In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7]. Marcel Proust

reached the landing, broke all the bonds that still held me to my past life, so that I did not even remember that I was to take off my muffler as soon as I felt too hot, and to keep an eye on the clock so as not to be late in getting home. That staircase, besides, all of wood, as they were built about that time in certain houses, in keeping with that Henri II style which had for so long been Odette’s ideal though she was shortly to lose interest in it, and furnished with a placard, to which there was no equivalent at home, on which one read the words: “NOTICE. The lift must not be taken downstairs,” seemed to me a thing so marvellous that I told my parents that it was an ancient staircase brought from ever so far away by M. Swann. My regard for the truth was so great that I should not have hesitated to give them this information even if I had known it to be false, for it alone could enable them to feel for the dignity of the Swanns’ staircase the same respect that I felt myself. It was just as, when one is talking to some ignorant person who cannot understand in what the genius of a great physician consists, it is as well not to admit that he does not know how to cure a cold in the head. But since I had no power of observation, since, as a general rule, I never knew either the name or the nature of things that were before my eyes, and could understand only that when they were connected with the Swanns they must be extraordinary, I was by no means certain that in notifying my parents of the artistic value and remote origin of the staircase I was guilty of falsehood. It did not seem certain; but it must have seemed probable, for I felt myself turn very red when my father interrupted me with: “I know those houses; I have been in one; they are all alike; Swann just has several floors in one; it was Berlier built them all.” He added that he had thought of taking a flat in one of them, but that he had changed his mind, finding that they were not conveniently arranged, and that the landings were too dark. So he said; but I felt instinctively that my mind must make the sacrifices necessary to the glory of the Swanns and to my own happiness, and by a stroke of internal authority, in spite of what I had just heard, I banished for ever from my memory, as a good Catholic banishes Renan’s Vie de Jésus, the destroying thought that their house was just an ordinary flat in which we ourselves might have been living.

      Meanwhile on those tea-party days, pulling myself up the staircase step by step, reason and memory already cast off like outer garments, and myself no more now than the sport of the basest reflexes, I would arrive in the zone in which the scent of Mme. Swann greeted my nostrils. I felt that I could already behold the majesty of the chocolate cake, encircled by plates heaped with little cakes, and by tiny napkins of grey damask with figures on them, as required by convention but peculiar to the Swanns. But this unalterable and governed whole seemed, like Kant’s necessary universe, to depend on a supreme act of free will. For when we were all together in Gilberte’s little sitting-room, suddenly she would look at the clock and exclaim:

      “I say! It’s getting a long time since luncheon, and we aren’t having dinner till eight. I feel as if I could eat something. What do you say?”

      And she would make us go into the dining-room, as sombre as the interior of an Asiatic Temple painted by Rembrandt, in which an architectural cake, as gracious and sociable as it was imposing, seemed to be enthroned there in any event, in case the fancy seized Gilberte to discrown it of its chocolate battlements and to hew down the steep brown slopes of its ramparts, baked in the oven like the bastions of the palace of Darius. Better still, in proceeding to the demolition of that Babylonitish pastry, Gilberte did not consider only her own hunger; she inquired also after mine, while she extracted for me from the crumbling monument a whole glazed slab jewelled with scarlet fruits, in the oriental styje. She asked me even at what o’clock my parents were dining, as if I still knew, as if the disturbance that governed me had allowed to persist the sensation of satiety or of hunger, the notion of dinner or the picture of my family in my empty memory and paralysed stomach. Alas, its paralysis was but momentary. The cakes that I took without noticing them, a time would come when I should have to digest them. But that time was still remote. Meanwhile Gilberte was making ‘my’ tea. I went on drinking it indefinitely, whereas a single cup would keep me awake for twenty-four hours. Which explains why my mother used always to say: “What a nuisance it is; he can never go to the Swarms’ without coming home ill.” But was I aware even, when I was at the Swanns’, that it was tea that I was drinking? Had I known, I should have taken it just the same, for even supposing that I had recovered for a moment the sense of the present, that would not have restored to me the memory of the past or the apprehension of the future. My imagination was incapable of reaching to the distant tune in which I might have the idea of going to bed, and the need to sleep.

      Gilberte’s girl friends were not all plunged in that state of intoxication in which it is impossible to make up one’s mind. Some of them refused tea! Then Gilberte would say, using a phrase highly fashionable that year: “I can see I’m not having much of a success with my tea!” And to destroy more completely any idea of ceremony, she would disarrange the chairs that were drawn up round the table, with: “We look just like a wedding breakfast. Good lord, what fools servants are!”

      She nibbled her cake, perched sideways upon a cross-legged seat placed at an angle to the table. And then, just as though she could have had all those cakes at her disposal without having first asked leave of her mother, when Mme. Swann, whose ‘day’ coincided as a rule with Gilberte’s tea-parties, had shewn one of her visitors to the door, and came sweeping in, a moment later, dressed sometimes in blue velvet, more often in a black satin gown draped with white lace, she would say with an air of astonishment: “I say, that looks good, what you’ve got there. It makes me quite hungry to see you all eating cake.”

      “But, Mamma, do! We invite you!” Gilberte would answer.

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      “Thank you, no, my precious; what would my visitors say? I’ve still got Mme. Trombert and 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 to-day, and forty-two of them told me about Gérôme’s picture! But you must come alone 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? To-morrow? 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-Elysées, 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