simply because I had recognised it as a book which had been well
spoken of, in my hearing, by the school-master or the school-friend who,
at that particular time, seemed to me to be entrusted with the secret of
Truth and Beauty, things half-felt by me, half-incomprehensible, the full
80
understanding of which was the vague but permanent object of my
thoughts.
Next to this central belief, which, while I was reading, would be con-
stantly a motion from my inner self to the outer world, towards the dis-
covery of Truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in which
I would be taking part, for these afternoons were crammed with more
dramatic and sensational events than occur, often, in a whole lifetime.
These were the events which took place in the book I was reading. It is
true that the people concerned in them were not what Françoise would
have called 'real people.' But none of the feelings which the joys or mis-
fortunes of a 'real' person awaken in us can be awakened except through
a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the
first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the picture was the one es-
sential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that sim-
plification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of
'real' people would be a decided improvement. A 'real' person, pro-
foundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure percept-
ible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a
dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some
misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete
idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it
is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he
is capable of feeling any emotion either. The novelist's happy discovery
was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by
the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is,
which the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which it matters not that
the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the
guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves
that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall, while we turn
over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring
eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to that state, in which, as in
all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which
his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid,
and of a more lasting impression than those which come to us in sleep;
why, then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and
sorrows in the world, a few of which, only, we should have to spend
years of our actual life in getting to know, and the keenest, the most in-
tense of which would never have been revealed to us because the slow
course of their development stops our perception of them. It is the same
in life; the heart changes, and that is our worst misfortune; but we learn
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of it only from reading or by imagination; for in reality its alteration, like
that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able
to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.
Next to, but distinctly less intimate a part of myself than this human
element, would come the view, more or less projected before my eyes, of
the country in which the action of the story was taking place, which
made a far stronger impression on my mind than the other, the actual
landscape which would meet my eyes when I raised them from my
book. In this way, for two consecutive summers I used to sit in the heat
of our Combray garden, sick with a longing inspired by the book I was
then reading for a land of mountains and rivers, where I could see an
endless vista of sawmills, where beneath the limpid currents fragments
of wood lay mouldering in beds of watercress; and nearby, rambling and
clustering along low walls, purple flowers and red. And since there was
always lurking in my mind the dream of a woman who would enrich me
with her love, that dream in those two summers used to be quickened
with the freshness and coolness of running water; and whoever she
might be, the woman whose image I called to mind, purple flowers and
red would at once spring up on either side of her like complementary
colours.
This was not only because an image of which we dream remains for
ever distinguished, is adorned and enriched by the association of colours
not its own which may happen to surround it in our mental picture; for
the scenes in the books I read were to me not merely scenery more
vividly portrayed by my imagination than any which Combray could
spread before my eyes but otherwise of the same kind. Because of the se-
lection that the author had made of them, because of the spirit of faith in
which my mind would exceed and anticipate his printed word, as it
might be interpreting a revelation, these scenes used to give me the im-
pression—one which I hardly ever derived from any place in which I
might happen to be, and never from our garden, that undistinguished
product of the strictly conventional fantasy of the gardener whom my
grandmother so despised—of their being actually part of Nature herself,
and worthy to be studied and explored.
Had my parents allowed me, when I read a book, to pay a visit to the
country it described, I should have felt that I was making an enormous
advance towards the ultimate conquest of truth. For even if we have the
sensation of being always enveloped in, surrounded by our own soul,
still it does not seem a fixed and immovable prison; rather do we seem to
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be borne away with it, and perpetually struggling to pass beyond it, to
break out into the world, with a perpetual discouragement as we hear
endlessly, all around us, that unvarying sound which is no echo from
without, but the resonance of a vibration from within. We try to discover
in things, endeared to us on that account, the spiritual glamour which
we ourselves have cast upon them; we are disillusioned, and learn that
they are in themselves barren and devoid of the charm which they owed,
in our minds, to the association of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilise
all our spiritual forces in a glittering array so as to influence and subjug-
ate other human beings who, as we very well know, are situated outside
ourselves, where we can never reach them. And so, if I always imagined
the woman I loved as in a setting of whatever places I most longed, at
the time, to visit; if in my secret longings it was she who attracted me to
them, who opened to me the gate of an unknown world, that was not by
the mere hazard of a simple association of thoughts; no, it was because
my dreams of travel and of love were only moments—which I isolate
artificially to-day as though I were cutting sections, at different heights,
in a jet of water, rainbow-flashing but seemingly without flow or mo-
tion—were only drops in a single, undeviating, irresistible outrush of all
the forces of my life.
And then, as I continue to trace the outward course of these impres-
sions from their close-packed intimate source in my consciousness, and
before I come to the horizon of reality which envelops them, I discover
pleasures of another kind, those of being comfortably seated, of tasting
the good scent on the air, of not being disturbed by any visitor; and,
when an hour chimed from the steeple of Saint-Hilaire, of watching what
was already spent of the afternoon fall drop by drop until I heard the last
stroke which enabled me to add up the total sum, after which the silence
that followed seemed to herald the beginning, in the blue sky above me,
of that long part of the day still allowed me for reading, until the good
dinner which Françoise was even now preparing should come to
strengthen and refresh me after the strenuous pursuit of its hero through
the pages of my book. And, as each hour struck, it would seem to me
that a few seconds only had passed since the hour before; the latest
would inscribe itself, close to its predecessor, on the sky's surface, and I
would be unable to believe that sixty minutes could be squeezed into the
tiny arc of blue which was comprised between their two golden figures.
Sometimes it would even happen that this precocious hour would sound
two strokes more than the last; there must then have been an hour which
I had not heard strike; something which had taken place had not taken
83
place for me; the fascination of my book, a magic as potent as the deepest
slumber, had stopped my enchanted ears and had obliterated the sound
of that golden bell from the azure surface of the enveloping silence.
Sweet Sunday afternoons beneath the chestnut-tree in our Combray
garden, from which I was careful to eliminate every commonplace incid-
ent of my actual life, replacing them by a career of strange adventures
and ambitions in a land watered by living streams, you still recall those
adventures and ambitions to my mind when I think of you, and you em-
body and preserve them by virtue of having little by little drawn round
and enclosed them (while I went on with my book and the heat of the
day declined) in the gradual crystallisation, slowly altering in form and
dappled with a pattern of chestnut-leaves, of your silent, sonorous, fra-
grant, limpid hours.
Sometimes I would be torn from my book, in the middle of the after-
noon, by the gardener's daughter, who came running like a mad thing,
overturning an orange-tree in its tub, cutting a finger, breaking a tooth,
and screaming out "They're coming, they're coming!" so that Françoise and I should run too and not miss anything of the show. That was on
days when the cavalry stationed in Combray went out for some military
exercise, going as a rule by the Rue Sainte-Hildegarde. While our ser-
vants, sitting in a row on their chairs outside the garden railings, stared
at the people of Combray taking their Sunday walks and were stared at
in return, the gardener's daughter, through the gap which there was
between two houses far away in the Avenue de la Gare, would have
spied the glitter of helmets. The servants then hurried in with their
chairs, for when the troopers filed through the Rue Sainte-Hildegarde
they filled it from side to side, and their jostling horses scraped against
the walls of the houses, covering and drowning the pavements like
banks which present too narrow a channel to a river in flood.
"Poor children," Françoise would exclaim, in tears almost before she
had reached the railings; "poor boys, to be mown down like grass in a
meadow. It's just shocking to think of," she would go on, laying a hand
over her heart, where presumably she had felt the shock.
"A fine sight, isn't it, Mme. Françoise, all these young fellows not
caring two straws for their lives?" the gardener would ask, just to 'draw'
her. And he would not have spoken in vain.
"Not caring for their lives, is it? Why, what in the world is there that
we should care for if it's not our lives, the only gift the Lord never offers
us a second time? Oh dear, oh dear; you're right all the same; it's quite
true, they don't care! I can remember them in '70; in those wretched wars
84
they've no fear of death left in them; they're nothing more nor less than
madmen; and then they aren't worth the price of a rope to hang them
with; they're not men any more, they're lions." For by her way of think-
ing, to compare a man with a lion, which she used to pronounce 'lie-on,'
was not at all complimentary to the man.
The Rue Sainte-Hildegarde turned too sharply for us to be able to see
people approaching at any distance, and it was only through the gap
between those two houses in the Avenue de la Gare that we could still
make out fresh helmets racing along towards us, and flashing in the sun-
light. The gardener wanted to know whether there were still many to
come, and he was thirsty besides, with the sun beating down upon his
head. So then, suddenly, his daughter would leap out, as though from a
beleaguered city, would make a sortie, turn the street corner, and, having
risked her life a hundred times over, reappear and bring us, with a jug of
liquorice-water, the news that there were still at least a thousand of
them, pouring along without a break from the direction of Thiberzy and
Méséglise. Françoise and the gardener, having 'made up' their difference,
would discuss the line to be followed in case of war.
"Don't you see, Françoise," he would say. "Revolution would be better, because then no one would need to join in unless he liked."
"Oh, yes, I can see that, certainly; it's more straightforward."
The gardener believed that, as soon as war was declared, they would
stop all the railways.
"Yes, to be sure; so that we sha'n't get away," said Françoise.
And the gardener would assent, with "Ay, they're the cunning ones,"
for he would not allow that war was anything but a kind of trick which
the state attempted to play on the people, or that there was a man in the
world who would not run away from it if he had the chance to do so.
But Françoise would hasten back to my aunt, and I would return to
my book, and the servants would take their places again outside the gate
to watch the dust settle on the pavement, and the excitement caused by
the passage of the soldiers subside. Long after order had been restored,
an abnormal tide of humanity would continue to darken the streets of
Corn-bray. And in front of every house, even of those where it was not,
as a rule, 'done,' the servants, and sometimes even the masters would sit
and stare, festooning their doorsteps with a dark, irregular fringe, like
the border of shells and sea-weed which a stronger tide than usual leaves
on the beach, as though trimming it with embroidered crape, when the
sea itself has retreated.
85
Except on such days as these, however, I would as a rule be left to read
in peace. But the interruption which a visit from Swann once made, and
the commentary which he then supplied to the course of my reading,
which had brought me to the work of an author quite new to me, called
Bergotte, had this definite result that for a long time afterwards it was
not against a wall gay with spikes of purple blossom, but on a wholly
different background, the porch of a gothic cathedral, that I would see
outlined the figure of one of the women of whom I dreamed.
I had heard Bergotte spoken of, for the first time, by a friend older
than myself, for whom I had a strong admiration, a precious youth of the
name of Bloch. Hearing me confess my love of the Nuit d'Octobre, he had burst out in a bray of laughter, like a bugle-call, and told me, by way of
warning: "You must conquer your vile taste for A. de Musset, Esquire.
He is a bad egg, one of the very worst, a pretty detestable specimen. I am
bound to admit, natheless," he added graciously, "that he, and even the man Racine, did, each of them, once in his life, compose a line which is
not only fairly rhythmical, but has also what is in my eyes the supreme
merit of meaning absolutely nothing. One is
La blanche Oloossone et la blanche Camire,
and the other
La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaë."
They were submitted to my judgment, as evidence for the defence of
the two runagates, in an article by my very dear master Father Lecomte,
who is found pleasing in the sight of the immortal gods. By which token,
here is a book which I have not the time, just now, to read, a book recom-
mended, it would seem, by that colossal fellow. He regards, or so they
tell me, its author, one Bergotte, Esquire, as a subtle scribe, more subtle,
indeed, than any beast of the field; and, albeit he exhibits on occasion a
critical pacifism, a tenderness in suffering fools, for which it is im-
possible to account, and hard to make allowance, still his word has
weight with me as it were the Delphic Oracle. Read you then this lyrical
prose, and, if the Titanic master-builder of rhythm who composed
Bhagavat and the Lévrier de Magnus speaks not falsely, then, by Apollo, you may taste, even you, my master, the ambrosial joys of Olympus." It
was in an ostensible vein of sarcasm that he had asked me to call him,
and that he himself called me, "my master." But, as a matter of fact, we each derived a certain amount of satisfaction from the mannerism, being
still at the age in which one believes that one gives a thing real existence
by giving it a name.
86
Unfortunately I was not able to set at rest, by further talks with Bloch,
in which I might have insisted upon an explanation, the doubts he had
engendered in me when he told me that fine lines of poetry (from which
I, if you please, expected nothing less than the revelation of truth itself)
were all the finer if they meant absolutely nothing. For, as it happened,
Bloch was not invited to the house again. At first, he had been well re-
ceived there. It is true that my grandfather made out that, whenever I
formed a strong attachment to any one of my friends and brought him
home with me, that friend was invariably a Jew; to which he would not
have objected on principle—indeed his own friend Swann was of Jewish
extraction—had he not found that the Jews whom I chose as friends were
not usually of the best type. And so I was hardly ever able to bring a new
friend home without my grandfather's humming the "O, God of our fath-
ers" from La Juive, or else "Israel, break thy chain," singing the tune alone, of course, to an "um-ti-tum-ti-tum, tra-la"; but I used to be afraid of my friend's recognising the sound, and so being able to reconstruct the
words.
Before seeing them, merely on hearing their names, about which, as of-
ten as not, there was nothing particularly Hebraic, he would divine not
only the Jewish origin of such of my friends as might indeed be of the
chosen people, but even some dark secret which was hidden in their
family.
"And what do they call your friend who is coming this evening?"
"Dumont, grandpapa."
"Dumont! Oh, I'm frightened of Dumont."
And he would sing:
Archers, be on your guard! Watch without rest, without sound,
and then, after a few adroit questions on points of detail, he would call
out "On guard! on guard," or, if it were the victim himself who had
already arrived, and had been obliged, unconsciously, by my
grandfather's subtle examination, to admit his origin, then my grandfath-
er, to shew us that he had no longer any doubts, would merely look at
us, humming almost inaudibly the air of
What! do you hither guide the feet Of this timid Israelite?
or of
Sweet vale of Hebron, dear paternal fields,
or, perhaps, of
Yes, I am of the chosen race.
These little eccentricities on my grandfather's part implied no ill-will
whatsoever towards my friends. But Bloch had displeased my family for
87
other reasons. He had begun by annoying my father, who, seeing him
come in with wet clothes, had asked him with keen interest:
"Why, M. Bloch, is there a change in the weather; has it been raining? I
can't understand it; the barometer has been 'set fair.'"
Which drew from Bloch nothing more instructive than "Sir, I am abso-
lutely incapable of telling you whether it has rained. I live so resolutely
apart from physical contingencies that my senses no longer trouble to in-
form me of them."
"My poor boy," said my father after Bloch had gone, "your friend is out of his mind. Why, he couldn't even tell me what the weather was like. As
if there could be anything more interesting! He is an imbecile."
Next, Bloch had displeased my grandmother because, after luncheon,
when she complained of not feeling very well, he had stifled a sob and
wiped the tears from his eyes.
"You cannot imagine that he is sincere," she observed to me. "Why he doesn't know me. Unless he's mad, of course."
And finally he had upset the whole household when he arrived an
hour and a half late for luncheon and covered with mud from head to
foot, and made not the least apology, saying merely: "I never allow my-
self to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric dis-
turbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time. I
would willingly reintroduce to society the opium pipe of China or the
Malayan kriss, but I am wholly and entirely without instruction in those
infinitely more pernicious (besides being quite bleakly bourgeois) imple-
ments, the umbrella and the watch."
In spite of all this he would still have been received at Combray. He
was, of course, hardly the friend my parents would have chosen for me;
they had, in the end, decided that the tears which he had shed on hear-
ing of my grandmother's illness were genuine enough; but they knew,
either instinctively or from their own experience, that our early impuls-
ive emotions have but little influence over our later actions and the con-
duct of our lives; and that regard for moral obligations, loyalty to our
friends, patience in finishing our work, obedience to a rule of life, have a
surer foundation in habits solidly formed and blindly followed than in
these momentary transports, ardent but sterile. They would have pre-
ferred to Bloch, as companions for myself, boys who would have given
me no more than it is proper, by all the laws of middle-class morality, for
boys to give one another, who would not unexpectedly send me a basket
of fruit because they happened, that morning, to have thought of me
with affection, but who, since they were incapable of inclining in my
88
favour, by any single impulse of their imagination and emotions, the ex-
act balance of the duties and claims of friendship, were as incapable of
loading the scales to my prejudice. Even the injuries we do them will not
easily divert from the path of their duty towards us those conventional
natures of which my great-aunt furnished a type: who, after quarrelling
for years with a niece, to whom she never spoke again, yet made no
change in the will in which she had left that niece the whole of her for-
tune, because she was her next-of-kin, and it was the 'proper thing' to do.
But I was fond of Bloch; my parents wished me to be happy; and the
insoluble problems which I set myself on such texts as the 'absolutely
meaningless' beauty of La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaë tired me more and made me more unwell than I should have been after further talks with
him, unwholesome as those talks might seem to my mother's mind. And
he would still have been received at Combray but for one thing. That
same night, after dinner, having informed me (a piece of news which
had a great influence on my later life, making it happier at one time and
then more unhappy) that no woman ever thought of anything but love,
and that there was not one of them whose resistance a man could not
overcome, he had gone on to assure me that he had heard it said on un-
impeachable authority that my great-aunt herself had led a 'gay' life in
her younger days, and had been notoriously 'kept.' I could not refrain
from passing on so important a piece of information to my parents; the
next time Bloch called he was not admitted, and afterwards, when I met
him in the street, he greeted me with extreme coldness.
But in the matter of Bergotte he had spoken truly.
For the first few days, like a tune which will be running in one's head
and maddening one soon enough, but of which one has not for the mo-
ment 'got hold,' the things I was to love so passionately in Bergotte's
style had not yet caught my eye. I could not, it is true, lay down the nov-
el of his which I was reading, but I fancied that I was interested in the
story alone, as in the first dawn of love, when we go every day to meet a
woman at some party or entertainment by the charm of which we ima-