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

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 over-burdened 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 shew 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 tie-pin, 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 was doing. All the greater was my astonishment, when my visit was prolonged, at finding to what a zero of realisation, to what an absence of happy ending those hours spent in the enchanted dwelling led me. But my disappointment arose neither from the inadequacy of the works of art that were shewn to me nor from the impossibility of fixing upon them my distracted gaze. For it was not the intrinsic beauty of the objects themselves that made it miraculous for me to be sitting in Swann’s library, it was the attachment to those objects—which might have been the ugliest in the world—of the particular feeling, melancholy and voluptuous, which I had for so many years localised in that room and which still impregnated it; similarly the multitude of mirrors, of silver-backed brushes, of altars to Saint Anthony of Padua, carved and painted by the most eminent artists, her friends, counted for nothing in the feeling of my own unworthiness and of her regal benevolence which was aroused in me when Mme. Swann received me for a moment in her own room, in which three beautiful and impressive creatures, her principal and second and third maids, smilingly prepared for her the most marvellous toilets, and towards which, on the order conveyed to me by the footman in knee-breeches that Madame wished to say a few words to me, I would make my way along the tortuous path of a corridor all embalmed, far and near, by the precious essences which exhaled without ceasing from her dressing-room a fragrance exquisitely sweet.

      When Mme. Swann had returned to her visitors, we could still hear her talking and laughing, for even with only two people in the room, and as though she had to cope with all the ‘good friends’ at once, she would raise her voice, ejaculate her words, as she had so often in the ‘little clan’ heard its ‘Mistress’ do, at the moments when she ‘led the conversation.’ The expressions which we have borrowed from other people being those which, for a time at least, we are fondest of using, Mme. Swann used to select at one time those which she had learned from distinguished people whom her husband had not managed to prevent her from getting to know (it was from them that she derived the mannerism which consists in suppressing the article or demonstrative pronoun, in French, before an adjective qualifying a person’s name), at another time others more plebeian (such as “It’s a mere nothing!” the favourite expression of one of her friends), and used to make room for them in all the stories which, by a habit formed among the ‘little clan,’ she loved to tell about people. She would follow these up automatically with, “I do love that story!” or “Do admit, it’s a very good story!” which came to her, through her husband, from the Guermantes, whom she did not know.

      Mme. Swann had left the dining-room, but her husband, who had just returned home, made his appearance among us in turn.’ “Do you know if your mother is alone, Gilberte?” “No, Papa, she has still some people.” “What, still? At seven o’clock! It’s appalling! The poor woman must be absolutely dead. It’s odious.” (At home I had always heard the first syllable of this word pronounced with a long ‘o,’ like ‘ode,’ but M. and Mme. Swann made it short, as in ‘odd.’) “Just think of it; ever since two o’clock this afternoon!” he went on, turning to me. “And Camille tells me that between four and five he let in at least a dozen people. Did I say a dozen? I believe he told me fourteen. No, a dozen; I don’t remember. When I came home I had quite forgotten it was her ‘day,’ and when I saw all those carriages outside the door I thought there must be a wedding in the house. And just now, while I’ve been in the library for a minute, the bell has never stopped ringing; upon my word, it’s given me quite a headache. And are there a lot of them in there still?” “No; only two.” “Who are they, do you know?” “Mme. Cottard and Mme. Bontemps.” “Oh! the wife of the Chief Secretary to the Minister of Posts.” “I know her husband’s a clerk in some Ministry or other, but I don’t know what he does.” Gilberte assumed a babyish manner.

      “What’s that? You silly child, you talk as if you were two years old. What do you mean; ‘a clerk in some Ministry or other’ indeed! He is nothing less than Chief Secretary, chief of the whole show, and what’s more—what on earth am I thinking of? Upon my word, I’m getting as stupid as yourself; he is not the Chief Secretary, he’s the Permanent Secretary.”

      “I don’t know, I’m sure; does that mean a lot, being Permanent Secretary?” answered Gilberte, who never let slip an opportunity of displaying her own indifference to anything that gave her parents cause for vanity. (She may, of course, have considered that she only enhanced the brilliance of such an acquaintance by not seeming to attach any undue importance to it.)

      “I should think it did ‘mean a lot’!” exclaimed Swann, who preferred to this modesty, which might have left me in doubt, a more explicit mode of speech. “Why it means simply that he’s the first man after the Minister. In fact, he’s more important than the Minister, because it is he that does all the work. Besides, it appears that he has immense capacity, a man quite of the first rank, a most distinguished individual. He’s an Officer of the Legion of Honour. A delightful man, he is, and very good-looking too.”

      (This man’s wife, incidentally, had married him against everyone’s wishes and advica because he was a ‘charming creature.’ He had, what may be sufficient to constitute a rare and delicate whole, a fair, silky beard, good features, a nasal voice, powerful lungs and a glass eye.)

      “I may tell you,” he added, turning again to me, “that I am greatly amused to see that lot serving in the present Government, because they are Bontemps of the Bontemps-Chenut family, typical old-fashioned middle-class people, reactionary, clerical, tremendously strait-laced. Your grandfather knew quite well—at least by name and by sight he must have known old Chenut, the father, who never tipped the cabmen more than a ha’penny, though he was a rich enough man for those days, and the Baron Bréau-Chenut. All their money went in the Union Générale smash—you’re too young to remember that, of course—and, gad! they’ve had to get it back as best they could.”

      “He’s the uncle of a little girl who used to come to my lessons, in a class a long way below mine, the famous ‘Albertine.’ She’s certain to be dreadfully ‘fast’ when she’s older, but just now she’s the quaintest spectacle.”

      “She is amazing, this daughter of mine. She knows everyone.”

      “I don’t know her. I only used to see her going about, and hear them calling ‘Albertine’ here, and ‘Albertine’ there.