"Bricquebec"

   When we left for Bricquebec that day my body offered no objection to this journey so long as I had been content, when I thought about it, to gaze out at the Persian church by the edge of the storm from the warmth of my bed in Paris. My body only began to object as soon as it understood that it would be of the party, and that on my arrival I would be shown to a room which would be called "my" room, which I would have never seen before. On the day of departure I looked so unhappy that the new doctor who was treating me and who had advised me to accustom myself to everything which his precursor had prescribed me to avoid, told me:
   "You don't seem pleased to be leaving. Doesn't Bricquebec mean anything to you? It is very strange to dislike journeys. I find that exquisite (which he pronounced esquisite). I don't mind telling you that if I could only manage a week to get some sea air at the coast, I wouldn't need asking twice. And then there will be races, regattas, you will have a wonderful time."
   It is probably true, however, that my yearning to see Cricquebec was much greater than the doctor's, and that I "loved" journeys just as much as he did. But I had already come to suspect, when I had been to see Berma, and on all the occasions when I had been to play in the Champs-Elysées with Gilberte, that those who love and those who feel pleasure are perhaps not the same. The contemplation of Cricquebec did not seem to me to be any the less desirable because it had to be bought at a heavy cost, which on the contrary was like a symbol of the reality of the impression I was going there to seek, an impression which no equivalent spectacle, no stereoscopic image, which would not have prevented me from returning home to sleep in my own bed, could have replaced. And as I understood that whatever it was, later, that I loved, that it would never be attained other than at the end of a painful pursuit, which initially I would have to overcome, to sacrifice my pleasure to the paramount good instead of seeking it therein, and to overcome like an obstacle, my own health, I would not have wished to ask to avoid taking this journey - while secretly hoping that some unforeseen accident was going to prevent it - which would have seemed to me to detract from the initial experience, if not to feel the sensation - because I never put it to the test - at least to possess the object of happiness. But on this occasion the resistance of my body was much more difficult to master because my father had not yet returned from a trip to Spain which he had taken with Monsieur de Norpois, and preferred, it seemed, to rent a house for the summer in the outskirts of Paris, causing my mother to decide, which she did not tell me until the day before our departure in order to lessen our distress, that she would not be accompanying us and that my grandmother would go alone with me to Cricquebec.
   My grandmother, anxious as ever that the presents which were made me should take some artistic form, had initially wanted to offer me an ancient "imprint" from this journey, and for us to repeat, partly by rail and partly by road, the route that Madame de Sévigné had taken when she went from Paris to "L'Orient" by way of Chaulnes and "the Pont-Audemer". But realizing that "it would be a shame" to have me pass by beautiful things without seeing them, she was obliged to renounce her plan, on the advice of my father, who Mamma had kept up-to-date by letter, and who knew that when my grandmother organized any expedition with a view to extracting from it the utmost intellectual benefit that it was capable of yielding, what a tale could be foreseen of missed trains, lost luggage, sore throats and broken rules. In short we were simply to leave by that 1:22 train which over the years I had often sought out in the timetable where its departure time gave me the emotion, almost the illusion of departure. To take it, to get out at Bayeaux or Coutances for a long time had symbolized for me one of the greatest of all possible forms of pleasure; and as the delineation in our minds of any form of happiness depends more on the nature of the longings that it inspires in us than on the accuracy of the information which we have about it, we believe that we know this happiness in all its details, and I had no doubt that I should feel in my compartment a special pleasure as the day began to cool, should contemplate such an impression at the approach of a certain station; to such an extent that this train always awoke in me images of the same villages which I swathed in the light of those afternoon hours through which it sped, seemed to me to be different from any other train; and I had ended, as we are apt to do, with a person we have never seen but who we imagine constantly, by giving a distinct and unalterable countenance to this fair, artistic traveller who would have taken me with him on his journey, and to whom I should bid farewell at the foot of a cathedral before he disappeared towards the setting sun.
   As my grandmother could not bring herself to go "purely and simply" to Cricquebec, she was to stop for twenty four hours at the house of one of her friends, from whence I was to proceed the same evening, so as not to be in the way there, and at the same time that I might see Bricquebec church in the daylight the following day, which, we had learned, was at some distance from Bricquebec-Plage, and which I might not have had chance to visit later on, when I had begun my course of bathing. And perhaps it was less painful for me to feel that the admirable goal of my journey stood between me and that cruel first night on which I should have to enter a new habitation and consent to live there. But I had first to leave the old and Mamma was to accompany us. She conducted us to the station. As she had to spend the summer with my father at St Cloud, she had arranged to move in on the same day and had made, or pretended to make, all the arrangements for going there directly after leaving the station, without having to call again at our house, to which she was afraid that rather than leaving I might feel compelled to return with her. And so, on the pretext of having so much to see to in the new house and of being pressed for time, so as not to remain with us (thinking that it would also be less unhappy to leave her) until the moment of the train's departure when, concealed amidst the comings and goings and preparations that involve no final commitment, a separation suddenly looms up, impossible to endure when it is no longer possible to avoid, concentrated in its entirety in one enormous instant of impotent and supreme lucidity. She would enter the station with us, in this tragic and miraculous place where I now had to abandon all hope of returning to the familiar places where I had lived but where the miracle was about to come about thanks to which those in which I would soon be living would be the very places which as yet had no existence outside my own imagination.
   Today we would doubtless make such a journey by motor car and we should think this would make it more agreeable and more real, following more closely the various gradations by which the surface of the earth is diversified. I have said elsewhere, and from a different point of view, that I will demonstrate later on that I do not disown the motor car. But I do not value this new spirit which, on the whole, only shows us things in the surroundings of their own reality, removes the essential thing, the intellectual act which keeps them apart and masks behind a mediocre satisfaction which it comes to grant us through excess, the original pleasure which they should have afforded us. We maintain that a XVIIth century painting must be viewed in the midst of furniture, trinkets and hangings of the period, and we merely reconstruct the stale settings such as we are presented with at all the "good" houses of today where the humiliated Rembrandt does nothing more than reflect the poor taste of the hostess, who has spent many years amongst archives just as all the others of her kind do nowadays, where the only irritation is the time of the dinner when we are in the presence of masterpieces which never restore in us the intoxicating joy which we should only expect of them on the walls of a museum, which can never be sufficiently bare, or stripped of all distractions, so that they are able to symbolize those innermost spaces into which the artist withdrew to create them. But after all the specific attraction of a journey lies not in our being able to alight at places on the way and to stop as soon as we grow tired, the real truth of a journey lies in its making the difference between departure and arrival not as imperceptible but as intense as possible, to preserve in its totality, intact, as it existed in us when our imagination bore us from the place in which we were living to the very heart of a place we longed to see, in a single leap which seemed miraculous to us not so much because it covered a certain distance as because it united two distinct individualities of the world, which took us from one name to another name; and which is schematized (better than in a real excursion in which, since one can disembark where one chooses, there can scarcely be said to be any point of arrival) by the mysterious operation performed in those peculiar places, railway stations, which scarcely form part of their surrounding town but contain the essence of its personality just as on their sign-boards they bear its name, smoking laboratories, pestiferous caverns through which we gain access to the mystery, vast glass-roofed sheds, like the one I entered that day when I went to find the train to Cricquebec, and which extended over the eviscerated city one of those immense, bleak and tragic skies, like certain skies by Mantegna or Véronèse, beneath which only some terrible and solemn act could be in process, such as a departure by train or the erection of the Cross.
   For the first time I began to feel that it was possible that my mother might live another kind of life, without me, otherwise than for me. I perceived that she could live for her part with my father for whom she felt perhaps that my poor health, my nervousness made life somewhat difficult and sad, so that I experienced a more melancholy wretchedness with this separation, in telling myself that for my mother it was probably the outcome of the successive disappointments which I had caused her, of which she had never said a word to me but which had made her realize the difficulty of our taking our holidays together; and perhaps also a preliminary trial for a form of existence to which she was beginning, now, to resign herself to the future, as the years crept on for my father and herself, an existence in which I should see less of her, in which (a thing that not even in my nightmares had yet been revealed to me) she would already have become something of a stranger to me, a lady who might be seen going home by herself to a house in which I should not be, asking whether there was a letter to her from me.
   My mother tried to comfort me by the methods which seemed to her successively most efficacious. Thinking it useless to appear not to notice my unhappiness, she gently teased me about it:
"Well, and what would Cricquebec church say if it knew that people pulled long faces like that when they were going to see it? Surely this is not the enraptured traveller Ruskin speaks of. In any case, I shall know if you have risen to the occasion, even when we are miles apart I shall still be with my little man. You shall have a letter tomorrow from your Mamma."
   Then she sought to distract me by asking what I thought of having for dinner, then admiring Françoise's outfit and complementing her on it.
   "Well, Françoise, you look magnificent! Where did you find that hat and cloak?"
   Françoise replied that we knew them well and indeed went on to force my mother to recall an ancient hat and cloak belonging to my great-aunt which had horrified my mother when they were new, the one with an immense bird towering over it, the other decorated with a hideous pattern and jet beads. But the cloak, having grown too shabby to wear, Françoise had had turned, exposing an inside of plain red cloth of a pretty shade. As for the bird it had long since come to grief. Just as it is disturbing sometimes, to find the effects which the most conscious artists have to strive for present in a folk-song or on the wall of some peasant's cottage where above the door, at precisely the right spot in the composition, blooms a white or yellow rose - so with the velvet band, the loop of ribbon that would have delighted one in a portrait by Chardin or Whistler, which Françoise had set with simple but unerring taste upon the hat, which was now charming. But over and above the feelings which were second nature to her, her fondness for her own people, her respect for her masters, the pride in her honesty which allowed her to "hold her head high", the modesty over the position in which she found herself such that it would be "pure nonsense" to wish to go out socially, all this had not only given a singular nobility to her regular features, which must have been charming in her youth, but had formed her deportment and the way she held her head; and even, in the unexpected clothes that she had readorned for the journey so as to be fit to be seen in our company without at the same time seeming or wishing to make herself conspicuous - from the faded cherry-coloured cloth of her cloak, to the inevitable nap and droop of her fur collar similar to those which cover the mouth - had acquired the reserved expression with no trace of servility of a woman who knows how to "hold her own and to keep her place", bringing to mind those portraits in which the old masters painted a stained-glass church window or Anne of Brittany at prayer for a Book of Hours, in which everything is so exactly in the right place, the sense of the whole is so evenly distributed throughout the parts, that the rich and obsolete singularity of the costume expresses the same pious gravity as the lips and the eyes. But when my mother saw that I was having difficulty holding back my tears she said to me:
   "Regulus was in the habit, when things looked grave..." then remembering that affection for another distracts one's attention from selfish griefs, she endeavoured to beguile me by telling me that she expected the removal to St Cloud to go without a hitch, that she was pleased with the cab, that the driver seemed civil and the seats comfortable. I made an effort to smile at these trifles, and bowed my head with an air of acquiescence and contentment.
   But they helped me only to picture to myself the more accurately her departure for St Cloud, and it was with a heavy heart that I gazed at her as though she were already torn from me, beneath her wide-brimmed straw hat which she had bought to wear in the country, in a flimsy dress which she had put on in view of the long drive through the midday heat, and which made her someone else, somebody who already belonged to that place in which I should not see her.
   In order to prevent the suffocating fits which the journey might bring on, the doctor had advised me to take a small drop of beer at the moment of departure, so as to begin the journey in a state of what he called "euphoria", in which the nervous system is for a time less vulnerable. I had not yet made up my mind whether to do this, but I wished at least that my grandmother should acknowledge that, if I did so decide, I should have wisdom and authority on my side. I spoke about it therefore as if my hesitation were concerned only with where I should go for my drink, to the platform buffet or to the bar on the train. But immediately, at the air of reproach which my grandmother's face assumed, an air of not wishing even to entertain such an idea for a moment, "What!" I cried, suddenly resolving with indignant violence on this action of going to get a drink, the performance of which became necessary as a proof of my independence since the verbal announcement had not succeeded in passing unchallenged, "What! You know how ill I am, you know what the doctor ordered, and you treat me like this!" And only then did I notice, so much had the grief at leaving Mamma completely absorbed my attention until that moment, that the attack which I was fearing was already primed, the psychological remorse at having deceived my grandmother with a show of apparent good health pushed me on to feel sorry for myself, to confess by my outward signs the illness which I was feeling but which I had omitted to make manifest.
   My grandmother looked so distressed and so kindly as she said to me: "Run along then quickly, get yourself some beer if it will do you good" that I flung myself upon her and smothered her in kisses which in my fondness for her I imagined could efface the grief which I had not hesitated to cause her in order to satisfy the wishes of my body to feel pitied. And if after that I went for some beer, and drank rather too much, it was because I felt that otherwise I should have too violent an attack, which was what would have distressed my grandmother the most. But by taking a good deal more than would have been necessary merely to prevent an attack, the attack had begun and must be overcome. When at the first stop I clambered back into our compartment I told my grandmother how pleased I was to be going to Bricquebec, that I felt that everything would go off splendidly, that after all I should grow used to being without Mamma, that the train was most comfortable, the barman and the attendants so friendly that I should like to make the journey often so as to have the opportunity of seeing them again. My grandmother, however, did not appear to be quite so overjoyed as I was at all these good tidings. Turning her head towards the window and without looking at me in the face she answered: "Perhaps you should try to get a little sleep", but when she thought that my eyes were shut I could see her now and again, from behind her spotted veil, steal a glance at me, then withdraw it, then look back again, like a person trying to make himself perform some exercise that hurts them in order to get used to the habit.
   Thereupon I spoke to her. But that did not seem to please her. And yet to myself the sound of my own voice was agreeable, as were the most imperceptible, the innermost movements of my body. And so I endeavoured to prolong them, I allowed each of my inflexions to linger lazily upon the words, I felt each glance from my eyes pause pleasurably on the spot where it came to rest and remain there beyond its normal time. In order to compensate for the sacrifice my love of architecture caused to my well being and to make me look at a beautiful monument, towards the middle of the day as we were approaching the town where we were to stop to go to her friend's house, my grandmother said to me: "You know the station after this one is Bayeux, wouldn't you prefer to stay on the train until then so that you can see the Cathedral rather than come with me. You would only be spending a few hours with me in any case, and the weather is fine, the sun hasn't yet set and it would give you more time to look at it properly."
   I recalled everything I had read about Bayeux Cathedral, about the tapestries of Queen Mathilda, but my grandmother was here; I did not have the strength to tear myself away from her so precipitously; suddenly she had once again become the most dear person in the world; then again the name of Bayeux with its associations of grand antique lace and gilded finery came back to me more forcefully; yet with all my reasoning I hesitated for a moment and as a single fixed idea of a resolution (unless one had not made the idea inert by deciding that one would not follow through the resolution) unfolds in a moment like a perennial seed following its natural pattern, every detail of the emotion which would come to fruition from this pleasant act touched and broke my heart through my hesitation quite as much as if I were to leave my grandmother, a distress which I could have spared myself, since when the train left the station I had disembarked with her. When I took the train again, alone, in the evening, after having spent a few hours with my grandmother at her friend's house, at least that particular night would seem a short one to me; this is because I did not have to spend it imprisoned in a room whose somnolence would have kept me awake; I was surrounded by the soothing activity of all those movements of the train which kept me company, watched over me, offered to stay and talk to me if I could not sleep, lulled me with their sounds which I combined - like the chime of the Combray bells - now in one rhythm, now in another (hearing as the whim took me first four equal semi-quavers, then one semi-quaver furiously dashing against a crotchet); they neutralized the centrifugal force of my insomnia by exerting on it contrary pressures which kept me in equilibrium and on which my immobility and presently my drowsiness seemed to be borne with the same sense of relaxation that I should have felt had I been resting under the protecting vigilance of powerful forces in the heart of nature and of life, had I been able for a moment to metamorphose myself into a fish that sleeps in the sea, carried along in its slumber by the currents and the waves, or an eagle outstretched upon the buoyant air of the storm. Sunrise is a necessary concomitant of long railway journeys, just as are hard-boiled eggs, illustrated papers, packs of cards, boats which strain without making progress on a river in the setting sun, beneath a partly-drawn blue blind. At a certain moment, when I was counting over the thoughts that had filled my mind during the preceding minutes, so as to discover whether I had just been asleep or not (and when the very uncertainty which made me ask myself the question was about to furnish me with an affirmative answer), in the pale square of the window, above a small black wood, I saw some ragged clouds whose fleecy edges were of a fixed, dead pink, not liable to change, like the colour that dyes the feathers of a wing that has assimilated it or a pastel on which it has been deposited by the artist's whim. But I felt that, unlike them, this colour was neither inertia nor caprice, but necessity and life. Presently there gathered behind it reserves of light. It brightened; the sky turned to glowing pink which I strove, gluing my eyes to the window, to see more clearly, for I felt that it was related somehow to the most intimate life of Nature, but, the course of the line altering, the train turned, the morning scene gave place in the frame of the window to a nocturnal village, its roofs still blue with moonlight, its pond encrusted with the opalescent sheen of night, beneath a firmament still spangled with all its stars, and I was lamenting the loss of my strip of pink sky when I caught sight of it anew, but red this time, in the opposite window which it left at a second bend in the line; so that I spent my time running from one window to the other to reassemble, to collect on a single canvas the intermittent, antipodean fragments of my fine, scarlet, ever-changing morning, and to obtain a comprehensive view and continuous picture of it. But I was impeded by the sun itself, because all at once, propelled mechanically like an egg which bursts by virtue of a single change to the density which causes it to set hard, it leapt from behind the curtain across the translucidity of which I felt a moment before it had been nervously awaiting the moment of its entry onto the stage, and the purple mystery of which it effaced beneath a flood of light. It was already illuminating the matutinal countryside and in which it gave me a joyous longing to go and live, which in no way neutralized my body's apprehension, assured as it was of not having to carry itself there or arrive there unaccustomedly. The countryside through which the train ran was furrowed by a river where the trees displayed the golden tableau of their foliage beneath the sheen of the water, just as at the hour when the walker who has taken his rest in the shade during the midday sun, gets up to continue his walk when he sees the sun getting lower in the sky; boats in disarray in the blue mists of night which still trawl over the waters encumbered by the remains of the mother-of-pearl and pink of dawn as they expire smiling in the slanting light which, just as when they reappear in the evening, moistening and tingeing with yellow the edge of their veil, their bows channelling through a point of gold: an imaginary scene, shivering and deserted, pure evocation of the sleeper, not resting on the succession of daylight hours which frequently precede it, as interpolated and inconsistent as a fleeting memory or an image from a dream. Then the river disappeared, the countryside became hilly and steep, and the train stopped at a little station between two mountains. Far down the gorge, on the edge of a hurrying stream, one could only see a solitary watch-house, embedded in the water that ran past on a level with its windows. If a person can be the product of a soil to the extent of embodying for us the quintessence of its peculiar charm, more even than the peasant girl who I had so desperately longed to see appear when I wandered by myself along the Méséglise way, in the woods of Roussainville, such a person must have been the tall girl who I now saw emerge from the house and, climbing a path lighted by the first slanting rays of the sun, come towards the station carrying a jar of milk. In her valley from which the rest of the world was hidden by these heights, she must never see anyone save in these trains which stopped for a moment only. She passed down the line of carriages offering coffee and milk to a few awakened passengers. Flushed with the glow of morning, her face was rosier than the sky. I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness. We invariably forget that these are individual qualities, and mentally substituting for them a conventional type at which we arrive by striking a sort of mean among the different faces that have taken our fancy, among the pleasures we have known, we are left with mere abstract images which are lifeless and insipid because they lack precisely that element of novelty, different from anything we have known, that element which is peculiar to beauty and to happiness. And we deliver on life a pessimistic judgement which we suppose to be accurate, for we believed we were taking happiness and beauty into account, whereas in fact we left them out and replaced them by syntheses in which there is not a single atom of either. So it is that a well-read man will at once begin to yawn with boredom when one speaks to him of a new "good book" because he imagines a sort of composite of all the good books that he has read, whereas a good book is something special, something unforeseeable. Such would be la Chartreuse de Parme, an Emily Brontë novel, a story by Francis Jammes and immediately the well-read man, however jaded his palate, feels his interest awaken to the reality which is depicted for him by the new great writer. In such a way, completely unrelated to the models of beauty which I was wont to conjure up in my mind when I was by myself, did the supple bearing of this handsome girl, with energetic and gentle features, appear to my eyes. And the sight of them gave me all at once the taste for a certain happiness - (the sole form in which we may acquire a taste for Happiness) - for a happiness that would be realized by my staying and living there by her side. Perhaps I was receiving, a little, the benefit of the fact that it was the whole of my being, a new being, tasting the keenest joys, which confronted her. As a rule it is with our being reduced to a minimum that we live, most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely on Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services. But on this morning of travel, in this railway carriage, the interruption of the routine of my existence, the unfamiliar place and time, had made their presence indispensable. My habits, which were sedentary and not matutinal, for once were missing, and all my faculties came hurrying to take their place, and even my simple organic functions of appetite or respiration were vying zealously with their nobler cousins. I cannot say whether, in making me believe that this girl was unlike the rest of women, the rugged charm of the locality added to her own, but she was equal to it. The singular and graceful assurance of her movements, the wild candour of her quick, piercing gaze and all those naive and lively qualities which had fixed the line of her nose, the curve of her chin, the looseness of her shoulders, with the sureness of a sculptor's chisel as if he had made of her a statue representing all the qualities which were foreign to me, like the personification of a life in which I took no part, all this suddenly gave something so sweet to the place in which she lived, to the insignificant tasks which occupied her time, that life would have seemed an exquisite thing to me if only I had been free to spend it, hour after hour, with her going to the stream, to the cow, to the train, to be always at her side, to feel that I was known to her, had my place in her thoughts. She would have initiated me into the delights of country life and of early hours of the day. I signalled to her to bring me some of her coffee. I felt the need to be noticed by her. She did not see me; I called to her. She retraced her steps, fastening her direct and penetrating gaze on me, and as the guards were starting to close the carriage doors and with marvellous speed and skill she poured me a steaming coffee. I looked at her; she did not avert her eyes from me. I tried to entice her into the compartment; she pulled herself away laughing: "Come on now, look, it's leaving", as the train began to move; I saw her leave the station and walk back down the path. Whether this state of exultation in which I found myself had been produced by this girl or on the other hand had been responsible for most of the pleasure that I had found in her presence, in either event she was so closely associated with it that my desire to see her again, like the predilection which endears opium smokers to their fellow smokers, was above all a mental desire not to allow this state of excitement to perish utterly, not to be separated for ever from the person who had participated in it. It was not only that this state was a pleasant one. It was above all that (just as increased tension upon a string or the accelerated vibration of a nerve produces a qualitatively different sound or colour), it gave another tonality to all that I saw, introduced me as an actor upon the stage of an unknown and infinitely more interesting universe; that handsome girl who I could still see, as the train gathered speed, walking back down the path by which she had come, was like part of a life other than the life I knew, separated from it by a clear boundary, in which the sensations aroused in me by things were no longer the same; it seemed that this boundary would be impossible to cross back over and now that I had entered this new life, to leave it would be to die myself. To have the consolation of feeling that I had at least an attachment to this new life, it would suffice that I should live near enough to the little station to be able to come to it every morning for a cup of coffee from the peasant girl. But alas, she must be for ever absent from the other life to which I was being borne with ever increasing speed, a life which I could resign myself to accept only by weaving plans that would enable me to take the same train again some day and stop at the same station, a project which had the further advantage of providing food for the selfish, active, practical, mechanical, indolent, centrifugal tendency which is that of the human mind, for it turns all too readily aside from the effort which is required to thoroughly examine in a general and disinterested manner an agreeable impression which we have received. And since, at the same time, we wish to continue to think of that impression, the mind prefers to examine it in the future tense, to continue to bring about the circumstances which may make it recur - which, while giving us no clue as to the real nature of the thing, saves us the trouble of recreating it within ourselves and allows us to hope that we may receive it afresh from without. In such a way my mind contrived itineraries which would allow me to find the handsome girl again whilst I began to see her anew as she returned to the watch house with an assured and brisk step, under a sky which was less rosy than her face.
   Certain names of towns serve to designate, by abbreviation, their principal churches. If someone asks us whether we prefer Vézelay or Jumièges, Bourges or Beauvais, we understand immediately that they are talking about the abbey or the church. This acceptation - if the names in question are those of places that we do not yet know - to sculpt the name as a whole, which henceforth, whenever we wish to introduce into it the idea of the town - the town which we have never seen - will impose on it like a mould the same carved outlines, in the same style, will make of it a sort of vast cathedral. It was, however, above a railway refreshment room, in white letters on a blue panel, that I read the name - almost Persian in style - of Cricquebec. I strode eagerly through the station and across the avenue, and asked the way to the shore, so as to see nothing in the place but its church and the sea; people seemed not to understand what I meant - Old Cricquebec, Cricquebec town, Cricquebec-en-Terre, at which I had arrived, had neither beach nor harbour. True, it was indeed in the sea that the fishermen, according to the legend, had found the miraculous Christ of which a window in the church that stood a few yards from where I now was recorded the discovery; it was indeed from cliffs battered by the waves that the stone of its nave and its towers had been quarried. But this sea, which for those reasons I had imagined as coming to expire at the foot of the window, was twelve miles away and more, at Bricquebec-Plage, and, rising besides its cupola, that steeple which, because I had read that it was itself a rugged Norman cliff around which the winds howled and the seabirds wheeled, I had always pictured to myself receiving at its base the last dying foam of the uplifted waves, stood on a square which was the junction of two tramway routes, opposite a café which bore, in letters of gold, the legend "Billiards", against a background of houses with the roofs of which no upstanding mast was blended. And the church - impinging on my attention at the same time as the café, the passing stranger of whom I had had to ask my way, the station to which presently I should have to return - merged with all the rest, seemed an accident, a by-product of this summer afternoon, in which the mellow and distended dome against the sky was like a fruit of which the same light that bathed the chimneys of the houses ripened the pink, glowing, luscious skin. But I only wished to consider the eternal significance of the carvings when I recognized the Apostles, of which I had seen casts in the Trocadéro museum, and which on either side of the Virgin, before the deep bay of the porch, were awaiting me as though to do me honour. With their benevolent, mild faces and bowed shoulders they seemed to be advancing upon me with an air of welcome, singing the Alleluia of a fine day. But it was evident that their expression was as unchanging as that of a corpse, and altered only if one walked round them. I said to myself: "Here I am: this is the Church of Bricquebec. All that I have seen so far have been photographs of this church, casts of these Apostles, of the famous Virgin of the Porch in the Trocadéro museum. Now here is the church itself, the statue itself, they, they, the only ones - this is something far greater." Perhaps also something less. As a young man on the day of an examination or a duel feels the question that he has been asked, the shot that he has fired, to be very insignificant when he thinks of the reserves of knowledge and of valour that he would like to have displayed, so to my mind, which had lifted the Virgin of the Porch far above the reproductions that I had had before my eyes, invulnerable to the vicissitudes which might threaten them, ideal, endowed with a universal value, was astonished to see the statue which it had carved a thousand times, reduced now to its own stone semblance, occupying, in relation to the reach of my arm, a place in which it had for rivals an election poster and the point of my umbrella, fettered in the Square, inseparable from the opening of the main street, powerless to hide from the gaze of the café and of the omnibus office, receiving on its face half of the ray of the setting sun (and presently, in a few hours time, of the light of the street lamp) of which the savings bank received the other half, affected simultaneously with that branch office of a loan society by the smells from the pastry cook's oven, subjected to the tyranny of the Particular to such a point that, if I had chosen to scribble my name upon that stone, it was she, the illustrious Virgin whom until then I had endowed with a general existence and an intangible beauty, the Virgin of Bricquebec, the unique (which meant, alas, the only one), who, on her body coated with the same soot as defiled the neighbouring houses, would have displayed - powerless to rid herself of them - to all the admiring strangers come there to gaze upon her, the marks of my piece of chalk and the letters of my name, and as it was she, the immortal work of art so long desired, as was the church itself, turned into a little old woman in stone whose height I could measure and whose wrinkles I could count. But time was passing; I must return to the station where I was to wait for my grandmother and Françoise, so that we should all go on to Cricquebec-Plage together. I reminded myself of what I had read about Bricquebec, of Swann's saying: "It's exquisite; as beautiful as Sienna." And casting the blame for my disappointment upon various accidental causes, such as the state of my health, my tiredness, my incapacity for looking at things properly, I endeavoured to console myself with the thought that other towns still remained intact for me, and that if my grandmother allowed it I might soon, perhaps, be making my way, as into a shower of pearls, into the cool babbling murmur of Quimperlé, or traversing the roseate glow in which verdant Pont-Aven was bathed; but as for Bricquebec, no sooner had I set foot in it than it was as though I had broken open a name which ought to have been kept hermetically closed, and into which, seizing at once the opportunity that I had imprudently given them, expelling all the images that had lived in it until then, a tramway, a café, people crossing the square, the branch of the savings bank, irresistibly propelled by some external pressure, by a pneumatic force, had come surging into the interior of those two syllables which, closing over them, now let them frame the porch of the Persian church and would henceforth never cease to contain them.
   I found my grandmother in the little train of the local railway which was to take us to Bricquebec-Plage, but found her alone - for she had had the idea of sending Françoise on ahead of her, so that everything should be ready before we arrived, but having given her the wrong instructions, had succeeded only in sending her off in the wrong direction, so that Françoise at that moment was being carried down all unsuspecting at full speed to Nantes, and would probably wake up next morning at Bordeaux. No sooner had I taken my seat on the carriage, which was filled with the fleeting light of sunset and with the lingering heat of the afternoon (the former enabling me, alas, to see written clearly upon my grandmother's face how much the latter had tired her), than she began: "Well, and Cricquebec?" with a smile so brightly illuminated by her expectation of the great pleasure which she supposed me to have experienced that I dared not at once confess to her my disappointment. Besides, the impression that my mind had been seeking occupied it steadily less as the place to which my body would have to become accustomed drew nearer. Uppermost in my mind I was trying to form a mental picture of the manager of the hotel at Bricquebec, for whom I, at that moment did not exist, and I should have liked to be presenting myself to him in more impressive company than that of my grandmother, who would be certain to ask him for a reduction in his terms. He appeared to me to be endowed with an indubitable haughtiness, but its contours were very vague. Every few minutes the little train brought us to a standstill at one of the stations which came before Bricquebec-Plage, stations the mere names of which (Bergeville, Cricqueville, Equemanville, Couliville) seemed to me outlandish, whereas if I had come upon them in a book I should at once have been struck by their affinity to the names of certain places in the neighbourhood of Combray. But to the ear of a musician two themes, substantially composed of the same notes, will present no similarity whatsoever if they differ in the colour of their harmony and orchestration. In the same way, nothing could have reminded me less than these dreary names, redolent of sand, of space so airy and empty, and of salt, out of which the suffix "ville" emerged like "vole" in Pigeonvole - nothing could have reminded me less of those other names, Trousainville, or Rousinville, which, because I had heard them pronounced so often by my great-aunt at table, in the dining-room, had acquired a certain sombre charm in which were blended perhaps extracts of the flavour of preserves, the smell of the log fire and of the pages of one of Bergotte's books, or the colour of the sandstone front of the house opposite, and which even today, when they rise like a gaseous bubble from the depths of my memory, preserve their own specific virtue through all the successive layers of different environments which they must traverse before reaching the surface.
   Overlooking the distant sea from the crests of their dunes or already settling down for the night at the foot of hills of a harsh green and a disagreeable shape, like that of the sofa in one's bedroom in an hotel at which one has just arrived, each composed of a cluster of villas whose line was extended to include a tennis court and occasionally a casino over which a flag flapped in the freshening, hollow, uneasy wind, and of little stations which showed me for the first time, through their daily exteriors, tennis players in white hats, the station-master living there on the spot among his tamarisks and roses, a lady who, following the everyday routine of an existence which I should never know, was calling to her dog which was lingering nearby, before going into her bungalow where the lamp was already lighted and closing the door behind her - and which with these strangely ordinary and disdainfully familiar sights cruelly stung my unconsidered eyes and stabbed my homesick heart. But how much more were my sufferings increased when we had finally landed in the hall of the Grand Hotel at Bricquebec, as I stood there in front of the monumental staircase of imitation marble, while my grandmother, regardless of the growing hostility and contempt of the strangers among whom we were about to live, discussed "terms" with the manager, a man with a face and a voice alike covered with scars (left by the excision of countless pustules from the one, and from the other the diverse accents acquired from an alien ancestry and a cosmopolitan upbringing), a smart dinner-jacket, and the air of a psychologist who, whenever the omnibus discharged a fresh load, invariably took the grandees for haggling skinflints and the flashy crooks for grandees. - While I heard my grandmother ask him in an artificial tone of voice: "And what are ... your charges? ... Oh! far too high for my little budget", waiting on a bench, I took refuge in the innermost depths of my being, strove to migrate to a plane of eternal thoughts, to leave nothing of myself, nothing living on the surface of my body - anaesthetized like those of certain animals, which, by inhibition, feign death when they are wounded - so as not to suffer too keenly in this place, my total unfamiliarity with which was impressed upon me all the more forcibly by the familiarity with it that seemed to be evinced at the same moment by a smartly dressed lady to whom the manager showed his respect by taking liberties with her little dog, the young "blood" with a feather in his hat who came in asking if there were "any letters", all these people for whom climbing those imitation marble stairs meant going home. My sense of loneliness was further increased a moment later when my grandmother was about to go out (I had confessed to her that I did not feel well, that I thought that we should be obliged to return to Paris, and she had offered no protest, saying merely that she was going out to buy a few things which would be equally useful whether we left or stayed, and which, I afterwards learned, were all intended for me, Françoise having gone off with certain articles which I might need such as jerseys, slippers, a hot water bottle). While I waited for her I had taken a turn through the streets, which were packed with a crowd of people who imparted to them a sort of indoor warmth, and in which the hairdresser's shop and the pastry cook's were still open, the latter filled with customers eating ices opposite the statue of Duguay-Trouin. This crowd gave me just about as much pleasure as a photograph of it on the cover of a magazine might give a patient who was turning its pages in the surgeon's waiting-room. I was astonished to find that there were people so different from myself, that this stroll through the town had actually been recommended to me by the manager as a diversion; and also that the torture-chamber which a new place of residence is could appear to some people a "delightful abode", to quote the hotel prospectus, which might perhaps exaggerate but was none the less addressed to a whole army of clients to whose tastes it must appeal. True, it invoked, to make them come to the Grand Hotel, Cricquebec, not only the "exquisite fare" and the "magical view across the Casino gardens", but also the "ordinances of Her Majesty Queen Fashion, which no one may violate with impunity without being taken for a philistine, a charge that no well-bred man would willingly incur". The need that I now felt for my grandmother was intensified by my fear that I had shattered another of her illusions by what I had said to her, by my confessing to her that I was not well and that it would be better not to continue with the trip in which she had invested so many hopes for my well-being. She must be feeling discouraged, feeling that if I could not stand the fatigue of it, there was no hope that anything could ever do me good. Needing to speak to her I returned to the hotel on two occasions but still she had not returned; thinking that perhaps I would not see her, would not be able to try to console her for at least another hour, being aware of her sadness which would endure until then, my anguish was so keen that my imaginings were forced to come to a halt there and then. Just as when one tries to imagine oneself falling from a balloon into the void, in a descent that one cannot imagine for the space of more than a second, I was touching nothingness, I was obliged even to stop walking in order to get my breath back and to begin to feel alive again. I decided to return to the hotel and to wait for her there; the manager himself came forward and pressed a button, whereupon a personage whose acquaintance I had not yet made, known as "lift" (who at the highest point of the building, where the lantern would be in a Norman church, was installed like a photographer behind his curtain or an organist in his loft) began to descend towards me with the agility of a domestic, industrious and captive squirrel. Then, gliding upwards again along a steel pillar, he bore me aloft in his wake towards the dome of this temple to commerce. Meanwhile, to dissipate the mortal anguish I felt in traversing in silence the mystery of this chiaroscuro so devoid of poetry, lighted by a single vertical line of little windows which were those of the solitary water-closet on each landing, I addressed a few words to the young organist, artificer of my journey and my partner in captivity, who continued to manipulate the registers of his instrument and to finger the stops. I apologised for taking up so much room, for giving him so much trouble, and asked whether I was not obstructing him in the practice of an art in regard to which, in order to flatter the virtuoso more than displaying curiosity, I confessed my strong attachment. But he made no reply, whether from astonishment at my words, preoccupation with his work, regard for etiquette, hardness of hearing, respect for his position, fear of danger, slowness of understanding, or the manager's orders.
   There is perhaps nothing which gives us so strong an impression of the reality of the external world as the difference in the position, relative to ourselves, of even a quite unimportant person before we have met him and after. I was the same man who had come, that afternoon, in the little train from Cricquebec, I carried in my body the same consciousness. But in this consciousness, in the place where - while the little train carried me to Cricquebec it had been impossible to form any idea of the manager, the hotel, his staff, a vague and timorous anticipation of the moment when the manager would first encounter me, this same fear had [section of manuscript missing] sublime. And this change which I had done nothing to bring about proved to me that something had happened which was external to myself, like the traveller who, having had the sun in his face when he started his journey, concludes that time has passed when he finds the sun behind him. I was half-dead with exhaustion; I was burning with fever. I would have gone to bed, but I had no night things. I should have liked at least to lie down for a little while on the bed, but to what purpose since I should not have been able to procure any rest for that mass of sensations which is for each of us his conscious if not his physical body, and since the unfamiliar objects which encircled that body, forcing it to place its perceptions on the permanent footing of a vigilant defensive, would have kept my sight, my hearing, all my senses in a position as cramped and uncomfortable (even if I had stretched out my legs) as that of Cardinal La Balue in the cage in which he could neither stand nor sit? It is our noticing them that puts things in a room, our growing used to them that takes them away again and clears a space for us. Space there was none for me in my bedroom (mine in name only) at Cricquebec; it was full of things which did not know me, which flung back at me the distrustful glance I cast at them, and, without taking any heed of my existence, showed that I was interrupting the humdrum course of theirs. The clock - whereas at home I heard mine tick only a few seconds in a week, when I was coming out of some profound meditation - continued without a moment's interruption to utter, in an unknown tongue, a series of observations which must have been most uncomplimentary to myself, for the red curtains listened to them without replying, but in an attitude such as people adopt who shrug their shoulders and raise their eyebrows to indicate that the sight of a third person irritates them. I was tormented by the presence of some little bookcases with glass fronts which ran along the walls, but especially by a large cheval-glass which stood across one corner and before the departure of which I felt that there could be no possibility of rest for me there. I kept raising my eyes - which the things in my room in Paris disturbed no more than did my eyeballs themselves, for they were merely extensions of my organs, an enlargement of myself - towards the high ceiling of this belvedere planted upon the summit of the hotel; and deep down in that region more intimate than that in which we see and hear, in that region where we experience the quality of smells, almost in the very heart of my innermost self, the scent of flowering grasses next launched its offensive against my last line of trenches, an offensive against which I opposed, not without exhausting myself still further, by the futile and unremitting riposte of an alarmed sniffling. Having no world, no bedroom, no body now that was not menaced by the enemies thronging around me, penetrated to the very bones of my fever, I was alone and I longed to die. Then my grandmother came in, and to the expansion of my constricted heart there opened at once an infinity of space.
   She was wearing a loose cambric dressing-gown which she put on at home whenever any of us was ill (because she felt more comfortable in it, she used to say, for she always ascribed selfish motives to her actions), and which was, for tending us, for watching by our beds, her servant's smock, her nurse's uniform, her nun's habit. But whereas the attentions of servants, nurses and nuns, their kindness to us, the merits we find in them and the gratitude we owe them, increase the impression we have of being, in their eyes, someone else, of feeling that we are alone, keeping in our own hands the control over our thoughts, our will to live, I knew, when I was with my grandmother, that however great the misery that was in me, it would be received by her with a pity still more vast, that everything that was mine, my cares, my wishes, would be buttressed, in my grandmother, by a desire to preserve and enhance my life that was altogether stronger than my own; and my thoughts were continued and extended in her without undergoing the slightest deflection, since they passed from my mind into hers without any change of atmosphere or of personality. And - like the man who tries to fasten his tie in front of a mirror and forgets that the end which he sees reflected is not on the side to which he raises his hand, or like dog that chases along the ground the dancing shadow of an insect in the air - misled by her appearance in the body as we are apt to be in this world where we have no direct perception of people's souls, I threw myself into the arms of my grandmother and pressed my lips to her cheeks as though I were thus gaining access to that immense heart which she opened to me, and which was more to me than my own. And when I felt my mouth glued to her cheeks, to her brow, I drew from them something so beneficial, so nourishing, that I remained as motionless, as solemn, as calmly gluttonous as a baby at the breast.
   At her request, as she appreciated my tiredness, I calmed myself; I gazed inexhaustibly at her large face, outlined like a beautiful cloud, glowing and serene, behind which I could discern the radiance of her tender love. And everything that received, in however slight a degree, any share of her sensations, everything that could be said to belong in any way to her was at once so spiritualized, so sanctified that with outstretched hands I smoothed her beautiful hair, still hardly grey, with as much respect, precaution and gentleness as if I had actually been caressing her goodness. She found such pleasure in taking any trouble that saved me one, and in a moment of immobility and rest for my weary limbs something so exquisite, that when, having seen that she wished to help me undress and go to bed, I made as though to stop her and to undress myself, with an imploring gaze she arrested my hands as they fumbled with the top buttons of my jacket and my boots, about to pitilessly crush her fragile goodness.
   "Oh, do let me!" she begged. "It's such a joy for your old grandmother to be useful for something. And be sure to knock on the wall if you want anything in the night, my bed is just on the other side, and the partitions are quite thin. Just give me a knock now, as soon as you're in bed, so that we shall know where we are."
   And sure enough, that evening as I gave three knocks - a signal which, a week later, when I was ill, I repeated every morning for several days, because my grandmother wanted me to have some milk early. Then, when I thought that I could hear her stirring - so that she should not be kept waiting but might, the moment she had brought me the milk, go to sleep again - I would venture three little taps, timidly, faintly, but for all that distinctly, for if I was afraid of disturbing her in case I had been mistaken and she was still asleep, neither did I wish her to lie awake listening for a summons which she had not at once caught and which I should not have the heart to repeat. And scarcely had I given my taps than I heard three others, in a different tone from mine, stamped with a calm authority, repeated twice over so that there should be no mistake, and saying to me plainly: "Don't get agitated, I've heard you, don't fret, I shall be with you in a minute!" and my grandmother would appear. I would explain to her that I had been afraid she would not hear me, or think that it was someone in the room beyond who was tapping; at which she would smile: "Mistake my poor pet's knocking for anybody else's! Why, your old grandmother could tell it a mile away! Do you suppose there's anybody else in the world who's such a silly-billy, with such febrile knuckles, so afraid of waking me and of not making me understand? Even if it just gave the tiniest scratch, your old grandmother could tell her mouse's sound at once, especially such a poor, miserable mouse as mine is. I could hear it just now, trying to make up its mind, and rustling the bedclothes, and going through all its tricks."
   She would give me my milk and partly open the shutters; and where a wing of the hotel jutted out, the sun would already have settled on the roofs, like a slater who is up in good time, and starts work early and works quietly so as not to rouse the sleeping town whose stillness makes him seem more agile. She would tell me what time it was, what sort of day it would be, that it was not worth my while my getting up and coming to the window, that there was a mist over the sea, whether the baker's shop had opened yet, what the vehicle was that I could hear passing - that whole trifling curtain-raiser, that insignificant introit of a new day which no one attends, and in which we, from all the inhabitants of the hotel, were the only ones present; a little scrap of life which was only for our two selves, but which I should have no hesitation in evoking, later on, to Françoise or even to strangers, by saying: "There was a terrible fog, you know, at six o'clock this morning", with the ostentation of one who was boasting not of a piece of knowledge that he alone had acquired but of a mark of affection shown to himself alone; sweet morning moment which opened like a symphony with the rhythmical dialogue of my three taps, to which the thin wall of my bedroom, steeped in love and joy, grown melodious, incorporeal, singing like the angelic choir, responded with three other taps, eagerly awaited, repeated once and again, in which it contrived to waft to me the soul of my grandmother, whole and perfect, and the promise of her coming, with the swiftness of an annunciation and a musical fidelity. But on this first night after our arrival, when my grandmother had quite left me, I began again to suffer as I had suffered the day before, in Paris, when I began to understand that in leaving for Bricquebec I was saying goodbye to my own room. Perhaps this fear that I had - and that is shared by so many others - of sleeping in a strange room, perhaps this fear is only the most humble, obscure, organic, almost unconscious form of that great and desperate resistance put up by the things that constitute the better part of our present life against our mentally acknowledging the possibility of a future in which they are to have no part; a resistance which was at the root of the horror that I had so often been made to feel by the thought that my parents would die some day, that the necessity of life might oblige me to live far from Gilberte, or simply to settle permanently in a place where I should never see any of my old friends; a resistance that was also at the root of the difficulty that I found in imagining my own death, or a survival such as Bergotte used to promise to mankind in his books, a survival in which I should not be allowed to take with me my memories, my frailties, my character, which did not easily resign themselves to the idea of ceasing to be, and desired for me neither extinction nor an eternity in which they would have no part.
   When Swann had said to me in Paris; "You ought to go off to one of those glorious islands in the Pacific; you'd never come back again if you did", I should have liked to answer: "But then I shall never see your daughter again, I shall be living among people and things she has never seen". And yet my reason told me: "What difference can that make, since you won't be distressed by it? When M. Swann tells you that you won't come back he means by that that you won't want to come back, and if you don't want to that is because you'll be happier out there." For my reason was aware that Habit - Habit which was even now setting to work to make me like this unfamiliar lodging, to change the position of the mirror, the shade of the curtains, to stop the clock - undertakes as well to make dear to us the companions whom at first we disliked, to give another appearance to their faces, to make the sound of their voices attractive, to modify the inclinations of their hearts. It is true that these new friendships for places and people are based upon forgetfulness of the old; my reason precisely thought that I could envisage without dread the prospect of a life in which I should be for ever separated from people all memory of whom I should lose, and it was by way of consolation that it offered my heart a promise of oblivion which in fact succeeded only by sharpening the edge of its despair. Not that the heart, too, is not bound in time, when separation is complete, to feel the analgesic effect of habit; but until then it will continue to suffer. And our dread of a future in which we must forgo the sight of faces and the sound of voices which we love and from which today we derive our dearest joy, this dread, far from being dissipated, is intensified, if to the pain of such a privation we feel that there will be added what seems to us now in anticipation more painful still: not to feel it as a pain at all - to remain indifferent; it would then be not merely the charm of our family, our mistress, our friends that had ceased to enclose us, but our affection for them would have been so completely eradicated from our hearts, of which today it is so conspicuous an element, that we should be able to enjoy a life apart from them; the very thought of which today makes us recoil in horror; so that it would be in a real sense the death of the self, a death followed, it is true, by resurrection, but in a different self, to the love of which the elements of the old self that are condemned to die cannot bring themselves to aspire. It is they - even the merest of them, such as our obscure attachments to the dimensions, to the atmosphere of a bedroom - that take fright and refuse, in acts of rebellion which we must recognize to be a secret, partial, tangible and true aspect of our resistance to death, of the long, desperate, daily resistance to the fragmentary and continuous death that insinuates itself through the whole course of life, detaching from us at each moment a shred of ourself, dead matter on which new cells will multiply and grow. And for a neurotic nature such as mine - one, that is to say, in which the intermediaries, the nerves, perform their functions badly, fail to arrest on its way to the consciousness, allow indeed to reach it, distinct, exhausting, innumerable and distressing, the plaints of the most humble elements of the self which are about to disappear - the anxiety and alarm which I felt as I lay beneath the strange and too lofty ceiling were but the protest of an affection that survived in me for a ceiling that was familiar and low. Doubtless this affection too would disappear, another having taken its place (when death, and then another life, had, in the guise of Habit, performed their double task); but until its annihilation, every night it would suffer afresh, and on this night especially, confronted with an irreversible future in which there would no longer be any place for it, it rose in revolt, it tortured me with the sound of its lamentations whenever my straining eyes, powerless to turn from what was wounding them, endeavoured to fasten themselves upon that inaccessible ceiling.
   But next morning! (like at Combray when, after spending a fretful night, all my cares were effaced all at once by the sun at the hour when it pressed its beams against the window, as if to say to me: come on down to the garden; where, seeing the blazing slates on the belfry of St. Hilaire, I got myself ready to go through the square, to the church, to the banks of the Vivonne), - the next morning, after a servant had come to call me and to bring me hot water, and while I was washing and dressing myself and trying in vain to find the things that I needed in my trunk, from which I extracted, pell-mell, only a lot of things that were no use whatever, what a joy it was to me, thinking already of the pleasure of lunch and a walk along the shore, to see in the window, and in all the glass fronts of the bookcases, as in the port holes in a ship's cabin, the open sea, naked, unshadowed, and yet with half of its expanse in shadow, bounded by a thin, fluctuating line, and to follow with my eyes the waves that leapt up one behind another like the jumpers on a trampoline. Every other moment, holding in my hand the stiff, starched towel with the name: Grand Hotel printed upon it, which I unfolded with difficulty, and with which I was making futile efforts to dry myself - I returned to the window to have another look at that vast, dazzling, mountainous amphitheatre, and at the snowy crests of its emerald waves, here and there polished and translucent, which with a placid violence and a leonine frown, to which the sun added a faceless smile, allowed their crumbling slopes to topple down at last. It was at this window that I was later to take up my position every morning, as at the window of a stage-coach in which one has slept, to see whether, during the night, a longed-for mountain range has come nearer or receded - only here it was those hills of the sea which, before they come dancing back towards us, are apt to withdraw so far that often it was only truly at the end of a long, sandy plain that I could distinguish, far off, their first undulations in a transparent, vaporous, bluish distance, like the glaciers one sees in the background of the Tuscan Primitives. On other mornings it was quite close at hand that the sun laughed upon those waters of a green as tender as that preserved in Alpine pastures, less by the moisture of the soil than by the liquid mobility of the light. Moreover, in that breach which the shore and the waves open up in the midst of the rest of the world for the passage or the accumulation of light, it is above all the light, according to the direction from which it comes and along which our eyes follow it, it is the light that displaces and situates the undulations of the sea. Diversity of lighting modifies no less the orientation of a place, erects no less before our eyes new goals which it inspires in us the yearning to attain, than would a distance in space actually traversed in the course of a long journey, when, in the morning, the sun came from behind the hotel, disclosing to me the sands bathed in light as far as the first bastions of the sea, it seemed to be showing me another side of the picture, and to be inviting me to pursue, along the winding path of its rays, a motionless but varied journey amid all the fairest scenes of the diversified landscape of the hours. And on this first morning, it pointed out to me far off, with a jovial finger, those blue peaks of the sea which bear no name on any map, until, dizzy with its sublime excursion over the thundering and chaotic surface of their crests and avalanches, it came to take shelter from the wind in my bedroom, lolling across the unmade bed and scattering its riches over the splashed surface of the basin-stand and into my open trunk, where, by its very splendour and misplaced luxury, it added still further to the general impression of disorder. Alas for that sea-wind: an hour later, in the big dining room - while we were having lunch, and from the leathery gourd of a lemon were sprinkling a few golden drops onto a pair of soles which presently left on our plates the plumes of their picked skeletons, curled like stiff feathers and resonant as citherns, - it seemed to my grandmother a cruel deprivation not to be able to feel its life-giving breath on her cheek, on account of the glass partition, transparent but closed, which, like the front of a glass case in a museum, separated us from the beach while allowing us to look out upon its whole expanse, and into which the sky fitted so completely that its azure had the effect of being the colour of the windows and its white clouds so many flaws in the glass. Imagining that I was "sitting on the mole" or at rest in the "boudoir" of which Baudelaire speaks - a very different thing from the evening ray, simple and superficial as a tremulous golden shaft - just what at that moment was scorching the sea topaz-yellow, fermenting it, turning it pale and milky like beer, frothy like milk, while now and then there hovered over it great blue shadows which, for his own amusement, some god seemed to be shifting to and fro by moving a mirror in the sky. And this instability of the light which one only ever finds on the sea and in the mountains made one think of uncertainties, of the perpetual setting up of some kind of sublime magic lantern, in which the accidents over which it plays seemed to have little importance; a great light joined the shore to the waves before deserting it, isolating itself in the middle of the sea, reuniting two boats, cutting in two a mist, one half of which remained in shadow, with as much indifference as did my magic lantern at Combray when it projected the image of Geneviève de Brabant across the door knob or the chimney breast as well as on the curtains at the window. But my grandmother, unable to endure the thought that I was losing the benefit of an hour in the open air, surreptitiously opened a pane and at once sent flying menus, newspapers, veils and hats, while she herself, fortified by the celestial draught, remained calm and smiling like Saint Blandina amid the torrent of invective which, increasing my sense of isolation and misery, those contemptuous, dishevelled, furious visitors combined to pour on us.
   To a certain extent - and this, at Cricquebec, gave to the population, as a rule monotonously rich and cosmopolitan, of that sort of "grand" hotel a quite distinctive local character - they were composed of eminent persons from the departmental capitals of that region of France, a senior judge from Le Mans, a leader of the Cherbourg bar, a notary public from Nantes, who annually, when the holidays came round, starting from the various points over which, throughout the working year, they were scattered like snipers on a battlefield or pieces on a draughts board, concentrated their forces in this hotel. They always reserved the same rooms, and with their wives who had pretensions to aristocracy, formed a little group which was joined by a leading barrister and a leading doctor from Paris, who on the day of departure would say to the others: "Oh, yes, of course, you don't go by our train. You're privileged, you'll be home in time for lunch."
   "Privileged, you say? You who live in Paris, while I have to live in a wretched county town of a hundred thousand inhabitants (it's true we managed to muster a hundred and two thousand at the last census, but what is that compared to your two and a half millions?)"
   They said this with a rustic burring of their 'r's, without acrimony, for they were leading lights each in his own province, who could like others have gone to Paris had they chosen - the senior judge from Rennes had several times been offered a seat on the Court of Appeal - but had preferred to stay where they were, from love of their native towns, or of obscurity, or of fame, or because they were reactionaries who enjoyed being on friendly terms with the country houses of the neighbourhood. Besides, several of them were not going back at once to their county towns.
   For - inasmuch as the Bay of Bricquebec was a little world apart in the midst of the great, a basketful of the seasons in which good days and bad, and the successive months, were clustered in a ring, so that not only on days when one could make out Rivebelle, which was a sign of a storm, could one see the sunlight on the houses there while Bricquebec was plunged into darkness, but later on, when the cold weather of autumn had reached Bricquebec, one could be certain of finding on that opposite shore two or three supplementary days of warmth - those of the regular visitors to the Grand Hotel whose holidays began late or lasted longer gave orders, when the rains and the mists came, for their boxes to be packed and loaded on to a boat, and set sail across the bay to find summer again at Costedor or Rivebelle. This little group in the Bricquebec hotel looked at each new arrival with suspicion, and, while affecting to take not the least interest in him, hastened, all of them, to interrogate their friend the head waiter about him. For it was the same head waiter - Aimé - who returned every year for the season, and kept their tables for them; and their lady-wives, having heard that his wife was "expecting", would sit after meals each working at a separate article of baby clothing, stopping only to put up their lorgnettes and stare at my grandmother and myself because we were eating hard-boiled eggs in salad, which was considered common and was "not done" in the best society of Nantes or Alençon. They affected an attitude of contemptuous irony with regard to a Frenchman who was called "His Majesty" and who had indeed proclaimed himself king of a small island in the South Seas peopled only by a few savages. He was staying in the hotel with his pretty mistress, whom, as she crossed the beach to bathe, the little boys would greet with: "Long live the Queen!" because she would reward them with a shower of fifty centimes pieces. The judge and the barrister went so far as to pretend not to see her, and if any of their friends happened to look at her, felt bound to warn them that she was only a little shop girl.
   "But I was told that at Ostend they used the royal bathing hut."
   "Well and why not? It's on hire for twenty francs. You can take it yourself if you care for that sort of thing. Anyhow, I know for a fact that the fellow asked for an audience with the king, who sent back word that he wasn't interested in pantomime princes."
   "Really, that's interesting! What queer people there are in the world to be sure!"
   And no doubt this was true; but it was also from resentment of the thought that, to many of their fellow visitors, they were themselves simply solid middle-class citizens who did not know this king and queen who were so prodigal with their small change, that the notary, the judge, the barrister, when what they were pleased to call the "Carnival" went by, felt so much annoyance and expressed aloud an indignation that was quite understood by their friend the head waiter who, obliged to show proper civility to the generous if not authentic sovereigns, would nevertheless, as he took their orders, glance across the room at his old patrons and give them a meaningful wink. Perhaps there was also some of the same resentment at being erroneously supposed to be less "smart" and unable to explain that they were more, at the root of their "Fine Specimen!" with which they referred to a young toff, the consumptive and dissipated son of an industrial magnate, who appeared every day in a new suit of clothes with an orchid in his buttonhole, drank champagne at luncheon, and then went off to the Casino, pale, impassive, a smile of complete indifference on his lips, to throw away at the baccarat table enormous sums "which he could ill afford to lose", as the notary said with a knowing air to the senior judge, whose wife had it "on good authority" that this "decadent" young man was bringing his parents to an early grave in their sorrow.
   Perhaps the little colony had less occasion to express these feelings with regard to a young actress (better known in fact for her grace, her wit, her elegance, her taste, her collection of German porcelain, than for the occasional parts that she had played at the Odéon), who was staying at the Grand Hotel, Cricquebec with her lover, an immensely rich young man for whose sake she had acquired her culture, and with two young men from the aristocracy at that time much in the public eye, four people who formed an exclusive group for the simple pleasure that they took in chatting together, playing cards together, eating together (as all four had attained the same degree of gastronomy), a little society that the changes of surroundings of the summer could not disunite and which transposed itself, complete and intact, sometimes here, sometimes there. But the wife of the senior judge, and the wife of the notary found themselves denying themselves any pleasure they would have had in tolerating any promiscuity with this member of the demi-monde. For the little society, which always had special menus, for the elaboration of which one or two of its members would have long discussions with the chef, did not come down for luncheon until extremely late, by which time everybody else was on the point of leaving table. They took their meals in a separate part of the dining room, entering through a small door, out of the way of everybody else; the woman, always beautifully dressed, always wore different dresses but ones which we had never seen before, with a taste, peculiar to herself, in scarves which were pleasing to her lover. One never saw a single one of them during the daytime, which they spent, together, playing cards. In the evening, after leaving table, we would see up to three young men in dinner jackets waiting for the woman, who was always late, and who, shortly after ringing for the lift from her floor, would emerge through the lift doors as if from a box of toys, all dressed up with a new scarf, pausing for a moment to look at herself in the mirror, applying a little more makeup, whereupon the whole group would disappear into a closed carriage, harnessed with two waiting horses, to set off to dine out at a little restaurant, well known for its food, which was half an hour away, and where, because there were not so many people there, the chef was able to take greater pains over his dishes, and they themselves could discuss with him at greater length the possibility of adding such and such an ingredient or not. In this way they passed virtually unnoticed by the other inhabitants of the hotel. The same was not true of a wealthy titled old lady of whom, even though she was from a different floor, the room valet from ours had spoken to us, impressed, as were all of his companions, by the fact that she had brought with her her own chambermaid, coachman, horses, carriages, and had been preceded by a butler who was charged with choosing the rooms and to have them made, thanks to the ornaments and precious antiques which he had brought, as little different as possible to those in which his mistress lived in Paris. The barrister and his friends were inexhaustibly sarcastic on the subject of their respect for an old titled lady, who never moved anywhere without taking her whole household with her. Whenever the wives of the notary and the judge saw her in the dining-room at meal times, they put up their lorgnettes and gave her an insolent scrutiny, as meticulous and distrustful as if she had been some dish with a pretentious name, but a suspicious appearance, such as is often served in "grand" hotels, which, after the adverse result of a systematic study, is sent away with a lofty wave of the hand, an air of resignation, and a grimace of disgust.
   No doubt by this behaviour they meant only to show that, if there were things in the world which they themselves lacked - in this instance certain prerogatives which the old lady enjoyed, and the privilege of her acquaintance - it was not because they could not, but because they did not choose to acquire them. But the unfortunate thing was that in seeking to persuade others that this was how they felt they ended up by convincing themselves of it. And the suppression of all desire for, of all curiosity about, ways of life which are unfamiliar, of all hope of endearing oneself to new people, of any effort to please, for which, in these women, had been substituted a feigned contempt, a spurious jubilation, had the disagreeable effect of obliging them to label their discontent satisfaction and to lie everlastingly to themselves, two reasons why they were unhappy. But everyone else in the hotel was no doubt behaving in a similar fashion, though under different forms, and sacrificing if not to self-esteem, at any rate to certain inculcated principles or mental habits, the disturbing thrill of being involved in an unfamiliar way of life, in pursuit of the object of their desires, in seduction, in forming attachments by renewing for themselves the mysterious sympathy of unknown beings. Of course the microcosm in which the old lady isolated herself was not poisoned with virulent rancour, as was the group in which the wives of the judge and the notary sat sneering with rage. It was indeed embalmed with a delicate and old-world fragrance which, however, was no less artificial. But I liked to think that perhaps she had deep within her some sensitivity and imagination, and that the charm which redeems an unknown person would have had a more profound effect upon her, than the pleasure without mystery which is to be derived from mixing with people from one's own world, and reminding oneself that this is the best of all possible worlds; who knows if it was not by thinking that if she arrived at the hotel incognito making little impression she would, in her black woollen dress and old fashioned bonnet, bring a smile to the lips, upon noticing her in the hall, of a young reprobate whom she would have thought a handsome young boy - like the one who was ruining himself this year with his gambling - and who would himself have murmured from his rocking chair "What a scarecrow!", or, still worse, to those of some worthy man who had, like the senior judge, kept between his pepper-and-salt whiskers a fresh complexion and a pair of sparkling eyes such as she liked to see, would have pointed out to his wife with a smile, the apparition of this quaint phenomenon upon whom she had brought to bear, with no malice, the lens of her lorgnette as if it were a precision instrument, who knows if it were not through apprehension of those first few minutes which one knows will be brief but which are nonetheless dreaded - like one's first head dip into the sea - that this lady sent a servant down in advance to inform the hotel of the personality and habits of his mistress, and who, upon leaving the motor car, and advancing rapidly between the lady's maid and the footman, cut short the manager's greetings with an abruptness in which there was more shyness than pride, and made straight for her room, where her own curtains, replacing those that draped the hotel windows, her own screens, photographs and trinkets, set up so effectively between her and the outside world, to which otherwise she would have had to adapt herself, the barrier of her habits, that it was her home (in the cocoon of which she had remained) that travelled rather than herself. Thenceforward, having placed between herself on the one hand and the hotel staff and the tradesmen on the other, her own servants who bore instead of her the pain or charm of contact with all this strange humanity, having set the prejudices between herself and the other visitors, strangers and bathers, indifferent whether or not she gave offence to people whom her friends would not have had in their houses, it was in her own world that she continued to live, by correspondence with her friends, by memories, by her intimate awareness of her own position, the quality of her manners, the adroitness of her courtesy. And every day, when she came downstairs to go for a drive in her own carriage, the lady's maid who came after her carrying her wraps, and the footman who preceded her seemed like sentries who, at the gate of an embassy, flying the flag of the country to which she belonged, assured to her upon foreign soil the privilege of extra-territoriality. She did not leave her room on the day after our arrival, so that we did not see her in the dining-room, into which the manager, since we were newcomers, conducted us at the lunch hour, taking us under his wing, as a corporal takes a squad of recruits to the master tailor to have them fitted. We did however see a moment later a country squire and his daughter, of an obscure but very ancient Breton family, M. and Mlle de Silaria, whose table had been allotted to us by the manager in the belief that they had gone out and would not be back until the evening. Having come to Cricquebec only to see various country magnates who they knew in that neighbourhood, they spent in the hotel dining-room, what with the invitations they accepted and the visits they paid, only such time as was strictly unavoidable. It was their haughtiness that preserved them from all human sympathy, from arousing the least interest in the strangers seated around them, among whom M. de Silaria kept up the glacial, preoccupied, distant, stiff, punctilious and ill-intentioned air that we assume in a railway refreshment-room in the midst of fellow-passengers whom we have never seen before and will never see again, and with whom we can conceive of no other relations than to defend from their onslaught our portion of cold chicken and our seat in the train. No sooner had we begun our lunch than we were asked to leave the table on the instructions of M. de Silaria who had just arrived and, without the faintest apology to us, requested in a loud voice to see that "such a mistake did not happen again", for it was repugnant to him that "people whom he did not know" should have taken his table.
   And certainly in the desire which impelled the wealthy young man, his mistress and his two friends to form an exclusive group, to travel only together, to come down to luncheon only after everyone else had finished, reflected no sort of ill will or malice towards the rest of us, which would have been distasteful and which they would have considered ill-mannered, but simply the requirements of the taste that they had formed for a certain type of witty conversation, for certain refinements of good living, which would have rendered intolerable a life in common with people who had not been initiated into their mysteries. Even at a dinner table or at a card table where these notions could not be made use of, each of them had to be certain that in the diner or partner who sat opposite to him there were, latent and in abeyance, a certain brand of knowledge which would enable him to identify the rubbish which so many houses in Paris boast of as genuine mediaeval or Renaissance "pieces", the subtlety of wit to take no pleasure in idiotic puns, and sufficient experience in good society to enable them to hunt out everything which is pretentious or common, in short a criteria common to them all by which to distinguish the good from the bad whatever the subject. No doubt by now, at such moments, it was merely by some rare and amusing interjection flung into the general silence of the meal or the game, or by the new charming dress which the young actress had put on for lunch or for poker with these three men, that the special kind of existence in which these friends desired everywhere to remain plunged was made apparent. But by engulfing them thus in a system of habits which they knew by heart it sufficed to protect them from the mystery of the life that was going on all around them. All the long afternoon, the sea was suspended there before their eyes only as a canvas of attractive colouring might hang on the wall of a wealthy bachelor's flat, and it was only in the intervals between "hands" that one of the players, finding nothing better to do, raised his eyes to it to seek some indication of the weather or the time, and to remind the others that tea was ready. As it was with the sea and with other people so it was with the countryside. And in the evening when they went out to dine, the road bordered with apple-trees that led out of Cricquebec was no more to them than the distance that must be traversed - barely distinguishable in the darkness from that which separated their homes in Paris from the Café Anglais or the Café Joseph - before they arrived at the fashionable rural little restaurant where they were to take their fine meal and where, while the rich young man's friends envied him because he had such a smartly dressed mistress, the latter's scarves hung before the company a sort of fragrant, flowing veil, but one that kept it apart from the outer world.
   Alas for my peace of mind, I was far from being like these people, to many of whom I gave constant thought; I did not want them to show contempt for me; and at that time I did not have the comfort of having learned the traits of Swann's character, who would have believed in having his mistress brought from Paris in order to expend with her the desire that had been inspired in him by an unknown woman, not believing in this desire to substitute a particular reality for that which one could not imagine from a man with a receding forehead and eyes that dodged between the blinkers of his prejudices and his upbringing. The grandee of the district was the brother-in-law of Legrandin, who sometimes came to visit Bricquebec and every Sunday, by reason of his garden parties, robbed the hotel of a large number of its occupants, because one or two of them were invited to these entertainments and the others, so as not to appear not to have been invited, chose that day for an excursion which kept them far away from Cricquebec. I should have been glad to arouse some response even from the adventurer who had been king of a desert island in the South Seas, even from the young consumptive about whom I thought constantly, supposing that he concealed beneath his insolent exterior a shy and tender heart, which might perhaps have lavished on me alone the treasures of its affection. I was concerned about the impression I might make on all these temporary or local celebrities whom my tendency to put myself in the place of other people and to re-create their state of mind made me place not in their true rank, that which they would have occupied in Paris for instance and which would have been quite low, but in that which they must imagine to be theirs and was indeed theirs at Cricquebec, where the want of a common denominator gave them a sort of relative superiority and unwonted interest. Alas, none of these people's contempt was so painful to me as that of M. de Silaria.
   For I had noticed his daughter the moment she came into the room, her pretty face, her pallid, almost bluish complexion, the distinctiveness in the carriage of her tall figure, in her gait, which suggested to me, with reason, her heredity, her aristocratic upbringing, and all the more vividly because I knew her name - like those expressive themes invented by musicians of genius which paint in splendid colours the glow of fire, the rush of water, the peace of the countryside, to audiences who, having glanced through the programme in advance, have their imaginations trained in the right direction. "Pedigree", by adding to Mlle de Silaria's charms the idea of her origin, made them more intelligible, more complete. It made them more desirable also, advertising their inaccessibility as a high price enhances the value of a thing that has already taken our fancy. And its stock of heredity gave to her complexion, in which so many juices had been blended, the savour of an exotic fruit or a famous vintage.
   Now, chance had suddenly put in our hands, my grandmother's and mine, the means of acquiring instantaneous prestige in the eyes of all the occupants of the hotel. For on that first afternoon, at the moment when the old lady came down from her room with a simple crocheted cap in her hair and looking less imposing in the flesh, but producing, thanks to the footman who preceded her, the valet who carried her things and the maid who came running after her with a book and a rug that she had forgotten, a marked effect upon all who beheld her and arousing in each of them a curiosity and a respect from which it was evident that none was so little immune, perhaps because he had heard more about her and her family than the others, as M. de Silaria, the manager leaned across to my grandmother and out of kindness (as one might point out the Shah of Persia to an obscure onlooker who could obviously have no sort of connection with such a mighty potentate, but might all the same be interested to know that he had been standing within a few feet of one) whispered in her ear: "The Marquise de Villeparisis!" while at the same moment the Marquise, catching sight of my grandmother, could not suppress a start of pleased surprise.
   Unfortunately, if there was one person in the world who, more than anyone else, lived shut up in a little world of her own, oblivious of anybody in the hotel, it was my grandmother. She would not even have scorned me, she would simply not have understood what I meant, if she had known that I attached importance to the opinions, that I felt an interest in the persons, of people the very existence of whom she never noticed, and of whom, when the time came to leave Cricquebec, she would not even remember the names. I dared not confess to her that if these same people had seen her talking to Mme de Villeparisis, I should have been immensely gratified, because I felt that the Marquise enjoyed some prestige in the hotel on account of her numerous servants and that her friendship would have given us status in the eyes of M. de Silaria. Not that my grandmother's friend represented to me, in any sense of the word, a member of the aristocracy: I was too accustomed to her name, which had been familiar to my ears before my mind had begun to consider it, when as a child I had heard it uttered in conversation at home for it to sound to me like a grand name; while her title added to it only a touch of quaintness, as some uncommon Christian name would have done, or as in the names of streets, among which we can see nothing more noble in the Rue Lord Byron or in the Rue de Gramont than in the Rue Léouce-Reynand or the Rue Hippolyte-Lebas. Mme de Villeparisis no more made me think of a person who belonged to a special social world than did her cousin MacMahon, whom I did not clearly distinguish from M. Grévy, likewise president of the Republic, or from Raspail, whose photograph Françoise had bought with that of the marshal from the open-air shop on the corner of the Rue Royale. It was one of my grandmother's principles that, when away from home, one should cease to have any social intercourse, that one did not go to the seaside to meet people, having plenty of time for that sort of thing in Paris, that they would make one waste, in polite exchanges, in pointless conversation, the precious time which ought to be spent in the open air, beside the waves; and finding it convenient to assume that this view was shared by everyone else, and that it authorized, between old friends whom chance had brought face to face in the same hotel, the fiction of a mutual incognito, on hearing her friend's name from the manager she merely replied "Ah" and looked the other way, pretending not to see Mme de Villeparisis, who, realizing that my grandmother did not want to be recognized, likewise gazed into space.
   She, too, had her meals in the dining-room, but at the other end of it. She knew none of the people who were staying in the hotel or who came there to call, not even M. de Solangy; indeed, I noticed that he gave her no greeting one day when, with his wife, he had accepted an invitation to lunch with the barrister, who, intoxicated with the honour of having the nobleman at his table, avoided his habitual friends and confined himself to a distant twitch of the eyelid, so as to draw their attention to this historic event but so discreetly that his signal could not be interpreted as an invitation to join the party.
   "Well, I hope you've done yourself proud, I hope you feel smart enough," the judge's wife said to him that evening.
"Smart? Why should I?" asked the barrister, concealing his rapture in an exaggerated astonishment. "Because of my guests, do you mean?" he went on, feeling that it was impossible to keep up the farce any longer. "But what is there smart about having a few friends to lunch" After all, they must feed somewhere!"
   "Of course it's smart! They were the Soulangys weren't they? I recognized them at once. She's a countess and quite genuine, too, not through the females."
   "Oh, she's a very simple soul, she's charming, no standoffishness about her. I thought you were coming to join us, I was making signals to you ... I would have introduced you!" he asserted, tempering with a hint of irony the vast generosity of his offer, like Asahuerus when he says to Esther: "Of all my kingdom must I give you half!"
   "No, no, no, no, we keep to ourselves in our own little corner."
   "But you were quite wrong, I assure you," replied the barrister, emboldened now that the danger point was passed. "They weren't going to eat you. I say, aren't we going to have our little game of bezique?"
   "Why of course! We didn't dare suggest it, now that you go about entertaining countesses!"
   "Oh, get along with you; there's nothing so very wonderful about them. Why, I'm dining there tomorrow. Would you care to go instead of me? I mean it. Honestly, I'd just as soon stay here."
   "No, no! I should be removed from the bench as a reactionary," cried the senior judge, laughing till the tears came to his eyes at his own joke. "But you go to their house too, don't you?" he went on, turning to the notary.
   "Oh, I go there on Sundays - in one door and out the other. But they don't come and have lunch with me like they do with the barrister."
   "That's only because I've known them for a long time," replied the barrister.
   M. de Silaria had not dined at Bricquebec that morning, to the great regret of the barrister, who, since the day when a waiter had given him the name of this unknown person, had judged that one could see straight away that here was a very well bred gentleman. But he managed to say insidiously to the head waiter:
   "Aimé, you can tell M. de Sclaria that he's not the only nobleman you've had in this dining-room. You saw the gentleman who was with me today at lunch? Eh? A small moustache, looked like a military man. Well, that was the Count de Solangy."
   "Was it indeed? I'm not surprised to hear it."
   "That will show him that he's not the only man who's got a title. That'll teach him! It's not a bad thing to take 'em down a peg or two, those gentlemen. I say, Aimé, don't say anything to him unless you want to. I mean to say, it's no business of mine; besides they know each other already."
   And next day M. de Sclaria, who remembered that the barrister had once represented one of his friends, came up and introduced himself.
   "Our friends in common, the Solangys, were anxious that we should meet", said the barrister shamelessly, "the days didn't fit - I don't know quite what went wrong."
   As usual, but more easily now that her father had left her to talk to the barrister, I was gazing at Mlle de Sclaria. I knew of the environment, still almost Feudal, in which she had been brought up in Brittany, and (no less than the bold and always graceful distinctiveness of her attitudes, as when, leaning her elbows on the table, she raised her glass in both hands over her forearms like the handles of a vase) the dry flame of a glance at once extinguished, the landed, congenital hardness that one could sense, ill-concealed by her own personal inflexions, in the depths of her voice, and that had shocked my grandmother, a sort of atavistic ratchet to which she returned as soon as, in a glance or an intonation, she had finished expressing her own thoughts; all this brought the thoughts of the observer back to the long line of ancestors who had bequeathed to her that inadequacy of human sympathy, those gaps in her sensibility, a lack of fullness in the stuff of which she was made and to the education which had circumscribed the world for her to her uncle the bishop and her aunt the abbess. Young noble cousins partaking of leisurely customs, the familiarity of her person with hunting parties, of pastimes which, alas, were far removed from my own upbringing, at the bottom of that silvery bay, sown with a myriad of small crags which on calm evenings, such as the one on which Tristan's sails appeared, refracted the gradations of the setting sun to infinity in this isle where fallen oaks whose green splendour above enchanted springs and pink heathers seemed to me to possess so much charm because it enclosed the life of Mlle de Silaria and reposed in the memory of her eyes. But from a certain look which flooded for a moment the wells - instantly dry again - of her eyes, a look in which one sensed that almost humble docility which the predominance of a taste for sensual pleasures gives to the proudest of women, who will soon come to recognize but one form of personal magic, that which any man will enjoy in her eyes who can make her feel those pleasures, an actor or a mountebank for whom, perhaps, she will one day leave her husband, and from a certain pink tinge, warm and sensual, which flushed her pallid cheeks, like the colour that stained the hearts of the white water-lilies in the Vivonne, I thought I could discern that she might readily have consented to my coming to seek in her the savour of that life of poetry and romance which she led in Brittany, a life which, whether from over-familiarity or from innate superiority, or from disgust at the penury or the avarice of her family, she seemed to attach no great value, but which, for all that, she held enclosed in her body. In the meagre stock of will-power that had been transmitted to her, and gave her expression a hint of weakness, she would not perhaps have found the strength to resist. And, crowned by a feather that was a trifle old-fashioned and pretentious, the grey felt hat which she invariably wore at meals made her all the more attractive to me, not because it was in harmony with her silver and rose complexion, but because, by making me suppose her to be poor, it brought her closer to me. Obliged by her father's presence to adopt a conventional attitude, but already bringing to the perception and classification of people who passed before her eyes other principles than his, perhaps she saw in me not my humble rank, but the attractions of sex and age. If one day M. de Silaria had gone out leaving her behind, if, above all, Mme de Villeparisis, by coming to sit at our table, had given her an opinion of me which might have emboldened me to approach her, perhaps then we might have contrived to exchange a few words, to arrange a meeting, to form a closer tie. And for a whole month in winter during which she would be left alone without her parents in her romantic and legendary castle, we should perhaps have been able to wander by ourselves at evening, she and I together in the twilight through which the pink flowers of the bell-heather would glow more softly above the darkening water, beneath oak trees beaten and stunted by the pounding of the waves which in heavy weather the wind hurled over the island. For it seemed to me that I should truly have possessed her only there, when I had traversed those regions which enveloped Mlle de Sclaria in so many memories - a veil which my desire longed to tear aside, one of those veils which nature interposes between woman and her pursuers (with the same intention as when, for all of us, she places the act of reproduction between ourselves and our keenest pleasure, and for insects, places before the nectar the pollen which they must carry away with them) in order that, tricked by the illusion of possessing her thus more completely, they may be forced to occupy first the scenes among which she lives and which, of more service to their imagination than the sensual pleasure can be, yet would not without that pleasure have sufficed to attract them.
   But I was obliged to take my eyes from Mlle de Silaria, for already, considering no doubt that making the acquaintance of an important person was an odd, brief act which was sufficient in itself and, to bring out all the interest that was latent in it, required only a handshake and a penetrating stare, without either immediate conversation or any subsequent relations, her father had taken leave of the barrister and returned to sit down facing her, rubbing his hands like a man who has just made a valuable acquisition. As for the barrister, once the first emotion of this interview had subsided, he could be heard, as on other days, addressing the waiter every other minute: "But I'm not a king, Aimé; go and attend to the king! I say, Chief, those little trout don't look at all bad, do they? We must ask Aimé to let us have some. Aimé, that little fish you have over there looks highly commendable to me: will you bring us some please, Aimé, and don't be sparing with it." He repeated the name "Aimé" all the time, with the result that when he had anyone to dinner the guest would remark "I can see you're quite at home in this place," and would feel himself obliged to keep on saying "Aimé" also, from that tendency, combining elements of timidity, vulgarity and silliness, which many people have to believe that it is smart and witty to imitate slavishly the people in whose company they happen to be. The barrister repeated the name incessantly for he wanted to exhibit at one and the same time his good relations with the head waiter and his own superior station. And each of his interpellations was accompanied by the sort of smile which one would reserve for when holding a conversation with a small child. And the head waiter, whenever he caught the sound of his own name, smiled too, as though touched and at the same time proud, showing that he was conscious of the honour and could appreciate the joke.
   But a few days later, the day after M. and Mlle de Silaria had left, my grandmother and Mme de Villeparisis collided with each other one morning in a doorway and were obliged to accost each other, not without having first exchanged gestures of surprise and hesitation, performed movements of withdrawal and uncertainty, and finally broken into protestations of joy and greeting, as in certain scenes in Molière where two actors who have been delivering long soliloquies each on his own account, a few feet apart, are supposed not yet to have seen each other, cannot believe their eyes, break off what they are saying, and then simultaneously find their tongues again and fall into each other's arms. Mme de Villeparisis tactfully made as if to leave my grandmother to herself after the first greetings, but my grandmother insisted on staying to talk to her until lunchtime, being anxious to discover how her friend managed to get her letters earlier than we got ours, and to get such nice grilled dishes. And Mme de Villeparisis formed the habit of coming every day, while waiting to be served, to sit down for a moment at our table in the dining-room, insisting that we should not rise from our chairs or in any way put ourselves out. "I shall tell my chamber maid to go and fetch your letters at the same time as mine. What, your daughter writes to you every day? What on earth can you find to say to each other?" These words of Mme de Villeparisis merited such disdain in the eyes of my grandmother that she did not think that they were even worthy of her protestation, so that when her old friend said to her "What's that you've got there? Oh, yes, I have often seen you with Mme de Sevigné's letters," (forgetting for the moment that she had never seen my grandmother at the hotel until they met in the doorway) "Don't you find it rather exaggerated, her constant anxiety about her daughter? She refers to it too often to be really sincere. She is not very natural." my grandmother felt that any discussion would be futile, and so as not to be obliged to speak of the things she loved to a person incapable of understanding them, concealed the Mémoires de Madame de Charlus by laying her bag upon them.

[Note in the manuscript by Proust: Before the passage in the margin and after the marquise, say that she accepted our thanks by saying: "It's wise to find fruit that one is sure of at the seaside" or "it's difficult to find decent fruit at the seaside. The little pears that they have here are not juicy enough for my taste."]

   In return, if my grandmother noticed a book that Mme de Villeparisis was reading or admired the fruit that she had for her dessert, an hour later a valet would come up to our room and ask Françoise - who was flattered by the provenance - to give us a book or some fruit "with the compliments of Madame the Marquise".
   "I must remember sometime to ask her whether I'm not right, after all, in thinking that she doesn't have some connection with the Guermantes," said my grandmother, to my great indignation, not appearing to understand that the life led by the descendants of Geneviève de Brabant was far removed from that of other beings, and that they would never have wanted to be known to Mme de Villeparisis. How could I be expected to believe in a common origin uniting two names which had entered my consciousness, one through the low and shameful gate of experience, the other by the golden gate of imagination?
   But one day in the hotel we saw some fruit which was even better than that which Mme de Villeparisis had on her table. We had, several times, in the last few days, seen driving past us in a stately equipage, tall, red-haired, handsome, with a rather prominent nose, the Princesse de Luxembourg, who was staying in the neighbourhood in order to spend a few days in the country. Her carriage had stopped outside the hotel, a footman had come in and spoken to the manager, had gone back to the carriage and had reappeared with the most amazing armful of fruit with a card: "La Princesse de Luxembourg", on which were written a few words in pencil. For what princely traveller, sojourning here incognito, could this fruit be intended? For it could not be on Mme de Villeparisis that the Princess had meant to pay a call. How could she possibly have known her? And yet one hour later Mme de Villeparisis sent us some pears and grapes which we recognized as the same. The next morning we met Mme de Villeparisis as we came away from the symphony concert which was given every day on the beach. The day before I had bumped into Bloch there, who told me that he never missed it because the musical director, who was a great musician (according to him), played several pieces from Wagner and transcriptions from Schumann. And he had recited to me some fine quotations from Baudelaire on Wagner and from Schopenhauer on music. In this way I came to hear extracts from Lohengrin, Rheingold, Schumann's Carnaval, the Dream of Brunhilde wherein the same phrases that I had heard at the end of the Walkyries were able, when rediscovered in a different place and no longer preparing the sleep of the Virgin but her resurrection, to show the same new and mysterious meaning as those rosy glimmers, those oblique rays which I had seen again after spending a night in a railway train, so often heralding the ending but this time the beginning of the day. Knowing the music to reflect the "Whims of its own nature and all the spectacles of the universe" I did not consider for a moment the idea that Schumann could have sought to depict anything quite so limited, of such amusing but mediocre importance, and, if I applied it to my own tastes, as boring and as vulgar as a night at the carnival. It was the alternations of irresistible joy and unutterable melancholy to which the spirit gives itself up by turns that I sought to seize upon in this music. And convinced that the pieces that I heard expressed the loftiest of truths, I tried to raise myself in so far as I could in order to understand them, and put back into them all that was best and most profound in my own nature at that time. But, as we came out of the concert, and, on our way back to the hotel, had stopped for a moment on the front, my grandmother and I, to exchange a few words with Mme de Villeparisis who told us that she had ordered some croque-monsieurs and a dish of creamed eggs for us at the hotel, I saw, in the distance, coming in our direction, the Princesse de Luxembourg, half leaning upon a parasol in such a way as to impart to her tall and wonderful form that slight inclination, to make it trace that arabesque, so dear to the women who had been beautiful under the Empire and knew how, with drooping shoulders, arched backs, concave hips and taut legs, to make their bodies float as softly as a silken scarf about the rigid armature of an invisible shaft which might be supposed to have transfixed it. Mme de Villeparisis introduced my grandmother and was about to introduce me, but she did not know my name. She had perhaps never known it, or if she had must have forgotten years ago to whom my grandmother had married her daughter. The name appeared to make a sharp impression on her. Meanwhile the Princesse de Luxembourg had offered us her hand, smiling as if at a joke. As a street vendor passed she bought everything that he had and held it out to my grandmother and myself as one might to a baby and its nurse, then pushed it, all tied up in packets, into my pocket telling me "You give some to your grandmother to eat." She called Mme de Villeparisis by her Christian name and invited her to dine the next day. From time to time her eyes rested on us, smiling, with a thousand little signs of understanding, just as one might look at a deaf mute with whom one cannot converse but wishes to show that one is fond of them. And her smile was so sweet that at any moment I thought that she was about to stretch out her hand and stroke us, my grandmother and me, like the strange but tame animals that we see at the Jardin d'Acclimatation. Another street vendor passed with his cakes, and again she bought them and put them into my other pocket. Then she bade her farewells to Mme de Villeparisis, and turning towards us held out her hand with a smile, just as we might amuse ourselves by saying goodbye to small children as if they were grown-ups, and continued her stroll on the esplanade bathed in sunshine, curving her magnificent figure which wound itself like a snake around her white parasol printed with blue designs. "Are you," she had asked me, "the son of the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry? Indeed, I'm told your father is a most charming man. He is having a splendid holiday just now."
   A few days earlier we had heard, in a letter from Mamma, that my father and his travelling companion M. de Montfort had lost their luggage.
   "It has been found, or rather it was never really lost. I can tell you what happened," explained Mme de Villeparisis, who, without our knowing how, seemed to be far better informed than ourselves about my father's travels. "I think your father is now planning to come home earlier, next week, in fact, as he will probably give up the idea of going to Algeciras. But he's anxious to spend a day longer in Toledo, since he's an admirer of a pupil of Titian - I forget the name - whose work can only be seen properly there."
   And I wondered by what strange accident, in the impartial telescope through which Mme de Villeparisis considered, from a safe distance, the minuscule, perfunctory, vague agitation of the host of people whom she knew, there had come to be inserted at the spot through which she observed my father a fragment of glass of prodigious magnifying power which made her see in such high relief and in the fullest detail everything that was agreeable about him, the contingencies that obliged him to return home, his difficulties with the customs, his admiration for El Greco, and, altering the scale of her vision, showed her this one man, so large among all the rest so small, like that of Jupiter to whom Gustave Moreau, when he portrayed him by the side of a weak mortal, gave a superhuman stature.
   My grandmother bade Mme de Villeparisis good-bye, so that we might stay and take in the fresh air for a little while longer outside the hotel, until they signalled to us through the glazed partition that our lunch was ready. We could hear a commotion. The young mistress of the king of the savages had been down to bathe and was now coming back to the hotel.
   "Really and truly, it's a perfect plague, it's enough to make one decide to emigrate!" cried the barrister in a towering rage as he crossed her path. Meanwhile the notary's wife was following the bogus queen with eyes that seemed ready to start from their sockets.
   "I can't tell you how angry Mme Blandais makes me when she stares at those people like that," said the barrister to the judge, "I feel I want to slap her. That's just the way to make the wretches appear important, which is of course the very thing that they want. Do ask her husband to tell her what a fool she's making of herself. I swear I won't go out with them again if they stop and gape at those masqueraders."
   As to the coming of the Princesse de Luxembourg, whose carriage, on the day she had left the fruit, had drawn up outside the hotel, it had not passed unobserved by the little group of wives, the notary's, the barrister's and the judge's, who had already for some time past been extremely anxious to know whether that Mme de Villeparisis whom everyone treated with such respect - which all these ladies were burning to hear that she did not deserve - was a genuine Marquise and not an adventuress. Whenever Mme de Villeparisis passed through the hall the judge's wife, who scented irregularities everywhere, would lift her nose from her needlework with her face in her hands and the air of someone examining a suspicious dish which he has no intention of trying in a way that made her friends die with laughter.
   "Oh well, you know," she proudly explained, "I always begin by believing the worst. I will never admit that a woman is properly married until she has shown me her birth certificate and her marriage licence. But never fear - just wait till I've finished my little investigation."
   And so every evening the ladies would come together and laughingly ask: "Any news?"
   But on the evening of the Princesse de Luxembourg's call the judge's wife laid a finger on her lips.
   "I've discovered something."
   "Oh, isn't Mme Poncin simply wonderful? I never saw ... But do tell us! What's happened?"
   "Just listen to this. A woman with yellow hair and six inches of paint on her face and a carriage which reeked of harlot a mile away - which only a creature like that would dare to have - came here today to call on the so-called Marquise!"
   "Oh-yow-yow! Tut-tut-tut-tut. Did you ever! Why it must be the woman we saw - you remember, Leader - we said at the time that we didn't at all like the look of her, but we didn't know it was the 'Marquise' she'd come to see. A woman with a nigger-boy you mean?"
   "That's the one."
   "You don't say! Do you happen to know her name?"
   "Yes, I made a mistake on purpose. I picked up her card. She trades under the name of the 'Princesse de Luxembourg'! Wasn't I right to have my doubts about her?"
   As the Bricquebec doctor whom my grandmother had called to see me had determined that I ought not to stay out on the beach all day where there was no shade (who had also written out innumerable prescriptions for me which my grandmother accepted with a show of respect but I could at once discern her firm resolve to ignore them all), my grandmother accepted an offer from Mme de Villeparisis to take us for drives in her carriage. In order not to tire me, on those days I had to stay in bed until lunch and, because of the very bright sunlight, I had to keep those same great red curtains, which had provoked so much hostility towards me on that first night, closed for as long as possible. But in spite of the pins which Françoise attached to them every evening so as to prevent any daylight penetrating through, and which she alone knew how to undo, and despite the sheets and the pieces of cloth which she put up here and there, variously adjusting their positions, she never managed to close them completely, so that they allowed a scarlet leaf fall of anemones to shine through onto the carpet, amongst which I was unable to prevent myself from placing my bare feet. And on the opposite wall an unattached cylinder of gold rose vertically, gradually shifting its position like the pillar of light that preceded the Hebrews in the desert. I went back to bed, and without stirring relished in my imagination, at one and the same time, the pleasures of play, of bathing, of strolling in the sunshine which the morning seemed to invite, and the joy of it made my heart beat clamorously like a machine working at full speed but immobile, which must discharge itself on the spot by revolving around itself. Sometimes it would be the hour of the high tide. I could hear from the heights of my belvedere the noise of the gently breaking waves punctuated by the cries of children at play, newspaper vendors and bathers as if they were the mewling cries of seagulls. Then suddenly at ten o'clock the symphony concert would burst to life beneath my windows. In the interludes in the music the watery billows took up the flow and continued the glissando of the music and seemed to envelop the strokes of the violins with its crystal volutes and caused its spray to gush forth over the intermittent echoes of a sub-aquatic music. As the time for lunch approached I would run to my grandmother's room to see if Françoise was about to come and unfasten the curtains and fetch me my things. Her room did not look out directly on the sea, as mine did, but was open on three of its four sides - onto a strip of the esplanade, a courtyard, and a view of the country inland - it was furnished differently from mine, with armchairs embroidered with metallic filigree and pink flowers from which the cool and pleasant odour that greeted one on entering seemed to emanate. And at that hour when the sun's rays, drawn from different exposures and, as it were, from different hours of the day, broke the angles of the wall, changed the shape of the room, projected onto the chest of drawers, side by side with a reflection of the beach, a festal altar as variegated as a bank of field flowers, hung on the fourth wall the folded, quivering, warm wings of a radiance ready at any moment to resume its flight, warmed like a bath a square of provincial carpet before the window overlooking the courtyard, at the end of which a wall bleached like limestone gave the appearance of being cut off from the midday, and added to the charm and complexity of the room's furniture by seeming to pluck and scatter the petals of the silken flowers on the chairs and to make their silver threads stand out from the fabric, this room in which I lingered for a moment before going to get ready for our drive suggested a prism in which the colours of the light that shone outside were broken up, a hive in which the sweet juices of the day which I was about to taste were distilled, scattered, intoxicating and visible, a garden of hope which dissolved in a quivering haze of silver threads and rose petals. I went back to my room. Françoise came in to give me some daylight as I rose myself up, impatient to know what sort of sea it was that was playing that morning by the shore, like a Nereid. For none of those seas ever stayed with us longer than a day. The next day there would be another, which sometimes resembled its predecessor. But I never saw the same one twice.
   There were some that were of so rare a beauty that my pleasure on catching sight of them was enhanced by surprise, as if present before a miracle. By what privilege, on one morning rather than another, did the window on being uncurtained disclose to my wondering eyes the nymph Alecto, whose lazy beauty, gently breathing, had the transparency of a vapourous emerald through which I could see teeming the ponderable elements that coloured it? She made the sun join in her play, with a smile attenuated by an invisible haze which was no more than a space kept vacant about the translucent surface, which, thus curtained, was rendered more striking, like those goddesses whom the sculptor carves in relief upon a block of marble the rest of which he leaves unchiselled. So, in her matchless colour, she invited us over those rough terrestrial roads, from which, sitting with Mme de Villeparisis in her barouche, we should glimpse, all day long and without ever reaching it, the coolness of her soft palpitation. But