among our lilac-trees.
If the weather was bad all morning, my family would abandon the
idea of a walk, and I would remain at home. But, later on, I formed the
habit of going out by myself on such days, and walking towards
Méséglise-la-Vineuse, during that autumn when we had to come to
Combray to settle the division of my aunt Léonie's estate; for she had
died at last, leaving both parties among her neighbours triumphant in
the fact of her demise—those who had insisted that her mode of life was
enfeebling and must ultimately kill her, and, equally, those who had al-
ways maintained that she suffered from some disease not imaginary, but
organic, by the visible proof of which the most sceptical would be ob-
liged to own themselves convinced, once she had succumbed to it; caus-
ing no intense grief to any save one of her survivors, but to that one a
grief savage in its violence. During the long fortnight of my aunt's last ill-
ness Françoise never went out of her room for an instant, never took off
her clothes, allowed no one else to do anything for my aunt, and did not
leave her body until it was actually in its grave. Then, at last, we under-
stood that the sort of terror in which Françoise had lived of my aunt's
harsh words, her suspicions and her anger, had developed in her a senti-
ment which we had mistaken for hatred, and which was really venera-
tion and love. Her true mistress, whose decisions it had been impossible
to foresee, from whose stratagems it had been so hard to escape, of
whose good nature it had been so easy to take advantage, her sovereign,
her mysterious and omnipotent monarch was no more. Compared with
such a mistress we counted for very little. The time had long passed
when, on our first coming to spend our holidays at Combray, we had
been of equal importance, in Franchise's eyes, with my aunt.
During that autumn my parents, finding the days so fully occupied
with the legal formalities that had to be gone through, and discussions
with solicitors and farmers, that they had little time for walks which, as it
happened, the weather made precarious, began to let me go, without
146
them, along the 'Méséglise way,' wrapped up in a huge Highland plaid
which protected me from the rain, and which I was all the more ready to
throw over my shoulders because I felt that the stripes of its gaudy tartan
scandalised Françoise, whom it was impossible to convince that the col-
our of one's clothes had nothing whatever to do with one's mourning for
the dead, and to whom the grief which we had shewn on my aunt's
death was wholly unsatisfactory, since we had not entertained the neigh-
bours to a great funeral banquet, and did not adopt a special tone when
we spoke of her, while I at times might be heard humming a tune. I am
sure that in a book—and to that extent my feelings were closely akin to
those of Françoise—such a conception of mourning, in the manner of the
Chanson de Roland and of the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs, would
have seemed most attractive. But the moment that Françoise herself ap-
proached, some evil spirit would urge me to attempt to make her angry,
and I would avail myself of the slightest pretext to say to her that I re-
gretted my aunt's death because she had been a good woman in spite of
her absurdities, but not in the least because she was my aunt; that she
might easily have been my aunt and yet have been so odious that her
death would not have caused me a moment's sorrow; statements which,
in a book, would have struck me as merely fatuous.
And if Françoise then, inspired like a poet with a flood of confused re-
flections upon bereavement, grief, and family memories, were to plead
her inability to rebut my theories, saying: "I don't know how to espress myself"—I would triumph over her with an ironical and brutal common
sense worthy of Dr. Percepied; and if she went on: "All the same she was
a geological relation; there is always the respect due to your geology," I would shrug my shoulders and say: "It is really very good of me to discuss the matter with an illiterate old woman who cannot speak her own
language," adopting, to deliver judgment on Françoise, the mean and
narrow outlook of the pedant, whom those who are most contemptuous
of him in the impartiality of their own minds are only too prone to copy
when they are obliged to play a part upon the vulgar stage of life.
My walks, that autumn, were all the more delightful because I used to
take them after long hours spent over a book. When I was tired of read-
ing, after a whole morning in the house, I would throw my plaid across
my shoulders and set out; my body, which in a long spell of enforced im-
mobility had stored up an accumulation of vital energy, was now ob-
liged, like a spinning-top wound and let go, to spend this in every direc-
tion. The walls of houses, the Tansonville hedge, the trees of Roussain-
ville wood, the bushes against which Montjouvain leaned its back, all
147
must bear the blows of my walking-stick or umbrella, must hear my
shouts of happiness, blows and shouts being indeed no more than ex-
pressions of the confused ideas which exhilarated me, and which, not be-
ing developed to the point at which they might rest exposed to the light
of day, rather than submit to a slow and difficult course of elucidation,
found it easier and more pleasant to drift into an immediate outlet. And
so it is that the bulk of what appear to be the emotional renderings of our
inmost sensations do no more than relieve us of the burden of those sen-
sations by allowing them to escape from us in an indistinct form which
does not teach us how it should be interpreted. When I attempt to reckon
up all that I owe to the 'Méséglise way,' all the humble discoveries of
which it was either the accidental setting or the direct inspiration and
cause, I am reminded that it was in that same autumn, on one of those
walks, near the bushy precipice which guarded Montjouvain from the
rear, that I was struck for the first time by this lack of harmony between
our impressions and their normal forms of expression. After an hour of
rain and wind, against which I had put up a brisk fight, as I came to the
edge of the Montjouvain pond, and reached a little hut, roofed with tiles,
in which M. Vinteuil's gardener kept his tools, the sun shone out again,
and its golden rays, washed clean by the shower, blazed once more in
the sky, on the trees, on the wall of the hut, and on the still wet tiles of
the roof, which had a chicken perching upon its ridge. The wind pulled
out sideways the wild grass that grew in the wall, and the chicken's
downy feathers, both of which things let themselves float upon the
wind's breath to their full extent, with the unresisting submissiveness of
light and lifeless matter. The tiled roof cast upon the pond, whose reflec-
tions were now clear again in the sunlight, a square of pink marble, the
like of which I had never observed before. And, seeing upon the water,
where it reflected the wall, a pallid smile responding to the smiling sky, I
cried aloud in my enthusiasm, brandishing my furled umbrella: "Damn,
damn, damn, damn!" But at the same time I felt that I was in duty bound
not to content myself with these unilluminating words, but to endeavour
to see more clearly into the sources of my enjoyment.
And it was at that moment, too—thanks to a peasant who went past,
apparently in a bad enough humour already, but more so when he
nearly received my umbrella in his face, and who replied without any
cordiality to my "Fine day, what! good to be out walking!"—that I
learned that identical emotions do not spring up in the hearts of all men
simultaneously, by a pre-established order. Later on I discovered that,
whenever I had read for too long and was in a mood for conversation,
148
the friend to whom I would be burning to say something would at that
moment have finished indulging himself in the delights of conversation,
and wanted nothing now but to be left to read undisturbed. And if I had
been thinking with affection of my parents, and forming the most sens-
ible and proper plans for giving them pleasure, they would have been
using the same interval of time to discover some misdeed that I had
already forgotten, and would begin to scold me severely, just as I flung
myself upon them with a kiss.
Sometimes to the exhilaration which I derived from being alone would
be added an alternative feeling, so that I could not be clear in my mind to
which I should give the casting vote; a feeling stimulated by the desire to
see rise up before my eyes a peasant-girl whom I might clasp in my
arms. Coming abruptly, and without giving me time to trace it accur-
ately to its source among so many ideas of a very different kind, the
pleasure which accompanied this desire seemed only a degree superior
to what was given me by my other thoughts. I found an additional merit
in everything that was in my mind at the moment, in the pink reflection
of the tiled roof, the wild grass in the wall, the village of Roussainville in-
to which I had long desired to penetrate, the trees of its wood and the
steeple of its church, created in them by this fresh emotion which made
them appear more desirable only because I thought it was they that had
provoked it, and which seemed only to wish to bear me more swiftly to-
wards them when it filled my sails with a potent, unknown, and propi-
tious breeze. But if this desire that a woman should appear added for me
something more exalting than the charms of nature, they in their turn en-
larged what I might, in the woman's charm, have found too much re-
stricted. It seemed to me that the beauty of the trees was hers also, and
that, as for the spirit of those horizons, of the village of Roussainville, of
the books which I was reading that year, it was her kiss which would
make me master of them all; and, my imagination drawing strength from
contact with my sensuality, my sensuality expanding through all the
realms of my imagination, my desire had no longer any bounds.
Moreover—just as in moments of musing contemplation of nature, the
normal actions of the mind being suspended, and our abstract ideas of
things set on one side, we believe with the profoundest faith in the ori-
ginality, in the individual existence of the place in which we may happen
to be—the passing figure which my desire evoked seemed to be not any
one example of the general type of 'woman,' but a necessary and natural
product of the soil. For at that time everything which was not myself, the
earth and the creatures upon it, seemed to me more precious, more
149
important, endowed with a more real existence than they appear to full-
grown men. And between the earth and its creatures I made no distinc-
tion. I had a desire for a peasant-girl from Méséglise or Roussainville, for
a fisher-girl from Balbec, just as I had a desire for Balbec and Méséglise.
The pleasure which those girls were empowered to give me would have
seemed less genuine, I should have had no faith in it any longer, if I had
been at liberty to modify its conditions as I chose. To meet in Paris a
fisher-girl from Balbec or a peasant-girl from Méséglise would have been
like receiving the present of a shell which I had never seen upon the
beach, or of a fern which I had never found among the woods, would
have stripped from the pleasure which she was about to give me all
those other pleasures in the thick of which my imagination had en-
wrapped her. But to wander thus among the woods of Roussainville
without a peasant-girl to embrace was to see those woods and yet know
nothing of their secret treasure, their deep-hidden beauty. That girl
whom I never saw save dappled with the shadows of their leaves, was to
me herself a plant of local growth, only taller than the rest, and one
whose structure would enable me to approach more closely than in them
to the intimate savour of the land from which she had sprung. I could
believe this all the more readily (and also that the caresses by which she
would bring that savour to my senses were themselves of a particular
kind, yielding a pleasure which I could never derive from any but her-
self) since I was still, and must for long remain, in that period of life
when one has not yet separated the fact of this sensual pleasure from the
various women in whose company one has tasted it, when one has not
reduced it to a general idea which makes one regard them thencefor-
ward as the variable instruments of a pleasure that is always the same.
Indeed, that pleasure does not exist, isolated and formulated in the con-
sciousness, as the ultimate object with which one seeks a woman's com-
pany, or as the cause of the uneasiness which, in anticipation, one then
feels. Hardly even does one think of oneself, but only how to escape
from oneself. Obscurely awaited, immanent and concealed, it rouses to
such a paroxysm, at the moment when at last it makes itself felt, those
other pleasures which we find in the tender glance, in the kiss of her who
is by our side, that it seems to us, more than anything else, a sort of
transport of gratitude for the kindness of heart of our companion and for
her touching predilection of ourselves, which we measure by the bene-
fits, by the happiness that she showers upon us.
Alas, it was in vain that I implored the dungeon-keep of Roussainville,
that I begged it to send out to meet me some daughter of its village,
150
appealing to it as to the sole confidant to whom I had disclosed my earli-
est desire when, from the top floor of our house at Combray, from the
little room that smelt of orris-root, I had peered out and seen nothing but
its tower, framed in the square of the half-opened window, while, with
the heroic scruples of a traveller setting forth for unknown climes, or of a
desperate wretch hesitating on the verge of self-destruction, faint with
emotion, I explored, across the bounds of my own experience, an untrod-
den path which, I believed, might lead me to my death, even—until pas-
sion spent itself and left me shuddering among the sprays of flowering
currant which, creeping in through the window, tumbled all about my
body. In vain I called upon it now. In vain I compressed the whole land-
scape into my field of vision, draining it with an exhaustive gaze which
sought to extract from it a female creature. I might go alone as far as the
porch of Saint-André-des-Champs: never did I find there the girl whom I
should inevitably have met, had I been with my grandfather, and so un-
able to engage her in conversation. I would fix my eyes, without limit of
time, upon the trunk of a distant tree, from behind which she must ap-
pear and spring towards me; my closest scrutiny left the horizon barren
as before; night was falling; without any hope now would I concentrate
my attention, as though to force up out of it the creatures which it must
conceal, upon that sterile soil, that stale and outworn land; and it was no
longer in lightness of heart, but with sullen anger that I aimed blows at
the trees of Roussainville wood, from among which no more living
creatures made their appearance than if they had been trees painted on
the stretched canvas background of a panorama, when, unable to resign
myself to having to return home without having held in my arms the
woman I so greatly desired, I was yet obliged to retrace my steps to-
wards Combray, and to admit to myself that the chance of her appearing
in my path grew smaller every moment. And if she had appeared, would
I have dared to speak to her? I felt that she would have regarded me as
mad, for I no longer thought of those desires which came to me on my
walks, but were never realized, as being shared by others, or as having
any existence apart from myself. They seemed nothing more now than
the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creatures of my temperament.
They were in no way connected now with nature, with the world of real
things, which from now onwards lost all its charm and significance, and
meant no more to my life than a purely conventional framework, just as
the action of a novel is framed in the railway carriage, on a seat of which
a traveller is reading it to pass the time.
151
And it is perhaps from another impression which I received at Mont-
jouvain, some years later, an impression which at that time was without
meaning, that there arose, long afterwards, my idea of that cruel side of
human passion called 'sadism.' We shall see, in due course, that for quite
another reason the memory of this impression was to play an important
part in my life. It was during a spell of very hot weather; my parents,
who had been obliged to go away for the whole day, had told me that I
might stay out as late as I pleased; and having gone as far as the Mont-
jouvain pond, where I enjoyed seeing again the reflection of the tiled roof
of the hut, I had lain down in the shade and gone to sleep among the
bushes on the steep slope that rose up behind the house, just where I had
waited for my parents, years before, one day when they had gone to call
on M. Vinteuil. It was almost dark when I awoke, and I wished to rise
and go away, but I saw Mile. Vinteuil (or thought, at least, that I recog-
nised her, for I had not seen her often at Combray, and then only when
she was still a child, whereas she was now growing into a young wo-
man), who probably had just come in, standing in front of me, and only a
few feet away from me, in that room in which her father had entertained
mine, and which she had now made into a little sitting-room for herself.
The window was partly open; the lamp was lighted; I could watch her
every movement without her being able to see me; but, had I gone away,
I must have made a rustling sound among the bushes, she would have
heard me, and might have thought that I had been hiding there in order
to spy upon her.
She was in deep mourning, for her father had but lately died. We had
not gone to see her; my mother had not cared to go, on account of that
virtue which alone in her fixed any bounds to her benevolence—namely,
modesty; but she pitied the girl from the depths of her heart. My mother
had not forgotten the sad end of M. Vinteuil's life, his complete absorp-
tion, first in having to play both mother and nursery-maid to his daugh-
ter, and, later, in the suffering which she had caused him; she could see
the tortured expression which was never absent from the old man's face
in those terrible last years; she knew that he had definitely abandoned
the task of transcribing in fair copies the whole of his later work, the
poor little pieces, we imagined, of an old music-master, a retired village
organist, which, we assumed, were of little or no value in themselves,
though we did not despise them, because they were of such great value
to him and had been the chief motive of his life before he sacrificed them
to his daughter; pieces which, being mostly not even written down, but
recorded only in his memory, while the rest were scribbled on loose
152
sheets of paper, and quite illegible, must now remain unknown for ever;
my mother thought, also, of that other and still more cruel renunciation
to which M. Vinteuil had been driven, that of seeing the girl happily
settled, with an honest and respectable future; when she called to mind
all this utter and crushing misery that had come upon my aunts' old
music-master, she was moved to very real grief, and shuddered to think
of that other grief, so different in its bitterness, which Mlle. Vinteuil must
now be feeling, tinged with remorse at having virtually killed her father.
"Poor M. Vinteuil," my mother would say, "he lived for his daughter, and now he has died for her, without getting his reward. Will he get it now, I
wonder, and in what form? It can only come to him from her."
At the far end of Mlle. Vinteuil's sitting-room, on the mantelpiece,
stood a small photograph of her father which she went briskly to fetch,
just as the sound of carriage wheels was heard from the road outside,
then flung herself down on a sofa and drew close beside her a little table
on which she placed the photograph, just as, long ago, M. Vinteuil had
'placed' beside him the piece of music which he would have liked to play
over to my parents. And then her friend came in. Mlle. Vinteuil greeted
her without rising, clasping her hands behind her head, and drew her
body to one side of the sofa, as though to 'make room.' But no sooner
had she done this than she appeared to feel that she was perhaps sug-
gesting a particular position to her friend, with an emphasis which might
well be regarded as importunate. She thought that her friend would
prefer, no doubt, to sit down at some distance from her, upon a chair; she
felt that she had been indiscreet; her sensitive heart took fright; stretch-
ing herself out again over the whole of the sofa, she closed her eyes and
began to yawn, so as to indicate that it was a desire to sleep, and that
alone, which had made her lie down there. Despite the rude and hector-
ing familiarity with which she treated her companion I could recognise
in her the obsequious and reticent advances, the abrupt scruples and re-
straints which had characterised her father. Presently she rose and came
to the window, where she pretended to be trying to close the shutters
and not succeeding.
"Leave them open," said her friend. "I am hot."
"But it's too dreadful! People will see us," Mlle. Vinteuil answered.
And then she guessed, probably, that her friend would think that she
had uttered these words simply in order to provoke a reply in certain
other words, which she seemed, indeed, to wish to hear spoken, but,
from prudence, would let her friend be the first to speak. And so, al-
though I could not see her face clearly enough, I am sure that the
153
expression must have appeared on it which my grandmother had once
found so delightful, when she hastily went on: "When I say 'see us' I
mean, of course, see us reading. It's so dreadful to think that in every
trivial little thing you do some one may be overlooking you."
With the instinctive generosity of her nature, a courtesy beyond her
control, she refrained from uttering the studied words which, she had
felt, were indispensable for the full realisation of her desire. And per-
petually, in the depths of her being, a shy and suppliant maiden would
kneel before that other element, the old campaigner, battered but tri-
umphant, would intercede with him and oblige him to retire.
"Oh, yes, it is so extremely likely that people are looking at us at this
time of night in this densely populated district!" said her friend, with bitter irony. "And what if they are?" she went on, feeling bound to annotate with a malicious yet affectionate wink these words which she was repeating, out of good nature, like a lesson prepared beforehand which,
she knew, it would please Mlle. Vinteuil to hear. "And what if they are?
All the better that they should see us."
Mlle. Vinteuil shuddered and rose to her feet. In her sensitive and
scrupulous heart she was ignorant what words ought to flow, spontan-
eously, from her lips, so as to produce the scene for which her eager
senses clamoured. She reached out as far as she could across the limita-
tions of her true character to find the language appropriate to a vicious
young woman such as she longed to be thought, but the words which,
she imagined, such a young woman might have uttered with sincerity
sounded unreal in her own mouth. And what little she allowed herself to
say was said in a strained tone, in which her ingrained timidity para-
lysed her tendency to freedom and audacity of speech; while she kept on
interrupting herself with: "You're sure you aren't cold? You aren't too
hot? You don't want to sit and read by yourself?…
"Your ladyship's thoughts seem to be rather 'warm' this evening," she concluded, doubtless repeating a phrase which she had heard used, on
some earlier occasion, by her friend.
In the V-shaped opening of her crape bodice Mlle. Vinteuil felt the
sting of her friend's sudden kiss; she gave a little scream and ran away;