the notary's wife was asked if she had been to Mme de Chemisey's, she would answer emphatically: "No, we went to the falls at Allaire" as though that were the sole reason for her not having spent the day at Mme de Chemisey's. And the barrister would charitably remark: "I envy you, they must be much more interesting."
   Mme de Villeparisis was not long in coming down, followed by her old butler who carried her things and watched us leaving with an approving smile, tender and complicit, as one would look on two newlyweds, on the new relationship which with an indulgent glance he saw establishing itself between his mistress and ourselves; meanwhile from time to time I would raise my eyes to seek out an open window where I could see Françoise appear and then immediately disappear, who with an avid yet indifferent expression was incapable of denying herself this spectacle, not wishing to appear to be disavowing the prohibition established by Mamma in Paris of ever standing at the windows. Shortly after rounding the railway station, we came into a country road which soon became as familiar to me as the roads around Combray, from the bend where it took off to the turning at which we left it where there were tilled fields on either side. All along the road it filled me with joy to see here and there an apple tree, stripped it is true of its blossom and bearing no more than a fringe of pistils, but sufficient even so to enchant me since I could imagine, seeing those inimitable leaves, how their broad expanse, like the ceremonial carpet spread out for a wedding that was now over, had been only recently swept by the white satin train of their blushing flowers.
   How often in Paris, during the month of May the following year, preserving from this roadway and also from particular fields which surrounded it at a distance the same present, fixed and immutable memory as formerly I had kept of certain scenes from classical plays which I had recited to myself and which I would have liked to have heard spoken by La Brème - how often was I to bring home a branch of apple-blossom from the florist and afterwards to spend the night in company with its flowers in which bloomed the same creamy essence that still powdered with its froth the burgeoning leaves and between whose white corollas it seemed almost as though it had been the florist who, from generosity towards me, from a taste for invention too and as an effective contrast, had added on either side the supplement of a becoming pink bud: I sat gazing at them, I grouped them in the light of my lamp - for so long that I was often still there when the dawn brought to their whiteness the same flush with which it must at that moment have been tingeing their sisters on the Cricquebec road - and I sought to carry them back in my imagination to that roadside, to multiply them, to spread them out within the frame prepared for them, on the canvas already primed, of those fields and orchards whose outline I knew by heart, which I longed to see, which one day I must see, again, at the moment when, with the exquisite fervour of genius, spring covers their canvas with its colours.
   Before getting into the carriage, I had composed the seascape which I was going to look out for, which I hoped to see with the "radiant sun" upon it, and which at Cricquebec I could distinguish only in too fragmentary form, broken by so many vulgar adjuncts that had no place in my dream - bathers, cabins, pleasure yachts. But when, Mme de Villeparisis's carriage having reached the top of the hill, I caught a glimpse of the sea through the leafy boughs of the trees, then no doubt at such a distance the disappearing contemporaneous details which hindered me from clearly understanding that Baudelaire's ocean was here before me, the ancient sea of Leconte de Lisle, still breaking with the same sonorous waves which "like a flight of birds of prey, before the dawn of day" are beaten by a hundred thousand oars from "spurred bows"; but on the other hand I was no longer near enough the sea, which seemed to me not alive but congealed, I no longer felt any power beneath its colours, spread like those of a picture between the leaves, through which it appeared as insubstantial as the sky and only of an intenser blue.
   From time to time, knowing that it would give pleasure to my grandmother, she would ask the driver to stop beside the Arbonne woods. The invisibility of the numerous birds which we could hear in the trees on all sides of us gave the same peaceful feeling that we have when we close our eyes to rest them; and enchained up on my carriage seat like Prometheus on his rock, I was hearing the cries of the Oceanides. And when I happened to see one of the birds as it disappeared from one leaf onto another beneath, there seemed to be so little connection between it and its song that I could not believe that the sound could be coming from this startled, hopping and unseen little body.
   As the driver did not yet know the area very well he would ask for directions from a passing peasant and I frequently heard them mention as a landmark a village whose church I especially wanted to see, Blenpertuis. As it was not directly on our route I could hardly, on account of Mme de Villeparisis, ask that we stop there, but I gave to this name a special place, a privileged position in my memory, I vowed that if my health did not improve sufficiently this year for me to take walks alone and to be able to visit this church, that next year at least I would return, be it from Paris expressly for the purpose. And by persuading myself and placing before myself the pledge that my pilgrimage was merely to be postponed, I was able without feeling too much regret to see our carriage continue on its way and leave the church of Blenpertuis far behind. But I knew perfectly well however that if, among all the other equally interesting churches which were described in my Concise Monumental Archaeology of the West it was that particular one which I wished to see, it was not because it possessed any intrinsic superiority to justify my exclusive preference. By leaving at the very moment that I had arbitrarily chosen it, it was to that particular one, each time my desire for village churches resurfaced, that I was drawn. It had provided my desire with an object to love, to name and to be represented. In the shapeless and empty expanse of the whole of France I only saw the blue steeple of Blenpertuis. To renounce Blenpertuis would be to take my first unwilling step towards the forfeiture which I would one day be forced to make, that of no longer seeing life as the embodiment of the knowledge and possession of the things I had desired, would be to renounce wishing from reality the things to which my imagination and my understanding had already set the value.
   Mme de Villeparisis, seeing that I was fond of churches, wanted us to be able to visit the one at Brissinville "quite buried in old ivy", as she said with a gesture of her hand which seemed tastefully to be clothing the absent façade in an invisible and delicate screen of foliage. Mme de Villeparisis would often, with this descriptive gesture, find just the right word to define the charm of an historic church, always avoiding technical terms, but incapable of concealing her thorough understanding of the things to which she referred. She appeared to seek an excuse for this erudition in the fact that one of her father's country houses, the one in which she had lived as a girl, was situated in a region where there were churches in the same style of architecture - of which, if she were being quite honest, she said, this house was one of the finest examples of that of the Renaissance - from which she had acquired a taste for painting - of which it was a regular museum, and of music and literature as well, Chopin having come to play the piano there, and Lamartine to recite verses to her mother - it having been a sort of annex of her liberal and cultivated aristocratic childhood. Perhaps even by dint of her ascribing, whether from good education, lack of vanity or a philosophical mind, this purely material origin of her artistic tastes she had come to regard them too exclusively. She would not entertain going to see a work of art in one of those collections which have been put together at vast expense where "one is never sure if any of it is genuine and where you are never sure of what you are seeing". When my grandmother admired a necklace with red beads that she was wearing underneath her cloak she replied: " Yes, it's pretty isn't it? I like to wear it because it appears in a portrait by Titian of my great-grandmother from whom I inherited it along with the portrait. It was in my bedroom when I was a child. It is one of the finest Titians there is and it has never left our family. That way you can be sure of its authenticity. But don't talk to me about paintings which have been bought, heaven knows where, I'm sure they are fakes and I have no interest in them." My grandmother was not in the least surprised to see that she was so knowledgeable about painting, knowing that she painted flowers in water-colour; she told her that she had heard them highly praised. Mme de Villeparisis modestly changed the subject, but without showing any more surprise or pleasure than would an artist of established reputation to whom compliments mean nothing. She said merely that it was a delightful pastime because, even if the flowers that sprang from the brush were nothing wonderful, at least the work made you live in the company of real flowers, the beauty of which you could never grow tired. She was not working at Cricquebec though, because she was giving herself a holiday in order to rest her tired eyes, but back in Paris she would be happy to give us some flowers of her own creation. But if nature, churches and paintings cropped up in the little vignettes which were sprinkled into her conversation, they were, so far as I could judge during the course of our drive, totally human, and more often featured anecdotes about society to which the public character of people whom the old lady had known in her youth gave an almost historical or literary interest. And with the same slight gesture of her hand, the same restrained epithet whether for a church steeple or of a mill chimney, she showed us the queen of Belgium on a visit, Louis-Philippe coming to her father's house when she was a child, Merimée making caricatures or Delacriox's studio. But it seemed as if she did this in spite of herself, and because that was the way she saw them again in her memory; and if the names of these people appeared in the history books, her familiarity with their behaviour and their gossip showed the extent to which she had lived in the intimate company of so many brilliant people. Because she never tried to talk about herself; in the smallest occurrences, in the most trivial incidents during the course of our drives, the things which she told us always had her placed in the background but made us seem important, always showing herself to be full of tact, regard, charm and kindness (the total opposite to my friend Bloch); all the more so because whereas in the prejudices of a less brilliant society, be they denigrated or be exalted but always longed for and respected, commanded a place of importance, Mme de Villeparisis spoke about birth and rank as being secondary to talent and intelligence. She extended this modesty so far as to reject ideas which, without being inevitably aristocratic or worldly, seemed to us nevertheless to be those which must be professed in the aristocracy and in the world of society. She did not understand how anyone could be scandalized by the expulsion of the Jesuits, saying that it had always been done, even under the Monarchy, in Spain even. She said: "To my mind, a man who doesn't work doesn't count", defending the Republic which she agreed to and reproached it for its anti-clericalism only to this extent: "I should find it just as bad to be prevented from going to mass when I wanted to, as to be forced to go to it when I didn't", even putting forth such remarks as "Oh! the aristocracy of today! what does it amount to?" - which she said perhaps only because she sensed how much they gained in spice and piquancy, how memorable they became, on her lips. In her every word she professed on all things the opinions of a bourgeois conservative yet liberal attitude the justness of which we had not dared to fully hold true, my grandmother and I, until that moment, because they corresponded too closely to our own wishes and because we would endeavour, when seeking the truth, to take the side, through an effort of impartiality, of those who were bound to think differently to us, and in the end perhaps more correctly than us, of somebody like Mme de Villeparisis for example. But what a shock it was to hear these opinions expressed here without scruple from a mind so different but which to us were so instinctive and natural, taking on the authority of truth and becoming meritorious. As we listened to Mme de Villeparisis expressing these opinions our sympathy for her became a real admiration and we took great pleasure in her conversation wherein two seemingly contradictory instincts, but which may nevertheless co-exist in the minds of many people, could be satisfied: a horror of snobbery in its eulogy of mediocrity, mockery of the nobility, lofty views; and the taste for snobbery, because through listening to such lofty language we were drawn further into the aristocratic world frequented by Mme de Villeparisis and her princely companions. At such moments I could almost believe that the measure and model of the truth in all its aspects was enthroned in Mme de Villeparisis. But - like those learned people who hold us spellbound when we get them on to Egyptian painting or Etruscan inscriptions, and yet talk so tritely about modern works that we wonder whether we have not over estimated the interest of the sciences in which they are versed since they do not betray therein the mediocrity of mind which they must have brought to those studies just as much as to their judgements on Manet and Baudelaire - Mme de Villeparisis, questioned by me about Chateaubriand, about Balzac, about Victor Hugo, smiled at my reverence, told amusing anecdotes about them such as she had just been telling us about dukes and statesmen, and severely criticized those writers precisely because they had been lacking in that modesty, that sober art which is satisfied with a single precise stroke and does not over emphasize, which avoids above all else the absurdity of grandiloquence, of self effacement, in that aptness, those qualities of moderation, of judgement and simplicity to which she had been taught that real greatness attained. It was evident that she had no hesitation in placing above them men who might after all, perhaps, by virtue of those qualities, have had the advantage of a Balzac, a Hugo, a Vigny in a drawing-room, an academy, a cabinet council, men like Molé, Barante, Fontanes, Vitrolles, Pasquier, Lebrun or Daru. Yet these people, Chateaubriand when she was small, Balzac at the home of Mme de Castries, Stendahl, these were people whom she knew and she had their autographs and mementoes of them. She seemed, presuming on the personal relations which her family had had with them, to think that her judgement of them must be better founded than that of young people who, like myself, had had no opportunity of meeting them. "I think I have a right to speak about them, since they used to come to my father's house, and as M. Sainte-Beuve, who was a most intelligent man, used to say, in forming an estimate you must take the word of people who saw them close to and were able to judge more exactly their real worth."
   Sometimes, as the carriage laboured up a steep road through ploughed fields, all at once the fields which were on either side of me seemed to me to be miraculously real, fields as beautiful as those in the Bible, and I would catch my breath. I would have just caught sight of a few hesitant cornflowers on the embankment that followed in the wake of our carriage. But after Combray certain very local aspects that I missed had in the end taken on this precious, inaccessible character, of everything which is in our thoughts, that is to say things which are so close to us but without us being able to touch them. A cornflower set its signature at the bottom of a field adding a mark of authenticity like the precious floret with which certain of the old masters used to sign their canvases. Presently the horses outdistanced them, but a little way on we could glimpse another that while awaiting us had pricked up its blue star in front of us in the grass. Some made so bold as to come and plant themselves by the side of the road, and a whole constellation began to take shape, what with my distant memories and these domesticated flowers.
   We began to go down the hill; and then we would meet, climbing it on foot, on a bicycle, in a cart or carriage, one of those creatures - flowers of a fine day but unlike the flowers of the field, for each of them holds something that is not to be found in another and that will prevent us from gratifying with any of her peers the desire that she has aroused in us - a farm-girl driving her cow or reclining on the back of a waggon, a shop-keeper's daughter taking the air, a fashionable young lady erect on the back seat of a landau, facing her parents. Certainly Bloch, in the same way as a great scholar or the founder of a religion, had been the means of opening a new era and had altered the value of life and good fortune on the day when he had told me that the dreams which I had entertained on my solitary walks along the Méseglise way, when I hoped that some peasant girl might pass whom I could take in my arms, were not a mere fantasy which corresponded to nothing outside myself but that all the girls one met, whether villagers or "young ladies", dreamed of hardly anything else than love making. And even if I were fated, now that I was ill and did not go out by myself, never to be able to make love to them, I was like a child born in a prison or in a hospital who, having long supposed that the human organism was capable of digesting only dry bread and medications, has learned suddenly that peaches, apricots and grapes are not simply part of the decoration of the country scene but delicious and easily assimilated food. Even if his gaoler or his nurse forbids him from plucking 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 ourselves there is a reality which conforms to it, even if, for us, it is not to be realized. And we think more joyfully 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 ourselves to be assuaging that desire. As to the pretty girls who went past, from the day on which I had first known that their cheeks could be kissed, I had become curious about their souls. And the universe had appeared to me more interesting.
   Mme de Villeparisis's carriage moved fast. I scarcely had time to see the girl who was coming in our direction; and yet - since the beauty of human beings is not like the beauty of things, and we feel that it is that of a unique creature, endowed with consciousness and free-will - as soon as her individuality, a soul still vague, a will unknown to me, presented a tiny picture of itself, enormously reduced but complete, in the depths of her indifferent eyes, at once, by a mysterious response of the pollen ready in me for the pistils that should receive it, I felt surging through me the embryo, equally vague, equally minute, of the desire not to let this girl pass without forcing her mind to become aware of my person, without preventing her desires from wandering to someone else, without insinuating myself into her dreams and taking possession of her heart. Meanwhile our carriage had moved on; the pretty girl was already behind us; and as she had - of me - none of those notions which constitute a person in one's mind, her eyes, which had barely seen me, had forgotten me already, even if she had not been mocking me. Was it because I had caught but a momentary glimpse of her that I had found her so attractive? Had I been free to get down from the carriage and to speak to her, I might perhaps have been disillusioned by some blemish on her skin that I had not been able to distinguish from the carriage. Perhaps a single word which she might have uttered, or a smile would have furnished me with an unexpected key or a clue with which to read the expression on her face, to interpret her bearing, which would at once have become commonplace. It is possible, for I have never in real life met any girls so desirable as on days when I was with some solemn person from whom, despite the myriad pretexts that I invented, I could not tear myself away. Such as being stricken with a sudden headache that would not go away unless I got down from the carriage and returned to Cricquebec on foot, which convinced neither Mme de Villeparisis nor my grandmother who would not let me out. And my regret at never having been able to stand before this pretty girl, at never having got to know her was more bitter for me than having to leave behind a village church or a belfry, and I found myself longing to find this one girl again, and no other who may have been more exclusive. Because I knew that lying beneath the grace of this pretty girl was something very different from what lay beneath the grace of old stones: a living consciousness in which I had no existence even if I were known and loved by every other girl in the world. But I had no point of reference such as a name, as I had for the church, or a mile-post for a field. But the particularities that I endeavoured to call to mind were so vague. She had passed at a similar time on a cart or in a victoria, in a similar place, heading towards a similar village, but even so would I ever be able to see her again? In the meantime I told myself that these encounters made me find even more beautiful a world which thus caused to grow along all the country roads flowers at once rare and common, fleeting treasures of the day, windfalls of the drive, of which the contingent circumstances that might not, perhaps, recur had alone prevented me from taking advantage, and which gave a new zest to life.
   Perhaps in hoping that, one day, with greater freedom, I should be able to find similar girls on other roads, I was already beginning to falsify and corrupt what is exclusively individual in the desire to live in the company of a woman whom one has found attractive, and by the mere fact that I admitted the possibility of bringing it about artificially, I had implicitly acknowledged its illusoriness.
   On one occasion Mme de Villeparisis took us to Brisseville to see the ivy-covered church which she had spoken to us about. Built on top of a hillock it dominated both the village and the river that flowed beneath it and looked down onto its little mediaeval bridge. My grandmother, thinking that I would like to be left alone to study the church at my leisure, suggested to Mme de Villeparisis that they should go on and wait for me at the pastry shop in the village square that was clearly visible from where we were and beneath its mellow patina seemed like another part of the wholly ancient object. It was agreed that I should join them there later. In the mass of greenery in front of which I was standing I was obliged, in order to recognize a church, to make a mental effort which involved my grasping more intensely the idea "church". In fact, as happens to school boys who gather more fully the meaning of a sentence when they are made, by translating or paraphrasing it, to divest it of the forms to which they are accustomed, I was obliged perpetually to refer back to this idea of "church", which as a rule I scarcely heeded when I stood beneath steeples that were recognizable in themselves, in order not to forget, here that the arch of this clump of ivy was that of a Gothic window, there that the salience of the leaves was due to the carved relief of a capital. Then came a breath of wind, sending a tremor through the mobile porch, which was traversed by eddies flickering and spreading like light; the leaves unfurled against one another; and, quivering, the arboreal façade bore away with it the undulant, rustling, fugitive pillars.
   As I came away from the church I saw by the old bridge a cluster of girls from the village who, probably because it was Sunday, were standing about in their best clothes, hailing the boys who went past. One of them, a tall girl not so well dressed as the others but seeming to enjoy some ascendancy over them - for she scarcely answered when they spoke to her - with a more serious and self-willed air, was sitting on the parapet of the bridge with her feet hanging down, and holding on her lap a bowl of fish which she had presumably just caught. She had a tanned complexion, soft eyes but with a look of contempt for her surroundings, and a small nose, delicately and attractively modelled. My eyes alighted on her skin; and my lips, at a pinch, might have believed that they had followed my eyes. But it was not simply to her body that I should have liked to attain; it was also the person that lived inside it, the consciousness within each of us, and with which there is but one form of contact, namely to attract its attention, but one sort of penetration, to awaken an idea in it.
   And this inner being of the handsome fisher-girl seemed to be still closed to me; I was doubtful whether I had entered it, even after I had seen my own image furtively reflected in the twin mirrors of her gaze, following an index of refraction that was as unknown to me as if I had been placed in the field of vision of a doe. But just as it would not have sufficed that my lips should find pleasure in hers without giving pleasure to them too, so I could have wished that the idea of me which entered this being and took hold in it should bring me not merely her attention but her admiration, her desire, and should compel her to keep me in her memory until the day when I should be able to meet her again. Meanwhile I could see, within a stone's throw, the square in which Mme de Villeparisis's carriage must be waiting for me. I had not a moment to lose; and already I could feel that the girls were beginning to laugh at the sight of me standing there before them. I had a five-franc piece in my pocket. I drew it out, and, before explaining to the girl the errand on which I proposed to send her, in order to have a better chance of her listening to me I held the coin for a moment before her eyes.
   "Since you seem to belong to this place," I said to the fisher-girl, "I wonder if you would be so good as to take a message for me. I want to go to a pastry shop - which is apparently in a square, but I don't know where that is - there is a carriage waiting for me. One moment! To make quite sure, will you ask if the carriage belongs to the Marquise de Villeparisis? But you can't miss it; it's a carriage and pair."
   That was what I wished her to know, so that she should regard me as someone of importance, and I was so worried that she would not hear me to the end that I held out the five-franc piece in front of her eyes (so that there would be more chance of her accepting the commission) before beginning my speech, not daring to raise my eyes until I had finished, for fear of seeing a gesture of refusal which would have interrupted me and would have denied me any pretext for making it known to this village girl that there was a carriage and pair belonging to a Marquise waiting for me. But when I had uttered the words "Marquise" and "carriage and pair", suddenly I had a sense of enormous assuagement. I felt that she would remember me. I felt my fear of not being able to see her again disappear. I felt that I had just touched her person with invisible lips and that I had pleased her. And this forcible appropriation of her mind, this immaterial possession, had robbed her of mystery as much as physical possession would have done. I raised my eyes to her face and gave her the coin. Then I saw that her brown cheeks were scarred, her eyes which I had thought to be disdainful and soft expressed merely a humble and stupid willingness and as she said something to her companions which I could not hear about them looking after her bowl of fish which she held out to them, her mouth took on a grimacing and vulgar shape. It had occurred to me that I ought not to send her off to the carriage where my grandmother and Mme de Villeparisis would not have been able to understand why I had sent her there. "But if it's a long way," I told her, "it would be simpler for me to come with you." And as soon as we were in sight of the pastry shop I said to her: "I recognize the shop window, this is it", and I took my leave of her. She remained at the corner of the square, watching us leave with eyes wide. But the creature that I had composed from some features that I had perceived from her appearance but which were contradicted by others, and from my imagination which had made me assume in her a depth that I thought she imagined in me, this creature no longer existed. There remained only a rather ugly girl, with a large body and a pretty nose and whose gaze was a matter of indifference to me at the glorious moment when, as soon as I had climbed back into the carriage, and when it was untied, we made our echoing and solemn departure, before the eyes of all the inhabitants of Briseville who had been drawn to their door steps.
   On one occasion as we were taking a crossroads which came down towards Couliville, I was filled with a profound feeling of well-being which I had felt only once, when I breathed in the humid odour from the little pavilion in the Champs Elysées, since our walks around Combray when I had been seized by it so often. From the carriage seat upon which I was sitting opposite my grandmother and Mme de Villeparisis, I had just seen, standing a little way back from the hog's-back road along which we were travelling, three trees which probably marked the entry to a covered driveway and formed a pattern which I felt, at the same time as it passed in front of my eyes, palpitate in my heart.
   Into these places which I was seeing for the first time they interpolated a fragment of scenery which I had not recognized but which I felt to have been very familiar to me once, so that my mind wavered between some distant year and the present moment, Bricquebec and its surrounding area began to dissolve and I wondered whether the whole of this drive were not a make-believe, Cricquebec a place that I had never visited other than in my imagination, Mme de Villeparisis a character in a novel and the three old trees the reality which one recaptures on raising one's eyes from the book which one has just been reading and which describes an environment into which one has come to believe that one has been bodily transported. This illusion lasted no more than a second. I sensed that the trees were no different from any other three trees that disclose themselves elsewhere in the same fashion onto a landscape which was familiar to me. But which? I looked at them; I could see them plainly, but my mind felt that they were concealing something which it could not grasp, as when an object is placed out of our reach, so that our fingers, stretched out at arm's length, can only touch for a moment its outer surface, without managing to take hold of anything. Then we rest for a little while before thrusting out our arm with a renewed momentum, and trying to reach an inch or two further. But if my mind was thus to collect itself, to gather momentum, I should have to be alone. What would I not have given to be able to draw aside as I used to do on those walks along the Guermantes way, when I detached myself from my parents. I put my hand across my eyes for a moment, so as to be able to shut them without Mme de Villeparisis's noticing. I sat there thinking of nothing, then with my thoughts collected, compressed and strengthened I sprang further forward in the direction of the trees, or rather in that inner direction at the end of which I could see them inside myself. I felt again behind them the same reality, known to me yet vague, which I could not bring nearer. And yet all three of them, as the carriage moved on, I could see coming towards me. Where had I looked at them before? There was no place near Combray, on the Guermantes way or the Méseglise way, where an avenue opened off the road like that. Nor was there room for the site which they recalled to me of the scenery of the place in Germany where I had gone one year with my grandmother to take the waters. Was I to suppose, then, that they came from years already so remote in my life that the landscape which surrounded them had been entirely obliterated from my memory and that, like the pages which, with a sudden thrill, we recognize in a book that we imagined we had never read, they alone survived from the forgotten book of my earliest childhood? Were they not rather to be numbered among those dream landscapes, always the same, and therefore more supernatural than earthly landscapes, at least for me in whom their strange aspect was only the objectivation in my sleeping mind of the effort I made while awake either to penetrate the mystery of a place beneath the outward appearance of which I was dimly conscious of there being something more, as had so often happened to me on the Guermantes way, or to try to put mystery back into a place which I had longed to know and which, from the day when I had come to know it, had seemed to me to be wholly superficial, like Cricquebec? Or were they merely an image freshly extracted from a dream of the night before, but already so floating, so vague that it seemed to come from somewhere far more distant? Or had I indeed never seen them before, and did they conceal behind their surface, like certain trees, certain church steeples, certain tufts of flowers that I had seen beside the Guermantes way, a meaning as obscure, as hard to grasp, as is a distant past, so that, whereas they were inviting me to probe a new thought, I imagined that I had to identify an old memory? Or again, were they concealing no hidden thought, and was it simply visual fatigue that made me see them double in time as one sometimes sees double in space? I could not tell. And meanwhile they were coming towards me; perhaps some fabulous apparition, a ring of witches or of Norns who would propound their oracles to me. I chose rather to believe that they were phantoms of the past, dear companions of my childhood, vanished friends who were invoking our common memories. Like the ghosts around Aeneas they seemed to be appealing to me to take them with me, to bring them back to life. In their simple and passionate gesticulation I could discern the helpless anguish of a beloved person who has lost the power of speech, and knows that he will never be able to tell us what he wishes to say and we can never guess.
   Presently, at a crossroads, the carriage left them behind. I watched the trees gradually recede, waving their despairing arms, seeming to say to me: "What you fail to learn from us today, you will never know. If you allow us to drop into the hollow of this road from which we sought to raise ourselves up to you, a whole part of yourself which we were bringing to you will vanish for ever into thin air." And indeed I was never to know later what they had been trying to tell me, nor where else I had seen them. And when the carriage turned off I turned my back on them and ceased to see them, while I smilingly replied to Mme de Villeparisis as she asked me why I looked as though I were in a dream, my heart beat with anguish as if I had just lost a friend for ever, had died to myself, had broken faith with the dead or repudiated a god.
   Often dusk would have fallen before we made our way back. Shyly I would quote to Mme de Villeparisis, pointing to the moon in the sky, some memorable expression of Chateaubriand or Vigny or Victor Hugo: "She shed all around her that ancient secret of melancholy" or "Weeping like Diana by the brink of her streams" or "The shadows nuptial, solemn and august".
   "And you think that good, do you?" she would ask. "I must confess that I am always surprised to see people taking things seriously nowadays which the friends of those gentlemen, while giving them full credit for their qualities, were the first to laugh at. It's like those novels of Stendhal. You would have given him a great surprise if you had spoken to him in that tone which you use all the time. He was very good company and confessed that he could not prevent himself from bursting with laughter at the extravagant praises of M. de Balzac (behind which there was an unseemly concern for money in any case). People weren't so free then with the word 'genius' as they are now, when if you say to a writer that he has talent he takes it as an insult. You quote me a fine phrase of M. de Chateaubriand's about moonlight. You shall see that I have my own reasons for being resistant to it. M. de Chateaubriand used often to come to see my father. He was quite a pleasant person when you were alone with him because then he was simple and amusing, but the moment he had an audience he would begin to pose, and then he became absurd. Once, in my father's presence, he claimed that he had flung his resignation in the King's face, and that he had controlled the voting in the Conclave, forgetting that he had asked my father to beg the King to take him back, and that my father had heard him make the most idiotic forecasts of the Papal election. As to his fine phrases about moonlight, they became part of our regular programme for entertaining our guests. Whenever the moon was shining, if there was anyone staying with us for the first time he would be told to take M. de Chateaubriand for a stroll after dinner. When they came in, my father would take his guest aside and say: 'Well, and was M. de Chateaubriand very eloquent?' - 'Oh, yes.' - 'He talked to you about the moonlight?' - 'Yes, how did you know?' - 'One moment, didn't he say...' and then my father would quote the phrase. 'He did, but how in the world...?' - 'And he spoke to you of the moonlight on the Roman Campagna?' - 'But my dear sir, you're a magician!' My father was no magician, but M. de Chateaubriand had the same little speech about the moon which he served up every time."
   At the mention of Vigny she laughed: "The man who said: 'I am the Comte Alfred de Vigny!' One is either a count or one isn't; it's not of the slightest importance, there is nothing to say about it." And then she discovered that it was, after all, of some slight importance, for she went on: "For one thing I'm by no means sure that he was, and in any case he was of very inferior stock, that gentleman who speaks in his verses about his 'esquire's crest'. In such charming taste, is it not, and so interesting to his readers!" In the same way she found fault with Balzac, whom she was surprised to find her nephews admiring, for having presumed to describe a society "in which he was never received" and of which his descriptions were highly improbable. As for M. Victor Hugo, she told us that M. de Villeparisis, her father, who had friends among the young Romantics thanks to whom he had attended the first performance of Hernani, had been unable to sit through it, so ridiculous had he found the verse of that gifted but extravagant writer who had acquired the title of "major poet" only by virtue of having struck a bargain, and as a reward for the not disinterested indulgence that he showed towards the dangerous aberrations of the socialists.
   It was time to be thinking of home. Mme de Villeparisis, who had a certain feeling for nature - colder than that of my grandmother but sharing with her an admiration of the same beauties - and who on the roads, just as, no doubt, in the museums, showed an elevated and discerning taste which could appreciate the most beautiful things from the past, asked her coachman one day to return home along the old Cricquebec road which was little frequented but was much more beautiful than the other, planted with venerable elms which enraptured my grandmother. Mme de Villeparisis, because of the nature of her education and even the literary culture that she had received, had thought it ridiculous to repeat admiring phrases about these old elms. Yet she did have an appreciation of them since she had chosen to return along the old road so as to pass before them and could smile at the enthusiasm of my grandmother who would never have seen them had it not been for her. But the long familiarity that certain people of taste have for objects, which were more recent for us, did not prove that in her case the admiration that she felt was the same as ours. Mme de Villeparisis did not show any admiration within herself, seeking neither to understand it nor to analyze it. She immediately let it sink into the obscure domain of practical life and in this way form the noble customs which for the arts make up a beautiful framework for her life, without her giving it much thought. Once we had got to know the old road, for a change we would return - unless we had taken it on the outward journey - by another which ran through the woods, [the text is very confused at this point] a road like many others which are to be found in France, climbing on a fairly steep gradient and then gradually descending over a long stretch. At that particular moment, I found no special attraction in it; I was simply glad to be going home. It was becoming cool, the leaves smelled good. Mme de Villeparisis threw a blanket over my legs. I was beginning to feel hungry. Occasionally a lady would send her greetings to Mme de Villeparisis from a carriage as it passed at full speed. On this occasion it was the Princesse de Luxembourg who was going to dine at her cousin's; we began to see a village and further on, through the trees, as if it were a far off place, like the following locality, remote and forested which we would not be able to reach that evening: the sunset. But this road became for me later on a frequent source of joy by remaining in my memory as a lodestone to which all the similar roads that I was to take, on walks or on drives, would at once attach themselves without breach of continuity and would be able, thanks to it, to communicate immediately with my heart. For as soon as the carriage or the motor-car turned into one of these roads that seemed to be the continuation of the road along which I had driven with Mme de Villeparisis, what I found my present consciousness immediately dwelling upon, as upon the most recent event in my past, would be (all the intervening years being quietly obliterated) the impressions that I had had on those late afternoons, driving in the neighbourhood of Cricquebec. Linked up with those I was experiencing now in another place, on a similar road, surrounded by all the incidental sensations of breathing fresh air, of curiosity, indolence, appetite, gaiety which were common to them both, and excluding all others, these impressions would be reinforced, would take on the consistency of a particular type of pleasure, and almost a framework of existence which, as it happened, I rarely had the luck to come across, but in which these awakened memories introduced, amid the reality that my senses could perceive, a large enough element of evoked, dreamed (and therefore not only beautiful but unseizable) reality to give me, among these regions through which I was passing, more than an aesthetic feeling, a fleeting but exalted ambition to stay and live there for ever. Many years later, on similar roads, sometimes at the end of the day, when the leaves smelled good, when the mist was lifting, and beyond the next village one could see the sun setting between the trees, like a distant scene, as if it were in the next locality, remote and forested but which we would not be able to reach that same evening, while I recalled that summer in Cricquebec, when often, as I was sitting on the carriage seat opposite Mme de Villeparisis, we would pass the Princesse de Luxembourg crossing through the forest, returning to dine at the Grand Hotel where the lights were already illuminated, who would send her greetings from her carriage, did it not appear to me as one of those ineffable moments of happiness which neither the present nor the future can restore to us and which we taste only once in a lifetime.
   We were already in sight of the hotel. And the luminous globes in the hall, those fascinating adversaries of my first evening had now become the friendly light of the foyer, gentle and protective like a study lamp. For me this was to return home, to return to the room that had finally become my actual bedroom, so that to see the great curtains and the low bookcases again was to find myself once more in my element. And when the carriage drew up outside the door, the porter, the grooms, the lift-boy, attentive, clumsy, vaguely uneasy, massed on the steps to receive us, hostile, then familiar, like the things, like the people who change so many times in the course of our lives, as we ourselves change, but in whom, when they are for the time being the mirror of our habits, we find comfort in the feeling that we are being faithfully and amicably reflected. We prefer them to friends who we have not seen for some time, for they contain more of what we are at the present. We got out of the carriage with the help of a great many more servants than were required, but they were conscious of the importance of the scene and each felt obliged to take some part in it. I was weary and hungry. Often, so as not to keep dinner waiting, we would not go back to our rooms before taking our places at table, and we would all wait together in the hall until the head waiter came to tell us that our dinner was ready. This gave us another opportunity of listening to Mme de Villeparisis.
   "But we must be getting in your way; we are taking advantage of you", my grandmother would say.
   "Not at all! Why I'm delighted, what could be nicer?" replied Mme de Villeparisis with a winning smile, drawing out her words in a melodious tone which contrasted with her customary simplicity of speech, like that of a grumbling old woman. And indeed at such moments as this she was not natural; her mind reverted to her early training, to the aristocratic manner in which a great lady is supposed to show commoners that she is glad to be with them, that she is not at all arrogant. And her one and only failure in true politeness lay in this excess of politeness. Mme de Villeparisis certainly had a wish to continue the relations which concerned us personally in her drawing room in Paris but which she feared on the contrary that my grandmother may not put an end to when we left Bricquebec. For we had seen once and for all one of those professional "wrinkles" of a lady of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, who, always seeing in her humbler friends the discontent that she must one day arouse in them, greedily seizes every opportunity to establish in advance, in the ledger in which she keeps her social account with them, a credit balance which will enable her presently to enter on the debit side the dinner or reception to which she will not invite them. And so, having long ago taken effect in her once and for all, and oblivious of the fact that now both the circumstances and the people concerned were different, that in Paris she would wish to see us often at her house, the spirit of her caste was urging Mme de Villeparisis on with feverish ardour, as if the time that was allowed to her for being amiable to us was limited, to step up, while we were on holiday at the coast, her gifts of grapes, roses and melons, drives in her carriage and verbal effusions.
   "No, no, on the contrary, I'm delighted, stay, let's complete this lovely day together. Give them your coats to take upstairs."
   My grandmother handed them to the manager who took them away muttering that he was not a lackey.
   "I think you've hurt his feelings," said Mme de Villeparisis. "He probably fancies himself too great a gentleman to carry your coat. I remember so well the Duc de Nemours, when I was still quite little, coming to see my father who was living then on the top floor of the Hôtel Bouillon, with a fat parcel under his arm, and letters and newspapers. I can see the Prince now in his splendid blue coat, framed in our doorway, which had such pretty panelling - I think it was Bagard who used to do it - you know those fine laths that they used to cut, so supple that the joiner would twist them sometimes into little shells and flowers, like the ribbons round a nosegay. 'Here you are, Cyrus,' he said to my father, 'look what the porter's given me to bring up to you. He said to me: Since you're going up to see the Count, it's not worth my while climbing all those stairs; but take care you don't break the string. - I hope I haven't damaged anything', said the Prince laughing. - Now that you've got rid of your things, why don't you sit down," she said to my grandmother, taking her by the hand. "Here, take this chair."
   "Oh, if you don't mind, not that one! It's too small for two, and too big for me by myself. I shouldn't feel comfortable."
   "You remind me, for it was exactly like this one, of an armchair I had for many years until at last I couldn't keep it any longer because it had been given to my mother by the unfortunate Mme de Praslin. My mother, though she was the simplest person in the world, really, had ideas that belonged to another generation, which even in those days I could scarcely understand; and at first she had not been at all willing to let herself be introduced to Mme de Praslin, who had been plain Mlle Sebastiani, while she, because she was a Duchess, felt that it was not for her to be introduced to my mother. And really, you know," Mme de Villeparisis went on, forgetting that she herself did not understand these fine shades of distinction, "even if she had just been Mme de Choiseul, there was a good deal to be said for her claim. The Choiseuls are everything you could want in a good family; they spring from a sister of Louis the Fat; they were real sovereigns down in Bassigny. I admit that we beat them in marriages and distinction, but the seniority is pretty much the same. This little matter of precedence gave rise to several comic incidents, such as a luncheon party which was kept waiting a whole hour or more before one of these ladies could make up her mind to let herself be introduced to the other. In spite of which they became great friends, and she gave my mother a chair like this one, in which people always refused to sit, as you've just done. One day my mother heard a carriage drive into the courtyard. She asked a young servant who it was. 'The Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld, ma'am.' 'Very well, say that I am at home.' A quarter of an hour passed; no one came. 'What about the Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld?' my mother asked, 'where is she?' 'She's on the stairs, ma'am, getting her breath,' said the young servant who had not been long up from the country, where my mother had the excellent habit of getting all her servants. Often she had seen them born. That's the only way to get really good ones. And they're the rarest of luxuries. And sure enough the Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld had the greatest of difficulty in getting upstairs, for she was an enormous woman, so enormous, indeed, that when she did come into the room my mother was quite at a loss for a moment to know where to put her. And then the seat that Mme de Praslin had given her caught her eye. 'Won't you sit down?' she said, bringing it forward. And the Duchess filled it from side to side. She was quite a pleasant woman, for all her ... imposingness. 'She still creates a certain effect when she comes in,' one of our friends said once. 'She certainly creates an effect when she goes out,' said my mother, who was rather more free in her speech than would be thought proper nowadays. Even in Mme de La Rochefoucauld's own drawing-room people didn't hesitate to make fun of her (and she was always the first to laugh at it) over her ample proportions. 'But are you all alone?' my mother once asked M. de La Rochefoucauld, when she had come to pay a call on the Duchess, and being met at the door by him had not seen his wife who was in an alcove at the other end of the room. 'Is Mme de La Rochefoucauld not at home? I don't see her.' - 'How charming of you!' replied the Duke, who had about the worst judgement of any man I have ever known, but was not altogether lacking in humour."
   After dinner, as we chatted together in my grandmother's room, I compared the justness of my favourable impressions of Mme de Villeparisis against hers. And my grandmother sanctioned them completely. But then I immediately brought to her attention my doubts and scruples. Was Mme de Villeparisis really so intelligent after all, and were we being totally sincere in our admiration for her? I reminded her of the things she had said about some great writers, and I confessed that it made me wonder not only if to have known an artist personally, to own their unpublished manuscripts can help one to understand him better, but even if those qualities of moderation, tact, delicacy and self-effacement, as possessed by Mme de Villeparisis, were not perhaps of very great value since those who possessed them in the highest degree were merely people like Molé and the Vitrolles, and that if the want of them can make everyday social relations disagreeable yet it did not prevent from becoming Chateaubriand, Vigny, Hugo, Balzac conceited fellows who had no judgement, at whom it was easy to mock, like Bloch... But at the name of Bloch my grandmother protested. She availed herself by contrasting his behaviour unflatteringly with Mme de Villeparisis's, whose praises she began to sing simply because she had a sincere admiration for her. As we are told that it is the preservation of the species which guides our individual preferences in love and, so that the child may be constituted in the most normal fashion, sends fat men in pursuit of slim women and vice versa, so in some dim way it was the requirements of my happiness, threatened by my disordered nerves, by my morbid tendency to melancholy and solitude, that made her allot the highest place to the qualities of balance and judgement, peculiar not only to Mme de Villeparisis but to a society in which I might find distraction and assuagement - a society similar to the one in which our ancestors saw the minds of a Doudan, a Mme de Rémusat flourish, not to mention a Mme de Sévigné, a type of mind that invests life with more happiness, with greater dignity than the converse requirements which had led a Baudelaire, a Poe to sufferings, to a disrepute such as my grandmother did not wish for her daughter's child. She repeated the pleasant words and the kind attentions paid us by Mme de Villeparisis that day. I interrupted her with a kiss and asked her if she had noticed such and such a remark that Mme de Villeparisis had made which seemed to point to a woman who thought more of her noble birth than she was prepared to admit. In this way I used to submit my impressions of the day to my grandmother, for I was never certain what degree of respect was due to anyone until she had pointed it out to me. I could take no pleasure from an intelligent remark, a kind gesture, until afterwards when, between two kisses, I was able to determine my grandmother's opinion of them. I took no pleasure in people without thinking that I would be able to describe them in our evening chats, in which, by allowing my thoughts to come into contact with hers I would discover something new in them, I would come to her with the mental sketches that I had made during the day of all those non-existent people who were not her.
   I would often say to her: "I couldn't live without you."
   "But you mustn't speak like that," she replied in a troubled voice. "We must be a bit pluckier than that. Otherwise, what would become of you if I went away on a journey? But I hope that you would be quite sensible and quite happy."
   "I could manage to be sensible if you went away for a few days, but I should count the hours."
   "But if I were to go away for months..." (at the mere thought my heart turned over) "...for years...for..."
   We both fell silent. We dared not look one another in the face. And yet I was suffering more keenly from her anguish than from my own. And so I walked across to the window and said to her distinctly: "You know what a creature of habit I am. For the first few days after I've been separated from the people I love best, I'm miserable. But though I go on loving them just as much, I get used to their absence, my life becomes calm and smooth. I could stand being parted from them for months, for years..."
   I was obliged to stop speaking and look straight out of the window. My grandmother left the room for a moment. But next day I began to talk to her about philosophy, a subject on which my [blank in the text] I told her that in the most recent, and after the most essential questions [the text is very confused at this point] everything that could be known about truth, then I told her about this philosophy and the great thinkers. A subject upon which my grandmother very much agreed with me. And speaking in the most casual tone but at the same time taking care that my grandmother should pay attention to my words, I remarked what a curious thing it was that, according to the latest scientific discoveries, the materialist position appeared to be crumbling, and what was again most likely was the immortality of souls and their future reunion.
   Soon Mme de Villeparisis stopped seeing us so frequently. A young nephew, recently entered at St Cyr, whose visit she had been expecting for some weeks, had arrived and she was spending much of her time with him. In the course of our drives together she had spoken highly of his intelligence and above all his kindness, and already I imagined that he would take a liking to me, that I should be his best friend; and when, before his arrival, his aunt gave my grandmother to understand that he had unfortunately fallen into the clutches of an appalling woman with whom he was infatuated and who would never let him go, since I was persuaded that that sort of love was doomed to end in mental derangement, crime and suicide, thinking how short a time was reserved for our friendship, already so great in my heart although I had not yet set eyes upon him, I wept for that friendship and for the misfortunes that were in store for it, as we weep for someone we love when we learn from his doctor that he is seriously ill and that his days are numbered.
   One afternoon of scorching heat I was in the dining-room of the hotel, plunged in semi-darkness to shield it from the sun, which gilded the drawn curtains through the gaps between which twinkled the blue of the sea, when along the central gangway which ran the length of the hotel, leading from the beach to the road I saw approaching a young man, dressed in a suit of grey, almost white material such as I had never seen before worn by anybody, and that I could never have believed that any man would have the audacity to wear, the thinness of which suggested no less vividly than the coolness of the dining-room the heat and brightness of the glorious day outside, whose skin was as fair and his hair as golden as if they had absorbed, as do grapes or honey, all the rays of the sun, and between the narrow gaps of his eyelids shone darting eyes as green as the colour of the sea. Here was Mme de Villeparisis's nephew, Comte de Beauvais, who had just arrived that morning. He seemed to be in pursuit of his monocle, which kept darting away in front of him like a butterfly. He was coming from the beach, and the sea which filled the lower half of the glass front of the hall made a background against which he stood out full-length, as in certain portraits whose painters attempt, without in any way falsifying the most accurate observations of contemporary life, but by choosing for their sitter an appropriate setting - a polo ground, golf links, a race-course, the bridge of a yacht - to furnish a modern equivalent of those canvases on which primitive painters used to present the human figure in the foreground of a landscape. A carriage and pair awaited him at the door; and while his monocle, now positioned and captive for the moment, resumed its luminous, winged gambollings on the sunlit road, with the elegance and mastery which a great pianist contrives to display in the simplest stroke of execution, where it did not seem possible that he could reveal his superiority to a performer of the second class, Mme de Villeparisis's nephew, taking the reins that were handed him by the coachman, sat down beside him and, while opening a letter which the manager of the hotel brought out to him, started up his horses.
   How disappointed I was on the days that followed, when, each time that I met him outside or in the hotel, he did not greet us, perpetually balancing the movements of his limbs round the fugitive and dancing monocle which seemed to be their centre of gravity. I could see that he had no desire to make our acquaintance, and that he did not bow to us even though he must have known that we were friends of his aunt. And calling to mind the friendliness that Mme de Villeparisis, and before her M. de Montfort, had shown me, I thought that perhaps they were only mock aristocrats and that there must be a secret article in the laws that govern the nobility which allowed women, perhaps and certain marquis to discard, in their relations with commoners, for a reason which was beyond me, the haughtiness which must, on the other hand, be pitilessly maintained by young counts. This haughtiness which I surmised in M. de Beauvais, his contempt for us and all that it implied of innate hardness, received daily confirmation from his attitude. Every time we passed him in the hotel or outside he gave us an impassive, implacable look, devoid of that vague respect which one has for the rights of other people, which we feel when confronted by another human creature, even if they do not know one's aunt, and as if he made no distinction between us and the furniture in the hall or the paving stones outside. And this evidence that his looks, his attitude came to bring thus to my hypothesis about his unfeeling, arrogant and unpleasant nature had created a moral certainty which was so absolute that when Mme de Villeparisis, doubtless in an attempt to counteract the bad impression which had inevitably created an attitude in us, by which she was no doubt constrained herself, spoke to us of the inexhaustible kindness of her nephew, I marvelled how the gentry, with an utter disregard for truth, and no doubt to give an honourable and legitimate appearance to their liking for them, ascribe tenderness of heart to those people who are perhaps friendly to the brilliant members of their own set but behave with a frightful dryness to the rest of humanity. Moreover even in front of Mme de Villeparisis he supplied renewed confirmation of the law which I had already established for myself governing his character. Because one day when I met him with his aunt coming along a path so narrow that she could not do otherwise than introduce me to him, while he thrust out his hand mechanically before him which I took, not a muscle of his face moved, remaining as impassive as if he had not heard his aunt telling him my name, his expressionless eyes, which showed not the faintest gleam of human sympathy, showed merely the the insensibility they would have shown had they been lifeless mirrors; they overstated this to such an extent that the living creature behind those dead eyeballs by an exaggeration of the lifelessness of his look, which did not recognize inanimate objects, by the faintest effort to expulse from his vision any notion that before him stood a cognizant person to whom his hand had been thrust out at arm's length, and not held out of his own volition.
   So it turned out that this attitude which so clearly confirmed the opinion that I had formed of him was quite simply a social usage - which was particular in this extreme form to his family - and to which his body had been moulded since his childhood; like that other habit that he had of at once demanding an introduction to the family of anyone he knew, which had become so instinctive in him that, seeing me again the day after our meeting, he bore down on me and without further ado asked to be introduced to my grandmother who was with me, with the same feverish haste as if the request had been due to some instinct of self-preservation, like the act of warding off a blow or shutting one's eyes to avoid a stream of boiling water, without the protection of which it would have been dangerous to remain a moment longer. But in these fulfilled formalities I saw that this young man who had the air of a disdainful aristocrat and sportsman had in fact no respect or curiosity except for the things of the mind, and especially those modern manifestations of literature and art which seemed so ridiculous to his aunt; he was imbued, moreover, with what she called "socialistic spoutings", was filled with the most profound contempt for his caste, and spent long hours in the study of Prudhomme. From the first day he made a conquest of my grandmother, not only by the incessant kindness which he went out of his way to show to us both, but by the naturalness which he put into it as into everything else. For naturalness - doubtless because through the artifice of man it allows a feeling of nature to permeate - was the quality which my grandmother preferred to all others, whether in gardens, where she did not like there to be, as in our Combray gardens, too formal flower-beds, or in cooking, where she detested those dressed-up dishes in which you can hardly detect the foodstuffs that have gone to make them, or in piano-playing, which she did not like to be too finicking, too polished, having indeed had a special weakness for the wrong notes of Rubinstein. This naturalness she found and appreciated in the clothes that Montargis wore, of a loose elegance, with nothing "swagger" or "dressed-up" about them, no stiffness or starch. She appreciated this rich young man still more highly for the free and careless way he had of living in luxury without "smelling of money", without being puffed-up or giving himself airs; she even discovered the charm of this naturalness in the incapacity which he had kept - though as a rule it is outgrown with childhood, at the same time as certain physiological peculiarities of that age - for preventing his face from at once reflecting every emotion. Something, for instance, that he wanted to have but had not expected, if only a compliment, induced in him a pleasure so quick, so glowing, so volatile, so expansive that it was impossible for him to contain and to conceal it; a grin of delight seized irresistible hold of his face, as would a fit of sneezing or giggling, the too delicate skin of his cheeks allowed a bright red glow to shine through them, his eyes sparkled with confusion and joy; and my grandmother was infinitely touched by this charming show of innocence and frankness, and which indeed in him was not misleading. But there are many others in whom such physiological sincerity in no way excludes moral duplicity; as often as not it proves nothing more than the intensity with which pleasures may be felt - to the extent of disarming them and forcing them publicly to confess it - by natures capable of the vilest treachery. But where my grandmother especially adored de Beauvais's naturalness was in his way of confessing without the slightest reservation his affection for me, to give expression to which he found words than which she herself, she told me, could not have thought of any more appropriate, more truly loving, words to which "Sevigné and Charlus" might have set their signatures. He was not afraid to make fun of my weaknesses - which he had discerned with a shrewdness that made her smile - but as she herself would have done, affectionately, at the same time extolling my good qualities with a warmth, an impulsive freedom that showed no sign of the reserve, the coldness by means of which young men of his age are apt to suppose that they give themselves importance. And he evinced, in anticipating my every discomfort, however slight, in covering my legs if the day had turned cold without my noticing it, in arranging (without telling me) to stay later with me in the evening if he thought I was sad or gloomy, a vigilance which, from the point of view of my health, for which a more hardening discipline would perhaps have been better, my grandmother found almost excessive, though as a proof of his affection for me she was deeply touched by it.
   It was promptly and tacitly settled between us that he and I were to be great friends for ever, and he would say "our friendship" as though he were speaking of some important and delightful thing which had an existence independent of ourselves, and which he soon called - apart from his love for his mistress - the great joy of his life. These words filled me with a sort of melancholy and I was at a loss for an answer, for I felt when I was with him, when I was talking to him - and no doubt it would have been the same with anyone else - none of that happiness which it was possible for me to experience when I was by myself. Then, at times, I felt surging from the depths of my being one or other of those impressions which gave me a delicious sense of well-being. But as soon as I was with Montargis, as soon as I was talking with someone else, my mind as it were faced about, it was towards this interlocutor and not towards myself that I directed its thoughts, and when they followed this contrary direction they brought me no pleasure. Once I had left him, I managed, with the help of words, to put some sort of order into the confused minutes that I had spent with him; I told myself that I had a good friend, that a good friend is a rare thing, and I savoured, when I felt myself surrounded by blessings that were difficult to acquire, what was precisely the opposite of the pleasure that was natural to me, the opposite of the pleasure of having extracted from myself and brought to light something that was hidden in my inner darkness. If I had spent two or three hours in conversation with Montargis, and he had expressed his admiration of what I had said to him, I felt a sort of remorse, or regret, or weariness at not having remained alone and settled down to work at last. But I told myself that one is not intelligent for oneself alone, that the greatest of men have wanted to be appreciated, that hours in which I had built up a lofty idea of myself in my friend's mind could not be considered wasted and if I experienced none of the joy I had felt when throwing light on the least of my thoughts about myself, at least I had no difficulty in persuading myself that I ought to be happy in consequence, and I hoped all the more keenly that this happiness might never be taken from me because I had not actually felt it. We fear more than the loss of anything else the disappearance of possessions that have remained outside of ourselves, because our hearts have 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 are devoted but which did not count for me. But I felt myself incapable of finding happiness in all feelings which, instead of increasing the differences that there were between my nature and those of other people - as there are between all of us - would eliminate them, and particularly the joy of friendship. On the other hand there were moments when my mind distinguished in Beauvais a personality more generalized than his own, that of the "nobleman", which like an indwelling spirit moved his limbs, ordered his gestures and his actions; then, at such moments, although in his company, I was alone, as I should have been in front of a landscape the harmony of which I could understand. He was no more than an object the properties of which, in my musings, I sought to explore. The discovery in him of this pre-existent, this immemorial being, this aristocrat who was precisely what de Beauvais aspired not to be, gave me intense joy, but a joy of the mind rather than the feelings. In the moral and physical agility which gave so much grace to his kindness, in the ease with which he offered my grandmother his carriage and helped her into it, in the alacrity with which he sprang from the box when he was afraid that I might be cold, to spread his own cloak over my shoulders, I sensed not only the inherited litheness of the mighty hunters who had been for generations the ancestors of this young man who had no pretensions except to intellectuality, their scorn of wealth which, subsisting in him side by side with his enjoyment of it simply because it enabled him to entertain his friends more lavishly, made him so carelessly shower riches at their feet; I sensed in it above all the certainty or the illusion in the minds of those great lords of being "better than other people", thanks to which they had not been able to hand down to Beauvais that anxiety to show that one is "just as good as the next man", that dread of seeming too assiduous of which he was indeed wholly innocent and which mars with so much stiffness and awkwardness the most plebeian civility. Sometimes I reproached myself for thus taking pleasure in considering my friend as a work of art, that is to say in regarding the play of all the parts of his being as harmoniously ordered by a general idea from which they depended but of which he was unaware and which consequently added nothing to his own qualities, to that personal value, intellectual and moral, which he prized so highly. And yet that idea was to a certain extent their determining cause. It was because he was a gentleman that that mental activity, those social aspirations, which made him seek the company of arrogant and ill-dressed students, Bloch being a case in point when he asked me to let him know that they had met in one of the common universities, connoted in him something really pure and disinterested which was not to be found in them. Looking upon himself as the heir of an ignorant and selfish caste, he was sincerely anxious that they should forgive in him that aristocratic origin which they, on the contrary, found irresistibly attractive and on account of which they sought his acquaintance while simulating coldness and indeed insolence towards him. And the opinions which he professed were not dictated in his case, as they were in theirs even though they would not admit it, by any wish to make a brilliant career. At the most I may have smiled now and then, to discover in him the marks of his Jesuit schooling in the embarrassment which the fear of hurting people's feelings at once provoked in him whenever one of his intellectual friends made a social error or did something silly to which Montargis himself attached no importance but felt that the other would have blushed if anybody had noticed it. And it was Montargis who used to blush as though he were the guilty party, for instance on the day when Bloch, after promising to come and see him at the hotel, went on: "As I cannot endure to be kept waiting among all the false splendour of these great caravanserais, and the Hungarian band would make me ill, you must tell the 'lighft-boy' to make them shut up, and to let you know at once." As far as Montargis was concerned, on discovering that Bloch did not know how to pronounce the word 'lift', he saw in this error nothing more than a lack of good breeding, something that Montargis himself practised faultlessly but for which he felt nothing but scorn. But the fear lest Bloch should retrospectively imagine that Montargis had thought him ridiculous, made the latter feel as guilty as if he had been found wanting in the indulgence with which, as we have seen, he overflowed, so that the blush which would doubtless colour the cheek of Bloch on the discovery of his error, Montargis already, by anticipation and reversibility, could feel mounting to his own. For he assumed that Bloch attached more importance than he to this mistake - an assumption which Bloch confirmed some days later, when he heard me pronounce the word "lift", by breaking in with: "Oh, one says 'lift' does one?" And then, in a dry and lofty tone: "Not that it's of the slightest importance." A phrase that is like a reflex action, the same in all men who in the gravest circumstances as well as in the most trivial, denounce the importance they attach to a thing which they lack, the first to escape (and then how tragic and heart-breakingly) the lips of any man who is at all proud from whom we have just removed the last hope to which he clung by refusing to do him a service: "Oh, well, it's not of the slightest importance; I shall make some other arrangement"; the other arrangement which is not of the slightest importance that he should be driven to adopt being sometimes suicide... But if Beauvais blushed on account of Bloch's error he did not laugh at him, as Bloch would not have failed to do so on his account. And if in this benevolence I still sensed the aristocrat devoid of shyness and envy which often gave rise to his malicious mockery of the petit bourgeois, the aristocracy still present in him had facilitated the manifestation of certain of its virtues by maintaining the great purity of its moral atmosphere. And it was this great purity which, not being able to find entire satisfaction in a selfish emotion such as love, and at the same time failing to find in him that sense (which existed in me, for instance) of the impossibility of finding one's spiritual nourishment elsewhere than in oneself, rendered him truly capable of friendship. Nobody had less class prejudice than he. One day when he was in a furious temper with his groom and I had reproached him for it he replied:
   "Why should I go out of my way to speak politely to him? Isn't he my equal? Isn't he just as near to me as any of my uncles and cousins? You seem to think I ought to treat him with respect, as an inferior. You talk like an aristocrat!" he added scornfully. And indeed if there was a class to which he showed himself prejudiced and hostile, it was the aristocracy, so much so that he found it as hard to believe in the superior qualities of a man of the world as he found it easy to believe in those of a man of the people. When I mentioned the Princesse de Luxembourg, whom I had met with his aunt:
   "An old trout," was his comment. "Like all that lot. She's a sort of cousin of mine, by the way."
   "How is she your cousin?"
   "Oh, I don't know," he replied absently with an air of boredom. "These questions of genealogy leave me cold. Life is too short, there really are far more interesting things for us to talk about."
   Having a strong prejudice against the people who frequented it, he went rarely into "society", and on the occasions he did go out the contemptuous or hostile attitude which he adopted towards it served to intensify, among all his closest relatives, the painful impression made by his liaison with an actress; a liaison which, they declared, would be his ruin, blaming it specially for having bred in him that spirit of denigration, that rebelliousness, for having "led him astray", and it was only a matter of time before he "dropped out" altogether. Of course, he was not the first to be thus ensnared. But the others amused themselves like men of the world, that is they continued to think like men of the world. Whereas his family found him "soured", they failed to realize that for young men of fashion who would otherwise remain uncultivated mentally, rough in their friendships, without gentleness or taste, it is very often their mistresses who are their real masters, and liaisons of this sort the only school of ethics in which they are initiated into a superior culture, where they learn the value of disinterested relations. Even among the lower orders (who in point of coarseness so often remind us of high society) the woman, more sensitive, more fastidious, more leisured, is driven by curiosity to adopt certain refinements, respects certain beauties of sentiment and of art which, though she may not understand them, she nevertheless places above what has seemed most desirable to the man, above money and position. Now whether it be the mistress of a young "clubman" like Montargis or a young workman, her lover has too much admiration and respect for her not to extend them also to what she herself respects and admires; and for him the scale of values is thereby overturned. Her very sex makes her weak; she suffers from nervous troubles, inexplicable things which in a man, or even in another woman - a woman whose nephew or cousin he was - would bring a smile to the lips of this robust young man. But he cannot bear to see the woman he loves suffer. The young nobleman who, like Montargis, has a mistress, acquires the habit, when he takes her out to dine, of carrying in his pocket the valerian "drops" which she may need, of ordering the waiter, firmly and with no hint of sarcasm, to see that he shuts the door quietly and does not put any damp moss on the table, so as to spare his companion those little ailments which he himself has never felt, which compose for him an occult world in whose reality she has taught him to believe, ailments for which he now feels sympathy without needing to understand them, for which he will still feel sympathy when women other than she are the sufferers. An actress, like the woman who was living with him - even a cocquette would have done the same thing - had given him the advantage of making him find society women boring, and to look upon having to go out to a party as a painful duty, had saved him from snobbishness and cured him of frivolity. Thanks to her, social relations filled a smaller place in the life of her young lover, but whereas, if he had been simply a man about town, vanity or self-interest would have dictated his choice of friends as rudeness would have characterized his treatment of them, his mistress had taught him to bring nobility and refinement into his friendships. With her feminine instinct, with a keener appreciation of certain qualities of sensibility in men which her lover might, perhaps, without her guidance, have misunderstood and mocked, she had always been quick to distinguish from among the rest of Montargis's friends the one who had a real affection for him, and to make that one her favorite. She knew how to persuade him to feel grateful to that friend, to show his gratitude, to notice what things gave his friend pleasure and what pain. And presently Montargis, without any more need for her to prompt him, began to think of these things himself, and at Bricquebec, where she was not with him, for me whom she had never seen, of his own accord would pull up the window of the carriage in which I was sitting, take out of the room the roses that made me feel unwell, and when he had to say good-bye to several people at once would contrive to do so before it was actually time for him to go, so as to be left alone and last with me, to treat me differently from the rest. His mistress had opened his mind to the invisible, had brought an element of seriousness into his life, of delicacy into his heart, but all this escaped his grieving family who repeated:
   "That creature will be the death of him, and meanwhile she's doing what she can to disgrace him."
   It is true that he had already drawn from her all the good that she was capable of doing him; and that she now caused him only incessant suffering, for she had taken an intense dislike to him. She had begun to regard him as stupid and absurd because her young literary friends had assured her that he was, and she duly repeated what they had said with that passion, that lack of reserve which we show whenever we receive from without, and accept as our own, opinions or customs of which we previously knew nothing. She readily professed, like her literary friends, that between Montargis and herself there was an unbridgeable gulf, because they were of a different breed, because she was an intellectual and he, whatever he might claim, by birth an enemy of the intellect. This view of him seemed to her profound, and she sought confirmation of it in the most insignificant words, the most trivial actions of her lover. But when the same friends had further convinced her that she was destroying the great promise she had shown in company so ill-suited to her, that her lover's influence would finally rub off on her, that by living with him she was ruining her future as an artist, to her contempt for Montargis was added the sort of hatred that she would have felt for him if he had insisted upon inoculating her with a deadly germ. She saw him as seldom as possible, at the same time postponing a definite rupture. This dramatic period of their liaison - which had now reached its most acute, its cruellest state for Montargis, for she had forbidden him to remain in Paris, where his presence exasperated her, and had sent him alone to Cricquebec - had begun one evening at the house of one of his aunts, on whom he had prevailed to allow his mistress to come there, before a large party, to recite some fragments of a symbolist play in which she had once appeared in an avant-garde theatre, and for which she had brought him to share the admiration that she herself professed. When she appeared in the room, with a large lily in her hand, and wearing a costume copied from the Ancilla Domini which she had persuaded Montargis was an absolute "vision of beauty", her entrance had been greeted, in that assemblage of clubmen and duchesses, with smiles which the monotonous tone of her sing-song, the oddity of certain words and their frequent repetition, had changed into fits of giggles, stifled at first but presently so uncontrollable that the wretched reciter had been unable to go on.
   Next day Montargis' aunt had been universally censured for having allowed so grotesque an actress to appear in her drawing-room. The Duc d'Albon, one of the most well-known gentlemen in society, made no bones about telling her that she had only herself to blame if she found herself criticized.
   "Damn it all, people really don't come to see 'turns' like that! If the woman had talent, even; but she has none, and never will have any. 'Pon my soul, Paris is not so stupid as people make out. Society does not consist exclusively of imbeciles. This little lady evidently believed that she was going to take Paris by surprise. But Paris is not so easily surprised as all that, and there are still some things that they can't make us swallow."
   As for the actress, she left the house with Montargis, exclaiming: "What do you mean by letting me in for those old hens, those uneducated bitches, those dirty corner boys? I don't mind telling you, there wasn't a man in the room who hadn't leered at me or tried to paw me, and it was because I wouldn't look at them that they were out to get their revenge." And what she told him had changed the antipathy he felt for society into a horror that was altogether more profound and caused him to endure ceaseless suffering. All of his relatives and friends that he had introduced her to, she assured him - whether out of a desire to burn the bridges between him and his young friends who may have sided with his parents and told the young woman of the pain that their liaison was causing them, in an attempt to make him accept the idea of a break with her, whether out of a desire to excite his jealousy, whether in an effort to explain her failure when she had gone to perform at his aunt's, or whether quite simply because it was true - she had sworn that they had all tried to sleep with her, even to take her by force. And Montargis, although he, and she too, had ceased to see them, thought that perhaps when he was separated from her, as he was now in Bricquebec, that they or others like them were profiting by his absence to return to the charge. And so it was almost always with a furrowed brow and often empty-handed that I would see him returning from the post office, where, alone in all the hotel, he and Françoise went to fetch and hand in letters, he from a lover's impatience, she with a servant's mistrust of others. And when he spoke of the lechers who betrayed their friends, who sought to corrupt women, tried to make them come to houses of assignation, his whole face radiated suffering and hatred.
   "I'd kill them with less compunction than I'd kill a dog, which is at least a decent, honest and faithful beast. They're the ones who deserve the guillotine if you like, far more than poor wretches who've been led into crime by poverty and by the cruelty of the rich."
   As my grandmother approved of my spending as much time as possible with Montargis she even allowed us to go out together in the evenings. We had begun by not returning to the hotel to dine one day and had gone together to an old mill, situated a few kilometres from Bricquebec, which had become a restaurant for the non-commissioned officers from the nearby garrison, men who had come to take a break from the harshness of their daily duties, from the heat and the dust of the town, by hiring a small boat and dining at the water's edge. Montargis told me: "Your grandmother is so good, she won't scold you if we stay out till nine." We had ordered trout and Montargis had taken me out on the water which struck against the slanting rays of the sun until the waitress signalled us that our meal was ready. I asked him if he thought one could easily take the waitress upstairs to the little room that was for hire. He didn't think so; but in any case I found it easier to stay with him and contented myself with watching him as I ate my trout, beside the murmuring water beneath the trees filled with birdsong. And I questioned him on the virtues of various women; personally he had no interest in them, being far from his mistress he maintained a chastity which cost him little, as he had become indifferent to other women, and it brought him a sort of calm by believing that through his own chastity he could prove to himself that it is not an impossible virtue and persuade himself that his mistress was practising it the same as him. But as we chatted I could not question him about the definite or possible fickleness of one woman or another without taking into account the same intolerable discomfort he would have felt had I asked him about debauched men, because he always imagined it was his mistress that their desires were focused upon. He assured me that young women were often far less shy than I supposed. "As for Mlle de Silaria who I know a little," he told me, "I have almost no doubt. I'm sorry I wasn't there, I could have brought you together." I used this to my advantage by talking to him about a tall young girl to whom he had introduced me outside the hotel, one of his cousins, who was staying in the country with the Princesse de Parme.
   It seemed to me impossible to mistake for anybody else this majestic and supple Jean Goujon or Primatrice nymph, with her towering crown of blonde hair, her brow elongated by an unblemished nose, this radiant beauty, as Greek as court goddesses, refined and proud as if she had been taken from the antiquity of the Fontainebleau school. And yet if Montargis had not said that she was one of his relatives I would have been sure that I recognized her, had encountered her several times on the street in my Paris neighbourhood. Something had struck me about her - which I never saw in such a proper way among the middle-classes - too elegant and at the same time too careless in her dress - unoccupied in her bearing, unconscious of the refined crowd all around her - which created retrospectively in my memory of this Parisian stroller the appearance of somebody finding themselves out walking after leaving a friend's villa, dressed for the beach. But when this beautiful girl caught sight of me in Paris, she stopped short, looked me in the eyes, smiling, lips parted, with more shamelessness than a prostitute. And I had noticed her behaving in the same way to other young men. So I interrogated Montargis about his cousin. On the contrary she possessed an ill-tempered virtue. "She is odious", he assured me. "The only reason she is not married is that she won't accept less than royalty, or at least the head of a grand ducal family. Honestly! She can hardly bring herself to say hello to my aunt Villeparisis. She's the limit! She has nothing going for her but her antique beauty and austerity. You can't deny Claremonde that. But she thinks that gives her the right to be haughtiness personified." Indeed she had barely even nodded her head when Montargis had introduced me to her.
   Consequently I learned that there could not possibly be anything in common between this woman and my unknown Parisienne. I was alarmed to think about the risks of identifying an image that was nothing more than our ever uncertain memory, and the way in which we fail to notice the tiny differences that are all we need to undeceive us. And by a bizarre coincidence which did not throw me back into perplexity because the information furnished by Montargis had unburdened me of my error and established for me a certainty - after having gone out some days later for a stroll along the embankment, right at the end where there are very few houses, when the neighbouring dunes begin, I crossed in front of Mlle Claremonde who turned around three or four times and even stopped, she even made a sign without me being able to see the friends that she had doubtless caught sight of and who were attracting her attention.
   Montargis was unable to join me on a visit a short distance from Cricquebec to the painter Elstir, who we had both got to know. Because that day he was expecting one of his uncles who was coming to spend a few days with Mme de Villeparisis. Montargis had preferred, since I was not going to be there, to devote this first afternoon to his uncle so that he could more easily excuse himself for spending the others with me. Since he was greatly addicted to physical exercise, and especially to long walks, it was largely on foot, spending the night in wayside farms, that this uncle was to make the journey from the country house in which he was staying, and the precise moment of his arrival at Bricquebec was somewhat uncertain. The uncle in question was called Palamède, a Christian name that had come down to him from his ancestors the Princes of Sicily. And later on, when I found, in the course of my historical reading, belonging to this or that Podestà or Pope, the same Christian name, a fine Renaissance medal - some said a genuine antique - that had always remained in the family, having passed from generation to generation, from the Vatican cabinet to the uncle of my friend, I felt the pleasure that is reserved for those who, unable from lack of means to start a collection of statues or cameos, look out for old names - names of localities in which survive the ancient vestiges of customs or of a region, instructive and picturesque as an old map, as unceremonious as a sign-board or a tailor's pattern - old Christian names whose fine French endings echo the defect of speech, the intonation of an ethnic vulgarity, the corrupt pronunciation whereby our ancestors made Latin and Saxon words undergo lasting mutilations which in due course became the august law-givers of our grammar books, and, in short, by drawing upon these collections of ancient sonorities, give themselves concerts like the people who acquire viole da gamba of viole d'amore to perform the music of the past on old instruments. Montargis told me that even in the most exclusive society his uncle Palamède stood out as being particularly unapproachable, scornful, obsessed with his nobility, forming with his brother's wife and a few other chosen spirits what was known as the Phoenix Club. Even there his insolence was so dreaded that it happened more than once that people who had been anxious to meet him had met with a refusal from his own brother: "Really, you mustn't ask me to introduce you to my brother Palamède. Even if my wife and the whole lot of us put ourselves to the task it would be no good. Or else you'd run the risk of his being rude to you, and I shouldn't want that." At the Jockey Club he had, with a few of his friends, made up a list of two hundred members whom they would never allow to be introduced to them. And in the Comte de Paris's circle he was known by the nickname of "The Prince" because of his elegance and his pride. This aristocratic arrogance, however mitigated, it seemed, by his piety and his age, could not have been other than particularly offensive to Montargis. But he assured me that despite what he called "those ideas from another world", nobody was more intelligent or gifted in all the Arts than his uncle Palamède, who lived in such an isolated sphere, distant and ravishing as a coral reef in the Australian seas, that he appeared to my mind not with the contradictions and opacity of a real man but with the homogeneous translucence of a character from legend. He gave me the idea of a power, not simply greater than that of other men, as with kings, but of a different kind of power, particular to the Noble Palamède, and which added something flattering for the vanity to the images that his name evoked, but at the same time remained so much held in their dependency, that behind the pleasure of imagining this great nobleman lurked, unrecognized by me, my ambition to know him, which, on the contrary, would never be fully satisfied if he turned out not to resemble the character that I had imagined.
   Montargis told me about his uncle's early life. Every day he used to take women to a bachelor establishment which he shared with two of his friends, as good-looking as himself, on account of which they were known as "the three Graces".
   "One day a man who is now one of the brightest luminaries of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, but who displayed bizarre tastes in his youth, asked my uncle to let him come to this place. But no sooner had he arrived than it was not to the ladies but to my uncle that he began to make overtures. My uncle pretended not to understand, and took his two friends aside on some pretext or other. They reappeared on the scene, seized the offender, stripped him, thrashed him till he bled and threw him outside where he was found more dead than alive; so much so that the police started an inquiry which the poor devil had the greatest difficulty in getting them to abandon. Naturally he would not do anything like that today because he detests those sort of men. On the contrary he is very good, in fact you couldn't imagine the number of working men he takes under his wing, only to be repaid with the basest ingratitude. It may be a servant who has looked after him in a hotel, for whom he will find a place in Paris, or a farm-labourer whom he will pay to have taught a trade. He really isn't as malicious as he pretends. I'm told it was quite extraordinary to what extent he set the tone, to what extent he laid down the law for the whole of society when he was a young man. As far as he was concerned, in any circumstances he did whatever seemed most agreeable or most convenient for himself, but immediately it was imitated by all the snobs. If he felt thirsty at the theatre, and had a drink brought to him in his box, a week later the little sitting-rooms behind all the boxes would be filled with refreshments. If there was a piece where you need to see the whole stage, he would leave his box and sit in the orchestra, then the stalls became the most sought-after seats. One wet summer when he had a touch of rheumatism, he ordered an overcoat of a loose but warm vicuna wool, which is used only for travelling rugs, and insisted on the usual blue and orange stripes. The big tailors at once received orders from all their customers for blue and orange overcoats of rough wool. If for some reason he wanted to remove every aspect of ceremony from a dinner in a country house where he was spending the day, and to underline the distinction had come without evening clothes and sat down to table in the suit he had been wearing that afternoon, it became the fashion not to dress for dinner in the country. If instead of taking a spoon to eat his pudding he used a fork, or a special implement of his own invention which he had had made for him by a silversmith, or his fingers, it was no longer permissible to eat in any other way. He wanted once to hear some Beethoven quartets again and arranged for some musicians to come and play them to him and a few friends once a week. The ultra-fashionable thing to do that season was to give quite small parties with chamber music. Really, I don't think he has ever been bored in his life. With his looks, he must have had any number of women. I couldn't tell you exactly which, because he's very discreet. But I do know that he was thoroughly unfaithful to my poor aunt, which doesn't mean that he wasn't always perfectly charming to her, that she didn't adore him, and that he didn't go on mourning her for years." And in this way Montargis, as he accompanied me all the way to the station where I was catching a train to visit Elstir, told me all about his uncle whose arrival he was anticipating. But he waited in vain. That evening, when I arrived back from my visit to Elstir, uncle Palamède had still not arrived.
   The next morning as I was passing the Casino alone on my way back to the hotel, I had the sensation of being watched by somebody who was not far off. I turned my head and saw a man of about forty, very tall and rather stout, with a very black moustache, who, nervously slapping his white linen trousers with a cane, was staring at me, his eyes dilated with extreme attentiveness. From time to time these eyes were shot through with a look of restless activity such as the sight of a person they do not know excites only in men in whom, for whatever reason, it inspires thoughts that would not occur to anyone else - madmen, for example, or spies. He darted a final glance at me that was at once bold, prudent, rapid and profound, like a last shot which one fires at an enemy as one turns to flee, and, after first looking all round him, suddenly adopting an absent and lofty air, with an abrupt revolution of his whole person he turned towards a playbill in the reading of which he became absorbed, while he hummed a tune and fingered the moss-rose in his buttonhole. He drew from his pocket a note-book in which he appeared to be taking down the title of the performance that was announced because it was Sunday and there was to be a grand matinée, looked at his watch two or three times, pulled down over his eyes a black straw hat the brim of which he extended with his hand held out over it like an eye-shade, as though to see whether someone was coming at last, made the perfunctory gesture of annoyance by which people mean to show that they have waited long enough, although they never make it when they are really waiting, then pushing back his hat and exposing a scalp cropped close except at the sides where he allowed a pair of waved "pigeon's-wings" to grow quite long, he emitted the loud panting breath that people exhale not when they are too hot but when they wish it to be thought that they are too hot. He gave me the impression of a hotel crook who, having been watching my grandmother and myself for some days, and planning to rob us, had just discovered that I had caught him in the act of spying on me. Perhaps he was only seeking by his new attitude to express abstractedness and detachment in order to put me off the scent, but it was with an exaggeration so aggressive that his object appeared to be - at least as much as the dissipating of the suspicions he might have aroused in me - to avenge a humiliation which I must have unwittingly inflicted on him, to give me the idea not so much that he had not seen me as that I was an object of too little importance to attract his attention. He threw back his shoulders with an air of bravado, pursed his lips, twisted his moustache, and adjusted his face into an expression that was at once indifferent, harsh, and almost insulting. So much so that I took him at one moment for a thief and at another for a lunatic. And yet his scrupulously ordered attire was far more sober and far more simple that that of any of the summer visitors I saw at Cricquebec, and reassured me as to my own suit, so often humiliated by the dazzling whiteness of their holiday garb. But my grandmother was coming towards me, we took a turn together, and I was waiting for her, an hour later, outside the hotel into which she had gone to fetch something, when I saw emerge from it Mme de Villeparisis with Montargis and the stranger who stared at me so intently outside the Casino. Swift as a lightning-flash his look shot through me, just as at the moment when I had first noticed him, and returned, as though he had not seen me, to hover, slightly lowered, before his eyes, deadened, like the neutral look which feigns to see nothing without and is incapable of reporting anything to the mind within, the look which expresses merely the satisfaction of feeling round it the eyelids which it keeps apart with its beatific roundness, the devout and sanctimonious look that we see on the faces of certain hypocrites, the smug look on those of certain fools. I saw that he had changed his clothes. The suit he was wearing was darker than ever; and no doubt true elegance is less intimidating, lies nearer to simplicity than false; but there was something more; from close at hand one felt that if colour was almost entirely absent from these garments it was not because he who had banished it from them was indifferent to it but rather because for some reason he forbade himself the enjoyment of it. And the sobriety which they displayed seemed to be of the kind that comes from obedience to a rule of diet rather than from lack of appetite. A dark green thread harmonized, in the stuff of his trousers, with the stripe on his socks, with a refinement which betrayed the vivacity of a taste that was everywhere else subdued, to which this single concession had been made out of tolerance, while a spot of red on his tie was imperceptible, like a liberty which one does not take.
   "How are you? Let me introduce my nephew, the Baron de Guermantes," Mme de Villeparisis said to me, while the stranger, without looking at me, muttered a vague "Charmed" which he followed with a "H'm, h'm, h'm," to make his affability seem somehow forced, and crooking his little finger, forefinger and thumb, held out his middle and ring fingers, which I clasped earnestly through his suede glove; then, without lifting his eyes to my face, he turned towards Mme de Villeparisis.
   "Good gracious, I shall be forgetting my own name next," she exclaimed. "Here I am calling you the Baron de Guermantes. But after all it's not a very serious mistake," she went on with a smile, "for you're a thorough Guermantes whatever else you are."
   By this time my grandmother had reappeared, and we all set out together. Montargis' uncle declined to honour me not only with a word but with so much as a look in my direction. If he stared strangers out of countenance (and during this short excursion he two or three times hurled his terrible and searching scrutiny like a thunderbolt at insignificant people of the most humble extraction who happened to pass), on the other hand he never for a moment, if I was to judge by myself, looked at persons whom he knew - as a detective on a secret mission might except his personal friends from his professional vigilance. Leaving my grandmother, Mme de Villeparisis and him to talk to one another, I fell behind with Montargis.
   "Tell me, am I right in thinking I heard Mme de Villeparisis say just now to your uncle that he was a Guermantes?"
   "Of course he is: Palamède de Guermantes."
   "Not the same Guermantes who have a Château near Combray, and claim descent from Geneviève de Brabant?"
   "Most certainly: my uncle, who is more concerned about heraldry than me, will tell you that our 'cry', our war cry that is to say, was 'Combraysis'," he said, smiling so as not to appear to be priding himself on this prerogative of a 'cry', which only the quasi-royal houses, the great feudal chieftains, enjoyed."It's his brother who has the place now. How do you come to know the Château? Have you visited it? Or perhaps you know the Gilbert de Guermantes, my aunt Guermantes-La Trémoïlle who used to live there before?" he asked me, finding it perfectly natural that I should know the same people as himself, taking no account of the fact that I belonged to a totally different social group, or rather, out of politeness, made himself appear not to be taking it into account.
   "No... but... I have heard people talking about the Château. Haven't they got the busts of all the old lords of Guermantes down there?"
   "Yes, and a lovely sight they are!" said Montargis ironically, partly from modesty, since to my great astonishment he was related to the Guermantes, partly due to his sincere indifference, even partly on account of his hostile prejudice against all matters concerning the nobility.
   "They have something that is a little more interesting! A superb portrait of my aunt by Carolus Deran, and some magnificent Delacroix drawings. My aunt is the niece of Mme de Villeparisis, she was brought up by her, and married her cousin, who was a nephew too of my aunt, the present Duc de Guermantes."
   "Then what is your uncle?"
   "He bears the title of Baron de Fleurus. Strictly, when my great-uncle died, my uncle Palamède ought to have taken the title of Prince des Launes, which was that of his brother before he became Duc de Guermantes - in that family they change their names as often as their shirts. But my uncle has peculiar ideas about nobility. As he feels that people are rather apt to overdo the Italian Prince, Grandee of Spain, Papal titles business nowadays, and although he had five or six Princely titles to choose from, he has remained Baron de Fleurus, as a protest, and with an apparent simplicity which really covers a good deal of pride. 'In these days', he says, 'everybody is a prince; one really must have something to distinguish one; I shall call myself Prince when I wish to travel incognito.' But," Montargis continued, "you mustn't ask me to talk pedigrees. Nothing bores me more."
   I now recognized in the look that earlier had made me turn round outside the Casino as the same that I had seen fixed on me at La Frapelière at the moment when Mme Swann had called Gilberte away.
   "But wasn't your uncle thought to be Mme Swann's lover?"
   "Good Lord no! 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 cause the utmost astonishment in Parisian society if people believed you thought that."
   I dared not reply that it would have caused even greater astonishment in Combray society if people thought that I did not believe it.
   My grandmother was delighted with M. de Fleurus. No doubt he attached an extreme importance to all questions of birth and social position, and my grandmother had remarked this, but without any trace of that severity which as a rule embodies a secret envy and irritation, at seeing another person enjoy advantages which one would like but cannot oneself possess. Since, on the contrary, my grandmother, content with her lot and not for a moment regretting that she did not move in a more brilliant sphere, employed only her intellect in observing the eccentricities of M. de Fleurus, she spoke of Montargis' uncle with that detached, smiling, almost affectionate benevolence with which we reward the object of our disinterested observation for the pleasure that it has given us, all the more so because this time the object was a person whose pretensions, if not legitimate at any rate picturesque, made him stand out in fairly vivid contrast to the people whom she generally had the occasion to see. But it was above all in consideration of his intelligence and sensibility, qualities which it was easy to see that M. de Fleurs, unlike so many of the society people whom Montagis derided, possessed in a marked degree, that my grandmother had so readily forgiven him his aristocratic prejudice. And yet this prejudice had not been sacrificed by the uncle, as it had been by the nephew, to higher qualities. Rather M. de Fleurus had reconciled it with them. Possessing, by virtue of his descent from the Ducs de Nemours, the Princes de Lamballe, La Trémoïlle and de Choiseul, documents, furniture, tapestries, portraits painted for his ancestors by Raphael, Velasquez, Boucher, justified him in saying that he was "visiting a museum and a matchless library" when he was merely going over his family mementoes, he still, on account of their rarefied tastes, placed the whole heritage of the French aristocracy in the high position from which his nephew had toppled it. Perhaps also, being less ideological than his nephew, less satisfied with words, a more realistic observer of men, he did not care to neglect an essential element of prestige in their eyes which, if it gave certain disinterested pleasures, could often be a powerfully effective aid to his utilitarian activities. No agreement can ever be reached between men of his sort and those who obey an "inner" ideal which drives them to rid themselves of such advantages so that they may seek only to realize that ideal, resembling in that respect the painters and writers who renounce their virtuosity, the artistic people who modernize themselves, the warrior people who initiate universal disarmament, the absolute governments which turn democratic and repeal their harsh laws, though as often as not the sequel fails to reward their noble efforts; for the artists lose their talent, the nations their age-old predominance; pacifism often breeds wars and tolerance criminality. Even from an aesthetic point of view, if M. de Fleurus had narrow tastes, if his mind appeared to be closed to Modern Art, ever since the rise of Romanticism which he considered decadent, it was possible to discern this narrowness as more perceptive than the efforts to emancipation that Montargis had made, by their visible result: M. de Fleurus had transported a large part of the marvellous panelling from the Hôtel de Guermantes to his own residence, rather exchanging the things he possessed, as Montargis had done, for a modern style of furniture and multi-coloured Gérôme statues. In certain women of great beauty and rare culture whose ancestresses, two centuries earlier, had shared in all the glory and grace of the old order, he found a distinction which made him capable of taking pleasure in their society alone, and doubtless his admiration for them was sincere, but countless reminiscences, historical and artistic, evoked by their names played a considerable part in it, just as memories of classical antiquity are one of the reasons for the pleasure which a literary man finds in reading an ode by Horace that is perhaps inferior to poems of our own day which would leave him cold. Any of these women by the side of a pretty commoner was for him what an old picture is to a contemporary canvas representing a procession or a wedding - one of those old pictures the history of which we know, from the Pope or king that commissioned them, through the hands of the eminent persons whose acquisition of them, by gift, purchase, conquest or inheritance, recalls to us some event or at least some alliance of historic interest, and consequently some knowledge that we ourselves have acquired, gives it new meaning, increases our sense of richness of the possessions of our memory or of our erudition. M. de Fleurus was thankful that a prejudice similar to his own, by preventing these few great ladies from mixing with women whose blood was less pure, presented themselves for his veneration intact, in their unadulterated nobility, like some eighteenth-century façade supported on its flat columns of pink marble, in which the passage of time has wrought no change.
   M. de Fleurus extolled the true "nobility" of mind and heart which characterized these women, playing upon the word in a double sense by which he himself was taken in, and in which lay the falsehood of this bastard conception, of this medley of aristocracy, generosity and art, but also its seductiveness, dangerous to people like my grandmother, to whom the less refined but more innocent prejudice of a nobleman who cared only about quarterings and took no thought of anything besides would have appeared too silly for words, whereas she was defenceless as soon as anything presented itself under the externals of an intellectual superiority, so much so, indeed, that she regarded princes as enviable above all other men because they were able to have a La Bruyère or a Fénelon as their tutors.
   Mme de Villeparisis took her nephew off for a little walk. Although it was Sunday, there were no more carriages waiting outside the hotel now than at the beginning of the season. The notary's wife, in particular, had decided that it was not worth the expense of hiring one every time simply because she was not going to the Chemisey's, and simply stayed in her room.
   "Is Mme Bruland not well?" her husband was asked.    "We haven't seen her all day."
   "She has a slight headache - the heat, you know, this thundery weather. The least thing upsets her. But I expect you'll see her this evening. I've told her she ought to come down. It can do her nothing but good."
   When Mme de Villeparisis, on returning from her walk, invited us to take tea with M. de Fleurus later that day, I thought that perhaps she had noticed the impoliteness that he had shown towards me, and she wanted to give him the opportunity to make amends. But when, on entering the little salon in her apartment where she was receiving us, I attempted to greet M. de Charlus, [sic] for all that I walked right round him while he was telling a story in a shrill voice, I could not succeed in catching his eye; I decided to say "Good evening" to him, and fairly loud, to warn him of my presence, but I realized that he had observed it, for before ever a word had passed my lips, just as I was beginning to bow to him, I saw his two fingers held out for me to shake without his having turned to look at me or paused in his story. He had evidently seen me, without letting it appear that he had, and I noticed then that his eyes, which were never fixed on the person to whom he was speaking, strayed perpetually in all directions, like those of certain frightened animals, or those of street hawkers who, while delivering their patter and displaying their illicit merchandise, keep a sharp look-out, though without turning their heads, on the different points of the horizon from which the police may appear at any moment.
   No doubt, had it not been for those eyes, M. de Fleurus's face and body would have been similar to the faces and bodies of many good-looking men, and just as I had imagined a "great nobleman" to be a totally different creature from all others, I felt that I had been deceived in seeing M. de Fleurus with the same slim figure, regular profile and refined moustache as so many other people I had either seen or knew. I thought that this great nobleman alone made himself an exception from the others by assuming the body of an ordinary man. And when Montargis, speaking to me of various other Guermantes, said to me: "Gad, they've got that aristocratic air to their very fingertips that my uncle Palamède has", confirming my suspicions that a thoroughbred air and aristocratic distinction were not something mysterious and new but consisted in elements that I had recognized without difficulty and without receiving any particular impression from them, I was to feel that another of my illusions had been shattered. But however much M. de Fleurus tried to seal hermetically the expression on that face, to which a light coating of powder lent a faintly theatrical aspect, the eyes were like two crevices, two loop-holes which alone he had failed to stop, and through which, according to one's position in relation to him, one suddenly felt oneself in the path of some hidden weapon which seemed to bode no good, even to him who, without being altogether master of it, carried it within himself in a state of precarious equilibrium and always on the verge of explosion; and the circumspect and unceasingly restless expression of those eyes, with all the signs of exhaustion which the heavy pouches beneath them stamped upon his face, however carefully he might compose and regulate it, made one think of some incognito, some disguise assumed by a powerful man in danger. or merely by a dangerous - but tragic - individual. I should have liked to divine what was this secret which other men did not carry with them and which had already made his stare seem to me so enigmatic when I had seen him that morning outside the Casino. But with what I now knew of his family I could no longer believe that it was that of a thief, nor after what I had heard of his conversation, of a madman. If he was cold towards me, while making himself so agreeable to my grandmother, this did not perhaps arise from any personal antipathy towards me, for in general, to the extent that he was kindly disposed towards women, of whose faults he spoke without, as a rule, departing from the utmost tolerance, he displayed towards men, and especially young men, a hatred so violent as to suggest that of certain misogynists for women. Of two or three, relatives or intimate friends of Montargis, who happened to mention their names, he remarked with an almost ferocious expression in sharp contrast to his usual coldness: "Young scum!" I gathered that the particular fault which he found in the young men of the day was their effeminacy. "They're nothing but women," he said with scorn. But what life would not have appeared effeminate beside that which he expected a man to lead, and never found energetic or virile enough? (He himself told how when he walked across country, after long hours on the road would plunge his heated body into frozen streams.) He would not even concede that a man should wear a single ring. And I noticed that on the ring finger that he held out to me he wore none.
   But this obsession with virility did not prevent his having also the most delicate sensibilities. When Mme de Villeparisis asked him to describe to my grandmother some country house in which Mme de Sévigné had stayed, adding that there was something rather "literary" about that person's distress at being parted from "that tiresome Mme de Grignan":
   "On the contrary," he retorted, "nothing could be further from the truth - it is because of that that Mme de Sévigné's letters are genuinely profound and human. Besides, it was a time in which feelings of that sort were thoroughly understood. The inhabitant of La Fontaine's Monomotapa, running round to see his friend who had appeared to him in a dream looking rather sad, the pigeon finding that the greatest of evils is the absence of the other pigeon, seem to you perhaps, my dear aunt, as exaggerated as Mme de Sévigné's impatience for the moment when she will be alone with her daughter."
   "But as soon as she was alone with her she probably had nothing to say to her."
   "Most certainly she had: if it was only what she calls 'things so slight that nobody else would notice them but you and I'. And even if she had nothing to say to her, at least she was with her. And La Bruyère tells us that this 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 true happiness," added M. de Fleurus in a mournful voice, "and alas, life is so ill-arranged that one very rarely experiences it. Mme de Sévigné was after all less to be pitied than most of us. She spent a great part of her life with the person she loved."
   "You forget that it wasn't love in her case, it was her daughter."
   "But what matters in life is not whom or what one loves," he went on, in a judicial, peremptory, almost cutting tone, "it is the fact of loving. 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 in which we circumscribe love arise solely from our ignorance of life."
   In these reflections upon the sadness of having to live far apart from those one loves (which were to lead my grandmother to say later that same evening that M. de Fleurus understood certain works a great deal better than Mme de Villeparisis, and moreover had something about him that set him far above the average clubman, who is often uncouth, and lent him an almost feminine intuition) - he not only revealed a refinement of feeling such as men rarely show; his voice itself, like certain contralto voices in which the middle register has not been sufficiently trained, so that when they sing it sounds like an alternating duet between a young man and a woman, mounted, when he expressed these delicate sentiments, to its higher notes, took on an unexpected sweetness and seemed to embody choirs of sisters, of mothers, of betrothed maidens, pouring out their fond feelings. But the bevy of young girls whom M. de Fleurus in his horror of every kind of effeminacy would have been so distressed to learn that he gave the impression of sheltering thus within his voice did not confine themselves to the interpretation, the modulation of sentimental ditties. Often while M. de Fleurus was talking one could hear their laughter, the shrill, fresh laughter of school-girls or coquettes quizzing their companions with all the archness and malice of clever tongues and pretty wits.
   "Goodness me, I could have taken you to visit that château that interests you so much," he told my grandmother, "if the Montmorencys were still living there, but the family line has died out."
   "How amiable you are to your cousin the Duc de Montmorency," put in Montargis.
   "Oh! excuse me I was meaning the Montmorencys, the members of the Montmorency family. The charming gentleman you are alluding to, probably not knowing which name to take and thinking that there were no Montmorencys left, conveniently found and took up the name of the station on the Northern line. Perhaps he owned a house nearby, you never know!" he added, when, noticing that the embroidered handkerchief which he had in his pocket was exhibiting its coloured border, he thrust it sharply down out of sight with the scandalized air of a prudish but far from innocent lady concealing attractions which, by an excess of scrupulosity, she regards as indecent.
   "It is always the case," he added, turning towards my grandmother, "that the owners of that château you were talking about show at that moment how unworthy they are of owning it, because they are going to sell it, and sadly it is to be feared that the people who are to buy it are less deserving still. In any case I don't want to have anything to do with an absurd and faithless place which allows itself to be sold to such people and to be disfigured by them. I don't want to have anything more to do with it than I do with my cousin Avaray who has turned out badly and is no longer beautiful. Yet I keep a picture of the house just as I do of my cousin, and I often gaze at those beautiful features that were then still unspoilt. I don't go as far as to carry it around with me but I could send you a copy. A photograph acquires something of the dignity it ordinarily lacks when it shows us things that no longer exist."
   He told us about a house that had belonged to his family, in which Marie-Antoinette had slept, with a park laid out by Le Nôtre, which now belonged to the Gebzelterns, the wealthy financiers, who had bought it. "To have been the home of the Guermantes and to belong to the Gebzelterns!" he exclaimed. "It reminds me of a room in the Château of Blois where the caretaker who was showing me around said to me: 'This is where Mary Stuart used to say her prayers. Now I use it to keep my brooms in.' The first thing these people did was to destroy the park and replace it with an English garden. Anybody who destroys a Le Nôtre park is as bad as somebody who slashes a picture by Poussin. For that alone these Gebzelterns should be in prison. It is true," he added with a smile, after a moment's silence, "that there are probably plenty of other reasons why they should be there! In any case you can imagine the effect of an English garden with that architecture."
   "But the house is in the same style as the Trianon," said Mme de Villeparisis, "and Marie-Antoinette had an English garden laid out there."
   "Which after all ruins Gabriel's façade," replied M. de Fleurus. "Obviously it would be an act of vandalism to destroy the Haneau. But whatever the spirit of the age may be, I beg leave to doubt whether, in that respect, a whim of Mme Gebzeltern has the same prestige as the memory of the Queen."
   Meanwhile my grandmother had been making signs to me to go up to bed, in spite of the urgent appeals of Montargis who, to my utter shame, had alluded in front of M. de Fleurus to the depression which often used to come upon me at night before I went to sleep, which his uncle must regard as showing a sad lack of virility. I lingered a few moments more, then went upstairs, and was greatly surprised when, a little while later, having heard a knock at my bedroom door and asked who was there, I heard the voice of M. de Fleurus saying drily: "It is Fleurus. May I come in Monsieur? Monsieur," he continued in the same tone, "my nephew was saying just now that you were apt to be a little upset before going to sleep, and also that you were an admirer of Bergotte's books. As I had one here in my luggage that you probably do not know, I have brought it to you to while away those moments during which you are unhappy."
   I thanked M. de Fleurus warmly and told him that I had been afraid that what Montargis had told him about my distress at the approach of night could have made me appear in his eyes even more stupid than I was.
   "Not at all," he answered in a gentler voice. "You have not, perhaps, any personal merit, so few people have! But for a time at least you have youth, and that is always an attraction. Besides, Monsieur, the greatest folly of all is to mock or to condemn in others what one does not happen to feel oneself. 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 who it throws into a fever. Do you suppose that for that reason I consider him inferior to me? I try to understand everything and I take care to condemn nothing. In short, you must not be too sorry for yourself; I do not say that these moods of depression are not painful, I know how much one can suffer from things which others would not understand. But at least you have placed your affection wisely in your grandmother. You see a great deal of her. And besides, it is a legitimate affection, I mean one that is repaid. There are so many of which that cannot be said!"
   He walked up and down the room, looking at one thing, picking up another. I had the impression that he had something to tell me, and could not find the right words to express it. Several minutes passed in this way, then, in his earlier biting tone of voice, flung at me: "Good night, Monsieur," and left the room.
   After all the lofty sentiments which I had heard him express that evening, next day, which was the day of his departure, on the beach in the morning, as I was on my way down to bathe, when M. de Fleurus came across to tell me that my grandmother was waiting for me to join her as soon as I left the water, I was greatly surprised to hear him say, pinching my neck with a familiarity and a laugh that was frankly vulgar: "But he doesn't care a fig for his old grandmother, does he, eh? Little rascal."
   "What. Monsieur, I adore her, I love her more than anybody in the world..."
   "Monsieur," he said, stepping back a pace, and with a glacial air, "you are still young; you should profit by your youth to learn two things: first, to refrain from expressing sentiments that are too natural not to be taken for granted; and secondly not to rush into speech in reply to things that are said to you before you have penetrated their meaning. If you had taken this precaution a moment ago you would have saved yourself the appearance of speaking at cross-purposes like a deaf man, thereby adding a second absurdity to that of having anchors embroidered on your swimming costume. You make me realize that I was premature in speaking to you last night of the charms of youth. I should have done you a greater service had I pointed out to you its thoughtlessness, its inconsequence, and its want of comprehension. I hope, Monsieur, that this little verbal dousing will be no less salutary to you than your swim. But don't let me keep you standing there, you might catch cold. Good day, Monsieur."
   No doubt he felt remorse for this speech, for some time later I received - in a binding on which my initials had been encircled by a spray of forget-me-nots - the book by Bergotte he had lent me and which I had had sent back to him on the day of his departure.
   

Bricquebec continued

With acknowledgement to Terence Kilmartin's revised Scott Montcrieff translation of Place Names: The Place, Penguin 1981. I have made frequent use of this translation where similar or identical passages have survived into the final published version.

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