In Search of Lost Time

of the newsboy, the “journalists” as Françoise used to call them, the shouts of the bathers and of children at play, punctuating like the cries of seabirds the sound of the gently breaking waves) I guessed their presence, I heard their laughter enveloped like the laughter of the Nereids in the smooth tide of sound that rose to my ears. “We looked up,” said Albertine in the evening, “to see if you were coming down. But your shutters were still closed when the concert began.” At ten o’clock, sure enough, it broke out beneath my windows. In the intervals in the blare of the instruments, if the tide were high, would begin again, slurred and continuous, the gliding surge of a wave which seemed to enfold the notes of the violin in its crystal spirals and to be spraying its foam over echoes of a submarine music. I grew impatient because no one had yet come with my things, so that I might rise and dress. Twelve o’clock struck, Françoise arrived at last. And for months on end, in this Balbec to which I had so looked forward because I imagined it only as battered by the storm and buried in fogs, the weather had been so dazzling and so unchanging that when she came to open the window I could always, without once being wrong, expect to see the same patch of sunlight folded in the corner of the outer wall, of an unalterable colour which was less moving as a sign of summer than depressing as the colour of a lifeless and composed enamel. And after Françoise had removed her pins from the mouldings of the window-frame, taken down her various cloths, and drawn back the curtains, the summer day which she disclosed seemed as dead, as immemorially ancient as would have been a sumptuously attired dynastic mummy from which our old servant had done no more than precautionally unwind the linen wrappings before displaying it to my gaze, embalmed in its vesture of gold.

Volume III

The Guermantes Way

Author’s Dedication

A
Léon Daudet

A l’auteur
du Voyage de Shakespeare,
du Partage de l’Enfant,
de L’Astre Noir,
de Fantomes et Vivants,
du Monde des Images,
de tant de chefs-d’oeuvre,

A l’incomparable ami
en témoignage de reconnaissance et d’admiration

M. P.

Translator’s Dedication

To Mrs. H⁠⸺⁠,
on her Birthday

Oberon, in the Athenian glade,
Reduced by deft Titania’s power,
Invented arts for Nature’s aid
And from a snowflake shaped a flower:
Nature, to outdo him, wrought of human clay
A fairy blossom, which we acclaim today.

Hebe, to high Olympus borne,
Undoomed to death, by age uncurst,
Xeres and Porto, night and morn,
Let flow, to appease celestial thirst:
Ev’n so, untouched by years that envious pass
Youth greets the guests tonight and fills the glass.

Hesione, for monstrous feast,
Against a rock was chained, to die;
Young Hercles came, he slew the beast,
Nor won the award of chivalry:
E.S.P.H., whom monsters hold in awe,
Shield thee from injury, and enforce the law!

C. K. S. M.

Part I

I

The twittering of the birds at daybreak sounded insipid to Françoise. Every word uttered by the maids upstairs made her jump; disturbed by all their running about, she kept asking herself what they could be doing. In other words, we had moved. Certainly the servants had made no less noise in the attics of our old home; but she knew them, she had made of their comings and goings familiar events. Now she faced even silence with a strained attention. And as our new neighbourhood appeared to be as quiet as the boulevard on to which we had hitherto looked had been noisy, the song (distinct at a distance, when it was still quite faint, like an orchestral motif) of a passerby brought tears to the eyes of a Françoise in exile. And so if I had been tempted to laugh at her in her misery at having to leave a house in which she was “so well respected on all sides” and had packed her trunks with tears, according to the Use of Combray, declaring superior to all possible houses that which had been ours, on the other hand I, who found it as hard to assimilate new as I found it easy to abandon old conditions, I felt myself drawn towards our old servant when I saw that this installation of herself in a building where she had not received from the hall-porter, who did not yet know us, the marks of respect necessary to her moral well-being, had brought her positively to the verge of dissolution. She alone could understand what I was feeling; certainly her young footman was not the person to do so; for him, who was as unlike the Combray type as it was possible to conceive, packing up, moving, living in another district, were all like taking a holiday in which the novelty of one’s surroundings gave one the same sense of refreshment as if one had actually travelled; he thought he was in the country; and a cold in the head afforded him, as though he had been sitting in a draughty railway carriage, the delicious sensation of having seen the world; at each fresh sneeze he rejoiced that he had found so smart a place, having always longed to be with people who travelled a lot. And so, without giving him a thought, I went straight to Françoise, who, in return for my having laughed at her tears over a removal which had left me cold, now showed an icy indifference to my sorrow, but because she shared it. The “sensibility” claimed by neurotic people is matched by their egotism; they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an ever increasing attention in themselves. Françoise, who would not allow the least of her own ailments to pass unnoticed, if I were in pain would turn her head from me so that I should not have the satisfaction of seeing my sufferings pitied, or so much as observed.