In Search of Lost Time

Mme. Cottard and Mme. Bontemps; you know dear Mme. Bontemps never pays very short visits, and she has only just come. What would all those good people say if I never went back to them? If no one else calls, I’ll come in again and have a chat with you (which will be far more amusing) after they’ve all gone. I really think I’ve earned a little rest; I have had forty-five different people today, and forty-two of them told me about Gérôme’s picture! But you must come along one of these days,” she turned to me, “and take ‘your’ tea with Gilberte. She will make it for you just as you like it, as you have it in your own little ‘studio,’ ” she went on, flying off to her visitors, as if it had been something as familiar to me as my own habits (such as the habit that I should have had of taking tea, had I ever taken it; as for my “studio,” I was uncertain whether I had one or not) that I had come to seek in this mysterious world. “When can you come? Tomorrow? We will make you ‘toast’ every bit as good, as you get at Colombin’s. No? You are horrid!”⁠—for, since she also had begun to form a salon, she had borrowed Mme. Verdurin’s mannerisms, and notably her tone of petulant autocracy. “Toast” being as incomprehensible to me as “Colombin’s,” this further promise could not add to my temptation. It will appear stranger still, now that everyone uses such expressions⁠—and perhaps even at Combray they are creeping in⁠—that I had not at first understood of whom Mme. Swann was speaking when I heard her sing the praises of our old “nurse.” I did not know any English; I gathered, however, as she went on that the word was intended to denote Françoise. I who, in the Champs-Élysées, had been so terrified of the bad impression that she must make, I now learned from Mme. Swann that it was all the things that Gilberte had told them about my “nurse” that had attracted her husband and her to me. “One feels that she is so devoted to you; she must be nice!” (At once my opinion of Françoise was diametrically changed. By the same token, to have a governess equipped with a waterproof and a feather in her hat no longer appeared quite so essential.) Finally I learned from some words which Mme. Swann let fall with regard to Mme. Blatin (whose good nature she recognised but dreaded her visits) that personal relations with that lady would have been of less value to me than I had supposed, and would not in any way have improved my standing with the Swanns.

If I had now begun to explore, with tremors of reverence and joy the faery domain which, against all probability, had opened to me its hitherto locked approaches, this was still only in my capacity as a friend of Gilberte. The kingdom into which I was received was itself contained within another, more mysterious still, in which Swann and his wife led their supernatural existence and towards which they made their way, after taking my hand in theirs, when they crossed the hall at the same moment as myself but in the other direction. But soon I was to penetrate also to the heart of the Sanctuary. For instance, Gilberte might be out when I called, but M. or Mme. Swann was at home. They would ask who had rung, and on being told that it was myself would send out to ask me to come in for a moment and talk to them, desiring me to use in one way or another, and with this or that object in view, my influence over their daughter. I reminded myself of that letter, so complete, so convincing, which I had written to Swann only the other day, and which he had not deigned even to acknowledge. I marvelled at the impotence of the mind, the reason and the heart to effect the least conversion, to solve a single one of those difficulties which, in the sequel, life, without one’s so much as knowing what steps it has taken, so easily unravels. My new position as the friend of Gilberte, endowed with an excellent influence over her, entitling me now to enjoy the same favours as if, having had as a companion at some school where they had always put me at the head of my class the son of a king, I had owed to that accident the right of informal entry into the palace and to audiences in the throne-room, Swann, with an infinite benevolence and as though he were not overburdened with glorious occupations, would make me go into his library and there let me for an hour on end respond in stammered monosyllables, timid silences broken by brief and incoherent bursts of courage, to utterances of which my emotion prevented me from understanding a single word; would show me works of art and books which he thought likely to interest me, things as to which I had no doubt, before seeing them, that they infinitely surpassed in beauty anything that the Louvre possessed or the National Library, but at which I found it impossible to look. At such moments I should have been grateful to Swann’s butler, had he demanded from me my watch, my tiepin, my boots, and made me sign a deed acknowledging him as my heir: in the admirable words of a popular expression of which, as of the most famous epics, we do not know who was the author, although, like those epics, and with all deference to Wolff and his theory, it most certainly had an author, one of those inventive, modest souls such as we come across every year, who light upon such gems as “putting a name to a face,” though their own names they never let us learn, I did not know what I