In Search of Lost Time

The lift-boy was on the small side, clumsily built and by no means good looking. This did not prevent him, whenever one spoke to him of some tall, slim, handsome young man, from saying: “Oh, yes, I know, a fellow who is just my height.” And one day when I was expecting him to bring me the answer to a message, hearing somebody come upstairs, I had in my impatience opened the door of my room and caught sight of a page as beautiful as Endymion, with incredibly perfect features, who was bringing a message to a lady whom I did not know. When the lift-boy returned, in telling him how impatiently I had waited for the answer, I mentioned to him that I had thought I heard him come upstairs but that it had turned out to be a page from the Hôtel de Normandie. “Oh, yes, I know,” he said, “they have only the one, a boy about my build. He’s so like me in face, too, that we’re always being mistaken; anybody would think he was my brother.” Lastly, he always wanted to appear to have understood you perfectly from the first second, which meant that as soon as you asked him to do anything he would say: “Yes, yes, yes, yes, I understand all that,” with a precision and a tone of intelligence which for some time deceived me; but other people, as we get to know them, are like a metal dipped in an acid bath, and we see them gradually lose their good qualities (and their bad qualities too, at times). Before giving him my instructions, I saw that he had left the door open; I pointed this out to him, I was afraid that people might hear us; he acceded to my request and returned, having reduced the gap. “Anything to oblige. But there’s nobody on this floor except us two.” Immediately I heard one, then a second, then a third person go by. This annoyed me partly because of the risk of my being overheard, but more still because I could see that it did not in the least surprise him and was a perfectly normal occurrence. “Yes, that’ll be the maid next door going for her things. Oh, that’s of no importance, it’s the bottler putting away his keys. No, no, it’s nothing, you can say what you want, it’s my colleague just going on duty.” Then, as the reasons that all these people had for passing did not diminish my dislike of the thought that they might overhear me, at a formal order from me he went, not to shut the door, which was beyond the strength of this bicyclist who longed for a “motor,” but to push it a little closer to. “Now we shall be quite quiet.” So quiet were we that an American lady burst in and withdrew with apologies for having mistaken the number of her room. “You are going to bring this young lady back with you,” I told him, after first going and banging the door with all my might (which brought in another page to see whether a window had been left open). “You remember the name: Mlle. Albertine Simonet. Anyhow, it’s on the envelope. You need only say to her that it’s from me. She will be delighted to come,” I added, to encourage him and preserve a scrap of my own self-esteem. “I should say so!” “Not at all, there is not the slightest reason to suppose that she will be glad to come. It’s a great nuisance getting here from Berneville.” “I understand!” “You will tell her to come with you.” “Yes, yes, yes, yes, I understand perfectly,” he replied, in that sharp, precise tone which had long ceased to make a “good impression” upon me because I knew that it was almost mechanical and covered with its apparent clearness plenty of uncertainty and stupidity. “When will you be back?” “Haven’t any too much time,” said the lift-boy, who, carrying to extremes the grammatical rule that forbids the repetition of personal pronouns before coordinate verbs, omitted the pronoun altogether. “Can go there all right. Leave was stopped this afternoon, because there was a dinner for twenty at luncheon. And it was my turn off duty today. So it’s all right if I go out a bit this evening. Take my bike with me. Get there in no time.” And an hour later he reappeared and said: “Monsieur’s had to wait, but the young lady’s come with me. She’s down below.” “Oh, thanks very much; the porter won’t be cross with me?” “Monsieur Paul? Doesn’t even know where I’ve been. The head of the door himself can’t say a word.” But once, after I had told him: “You absolutely must bring her back with you,” he reported to me with a smile: “You know, I couldn’t find her. She’s not there. Couldn’t wait any longer; was afraid of getting it like my colleague who was missed from the hotel” (for the lift-boy, who used the word “rejoin” of a profession which one joined for the first time, “I should like to rejoin the post-office,” to make up for this, or to mitigate the calamity, were his own career at stake, or to insinuate it more delicately and treacherously were the victim someone else, elided the prefix and said: “I know he’s been missed”). It was not with any evil intent that he smiled, but from sheer timidity. He thought that he was diminishing the magnitude of his crime by making a joke of it. In the same way, if he had said to me: “You know, I couldn’t find her,” this did not mean that he really thought that I knew it already. On the contrary, he was all too certain that I did not know it, and, what was more, was afraid to tell me. And so he said “you know” to ward off the terror which menaced him as