Notes for Le Temps retrouvé

[Cahier 57, NAF 16697]

  Capital: The structure of this chapter could be
1. The publication of my article makes me not want to work and causes me to go into society (This first point not of great importance).
2. (very important) It might seem strange that to go out to enter into society might create impression, but nothing is just in ourselves, society in ourselves, and impressions due to differences in sensibility (go by motor car part of the way)
3. Capital. Time found again which is to say the whole explanation of the aesthetic during the buffet.
4. Most capital but this endless time can only be realized by a creature submissive to time, which makes my task very perilous, I would be given a proof of it upon entering the drawing-room.Then the costume ball etc. (into which I could introduce if I want that changes in time could serve as the framework for time found again in the numerous less precious passages of the novel by making felt the physical and psychological differences of intensity according to changes of position in regard to people, planets etc. And this will finish with Gilberte proposing that I come to Combray, the sound of her father ringing the bell and the crutches of time (Gilberte and bell doubtful).

  The moment when I hear the sound of the knife just as it was and not as I had seen it again, for an instant it caressed my thoughts not only with the view of the sea as it was on that particular morning. Like the wings of cherubim who make a thousand turns in a moment (?) all the sensations that I felt at the same time as that one, the odour of the room, wanting lunch, the uncertainty of going for a walk, the presence of the pyramid-shaped ceiling above me, all of that attached together and turning like the thousand wings of cherubim who make a thousand turns a minute, caresses my soul with the memory of a vanished world, but a world that was not like a flat picture but like the pictures in the memory with every dimension all the qualities of sensation, accompanied by my existence from that time, my thoughts from that time,fully formed, replete, existing in total reality. And so it was at the following moment my thoughts no longer felt its touch, because to feel it it needed a second for not only what I was seeing in the library to be annulled to make way [incomplete]

   Before the napkin at the time when the trees said nothing to me: Just as despite my promise given once upon a time to the hawthorns, my life had withered away since Combray. Hardly a few apple trees in flower, compared to the flowers of days gone by when I was even delighted by asparagus.

   To be placed with the starch in the napkin. My pleasure was not only in the beautiful colours of the sea, the sunshine in my room, the reflection of the boats in the chest of drawers, the thought of a nice lunch. I rejoiced in that instant of my life that at that moment was sustaining those impressions, in that instant of my life that had at its surface on one side the beautiful sea, on the other the walk to be taken, on a third the moment when it was lunchtime, and which was a tendency, a hunger for all that but which perhaps at that particular moment a slight tiredness or some other feeling prevented me from fully enjoying the pleasure, which I now felt, delicious, pure and disembodied.

   To go before my arrival at the Princesse (who is perhaps Mme de St Euverte?) de Guermantes, if it is the day when my article has appeared - and after my joy to have read it and the telegrams that I had received. Unfortunately I immediately felt that this small success, if it could be called that, would not help me in any way to work. Because encouragement is not help and the wish does not correspond to the ability. And in any case great ability would not have been any more useful. There formed in me a feeling of satisfaction, feelings of affection for the people who spoke well of my article to me, a wish to see them, to be obliging to them, to thank them, to chat with them, something analogous to friendship, that is to say something superficial which produces tender conversations, touching behaviour, but absolutely no piece of work, which is why on the contrary we must renounce others and go back into ourselves, because the first result of that feeling of pleasure was not to be left alone to think but to instill in me a desire for going out and seeing people, and for the first time in a long time to go out into society. I had received an invitation from the Princesse de Guermantes: This seemed to me an opportunity to see them again. Fortunately society is not an obstacle to art if in my case it is realized, just as great events do not necessarily furnish us with great ability whatever people say after wars etc. (If need be quote Flaubert, correspondence about La Caussade I think). But that day was going to have a quite different effect on me than the telegrams that I received would have done. I had not gone out in a very long time.  Then will follow the exaltation that it provides me before which I will need to have mentioned the memory of trees that I see clearly but without finding any beauty in them. All this developing in a long section and to this despair at having no great talent there follow as soon as I get up (Make a note of the contrast by a But as soon as I resolved to get up or as soon as I was ready to go out) the successive deep impressions of memory (ray of sunlight on the balcony and the weathercock would be very good here). Then floor of the baptistry etc., it is summer, think about doors linked to flowering foliage that one opens getting out of an open cab (going to get news from Hermann meeting with Paul Goldsmith) the new Guermantes mansion could be in the Parc Monceau.

   To be put in for feelings about the past.
And immediately Venice and Saint Mark's that were no longer anything to me but dry, thin images, these purely visual images, these "views" in which we transform things we have lived and perceived at the same time with all our senses and which at the same time externalize themselves so well, detach themselves so perfectly from us, divest themselves so well from life that we come to believe we have seen them simply in an album or in a museum, Venice and Saint Mark's, like seeds that have been frozen for years and that we thought were dead and which all of a sudden upon exposure to moisture* begin once again to germinate, spread themselves out with all the sensations of warmth, of light, of reflections, of a sea voyage in the Middle Ages that I felt on being taken every day by gondola upon those springtime waters, into the cool baptistry where my mother threw a shawl over my shoulders. The square was attached to the church, the landing place to the square, the canal to the landing place, and to what my eyes were seeing the whole passage* of desires, of diverse sensations, of life at the extremity and depth of which our eyes make out an image of reality [incomplete]

   We take pleasure in going deeply into our soul to inhale only at the times our refreshed memories begin once again to exhale their perfume.

   When I was away from my home, I heard in a chimney that had been set up a noise that I took to be made by the water heater. And before I recognized it I had become aware of the white flood of mist blocking out the countryside like a fresco from which preserved alone there surged an oblong-shaped hill; I sensed the warmth of chocolate, the hope of a beautiful morning. But the suffering of remembering my first visit when I had kissed Albertine was no longer a part of it. It is the same with unhappy memories as with deaths - they are quickly effaced and we find in them now only nature, the morning and evening air, the grass, the flowers.

  Note
   I can probably say, when I have understood what there is that is real in the common essence of memory and it was that that I wanted to hold onto (but not yet knowing that that is possible through art, knowing only that it was not possible either through travel, love or through the intellect) that I heard Vinteuil's quartet through the door (whose compositions that morning party would be devoted to). And I will say something like this: as in days gone by at Combray when, having exhausted the joys that the hawthorns provided me and not wanting to ask of them one more flower, I saw on the ascending road to Tansonville a focus for new joys born for me out of a bush of pink thorn, in the same way, no longer having any new joy to embrace in Vinteuil's sonata, all at once upon hearing the beginning of the quartet I felt that I was experiencing this joy anew, the same and yet still intact, enveloping and revealing to my eyes another universe, similar but unknown; and the resemblance was achieved out of that which in the beginning of the quartet was so different from everything I knew, radiating, blazing with joyous scarlet gleams; it was a morsel of pale carnation, it was the sonata in pink. Vinteuil's sonata had appeared to me as an entire world, but I world that I knew completely, and here the God who created it had not exhausted its power by creating a second one, which is to say one that was completely different, just as original as was the sonata, to such a degree that the sonata that had seemed to me a totality, was nothing less than a unity, so that I had now gone beyond the notion of the single one and understood that it was a multiplicity thanks to the genius which proved to me that the beauty whose essence he had manifested in the sonata had still many more secrets to tell, many more paradises to open up. I had not comprehended that the species of beauties that it contained was not entirely exhausted and consumed in it; when I tried to imagine them, I imagined them in relation to the sonata, I was simply retouching dull pastiches. And all of a sudden this rosy phrase, just as marvellous as that of the sonata had appeared to me the first time, but quite different, which I could never have imagined, had just been born, as if it were there beside a young girl, a quite different sister. It created before me, drawing from the silence and the night in the flush of dawn, the forms of an unknown and delightful world which was shaping itself bit by bit in front of me. And this new world was incorporeal, the singular form that it projected in front of me in a crimson glow was that of a different feeling of pleasure from other feelings of pleasure, like the mysterious and shadowy joy that would emanate from the good tidings of the morning angel. Most certainly there were considerable similarities between the Sonata and the Quartet. Without a doubt Swann had been correct back then to call the phrase from the sonata: an immaterial creature, a fairy captured by Vinteuil, snatched by him from the world of the supernatural. But as for those supernatural creatures, it is curious that a certain affinity, a mysterious correspondence between the human mind and their immortal phalanxes ensures that they will always be the same ones that thrive in the work by the same artist, whereas in that of another artist it will be others that are elected to reside. So it was that Vinteuil had certain phrases which, whatever he was talking about, whatever subject he was discussing, inhabited his work of which they were the familiar residents, dryads and nymphs, beautiful and divine strangers whose language we do not know and yet we understand so well! so tender and so beautiful that when I feel them pass and pass again between the nocturnal mask of sounds that conceals their face from me for ever, my heart grows tight in feeling so close beside me the only creatures who had ever spoken a new word of love to me and my eyes fill with tears. It was not only Vinteuil's phrases that one recognized in the quartet, as in the harmonies that began to create a mist over all his compositions from that sorrowful period when he wrote his sonata, those same mists that rose in the evening, from that time of his life, and floated here and there over his work. But when I felt that time was not really anything like the particular quality of an impression, of a feeling of joy that I had been unable to find in Balbec where nothing remained of that which contributed to the strangeness of its name (nor with Albertine). Love had not given it to me any longer either. The phrase could sometimes be unsteady in its sadness, it rang a full peal as of bells with a joy that streamed with sunshine more than any parts of the country I had seen, and already with the unfurling of certain harmonies from the sonata was it not displaying more sunshine than the waves at Balbec at midday? What I was feeling then was it not the same feeling that I had experienced just now upon hearing the spoon, upon walking over the uneven paving stones, and is it not something necessary to our spirit to not truly feel the pure savour of a thing other than when it is evoked by another; and indeed I had never felt the sweetness of the morning sea in the mist in the same way as I had in the angel of white stone on a fresco by Elstir where she was so pale and hazy with mist. I had rediscovered it just now on hearing the clatter of the spoon and feeling the unevenness of the paving stones.It was accordingly something of such an essence that I was hearing in this quartet; and it reminded me that sometimes too in certain phrases of Bergotte's, in the colour of one of Elstir's paintings, I had felt that revelation of those particular qualities of the soul's emotions that we do not find in the real world. In this way then it was the work of art which like a spectrum revealed the composition of [individuals].

Most capital
   In a place where I talk about bachelors in art (Stany and Saussine applauding. To applaud? Even to always listen is too much) I say that they tell me: "I heard it. It is devilishly good." Add this Most capital, they say to me in a natural tone of voice: I was at the concert where they were playing some things by Vinteuil (because it would be better for it to be Vinteuil). I must confess to you that it didn't drive me away. Then my bachelor hastened to add on the down side: They began the quartet. (At which point his face expressed uneasiness, distraction, as if there had been a fire, in a completely colourless voice as if he had told me that he could see sparks, you could smell burning, people were shouting fire. The same with Mme Verdurin's migraines, emotions taken to the letter to show how strong they are. And yet it is not necessarily sterile because this was the same way that Elstir spoke to me about painting when he had not yet extricated himself from that milieu. Follow on from the margin after +, let his age become apparent when he exclaims: "Ah, but I tell myself, damn it, everything changes! Ye gods, what I just heard, it's exasperating, it's appallingly badly written, it is ponderous, but it is extraordinary, but then it's not to everyone's taste. I'll have to listen to it again. And I'm on my eighth time old chap, but I tell you, penny to a pound, it won't be the last."

   MOST CAPITAL
   To be placed when I arrive at the soirée and do not recognize people.
   A gentleman came up to me. Good evening. Don't you recognize me? I looked at him closely. I was certain I had never seen those ruddy cheeks, that white beard before. Then from the depths of this unknown being in which he was held captive and as if his real self was struggling to reach mine, he said, like a masked man at a ball who is informing us of his identity: "I am M. de Cambremer." At that point the enchantment that had made M. de Cambremer invisible to me fell away and I could see that he was speaking the truth however much the form in which he spoke to me differed from that under which I had known him as if, by a genuine metempsychosis he had been turned into a toad or a linden tree. He himself appeared to be ashamed of his new form, and he spoke to me in the same supplicating tone as the shades of the dead, in Erebus (verify Erebus) when they surround Ulysses and try to make him recognize them.
   This capital bit could be applied to somebody other than M. de Cambremer (Desjardins). On the other hand the word masked could be saved for somebody else. And perhaps I could even consider metempsychosis here and when I have enumerated everybody I will put in the comparison with Homer and can say: This whole crowd pressed around me like the dead in The Odyssey coming to tell Ulysses their name and reminding him of the past. (Check in The Odyssey).

   In literature there must be something in the things one wants to say where it is like the pod of a pea just as much as it is constructed, let's not be pretentious and say a cathedral, but like a dress (this in the case of composition) marking out a path and setting up bridges (this is less good).

   When I talk about the style of Romain Rolland and Bergotte too (?) who wrote about the war. They said that they were doing it to rebuild the moral unity of the nation (get hold of the exact wording from Desjardins, Action Morale), for the triumph of Right (Dreyfus affair) (or the war) which prevented them from thinking about literature. But these were excuses and because they no longer possessed genius, which is to say instinct, (which could be added to the theory further on about the intelligence) (and in the large blue exercise book Bergotte and the war). Because instinct dictates the task and intelligence provides the excuses for avoiding it. But what makes art the true reality, and the most austere school of life, and behind it true judgement, is that there is no place for excuses, intentions count for nothing, and at every moment the artist must listen to his instinct.
   Sensibility furnishes the material to which the intelligence brings light. It is the combustible material (put that somewhere).
   As regards Bergotte I will say that for his first books the public, who after reading them had in short contracted a debt towards him that said we are waiting for the next ones: he owes them to us. When he became famous old Bloch will say complacently as if he was sitting at the dinner table: his articles are tiresome, I think he stinks. People who admire him without understanding anything will say he has a beautiful use of language, he is an important figure, he has the great manner.

   As regards the models I have made use of (Caen church, de Falaise etc.) and to construct a dress etc., I shall say that the models (especially the characters) were as numerous so as to have a single residue as were the cuts of meat that Françoise bought to construct her boeuf à la mode. So that I was constructing this book like a dress (enumeration of other images) and I brought it all together like a jelly. (This new image to be added).

   Before the matinée some snob not yet welcomed in society (Legrandin or Bloch) will say to me provokingly that I say the Marquise de Saint-Loup: "But isn't the Marquise de Saint-Loup plain and simply Mlle Swann? She doesn't need to make such a fuss. I knew her mother (as if it diminished her that he had known her. Grunebaum humility).

   Most capital. When I say that the materials for a literary vocation, frivolity, laziness, grief, had come to me without my recognizing them: they were also accumulated in me without my knowledge, as unknown to me as in a plant are the reserves of (put in an example taken from the vegetable world, wheat or I don't know what, although maybe that doesn't work with wheat perhaps which is just wheat in our regions).

   To be put when I receive the invitation from Mme de Guermantes (Mancieux*) the name Guermantes (the château) written on the letter did not seem to me to be that of a material building, but like something coming back from history and from nature, a distance out of which the letter seemed to come to me from the time of Geneviève de Brabant. Yet today I know plenty of people whose situation is as grand as the Guermantes' and who did not interest me at all however. I had not imagined them in relation to a name or a title before getting to know them. For me Mme de Guermantes was in incarnation of the Idea, in the platonic sense, of the Duchesse. Was that acquaintance any more false than the ones I had with the various lady duchesses that I had known? In the end probably not; it had its own truth since the impression that the Guermantes had made on me in my childhood was the same as was felt and recognized by all the other young people. That same concordance is also a truth. La Rochefoucauld signature, Josephe Labursa.*

   When I speak about those people who are intelligent but a bit stupid who believe successively in antisemitism, in Wagnerism, in anti-Wagnerism (Forain: Their opisons, after Wagner, poison gas) I need to attach it perhaps when I am talking about coteries that form a kaleidoscope (if it is in that bit where I say it). And that will allow the worldly kaleidoscope to be enlarged, saying: A simple worldly kaleidoscope you might think. Not at all because it simply reflects all the political, social, religious ideas that follow on from one another in the minds of ideologues and that guide nations, cause wars (or at least the prolongation of wars as did Priam), revolution (Dreyfus affair), dismiss Jews from employment, etc., all of that diminishing despite the profusion that their refraction gives them in the masses to the short life of certain ideas whose novelty seduces certain minds not over particular in matters of proof, as if their continued existence after a few years wears them out out, so that everybody clamours in chorus: France for the French, Christianity is against nature. No lame peace etc., we didn't ask for war, now we must have Alsace-Lorraine etc. and we at a little time and distance to judge and blame the august and contemptible Franz Josef, the king of Serbia assassin then venerable etc., and the Japanese monstrous to the Russians and then their allies, the British monstrous to the Boers etc. But to come back to anti-Wagnerism etc., as all ideologies change but follow on from each other without interruption, the man of intelligence who does not ascribe to them has in reality a perpetual rock of Sisyphus to roll back. He thinks he has finished with anticlericalism, then antisemitism rears its head; he has finished with antisemitism and then it is anti-Germanism, to anti-Wagnerism the people who talk about the music of the future are succeeded by people who talk about music of the past, German music can stay in the mists of the North, Ibsen if there is war with Sweden, Tolstoy and the Ballets Russes if there is war with Russia, Kipling more imperialist than all of German literature (quote something by Ruskin about England, Sesame and Lilies) Annunzio etc. If a decent piece can be made out of all that.

   Say about one of those recent reviews about which people have objected that the portrayal of an aristocratic society and a work from which the people are absent is not necessarily insignificant and quote as examples the Memoirs of Saint-Simon, that one of the most intelligent, hard-working and best intentioned among the writers for the Review had replied: I confess that the portrayal of all those useless people leaves me quite indifferent, I can't go into all that in ten pages, which in any case had brought a smile to the lips of a writer of excellent taste whatever his social position who founded the review and for whom the aristocratic character of certain scenes from Balzac and Stendhal and often artists like Flaubert, did not stop him considering these works as the most beautiful in all French literature.

   When I talk about Bergotte (perhaps at this point: And you too, you will pass away). Even at that moment his glory was undergoing an eclipse. Just as the most recent great works of art that had created an impression turned out to have a certain philosophical and religious ideal, it happened that (a factor common to all periods because the faculty of experiencing ideas, of assimilating them, of considering them, had always been much more prevalent than true literary taste, but which is more extensive today when reviews, literary magazines have multiplied considerable and along with them the artificially created vocations of writers) the finest section of our young people, the most intelligent, the most impartial was fired up by such ideals and surmised that this was the criterium for the value of a work. Doubtless they would have been greatly astonished had they been told that they were repeating the error of the Davids, the Chenevards, the Brunetières about the portrayal of great subjects and ideas, because the error is never repeated in exactly the same way and those who fall into it do not recognize it. By being classed among the writers who pursue Art for Art's sake, Bergotte appeared to them to be inferior for that reason. Furthermore these young people were smitten with an art that was populist, with a return to the people, and the world depicted by Bergotte was the world of elegant society, the portrayal of which could not be anything other than puerile. And thus the work of Bergotte seemed to them to be capable only of appealing to people from this same world because it frequently portrayed that special world and also because of the complexity of his "writing" which could only appeal to people of refinement. Place here as a response (no doubt it will go better there) the section already written that the general public are more interested in people in society and yet on the other hand that the people in society are not at all the refined ones.
[margin] Before this sentence say that this notion of youth towards social tendencies was increased tenfold by inquiries in which youth said what it was.
Also had this current of ideas not invaded the most intelligent section of society in which was found at its natural foundation the scorn felt in society for all that is worldly and which is filled with enthusiasm for art that is social. Accordingly when it is the intellect that chooses to place itself in judgement over works of art, there are no longer any certainties, nothing is fixed, one may prove anything one wants. Also are there not in literature the same phenomena that are found in politics where changes in opinion slowly construct a great man of state from an ancient and long forgotten minister and who is no different from all the others. A writer who is inferior to Bergotte, much more worldly in his tastes, but much less perfect in his style yet having portrayed with some intelligence certain popular milieux, comes one day to establish a connection, a sort of coincidence between a certain academic flair that he had in his style and the religious and philosophical ideas that it seemed vain to express to young people.
[margin] Say concerning this writer, an old joke, that he had become an idol to young people, just as a moderate is accepted for no apparent reason by the socialist party.
This happy result has him crowned as the greatest writer of the day. Secretly loving society, he walked around dressed as an old bohemian among the young people and inveighed against society. In the recent reviews they contrasted the humanity of his writing with Bergotte's dilettantism. In reality he had much less talent. Bergotte knew that next to him Legrandin was nothing. In Legrandin's pages that were being quoted in contrast to his own, he recognized a host of mediocre ideas that he himself would never have dared express, banalities thinly disguised through the use of the most vulgar language, and in the same issue he saw attacks being made on his best books. He had nothing but scorn for these attacks but he suffered on account of them. Which did not stop the young people who were writing such things from being, when all is said and done, an elite of impartial labourers in comparison with the host of successful journalists or novelists who had still fewer literary gifts than they did and much less intelligence and impartiality. But they showed me by their example that if I still did not clearly understand how when the intellect puts itself in a position to touch upon works of art so as to judge them everything becomes muddled and
   See four pages further on, opposite page, in blue pencil something that could come after this or on the same lines.

   Capital: the judgements from which I would have to defend myself for making about Romain Rolland and for following the fashionable aesthetic, would come together to add to the confusion of theories that always follow the upheavals of war and make those that preceded them despised. After the Revolution no case was ever made for Watteau's civic responsibility. And yet perhaps in the entire glory of France does he not come in for a greater part of it than Vien? Barrès himself who wrote recently that to be a poet the imagination is more necessary than the heart, now writes (Écho de Paris in the articles about his stay in Italy in June? 1916) that Titian prefers the glory of his homeland (see the exact article). And that is exactly right if we are satisfied with the result. Yes a great artist prepares the glory of his homeland, but on condition that he does not realize it, which is to say by not allowing reason to interfere in the choice of his work, whereas Barrès does not quite mean to say that. Besides (this could be included with what I say about the laws that the artist discovers) these laws have no relation to his moral goodness. It is often painful for the mild mannered man to make discoveries by anatomical analysis. Laclos wrote Les Liaisons dangereuses. Flaubert suffered by living among the middle-classes in Yonville. And it can be cruel for certain people to write a work in which their calling does not permit them to portray the finer virtues that they have known all around them but to be constantly stooping down to monstrosities. The Church Fathers must have experienced that.

   When I talk about the sensation of the paving stones in Venice, of the spoon and the pleasure it gives me and around which I now want to arrange my life (if I haven't said so say it because for what follows I'm sure that I haven't said it) I knew very well that this pleasure alone was fruitful and real; I do not even speak of worldly pleasures that have certainly provided me with their adulterated make-up without stimulating anything in me other than boredom, the discomfort caused by poor nourishment, about friendship which was a mere stimulation since for various moral reasons in that it ensures that the man who renounces his work for his friends knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist, friends being friends only within that sweet folly that we hold onto through the course of our life, to which we yield, but deep down in our minds we can see the error of the madman who believes that the furniture is alive and who holds conversations with it (put this rather when I say that I like young girls best, at Balbec) and he behaves in the same way as a toiler interrupts his work on a masterpiece to receive a visitor out of politeness, and does not reply like Nehemia on his ladder "non possum descendere magnum opus facto" which ought to be the motto of every artist whom it is just as absurd to reproach for locking himself up in his ivory tower as it is to reproach bees in their honeycombs or caterpillars in their cocoons. But talking of more genuine pleasures,  even that which I had taken with the young girls at Balbec, which it was also more costly to renounce because of the
   Take up on the following page opposite

   Following on from the previous page by the margin
because of the suffering that was connected to it, that of feeling a person belongs to me, and brings me sweet food from far away like bees bringing back their honey, like Albertine coming back to me when I had had Françoise search for her on that sweet day when I had waited for her while playing Wagner, that pleasure was less powerful because it was less real and more selfish than the one that would be more difficult to take but which at least did not destroy itself by its own enjoyment like the one of feeling that Albertine was mine and which as soon as I felt it I no longer appreciated since I had believed that I was bored waiting for her returning from the Trocadéro whereas I became more and more exalted in my deep study of the noise of the spoon, the taste of the cup of tea or the staggered movements of the steeples.

   to mention somewhere. Moreover Françoise's use of language will seem less unusual day by day, because novels being written by journalists, newspapers written by the most vulgar people, and nobody knowing French any longer, the faults that in the past might be identified with a peasant, have now tended to become current in "feature articles". Yesterday an Academician wrote "the instant when" in the sense of "from the moment that", just as Françoise might say, and tomorrow perhaps this Academician will say like Françoise that he is stopping in Neuilly meaning he is staying there.

   I called for Françoise. "Françoise," I ask her, "do we have a girl who comes to bring the milk?" "Yes, Monsieur." "A young girl?" "About seventeen or eighteen." "With large white hands?" "Yes, Monsieur." "Has she already been?" "No, she will be here in an hour." "Tell her to come through and speak to me." It was because I had seen a young dairymaid, not through the doorway of her dairy but through the coloured glass of a dream that I had had the night before in which she was passing by but turning her smiling eyes back towards me. I called to her, she did not hear me and I awoke. But her reflection projected before me made life precious to me, a life in which I hoped to find her again and I would dream about the dairy for several days. In the end I found a young dairymaid who pleased me. But I do not know if she looked like that one. The young dairymaid came in, but to justify having had her called through I put so much attention into explaining to her, asking her complicated questions about different types of cream, going into the next room to look for money, and not actually looking at her so that at most all I could see was that she did not look like the girl whose turned gaze I felt still in my heart. I put my clothes on and went out, going from dairy to dairy. I could still see in my mind's eye the face of the dairymaid whose friend I wanted to be. I knew that I would never see her. But I saw too in my mind's eye the face of the young milk seller, the face of Mlle de Quimperlé, the face of my unknown woman at the Princesse de Guermantes' ball. They too I saw, my lips were moving towards them and I knew that I would never see them again because the first two were now very old and the other was dead.

   Continuation from four pages before (or if not continuation at least can be incorporated in the same pages).
   Because the reality of talent is a gift, a universal acquisition - which does not mean intellectual - whose presence we must establish first and foremost from beneath the apparent fashionable ideas and style. But it is at these that the critic stops in order to differentiate and classify authors. He will hail as a prophet a writer who brings us no new message but whose tone is peremptory, with the constant use of interjections and who is all puffed up with the sort of rhetoric that a sober medicine for the soul would hardly dare deny him from fear that there would be nothing left of him, like certain obese people or morphine addicts that one would not dare to make lose weight or take away their morphine for fear of killing them. This aberration by the critic is such that a writer must almost prefer to be judged by the general public were it not unfortunately incapable of taking into account even that which the writer has attempted because the nature of such research is unknown to it; apart from that there are more parallels between the public's good sense and the talents of a great writer who has never stopped listening and observing within himself and causing to make silent to all the rest nature and instinct, between the instinct of the public, and the talent of a great writer which is simply an instinct that has been brought to perfection, more clearly understood, still more religiously listened to, than is the case with the verbiage of the critic who does not know when to shut up, to look deep within himself or others, who compares things according to appearances and still today would be quite ready to revive under different names the same mistake that would not be recognized, Petrus Borel is promoted and Racine an old joke.

   Most capital. When I talk about the necessity for loving other young girls (the formula below being good to add to what I have said) what sadness when the memory stimulating the desire, searching back to the time it dated from, we comprehend that the person has not been able to preserve the freshness in real life that she has in our memory and that the surest means of finding a little beauty that comes close to her, is to look for it at an age that is close to that of the one we remember, which is to say, and oh how tragic! to look for it in a different person.

   See on the back an important detail
   phrase to be added to Most capital
   (this phrase to be placed after the one (probably) where I say that he will be found dead.) Poor labourers, like invalids, like our sainted soldiers, with any leisure an unknown thing to them, know what life is, or rather what is death and resurrection. They give through their fatigue a part of their life that they feel has been cut off from them during the precarious hours in which they were no longer in a state to face any task, any suffering, the simple functions of life, feeling themselves close to death. Alone, they still think that they will experience the miracle of sleep and rest, they can sleep for two nights together, and suddenly surprised, on the third morning of the third day, feel the boulder lifted and the triumphal day of the resurrection.
   Most Capital.
   While I was musing to myself, one of the singers and his wife who were to perform, came in timidly, and used to being dismissed as counting for nothing by the servants, made their appearance in order to perform their parts for one last time. Prematurely aged and with his hair completely white, the man had no longer been able to find any engagements in the theatre for a long time, despite his great talent. But he gave singing lessons, always privately, to feed his young wife and his children. The dignity of his life, full of toil and difficulty, shone in his face of an over-worked old man. Seeing them and taken with pity as I had been earlier during Aimé's illness, I said to myself that I had placed far too much interest up until now in my curiosity for vice and that there was something far more beautiful and poignant in virtue. At that time my whole life had been spent in the company of wealthy people, or if they were poor were guaranteed riches through good fortune, like Françoise, by the unerring cricket on our hearth. Whereas the old man, whatever discomfort he was feeling, coughing, shivering with fever, having no means of taking a carriage when it was snowing, was forced to go out, to go and sing wherever he was wanted so that he could feed his children, to provide a scrap of elegance for his wife, at their wretched "students' mornings" where they felt obliged to provide refreshments. Never at rest, never able to think about himself, about the weariness of old age. We understand that the hair might quickly have turned white, that the veins can become distended, as can the arteries that burst one day when we find the poor artist fallen down dead, in the mud or the snow, while running to catch an omnibus. The young wife's dress in the grace of its trimmings caused me no less regret. I perceived everything that caused pain to the old husband and to her, the price that such ornate sleeves must have cost [missing text] so that she believed that she was obliged to come to the home of the Princesse de Guermantes who paid her very badly or did not even pay her at all and who, there was no doubt, barely appreciated her talent, any more than she did the husband's, who was not only so good, so loyal, who asked nothing for his efforts, but who was also such a great artist, nor did he ask anything for his wife who was a remarkable artist too. It was impossible to understand why [missing text] she had not, alone among so many other singers with less talent than her, been able to find an engagement. She loved this husband who was so much older than her, who had never been jealous because he knew she was virtuous. But not one single theatre director wanted her.

   For what is on the back or rather for what I say about the singer's dress perhaps a few pages on.
   In addition to which it must be said that this effort was certainly not without results even though it it was the only one that the artiste could hold on to.  Because the Princesse de Guermantes  having invited a poor secretary of her husband's (if he can be given a name - Aimé? - that would be better) he found all elegant women not actually elegant at all and said so with the presumption and haughtiness* [illegible] of common people (Charley perhaps). The person that he found the best and who I could finally identify from their description, the one that he had found most distinguished, most elegant, most beautiful, more proper than the others, was precisely the only one who was not from society and no doubt precisely because of that she had carried to the maximum the same kind of effort that Charley's mother or sisters made when they wanted to look finely dressed or to appear distinguished.

   P.S. there would also be a recitation of a little poetry, famous verses that nearly everybody knew. And she was pleased about their introduction into the programme. But the performer arrived, looked searchingly all around her, with a distracted expression, raised her hands with an air of supplication and uttered the first words like a groan. Each subsequent word was preceded by a similar gesture. Everybody present felt awkward before this display of sentiment as if it were something indecent. Nobody thought for a moment that this was the way to recite poetry. As time went on people got used to it, which is to say that they forgot their discomfort, they picked out what was good and compared different recitations in their own minds so that they could say this is better, that is less good. But initially, in the same way that when during a simple trial we see a barrister come forward and raise his arm in the air from which we see fall back the folds of his gown and begin to speak in a threatening tone of voice, we dare not look at our neighbours (this could be put somewhere, I don't really know, where the word needs taking out. Later on it is a question of a public that is already worn out. It will be explained by saying that this impression was strongly felt, or by very young people, or by people who were not used to listening to poetry recitals.)

   When I speak about the book I am to write: for it to have more strength I shall overfeed it like a weak child (in the part where I say I will prepare it as if for an offensive, I will construct it like a dress, etc.) I will spread it out on a table like pastry that one is going to use to make a tart, I will surmount it (or I will overcome it) like an obstacle.

   for the Book: I will hold out against it as if against an enemy (because of the fatigue from such great effort) I will conquer it like a friendship.

   for the Book: I shall create it like a world without leaving aside the mysteries that probably only have their explanation in other worlds (exterior or interior) for those mysteries that even from a positive point of view were the ones that had moved me most in my life (steeples) and whose signs I encountered again in Vinteuil's quartet. When I say that I shall create it like a world, add: But how pitiful its realization would be next to such ambitions. And yet I was not setting out for an ambition but for a reality and those mysteries that I had so often gathered like precious and mystical seeds.

   At one of these points. Already I was not fond of those theories in themselves because they were trenchant, ostentatious, because they were theories; their logical contents could impose upon me, but I thought that their existence was already a proof of their inferiority, like a genuinely sincere, good and well-brought-up child, when he goes to play with friends whose parents tell him: "Why don't you say what you think, first and foremost we are quite frank here" thinks that all of this shows a moral quality that is inferior to the purely and simply proper action which would be to say nothing. True art does not proclaim, and is accomplished in silence and discretion.

   Capital, when I talk about François de Champi, if I talk about it (and although this is inspired by Saint Mark's Rest I can't - without mentioning Saint Mark's, etc. bring together Combray and Venice). There were some pages in François de Champi and the book about (put one in about art) that I had read in Venice, now enriched by the memory of illustrations that had at least for the [between which] I saw Combray (say what I have said, that I saw again), the gondola moored in front of San Giorgio Maggiore where it is rocking gently in the shadow of the feet of the completely black columns of the Piazzetta. In this way they had become illustrated books, what they call in the language of learned scholars (check) iconographic books. And so as not to talk about François le Champi which has its merits, at any rate the last book which has very few +  was graced with illustrations that had enriched my memory and become precious like those ancient works of no intrinsic worth in themselves but between the leaves of which (check which town the great illustrators of books of hours reproduced).
[margin] + I was like those collectors who never read the texts of ancient books or the prayers that illustrated Fouquet but go into raptures over marvellous illuminations depicting a town which is always ... For in this little book that had become precious to me because of the illustrations that my memory had furnished it with, the town was never other... than Venice.It was between these pages of such true lustre that I saw the sublime scintillations of the waters of the Grand Canal.
Then again those illuminations in which the sapphire of the Grand Canal was scintillating was this only in paintings? It was not only a picture that we are seeing, it bathed me in all the sensations etc. and then bring together if it can possibly be done the lines that probably come a few pages on, where I say that I want to see again those moments in Venice - N.B. If I want to put myself back into that state of mind It's the second page of Saint Mark's Rest that made me see Venice again. This is the mediocre book that I am talking about. Besides it is not so mediocre as all that.

   In the same way that I'll present, like an illumination such as Parsifal's, the discovery of Time regained in the sensations of spoon, tea etc., this will be a second illustration dominating the composition of the chapter, yet subordinate to the first one and could be when I ask myself what is going to affirm the material of the book which will suddenly make me notice that all the episodes of my life have been a lesson in idealism (and it is in this way that I will recall in a single enumeration Germanophilia, homosexuality and for love I could say like Leconte de Lisle or Olympio And Love, even you [incomplete]

   Put here through lack of space:
   somewhere or other: also absurd to say that art from an era of speed must be short. It is like the people who thought that the coming war would necessarily be short. It has also been said that the railway and the motor car have restored our diligence in regard to our abandoned churches. Constant repetition.

   It will be better if Bloch dies (Caillavet) and I consider his whole fate next to mine like a bank of sand that one has seen formed over several years, childhood (that we recount today, our poor* classes at Condorcet, in magazines) in [...] , glory that Bergotte has suppressed, and that dethrones the people from the Revue Française (perhaps he will even be a Quillard*) so that Bergotte content with his death. Thus Bloch is added to the list of people who have died, a list that makes me have I don't know what thoughts.

   Capital when I evaluate the book: a book must be constructed, I do not say like a monument, but like a dress. We change things around etc. and at the last minute we make reinforcements to its strength and beforehand it must be prepared for like a war.

   Capital concerning Mme de Guermantes. All the people who make her acquaintance today are astonished that I could have loved her and indeed however much she held her face in check in a state of preservation her skin was no more than a kind of nougat that in no way resembled actual flesh and had embedded in it fragments of sea shells, tiny glass beads, with a background of yellowing paper over which curved into a harder point the beak-like tilt of her nose, and where there remained alone in their clarity, because they were the Vivonne, and because water is more unpolluted than earth, her violet eyes.

   Add to all that: Then Wagnerian exclusivity had been succeeded by anti-Wagnerism, split into two camps who were ready and waiting, on one side Debussyism, Stravinskyism, on the other anti-Germanism which considered Wagner as a peaceable but dangerous Germanic infiltration, like a secret pre-war invasion. Alas, all of this marked out (or say that later on this marked out when I am talking about Time) time past because for twenty out of twenty years all the war-lords were being revived and it is always the same minds that take it up. The same minds take it up, intelligent men but a little stupid just the same as truly scrupulous minds, more demanding in their proofs, they smile as they watch them become infatuated with it all. Unfortunately the superficial minds, simply because they are nothing more than superficial minds, require action to compliment each other and have more effect than others, with all their formulas, on the people. Almost every misfortune (and by Germany as well as Pan-Germanism) have been brought about by them. It seems that severe discipline and modesty (Port-Royalism, Cartesianism) must preserve some of it. Not having thought deeply they are naturally very sensitive to events and now believe that literature and philosophy have been altered by the War. Creative individuals who hold onto artistic truth avoid all the going back and forth and leave aside any argument about social art, France under the monarchy, Nietzscheanism, Catholic art, anti-semitism, anti-Wagnerism, even the necessity for an art that is long in its development, or too short in its development, even though the latter (just like in a regime like Dubois' alcohol might however be discouraged) is wrong to take as a measure the right to bore the listener, which means nothing to him,who must adapt himself to the art, and indeed does adapt himself, and stretching himself for the great works and contracting himself for the lesser ones, in the end becomes more bored still - because we need to create a criterium of boredom - with a slight work rather than with The Twilight of the Gods.

   Think about Bergotte taking words and impressions from Paul Desjardins (I've had to underline one or two places or even make a note in some way of the pages (probably mostly about Heidelberg) about things that I can't understand why I liked them so much.

   Capital
   If I talk about snow for Bergotte do not forget the impression of snow bathed in sunshine in the Tuileries on the way to the Concert Rouge: "that snow finally bathed in sunshine upon which I had played with Gilberte. But one day when for a long time I had thought that she would not come, one day in the Champs Élysées when the sight of sunshine on the snow, the white scenery that represented her absence had remained implanted despite the appearance of the sun, when even had Gilberte also made her appearance, the sight of the snow bathed in sunshine was combined in my memory with the anguish of the absence of the pleasures of love.

Capital
   Somewhere. What I had felt for Albertine had also been felt by other men. We feel things but we do not express what it is that we have felt if we do not approach it through the intelligence just as there are certain snapshots that only show as black unless they are placed under the light (ask) of a lamp. Only then, when we have intellectualized what it was that we felt. were we able to distinguish, although with difficulty, the features of what we have felt.

   If we look at what is really in our minds, or if we listen to our words, the moment we claim to be conveying our impressions and defining the cause of our pleasure [incomplete]
and as we are obliged to make material in our minds under one form or another, to explain through some cause, the pleasure that we have just felt, we hope to include in it, not the impression that we have not even considered, but what we think is an intellectual equivalent. But the so-called equivalent, either takes no account of that at all, just like when we feel a particular emotion in a page of Flaubert we cry: "This is wonderful", or else has nothing to do with it, such as the words "damn it" that I cried out, jumping for joy, on the banks of the Vivonne when a ray of sunlight made a liquid emerald ripple around the tree trunks; or else absolute unnaturalness such as when particularly at the Guermantes' into whose home I had been flattered to have been welcomed, had dined excellently, and had been shown marks of friendliness I said to myself: what delightful, truly intelligent creatures, or again, which is the complete opposite, every time for example that such an impression injures our affection or our vanity, it provides our intelligence with a false account, such as I told myself when Mme de Guermantes was being disagreeable to me: "What an uninteresting creature" or when Bloch, hurt at the memory of a passer-by said in a tone of dilettantism: "I find that quite f-fantastic". Already the true moment, the reality, has fled. It is the conventional but discredited substitute that we have put in its place and it is that that we bring back to mind. If we want to recall the impression we have had it is this intellectual substitute which has retained nothing of its particularity and which does not explain it at all, conventional and discredited as we recall, attaching us above all for the remainder to this exterior extension. Already the real moment, the portion of our true impression has fled, without hardly being noticed and without us retaining anything of it. But as some part of our impression of things is prolonged in us - the other part that remains enveloped inside the object is plunged outside of ourselves, that other part that we can only have a superficial notion of and which does not offer us any difficulty like the one that we can investigate deeply, it is to these last ones that we attach ourselves, simple identical landmarks for everything that makes up the material of a language common to all men, with a general agreement about its usage, which when all is said and done is nothing more than an immense misunderstanding. Put on the opposite page: Even in art [incomplete]

   When I say in this exercise book or the previous one that I only think about Albertine very rarely: my memory only made any reappearance on certain days and for one evening, often after months or years, like those plays whose title has disappeared into obscurity over the course of such a long period of time but astonished me when on another occasion I saw it repeated on theatre posters, brought back to life out of forgetfulness. Maybe put her my grandmother compared to a waggon and a glass in the blue exercise book (V) or leave it there and say: I remembered my grandmother more, the memory of her had to stretch more slowly over the course of my life than that of Albertine, because like the shadow of tenderness the memory endures longer from a love that began earlier.

   For Bergotte say this book that I used to love so much, I can no longer find anything in it of what I loved. The celebrated phrase about the Seine, the celebrated phrase about Venice was that really all it was, but there is nothing there but the name Venice. I glanced through the pages with the disappointment of Olympio:
   "Our refuges from love in the undergrowth are changed
    And the little children who leap over the ditch"
    "How short a time is enough to change everything!"
And if this was the case with books, then how much reduced would it all seem to me had I gone back to see the Vivonne, the bridge where one passed by the fisherman, the gate that they had to raise to get into Tansonville.

   Add to the things I am saying about Bergotte in the margin: I reread the sentences that I had loved most of all; I no longer found anything in them, no doubt I would have had to have seen them again by the light of the oil lamp in my bedroom in Combray. Books are like women; when we no longer love them we no longer see any beauty in them. And perhaps in order to endure, the beauty of books needs to be more complex than that of Bergotte's. They only last for a time and so much longer when the attention is required to make more effort to unravel their beauties, to become smitten with them, which delays the time it takes for one to feel aversion to them. Fortunately books, just like cliffs continually battered throughout the centuries, still retain some material to be eroded.

Most capital When I say that Albertine etc. had posed for me, others too who I do not remember; a book is a vast cemetery where one can no longer read the worn-away names on most of the grave stones. Sometimes on the contrary it is the name that I recall, and the woman without being able to recall whether any part of her has survived in these pages. That young girl with the charming glance, with the sweet words, is she here? And in which part? I no longer know.

   Most capital from the point of view of the composition of the book: when I talk about the unreality of what is not in the mind, I'll say: had not the study of inversion presented me with its proof in contemporary life and without that it remains as an inexplicable phenomenon to many. (It is Most Capital so as to explain why so much space is devoted to inversion and perhaps previously say at the right time a little bit of that kind of interest).

  In the things that I add elsewhere about inversion as a proof of idealism cite the Dreyfus affair as well where it was believed that innocence or guilt was a piece of paper that had the same meaning for everybody, and in the war when nobody could believe that if Serrail the means to march at the same time as the Romanians he would not be given them with no need for Roques to come onto the scene, medicine (radiography), my article etc.

   Add to the little furrow. Other ideas that we form might be sound, we do not know if they are true. Also is anything more precious, so frail than this sort of impression appears to be, the subject to which it refers, than those impressions which direct us from the true point that we feel inside. They are what is the most precious thing in the world because it is from them alone that can be extricated the single thing out of which pleasure leads our minds on to a greater perfection and a pure joy, the truth. Not the truth that in almost the same words we hear described as the humble truth,  which establishes itself and observes itself, which adorns the exterior of things like a humble and characteristic branch that has been planted there, but a truth that one does not perceive, of which one has a presentiment, which does not allow itself to be seen and cannot be attained other than on condition that one has created it, by making the impression that contains it be completely reborn, that one causes to be born along with them that which is most deeply at its heart, the truth. And in this way its reality expires at our doorstep and leaves us a note about it written in cryptographic characters that we do not take the trouble to decipher.

   When I say (I don't quite know where) that to write is a great temptation because it is to realize the true life,to revive impressions. But it also takes great courage. It is to abrogate all our dearest illusions, to cease to believe in the objectivity of what one is elaborating oneself, it is not to delude oneself with words such as: I took great pleasure in kissing her.

   1. (put after life even though this 1. below is something else)
   How in all of this are we to recognize pure intelligence. It know nothing of reality.
   Somewhere in the chapter: now that I had felt this, that I had recovered my health, it would be difficult for me to be content with a life like Swann's.

   For Bergotte I will say in a previous exercise book, for example when he comes to see me when my grandmother is dying.
   I still admired him, but tried to detach myself from that admiration like a devoutly brought up young man impelled by instinct to search for truth outside of what he desires, of what gave him pleasure, what was true, but no longer dares to abandon himself to beliefs that he finds too captivating, too benevolent. Between him and life - and death - and consequently between life and what he was reading, he too raised up beautiful and consoling effigies, the memory of the glorious works of art out of which his style had been nourished. And the idea being made in some way to ricochet from one to the other was unable to pursue a straight path, to go as far as reality even;  it brought together in a sort of game of style and erudition that was enchanting, which was too enchanting because the truth perhaps was not there.
[margin] the pleasure that Begotte's books gave me, seemed to me now too artificial and always originated in the connections made in his style. Between the things of which he spoke, eternal, inhuman things [incomplete]

Most, most capital
   To be added about Bergotte. Not only was the memory of the hours I had spent reading them closely attached to the intrinsic beauty value of his works, but to that of his very person, that person who in days gone by had troubled me so much when I had to concentrate in him the sparse beauty charm of so many books and towards whom they returned now if I thought about them. Such however was my joy in seeing him at that time and had I only been able to write to him, it would merely have been to ask him for some clarifications about his books, to ask his opinion about something that he had not mentioned. And I was only disappointed, as I had been at school by the philosophy class, because in Bergotte's company I was having a conversation that was quite different to Bergotte, another reality that did not accord with the memory of those pages. But that reality had itself become a memory. I was unable to separate those conversations from Mme Swann's five o' clocks where I had heard them, they recalled to me even more than Bergotte's past, the turmoil that the life of Swann brought to me at that time, the charm of snowy winter afternoons that I savoured on my way to Mme Swann's and all the more strongly since I was not going there for the refreshments, the lamps lit early in the drawing-room filled with chrysanthemums while the author held forth in the golden light, between the great windows covered with frost, surrounded by steam from the tea, all of this has stayed in my memory with something of the mystery of a Christmas night. Without doubt to have a fondness for Bergotte on this account was much more than M. de Charlus did when he showed some fondness for him as an act of politeness towards Santois or Mme Molé. It was even less than having a fondness for him on account of his ideas. But always with me the inmost impression had been something stronger than that which I received from others, however lofty their ideas, who in spite of everything did not descend into me beyond my intelligence. I held tightly to this intimate impression like the drunkard to his intoxication. And now when anybody proposes that I dine with Bergotte I refuse because such an occasion cannot bring me back the refined winter afternoons at Mme Swann's, and that they were so long ago was not in any way a sadness to me, because they had never existed for me any longer like things to which we pay no attention when they are in our room, but the regret at our being deprived of making a gift of them to somebody finally makes us possess them spiritually the very moment we renounce their material possession. But for me Bergotte was all of this, and without those times at Mme Swann's that I had felt subjected like those in me to the inexorable despotism of winter, of snow, short days even though we respond to them quite differently, by a thousand mysterious lamps, by a rose coloured flame in a crystal vase, by the discourse of a marvellous novelist, by the visit of Prince d'Agrigente, by extraordinary refreshments, stripped of all that Bergotte would no longer have been anything to me than a bit of honey that is curiously conserved in a museum because it is surrounded by whole nests of dead bees, with shutters to keep out the sunlight and awnings to keep out the rain in the branches of a horse chestnut tree.

   Most, most, most capital perhaps the most in the entire work: when I write about the eternal pleasure of the spoon, the cup of tea etc. = art: Was it this happiness that the little phrase of the Sonata offered to Swann who was mistaken in assimilating it with the pleasure of love and had not known where to find it (in art); this happiness that had defined itself to me as more extraterrestrial still than had the little phrase of the Sonata, the mysterious appeal, the cock crow of the Sextet that Swann had not been able to understand because that gospel had not been divulged until a little later and Swann along with so many others was dead before the revelation that would have affected them the most (Bernard Lazare Dreyfus Aff. etc.) But Swann would not have become a musician for all that, the phrase from the sextet could only symbolize an appeal not create in him those lasting strengths.

   For lack of space I am gluing in Madame Staus old friend of Gounod for Princesse Soutzo, it is capital but has nothing to do with this page.

   Bloch introduced me to a young woman who had heard the Duchesse de Guermantes talk about me and who was one of the most elegant women of the day. She was also intelligent and our conversation was pleasant but soon became difficult because it was not only the name of the young woman I was talking to that was new to me but also those of a large number of people who she was talking about and who at that time formed the backdrop of her society. On the other hand it was true that, since she wanted to hear me telling my stories, many of the people I named meant absolutely nothing to her, they had all sunk into oblivion.

   And in Princesse de Guermantes' soirée (This then is what I'll say to terminate the new section about the new school that did not like Bergotte and before what I say about his style being analogous to that of the masters which could perhaps tie it up as a conclusion with (after) what I'm going to say:
   I too, in my own way, more serious and profound, had had my doubts about him, I had been severe towards him, not only to the extent that I had doubts, but in the severity towards that part of myself that had been most dear to me. My distrust of him was merely the distrust that we have for own own ideas, and what results from them. But they did not have that right. And already out of this movement there began to emerge an admirable neo-catholic school which was composed of two great poets. When I read them, those of them who were sincerely exploring, outside of literature, their most profound ideas, whatever reality they might have, I saw that what they were doing was what Bergotte had done only better. They had never read him. But it was touching to see that outside of general and significant similarities even on parallel and specific points, there were things that were surprisingly identical. At which point I was more indulgent towards my youthful admiration. I understood that those weaknesses that Bergotte had were a single weakness like a clockwork mechanism by which despite of him there emerges human genius, which is due to his make-up and that a part of beauty is legitimate. Brought back to life by all this effort that was so different to what had brought it to maturity and which came to the same result, he appeared to me to be legitimized. And then I began to be carried off, into the life where the things that we have loved, the books that we have loved, are because of [incomplete]

   Don't forget (or deliberately omit) among the things that demonstrate to me that reality is not only in the mind, that it was not when my grandmother's death took place, but when it took place in me, that I suffered over it.

Most capital to be placed somewhere in the chapter about Vaugoubert's son.
   A young man who was chatting with some ladies turned around as though he was going to speak to me. I thought that he recognized me but I did not recognize him, or rather that he wanted to ask me to close the door on behalf of one of the ladies, a service one might ask of somebody without knowing them. But the next thing, when I went over to greet the ladies he was with and who I was indeed acquainted with, I saw that on the contrary he was paying me no attention, chatting and laughing with them excessively. But the sound of his voice provided me with the meaning of the look that I had taken as the expression of a word addressed to me. That look was simply that of somebody who was talking to people who did not know who Monsieur de Charlus was when they saw him for the first time, an astonishment that then disappears when they are introduced to him, he dared not pay them the same attention as to unknown passers-by, which for one moment they had been. I was informed that this young man was the Comte de Vaugoubert, one of the sons of the celebrated diplomat. He had the most admirable eyes in which there appeared to be inscribed in bolts of flame the Southern Cross. He was betrothed to a ravishing and heavily made up young woman who was said to adore him and who in fact he was marrying despite the wishes of his parents. But in the stars in his eyes I had read the future and could foresee that from then on this marriage was not without its difficulties.

   Somewhere about the book to be written. Would I have the courage to tell the friends who had come to see me that, for the sake of currently essential matters that I must attend to without delay, I had an important meeting with myself? We are so lazy that we prefer to listen than to talk (and to talk to people is to listen to ourselves since we let our mind, our memory speak, so that it doesn't take us a great deal of effort to come up with what we are going to say). And then, even though there may be little resemblance between our true self and the other on account of their homonomy and unicorporality (find the word used for Radica Duplica) we are tempted to reject as egoism the highest abnegation and to believe that we are less egotistical in rendering a service to Bloch than in working alone.

   Very important concerning first names.
   The disappointments of love, of travel etc. ought however to have clearly demonstrated to me that this was not what it was all about, that it was something interior and was not at all from any external object. We need to think that this astonishing thing that we are and which lives and unfolds within us has this peculiarity, that it is within our own self that we understand things and that we must enfold them so as to understand them.

   Don't forget that when people, even a few artists, (Gaigneron), say I knew that, they are referring not to what they knew, but to something that made a striking internal impression on them. Also for the artist whether such a thing had been seen by him or not was not the proof but rather that it had provoked an impression (badly put).

   This is the better of two pages before
   And I too in my time had doubted Begotte,
[margin] I put. And I too in my time if I put everything in a single piece at the Princesse de Guermantes'. If I put them in their time (for example when my grandmother is ill I have to change the expression, And I too in my time)
I had been severe tried to break away from him, like a religion to which we yearn too ardently to be able to continue believing in for ever, a religion that is too appealing, too human, so that the instinct that drives us to look for the truth outside of ourselves, beyond our desires, does not proclaim to us that it must not be true. The moment in his books when he talks about life, about death, the image of some glorious work of art evoked by an allusion in his style places between us and reality this protective, consoling effigy, and our thoughts that are diverted from their bitter and amusing inquiry ricocheted with delight but it was a literary delight and one that had prevented us from reaching the end of the path. We were happier but in the same way as if we were in church because we are not alone in the presence of reality.
   Next, here is the best form of what needs to come at the Princesse de Guermantes'.
   To begin with I too had wanted to believe in the ideas of the best among them, precisely because they were devoid of the things I loved, and because I had always thought that in order to discover the truth I had to renounce everything that I loved. I knew at the very least that truth does not give the appearance of being aesthetic or literary, and it was because the pleasure that Bergotte's books provided summoned up memories of libraries and museums so that I assumed reality was unaware that this pleasure was not true and that I was detaching myself from Bergotte.
[margin] For the section sort of Temptation of images for my Book add: I will follow it like a regimen, I will take it like a remedy.
But when a little later, having loyally followed the endeavours of two great writers who came from the school that was contemptuous of Bergotte, and who it rightly proclaimed as masters of the present age, I saw them little by little, certainly without ever having read Bergotte, attempting to do, only less well, everything that he had done, and not only in the general design of their writing, but in specific, parallel details where the similarities were astonishing, I could not stop myself from feeling a sort of pity an inexpressible pleasure.
   There is no doubt that it was a sign of weakness. Because I ought to have been disappointed to see that the efforts of a different, even totally opposite, school resulted merely in returning to the same question, and being satisfied with following the same research. But I had arrived at that period in life when if reason did not deny us some peace of mind, we still wish to return to the impressions of our youth, and now the creeds of my old master seemed to be invested with new meaning since these contemporary writers, whom I had certainly not suspected of idolatry, were saying the same things. At which point I returned with a feeling of emotion to Bergotte's books, I admired him for having said the same things as them, better than them. Now that I understood that this aesthetic point of view was his own, that this endeavour to rejuvenate words, to enclose within them the imagery of ancient masterpieces, was something natural to the human spirit, which in its most noble endeavours was happening once again (just as the quests of the early Italians did not seem to me the fantasy of a school but fully in keeping with the pattern of creation of a species) and by believing this to be permissible, I no longer had any scruples in my admiration of him, and in my moments of leisure I could take up his books once more, without feeling any of the scruples of times gone by.
   Now that all the particularities of his writing, those memories from antiquity and masterpieces of Christian architecture along with the sacred texts mingling together their substance into his style and infusing it with beauty, his attention to the ancient meanings of words, his efforts to bring out their beauty, I found them flowering again on their own account, and not imported into his work, into a different and totally opposite school, I realized, just as with certain features in the paintings of the Italian primitives when we see that those features had quite naturally been created in different times beyond the China seas, in the Buddhist paintings of the Middle Ages, that they were not the fantasies of one artist or one school, but expressions corresponding to a natural law, appearing here and there like those of a plant species. I was affected like a man raised in the Catholic religion who has been estranged from it out through reason but for ever remaining attached to it, who learns in his old age that science and metaphysics now appear to declare it possible and is filled once again with a new sense of the beliefs of his youth, and I said: "You were not being so unreasonable by believing in it.  Dear Bergotte, everything that they are saying now, how much better did you say it." He was dead now. Not long before a review had printed side by side a portrait of him at five years old in a little dress and comforter, and as an old man with a long white beard just before his death.

   a quite different, almost contrary artistic endeavour arriving at the same result. Just as when we encounter in paintings from beyond the China seas, in their pigments of old Buddhists from the Middle Ages the same art that was flourishing in Italy before the Renaissance, we understand that in the art of the primitives there is something more essential than the fantasy of a school of painters, something that corresponds to a line of descent on the map of creation like a plant species, similarly by nurturing the reality of all this contemporary literature for which I was quite certain of feeling no idolatry, the creeds of my dear Bergotte I found more nurturing still, and I was comforted by their enchantment from that time on. He was dead now. A few days earlier I had seen in a review reproduced side by side a portrait of him at the age of four in a little dress, and a photograph taken a few days before his death, with his long white beard, among carved wooden statues and the paintings that he had loved so much. Throughout the entire course of a human life  the human plant changes from the bulb out of which it emerges to the immense and bending tree leaving its extensive foliage to weep.
   To follow on the next page.

   lack of space
   I'll make use of this blank space to say (and the ending on the back of the paper glued opposite) when I speak about the true impression: "This impression, the sight of a person, and above all a beloved person was rendered up to me each time for a while and at the same time showed me the degree of separation that exists between the memory and the actual impression through a kind of astonishment that it, face and voice - gave me (this is an allusion to Albertine but it is better not to specify). But very quickly the memory encroached upon the appearance. Like a corneal opacity it imposed itself between our eyes and the objects we were looking at. Art alone has the ability to be a lasting and all-conquering truth.

   With regard to situations (it's probably much further on but there isn't enough space) my situation in the Guermantes circle had been something exceptional. But if I left my own surroundings and the environment that immediately surrounded me, I saw that this phenomenon was not as isolated as had first seemed to me, and that from the middle-class pool where I had been born, like certain bodies of water, quite numerous in all reality were the jets of water that then ascended above the liquid mass that had fed them. Even though the circumstances were somewhat particular and the characters individual, it was in a quite different way and through entirely different paths that Legrandin in his turn penetrated into this circle, that Odette's daughter was allied through marriage, that Swann had made his way into it, that I myself had. As for myself who had lived a closeted life, that of Legrandin and the road that he had followed seemed to me to have no more in common than the Méséglise  way and the Guermantes way, in the same way that a stream at the bottom of a deep valley does not see a divergent stream which however in spite of the variations of its course has had its origin not far from there and empties into the same great river. But for someone who [incomplete]
[margin] N.B. What is in the margin opposite (and has no connection with what is below) should perhaps originate from the Cambremers' son and from the sweet bloom of this change of situation which marks the passage of time not perhaps towards that sweet bloom but combining [incomplete]

    For Bergotte when I say that he was rightly contemptuous of the newcomers, I might add: Besides, he had - for the best among them - another reason which was not so admirable. It was that Bergotte, so modern in other respects (perhaps put this at the proper time) was the last representative - the last for the moment - because this style of art may come back - of an intellectual art who left no stone unturned in order to suppress much of what he wanted to say, to let it speak through its composition, meaning and irony. Irony had the effect that beneath some or other small action there was hidden for the reader who understood the allusion, an entire psychological law. The newcomers who are straightforward writers of sensibility, would not scruple to tell all. Because of that their art was less aristocratic. They could find Elstir's art less profound and its ingenuity of little interest, but inevitably he found them a little naive, a bit ponderous, having little beneath the surface, of little intelligence, as for example a page of Gautier would appear heavy and dull next to one by Merimée for whom the deed is the summation, the indicator of an entire psychological state that he hints at, or a piece by Maeterlinck would appear ridiculous next to one by Meilhac who had a habit of leaving hints in his arguments of psychological laws that he did not express. But progress in art is quite rightly made by new writers casting aside all the rhetoric of those who went before them.
   Again as regards Bergotte saying what they reminded me of, because if that writer's pen, in the words of M. de Norpois, had lost the poetic power that it had had in the past, on the other hand it immediately brought back to me memories which themselves brought back others, so that at the tip of the pen that had ceased to be magical, but which, as in those schoolboy games, had become magnetized, there hung in an unstable equilibrium like a metallic construction, a whole immense and fragile assembly of memories.
[margin] Maybe put this when he comes to see my grandmother. Say that I admire him less because of work of art (Ruskin) then in any case he differed from authors of today in that which (or rather at Gilberte's house). Then leave that he was superior to them to this last part of the volume.
[margin] Capital
When I mention Bergotte's books I will say those books that still illustrated the shade of sweet-peas and nasturtiums that the gardener in Combray lacking any feeling for nature forced to climb regularly up trellises creep too stiffly up the trellised wall of our garden in Combray.

   Place somewhere most capital, put here because of lack of space. The pleasures that love, that painting, that music have given me are not pleasures with absolutely no value. But most talented people only cling to the object of that pleasure.  After having greatly adored and studied a musician they then pass on to another. So that what is most interesting in our pleasure is not the object itself, but the organ that is made to feel that pleasure by the object, and it is only in the organ that we can understand the nature of pleasure, we must study ourselves. Those who after having studied Beethoven exhaustively move on to Bach may continue in this way indefinitely, they stuff themselves endlessly without ever satiating themselves. Some unfortunates who are particularly talented yet not sufficiently to pass from the aesthetic sensation to self knowledge, feel however a kind of exaltation that the consumption of masterpieces cannot diminish, any more than conversation or friendship can diminish immense desire. This overflow is reflected in the pretentious manner in which they feel the need to relieve themselves by saying: "My dear, I heard his quartet. But oh, I was completely dumbfounded! Let me tell you, it is damned beautiful; there are some things that give you the goosebumps, that are detestable, but what do I care, the gentleman who conceived and realized the andante in C is a great man." And these sort of expressions are still not enough to relieve the whim, the search for truth [incomplete]

   Say about memory (in Venice I think)
   This true memory (don't say true memory) is first of all the recreation of the movement that engendered it. False memory recalls this then that, but it cannot pass from one to the other. How often is it the case that when we want to remember, we remember that a certain person said a certain thing, then someone else something totally different afterwards, we would like to pass from the one to the other, recreate the mysterious facial expression that unites them. We repeat to ourselves the initial words, we try to entice back that facial expression but it is impossible, that memory is immovable, in vain we rack our brains, it will not come out,but remains at a standstill like a consciousness that does not function
   Say too:
   Thus there exists another universe than the one we can see and which we encounter, it is the one we see in reality but which we are constantly diverted from looking at and which is hidden by the other. It is not made from different material. It consists in the same musical matinée, in the same eleven o'clock mass, in the same cup of tea but in the very impression that they made on us and which we can rediscover just like archaeologists drawing up [incomplete]
[margin] Say that Dostoyevsky "we know not why" has no connection. Sainte-Beuve has shown on the other hand how my involuntary memory differs from Dostoyevsky, Hardy and Tolstoy I must remember later.

   When I talk about form with regard to Bloch being justified, I'll put in a note.
   The form of art I am talking about here is not the one that the critics declare unanimously can enable works to endure. Probably quite an inexact proposition. There is a short prose poem by Baudelaire called Portrait de Maîtresses which is absolutely a story by Balzac (of the type: Étude de femme, Nouvelle étude de femme). The only difference is that its form is wonderful; yet how much less read it is than Balzac's stories. It should be noted in any case that the authors from the nineteenth century who have survived most are Balzac and Stendhal. The former, whatever one says, wrote badly (according to Stendhal himself) and the latter strictly speaking lacked style and on his own evidence rewrote sentences ten times over in an attempt to achieve the dryness of the civil code. And without a doubt Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse are more alive today than Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris.

   Say when I describe the hostility of young people towards Bergotte. As a matter of fact their masters, writers of originality, were not so severe towards him; but these young people having in truth no feeling for what is good or bad, rushed blindly at anything that seemed to them to be guilty of dilettantism or perversity. They aspired to such a union of art with life and action, that not only did they want to feel life in works of art, what they called tone, but they also wanted their own life to be inspired by their judgements on works of art. They declared themselves unfortunate, humiliated, irritated, troubled in their every day lives, in their sleep, in their digestion, by books with no conviction, like Bergotte's and in their intelligent and lively but colourless prose in which they talk unceasingly about the shameful absurdities, degrading obscenities which are served up to the public with the complicity of profiteers and cowards, they take up a purely physical passion, with their voices raised ridiculously, and with blows of their fists. They spoke with an indignation that was incited by a more "informed" Legrandin, about "salons" that nobody ever visited. They imagined that people went into raptures there over old-fashioned prose, over the paintings of Carolus de Duran, over the music of Gounod, while they only valued works that they themselves admired, by great artists such as Debussy and Maurice Denis. As I could see then, from the outside, that they really understood nothing and they would have had just as much admiration for artists of no talent if they wore the cockade of fashionability. And in this way they did not at all differ from the new Reviews which simply on account of that cockade disowned a great artist like Bergotte and acclaimed a false one like Legrandin. Say before that: so it was stupid to label as audacious, as they did, those who created progressive painting and music. What was audacious (but there is no place in these things for being audacious or literary), would be to create retrogressive art.

   But this art, by stigmatizing worldly art, is the ultimate in frivolous art. Because just as only deceitful people, people who do not have any intimate experience of boldness, can admire somebody who goes around repeating: "I am completely frank, I don't know how to flatter etc." while somebody of genuine delicacy and frankness is distrustful of them, likewise it is only those readers who have no intimate experience of depth, who can even think that there is any in these ready-made metaphors, these commonplace ideas, these banal situations. And despite these idealistic tendencies it is a materialist art since it does not know how to delve beneath the appearance, more materialist even than an art which takes as its object one of these real objects, paltry and wholly material as they may be, but delves into its depths.

   When I say (I'm putting it here because there is some blanks space) that particular persons make us understand general truths. In the past when I was in love with Gilberte, when I was in love with Albertine, I strove to be in communion with that which humanity calls love, just as had not only Swann with Odette, but even Charlus with Bobbey. And now by an inverse measure I understood that general feelings which we ought to know, can only appear to us under a particular humble form. What is the use of saying to ourselves it is only an Odette, an Albertine, when Love, Jealousy, Suffering are made manifest to us, that they must appear in our life behind some slight female body which in itself has no importance. No doubt to tell ourselves that it has none ought without any doubt to prevent us from suffering too much over it. But doctors who understand the general causes of a morbid affection do not suffer any less than their patients when they themselves are afflicted by it, even though they can rationalize it better. They are not calmed through reason because the mind separates itself from the pain but cannot make the body do the same.

   Important
   When I yearn to leave for Florence, during the Princesse's matinée, I'll say this:
   I was saying to myself hesitatingly: it would be good to go to Florence and all of a sudden I saw - or rather the sight turned me into its bait - the Giotto at Santa Croce illuminated by sunlight while the Ponte Vecchio was covered with flowers and I immediately said to myself: no, I must  not hesitate, I must leave, I remember this paradise beside which I have lived on two occasions in periods of ecstasy; and I have remained at its threshold. These images like divine bandages had over several weeks closed my eyes to the realities that were all around me, but this Paradise, this world that was wholly different from everything I knew, which had given me the one great desire that could intoxicate my life for a few days, and which I had not penetrated, I would not have known it, I would die without ever seeing that Paradise, that Paradise that can only exist while we are alive. Let us leave right now! But at the same moment I understood that this image where the sunlight was touching the St Louis of Santa Croce, this monument the sight of which decided me to leave, it was I myself who had formed this image and I understood that by forming it I did not have the power to decree that for all that, it even existed outside of myself. I saw it with precision; but I also saw just as clearly the girl selling coffee at the station; and yet she was no longer the same age; we must resign ourselves to see that what our thoughts had just shown us, what our desire demands like a spoiled child, reality refuses us.  And besides would it have let me see that it would not have shown me what I thought was Paradise. I mentioned sunlight on the Giotto because that is the image that accompanied my desire for Florence. But the ridiculous insufficiency of that image would long have warned me that it was not that that was causing me to feel ecstasy, but my very desire to see Florence and into which had been transposed the memory of so many things I had read, the quintessence of so many thoughts which had formed an original idea out of it but which reality could not give me. So then this Paradise which in my life had excited the greatest desire did not exist. I could not visit it; other than by searching for the way it had come to me within myself.

   To be added when I meet Bloch in the salon.
   I could barely recognize my friend Bloch who had now not only taken as his pseudonym but had taken the name of Jacques du Rozier under which it would have taken the flair of my grandfather to recognize the "sweet valley of Hebron" and the "chains of Israel" that my friend appeared to have definitively broken. Indeed an English stylishness had completely transformed his appearance and smoothed away, as if with a plane, everything that could be erased. His hair stuck down flat with a parting in the middle, glistened with hair cream. His nose remained large and red, but seemed now to owe its tumescence to a sort of permanent cold and which could have explained the nasal accent with which he languidly expressed everything he said. For just as he had found a way of doing his hair to suit his complexion, so he had found a prominently nasal voice where the adenoidal quality of former times took on an air of indolence, of disdain for articulating anything which went with the enflamed wings of his rostrum (these two lines fit at the end and the whole section about Weissmann can go after the Cambremer, Recouly photographs etc. but in this exercise book). But above all, as soon as one set eyes on him, the significance of his physiognomy had been altered by a formidable monocle. By introducing an element of apparatus into Bloch's face this monocle absolved it of all the difficult duties which a human physiognomy is normally called upon to discharge, such as being beautiful or expressing intelligence or kindness of effort. The monocle's mere presence even absolved one, in the first place, from asking oneself whether the face was pleasant to look at or not, just as, when a shop-assistant has told you that some new objects from England are the last word in chic,  you no longer dare to ask yourself whether you really like them. In any case, behind the lens of this monocle Bloch was now installed in a position as lofty, as remote and as comfortable as if it had been the window of a double-sprung carriage. And, so that his face should match the smooth hair and the monocle, his features now never expressed anything at all. Here I can put a conversation with him.  Then: No doubt he lost something in that moment of relaxation. But those were rare. In reality one could not picture him to oneself as an untidy little journalist so much had his external framework changed him. The immobility of his face inspired respect. One did not have to think to ask oneself if his nose or his ruddy complexion was ugly, so much had he become the last word in refinement. And everybody moved to one side out of fear when on an evening he burst into the printing offices with an air of seeing nothing, preceded by his flaming monocle like the lights of a train travelling at full speed.

   When I say that resurrection cannot be brought about through the intelligence.
   It and its memories retain nothing of the past. What it pictures to us of the ones we have loved differs so much from those that we can say quite literally that we do not remember, who we have forgotten. It witnesses powerlessly the destruction of our affections, of all the vital forces of our sensibility, of our past, which is to say of ourselves. It and our voluntary memory retain none of it. We can say without truism (?) that if we forget those we have lost it is because we do not remember them. The intelligence shows us in their place images that are not at all like them and which we are unable to love. A forgotten muff found in a wardrobe says more to us than the intelligence can with all its words and brings tears to our eyes. It will not be the Muse of my art. It creates no resurrection. And yet I cannot banish it entirely. If [incomplete]

   And in a quite different place (inability of poets to take pleasure from beauty, affection from tenderness etc. - or for my mother) I will say that in her tenderness for my grandmother she was upset not to be sufficiently sad, that she thought about her so much that she was suffering over forgetting her, as if our thoughts of tenderness, our memories of the dead or the absent were in some way secondary in us, just like, for example, the appetite that habitually accompanies our deep need for nourishment but could if necessary not accompany it as seen in certain diseases. As if there were within us for a master a deeper inclination which may not be accompanied by the gentle perception of its own tenderness, which may be deprived of memory and continue to survive, without materiality, empty, under the form for example of a regret over forgetting a person we love so much that we kill ourselves because we sense that we are forgetting them.

   Capital
   Maybe when I talk about the cup of tea or somewhere else: Death was something to which I was indifferent because such an idea was eternal; not only for that reason but also perhaps because it was impersonal. There is a certain harshness in the feeling of universality. Harshness for others for oneself. I understood that Swann had been fundamentally careless about recognizing Vinteuil, that I myself felt no gratitude now towards Bergotte and Elstir. The ideas that they had brought to the light of day were independent of the chrysalis from which they had emerged and it was enough for me that I fully understood those ideas. In the same way again I no longer felt myself obliged to have a great personal loyalty towards the principles of my grandmother when I felt that her virtues, her particular qualities had been passed down to me and that I knew how to make use of them.

   Concerning what I wrote opposite at the top (Perhaps when I talk about the cup of tea). With the man of the world even poetical memory remains personal, he does not seek to disengage its substance, he says to himself I like the clothes that people used to wear in my youth, I like the society such as it existed at the time of my youth, I like the little Viennese bread rolls that we used to eat in my happier days. This is M. de Charlus, he frequents small chosen circles, retains the fashions of his time, he is proud to think that he has disinterested reasons for liking certain pieces of music, and little Viennese bread rolls. But for the artist memory quickly comes to be more impersonal. I do not even say that in this impersonality there is not a certain hardness and then to follow on with the above opposite or it could perhaps go somewhere else.

   For the section just below I could put some of it before Elstir's painting at the Guermantes' (or perhaps it might be there in front of me at the Princesse de Guermantes' (given to her by the Duchesse) and say: "As for the writer's style - it is like in painting etc.)"
   As regarding style I shall say (like the magic lantern for Elstir which is his painting) because style to the writer, like colour for the painter, is not a question of technique but a question of vision. It is the revelation that we would be incapable of forming through direct and conscious means the qualitative difference that exists in the way the world appears to us. The world that we all see but that we all see in different ways would remain an eternal secret were it not for art. Through art alone are we able to see outside of ourselves, to suddenly have revealed to us that universe that is seen by others but is as hidden to us as the world that exists on the moon. Suddenly [incomplete]

[margin] before our astonished eyes a painting that we see shows us a colour of things that to us is as much a revelation as if we were to see a landscape that is in the moon, something that we will never see. And thanks to art instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply itself and we have before us completely different worlds like those that soar into infinity.
Maybe oppose that to the idea of an art that shows us what we have already seen. But better for Elstir and say what I say about Vermeer - we have the perceptions of later centuries.

   When I say that reality is purely intellectual; Gilberte's agate marble, the name, the person of Gilberte, would they have become nothing to me, when in my thoughts the idea of Gilberte had withered away. And during the war, had I not seen people who were involved in the most momentous events, use the most banal expressions from before the war when they had to describe them, the great dawn, the fluttering of the wings of victory (this in detail - Alps that give no strength, nor virgins to the elderly, in the Babouche exercise book I think, maybe better to put it here, I'm not sure).

   Put somewhere, I don't know where, to say that art must be created with sincerity, that when we let ourselves go to nature (instead of doing what is fashionable) in the end we find ourselves doing the same as others have done, just the same as if we place ourselves before life we have as our auxiliaries the laws of gravity, of the circulation of the blood etc.

   These truths no longer reconstitute the real in all its fullness, but rather delusion. They are content to work on the parts of it that lay bare only general similarities, allowing to escape that particular thing that resides only in the unconscious.

   Say at one of these points (about the little furrow for example) every impression caused at every moment of our life stands for something that it does not define; it is something that can be dissolved in an idea but which is given to us in an obscure manner, for example if it concerns an impression given by a person, through a glance from our interlocutor, the sound of his voice, a certain idea that he expresses. So we do not seek to see clearly in the obscure impression and we are content just to repeat the words (this was suggested to me by "what a nuisance it will be to meet Robert"). A real book would be one in which every inflection of the voice, look, word, ray of sunlight, would be recovered, and everything obscure beneath its surface would be illuminated. So that instead of a  memento of meaningless notes which is life as we see it, the book would be made up of the true reality, that which the notes tell us if we read them with a deeper sensibility and a clearer mind. Then such a book would be a true picture of reality. And no doubt it would be more elegant if it did not insist on it so much. But it would still be unreal. Because even if it gives the right inflection, the right word, to express what they mean, the reader will go no further in the book than he does in life and the deeper reality will remain hidden from him. (This passage would fit better when I say that one must make intellectual reflections or even put it before: "That is what it really is, it is about breaking the glass" which will form the conclusion.

   Capital
   Somewhere in this exercise book. Once again I felt an extreme fatigue when confronted with all those people who have intelligence but nothing more. Not that I felt any scorn for intelligence which alone can lead us to truth when the real experience of our sensibility has shown where it lies.  But intelligence alone can discover nothing because all the roads that lead nowhere are also wide open to it as the only one that leads to the truth. It is no more capable on its own of discovering the latter than a man who searches for every possible harmonic combination could create a tiny morsel of Beethoven. Also, for somebody who feels profound realities within himself, who never loses sight of them, the intelligent man who will never see them and who hurries quickly down every path seeing the truth everywhere where it is not, will give you the impression of useless and dangerous activity.

   When I compare the aging at a costume ball the precise formula will be: For the solitary person who comes back into the world of Society the people are "masked" they "intrigue" you. You tell yourself that you know them, hesitate between several different names, in reality, according to the current expression, they have changed. And it is in this way that the entire socialite party that you go to after you have spent a long time apart from Society is inevitably - masked matinée - more or less costume party - a masked ball.

   The presence of the new Duchesse at the home of the Prince de Guermantes caused great astonishment in Combray where people said laughingly "The Duchesse de Duras" (de Tarente) as if it had been a role that Mme Verdurin had taken up in a society play. But the caste principle required that she died a Verdurin, this title that nobody imagined could confer any new power created more of an unpleasant effect in the Faubourg St Germain than when a young woman had published a book. "She's making people talk" was said severely, in the same words that meant that a woman had lovers serve to signify in the Faubourg that she writes, in the bourgeoisie that she is marrying outside her class.

   Lack of space.
   When I say that people did not know who Mme de Forcheville was and that this ignorance was  quickly dissipated, I will add: giving way by contrast to a little knowledge, all the more precious because it was not widespread, applying itself to the exact genealogy of people, to their true situations, to their reasons for love, of money or otherwise, why they are allianced or misallianced, in the same way as, for example, my grandfather referring to a less brilliant world could say it with certainty and the relish of a gourmand. Such gourmets and devotees had already become fewer in number who knew that Gilberte had not been born Forcheville, nor Mme de Cambremer the dowager Méséglise, nor Mme de Cambremer the young Valentinois. Very few, not even those recruited perhaps from the highest aristocracy but from a lesser level which is daintier in that it does not come too close. But meeting up again with pleasure, making the acquaintance of one or two of them at Balbec or elsewhere, giving dinners there such as dinners for bibliophiles or patrons of cathedrals where one talked about genealogy and turning a sparkling eye and a florid nose to their wife saying: "I went to a very interesting dinner. There was a M. de Raspelière there, the Raspelières from the Manche, relations of the Cambremers who had us under their spell! He told me that this Mme de St Loup who married off her daughter last year was not actually born Forcheville. It's a real saga." I daren't say that they added: it's thrilling, since this genealogical saga is only of interest through what I just wrote in the three volumes.

   Perhaps this is best put here.
   In a word we accept as binding the intuitive truths intuitions of the instinct, we accept however as less profound the truths furnished by the intelligence. Until then I had only allowed it a small part. I felt too much that it was not in their brightly lit zones that are preserved those impressions which are the material for art. It did not understand reality, and its voluntary memory held none of them.
[margin] It witnesses, powerlessly, the destruction of our past, which is to say of our own selves, because it cannot create any resurrection if we interrogate it about it.
When we interrogate it about our past, about those we have loved, it is of something else, of other people that it tells us about, and it furnishes us with the dead that we have lost a memory of, which is the beginning of forgetting since it contains nothing of them and which the sight of an old forgotten muff in a wardrobe tells us so much more and brings tears to our eyes. In these inspirational moments in which I understood the presentiment of a reality, which is to be rediscovered perhaps, and also risked being lost for ever, it was not to the intelligence that I could ask for help, it was to some blind sensation, one day the taste of tea, the noise made by a fork, the stickiness of a serviette that I held onto, it is to an unusable side, to a sort of new rush of instinct that I had asked for a sort of resurrection, or rather the recreation of my impression of former times. And as I understood that in life everything that from a distance resembled my fertile impressions, the pleasure of looking through a railway timetable, of leafing through a book from my childhood, of scenting an ancient perfume, of seeing once more a young girls' ball, a same ray of sunlight, that all of this held a greater place in my life than reading books written with the most elevated reasoning, so as to make me doubt that I was capable of spiritual happiness.
   And yet if I did not think that the intellect must take the premier role in art, I no more wished to banish it. Even in its inferiority is it not to it that we must apply for its establishment? If it does not merit the supreme crown, it alone can discern it. And then even from the outside in these secondary truths which are its lot I would not have wanted to separate myself from it. Intellect and sensibility are two most powerful agents of our nature so that every action seems to us to be incomplete where one or other of them has not supplied some effort. What they tell us about the same thing differs considerably, so that even if what sensibility tells us is primary, it does not say everything. When instinct has recreated the particular Between them both there is an incessant emulation, in an avidity to go deeper into things, as if neither of the two was sufficient in a single act, as if our nature was not capable at the same time of grasping the particular and rising back to the general, constantly running from the sensibility that binds one to the intelligence which rises back to the other to try to exhaust reality.
   I remembered one of those infinitely small examples in which one may also study life as closely as in the very large. I had spent a year on pastiches of great writers. An easy game. The rhythm of the great writers comes to possess us so much that for a long time after reading them we are still in harmony with them and that we are haunted [incomplete]

For me it is to identify a thing in its entirety. Between them both is an incessant emulation, in an avidity to exhaust the meaning. The original impetus which is like a heartbeat, the very act of life, is not intellectual, the intelligence cannot identify it for us, it is necessary for sensibility to imitate it in us, play it to us, repeat it, make itself into the impetus and life. But the intelligence wants to know. It knows that this impetus, however particular it might be, is comparable to others, to something that is general, that can be defined. And it is this that the sensibility cannot do, because if the intelligence is not capable of life, the sensibility does not know the general and they devote themselves eternally, each of them, to the unique occupation elaboration, meditation on the unique quality of things that they see in an absolute fashion, without perceiving the antagonistic quality that could take away the firmness of its conception but neither one of them exhausts reality in one single act and between the two there is an incessant emulation of the (see the end of the sentence below, in the main text).

   Important
   With regard to one of the faces of the people who are present and have changed so much (Réjane) I will say: Seeing what erosions had taken place along the nose, the enormous alluvia at the bottom of the cheeks, surrounding the face like an enormous plaster mask as far as the extremities that it could no longer encompass to irradiate its life and charm, and which at intervals no longer able to please, she tried like a theatrical mask to form a smile, such a great change and the length of time it must have taken to be brought about in Mme de ... gave me the terrible impression less of her old age than of my own. (I need to put this along with one of the people I had to speak to who tries to maintain her smile, her charm, in a different face).

   Capital about people being in the fancy dress of old age (Crozier at the opening night of  Briséis). Was it ice around his whiskers that gave that elegant gentleman the look of an ogre? This awkward white moustache above his inflexible mouth had succeeded in giving him the appearance of an old Bismark, but he would have done better to shave it off, it was embarrassing to look at. Besides he was so very much made up that when I was told that it was recognizably him, I was forced to make the effort to look closely, in an effort of memory, to reconstruct him as he used to be in the past, to see if the parts that were not made up were the same, if that was what a disguise was able to do, and, in a word, to undo the disguise:
because a party twenty years later was the most successful of fancy dress balls the only one where the guests in masks that they were not allowed to take off genuinely intrigued us all the while and alas more than we ourselves would wish to intrigue them.

   I'm writing out again the good piece from the opposite page (to be included with the disguise of old age) just in case that part about Crozier is illegible: Because a party held by the same people twenty years later was the most successful of fancy dress balls, the only one where the guests in masks that they were not allowed to take off genuinely intrigued us, all the while and alas more than we ourselves would wish to intrigue them.

   I had banished everything from my life that had seemed to me to be a false creation. Those untruths that are superimposed onto reality were preventing me from seeing it and would also alter its expression just as completely. I had given leave during my hours of work to my physical self, which if allowed to remain in me would continue to write down the sensation of someone's face and their necktie and would no longer be able to translate those deep impressions other than before a nature that it was unable to feel. All the ideas, all the words that came from that person, that one feels the need to deliberately pronounce only at the top of one's voice and gesticulating in moments of excitement, when one has just left an enjoyable gathering and which corresponded so little to the true feeling that was experienced, all those ideas that the writer fails to achieve completely on the page but only says to himself, the pleasure that he feels, insufficiently explained through his style, being prolonged with little puckerings of the cheeks, in extravagant shruggings of the shoulders - indispensable  complements of the apparently bizarre choice of almost every epithet from Sainte-Beuve, like certain extravagant shruggings of the shoulders or knitting of the brows as are such diatribes of the most "idealistic" writer against contemporary art. No more any of the inevitable lies of the action, however elevated it might be, of so-called intellectual friendship, everything that by its very nature the mind is unable to realize and which from the point of view of the mind (even admitting a moral order superior to intellectual order) is of no interest. And generally every word written as if spoken to an interlocutor, because books are the work of solitude and the children of silence. And the children of silence need not have anything in common with the children of chatter and humour and

precedent after silence or rather after the whole section (geometry in space and characters through division if that comes after silence like construction of other parts of the novel)
   And when one has drawn one's work out of oneself in this way, it turns out, with one difference, to be of the same nature as the works of other writers between which it comes to rank itself.  But this work which should bloom imperceptibly in the work of the one before and the one after, is that which can be found deep down inside. We might look at the two other works for hundreds of years before finding the intermediary work. Because all souls are harmonious but each one is spontaneous. And this difference suffices for that which, from the same turn of mind, from the same period in time, another great writer whose same efforts to say similar things nevertheless produce forms that are hardly any different and yet irreducible from others, uniting themselves by this very fact, in a harmonious diversity which is the only real unity even though it is so far away  from our observations about the meaning of things, of which we disregard the differential quality in a discordant identity. The culture that we know to be steeped in duplicity or crudeness serves for little in an art in which we can learn nothing other than from ourselves and where when when we know everything that is said by others, this becomes a shade of the same image that is unknown to the others and into which they are unable to descend with us to give us any help. But within us nature has placed everything necessary for us to take our rightful place and maintain our position and before we commence our journey its coachman puts us down at the place where the one before stopped and from where we are to set off, the shepherdess rightly admired by Bloch frequenting a same episode as the author of François le Champi but in the way that episode is treated in her book and in the other one that she has not read the distance is just the one that human sensibility has travelled between George Sand and her, because Marguerite Andoux had [missing text] exactly like a beautiful flower [missing text] to include the neighbouring flowers, of which there is no equal and even by flowering so as to obey the same interior impetus, enlarging its petals with Chateaubriand, curving them and strengthening them with France, tearing them up with Henri de Régnier, simplifying them with Jammes, infinitely varied in an harmonious diversity which is also close to unity as opposed to the discordant similitude of current perception, the garland woven infinitely by the poets of the glory of Reality. Through one single poet who has endured since the beginning of time, so much does he seem to have been of a single mind and of which in our century Gérard de Nerval is only the name of his vagabond moments...
but as unique as even their physical portraits seem under the name of the portrait of Baudelaire, of Hugo, of Alfred de Vigny, of Baudelaire, being only the different profiles of the same admirable face. The works themselves could be given new canvases together like the scattered particles of a same universe, only painted with less fullness and strength there where Jean le Rouge's hill would connect itself to the mown grassland at his feet by Levine.

   Capital for poses. When I say that I pose people like a painter and that many individuals or objects are needed for literary reality in order to have volume (say this) because that alone permits of the general, I shall add.  And then it is also that where art is long and life is short, feelings are not of much longer duration.  When we can take up the work again the feeling that "posed" for love, the woman who "posed" for Woman are long gone, they can no longer sit for us. We continue with another what we have begun with the first.  It is a little like sentimental treason but in literature, thanks to the similarity of our feelings, that is not any great disadvantage and it gives something of impartiality, something more general which is also a severe lesson that it is not to people that we must attach ourselves, that it is not people who actually exist and are consequently capable of being expressed, but ideas.

   It is the case that having little by little undone once more but in reverse everything that separates us from life, art turns out to be precisely, integrally, life.  Has not the same nature put us on the same path? By not allowing me to understand the reality of occasions in my life until a long time after having lived them,  being surrounded by anything else but that, afternoons at Combray in the sound of the striking of my neighbour's clock, mornings at Rivebelle in the sound of our heating pipes, was it not already creating art, was it not art that it created once again when at the moment I went out for the first time to go, a very long time ago, to the same Guermantes mansion that I was returning to today, it was associated with a sensation that was the same as the one felt then, the sound of thunder (maybe this will be another evening) so many sensations from the past, the scent of lilac, the charm of evening parties, of conversations, assembling together charms that had an affinity one with another, creating its part in the imagination, and keeping the past deployed on different levels to the present moment that during a ... took on the consistency, the dimensions, the fullness,, the generality, the attractions of a beautiful novel that one would like to live.

   As regards literature: we live outside of reality; even our strongest feelings, as had been my love for my grandmother, for Albertine, after a few years have passed we no longer know them, they are no more to us than a word we cannot understand, since we can talk about them with people in society at whose houses we are delighted to find ourselves when all that we might love is dead.  But if there had been a means of learning to reread the forgotten words, of translating them into a permanent language that would always be understood; if the law of change that made it so we had ceased to would this not be a great acquisition for our soul? And if the law of change that had made those words unintelligible, and we were to succeed in explaining them, would not our very weakness become the pretext for a new force? In short, art reacting against the daily work of death that I had thought unavoidable on my first night in Balbec, could it not make us enter for ever into reality and into life (this is a bit vague but the beginning is very good).

   On the new persons (not smart) who knew the Duchesse de Guermantes - she addressed a not very smart friend of the Princesse de Guermantes familiarly, a person that in the past she would not have wanted to see (put it at the right time) say: when one has held the most exclusive salon of the period for a considerable length of time, and one has imposed upon all people the idea of its sovereign elegance, since in the end it is always the ideas - the ideas of elegance - that shape material things - one is jaded about it, one lets oneself become tempted by art, by politics, by love perhaps. One invites people who are useful to your husband, to your children. For all that the new persons who knew the Duchesse de Guermantes were like the oxidation of a group made of the lead at Versailles in a fountain's basin, the moss on a church wall - a product of time. But seen from the outside by the newly elegant who were just beginning their career in elegance, these people who were not smart (put that better) simply seemed to be somewhat unfortunate, clumsy. They complained about meeting people they did not know at their aunt Guermantes' house, or a little, although to a lesser extent, like the way in the past Madame de Guermantes had felt sorry for Madame de Villeparisis. They carried on, just like birds against insects in nature, to recreate an elegant salon stripped of its destructive elements, to exercise an active phagocytosis. In vain was it that Bloch left his card with them. Since for them too, after the gratifications of society, life led them to other desires, and younger ones would have to eliminate in them [incomplete]

   Most capital (I'm putting this here from lack of space, find out where to put it in this exercise book when I talk about Legrandin). As for his snobbishness it had become less acute, Legrandin was better mannered, would not have dropped us like in Combray for an elegant lady. Everybody recognized how much more agreeable he was, whereas Bloch, on the contrary, having nothing but important names on his lips had become insufferable. Although it was quite possible that in a few years' time he too would become equally agreeable and natural. Because certain shortcomings, certain qualities are less tied to one individual or another as much as to one or another moment of social evolution of existence considered from the social point of view. They are almost exterior to the individuals, who - those at least who follow this path - pass necessarily successively under them like under different solstices that are pre-existing, inevitable, universal. Doctors who seek to find a clear idea of whether a particular medication increases or diminishes the stomach's acidity, accelerate or slow down its secretions, gain different results not on account of the stomach in which a little gastric juice has been produced, but depending on whether they administer it a little earlier or a little later.

   Most capital to go somewhere in this last exercise book when I say that I understand what it is to have grown old, what it is to have loved (I thought I did not love Albertine), the usefulness of suffering (I thought that fatal and Albertine had been useful to me) what it is to be a great writer (Bergotte). Thus if names has lost their individuality for me words had been seen to be full of meaning. Because the beauty of images is lodged behind them but the beauty of ideas before them, so that the former cease to make us marvel when we have approached them, but the latter only allow themselves to be understood when we have gone beyond them.

   Capital Think about saying: when I was in love with Albertine I realized that she did not love me, and I had been obliged to content myself with the fact that she could help me to understand suffering, love, and even at the start happiness. And perhaps I had been wise in this and was obeying an artist's instincts. Perhaps the people we know, the feelings we experience thanks to them, are for the psychologist what models are for the artist. They pose for us. They pose for suffering, for jealousy, for happiness. And it is essential to profit from them when we have these models. The ones that pose for happiness do not generally have very may sittings to give us.

   But if the Princesse, with her wonderful profile, her eyes of an involuntary hardness and fixity because she had not yet recognized me, was so exactly the same as when I had seen her for the first time, so that the image of today in passing through the atmosphere could come and apply itself exactly, the Prince, if he himself were not in costume [incomplete]

   Take extreme care because extraordinarily, as there are three sets of paper here, the one that is glued in double sheets is the ending of what is above and has nothing to do with what it is folded over.
   To be added Most most most capital To you one of our oldest friends (when I was still one of the newcomers firstly in essence and secondly because I did not feel I had got a lot older, add: When it all comes down to it it is lucky that you were not married, who knows how many sons you might have lost in the war).
   Most capital
   When the Duchesse de Guermantes [says] : "You, one of my oldest friends. It's lucky that you never married etc. Whilst almost at the same time the young Duc de ... who had not heard Mme de Guermantes and to whom somebody was talking to about Maubert the actor, replied, pointing me out with a certain degree of esteem: "Perhaps Monsieur, who is an old Parisian, could enlighten us." Immediately a rift opened before me that was even more immense than the moment when all those people had appeared to me as greatly aged. Because at these words: "One of my oldest friends, an old Parisian" the spell in which I had been living since my childhood had just been broken: just like all those other people who had grown old, I too had made my entrance into Time. On the walks along the Guermantes way when I was a child, I thought that my father always arranged everything, that if I had no talent, it was like when I was bathing at the seaside and I still had no box for my seashells, somebody would come and put it in my hands. Then my very laziness, the state of my health, the putting off of my work until the next day, the metamorphoses that the days on which we are not the same made on me, all of this had caused me to live on the threshold of Time, ready to throw myself into it, but convinced that I was not yet there. Two or three times when my grandmother had spoken to me about my tastes that were already fixed I had a presentiment that I was entering into Time and this had made me so ill that I pushed aside these concessions with horror (put it at the right place, permission to take up the profession I wanted) ransoms for what I preferred a thousand times over, to keep my childhood intact. With all my memories I stopped time at them. In the case of Mme de Guermantes I felt that I was the young man who had only just made her acquaintance and quite the opposite of what I had longed for, I had just met her old friends. As for old Parisians, they were people like Swann, dead now, who as a child I had known as unmarried and about whom my grandmother said: how he has aged. But these realities, an old friend of Mme de Guermantes, an old Parisian, so it is with talent, just like plenty of other entities, all of a sudden I saw that I had lived them without recognizing them, that they were within me. I was not a child - whose all-powerful father will protect from everything, I was less than that, I had grown old, perhaps I was more than that, I had not been preserved from experiencing reality; while I still searched for it vainly in the imagination, I suddenly found it with a sense of anguish, of arrogance, constituted in me like an actual illness.

   As the author has in his head an album of sketches and a treatise on anatomy... Make that more elegant.
   On the subject of literature when I say that nothing from the past is lost, the author does not need to tell himself that he is doing the same thing as the painter but in fact he does do the same thing as him. Add this (even if what I have already written resembles [illegible]
   Because as the painter has notebooks of quick sketches, the author while he failed to observe a lot of things that others might see, unconsciously dictated to his ears and his eyes so that he could retain them for ever, the accent with which a certain phrase was spoken and the expression on the face and the movement of the shoulders that a particular person had made and about whom he perhaps knew nothing else, all of which might have been many years ago, and this was because that accent, that expression had been heard and seen by him before, so that he felt there was something general in them, and therefore repeatable, durable and that he was only recollecting something that was general. For we have only paid attention to others when, however silly and parrot-fashion they may be, like Mme Grunebaum-Ballin, they were not like the Prophet bird, but the spokespersons of a Psychological Law. And with certain accents and with certain expressions they had been heard and seen since his childhood, the lives of others represented themselves in him, and when he wrote he came to compose a movement of the shoulders that was common to many, as true as if it had been written down in an anatomist's notebook, but in this case used to explain a psychological truth and he placed upon those shoulders a neck, a movement of the neck as performed by somebody else, each of those persons having posed for a different part of the body (What Molière explained by saying: "I take the nose from one person etc. Copy the quotation).

   Capital on the subject of old age
   (Regarding one of them who have changed less.)
   So regarding (Jacques Bizet) [illegible] curious about this young man, about my friend there are signs that normally we attribute more readily to a man who is already old? And all of a sudden I say to myself: But that is what he is! And yet it really was him, my friend, this young man who had hardly changed. On "recognizing" him - just like when we read a book we take the meaning of the words as we have learned them, I had as a lexicon that allowed me to understand who he was, the memory of a charming young man. And by the same token I had rendered him still more like that young man. But then with the old people they were not what I had believed them to be as a child, a special type of men who I knew had been young but without thinking too much about it. The old people, they were the young people I had known and remained such as they were, but starting to find reading more difficult, to need glasses, as they would have in their adolescence after an eye complaint, having a certain puffiness in their complexion, old age was hardly a transformation, it was a young man, still young in my eyes and no doubt in his too, who in the long run was rotting on the branch like a fruit that has not ripened. In the past I had learned the expressions the pleasures of the mind, talent, admiration, love. One fine day I realized to my great astonishment that life was the thing I liked about things that I had known without suspecting that that was what it was, friendship was the seductiveness of Bergotte, admiration was the avid uneasiness with which I listened to La Berma, and love was the feeling of deception every time I saw Gilberte. Now here in turn I saw that old age was no longer unknown to me in its true reality, that it had also been realized in me without my recognizing it, that it consisted of what I had said to myself several times over, ten years in a row, I will set to work tomorrow. By dint of saying: tomorrow I shall begin my life, we find ourselves at the end of it. And so in this way after talent, love, admiration, the pleasures of the mind, I had also made the acquaintance of old age. And so everything finished by being known, and one day too from something which it would seem to me - was as interior and as impossible to separate from myself and to attach back to an exterior notion such as had been the pleasures of the mind, love, old age etc., I told myself as I then recognized it: that is death. Because it all happens in the end and even though we always believe the child to be protected by good fairies, by parents, in the end we come to know everything. (it would be better to put all this about death at the end of this section if I can get past the vagueness of it: so it needs to be before that if I still have the time to devote myself to work, and then talk about the external and internal dangers - sudden illness - as I wrote previously). Perhaps (before death, I think, for old age) those people who have little understanding of themselves, who judge things from the outside, are much less surprised by these realities. It is clear that a man who has pursued a single idea from his childhood, with an unchanging mind, is far more stupefied to find he has grown old than somebody who lives their life by the calendar. So I was stunned as by a sentence that was false, absurd and cruel about herself and vulgar hearing Mme de Guermantes, the Mme de Guermantes that I had seen in the church in Combray at the wedding of Dr Percepied's daughter, when I was the same ? (put all this together with Mme de Guermantes in the whole matinée) then as today, so the same age as today, say to me: "Upon my word do you think I'm no older than twenty five!" I was shocked by these words as though it were an expression of vulgar impropriety. "It's not bad for an old lady", I was thinking of saying; and all of a sudden I said to myself: "But she really is an old lady!" (This before the part about death, probably even before the last reflections on old age.)
   Add to the things that I knew: "being one of my oldest friends". So somebody will say to me "Monsieur who is an old Parisian".

   I don't know who it will be for, or if it will be in this chapter (I would prefer it for Charlus' lover who I will also make a sort of Yturri only thought to be loved but loving others, because things are more complicated than we think, complexity as much as symmetry being one element of beauty):
   Somebody asks for an explanation from this virile young man (Hermant's son). Then in the vocal register of his long and rather vehement reply, all of a sudden I noticed a few revelatory notes and I said to myself: "What? him as well!" Because there are sonorities that relate to inversion just as there are those that relate to consumption and which, even in the absence of material findings, cannot deceive, either in the case of the first for the psychologist nor in the second for the clinician, and yet neither one nor the other can perhaps say why one falsetto signifies nothing when another is symptomatic, and similarly when there is a bit of a crack in the voice. Thus (and then it would be better if I put what I put first of all) this young man who I believed to be loved by a man and yielding himself purely out of self-interest, loved in the same way and no doubt loved others. So that what had seemed to me to be purely exterior was also interior, that by seeking an opposite pole M. de Charlus had however encountered an identical pole, and that while a sort of current was passing from him to Bobby, another one passed from Bobby in the direction of others; all of this indicated something more complicated than I first thought as is often the case, and also something more beautiful, because in nature, complexity, when it is organized by symmetry, is also an element of beauty.

   In the place, I'm not sure where, when I say that I felt that I had arrived at that moment in life that comes to people where all of the substance that makes up their lives is within themselves, I shall say: at that moment things no longer interest us other than in the extent to which they overexcite in us the discharge of that substance, purely individual connections that cannot be understood by others; and in which there figure simply as general qualities those that awaken the memory of or the desire for countries and beauty, railway timetables, filled with the names of parts of the country we will never visit, like the conversations of madams replete with the names of women that it would be possible for us to possess, or failing that like the society of a cotillion, the frequency of balls or beaches.

   Somewhere when I talk about the elucidation of our impressions. The truth is within us, but confused, difficult to disengage through the intelligence. So for example a writer who wants to arrive at a particular truth looks over it, tries to clarify his thoughts, works on it. So then he comes to believe that the thing he is studying, the world, the truth, is within him. We all hold it inside in the same way that all bodies contain the primary principles of chemistry and obey the most organic laws of physics. But the difficulty is to disengage them. That is because the truth is within us, like a father who has just lost a son in the most tragic circumstances. (Pierre Mille, Temps one day around 18th March 1915) if his mind is banal he will write false things about those topics. So that somebody who to all appearances has lived through such a thing: the death of a son, will not have disengaged a truth at all. And for a mind capable of drawing the truth from it, he will realize the whole time that the truth is not clear, at no point will he feel an unknown truth called up to enter into him, as happens when one reads something that is true. On the contrary it seems to me that the instrumental cause of these phrases: "My poor little one you are now sleeping in the cemetery etc., your band of men etc." have their instrumental cause not in the fact itself but in an anterior literature (Renan, preface to his Life of Jesus, Bourget,  Capus etc. etc.) which the author is not aware of, and which he believes because it takes the form: "Let us not create literature" which is not then literature, on the contrary it is one of the most banal forms of a recent literature rather than rejecting literature at a great distance. That is why events transform ideas less than we think and above all those collective events in which ideas participate more by imitation, by contagion from shallow sentiments, that are impersonal, like the Dreyfus affair, democracy, war, theatre of the people etc.

I recognized the Ruskin that I had given to the Princesse de

   Somewhere: Why don't you create some order in your room? - I spend the little time I have putting my ideas in order. - Why don't you have pretty things around you? - I have them in myself because I am looking into myself. - You are an egotist. - No! Because it is not in my room that you will see pretty things but in my books. - Don't come and tell me: you will have to read me when I'm dead.

   Capital when I talk about original impressions that deviate so quickly: had I not seen in the melancholic years of a man preoccupied with his health that had followed my first meeting with Albertine then her death, that the very questions of fidelity in love fall within the jurisdiction of those of the phenomena of memory!

Most capital works in which there are intellectual things are like objects that have had their prices left on. Moreover all it does is indicate its value whereas reasoning diminishes it. We reason, that is to say we flit from one thing to another, every time that we do not have the strength to confine ourselves to explanation, to make an impression go through all the chemical states that will finally fix it in an expression.

   When I show (in this last volume) that the truth of these forgotten impressions and by consequence real life is literature, it must be added that this is one aspect of literature. But another aspect is also this: the most stupid people show through their gestures, their words, their feelings, the involuntary expression of laws that they are not even aware of, but which the artist intercepts from them, so that by portraying them he is uncovering those laws. And thus he shows not only the truth that was in him but the truth that was in them. The former is objective subjectivism, the latter subjective objectivism. And because of this manner of observation the writer, who is considered malicious by vulgar people, is nothing of the sort, because in something ridiculous he sees a beautiful generality and from it he excludes the one who caused him to distinguish it, and so he no longer thinks of it as something ridiculous. Unfortunately by the same token when he is suffering under a passion he also feels its general character, he cannot exempt himself from personal suffering, any more than personal happiness; he is more unfortunate than malicious.

   Lack of space: when I talk about sickness and death (capital). In one aspect my illness had rendered me a service like a strict headmaster who had made me renounce the outside world: "truly, truly I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit". Only one of the conditions of my writing was the thorough examination of impressions that had first to be recreated by the memory. But it was threadbare (put what I wrote in the exercise book about death, and also what I say in the grey exercise book of drafts (after Albertine's death) about the diminishing of my memory that I wrote after the visit when I first meet Mlle de Forcheville - and kept).

   When I talk about the novel:
   In the same way that Science is not wholly constituted from intellectual reasoning or by observation of nature, but from a sort of constant collaboration between the two alternating fertilization of one by the other, similarly it seemed to me that it was neither by observation of life nor solitary meditation that a work of art was created but by a collaboration of the two, an action where the idea, the "scenario" furnished by one of the two was, by turns, thrown in the waste-paper basket, or conserved by the other. The thinker, like a solitary rower, may manoeuvre along the current of days, but a sharp bend in the river will force him to change direction. I also compared the passions to the models that the painter cannot do without in order to paint, even if it is the daughter of an innkeeper who he uses to pose for a queen, or to retorts through which experiences flow while the scholar meditates and reasons and which often before he has finished, force him to modify his hypothesis and his conclusions.

    perhaps this little section for the bringing to life of memories of Venice, or a different one.

   Place somewhere about a memory brought back to life but not yet recognized (as it would be for the cup of tea etc. I felt it for - your reasoning is fundamentally wrong, de Guisbourg*). It is something that dazzles, that glides, that slips through the fingers, that we cannot hold onto completely, unlike voluntary memories that are there in the harsh and cold light of day. So it is that we have not cut those involuntary memories out with sufficient borders for them to be complete and be sufficient in themselves. Like a plant that has been pulled up that brings up a little soil with it, there remain after them a few surrounding memories, too few for us to be able to recognize and help to situate, yet enough for us to want to draw them all around us without them however offering us much of a prize. We do not see them but as on the walls of rooms in Venice over which we see glide and tremble the moving reflection daylight from the invisible lagoon, we see the flight and the dancing of the reflection of our unseizable and endearing surroundings.

Capital. When I come to speak about enumerating things.
   We understand that
   To make a note of something means nothing if we really believe that realities never appear to us other than under particular appearances from which they need to be disengaged. Grandeur can be found in the distant noise of an aeroplane, the outline of the belfry of St. Hilaire, the past can be found in the taste of a madeleine. Writing down means nothing, what is required is translation. It is probable that if a complete translation of the universe could be achieved, we would become eternal, and all the problems that currently exist between nations could be resolved, and that is unquestionably impossible. But at least the task of translation, is it not the highest of those duties that may be incumbent upon those who have been given the power to be translators? Do they not also fulfill a higher duty but desert that higher duty for a less lofty one when, giving in without admitting it to the appeals of idleness and impotence they cease to be translators in order to perform citizens' work, to inform the people, to sustain them in times of war, to speak to them in the language they can understand, that they will listen to, like those scholars who believe they were more relevant in their youth if they cease to make new discoveries, to write in that infantile and detested childish style, things like the misfortunes of Toto.

Capital. When I talk about changes that take place in people's faces. The change that I ascertained because I saw it after a very long time during which it had become considerable, was not in the end anything more than the symbol of an interior change that had taken place day by day. Perhaps they had continued to keep company with the same people, to occupy themselves with the same things. But day by day the ideas that they formed about those people and those things having deviated a little after the course of several years, under the same names there were other things that they liked, other people that they kept company with, just as Françoise had changed for me, Françoise who inspired fear in me as a child and who I had no doubt could still inspire it today, just as Gilberte, Albertine, the name Guermantes had changed for me. And for all the people who were present it was not surprising that they had a different face because everything that they did, without their noticing it because it happened insensibly, had changed, because they had become different people.

   Show somewhere that only the style of mansion on rue Lapérouse with chrysanthemums, the Straus apartments, the courtyards behind the Montargis hotel (Fontainbleu), the trees at Versailles and Chantilly, the hats and dresses of Laure Hayman seemed real to me (this must only be in order to recover what love helps me to find, the poetic sense and not to make me satisfied with preferring them and saying that everything else is awful, railing against modern mansions, hats with enormous flowers, Liberty fashions etc. Very important.)

   Capital when I talk about people who have changed. With those who had changed less I observed however the permanent state, taking upon themselves one of those fugitive expressions that one assumes for a quick pose, and out of which we attempt to give ourselves an external advantage, or more often to mitigate a fault. M. de Cambremer, who was vulgar but who in profile with his arms folded and if he hid his nose, knit his brow, could pass for having a somewhat Roman appearance, maintained that oratorial pose even when walking through a drawing-room. Cottard had permanently assumed in his expression the finesse that Mme Verdurin had so often described to him and which the resultant softness of his white hair and his white beard rendered more agreeable still. In short they had the appearance of having become inimitable "snapshots" of themselves.

   Most Capital Bloch will say: Such distinction! about Mme de Duras not knowing that she was Mme Verdurin and not finding Princesse de Guermantes so very extraordinary (Marquise de Noailles, Duchesse de Noailles, according to Lauris) not knowing that the Princesse had remarried.

   (placed here because of lack of space)
   When I talk about my aesthetic I will say: "I will not disregard the occult influence of dreams. When I was living in a rather less disinterested way, for a love affair, a dream came upon me rater strangely, causing to traverse long stretches of lost time, my grandmother, Albertine who I had begun to love again because she had told me a version (attenuating at least) about the laundry girl. I thought that they would sometimes come and bring me the truth, impressions that my efforts alone, that even my encounters with nature could not provide me, that they would reawaken in me desire, regrets for certain inexistent things, the necessary conditions for work, for isolating oneself from habit, for removing oneself from the concrete. I did not scorn this secondary Muse, this nocturnal Muse, that sometimes took the place of the other.

   In its place it needs to be that from then on after that dream I did in fact begin to love her again, that this marked a "renewal". The dream is set out with neat comparisons in cahier Vénusté.

   I'm gluing this in here from lack of space. This part is capital. But maybe instead of placing it in the last chapter it could be placed for example when I begin to forget Albertine, or at Doncières, or at Balbec. But in that case the first sentence will need to be changed. Even in the last chapter (where it is probably better still) the first sentence changed perhaps. If it begins with this it could come when I decide it is useless to return to Combray or Venice, or even when I say that I no longer love Albertine: but keep in mind that not only in this piece but all the way through it will probably (?) be better to remove the too specific references (I am underlining them here for example in blue pencil).
   I especially wanted, moreover, to seek reality in a work that I had made up my mind was intellectual. What role life played in its creation was another matter. Even if a reality, that was purely intellectual, once it had been removed from life, could, in its actions, be realized in life, that was another mater still, and for a stage I had not yet attained that first time. That first time I had a clear idea that the satisfactions and the sorrows that people cause us fade away within us and cannot be seized in their essence other than in ourselves, which is to say through art. The importance of self respect that some place here and others there, and which may go as far as to lead to vengeance, murder, vendetta, I have seen diminish with the memory, with the different points of view that produce different impressions, to the extent of not being able to understand today the pleasure that I would have felt at one time in Balbec at being acquainted with the sham king of Oceana, or when in the Bois de Boulogne to be seen just as I was greeting Mme Swann by a certain mulatto banker. This illumination of things which according to the point of view in which our relations with society have placed us, which make the importance of things  vary from a million to zero, and means that for the equally refined and vain persons and even for the same person at two different moments in their life, the medal of honour from the salon will be pursued with equal ardour by a person for whom entry into the Jockey Club means nothing whatsoever, and inversely being received into the Jockey Club for a person for whom the medal of honour would mean nothing, according to the circles they frequent, the memories, the images, the desires that they awaken, images that in turn awaken desires. Much more this love for a being who might go so far as homicide, as far as suicide, I had seen it when the impressions that that person has caused begin to weaken, like Albertine (I need to reinforce all this with what I say analogously about love, probably in the last chapter, maybe elsewhere), to detach oneself from this person so as to be able to refer back, just as inseparable as them in every appearance, to another, as had happened to me with Gilberte, which had almost happened to me with Gisèle, with Mlle de Silaria, with so many others, for whom today all desire was gone. Besides that the feeling belongs to us and not to that person, had I not had exactly that in the garden at Combray, had I not still now had the counter-proof, since these feelings and the most varied nuances, of characters invented by a novelist could make us feel for them to the extent of hoping for their success and wishing shame upon good and bad people who we know do not exist. Even who we know could not exist, because every time in The Thousand and One Nights >that we see the genie of the lamp going to seek out the most marvellous riches with the utmost docility we are a little put out that Aladin no longer thanks him, we hope that on the next page he will have some kinder words for the good genie and we suffer when he squanders them by giving the wondrous plates of silver that the genie has brought him to the Jewish thief for a single gold piece. (Maybe put all this earlier). I could see then that I was taking a false path by seeking the realization of feelings in life, that to feel was not enough, that it was necessary to extract from oneself that which we have felt and place it before ourselves and others in a book, and not to be satisfied by saying it in confused words, which is to say to leave it unknown to one or the other who provoked it. Then after that perhaps I can say that in any case this intellectual reality of which life's pleasures are not sufficient realization can however realize itself in life by way of action, which was a different question etc.

   Somewhere or other (the idea suggested by Mercier de Lostende) Guermantes! Swan! St Loup-en-Bray! names that I heard again from time to time, syllables into which I had introduced desires, all of them very specific, about loves or friendships and which when now offered up to my ears, to my eyes, had lost all of their charm on account of having, like familiar towns, undergone through the course of years in which I had lost all memory of my dream - the discolouring contact of reality.

   Somewhere or other capital and this is good:
Guermantes, Swann, St Loup-en-Bray. Names that for a moment I discovered once again in my memory after so many years along with the same evening parties from days gone by when I had caused to enter desires, all of them very specific, about love and friendship, into their syllables which since then, like those of the names of towns that one has visited, had lost all their charm by having undergone for far too long the discolouring contact of reality.

   Most capital when I say that everything has been useful to me, the noise of the paving stones in Venice, the love for Albertine, Society etc.

[crossed out] So in this way my whole life up until now may or may not have been summarized under this title: A Vocation. It could not have been because I never felt myself called upon, since literature had never played any role in my life; and it could have been because I carried this life around with me, because it had nourished my thought without my noticing it, and when books that nourish themselves on it consume what in reality had first assured my own maturation and my own [...]
nourishment like those foods that we consume without noticing certain seeds that contain the food of the seed itself.
and allowed its development
N.B. This is a bit vague, it needs to dig out the idea of searching for the seeds for albumen and without albumen in Bonnier's botany, or abridge a lot and only make one allusion.
No, see below in much more intelligent form.

   So in this way my whole life up until now (Venice, love for Albertine,social life etc.) may or may not have been summarized under this title: A Vocation. It could not have been in the sense that literature had never played any role in my life. It could have been in that this life, the memories, the sufferings, the joys of this life formed a reserve equivalent to the albumen that is stored in the ovule of plants and in which the latter will draw its nourishment to transform itself into seeds over time and in which one does not yet know that the embryo of a plant is developing, which is however the place of chemical phenomena and secret but very active respiration. In this way my life was in keeping with what I produced. And those who nourish themselves on it next would not know, like those people who eat edible seeds and who happily believe that the rich substances they contain were created for their nourishment, that they had first of all nourished the seed and allowed its maturation.

   Introduce this piece in the margin when I explain what literature is: I lived in a world of signs which habit had caused to lose their meaning. I read the book of my own life the wrong way round since in Guermantes I no longer saw the water lilies (see the image) more suffering (try to say if possible what suffering) in the death of Albertine, more blue mountains of the sea in the dried fruit that she sometimes ate at my house in the evening in the early days, more prestige in the lift operator, more desire to see churches because ever since Balbec I still believed I had the book of my life in me like somebody who has a book but for whom a congestion followed by verbal aphasia would have taken away the ability to read the letters. I wanted to give meaning to these signs.

   The Comte de (the one who was once in the box with Mme de Cambremer and who I would have been careful to describe as arthritic and that I had seen an old colonel at the second evening at the theatre, the first time it was Boni, the second time Luynes, the third Béraudi) had always had perfectly regular features, but his physiological arteriosclerotic rigidity exaggerating his upright dandyish manner, the head which in days gone by had simply seemed pleasant and gracious, took on the intensity of expression of a gorgon-like study by Michelangelo  or Montegna and its immobility, even by dint of being intense, took on something of a grimace. And in the place where there flourished across an admirably smooth surface the rectangle of his blond beard, there extended the perfectly similar rectangle of an entirely white beard. Sitting apart in an armchair as if he was taking refuge on a rock, he performed the same gesture as he had in the past by resting his elegant hand against his brow, but now it gave the appearance of his repressing ancient cares which he appeared to be contemplating. This Paris shepherd of yesteryear seemed to have admirably made himself up as father Saturn. Opposite him, an isolated divinity also who continued to preside over the musical solemnities, a kind of tragic Norn evoked in the surroundings of fashionable society by Wagner, to the glory of whom, once and once only, she had resigned herself to visit the "bores", Madame Verdurin sat listening. She no longer had any need to assume her expressions of the past because they had now become part of her face. From the effect of countless neuralgias that the master from Bayreuth's music had made her experience, her forehead had taken on enormous proportions, just like those persons for whom rheumatism had deformed the body; it bulged out with a painful strenuousness that gave the impression of the proclamation of an aesthetic; her habitual hairstyle putting forth her white curls at either side seemed to be attempting to refresh it.
[crossed out] One only felt upon seeing her that she knew Kundy's Amfortas's theme and that she was going back home to take to her bed; she gave the appearance of the Goddess of Melomania or Migraine. But this Goddess was already in her twilight. Her hair which looked such a pretty blue colour was merely grey, and where it was completely white was a dirty grey which made her look too red in the face. A slight trembling - the result it was said of a mild stroke - caused a barely perceptible movement of the head while she listened to music, despite the relentless immobility that she invoked and which was as if to say: "You understand how well I know Parsifal! If I carried on like those young things and explained everything I feel there would be no end to it."
But her hair which had looked so white (put at the right place) when it was merely grey and not powdered, now that it was completely white, was of a dirty and dull shade, almost grey and made her face appear even more red. And a slight trembling, the result it was said of a mild stroke, caused a barely perceptible movement of her shoulders - while she listened to music. She strove - at that particular moment however, for an implacable stillness in protest against those young things from the Faubourg Saint Germain who thought they had to execute with their head every note of the minuet as it was being played. Mme Verdurin herself seemed to say: "You understand that I know Parsifal a little. If I had to make myself explain everything that I am feeling there would be no end to it." She would listen with fierce immobility. One understood that she was artistic and courageous, that she knew Amfortas's theme and that she would take herself to bed when she got home. Despite her solitary majesty and to which the desire not to appear to be making any advances towards the bores whom she did not know, gave her something more redoubtable, and with these familiar words that reached me as I leaned towards her: "Well, well, it's nice to meet an old friend. Your patron is over there, who will be delighted to see you", she had the air of a goddess who was both eternal and in her twilight, the goddess of melomania and migraine.

   Somewhere or other when I say that perhaps I will write a book. I thought sadly about my grandmother who for such a long time had wanted me to work and who had died believing that I would never set myself to work. Alas I had no other consolation than to think that oblivion, if that was the lot of the dead, would not only prevent her from taking pleasure from my progress, but also happily would prevent her from suffering any more over my life upon which she had also made her mark.

   Somewhere - rational human life about which we ought not so much to say that it is an unforeseen perfecting of physical life but rather that it is an imperfection that is still as rudimentary as the polyp, as the body of a whale, in the organization of intellectual life. The body imprisons the mind in a fortress; soon the fortress is besieged on all sides and in the end the mind has to surrender.

   NB Capital
   At several points in the book I say that in order to possess young girls I was obliged not to look to the ones who had grown older because it was youth I was attracted to in them. I think it would be better to take all that out and just put it in this last chapter and I'll add to the sections that I'm going to write out again here this important idea that could either come before them or after: I might often have suspected that what is unique in a woman we desire does not belong to her. But the fullness of time provided me with a more complete truth of this since, after twenty years, I myself had abstained from pursuing the dairymaid in the mountain station and even Albertine's friends, but I only pursued the young girls who were now the same age as she was then. Already [several illegible words] since what it was that I desired in them was no longer there and was to be found in others. And I myself asked Gilberte to get me invited to balls, galleries of young girls where my taste for beauty would be reinvigorated. Maybe add at this point the bit where I ask her to find me a little friend.

   The great hall at the Princesse's had something of the air of a church, with first floor galleries (find the technical term), elderly lady piano teachers, impoverished artists and the Princesse's favourites took refuge there where in a church there would be misericord pews, their cheeks streaked with the pinkness of old age, the most modest and suppliant ones bowed down in humble and mournful attitudes that made them take up the hymns that they were anticipating, as if the music had awoken all around them a whole statuary of pathetic and polychrome wood. The Comtesse de Morienval too had the expression that she habitually wore,
[margin] Place the Comtesse de Morienval sooner, immediately after Mme Verdurin, or
of finesse that seems about to unravel, that is almost approaching what might be delicacy and had resulted in forming dimples, then a mouth set, capriciously, like a Harlequin's cap, all askew, to such an extent that she looked like she had had a stroke. And fixing upon the instrumentalists a sort of amused smile, she seemed, with a shrewd and perspicacious look, to be trying to distinguish what they were playing, and in order to look closer she had put her face in her hands and gazed at their playing in the same way that one would inspect a plate of food, in order to see how it had been created so as to be able to tell her cook when she got back. When I approached all these people (maybe don't put this phrase here exactly) even though I was close up to them, they looked at me as if I was far away, saying: "Oh, it was all such a long time ago", but in a weak voice as if they were speaking to me from the other side of a great river that created a distance between us with its rising mists, which their gaze attempted to pierce and this river was the river of Time. All through Parsifal a reserved lady was allowing a suppressed and hesitant smile to flutter in her eyes which seemed like the proclamation of a greeting that she was hoping I would make to her; and be it through indulgence, be it through uneasiness, be it through foolishness, I could see that all through the most sublime passages of Parsifal she was thinking of only one thing: embarrassment at not being able to say hello to me. I sought in vain to identify to which woman, who I had known a long time ago, I should apply this obstinate, confused and smiling face. I did not find out until later that it was Mme Cottard. In the meantime during the whole of the final movement a young man, Chemisey perhaps,
[margin] Bloch would be better. But I don't think that is possible because I met him earlier.
had been making preparations to carve out a passage for himself that he had planned beforehand just as a siege comes before an attack. He disturbed fifty people, made ladies stand up, stood on their dresses and coming up to me he said: "How well they have played, don't you think?" Having spoken these words, his violent desire satisfied, he moved away again and had so much difficulty regaining his place that the musicians had to wait ten minutes before starting to play the next movement because of all the noise he was making. The young ladies were swaying their heads archly every time the rhythms became clearly perceptible. It was most amusing to watch. They began to notice and one by one they stopped nodding their heads and as if they thought I was making fun of them, still red-faced with passion, they pointed me out laughingly to a neighbour so that it looked as if it was they who were making fun of me. As for M. de [incomplete]

   Capital perhaps when I talk about the age when I suddenly understand that I have (but then again it would be better if this comes before the desire to work...) I tell myself that it is time if I want to begin to achieve what I have sometimes felt in life, in the drive with Mme de Villeparisis, in my walk in the woods with Albertine, in the sight of the milkmaid etc. But I saw clearly that these episodes from a real life that contains such moments had made me consider life as worthy of being lived, it was not in the enjoyment of life itself that I would encounter them. If the life of young working girls bent over the crossbars of their bicycles still seemed to me to be something miraculous, it was because I had passed them by at a distance without being able to speak to them. To speak to the young messenger girl (drive with Mme de Villeparisis), with Albertine, with Mme de Guermantes, would have been to extirpate from mediocre reality what my imagination had placed in it. And that was the reality that I wanted to understand. I felt that it was only through art that I would arrive at it (include this with what I say in this exercise book about the fruitlessness of returning to Venice
[written between the lines] when I had gone to Combray I did not discover anything as well as I did through the cup of tea, Venice less than the uneven paving stone
and along with what I say about it I imply the imperfection of the experience and the relations of art with involuntary memory, with the originality of impressions).

   See on the back of this sheet something quite different but Capital.
   To add to what is in the margin.
   Or rather it is not perhaps because we talk to people in society that we lie. I was lying just as much by saying: "Oh, if you had known Albertine, she was charming, so much fun" because that was not the reason why I loved her, as when I said "Mme de Guermantes is so intelligent" because that was not the impression she gave me. The truth perhaps is more that it is not the object that leads to the lie but conversation, because the impression that the object has given us (Albertine or Mme de Guermantes) is something that cannot be rendered directly, something ineffable that can only be rendered by the equivalences that literature discovers, and which conversations exclude. From which again the necessity of art to speak about the things even that we had understood to be most simple.

Capital
   Concerning Bloch's father or others, whose face, character, outbursts of rage (if necessary at home imitating the despotism of Papa and Mama) recur (there where I talk about Nicolas' father). So that if the kinship of my ideas with Bergotte and the similarity of certain phrases, certain forms of language, certain years at the houses of people who were not acquaintances had demonstrated to me that more wide ranging than Individuals there was a single Mind, dispersed across space, I understood too that the turns of mind of men do not die with their bodies and are reborn to importune others with them which their bodies will not know other than through the instrument of their descendants. So that the two statements had led me to form an idea of Existences more wide ranging than those of individuals, of a single Mind, dispersed across space, and of immortal Characters perpetuating themselves through the course of Time.

   To be placed when Bloch asks me what Swann was like and I say (it is already written) you can have no idea, really I was exaggerating because what people said had never interested me, it was only after the event, when I was alone, and making myself into a social person, that I remembered their words in admiring them. Those people had only interested me as they related to me, through some slight impression they gave in spite of themselves, and not by their intellect, as if my role here on earth (which in any case I spent my time wasting) had been to give and not receive. In reality every time that we say that someone in the world was extraordinary we are exaggerating. The only extraordinary thing is what has taken place within ourselves, because the mystery only commences in our interior understanding. So that on the other hand these are the only things that we cannot relate. It is true that we cannot relate them - to others - only to ourselves, in silence. (Maybe I could append here what I already said about a work of art: child of solitude and silence. But I think that would be too difficult).

   Capital When I take Mlle de St Loup (Gilberte)  for her mother. This repetition of the face of her mother, from days gone by, the day Bergotte was having luncheon with the Swanns, whose delicate and striking sketch I had noticed in profile in Albertine's face, Time had finally worked it into a perfect resemblance, just as some artists keep a work for a long time and perfect it year by year.

   In the scene where old age changes everyone: capital M. Verdurin comes up to me. I almost asked what it was that he had, he had become scarcely recognizable on account of excessively red cheeks that half closed his mouth and his eyes, so much so that I was struck dumb before him fearing that I was lacking in compassion by not feeling pity for him and lacking in tact by not asking what was wrong with him. Mme Verdurin came up to me and said: "Well, you must be so pleased to see him." Since she did not say anything I dare not speak first about what I had noticed. To try to get her to furnish me with some explanation first I said to her: "Is he well?" "Good Lord yes, not too bad at all" she replied as if she had not noticed anything. Then I understood that it was simply that he had aged, changed, and that his face was one of the masks of Time that he had been obliged to wear.

   When I want to show all the changes that have taken place, Jupien's niece becoming Comtesse [blank], Odette's daughter marrying into the Guermantes etc. add this. These same changes had taken place along other lines, these being collective, like a small change between two pointers in a machine corresponding to the displacement of enormous masses. All these things that had seemed the most unbelievable in our youth had happened, not through any violation of the laws that we had held true but through their subordination to other laws that we had not thought about. The time when it seemed materially impossible that Picquart would ever be received back into the army was so forgotten that we no longer dreamed that we should be astonished that he had become Minister of War. If anybody had told me in Combray that it would be possible to speak to somebody in Balbec from Paris I would have thought that they were telling me a fairy tale. The telephone was now widespread. It was no longer in those far off years in Combray but in the most recent years in Balbec (put in its place, Évian, Lozé, Archduke) that the first President had assured us that the experiences that concerned one of his friends could never have successful results, that the problem of aerial navigation was insoluble, and now all around us heavy vehicles were casting themselves off, racing along the grass for a short distance and suddenly rising up off the ground, conducting their hosts just like the one that had frightened my horse on the solitary road at Doville (change the name) and capriciously ascending as high as the mountains, looking down on the affairs of men from on high, interposing their authority like the warlike gods of Olympia, throwing down from the clouds a signal that instructed the army on whose side they were, or sowing terror in the enemy army, or fighting between themselves like gods in opposition, in the wide open sky, and returning to have their arms furbished at aeronautic stations sited on some hill, at Buc or Friedrichshafen (check if it is high up and if not choose another) which are their Olympia and Valhalla. Because the war was also taking place. And unforeseeable ruptures to the laws which introduced an implacable necessity, those grandiose "That was not fair"s, upsetting all the rules of the game that had seemed so secure, and had also overturned the disposition of collective forces. Just as I had seen people dedicated to always remain humble be lifted up, and others for whom wealth and grandeur seemed guaranteed (put in an example in the proper place) ruined and destitute, likewise after a quarrel in which collectivities had played the role of persons, but immense persons, with bodies forty million times greater than a human body, as in a dispute between giants and God taking part in a quarrel in which each side believed they were in the right, as happened to me when I was quarreling with Françoise or Mama, gentle and modest France seeming to be devoted despite the superiority of her distinction, her intelligence and her manners towards a poor situation was in the process of accepting the immense situation which seemed a guarantee to the all powerful Germany and that she was in the process of falling. So that in the new world, a France having new, unheard of members, was going to be laid out before us, unexpected, reversing the eventualities of what seemed must always be, just like in my dreams and yet forcibly constructed from reality, like the aeroplanes in the sky.

   Among the changes to one or another. When I had recognized him properly I realized that the person I had before me was not just the Duc de Chatellerault, but the Duc de Chatellerault when he was twenty years old. Like the dryness of the lime flowers in my aunt Léonie's packet of tissane that retained as still recognizable all the parts of the flower that I had seen on the tree, it was indeed the face of a young man of eighteen that I had before me, of an adolescent who had not been able to go beyond that period of his life. Wrinkles had formed, the hair had whitened around the same face that still proclaimed, be it that illness or vice had made him live in a permanent expectation causing him to live outside of time, the delicate sprightliness of an eighteenth year. Under the skin this would be an old man, but this old man was simply a young man of eighteen who would have withered without showing any age and who in the end would shed to the wind the unrecognizable rags of a dried up flower but would not have changed (Baignères, Berckheim).
   Add this further to Baignères (which because of that might need to come after my reflection that follows all those faces over the passage of time). On its own the face of the latter seems to indicate an age of thirty years old, but that is nothing! That passes day by day, days during which one is always unchanged and when they have passed one has remained the same. Old age, it is really nothing but an external face makeup on a youthfulness that has not matured, it is why the deceased become young again so rapidly as soon as the portrait has had its dirt removed by death and appears recognizable  as if it had been cleaned (Nattier).

   Most capital
   To come at the moment when I speak about the desire to return to Venice. I felt even stronger the necessity of art, that without it the deceitful activity of the imagination would continue to lure me with the same lies that I had brought into the light of day, because in the same way that I wanted to return to Balbec, likewise, already in Albertine's lifetime, and after her death, I had begun once again to desire as something important in life, capable of placing in equilibrium all of the emptiness even if death were to come quickly, to penetrate the existence, of the working girls etc. who passed unknown in front of me just as once upon a time had the young girls by the sea.

   Place somewhere in this ending: I had frequently felt that things were not only what my thoughts had named them, that in the sweetness I had felt by having Albertine close to me, in the interest I found in everything that had appeared to make up her life in the periods when I had not known her, there was something more that I felt and which was slightly too far away from me. I began to understand that art was something that brought forth and allowed us to seize those things that were real and specific and which were always at a distance from our notions which constantly dominate it, give us pleasure, make us suffer, about which we think constantly but without really thinking about them.

   Place somewhere concerning art
   When after Albertine's death I had tried so hard to fully understand what I was feeling, to extract what was general in my suffering, I was perhaps merely anticipating eternity where what perhaps subsists of us - a thought that had made me so ill when I had such a strong desire to see her fleshy cheeks again - is only what is not specific, what is behind our actions and our passions, all the general material of our soul that our particular passions deliver up and put into play but which are not specific.

   Place somewhere concerning Art.
   If I wrote, I would arrive in the end at that which, during my walks on the Guermantes way I had thought impossible, at that which in effect since then, day by day, through the years, I had deferred. I could put into my life that which I had desired the most during my walks on the Guermantes way, which I had at that time judged impossible and which indeed from day to day for so many years I had deferred. In the same way that I ended up by living (to the extent that I no longer even noticed it) with the idea that I had initially judged impossible to bear, that Albertine loved women. Because our worst fears and our greatest hopes are not beyond our strength, they can be realized and we end up living with them.

   When I talk about ageing, Jacques Bizet, Suzette I will say. Like someone who can easily arrive at the wrong conclusion if a person he does not know has some features of another who in his mind he completes from what he remembers as the one he thought, thus, convinced that I had in my presence M. de Cambremer, Mme de Cambremer, I spoke to them without really looking at them but at some features which I brought back into my mind through the synthesis of memories and by which I identified their persons. All of a sudden M. de Cambremer turned his head to the side, I saw a puffiness to the cheeks at the corners of his mouth that he had not had before, I turned my head away out of decency as if he had had an abscess, something that it would have been more proper if he had warned me about first. And I will put J. Bizet in here, who carried on laughing and did not notice anything. Then he suddenly turned to one side; it was then that I saw displayed across his face the large nose of his mother's that he had not had in the past or which no doubt had remained stuck onto his face like a veneer.

   See an important bit on the back about The Thousand and One Nights and Af. Dreyfus.
   If possible Mme Verdurin to show her contempt will come before everybody and before the arrival of Bloch which will allow me to set up this scene (Griolet, Sulsbach, Polignac)
   Be it the desire to show a particular amiability to a commoner, be it that Mme Verdurin's contempt truly overawed him, but more than anything else because to take a few steps, to put oneself out, are something agreeable for the one who knows that in it people will see that he is bestowing a distinction (and as with the Prince de Guermantes and like his cousin Charlus, M. de Guermantes very much enjoyed playing the King or the Minister, recalling that Louis XIV invited Molière and that cardinal Richelieu made Desmarets and Gombaud put their hats on) the Prince who was chatting in a tight group of people, instead of saying goodbye to Mme Verdurin just like any other guest, walked through the immense drawing-romm with her, saying: "Only too happy to spend a few moments more with you", and waited with her at the door while she had her things brought to her. Bloch arrived at the moment the Prince was bowing to say his goodbyes to Mme Verdurin which she accepted with haughtiness, and he was in no doubt that the proud lady being escorted in this way was some Queen or at least  an Imperial or Royal Highness, of whom there were always some present at the home of the Guermantes. And he stared with eyes wide open all the better to lodge in his memory this vision of history and art which he would describe one day in a book. He tried to "consider" the idea of royalty as he looked at Mme Verdurin, and the fecundation of one by the other was most auspicious; Mme Verdurin was indeed beautiful, majestic, her brow over which her white hair was piled up into a high bouffant seemed ready to accept the crown. You've got to admit she has an air of grandeur, Bloch said to himself. He was astonished that at the same moment the Prince deigned to recognize him and address to such a humble guest a slight but distinct greeting. Bloch felt his heart swell with gratitude which he dissipated just as quickly by telling himself that doubtlessly he had been deluded up until now about his own importance which had been greater than he had thought. The following day he searched in the society reports in the Figaro to discover which sovereigns or highnesses had been present at the matinée in order to put an exact illustrious name to the imposing guest with such a grand air. The name he found was that of the Queen of Sweden which did not surprise him because he knew through his father that Mme de Villeparisis knew her. Also he was able to affirm a short time afterwards, in front of people who were not at all of the same opinion, that the Queen of Sweden was truly beautiful with a very regal manner. The role of this sovereign had actually been admirably played by Mme Verdurin "with her customary authority".
N.B. The above on this sheet has been put in the wrong place. But I don't know where it should go (but in this chapter).

   When I say that The Thousand and One Nights was created in its time without being able to say instead of "The Thousand and One Nights", "The Thousand and One Nights or the Memoirs of St. Simon". And add: one only does that if one wants to,  these are the objectives that we only achieve by looking elsewhere. Because nature constantly finding itself face to face with new givens by the same action of Time, a same creative force can only have a different result. A copy is entirely missing of that creative force that makes up the beauty of works. Conversely it is in different things that we must learn to recognize the same laws. But a materialist superstition makes it that in works of art the right to change during its own time (which others have) is closed off and the shocking innovation only seems to begin with Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec (Moreau) rather than with Debussy. And in the general order of things if one invokes to the face of a Dreyfusard his own Dreyfusism so that he cannot be High Court, anticongregationalist, antigermanic, he will reply: "the congregationalist teaching is contrary to nature, creates monsters, the Dreyfus affair was just between the French, the German race wants the annihilation of France for all time etc. That is not the same thing." Because nobody understands that even when it is the same thing it assumes another aspect and because it is the same thing that the realization cannot be the same.

   Put in the place where I am thinking about Mme de Guermantes. When we have known somebody for a considerable length of time and even more so over different periods of time, the image that they present to our senses in the present moment is only a very small part of the total image that we have constructed for ourselves and in which the memories that we have of them vastly outweigh that image, and even more so from the idea that we have constructed of them, at one particular time, then at another. Mme de Guermantes could offer me at that moment nothing but mediocre feeble impressions. But I easily escaped their mediocrity by bringing back together or waylaying various images that I had collected along the Guermantes way, from the descendant of Geneviève de Brabant, from the evening gala at which La Berma had performed, from the visits I made her in the summer in a cool drawing-room in which one could not see clearly. That my imagination played a large part in all of this, it is true. But still it was Mme de Guermantes who had provoked them. I was not unmindful of being enchanted by some part of the illusion since that illusion is wedded to the nature of reality itself and on account of that everything that falls under our senses is struck by it.

[margin] Capital. (It could have been put on the last page of this exercise book when I talk about Time which seems so vast.
When I talk about Time which even as distant as it might be is not so vast: The years through which we have traversed seem vast but that is because they must be reckoned as vast, perhaps simply because distances must be reckoned in one direction where they do not usually exercise our limits.
But is it so vast? What seems to us so distant, is it not very near; even over the course of centuries, is that not something quite small. And do not the words of Euripides reach us just the same as our own despite the distance that seems so great to us in its vastness simply because we must calculate it in one direction, where they do not usually exercise our limits? Do they not reach us from close at hand like the nearby buzzing of a wasp which I heard being made by an aeroplane two thousand metres up in the pale blue sky?

   P.S. Besides it would also be better to only have one soirée. And then if it is not at the end of the book I could come into the Princesse's matinée when the music has already finished.
   When I speak about the pianist who looks like he is running after the sonata (here or at Balbec or at the Verdurin's). Yes, it was if, on a plane other than that of the exterior world, (there are many things engendered all the time without our own perception, which accounts for everything to its fullest extent, appearing to notice - when we are thinking for example) all of a sudden, just as one might release some fabulous rat from a cage, someone had let loose the sonata. The instrumentalists gave the appearance of running after it, the pianist leaping over the written notes in one bound, harnessing notes that were not there into a particular passage, sweating, puffing, showing off the muscular speed of his wrist, trying in vain to catch up with it; and this mass of muscular sensations the amalgamation of which display "virtuoso ability" and which impose such a frustrating screen between the work and the listener were not for the listeners what they should have been, that is a sign of the mediocrity of the performer, but a sign of his mastery. One felt oneself to be pounded just like the piano itself and during the momentary rests that the listeners took for the end of the piece they broke out into applause, but, coming to the realization that they had been somewhat premature when they heard the notes start up again, they continued clapping for a few moments more so that they would appear to have been motivated by the wish that their endorsement be bestowed upon the performer rather than by a mistake they had made concerning the subdivisions of the sonata.

   Most capital. About different stages of Pinçay's old age, all have to be important characters in the book.
   On this tall thin man, with a wan appearance, with eternally red hair, an old man with white hair had been succeeded through a sort of metamorphosis, which had to necessitate a sort of bursting with its conscious gravity about itself and inclining towards benevolence, a new and powerful corpulence that was almost warlike and which had had to necessitate a veritable bursting of the fragile chrysalis. And since in spite of everything there was a certain resemblance between the portrait that was preserved in my memory and the powerful old man before my eyes, I admired the singular force of renewal of its harmony, of Time like that of a great artist who knows, while fully respecting the unity of life's laws, how to introduce wonderful unexpected contrasts in his characters.
   Monsieur (but this is not so useful) had not aged: a covering of white hair had simply replaced the covering of red hair, as if somebody had swapped the carpet under a table.

   I will say that I was thinking about Bergotte and the Princesse de Guermantes (or Mme de Chemisey) will say with authority: "Oh it's all worn out with Bergotte, it's all over and done with. Yes, I'm not saying that it doesn't have a little grace, but all these prettinesses of style are not very interesting. And besides the young people are completely detached from all that. Nothing is more old hat than Bergotte. And then there's always society. You find all that very interesting, society? Maybe it's because I live within it but I find all that rather tiresome. Yes I know that there are some attractive little corners in it. But I hate literature that has attractive little corners in it, I prefer inaccuracies, it's all the same to me, but I want works that have wider inspiration." Such was the effect of youthful literary proselytization, an effect that was all the easier to produce since in order to repeat those phrases and even to understand those ideas there was no need to be aware of the value of what one was reading. "I must arrange for you to get to know my young nephew de Montargis Villeparisis, he is everything that is most up to the minute, he subscribes to all the new reviews, he told me, indeed, that none of them much care for Bergotte."

   When I talk about people who have grown old. (Maybe to be added to what I say about Luynes, maybe to include in the idea of the masked ball that this suggests in a different form). I recognized Mertian (I would have got to know him at Doncières, a friend of St. Loup) despite his having the white hair of an old man. I learned with surprise that he was a retired colonel. Because I had maintained the idea that he was a young man and to tell the truth that is how he had stayed for me. His old age then was merely a kind of disguise. I almost wanted to congratulate him as though we were at a fancy dress ball. "Aha, you really look the part of a colonel". But I though he must have hurt himself when I saw how much difficulty he was having walking. Then all at once I understood that it was age that as well as silvering his moustache had also attached lead boots to his feet.

   Perhaps I could also compare, (and then in a single grand phrase: a costume ball... an idiot's universe... a dream) this party to a dream in which the people we see are nothing like the way we remember them in spite of a few similarities.  Just like in a dream I ask: but who is this then, everything for me has a kind of uncertainty that presents the universe as of those fools who do not see things very clearly, who ask people's names, and in whom their uncertainty of sight is betrayed by their vacillating looks.

   Lack of space: When I talk about the disguises of people who have grown old I will say that their grimaces, their period costumes were frequently the announcers of a death already foretold. Thus it was that M. de Cambremer with his silver beard had taken on a fullness, a dignity that gave him the appearance of a Venetian praetor, a sort of doge, in all his magnificence. To arrive at this marvellous result he first had to have an arteriosclerosis followed by an angina of the chest that replaced with a different colour not only his hair but his aged skin, habitually a lively red, now a solemn pallor and which stretched his skin into a sort of substance that was often melancholy and always grave which, for the few months he had left because the end had been fixed and was close at hand, maintained a considerable majesty. (Include this with one of the old ladies. Ochoa). These spectres existed in effect because the hour of their death was known (if I say that they had the appearance of laying down to die, see [incomplete]

   Most capital when I say that without realizing it I had been a snob, an egoist etc. and add that in compensation if I had made errors all my life without noticing them, I had had other things in my life that I had not recognized because they were individual to me and perhaps because it is a part of their nature that the love they give us is always too dissatisfied with itself to understand itself. Just as I thought I was not in love with Gilberte, for the same reason, because I was unable to discover the joy that I was searching for in it, I thought that I did not love literature. In short I could never say one single day of my youth: "I feel within myself a taste for writing, the inclination to write, for the joy that beauty gives us, the instinct for beautiful things". No, out of restlessness, out of dissatisfaction come deficiency of taste, boredom when confronted with a masterpiece, idleness; and it is perhaps in this way that there sometimes becomes apparent to those with much more ability than me, a Vocation (no doubt this can be placed in the middle of where I write about the pleasures of the mind being individual). And although I had heard talk about these modern times or could suspect something, I did not know precisely what, from my own age (besides had I known it, in vain do we have the complete measure of time, deep down inside we glimpse how men entombed in a mine, who do not count the hours in the same way as we do outside, only discover upon returning into the daylight that two weeks have gone by, when they thought it had only been three or four days), to me all of this was nothing more than numbers which said nothing to me, spending my life looking forward to and then putting off the realization of my work, a constant desire continually kept intact within me, my resolution to work, doing this to me by [incomplete]

[margin]  When I am at Mme de Chemisey's she will say admiringly of Mme de Guermantes, she is a friend of Mme de Monyton isn't she (Peységur, Wagram etc., Clermont-Tonnerre, Forceville)

   Capital when I do not recognize anybody at all.
   My feeling of uncertainty seemed to be shared and concealed even less by a boy who was still very young and whose face drew one's attention. One could not really say why, like those people who find us changed in some way without knowing whether it is because we are looking well or because we have shaved off our beard, it was difficult to say if it was because he was unusually good looking (which he was), if it was because his good looks had something a little moth-eaten about them and were rather disagreeable, or through his wide gaze that seemed to contain immense sorrow, or because the dark rings around his eyes gave him the appearance of being ill. For whatever reason he very much drew one's attention. But what made him appear more strongly to me to be a character in the costume ball that I was imagining was that if one was looking at him, he was looking at everyone else a thousand times more intently. His gaze had hardly settled on you but then he could no longer take his eyes off you. It could not be possible, I thought, he has recognized me. Next thing he turned to look with an anxious air at one of Mme Cottard's sons. One would have said that he was a gate-crasher or had stolen the silver and was fearful of being discovered. I had no difficulty in comprehending what sort of a person he was and that the race of Charluses was not yet ready to die out. "Allow me to introduce my cousin de Clévrigny", Mme de Cambremer said to me, and the young man addressed a few well turned words to me in a shrill voice that did not deceive, all of this while he held out a lace handkerchief. He spoke to me but without looking at me, his eyes like a lighthouse by turns lighting up some or other part of the assembly. He seemed to be much affected every time they encountered the Cottards' son.

   The Duc de X led the wife of the great financier whose hunts he steadfastly refused to go to or whose balls which, in his defence, his nephew was the only young man from society not to attend. Precisely because of that his stock had risen in the estimation of Baronne X to a special rank and when their speculations having provided them with such a colossal fortune that their daughter was sought out by a number of sons of kings royal highnesses, the parents had refused to make any overtures to that inaccessible nephew of the Duc, who had then married her. It was almost as the father-in-law of the daughter that the Duc took her arm and he now attended all of his hunts. But at any rate even in the past she had counted so many friends of the Guermantes in her circle that the transition had not then been so abrupt and the unity of the picture of the Guermantes set had not been too badly damaged. In a different way I was astonished when [incomplete]

   When I talk about kindly old people who had been wayward young people, I will say: when we grow old we become a different person, I will add that old age, if it changes the personality of people just like men who when they grow old seem to have a different personality, they are like trees where by varying the colours of their leaves autumn seems to change their species.

   Most capital, lack of space, I'll put in the Babouche exercise book things concerning M. de Guermantes and Mme de Forcheville.

   Include this with what I say about the different reasons for my improved elegance, and Gilberte's etc.
   When I talk about Bloch: he too had begun to be fashionable, because (even though the accession of people who are obscure escapes us because once they have arrived and constitute for us a part of "society" we no longer consider where they came from) with most people they are like stock-market prices. There are very few, and even those of the poorest quality, who for some particular reason that prevents us from seeing the general law, do not have their moment and and are not drawn up into an increase in value.

   When I see Mme de Guermantes
   She was wearing an outfit that everybody complimented her on and indeed people said that she dressed better than she had done in the past. But just like churches, dresses were no longer things that existed solely in themselves, like a reddish velvet dress had been which I had been told since was very ugly but which remained in my memory as something just as alive, opening up as many streams of life as did the apse at Combray. Besides Mme de Guermantes was no longer young enough for me to take pleasure in appreciating in an artistic way, as Elstir had done with the women he had watched go by, the daintiness of her [blank] or the arrangement of her hat. One single thing gave me pleasure but when I mentioned it in front of Mme de Chemisey she filled me with scorn by replying: "That is just what I like the least" and she was right from the point of view of good taste, but that is something to which I am indifferent. It was a certain excess of little trimmings and lace that rather over complicated the design of the lapels that gave me a feeling of poeticism upon which her taste, or her bad taste of the past, rested; there was in her attire of today something that had been lacking in her attire of the past, but standing out naturally in some way between the two, like certain ornamentations to be found in Elstir's paintings or certain rhythms in Bergotte's prose, the entity that was Mme de Guermantes' dress, be it through its tailoring, be it through its an immanent entity in every way,
[margin] that was characteristic of her dressmaker
or peculiar to her or characteristic of her dressmaker, or a combination of the two which always added to its modishness by following it fully, the particular style of embellishment that was almost literary, (at which point I need to add a few little things about her past dresses that were very fashionable or it could be here about the Princesse de Geuermantes).
but to several dresses that Mme de Guermantes had worn, one universal dress, appealing to me as a more universal entity, Mme de Guermantes' dress.

Capital
  When I talk about the disguised faces that I no longer recognized I will say: I did not discover anything in the smiling mask of Mme de Saint-Euverte, I thought it decrepit, when all of a sudden I perceived who it was that was looking at me, laughing, on top of the features of her daughter where it had now made its home, as though there existed in every family a single mask, a single face covering that was alive and at their disposal, and which living for longer than the individual, amused itself by remaining for fifteen years on the face of a woman, then disappearing but then finding itself suddenly recognizable on the face of the girl it then too deserted (Suzy Lemaire)

   With respect to what I put here on the opposite page in the margin about faces, put capital before this. The enormous nose of her mother (or of her father) that for twenty five years had remained almost invisible stuck onto her small nose like a leaf that is barely in bud eventually came to open up and oblique and palpitating swelled up like a triangular veil at the front of her face.

   all this can be attached to this previous page and to the Jacques Bizet passage (It could be  M. de Cambremer [illegible]) I don't know where in this exercise book, so that it could be M. de Cambremer who has those swellings and his mother's nose. And perhaps it could be him (but if so reread it) who three pages earlier (Ochoa) had taken on the dignity of a doge.
   Put in its place at Balbec old Cambremer's large nose and the even larger nose and lack of dignity of Cambremer up until then very d'Yonville.

   Put in one of these places
   Mme Swann, the Duchesse de Guermantes, the Princesse de Guermantes, since they had all seemed to me to be different from other women, different from each other at the time where, like a pianist of a copyist painter full of ardour and talent, I placed so much sensibility into the same features of their face; I thought about them again and again, I directed them, I twisted them out of shape according to a similar sentiment. Then each of them was a work of art which had no point of similarity with the others and each was self contained. The little buttons on her sleeves which slightly pinched Mme de Guermantes' cuffs on her morning gowns when she went out for a walk, were almost as charming as her pale eyes, as her rather too arched nose, as her blonde hair of that particular being, of that unknown life, which when I saw her on spring mornings opening up her white arched parasol like a veil, seemed to me to ballast her like a new vessel carrying mysterious cargoes from a distant world.
   And say now rather turning the page, other side

   Then her body, her long arched nose, her curved waist, seemed to be merely the sharp notch, the daring prominences of her unique personality biting by reaction upon the atmosphere travelled through and which she corroded, she engraved as with aqua fortis, with the acidity of an unknown substance whose chemical discharge caught me so strongly in the throat that I was obliged to restrain myself so as not to cry out. Since the rest of the world resisted it unaware that it was from that specific essence that was her own and on the other hand I would have been capable of extracting some things from it as well as my undergoing its action, as well as in her pale eyes and her blonde hair, in the little buttons that pinched the cuffs on the sleeves of her morning gowns...

   Most capital
   On where I am soon to die: when the person has appeared to me different [...] I had in my life this great pleasure comparable to that which I happened to taste sometimes in the garden in Combray sitting throughout a lovely day without moving beneath the shelter of the great chestnut tree, seeing the sun turn all the way around its trunk. But sadly when you have seen it also cast its light successively on every surface you know that night-time is going to come.

   Most capital those three persons
   Mme de Rezké - Legendre, young Serpinacio, Mme de la *** will not necessarily work
   Add to persons who have grown old
   The Duchesse de Guermantes, rosy and blonde, had as if the party had lasted too long a sort of air of lassitude that proceeded not only from that matinée, but from the fact that her life itself had already lasted quite a long time. It was with an air of fatigue which gave her an appearance of austerity, of sadness and almost of ill health that she continued to hold on to her heavy beauty as applied to her face. Though this beauty became exhausted in places and like those animal or vegetable species that having lived for so long create hybrids of themselves, and come so closely to resemble others that we ask ourselves if there really is an insurmountable demarcation line between the species, similarly Mme de Guermantes now came to closely resemble a renowned Princesse who I had known to be still beautiful and already old, and who was no relation of the Duchesse de Guermantes, that seeing how much the Duchesse's type was nearing the limit at which point it turned into the type of this other woman, one came to doubt that individuality was something from which humanity was unable to escape.
   I saw a young man who was overly tall, overly thin, very blond, very pale, like a young shoot just recently emerged from its seed, with charming features, and when Mme Cottard came to speak a few words to him it made me suddenly realize that this young asparagus shrub was the small seed that I had seen one day barely germinated and all curled up next to Mme Cottard's bed (perhaps a different name would be better) when she had just given birth. When we do not see a person, a young person, for a certain period of time, it is not always easy to to place humanity outside of natural history, so much does the growth of a young man resemble that of a young plant.
   I noticed a woman I did not know. But after overhearing a few words it was revealed to me that this was Mme Goupil, but regardless of that by making her features submit to an inverse touching up of the features that time had brought about in her it may have been possible to detect that it was she. Indeed it was she and in her memory she had pictures which reminded her of me because she looked at me at length. And yet it was not her. Because the new forms that her nose, her cheeks had taken on were not just new designs but characteristics that had a different meaning, as if she had taken offense, was irritated, to the point where I wondered if she was not a little deranged in the head. I ought to have greeted her. But there are periods in our lives which are so detached from us that the people who remain in them like a fragment detached from a continent and are carried off like an island that is drifting, make us believe that we are excused from feeling any duty towards them, because of the impossibility of being able to perform our duty towards everyone, like a generous person  who after having given enormous tips to almost everybody on leaving an hotel, makes it look as though they are in a hurry to catch a train, and do not see the barman who comes out to the very door of the omnibus. I did not greet Mme Goupil. And she left the matinée before the end. But had I been indifferent to her I would not have formed any wishes towards her afterwards, but I was not indifferent, I had always had a lot of affection for her. But I conceived two wishes towards her. They were that either she should lose the husband who she adored so that I would have the opportunity to write her a letter so that she would think that I had forgotten none of the past, or that she herself would die so that the scant existence she still had for me would be completely annihilated and she could no longer judge me unfairly and think that I was ungrateful to her.

   Generally, when we observe what we call society, it is divided, like a cake that has been cut into two parts that are not necessarily equal but which seem to be permanently separated. But in reality the cause of the split was a certain idea, born out of a certain event, around which there forms a double system of crystallization. But little by little this idea loses its force and all of a sudden a new event comes to the surface, a new idea that is now the only important one, the dividing line is no longer the same, the parts from one of the two pieces are completely rejoined to the other, which has caused, according to the order of the new affinities, more than one of its parts to rejoin the opposing piece. Thus when Mme de Guermantes was still Princesse de Laumes, society was still divided by the idea of republicanism. There were two camps, the conservatives and the republicans. At that period when I was just starting to pay my calls  on Mme de Guermantes, one could no longer see the traces of the split in the parts of the cake that had been so cleanly separated. Miraculously reconciled anti-Dryfusard conservatives and republicans formed one bloc and Dreyfusard conservatives and republicans formed another bloc. The Dreyfus affair was the new event that destroyed in an instant the two combinations that had been thought to be eternal and which were in fact unstable, and had created two new and totally different ones from them, each of the two new ones borrowing elements from the first. But the war had been a third event; it differed from the others (placing it exclusively from the point of view of its consequences in society) in that in the conservative consolidation, or in the anti-Dreyfusard consolidation, the contrary consolidation was not far away. Mme de Gallardon no longer greeted the Princesse de [blank] who sat in the Chamber as a progressive republican but she encountered her wherever she went; Mme de Marsantes no longer greeted Lady [blank] (and in exchange had assimilated herself to Mme Swann because she was a nationalist) but she found herself face to face with her at the dressmaker's. In the anti-Boche split on the other hand, Austrian nobles, German ambassadors whose antisemitism was clear to be seen were driven out; the other half of the cake was no longer in France. This is what was called the sacred union. On the other hand the war, like the Dreyfus affair, was a passionate subject of conversation; less so than the Dreyfus affair because the adversary was further away, but more so because there were absolutely no more distractions to divert us from thinking about it. During the Dreyfus affair it was among the activists only that the life of the salons took on the aspect of political gatherings where one found oneself, be it among the nationalists, be it among the revisionists, discussing the incidents of the day around the tea table at which some important gentleman from the party was impatiently awaited, coming to announce that at the last hour Zurlinden or Galliffet had decided to advance. Many of the salons preferred to remain disinterested, at least during the hours of social gatherings, about the events of the day and to not adopt that purely political form of society conduct which at Mme de Gallardon's for example had the effect of allowing a position of eminence to some radical anti-Dreyfusard who she would never have received during the "affair" and of excluding some ardently revisionist Duchesse. Even though it was understood that in certain areas of society everybody there was anti-Dreyfusard, everybody knew, if not outside,  where it was believed the whole of the Faubourg Saint-Germain was on its knees before General Mercier, that there were some exceptions, some "wrong thinkers". And even many mistresses of houses who knew to only receive anti-Dreyfusards,  having hard from the very start that the Dreyfus affair was a divisive subject, a controversial subject, forbade, with a slight, scandalized smile, anybody to talk about it, not so much out of prudence, because they did not actually know any dissidents, but out of a habit of imitation and banality of mind. But during the war all social distractions had disappeared, to discuss the war together was actually the only excuse that could be found for gathering together and because the dissidents were beyond the frontiers there was no fear of offending anybody even though the expression "wrong thinkers" had outlived the Affair and was applied, by they themselves, to those who found the German Emperor much more intelligent than the French papers said and who shrugged their shoulders at those who were looking forward to the crushing of the enemy. "I am very much a wrong thinker", said the Duchesse de Guermantes.
   Then, like at the time of the Dreyfus affair, men who were informed, men with power who could call you on the telephone if not about Galliffet any longer, but about Greece "on the advance" (even if contradicted the next day by the turn of events) were also the men who were most sought out. But since the point of view was no longer the same some noted Dreyfusard now turned anti-Boche was received in [illegible] in some previously nationalist salon dedicated to the execration [illegible] of ministers who had not known until then from the Faubourg Saint-Germain that the two or three ladies who hoped to be decorated or to see their husband made ambassador (and we have seen that M. de Norpois dared not present them, even at Mme de Villeparisis'), were sought out by the Duchesse who they telephoned in the early morning with the outcome of the offensive or the stance taken by Bulgaria. All of which explains how the Duchesse de Guermantes, who was so elegant, who had been through the whole Dreyfus affair without allowing herself to present a single nationalist who was not part of society, was now inseparable from M. Bontemps.
   "It must have been a great effort for her to come here," I said, pointing out Gilberte. "She must be grieving so much for her husband."
   "If you don't mind me saying so I think she has been more contented since his death although it's a terrible thing to say. She is enchanted to be a Duchesse. Besides, it is claimed that she is to marry young Montesquiou."
   "Is he any relation to the Montesquiou-Fezensacs?" asked M. Bontemps. "I have a friend in the senate of that name." Not only did such ignorance not displease the Duchesse any more than might a few rustic expressions when we are talking to a country person, but it even seemed to her, without her admitting it, a sign of intelligence. We never imagine the people we always dine with in town and who are part of our circle to be great men. A vivid indication that they are however predisposes us on the contrary to give them credit for a certain amount of talent. But then all through her youth the Duchesse, moulded by fashion, had been shocked by anything that deviated even a little from the most elegant good breeding. Now it was the complete opposite; having achieved everything she wished for, wearied by her regal position in society, she was curious for something else. She spoke in praise of radical men of state and liked to recount that she invited actresses to lunch. The singular, mannered, very Guermantes way that she said such anti-Faubourg things, would alone have been enough to recall that she had once been a "lioness", "cutting" those men or women whom she did not consider as completely "pure" at matinées or on the beach at Trouville.
   But just as when we reply to a provincial expression from a country person, which is far from giving us a poor idea of them,  we speak rather according to the rules that we have learned in childhood and which we apply instinctively, Mme de Guermantes replied to the Minister: "It's the same family, they are the Montesquious."
   "But forgive me, my friend isn't called Montesquiou but Montesquiou-Fezensac."
   "Yes, it's the same thing, that was Aimery the head of my unc's family. His wife, the Duchesse de F'zensac was actually Basin's aunt."
   Perhaps say at this point Mme de Belmont saying "pig" or Mme de Guermantes saying to me "you have been a friend of twenty years" or reflections about M. Bontemps and forgetting Albertine. Maybe he will speak to me about her? Or on everyone I have loved brought together Gilberte Bontemps Saint-Loup Guermantes.
   I need to pay my respects... Mme de Forcheville said [illegible] "You know her [illegible] you like her. So stay here. She's as silly as aye goose."
   Perhaps this whole section about salons during the war would be better when Cottard comes to the Verdurin's (or Guermantes') as a major during the war and I will just keep the Bontemps dialogue (that we knew the Duchesse for a long time?) for this last chapter.

   Lack of space:
   Capital
   When I say that throughout one's life the threads intersect, criss-cross, Guermantes three evenings etc. And this is only with regard to ourselves. Laws are procreative. There had been great similarities in the way that I sought out Gilbertine and Albertine, in my love for Albertine and my mother, in the discoveries I made about St-Loup and Albertine. That is because I myself was the same and once our character has created the mould for our loves, of our friendships etc., they are all of them poured into it and life is nothing more than a series of verifications of different forms that demonstrate a theorem set by the intellect. It is for an analogous reason that in a novel which follows the course of a life, which is to say where every path leads onto countless others, so many people recognize themselves, even though they are not the ones who have been depicted. To maintain that such a person who is not Odette or is not M. de Guermantes, may be them, might they not find that in fact at the end M. de Guermantes entertains Odette under the same circumstances as M. de Guermantes entertains that lady, whereas somebody else will not hesitate to recognize themselves in M. de Guermantes because he really is of a particular family, with a brother who is known for the same vice, has a nephew with the same physical appearance who was killed in the war. The colours that make good portraits are the ones that serve for everybody. 

   Follows on from previous left hand page.
   Madame Swann! the Duchesse de Guermantes, the Princesse de Guermantes, for me they all had their essence, a life that was so special that it circulated like a delightful breeze, recognizable among all others, even in the things that merely belonged to them, their dresses, their handwriting, their writing paper, their antechamber, and they perfumed for ever those places where I knew they had been, and who now seem to me to be hardly distinguishable from so many other women, cut out from the same material to a design that differed but little. I understood that what had differentiated things, the reality of actions, the original enchantment of certain times of day, was in our minds. And it is because now like a performer, a mediocre copyist who no longer knows how to rethink a work, sketching out every feature with the same sentiment, I depicted to myself as cold and indifferent Mme Swann, the Duchesse de Guermantes, the Princesse de Guermantes, who formerly I had loved as a preconceived entity, each of them appeared to me in their original splendour as different in the universal frescoes that were at that time the whole world to me as in those in the Louvre, in Rome, in the Doge's palace in Venice. Queen of the Seas. What a deception; not an encouraging sign. If these treasures were in the mind, should it not be on that that from now on I should rely; should it not be in that that I ought to seek the life of cities, of those bodies that faded away when my mind was no longer holding them up. And how could I make myself sad since I was now remembering that I saw my grandmother for the first time when I was returning from Montargis's and already in Combray, in the little garden on an evening when I saw Swann, I had a clear idea of it all, I told myself that to see is to think; the error was always not to realize that we are living, even in our life with others, with both our external life and our life within.

   When I was astonished to find that people considered Forcheville to be more stylish than Swann: It is true that Swann's extreme elegance seemed to me a self evident truth and I was astonished that people disregarded me, and for a long time I had not been aware of it, having at first believed along with my parents in Combray that Swann only shared the company of stockbrokers (positively) and after that that he only attended  the Villeparisis salon because he could not do better, that he was a man of elegance but to whom the real Faubourg was closed. But once we know something it is as if we had always known it and we are unforgiving towards those people who are still at that earlier stage of our evolution.  Mme de Sévigné's d'Hacquevilles (better to have that said by my grandmother, maybe not about Swann, or else say it here about Swann).

   Somewhere when I talk about the assembly of (aged) masks or else the turns that take place in life and maybe through this passage the masks could lead on to the turning points, but maybe not, if not perhaps this passage could be cut in two, half about the masks, half about the turning points. And some of them were dressed in something invisible that I had seen at the first soirée at the Princesse's, like Swann, St Loup. If they were there, in which case it was in a costume that the eye cannot see, speaking words that the ears cannot hear. As death had come to surround me, still not in the expected way, because if the causes are natural, as they are unknown, the effect strikes in a place that we had not imagined, like in the mysteriously prepared attack by an enemy who is trying to defeat you. We expect that which we think we can foresee. For example being so ill in Balbec (indicate that in its place, the stares of people) I was able to expect my death along with all the people who had expected it there. But it was all those who were fearing it who suddenly, in a way that nobody had imagined, had fallen, the first President of the Republic struck down by a crazed litigant (put this in its place), St Loup in the war, Albertine in a riding accident. And regarding Albertine, after having suffered so much at her death, now that merely created one more "view" like a magic lantern (the same for St Loup) after having seen her on the beach among the young girls. Thinking that I would never get to know her, then having had her all to myself, then  her death being like one more image, one more possession in my life (all this is very badly put, could articulate in that section about life's turning points, indifference towards Albertine now). Besides, it is in the same way that causes have acted politically and socially. Once again it is a measure of time. St Simon who wrote long after the period in which the beginning of his memoirs took place often said: "who could have said of him that his son, who could have said of him that his son-in-law". Thus I could say: who could have said of Albertine, of St Loup that they would die before me, who could have told my grandmother that men would fly, Odette that her daughter would marry St Loup, who could have told M. de Norpois that Picquart was to become Minister of War, that France would enlarge its territory with the Alsace-Lorraine, that Germany's might would be smashed. And yet all these events, so unlikely they might appear in regard to a past that was so different, so natural might they seem to us who have witnessed them and because they in turn form a part of the past, human will had played some role in it all (if St Loup had stayed in the General Staff he would not have been killed, if Kaiser Wilhelm had not declared war the shape of Europe would perhaps not have been changed), they had been brought about by these rational and necessary causes in collaboration with that will.

   Capital
   I was thinking again about what Mme de Guermantes told me at the Verdurin's about the dreariness of growing old and I thought that whatever I had observed about time I was not sad about growing old because I placed the goal of my life not behind me but in front of me, not considering myself as a flower that fades, but as a fruit that ripens and that the years to come would not distance me from something I was trying to find.

   Say that at that soirée Bloch knew everybody. As for Mme Verdurin she held an eminent position, the pleasure taken by a class in trying to amuse her like the Duchesse de Bourgogne and Mme de Maintenon. But who can say if all that was not yielding...

   At some point
   On seeing the two scenes, scenes nevertheless that were lodged within me, the very different scenes that the Guermantes presented to me then and now, Maria telling me with my consent all the things that I had hoped never to hear from her (in the theatre box) and having presented to me as something entirely natural the image of that compliant girl who, a few years previously, everyone including myself had judged to be the most distant, life was seeming to me to be something that allowed me to rectify that initial image, like some acquired knowledge, like a conquest, like a chemical  action that results in causing the elements that make up a substance to materialize.
   This caused to appear before me those first scenes, those first characters, like a stage set, as a truth for all to see, and consequently with no hidden secrets, and which I myself now knew were concealing something else. So that life appeared to me like a sort of acquired knowledge that added to those visions which were to all appearances the most immutable from the past, with a new and secret beauty.

   Placed here through lack of space
   The young and very handsome man who irresistibly had the look of a "tante" could have been the young Cambremer widower. People who saw themselves being stared at by him would not understand but would ask who he was. "He's a nephew through marriage to the Guermantes, M. de Cambremer." "What? M. de Cambremer? That hardly fits in with the Guermantes." "But I think the Cambremers are from very good stock." "Yes, but still, they are not at all of the Guermantes' society." "I think he married a daughter of the Baron de Charlus." "Well then, M. de Charlus must have been married twice then because as far as I know he didn't have any children with his first wife who was a Princesse de Bourbon." (This will lead on too to reflections about things people know nothing about, whereas my grandfather knew all his tenants and what made each and every one of them "tick".

   Most capital
   To go somewhere either as part of this ending, or might go well perhaps in Venice.
   (N.B. At the bottom of this page I am adding more to this:)
   What marked out the passage of time on the other hand as if by an astronomical clock (find the exact word) (But if it is in Venice I don't talk about the passage of time and I'll take out the start of the remaining sentence if it is the last chapter) was that for some time my character had been so entirely different from what it was in days gone by, that this second part of my life was placed as if opposite to the other, distinct like a mirror that reflected all my faults of the past, and which I now observed for the first time. I realized that I had been a ridiculous snob who had not dared greet Bergotte in front of Mme de Guermantes. Certainly now I would no longer be capable of such cowardice, but that is because it is only now that I find it culpable, but that again is because it is only now that I have become conscious of it. After that particular moment the poetry of the name of Guermantes obscured everything else to me. I realized that the day when I had believed that a girl loved women And yet while judging myself severely for the first time,  while feeling myself to be a better person, I asked myself if I preferred it when the poetry of the name Guermantes could obscure for me the motive power of actions that I would avoid nowadays through judging from the outside with a cold prosaism, not being able to embellish them further I perceived what was indelicate about them.
   For the first time I realized that the day when I had believed that a girl loved a woman, thinking only to calm my jealousy, I had straight away committed the infamy of wishing to make her daughter-in-law to my mother, and had possessed her in our home. Thus if Balzac's novels had for a long time seemed absurd to me, because in his depiction of people like me he had given them a coarseness of character that revolted me, I now appreciated those novels because I realized that there was no infamy in his characters of which I was not capable myself at any moment. Similarly with Baudelaire. As much as I had loved "the sun sparkling over the ocean", as much as I found the most absurd rhetoric in some of his pieces such as "If rape, poison, dagger, fire" - quote the whole thing - now I recalled with what passion I had wished for Albertine's death, in those moments when I thought that she would not come back, and how much I had wept on her death. There is no doubt that I had wept over her death, but because she had caused me a suffering hurt that I knew nothing about when I had wished for it, prayed for it, perhaps too because no longer having the choice between her life apart from me and her death, I wept over the suffering that her death had caused me without knowing that the suffering of knowing her to be alive and being with other people would have been more intolerable still because dead I kept her unchanged and all to myself. The passage of time still marking out different hours.

   To be added to what is on the back about my new character (in writing this I haven't reread this sheet, so it might have a double use).
   The character of my parents for which I had been obliged to find accommodation within myself and which had already manifested itself sometimes in my theories of good sense with regard to Françoise and Albertine, had little by little taken command over the rest of my character. In the past in the sentimental agitation of my words there had been a sensual realist in me that I had not recognized, now on the other hand perhaps I retained one that was agitated and sentimental, in any case the coldness of my words, the imperturbable calm of my movements took command of me externally to my character; others spoke, I listened; I could suffer, and like my grandmother I found it useless to complain and on our trips I let everyone jostle me, saying that that would not make us move more quickly...

   Somewhere. Not only had the war not brought about the great changes that we thought but when somebody was talking about Mme de Villeparisis Mme de Sixtours asked which one: "the Comtesse or the Baronne?" The Comtesse Baronne who at that time was performing honourable service beside the Queen of England was considered the height of elegance, whereas the Comtesse was the most rejected by her peers. Yet Mme de Sixtours, virtually maid of honour to the Empress of Russia had witnessed her final fate. But it is probably the case that the subtleties of snobbism were of no less importance to the old lady as the gallows. They had been taken back up again after the Revolution, alive and well in republican society. As for the aristocratic characters such as Mme de Guermantes, St Loup (who in any case was such a supporter of the war that he died in it), Charlus, the Marquise de Villeparisis, even if they did not reappear, their interest would not be any the less great, the revolutions that have followed on later had not diminished our interest in the ladies of the Ancien Régime or the Egyptian pharaohs.

   Capital
   I do not know where, I felt a renewed desire for the milkmaid from the mountains by the railway and I told myself that she has grown old now whilst I desired her so much younger. I will add this fo finish: because time changes people without changing the image that we have kept of them and which we can no longer attain from the outside whatever violent desire that she excites in us. And a sadness was born in me for the opposition between the instability of the person and the fixity of our memory.

   Add at some point for the name of Guermantes. In the period when I had heard it said that the Guermantes were powerful lords, to me this idea meant nothing, I did not know any other ducs, I did not know anything, the Guermantes, isolated against a vague background like a cathedral in the mist, seemed to be something unique that had descended from the heavens. It was quite different for all those ducal houses of which a life in society had given me an experimental knowledge and my readings of history a rational knowledge, and to which I had been forced to attach the Guermantes. But their name still retained traces of the colour that in days gone by my more lively imagination had laid upon them, and at times when I read that name, by a sort of reduplication I was distancing myself from what it was for me today, I saw it again in a sort of dream, I was in no doubt that one day I would learn for what mysterious reasons they were unique lords in whom there resided that virtue which in the depths of my past I could hear reverberating in their name and to which it would have been derisory to compare to the Uzès or the La Rochefoucaulds, or even the Orléans or the Bourbons. Just as a single cord fulled tight and wound around a winch returns at strict intervals to reach at different elevations the various points of the winch around which it is acting, it seems that life has the less numerous mechanisms so as to be always the same for whoever has lived it a little, at diverse repetitions we have met them again over a small duration of elevation, making contact with us in a different way. But these identities of actors in my life pleased me too because I saw in them, I felt in them the action of life itself, I extricated them from life, in the various uses and designs that it made from the threads that composed its weave.

   Concerning the music we hear in this exercise book add (capital) those mad about music not only looked at each other in a conniving way at every piece of music they liked but gave the appearance of showing off the music itself as if it were a delightful child about whom they were silently pointing out his charms while he frolicked exquisitely. Also to show how well she knew it Madame de Cambremer placed her extended index finger in front of her mouth and touching the tip of her nose as if ready to indicate the time which the silence of her surroundings prevented her from beating out or perhaps to indicate by such a signal of hush, the silence that she was obliged to maintain.

   To include in one of these places
   Even that single face of the Princesse de Guermantes that I had hardly ever seen, always seeming to be posing so well with her immovable profile, her eyes fixed and unyielding, her attire always of the same style, upon those images that I had of them how many turns in the road had I created, and how many friendships in my life had changed so that finding myself on different occasions in front of the same immobile face and the same unyielding eyes, they had signified for me successively - as if the same identical image had only appeared there in order to explain the changes in my life, on my first evening at the theatre a woman who I thought I would never get to know, later on at her house a woman that I thought could scarcely believe that she had invited me, today a female friend who would have been happy to invite my aunt. Also beautiful widow on the first evening in front of her box but connected with too many familiar things to have retained her situation of those times before.

   When I see the Duchesse de Guermantes during that matinée. The grey hair that she now wore pinned up in some way ravaged her face, made it larger, made her eyes almost boundless as in a denuded area of countryside, the captive sky of the Île-de-France where the light seemed to shine more sweetly  as in the late afternoon. It seemed that in her voice I would have been able to find too the golden sweetness "of the yellow and sweet rays of late autumn". But frequenting the company of artists, her affectation of naturalness, of humour, of using coarse language, had almost given her a kind of rascality in which the language of street urchins seemed to border on provincial slurring like in the composite accent of a singer who is forgotten today, Fragson, where one could not make out whether it was English or in a Montmartre accent. And it was not only in the phrases she used, devoid of any intonation, in her involuntary hesitations, liberally gilded  and drawn out that I recognized the lingering light on the golden porch of a church.

   Mme de Chemisey being Legrandin's married sister in Normandy for whom he was afraid to give us an introduction, Like Madame Swann in pink satin at my uncle's, and Swann in Combray preventing Mamma from coming up to see me, who I never suspected for a moment that one day they would be (his wife and him) for me the ineffable parents of the one I was in love with, and become, he some sort of gentleman of the fashionable world, she the most annoying and the most vulgar of women, Montargis hostile on the first day and then coming to see us through the rain swept road, then to turn out to be the nephew of the woman I was in love with, and so good with his regiment when I was feeling miserable and making me become acquainted with the artist who has had the greatest influence on me.

   When I talk about Bloch at this matinée (or else put this without Bloch, and not at the Guermantes', in the part where I sum up the war). He was somewhat disconcerted to meet there the corpulent old baccarat player from Balbec, who had the appearance of St Paul in the illustrations in the Gospels in local colours. This mysteriously wealthy gentleman was vulgar and ugly but more generous and more patriotic than many French people who were not Jewish. All of his children had served in the war with great courage. And he had heaped such colossal sums of money into the Princesse de Guermantes' patriotic works that she regarded him as a sort of providence and never held a reception without inviting the whole family and which through discretion they would forego. But this man who worshipped the beauty and the goodness of the Princesse, had finally come this time and his presence had stupefied many Jews who were more elevated than him in the hierarchy of Israel and who however were far from arriving at the level of penetrating the homes of the Guermantes.

   Capital. During the matinée: I was abruptly silenced, it was the elderly singer I had seen at the buffet with his young wife and who were about to sing a duet. Everybody carried on talking despite their efforts to sing as best they could. And yet the elderly singer cast an involuntary and furtive glance of loving encouragement towards his young wife with a trembling voice by which it appeared that she was agitated by such a reception. They were met with a great deal of injustice at this matinée because the Princesse de Guermantes had thought it amusing to say that she had discovered her two detestable singers. She omitted to add that she was not paying them. They only dared claim their fee on one occasion and having received nothing they did not repeat the offence. It was all for nothing that the young wife had spent three hundred francs on her dress, and that her husband ended up catching bronchitis.
   [several lines missing] here with regard to this duo I could have it that I praised Mme de Cambremer's reflections, the jokes that were made by the Princesse and to which the Duchesse responded.

   See on the back something that is not connected but is capital.
   Capital. I don't know where but probably in this section. Time had passed and now I had notions about certain people that it seemed to me I had held all along but were very different from what I had believed for a long time, for example the real morals of Albertine and M. de Charlus. - Because people are concealed, only letting a few rays of their true light that they carry within themselves filter out, and it is only very much later, sometimes not until the end of their lives, that like clouds completely penetrated by the moon they are for us no longer in any shadow but fully lit up. Which cam be a great disappointment for example in the case of those made in such a way that any novel for them must have a psychological predestination as a necessary condition, and who with this belated knowledge would have been able to construct such novels that they thought impossible. I was told that M. de Charlus (or even perhaps the young Cambremer and then replace before the war with after the war) had found out what St Loup really was just at the moment when he was going off to war and he had cried out: "Robert! Oh, I could never have believed it! Oh, if I had only known!"

   I had never seen any resemblance between the very charming Mme X and her mother who I had known when she was old and who had the appearance of a shrunken little Turk. And indeed for a very long time Mme X had remained charming and sincere. For too long, because like a person who before nighttime comes must not forget to put on the disguise of a Turk, she left it too late, and thus was she suddenly and all at once become shrunken and had exactly reproduced the orientalized old age of her mother.

   Are not perhaps certain accidental circumstances just the aspect that cloaks for us the realization of more general social laws? Chance sympathies, friendships have, it seemed to me, made me leave behind my own sphere by one particular path and make my way into a completely different society. But in this society I rediscovered the daughter of an old friend of my grandfather's who, it is true to say, penetrated it via a very circuitous route, a chance inheritance, an adoption etc., whereas I also saw the nephew of our friend Norpois there, he being there on account of another accident of fate, so it seemed, the marriage of our friend's sister to a Norman aristocrat. But in the end, starting from the same point, these chance circumstances have brought us to the same point, not perhaps being anything but the particular aspect that brought something, here being diffused into a pool, there in turn coming out of the waves which in reality obey the rising tide and must arrive at the same point once again as if specific accidents, the chill of leaving a theatre, lack of strength following a sorrow etc. in which the invalid does not notice the progressions that a hidden illness takes, or again the various contrary circumstances [illegible passage], an important affair that occurs unexpectedly at the very moment it was about to come to a close, and where there is no necessity to feel weak, a sudden discomfort for which a sedative is needed etc. etc., where the morphine addict thinks he can see deaths which prevent him from giving up his morphine, when they are nothing more than various faces that this impossibility has assumed and even that it is itself manufactured, but beneath these faces he is unable to recognize it.

   At some point in this soirée: I did not perhaps have any great imagination but as if I was thinking over (which is no advantage) what St Simon discovered in different family situations etc. For an uninformed person reading an account in the Figaro: Comtesse de Forcheville, Duchesse de Guermantes, Baron de Charlus, Marquise de Cambremer, Princesse de Guermantes, they all sound the same. As for me I recognized that the Duchesse de Guermantes was a great lady, the Baron de Charlus a great nobleman, Mme de Forcheville a nobody, Mme de Cambremer of no great account, the Princesse de Guermantes even less.

   Capital when I talk about family traits - two different things
   One
   it is on account or our life enclosed within the individual that we believe that certain particularities are inherent in it. In reality they are unaware of the individual, play across much vaster surfaces, do not consider individuality and have a different system of numeration.  In the same way as when we are in the mountains we no longer see the rain as we see it from a house in a village in the plain, but - (like the doctor who knows that the slight haemorrhage which the patient believes has come from the depths of his being ia related to the rupture of a tiny blood vessel that he can tie up at will), we see that it is falling from clouds whose shape and dimensions are not the same as those over the village and are not in the deepest part of the sky, with the result that above them there is no rain and that over the plain the alternating zones of the sun in shadow and the rain, here, cut a village into two, there, bring the two together, in a word obeying a different and greater system, similarly with Bloch, with young Cambremer, with the Duc de could be observed a habit of blowing out while taking back some saliva from time to time, a sexual reversal, a precocious unwittingness that was never found in their parents but in their grandparents who they had never known and thus, like the whims of nature, greater than the whims of the individual, extended over larger surfaces like te sunshine and shadow on the sea, springing forth like a fountain or a volcano (confirm snow) every two or three generations.
   The second thing which will follow on from what I wrote through lack of space in the margin of the right hand page opposite this one is: Yes, at a certain age in this family, just like in winter even if it is bright and sunny the daylight arranges itself to fall at about half past four, at around forty-four years of age there is a change of health, the fat man grows thin, his weakly and cancerous peasant father appears in him like an apparition through a magical transparence just as if he had wanted to come back for two more years on earth, then returning under the earth and taking with him his son who has only spent one with him (Nicolas and combine that with Bloch's father? or Cottard who must keep him alive for a few more days, even though his life had hardly been of any interest and even though I had seen no necessity of old Bloch living on several times over, but nature must not have been of my opinion).

   Concerning a gentleman who I did not remember if in the end he married Mme X or not and who he married (try to make this a character from a book and that the marriage plans had been drawn up at the time) I will say: With age or in the memory all recollections have become homogeneous, those of men that one has noticed having lost half of their body, those of characters whose adventures one rereads from time to time, having ended up by having one, it is permitted that we begin to have large gaps, even in the things that we have known best. And it was perfectly excusable for me not to remember who had married M. de X in the end, I, who when I reread Le Lys dans la vallée from time to time and the last letter from Natalie de Maneville, was obliged to reach for Une fille d'Eve in my bookcase to remind myself - even though I had looked at it at least as many times as my questions about X had remained unanswered - who married Félix Vanderesse in the end.

   The young Duc de Chatellerault (no because he would not be young enough it must be someone else - it could be the Prince de Laumes) was there. His appearance was truly distinguished and intelligent. He was between the Princesse de Laumes and Marquise de ... and it was only when he walked with the support of two crutches under his armpits that one noticed the glorious wound that he had received during the war. All of a sudden I saw the young prince cast a worried glance towards the back of the room with that anxiousness that is conveyed in the eyes as much by the regret at a pleasure that one cannot engage in and cannot let it be seen, as by a fear of draughts even or some other annoyance. It was upon a young footman who had just entered for a moment that the young man's gaze alighted. Two or three times his gaze hovered with an air of discomfort as if his wound was causing him to suffer. Then he once more began to chat and to laugh with his two neighbours as if he had been paying attention only to them. But I told myself that if the appearance alone of people is there for us to see, on the other hand their looks inscribe before them, like phylacteries that holy persons carry, their true legend, and which allow them to be identified. I had been told all the things about the young Prince de Laumes that everyone says about others, which amounted to nothing. But in that room, as if it had been decorated with Byzantine mosaics, a true inscription, that one had been traced by a furtive but attentive trait, profoundly hollow, indelible, by the curve of that anxious look and I saw in the Prince de Laumes the heir of M. de Charlus. (I could connect this to the voice; in any case I would not have needed this look, because a little later I lifted my eyes on hearing quite close to me a shrill and peculiar voice just as one stares involuntarily when one hears the coughing of a consumptive in a railway carriage.

   Capital: When I think about the passage of time I will say: my personality had changed; those very reflections I had made at the Princesse de Guermantes' buffet proved that, considering the place where I was now as somewhere indifferent in which to pursue and develop the ideas that I had had previously, I was no longer capable of those combinations of things that operated on me in days gone by, at Rivebelle, at Elstir's studio, on every occasion when I walked into a new restaurant, at a society gathering, as if it were a universe that had anulled my previous self; just as my anxiousness to go and find Legrandin and make amends for my past incivility proved that I was no longer the impulsive person who did not greet my uncle out of fear that my greeting was not adequate. All new qualities whose appearance in me I now regretted profoundly, after the death of my father who would have been so pleased and so surprised to find me a man of good sense and behaviour, and at the point of embarking upon a work of art, for which the opposite quality to distinction, disorder, even coarseness and indiscretion in relationships and in life are infinitely more precious.

   Most capital, ignorant people who are not part of society said of Mme de Saint-Loup it's not surprising that she had a lot of relations, because as well as Forcheville and Swann her mother had had many (the Baignères, Gounod by marriage, according to Shrameck) and add perhaps even though very different Forceville Clermont-Tonnerre.

   At a certain point that I have yet to choose (perhaps include it with what I put five pages back about the ancient name of Guermantes being revived).
   And similarly when I suddenly recalled that certain women whose reputation, whose image stood out in my adolescent dreams, like Mme de Guermantes, certain women who were so famous that to me their lives seemed already almost accomplished many years ago, they were the ones who sometimes under the same name or sometimes under another because they had remarried or had changed their title - sometimes ruined, sometimes having changed their circle, their situation, their character, their reputation - more often their appearance - that as if they been just anybody and without any reality in my imagination I greeted and led to the buffet and they would say to me: "try to come to the Opéra tomorrow night".

   Certain women who I found it quite natural to meet as if they had been just anybody, who told me: "It's such a long time since we've seen you", who I led to the buffet and who would say to me: "so come to the Opéra tomorrow", suddenly I remembered something that I had never thought about again, that they were - sometimes having changed their names because they had remarried or had inherited a new title - sometimes having become rich, poor, virtuous, shameless, pious, beautiful, ugly - they were the same ones whose reputation, whose ineffably elegant image stood out in my adolescent dreams, so famous then that their destiny had already been accomplished and about whom one would have been stupefied to think: these are the same people at this Guermantes soirée as in those works in which one discovers fifty years later, their role finished, certain figures from history who we are amazed to think that our grandfathers were still able to meet them; to the extent that the kind of miracle that consisted of vulgarly sandwiching Mme de Guermantes between women who, when I was a child - for so many years they had been creatures of legend to me, this matinée gave me the impression of at the same time the reality and the impossibility that certain dreams give us, where in an authentic omnibus whose odour we can smell and in which we are sitting, we have as our neighbour Marie-Antoinette who is asking me to beckon to the conductor.

   Capital: When I talk about Albertine, Gilberte, etc. say: I who had clung so much to their possession, to their assimilation (and so much so that one finds oneself in that illusion which in other respects would happen with others, one would give one's life for them, kill oneself) I saw that they no longer counted for me other than for the truths they had taught me. Each one of them I saw against my life with the symbol of those truths in their hands like the Sciences that were depicted in the Middle Ages on the portal of St André des Champs as charming young women yet who held between their hands instruments with which to discover the stars or to learn grammar (look in Mâle for Laon or somewhere else or the frescoes at Sienna).

   When I talk about the carriage accident (or rather motor car) which I now fear, add as capital. But now that I felt myself of a work of art it made such an accident more terrible, even (to the extent that this work seemed to me to be something essential and lasting) absurd, contrary to my wishes, with my burst of ideas, but in no way less possible for all that, since material accidents being the outcome of material causes may easily take place at the moment when very different ideas make them detestable, as happens every day in the simplest incidents in daily life or when one is trying with all one's heart not to make a noise in front of a neighbour and a bottle left too close to the edge falls off and wakes him,or the night one has reached the limit of one's strength and about to be overtaken with an attack if one waits another two minutes before going to bed, a hot water bottle knocking against something in the bed breaks, soaking it, and it will be another two hours before one can get to bed (but place the two examples at the beginning of the passage. But as a material accident is the cause, and just like not wanting to make a noise, so the fact that the carriage accident had become more to be feared did not make it any less possible. And thinking back about earlier accidents (attack).

   Capital: When I talk about Time elapsing. It really was this flight of Time that had seemed to me so mortally sad in the novels I read in Combray and which had left me in despair when, one evening when M. de Norpois had dined with us, a word from my father had given me to believe that it would come to me too (say this better and not the word flight). And it had indeed come but not quite so gradually that I would not have suffered like in the books, leaving me sufficiently changed that I would not find it sad to have changed.

   Place after being at my uncle's in my relations with Mme de Guermantes, that this Mme de Guermantes, seen in the church at Combray at Mlle de Percepied's wedding and under the sparkling eyes and the mauve scarf (?) which had produced in me a very different idea to the one I later attributed to the Mme de Guermantes who was closely linked to my ideas about the Guermantes way and which no longer ever entered into my thoughts, so that from a distance she seemed to me to be a different person from the same family, as might have been a sister or sister-in-law to the person I got to know since then, whose existence I would have discovered from a book of memoirs or from some conversation, whose existence I would have entirely based on my ideas from that time just as we do for a famous person who we do not know, and the sight of whom - like that of a person who has been much spoken about to us and who we catch sight of at some formal occasion so as to allow us to place in front of our dreamed one the image of the person to whom we had given an imaginary existence - was merely a faint sketch of the noble lady delicately enhanced with colours taken from life, such that, on that same day in an ancient church bathed in sunlight where the multicoloured light falls from the stained glass windows, so as to render old architecture more vividly, so many artists have depicted Gothic naves in the nineteenth century.

   Most capital when I ask Gilberte to introduce me to young girls (unless I prefer to say it when I ask Mme de Guermantes to get me invited to balls but no the second is better) because I felt that brief love affairs which I would no longer believe in anyway would be good, much like those intellectual conversations that people in society think are of benefit to scholars, the chosen nourishment that I could allow myself if absolutely necessary and that would keep me in a good enough state to compose my work if I lacked the courage for complete solitude (say before these words complete solitude so as not to mix up the image. It must be young girls in flower for the poet like the horses that are only fed on roses (find the exact reference).

   Place somewhere around here (about ageing). I recognized the two young ducs that I had met at Mme de Villeparisis'. But I recognized them only as one does in nightmares dreams, or at exhibitions, when the character evoked or painted merely presents a vague resemblance with the one we have seen in real life.
   [paragraph crossed out] Their faces did not have the freshness I remembered, their features were harsher, their graver expression contrasted with their juvenile appearance appearance destitute of the expression that had charmed me had something more grave, so that I did not recognize them and just as some people have when one is sleeping and dreaming about and who do not have their usual physiognomy look at us differently to the way they usually do. One would have said two mature gentlemen who resembled them; their features were harsher, the brow marked with a slight wrinkle, it was as if I was standing before a portrait of them in which even though I could recognize them I would have said that the artist had not captured their likeness. He had not flattered them, he had aged them. And all of a sudden I asked myself if in fact they had not aged and if the illusion where they appeared to me was not simply the illusion of life.
   I greeted M. d'Argencourt who looked the same, but the moment he came forward to shake hands, he, so slim, so light on his feet, his feet thudded heavily against the floor, his entire body moved with difficulty as though he had been encumbered with a breast-plate and his legs placed in iron greaves.His features were quite the same, and for him Time had merely made him into the knight who was so heavily with arms that his steps had been slowed. He shook hands with a smile and such an expression of friendliness that I tried to recall whether he had known me well in the past. I could come up with nothing however but a visit to Mme de Villeparisis' where he had scarcely seen me. But all those years were clouded by so many shadows that what I remembered had the uncertainty of something I had dreamed. Perhaps though without having seen me he had nursed a profound sympathy for me, had never ceased to talk about me here there and everywhere, was upset when he was told that nobody saw me any more and marked with a white pebble that day when he had shaken my hand. Had he been acquainted with my father in the past, had my father chatted to him in the shower? Or maybe this was a form of greeting that he adopted with everyone who spoke to him whether he knew them or not, being known to too great a number of people not to be amiable to the ones he recognized.

    To be placed  for Montargis (Allard, Billy)
   And yet I thought tenderly that one day perhaps we would find each other again, at the end of our lives, Montargis and myself, chatting amicably, as in the past one of the final scenes of our lives would once again place Montargis and myself side by side, unrecognizable  in our old wigs and our costumes for the final act, but [...]
   And yet, as if this loss were compensated by a sort of gain, I thought with pleasure that one day perhaps, after many years, we would find each other again, Montargis and myself, side by side and unrecognizable in our old men's costumes for the final act, but still in the same attitude of affectionate conjunction, like fruits that are ready to drop, one beside the other, weighed down now, which are plumper and sweeter, and covered with a white bloom. The same conversation on two chairs pulled together would seem to us more delightful, through that conscience and memory of similar chats through the years, which those first ones never had. And in the bosom of this selfsame familiarity each of us would speak to the other only with a sort of esteem and respect. Because - we are successively so many different men through the course of our life, that life itself dons so many different aspects and takes up so many different styles - each perceiving the other as merely the grandson or great-grandson of the person to whom he had sworn his friendship at Querqueville, who in spite of the changes of life, condition, society in all its forms, had insisted on never allowing the inherited debt to be protested, a debt of friendship that had also become something more durable than most forms of memory, more ancient, more permanent and which by going back to its source when we found ourselves side by side once more, could embrace and confront with its permanence the succession of their vicissitudes and their ephemeral contrasts.

   Most capital and I place it here through lack of space but it definitely needs to be placed after I have demonstrated that the unreality of travel, the impossibility of isolating other than through art what there was in the name of Balbec, in the memories of Combray (say this) impel me towards art, it is the same for love (Probably after travel and before love put what I wrote somewhere that way about the mystery of women in the street who reappear even in Albertine's lifetime). Was it not the same for love. From time to time had I not felt, even before I had completely forgotten Albertine, when a woman pleased me on account of her body, left me in expectation for the whole day, made me believe that she had other plans with somebody else, was I not taken up again with the same love as for Albertine, and did I not feel strongly that the woman was not there for nothing, that the circumstances were the same and absolutely independent of the person that had provoked them and who could be anybody else. From that moment what use contriving to myself little by little the artificial but unavoidable necessity of a person, imaginary predestination but from which one cannot free one's thoughts, what use contriving them by the association of ideas between this person and sufferings anterior to that person. Was it not more necessary to cling to what was real, to those sufferings themselves and to seek to extract the truth from them.
   Before saying this and after the trip I will say: Far from believing that I am unfortunate, as some of the greatest have believed, to live without friends, without conversation, it seemed clear to me that the intensity of exaltation which is spent in friendship is a sort of false doorway that aims for a particular friendship that leads nowhere and turns from a truth towards which it is its goal to carry us up. And it was not simply the forces of the mind that I felt were of a general character and not made for particular relationships. The object to which they apply themselves even when it seems particular is not. Thus when it comes to love (And then comes what I said in the right hand margin) (I could place the conversation before or after the travelling, the mystery of lives etc.). And after what I have said about love, I will say: just as in the odour of the cup of tea I felt myself urged on, objectively supported by different brothers, by the scent of the mignonettes (?) of Chateaubriand, by Baudelaire's perfumes, the same way in that interior state which was that of a true and permanent lover, I felt that more unhealthy, more enveloped in a suspicious and jealous character, in the melancholies of childhood, in familial tenderness it was however parent of Chateaubriand's Sylphide and those of Gérard de Nerval. Maybe I could put this before the left hand margin about love and say: just as with scents. Then after the word G. de Nerval: even before having forgotten Albertine and before the left hand page. Maybe on the other hand better to place Chateaubriand and Nerval to finish off.

   Perhaps if the person were detached from their surroundings might they not amount to very much, like those monuments that look well according to their situation even if they lack beauty in themselves. But just as in order to think about them I went back to the places where they first appeared to us, just like seeing once again Mme de Souvré's jacket in grey beige wool, I detached her onto the glittering blue of the sea, from that glorious afternoon and felt the mild and salty breeze coming through the window, in the extinction of my memories I gave "one in the other" as shopkeepers say, a fixed price for "everything" that I would not perhaps have given to Mme de Souvré if my less clear-sighted memory had consented to subtract her from the group and offer her up to me in isolation.

   When I say how much I was deceived about my own character and that I had not loved Albertine well say: yes, I had loved her but in the same way that we say to the cook that I like chicken, that I like lobster, which is to say wring the neck of one, boil the other alive, so that I can enjoy eating them, I like them very much. And introduce my impressions about nature when I make a visit in the afternoon to Cours-La-Reine etc. like one of those then unknown aspects of the nature of the poet that I was going to finally exploit and which were not interpreted at that time other than by my mistakes and stupid questions, the Argencourt salon before the Guermantes salon etc.

   But all of a sudden the name Guermantes, which for me just as for everybody else, was nothing more than the correct designation for presenting those people who we met at soirées, words that I spelled out in pronouncing them, in giving approximately equal importance to each syllable, all of a sudden something like the sound of bells escaped from this name and it was the ancient name of Guermantes; in which I barely heard anything but the final syllable, a name from days gone by, and everything it signified for me on the Guermantes way, of the duchesse who was dreaming in the lofty heights of her tower, of the stained-glass window, which sometimes, at rare intervals, like the clock of a distant church that we only hear at certain times escaping as if in fragments, consisting almost entirely of the sonorousness of "antes" which was the only part of it that I heard in the past (put this in the right place), the echo of the ancient name of Guermantes, of the lady who lived in the Guermantes château in Brabant, the lady in the stained-glass window and of the walk that made me tremble, giving a different meaning suddenly to the present name of Guermantes, a greater value that I had ceased to think about and which came to me with as much sweetness - mantes, mantes - as those sounds of the angelus that reached us when we were coming from Guermantes and which made us hurry as if they were coming - like those sounds of the angelus which made us hurry our steps when we heard them during our walks so as not to get back late, it came to me over the fields of Combray, in the sweetness of the evening air, on the same Guermantes way. At the moment I heard the fragment of the angelus the Duc came up to me: Do you know where Mme de Guermantes is? Ah! [several illegible words] becoming more artistic, he could pay attention to it and notice that it was pretty, he could never know the whole surge of sweetness which at intervals could detach itself from it.

   When I say that I will not allow people to come and see me when the need for work on my writing takes precedence over the need to be polite or even behave well, I will add: "No doubt when their labours were completed they had a need for me just as I myself had a need for St Loup like the prophet Nehemiah and I had already come to realize when at Combray I returned full of love for my parents who were angry because the different clock-faces that regulate our actions are not always set to the same time. One strikes the time for rest at the same time that the other strikes the time for work and one the time for punishment by the judge when for the guilty one the time for repentance and inner change had already come about some time before.

   Most capital
   Upon hearing the mention of Swann's name the Duc de Chatelleraut said to me: "Ah! you're talking about that old man." Indeed during the first few years when he went into society people still spoke of a M. Swann as somebody he heard described as a person who was very artistic (that is to say somebody whose company was enjoyed by Mme de Guermantes) and on account of certain notions that were held about artistic affectations he pictured to himself a renowned invert. Then for many years afterwards he had never heard the name again, since it was never mentioned, so that coming upon the name again in conversation this strange, quaint, mismatched name reached his ears evoking perfectly a particular era, because unlike others it had not lived on for him, a name like those that embody a form of comedy or vice corruption that has died out, a name like that of Gilberte or Gil Perez. "Oh! Swan", said (the misinformed man from the Verdurin's) "I can tell you exactly who he is. He is a man with a considerable business in pen-holders, Swan pen-holders, Onotos." "That's nothing to do with him", I replied, besides which to me the name of Swann did not carry that evocative strangeness that it had for the Duc de Chatelleraut and which other names had for me, because the name Swann was too constantly brought back to me by my memories to have taken on that strange and poetic remoteness. Maybe attach this bit about Swann and in any case most capital.

   Everything that floated impertinently around the Princesse des Laumes who was already so pretty

   Somewhere in this chapter (or somewhere else!) if I put it in this chapter I will introduce Bloch to Gilberte (when he will know her. And I will tell him that she is Swann's daughter, like when I explained to him who was one or the other). The humiliations that he was often prone to, such as when at Mme Verdurin's he had asked if she received General de Boisdeffre and du Paty de Clam, ought to have cured him. But the memory of having seen Tansonville when he had visited us at Combray, of having had relations with Mme Swann in the railway carriage had deeply excited the interest that he felt in Odette, in Gilberte, in their various worldly avatars that he asked Gilberte with the utmost crudity to recount to him how her mother had married her father, why she had remarried, why she, Gilberte, had married St Loup, if Swann had more or fewer relationships than she had now, if Forcheville had more or fewer  relationships than Swann: "You understand that I am asking you this from a purely Balzacian point of view, to try to put together a novel", he told her - and it was only then that he noticed that she had turned her back on him and he was speaking into thin air.

   N.B. It might be better to put in this cahier what I said about the loss of my memory - either just on the natural theory (Blotin*) or on the memory, or even also (maybe not...) on forgetting Albertine - in the cahier that follows on from the death of Albertine, so that I will say that lost time is measured both by memory and the loss of memory.

   Most most most most capital to add on the left-hand side above when I talk about external danger

   P.S. It is necessary that I have gone out exceptionally during the day to go to this matinée which will explain perhaps the ardour of my feelings and the rediscovery of Time. I'm thinking of Sunlight on the Balcony.

   To be placed perhaps in the series on the left-hand page opposite before talking about the risk of death: this had made me so disinterested in working that I hadn't written anything unnecessary. Perhaps I wouldn't have written anything useful at all if I had continued to go out. But idleness had protected me from facility perhaps and in turn illness was going to protect me from idleness,
   Most capital:
   To go probably at the bottom of the right-hand page opposite where I talk about the dangers of death which were menacing me from the cab (I will be able to say where I will now find death less indifferent than after the dinner at Rivebelle). Because the well being that I felt was not coming from a purely subjective nervous tension which by moderating our consciousness isolates us from the past but on the contrary out of a widening of my thought which actualized the past and provided me with a value of eternity but only momentarily and that I would have wished to bequeath to those whom in the same way I could make pass through the same states. It was once more a pleasure but no longer a selfish one, or at least out of selfishness (because all the great fruitful altruisms in nature are clothed in a form of selfishness and human altruism that is not selfish is nearly always sterile - it is that of the writer who instead of locking himself away in his "ivory tower" receives a visitor, accepts a public function etc.), a selfishness that is of use to others... and I will add: External danger, and internal danger too. If I was preserved from accidents coming from outside, who knows if I would not be prevented from profiting from that mercy by an unforeseen accident within myself before the necessary months had passed for me to write this book. When my grandmother had gone out When presently I returned home through the Champs-Élysées, who was to say I would not go just as my grandmother had gone there with me the day before, which for her was the last, in that ignorance that is ours too, of a hand that has stopped, without its knowing, at the point where the released spring of the clock is about to strike the hour. The hour! but the final hour. Perhaps the fear that I might already have traversed almost the whole of that minute that preceded it, when the stroke is readying itself, the stroke in my brain, perhaps this fear was like an obscure awareness of what was going to be, a reflection of the conscious mind of the precarious state of the brain whose arteries are about to give way, which was no more impossible than this acceptance of death that comes to wounded men who, even though they have retained their lucidity, and have been deceived by their doctor and their desire to live, say: "I am going to die, I am ready" and write to their wife. As for me it is something else that I have to write, something much longer.

   Look again at the cahier with the canvas outside cover and see if I have actually put this in the young girls at the seaside and see if there isn't space to put it back here.

 


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Begun 19.12.17
Last update 14.11.24