for a long time i used to go to bed early sometimes when i had put out my candle my eyes would close so quickly that i had not even time to say im going to sleep and half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me i would try to put away the book which i imagined was still in my hands and to blow out the light i had been thinking all the time while i was asleep of what i had just been reading but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own until i myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book a church a quartet the rivalry between i and charles v this impression would persist for some moments after i was awake it did not disturb my mind but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning then it would begin to seem unintelligible as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit the subject of my book would separate itself from me leaving me free to choose whether i would form part of it or no and at the same time my sight would return and i would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness pleasant and restful enough for the eyes and even more perhaps for my mind to which it appeared incomprehensible without a cause a matter dark indeed  i would ask myself what oclock it could be i could hear the whistling of trains which now nearer and now farther off punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest shewed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying towards the nearest station the path that he followed being fixed for ever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place to doing unusual things to the last words of conversation to farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp which echoed still in his ears amid the silence of the night and to the delightful prospect of being once again at home   i would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my pillow as plump and blooming as the cheeks of babyhood or i would strike a match to look at my watch nearly midnight the hour when an invalid who has been obliged to start on a journey and to sleep in a strange hotel awakens in a moment of illness and sees with glad relief a streak of daylight shewing under his bedroom door oh joy of joys it is morning the servants will be about in a minute he can ring and some one will come to look after him the thought of being made comfortable gives him strength to endure his pain he is certain he heard footsteps they come nearer and then die away the ray of light beneath his door is extinguished it is midnight some one has turned out the gas the last servant has gone to bed and he must lie all night in agony with no one to bring him any help  i would fall asleep and often i would be awake again for short snatches only just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wainscot or to open my eyes to settle the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness to savour in an instantaneous flash of perception the sleep which lay heavy upon the furniture the room the whole surroundings of which i formed but an insignificant part and whose unconsciousness i should very soon return to share or perhaps while i was asleep i had returned without the least effort to an earlier stage in my life now for ever outgrown and had come under the thrall of one of my childish terrors such as that old terror of my great uncles pulling my curls which was effectually dispelled on the day  the dawn of a new era to me  on which they were finally cropped from my head i had forgotten that event during my sleep i remembered it again immediately i had succeeded in making myself wake up to escape my great uncles fingers still as a measure of precaution i would bury the whole of my head in the pillow before returning to the world of dreams  sometimes too just as eve was created from a rib of adam so a woman would come into existence while i was sleeping conceived from some strain in the position of my limbs formed by the appetite that i was on the point of gratifying she it was i imagined who offered me that gratification my body conscious that its own warmth was permeating hers would strive to become one with her and i would awake the rest of humanity seemed very remote in comparison with this woman whose company i had left but a moment ago my cheek was still warm with her kiss my body bent beneath the weight of hers if as would sometimes happen she had the appearance of some woman whom i had known in waking hours i would abandon myself altogether to the sole quest of her like people who set out on a journey to see with their own eyes some city that they have always longed to visit and imagine that they can taste in reality what has charmed their fancy and then gradually the memory of her would dissolve and vanish until i had forgotten the maiden of my dream  when a man is asleep he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours the sequence of the years the order of the heavenly host instinctively when he awakes he looks to these and in an instant reads off his own position on the earths surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused and to break its ranks suppose that towards morning after a night of insomnia sleep descends upon him while he is reading in quite a different position from that in which he normally goes to sleep he has only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back in its course and at the moment of waking he will have no idea of the time but will conclude that he has just gone to bed or suppose that he gets drowsy in some even more abnormal position sitting in an armchair say after dinner then the world will fall topsy turvy from its orbit the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and space and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep months earlier and in some far distant country but for me it was enough if in my own bed my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness for then i lost all sense of the place in which i had gone to sleep and when i awoke at midnight not knowing where i was i could not be sure at first who i was i had only the most rudimentary sense of existence such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animals consciousness i was more destitute of human qualities than the cave dweller but then the memory not yet of the place in which i was but of various other places where i had lived and might now very possibly be would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not being from which i could never have escaped by myself in a flash i would traverse and surmount centuries of civilisation and out of a half visualised succession of oil lamps followed by shirts with turned down collars would put together by degrees the component parts of my ego  perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else and by the immobility of our conceptions of them for it always happened that when i awoke like this and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where i was everything would be moving round me through the darkness things places years my body still too heavy with sleep to move would make an effort to construe the form which its tiredness took as an orientation of its various members so as to induce from that where the wall lay and the furniture stood to piece together and to give a name to the house in which it must be living its memory the composite memory of its ribs knees and shoulder blades offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept while the unseen walls kept changing adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered whirling madly through the darkness and even before my brain lingering in consideration of when things had happened and of what they had looked like had collected sufficient impressions to enable it to identify the room it my body would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like where the doors were how daylight came in at the windows whether there was a passage outside what i had had in my mind when i went to sleep and had found there when i awoke the stiffened side underneath my body would for instance in trying to fix its position imagine itself to be lying face to the wall in a big bed with a canopy and at once i would say to myself why i must have gone to sleep after all and mamma never came to say good night for i was in the country with my grandfather who died years ago and my body the side upon which i was lying loyally preserving from the past an impression which my mind should never have forgotten brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the night light in its bowl of bohemian glass shaped like an urn and hung by chains from the ceiling and the chimney piece of siena marble in my bedroom at com bray in my great aunts house in those far distant days which at the moment of waking seemed present without being clearly denned but would become plainer in a little while when i was properly awake  then would come up the memory of a fresh position the wall slid away in another direction i was in my room in mme de saint loups house in the country good heavens it must be ten oclock they will have finished dinner i must have overslept myself in the little nap which i always take when i come in from my walk with mme de saint loup before dressing for the evening for many years have now elapsed since the combray days when coming in from the longest and latest walks i would still be in time to see the reflection of the sunset glowing in the panes of my bedroom window it is a very different kind of existence at tansonville now with mme de saint loup and a different kind of pleasure that i now derive from taking walks only in the evenings from visiting by moonlight the roads on which i used to play as a child in the sunshine while the bedroom in which i shall presently fall asleep instead of dressing for dinner from afar off i can see it as we return from our walk with its lamp shining through the window a solitary beacon in the night  these shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted for more than a few seconds it often happened that in my spell of uncertainty as to where i was i did not distinguish the successive theories of which that uncertainty was composed any more than when we watch a horse running we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscope  but i had seen first one and then another of the rooms in which i had slept during my life and in the end i would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream rooms in winter where on going to bed i would at once bury my head in a nest built up out of the most diverse materials the corner of my pillow the top of my blankets a piece of a shawl the edge of my bed and a copy of an evening paper all of which things i would contrive with the infinite patience of birds building their nests to cement into one whole rooms where in a keen frost i would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world like the sea swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth and where the fire keeping in all night i would sleep wrapped up as it were in a great cloak of snug and savoury air shot with the glow of the logs which would break out again in flame in a sort of alcove without walls a cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself a zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature as gusts of air ran across them to strike freshly upon my face from the corners of the room or from parts near the window or far from the fireplace which had therefore remained cold  or rooms in summer where i would delight to feel myself a part of the warm evening where the moonlight striking upon the half opened shutters would throw down to the foot of my bed its enchanted ladder where i would fall asleep as it might be in the open air like a titmouse which the breeze keeps poised in the focus of a sunbeam  or sometimes the louis xvi room so cheerful that i could never feel really unhappy even on my first night in it that room where the slender columns which lightly supported its ceiling would part ever so gracefully to indicate where the bed was and to keep it separate sometimes again that little room with the high ceiling hollowed in the form of a pyramid out of two separate storeys and partly walled with mahogany in which from the first moment my mind was drugged by the unfamiliar scent of flowering grasses convinced of the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of a clock that chattered on at the top of its voice as though i were not there while a strange and pitiless mirror with square feet which stood across one corner of the room cleared for itself a site i had not looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of vision that room in which my mind forcing itself for hours on end to leave its moorings to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the room and to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed my eyes staring upwards my ears straining my nostrils sniffing uneasily and my heart beating until custom had changed the colour of the curtains made the clock keep quiet brought an expression of pity to the cruel slanting face of the glass disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses and distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling custom that skilful but unhurrying manager who begins by torturing the mind for weeks on end with her provisional arrangements whom the mind for all that is fortunate in discovering for without the help of custom it would never contrive by its own efforts to make any room seem habitable  certainly i was now well awake my body had turned about for the last time and the good angel of certainty had made all the surrounding objects stand still had set me down under my bedclothes in my bedroom and had fixed approximately in their right places in the uncertain light my chest of drawers my writing table my fireplace the window overlooking the street and both the doors but it was no good my knowing that i was not in any of those houses of which in the stupid moment of waking if i had not caught sight exactly i could still believe in their possible presence for memory was now set in motion as a rule i did not attempt to go to sleep again at once but used to spend the greater part of the night recalling our life in the old days at combray with my great aunt at balbec paris venice and the rest remembering again all the places and people that i had known what i had actually seen of them and what others had told me  at combray as every afternoon ended long before the time when i should have to go up to bed and to lie there unsleeping far from my mother and grandmother my bedroom became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred some one had had the happy idea of giving me to distract me on evenings when i seemed abnormally wretched a magic lantern which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner time to come in the manner of the master builders and glass painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence supernatural phenomena of many colours in which legends were depicted as on a shifting and transitory window but my sorrows were only increased because this change of lighting destroyed as nothing else could have done the customary impression i had formed of my room thanks to which the room itself but for the torture of having to go to bed in it had become quite endurable for now i no longer recognised it and i became uneasy as though i were in a room in some hotel or furnished lodging in a place where i had just arrived by train for the first time  riding at a jerky trot golo his mind filled with an infamous design issued from the little three cornered forest which dyed dark green the slope of a convenient hill and advanced by leaps and bounds towards the castle of poor  de brabant this castle was cut off short by a curved line which was in fact the circumference of one of the transparent ovals in the slides which were pushed into position through a slot in the lantern it was only the wing of a castle and in front of it stretched a moor on which stood lost in contemplation wearing a blue girdle the castle and the moor were yellow but i could tell their colour without waiting to see them for before the slides made their appearance the old gold sonorous name of brabant had given me an unmistakable clue golo stopped for a moment and listened sadly to the little speech read aloud by my great aunt which he seemed perfectly to understand for he modified his attitude with a docility not devoid of a degree of majesty so as to conform to the indications given in the text then he rode away at the same jerky trot and nothing could arrest his slow progress if the lantern were moved i could still distinguish golos horse advancing across the window curtains swelling out with their curves and diving into their folds the body of golo himself being of the same supernatural substance as his steeds overcame all material obstacles  everything that seemed to bar his way  by taking each as it might be a skeleton and embodying it in himself the door handle for instance over which adapting itself at once would float invincibly his red cloak or his pale face never losing its nobility or its melancholy never shewing any sign of trouble at such a transubstantiation  and indeed i found plenty of charm in these bright projections which seemed to have come straight out of a merovingian past and to shed around me the reflections of such ancient history but i cannot express the discomfort i felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which i had succeeded in filling with my own personality until i thought no more of the room than of myself the anaesthetic effect of custom being destroyed i would begin to think and to feel very melancholy things the door handle of my room which was different to me from all the other doorhandles in the world inasmuch as it seemed to open of its own accord and without my having to turn it so unconscious had its manipulation become lo and behold it was now an astral body for golo and as soon as the dinner bell rang i would run down to the dining room where the big hanging lamp ignorant of golo and bluebeard but well acquainted with my family and the dish of stewed beef shed the same light as on every other evening and i would fall into the arms of my mother whom the misfortunes of de brabant had made all the dearer to me just as the crimes of golo had driven me to a more than ordinarily scrupulous examination of my own conscience  but after dinner alas i was soon obliged to leave mamma who stayed talking with the others in the garden if it was fine or in the little parlour where everyone took shelter when it was wet everyone except my grandmother who held that it is a pity to shut oneself indoors in the country and used to carry on endless discussions with my father on the very wettest days because he would send me up to my room with a book instead of letting me stay out of doors that is not the way to make him strong and active she would say sadly especially this little man who needs all the strength and character that he can get my father would shrug his shoulders and study the barometer for he took an interest in meteorology while my mother keeping very quiet so as not to disturb him looked at him with tender respect but not too hard not wishing to penetrate the mysteries of his superior mind but my grandmother in all weathers even when the rain was coming down in torrents ande had rushed indoors with the precious wicker armchairs so that they should not get soaked  you would see my grandmother pacing the deserted garden lashed by the storm pushing back her grey hair in disorder so that her brows might be more free to imbibe the life giving draughts of wind and rain  she would say at last one can breathe and would run up and down the soaking paths  too straight and symmetrical for her liking owing to the want of any feeling for nature in the new gardener whom my father had been asking all morning if the weather were going to improve  with her keen jerky little step regulated by the various effects wrought upon her soul by the intoxication of the storm the force of hygiene the stupidity of my education and of symmetry in gardens rather than by any anxiety for that was quite unknown to her to save her plum coloured skirt from the spots of mud under which it would gradually disappear to a depth which always provided her maid with a fresh problem and filled her with fresh despair  when these walks of my grandmothers took place after dinner there was one thing which never failed to bring her back to the house that was if at one of those points when the revolutions of her course brought her moth like in sight of the lamp in the little parlour where the liqueurs were set out on the card table my great aunt called out to her bathilde  come in and stop your husband from drinking brandy for simply to tease her she had brought so foreign a type of mind into my fathers family that everyone made a joke of it my great aunt used to make my grandfather who was forbidden liqueurs take just a few drops my poor grandmother would come in and beg and implore her husband not to taste the brandy and he would become annoyed and swallow his few drops all the same and she would go out again sad and discouraged but still smiling for she was so humble and so sweet that her gentleness towards others and her continual subordination of herself and of her own troubles appeared on her face blended in a smile which unlike those seen on the majority of human faces had no trace in it of irony save for herself while for all of us kisses seemed to spring from her eyes which could not look upon those she loved without yearning to bestow upon them passionate caresses the torments inflicted on her by my great aunt the sight of my grandmothers vain entreaties of her in her weakness conquered before she began but still making the futile endeavour to wean my grandfather from his liqueur glass  all these were things of the sort to which in later years one can grow so well accustomed as to smile at them to take the tormentors side with a happy determination which deludes one into the belief that it is not really tormenting but in those days they filled me with such horror that i longed to strike my great aunt and yet as soon as i heard her bathilde  come in and stop your husband from drinking brandy in my cowardice i became at once a man and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice i preferred not to see them i ran up to the top of the house to cry by myself in a little room beside the schoolroom and beneath the roof which smelt of orris root and was scented also by a wild currant bush which had climbed up between the stones of the outer wall and thrust a flowering branch in through the half opened window  intended for a more special and a baser use this room from which in the daytime i could see as far as the keep of roussainville le pin was for a long time my place of refuge doubtless because it was the only room whose door i was allowed to lock whenever my occupation was such as required an inviolable solitude reading or dreaming secret tears or paroxysms of desire alas i little knew that my own lack of will power my delicate health and the consequent uncertainty as to my future weighed far more heavily on my grandmothers mind than any little breach of the rules by her husband during those endless perambulations afternoon and evening in which we used to see passing up and down obliquely raised towards the heavens her handsome face with its brown and wrinkled cheeks which with age had acquired almost the purple hue of tilled fields in autumn covered if she were walking abroad by a half lifted veil while upon them either the cold or some sad reflection invariably left the drying traces of an involuntary tear  my sole consolation when i went upstairs for the night was that mamma would come in and kiss me after i was in bed but this good night lasted for so short a time she went down again so soon that the moment in which i heard her climb the stairs and then caught the sound of her garden dress of blue muslin from which hung little tassels of plaited straw rustling along the double doored corridor was for me a moment of the keenest sorrow so much did i love that good night that i reached the stage of hoping that it would come as late as possible so as to prolong the time of respite during which mamma would not yet have appeared sometimes when after kissing me she opened the door to go i longed to call her back to say to her kiss me just once again but i knew that then she would at once look displeased for the concession which she made to my wretchedness and agitation in coming up to me with this kiss of peace always annoyed my father who thought such ceremonies absurd and she would have liked to try to induce me to outgrow the need the custom of having her there at all which was a very different thing from letting the custom grow up of my asking her for an additional kiss when she was already crossing the threshold and to see her look displeased destroyed all the sense of tranquillity she had brought me a moment before when she bent her loving face down over my bed and held it out to me like a host for an act of communion in which my lips might drink deeply the sense of her real presence and with it the power to sleep but those evenings on which mamma stayed so short a time in my room were sweet indeed compared to those on which we had guests to dinner and therefore she did not come at all our guests were practically limited to m swann who apart from a few passing strangers was almost the only person who ever came to the house at combray sometimes to a neighbourly dinner but less frequently since his unfortunate marriage as my family did not care to receive his wife and sometimes after dinner uninvited on those evenings when as we sat in front of the house beneath the big chestnut tree and round the iron table we heard from the far end of the garden not the large and noisy rattle which heralded and deafened as he approached with its ferruginous interminable frozen sound any member of the household who had put it out of action by coming in without ringing but the double peal  timid oval gilded  of the visitors bell everyone would at once exclaim a visitor who in the world can it be but they knew quite well that it could only be m swann my great aunt speaking in a loud voice to set an example in a tone which she endeavoured to make sound natural would tell the others not to whisper so that nothing could be more unpleasant for a stranger coming in who would be led to think that people were saying things about him which he was not meant to hear and then my grandmother would be sent out as a scout always happy to find an excuse for an additional turn in the garden which she would utilise to remove surreptitiously as she passed the stakes of a rose tree or two so as to make the roses look a little more natural as a mother might run her hand through her boys hair after the barber had smoothed it down to make it stick out properly round his head  and there we would all stay hanging on the words which would fall from my grandmothers lips when she brought us back her report of the enemy as though there had been some uncertainty among a vast number of possible invaders and then soon after my grandfather would say i can hear swanns voice and indeed one could tell him only by his voice for it was difficult to make out his face with its arched nose and green eyes under a high forehead fringed with fair almost red hair dressed in the bressant style because in the garden we used as little light as possible so as not to attract mosquitoes and i would slip away as though not going for anything in particular to tell them to bring out the syrups for my grandmother made a great point thinking it nicer of their not being allowed to seem anything out of the ordinary which we kept for visitors only although a far younger man m swann was very much attached to my grandfather who had been an intimate friend in his time of swanns father an excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing would it seemed often check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts several times in the course of a year i would hear my grandfather tell at table the story which never varied of the behaviour of m swann the elder upon the death of his wife by whose bedside he had watched day and night my grandfather who had not seen him for a long time hastened to join him at the swanns family property on the outskirts of combray and managed to entice him for a moment weeping profusely out of the death chamber so that he should not be present when the body was laid in its coffin they took a turn or two in the park where there was a little sunshine suddenly m swann seized my grandfather by the arm and cried oh my dear old friend how fortunate we are to be walking here together on such a charming day dont you see how pretty they are all these trees  my hawthorns and my new pond on which you have never congratulated me you look as glum as a night cap dont you feel this little breeze ah whatever you may say its good to be alive all the same my dear and then abruptly the memory of his dead wife returned to him and probably thinking it too complicated to inquire into how at such a time he could have allowed himself to be carried away by an impulse of happiness he confined himself to a gesture which he habitually employed whenever any perplexing question came into his mind that is he passed his hand across his forehead dried his eyes and wiped his glasses and he could never be consoled for the loss of his wife but used to say to my grandfather during the two years for which he survived her its a funny thing now i very often think of my poor wife but i cannot think of her very much at any one time often but a little at a time like poor old swann became one of my grandfathers favourite phrases which he would apply to all kinds of things and i should have assumed that this father of swanns had been a monster if my grandfather whom i regarded as a better judge than myself and whose word was my law and often led me in the long run to pardon offences which i should have been inclined to condemn had not gone on to exclaim but after all he had a heart of gold  for many years albeit  and especially before his marriage  m swann the younger came often to see them at combray my great aunt and grandparents never suspected that he had entirely ceased to live in the kind of society which his family had frequented or that under the sort of incognito which the name of swann gave him among us they were harbouring  with the complete innocence of a family of honest innkeepers who have in their midst some distinguished highwayman and never know it  one of the smartest members of the jockey club a particular friend of the comte de paris and of the prince of wales and one of the men most sought after in the aristocratic world of the faubourg saint germain  our utter ignorance of the brilliant part which swann was playing in the world of fashion was of course due in part to his own reserve and discretion but also to the fact that middle class people in those days took what was almost a hindu view of society which they held to consist of sharply defined castes so that everyone at his birth found himself called to that station in life which his parents already occupied and nothing except the chance of a brilliant career or of a good marriage could extract you from that station or admit you to a superior caste m swann the father had been a stockbroker and so young swann found himself immured for life in a caste where ones fortune as in a list of taxpayers varied between such and such limits of income we knew the people with whom his father had associated and so we knew his own associates the people with whom he was in a position to mix if he knew other people besides those were youthful acquaintances on whom the old friends of the family like my relatives shut their eyes all the more good naturedly that swann himself after he was left an orphan still came most faithfully to see us but we would have been ready to wager that the people outside our acquaintance whom swann knew were of the sort to whom he would not have dared to raise his hat had he met them while he was walking with ourselves had there been such a thing as a determination to apply to swann a social coefficient peculiar to himself as distinct from all the other sons of other stockbrokers in his fathers position his coefficient would have been rather lower than theirs because leading a very simple life and having always had a craze for antiques and pictures he now lived and piled up his collections in an old house which my grandmother longed to visit but which stood on the quai a neighbourhood in which my great aunt thought it most degrading to be quartered are you really a connoisseur now she would say to him i ask for your own sake as you are likely to have fakes palmed off on you by the dealers for she did not in fact endow him with any critical faculty and had no great opinion of the intelligence of a man who in conversation would avoid serious topics and shewed a very dull preciseness not only when he gave us kitchen recipes going into the most minute details but even when my grandmothers sisters were talking to him about art when challenged by them to give an opinion or to express his admiration for some picture he would remain almost impolitely silent and would then make amends by furnishing if he could some fact or other about the gallery in which the picture was hung or the date at which it had been painted but as a rule he would content himself with trying to amuse us by telling us the story of his latest adventure  and he would have a fresh story for us on every occasion  with some one whom we ourselves knew such as the combray chemist or our cook or our coachman these stories certainly used to make my great aunt laugh but she could never tell whether that was on account of the absurd parts which swann invariably made himself play in the adventures or of the wit that he shewed in telling us of them it is easy to see that you are a regular character m swann  as she was the only member of our family who could be described as a trifle common she would always take care to remark to strangers when swann was mentioned that he could easily if he had wished to have lived in the boulevard haussmann or the avenue de and that he was the son of old m swann who must have left four or five million francs but that it was a fad of his a fad which moreover she thought was bound to amuse other people so much that in paris when m swann called on new years day bringing her a little packet of marrons she never failed if there were strangers in the room to say to him well m swann and do you still live next door to the bonded vaults so as to be sure of not missing your train when you go to lyons and she would peep out of the corner of her eye over her glasses at the other visitors  but if anyone had suggested to my aunt that this swann who in his capacity as the son of old m swann was fully qualified to be received by any of the upper middle class the most respected barristers and solicitors of paris though he was perhaps a trifle inclined to let this hereditary privilege go into abeyance had another almost secret existence of a wholly different kind that when he left our house in paris saying that he must go home to bed he would no sooner have turned the corner than he would stop retrace his steps and be off to some drawing room on whose like no stockbroker or associate of stockbrokers had ever set eyes  that would have seemed to my aunt as extraordinary as to a woman of wider reading the thought of being herself on terms of intimacy with aristaeus of knowing that he would when he had finished his conversation with her plunge deep into the realms of thetis into an empire veiled from mortal eyes in which virgil depicts him as being received with open arms or  to be content with an image more likely to have occurred to her for she had seen it painted on the plates we used for biscuits at combray  as the thought of having had to dinner ali baba who as soon as he found himself alone and unobserved would make his way into the cave resplendent with its unsuspected treasures  one day when he had come to see us after dinner in paris and had begged pardon for being in evening clothese when he had gone told us that she had got it from his coachman that he had been dining with a princess a pretty sort of princess drawled my aunt i know them and she shrugged her shoulders without raising her eyes from her knitting serenely ironical  altogether my aunt used to treat him with scant ceremony since she was of the opinion that he ought to feel flattered by our invitations she thought it only right and proper that he should never come to see us in summer without a basket of peaches or raspberries from his garden and that from each of his visits to italy he should bring back some photographs of old masters for me  it seemed quite natural therefore to send to him whenever we wanted a recipe for some special sauce or for a pineapple salad for one of our big dinner parties to which he himself would not be invited not seeming of sufficient importance to be served up to new friends who might be in our house for the first time if the conversation turned upon the princes of the house of france gentlemen you and i will never know will we and dont want to do we my great aunt would say tartly to swann who had perhaps a letter from twickenham in his pocket she would make him play accompaniments and turn over music on evenings when my grandmothers sister sang manipulating this creature so rare and refined at other times and in other places with the rough simplicity of a child who will play with some curio from the cabinet no more carefully than if it were a penny toy  certainly the swann who was a familiar figure in all the clubs of those days differed hugely from the swann created in my great aunts mind when of an evening in our little garden at combray after the two shy peals had sounded from the gate she would vitalise by injecting into it everything she had ever heard about the swann family the vague and unrecognisable shape which began to appear with my grandmother in its wake against a background of shadows and could at last be identified by the sound of its voice but then even in the most insignificant details of our daily life none of us can be said to constitute a material whole which is identical for everyone and need only be turned up like a page in an account book or the record of a will our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people even the simple act which we describe as seeing some one we know is to some extent an intellectual process we pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place in the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks to follow so exactly the line of his nose they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen and so no doubt from the swann they had built up for their own purposes my family had left out in their ignorance a whole crowd of the details of his daily life in the world of fashion details by means of which other people when they met him saw all the graces enthroned in his face and stopping at the line of his arched nose as at a natural frontier but they contrived also to put into a face from which its distinction had been evicted a face vacant and roomy as an untenanted house to plant in the depths of its unvalued eyes a lingering sense uncertain but not unpleasing half memory and half oblivion of idle hours spent together after our weekly dinners round the card table or in the garden during our companionable country life our friends bodily frame had been so well lined with this sense and with various earlier memories of his family that their own special swann had become to my people a complete and living creature so that even now i have the feeling of leaving some one i know for another quite different person when going back in memory i pass from the swann whom i knew later and more intimately to this early swann  this early swann in whom i can distinguish the charming mistakes of my childhood and who incidentally is less like his successor than he is like the other people i knew at that time as though ones life were a series of galleries in which all the portraits of any one period had a marked family likeness the same so to speak tonality  this early swann abounding in leisure fragrant with the scent of the great chestnut tree of baskets of raspberries and of a sprig of tarragon  and yet one day when my grandmother had gone to ask some favour of a lady whom she had known at the sacred heart and with whom because of our caste theory she had not cared to keep up any degree of intimacy in spite of several common interests the marquise de villeparisis of the famous house of bouillon this lady had said to her  i think you know m swann very well he is a great friend of my nephews the des laumes  my grandmother had returned from the call full of praise for the house which overlooked some gardens and in which mme de villeparisis had advised her to rent a flat and also for a repairing tailor and his daughter who kept a little shop in the courtyard into which she had gone to ask them to put a stitch in her skirt which she had torn on the staircase my grandmother had found these people perfectly charming the girl she said was a jewel and the tailor a most distinguished man the finest she had ever seen for in her eyes distinction was a thing wholly independent of social position she was in ecstasies over some answer the tailor had made saying to mamma would not have said it better and by way of contrast of a nephew of mme de villeparisis whom she had met at the house  my dear he is so common  now the effect of that remark about swann had been not to raise him in my great aunts estimation but to lower mme de villeparisis it appeared that the deference which on my grandmothers authority we owed to mme de villeparisis imposed on her the reciprocal obligation to do nothing that would render her less worthy of our regard and that she had failed in her duty in becoming aware of swanns existence and in allowing members of her family to associate with him how should she know swann a lady who you always made out was related to marshal mac mahon this view of swanns social atmosphere which prevailed in my family seemed to be confirmed later on by his marriage with a woman of the worst class you might almost say a fast woman whom to do him justice he never attempted to introduce to us for he continued to come to us alone though he came more and more seldom but from whom they thought they could establish on the assumption that he had found her there the circle unknown to them in which he ordinarily moved  but on one occasion my grandfather read in a newspaper that m swann was one of the most faithful attendants at the sunday luncheons given by the duc de x     whose father and uncle had been among our most prominent statesmen in the reign of louis philippe now my grandfather was curious to learn all the little details which might help him to take a mental share in the private lives of men like mole the due pasquier or the duc de broglie he was delighted to find that swann associated with people who had known them my great aunt however interpreted this piece of news in a sense discreditable to swann for anyone who chose his associates outside the caste in which he had been born and bred outside his proper station was condemned to utter degradation in her eyes it seemed to her that such a one abdicated all claim to enjoy the fruits of those friendly relations with people of good position which prudent parents cultivate and store up for their childrens benefit for my great aunt had actually ceased to see the son of a lawyer we had known because he had married a highness and had thereby stepped down  in her eyes  from the respectable position of a lawyers son to that of those adventurers upstart footmen or stable boys mostly to whom we read that queens have sometimes shewn their favours she objected therefore to my grandfathers plan of questioning swann when next he came to dine with us about these people whose friendship with him we had discovered on the other hand my grandmothers two sisters elderly spinsters who shared her nobility of character but lacked her intelligence declared that they could not conceive what pleasure their brother in law could find in talking about such trifles they were ladies of lofty ambition who for that reason were incapable of taking the least interest in what might be called the pinchbeck things of life even when they had an historic value or generally speaking in anything that was not directly associated with some object aesthetically precious so complete was their negation of interest in anything which seemed directly or indirectly a part of our everyday life that their sense of hearing  which had gradually come to understand its own futility when the tone of the conversation at the dinner table became frivolous or merely mundane without the two old ladies being able to guide it back to the topic dear to themselves  would leave its receptive channels unemployed so effectively that they were actually becoming atrophied so that if my grandfather wished to attract the attention of the two sisters he would have to make use of some such alarm signals as mad doctors adopt in dealing with their distracted patients as by beating several times on a glass with the blade of a knife fixing them at the same time with a sharp word and a compelling glance violent methods which the said doctors are apt to bring with them into their everyday life among the sane either from force of professional habit or because they think the whole world a trifle mad  their interest grew however when the day before swann was to dine with us and when he had made them a special present of a case of asti my great aunt who had in her hand a copy of the figaro in which to the name of a picture then on view in a corot exhibition were added the words from the collection of m charles swann asked did you see that swann is mentioned in the figaro  but i have always told you said my grandmother that he had plenty of taste  you would of course retorted my great aunt say anything just to seem different from us for knowing that my grandmother never agreed with her and not being quite confident that it was her own opinion which the rest of us invariably endorsed she wished to extort from us a wholesale condemnation of my grandmothers views against which she hoped to force us into solidarity with her own  but we sat silent my grandmothers sisters having expressed a desire to mention to swann this reference to him in the figaro my great aunt dissuaded them whenever she saw in others an advantage however trivial which she herself lacked she would persuade herself that it was no advantage at all but a drawback and would pity so as not to have to envy them  i dont think that would please him at all i know very well i should hate to see my name printed like that as large as life in the paper and i shouldnt feel at all flattered if anyone spoke to me about it  she did not however put any very great pressure upon my grandmothers sisters for they in their horror of vulgarity had brought to such a fine art the concealment of a personal allusion in a wealth of ingenious circumlocution that it would often pass unnoticed even by the person to whom it was addressed as for my mother her only thought was of managing to induce my father to consent to speak to swann not of his wife but of his daughter whom he worshipped and for whose sake it was understood that he had ultimately made his unfortunate marriage  you need only say a word just ask him how she is it must be so very hard for him  my father however was annoyed no no you have the most absurd ideas it would be utterly ridiculous  but the only one of us in whom the prospect of swanns arrival gave rise to an unhappy foreboding was myself and that was because on the evenings when there were visitors or just m swann in the house mamma did not come up to my room i did not at that time have dinner with the family i came out to the garden after dinner and at nine i said good night and went to bed but on these evenings i used to dine earlier than the others and to come in afterwards and sit at table until eight oclock when it was understood that i must go upstairs that frail and precious kiss which mamma used always to leave upon my lips when i was in bed and just going to sleep i had to take with me from the dining room to my own and to keep inviolate all the time that it took me to undress without letting its sweet charm be broken without letting its volatile essence diffuse itself and evaporate and just on those very evenings when i must needs take most pains to receive it with due formality i had to snatch it to seize it instantly and in public without even having the time or being properly free to apply to what i was doing the punctiliousness which madmen use who compel themselves to exclude all other thoughts from their minds while they are shutting a door so that when the sickness of uncertainty sweeps over them again they can triumphantly face and overcome it with the recollection of the precise moment in which the door was shut  we were all in the garden when the double peal of the gate bell sounded shyly everyone knew that it must be swann and yet they looked at one another inquiringly and sent my grandmother scouting  see that you thank him intelligibly for the wine my grandfather warned his two sisters in law you know how good it is and it is a huge case  now dont start whispering said my great aunt how would you like to come into a house and find everyone muttering to themselves  ah theres m swann cried my father lets ask him if he thinks it will be fine to morrow  my mother fancied that a word from her would wipe out all the unpleasantness which my family had contrived to make swann feel since his marriage  she found an opportunity to draw him aside for a moment but i followed her i could not bring myself to let her go out of reach of me while i felt that in a few minutes i should have to leave her in the dining room and go up to my bed without the consoling thought as on ordinary evenings that she would come up later to kiss me  now m swann she said do tell me about your daughter i am sure she shews a taste already for nice things like her papa  come along and sit down here with us all on the verandah said my grandfather coming up to him my mother had to abandon the quest but managed to extract from the restriction itself a further refinement of thought as great poets do when the tyranny of rhyme forces them into the discovery of their finest lines  we can talk about her again when we are by ourselves she said or rather whispered to swann it is only a mother who can understand i am sure that hers would agree with me  and so we all sat down round the iron table i should have liked not to think of the hours of anguish which i should have to spend that evening alone in my room without the possibility of going to sleep i tried to convince myself that they were of no importance really since i should have forgotten them next morning and to fix my mind on thoughts of the future which would carry me as on a bridge across the terrifying abyss that yawned at my feet but my mind strained by this foreboding distended like the look which i shot at my mother would not allow any other impression to enter thoughts did indeed enter it but only on the condition that they left behind them every element of beauty or even of quaintness by which i might have been distracted or beguiled as a surgical patient by means of a local anaesthetic can look on with a clear consciousness while an operation is being performed upon him and yet feel nothing i could repeat to myself some favourite lines or watch my grandfather attempting to talk to swann about the duc daudriffet pasquier without being able to kindle any emotion from one or amusement from the other hardly had my grandfather begun to question swann about that orator when one of my grandmothers sisters in whose ears the question echoed like a solemn but untimely silence which her natural politeness bade her interrupt addressed the other with  just fancy flora i met a young swedish governess to day who told me some most interesting things about the co operative movement in scandinavia  we really must have her to dine here one evening  to be sure said her sister flora but i havent wasted my time either i met such a clever old gentleman at m vinteuils who knows maubant quite well and maubant has told him every little thing about how he gets up his parts it is the most interesting thing i ever heard he is a neighbour of m vinteuils and i never knew and he is so nice besides  m vinteuil is not the only one who has nice neighbours cried my aunt in a voice which seemed loud because she was so timid and seemed forced because she had been planning the little speech for so long darting as she spoke what she called a significant glance at swann and my aunt flora who realised that this veiled utterance was  way of thanking swann intelligibly for the asti looked at him with a blend of congratulation and irony either just because she wished to underline her sisters little epigram or because she envied swann his having inspired it or merely because she imagined that he was embarrassed and could not help having a little fun at his expense  i think it would be worth while flora went on to have this old gentleman to dinner when you get him upon maubant or mme materna he will talk for hours on end  that must be delightful sighed my grandfather in whose mind nature had unfortunately forgotten to include any capacity whatsoever for becoming passionately interested in the co operative movement among the ladies of sweden or in the methods employed by maubant to get up his parts just as it had forgotten to endow my grandmothers two sisters with a grain of that precious salt which one has oneself to add to taste in order to extract any savour from a narrative of the private life of mole or of the comte de paris  i say exclaimed swann to my grandfather what i was going to tell you has more to do than you might think with what you were asking me just now for in some respects there has been very little change i came across a passage in saint simon this morning which would have amused you it is in the volume which covers his mission to spain not one of the best little more in fact than a journal but at least it is a journal wonderfully well written which fairly distinguishes it from the devastating journalism that we feel bound to read in these days morning noon and night  i do not agree with you there are some days when i find reading the papers very pleasant indeed my aunt flora broke in to show swann that she had read the note about his corot in the figaro  yes aunt  went one better when they write about things or people in whom we are interested  i dont deny it answered swann in some bewilderment the fault i find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance suppose that every morning when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands a transmutation were to take place and we were to find inside it  oh i dont know shall we say pascals he articulated the title with an ironic emphasis so as not to appear pedantic and then in the gilt and tooled volumes which we open once in ten years he went on shewing that contempt for the things of this world which some men of the world like to affect we should read that the queen of the hellenes had arrived at cannes or that the princesse de had given a fancy dress ball in that way we should arrive at the right proportion between information and publicity but at once regretting that he had allowed himself to speak even in jest of serious matters he added ironically we are having a most entertaining conversation i cannot think why we climb to these lofty summits and then turning to my grandfather well saint simon tells how maulevrier had had the audacity to offer his hand to his sons you remember how he says of maulevrier never did i find in that coarse bottle anything but ill humour boorishness and folly  coarse or not i know bottles in which there is something very different said flora briskly feeling bound to thank swann as well as her sister since the present of asti had been addressed to them both began to laugh  swann was puzzled but went on i cannot say whether it was his ignorance or a trap writes saint simon he wished to give his hand to my children i noticed it in time to prevent him  my grandfather was already in ecstasies over ignorance or a trap but miss the name of saint simon a man of letters having arrested the complete paralysis of her sense of hearing  had grown angry  what you admire that do you well it is clever enough but what is the point of it does he mean that one man isnt as good as another what difference can it make whether he is a duke or a groom so long as he is intelligent and good he had a fine way of bringing up his children your saint simon if he didnt teach them to shake hands with all honest men really and truly its abominable and you dare to quote it  and my grandfather utterly depressed realising how futile it would be for him against this opposition to attempt to get swann to tell him the stories which would have amused him murmured to my mother just tell me again that line of yours which always comforts me so much on these occasions oh yes    what virtues lord thou makest us abhor  good that is very good  i never took my eyes off my mother i knew that when they were at table i should not be permitted to stay there for the whole of dinner time and that mamma for fear of annoying my father would not allow me to give her in public the series of kisses that she would have had in my room  and so i promised myself that in the dining room as they began to eat and drink and as i felt the hour approach i would put beforehand into this kiss which was bound to be so brief and stealthy in execution everything that my own efforts could put into it would look out very carefully first the exact spot on her cheek where i would imprint it and would so prepare my thoughts that i might be able thanks to these mental preliminaries to consecrate the whole of the minute mamma would allow me to the sensation of her cheek against my lips as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only prepares his palette and from what he remembers and from rough notes does in advance everything which he possibly can do in the sitters absence but to night before the dinner bell had sounded my grandfather said with unconscious cruelty the little man looks tired hed better go up to bed besides we are dining late to night  and my father who was less scrupulous than my grandmother or mother in observing the letter of a treaty went on yes run along to bed with you  i would have kissed mamma then and there but at that moment the dinner bell rang  no no leave your mother alone youve said good night quite enough these exhibitions are absurd go on upstairs  and so i must set forth without viaticum must climb each step of the staircase against my heart as the saying is climbing in opposition to my hearts desire which was to return to my mother since she had not by her kiss given my heart leave to accompany me forth that hateful staircase up which i always passed with such dismay gave out a smell of varnish which had to some extent absorbed made definite and fixed the special quality of sorrow that i felt each evening and made it perhaps even more cruel to my sensibility because when it assumed this olfactory guise my intellect was powerless to resist it when we have gone to sleep with a maddening toothache and are conscious of it only as a little girl whom we attempt time after time to pull out of the water or as a line of which we repeat incessantly to ourselves it is a great relief to wake up so that our intelligence can disentangle the idea of toothache from any artificial semblance of heroism or rhythmic cadence it was the precise converse of this relief which i felt when my anguish at having to go up to my room invaded my consciousness in a manner infinitely more rapid instantaneous almost a manner at once insidious and brutal as i breathed in  a far more poisonous thing than any moral penetration  the peculiar smell of the varnish upon that staircase  once in my room i had to stop every loophole to close the shutters to dig my own grave as i turned down the bed clothes to wrap myself in the shroud of my nightshirt but before burying myself in the iron bed which had been placed there because on summer nights i was too hot among the rep curtains of the four poster i was stirred to revolt and attempted the desperate stratagem of a condemned prisoner i wrote to my mother begging her to come upstairs for an important reason which i could not put in writing my fear was thate my aunts cook who used to be put in charge of me when i was at combray might refuse to take my note i had a suspicion that in her eyes to carry a message to my mother when there was a stranger in the room would appear flatly inconceivable just as it would be for the door keeper of a theatre to hand a letter to an actor upon the stage for things which might or might not be done she possessed a code at once imperious abundant subtle and uncompromising on points themselves imperceptible or irrelevant which gave it a resemblance to those ancient laws which combine such cruel ordinances as the massacre of infants at the breast with prohibitions of exaggerated refinement against seething the kid in his mothers milk or eating of the sinew which is upon the hollow of the thigh this code if one could judge it by the sudden obstinacy which she would put into her refusal to carry out certain of our instructions seemed to have foreseen such social complications and refinements of fashion as nothing ines surroundings or in her career as a servant in a village household could have put into her head and we were obliged to assume that there was latent in her some past existence in the ancient history of france noble and little understood just as there is in those manufacturing towns where old mansions still testify to their former courtly days and chemical workers toil among delicately sculptured scenes of the miracle of theophilus or the quatre fils aymon  in this particular instance the article of her code which made it highly improbable that  barring an outbreak of fire e would go down and disturb mamma when m swann was there for so unimportant a person as myself was one embodying the respect she shewed not only for the family as for the dead for the clergy or for royalty but also for the stranger within our gates a respect which i should perhaps have found touching in a book but which never failed to irritate me on her lips because of the solemn and gentle tones in which she would utter it and which irritated me more than usual this evening when the sacred character in which she invested the dinner party might have the effect of making her decline to disturb its ceremonial but to give myself one chance of success i lied without hesitation telling her that it was not in the least myself who had wanted to write to mamma but mamma who on saying good night to me had begged me not to forget to send her an answer about something she had asked me to find and that she would certainly be very angry if this note were not taken to her i think thate disbelieved me for like those primitive men whose senses were so much keener than our own she could immediately detect by signs imperceptible by the rest of us the truth or falsehood of anything that we might wish to conceal from her she studied the envelope for five minutes as though an examination of the paper itself and the look of my handwriting could enlighten her as to the nature of the contents or tell her to which article of her code she ought to refer the matter then she went out with an air of resignation which seemed to imply what a dreadful thing for parents to have a child like this  a moment later she returned to say that they were still at the ice stage and that it was impossible for the butler to deliver the note at once in front of everybody but that when the finger bowls were put round he would find a way of slipping it into mammas hand at once my anxiety subsided it was now no longer as it had been a moment ago until to morrow that i had lost my mother for my little line was going  to annoy her no doubt and doubly so because this contrivance would make me ridiculous in swanns eyes  but was going all the same to admit me invisibly and by stealth into the same room as herself was going to whisper from me into her ear for that forbidden and unfriendly dining room where but a moment ago the ice itself  with burned nuts in it  and the finger bowls seemed to me to be concealing pleasures that were mischievous and of a mortal sadness because mamma was tasting of them and i was far away had opened its doors to me and like a ripe fruit which bursts through its skin was going to pour out into my intoxicated heart the gushing sweetness of mammas attention while she was reading what i had written now i was no longer separated from her the barriers were down an exquisite thread was binding us besides that was not all for surely mamma would come  as for the agony through which i had just passed i imagined that swann would have laughed heartily at it if he had read my letter and had guessed its purpose whereas on the contrary as i was to learn in due course a similar anguish had been the bane of his life for many years and no one perhaps could have understood my feelings at that moment so well as himself to him that anguish which lies in knowing that the creature one adores is in some place of enjoyment where oneself is not and cannot follow  to him that anguish came through love to which it is in a sense predestined by which it must be equipped and adapted but when as had befallen me such an anguish possesses ones soul before love has yet entered into ones life then it must drift awaiting loves coming vague and free without precise attachment at the disposal of one sentiment to day of another to morrow of filial piety or affection for a comrade and the joy with which i first bound myself apprentice whene returned to tell me that my letter would be delivered swann too had known well that false joy which a friend can give us or some relative of the woman we love when on his arrival at the house or theatre where she is to be found for some ball or party or first night at which he is to meet her he sees us wandering outside desperately awaiting some opportunity of communicating with her he recognises us greets us familiarly and asks what we are doing there and when we invent a story of having some urgent message to give to his relative or friend he assures us that nothing could be more simple takes us in at the door and promises to send her down to us in five minutes how much we love him  as at that moment i lovede  the good natured intermediary who by a single word has made supportable human almost propitious the inconceivable infernal scene of gaiety in the thick of which we had been imagining swarms of enemies perverse and seductive beguiling away from us even making laugh at us the woman whom we love if we are to judge of them by him this relative who has accosted us and who is himself an initiate in those cruel mysteries then the other guests cannot be so very demoniacal those inaccessible and torturing hours into which she had gone to taste of unknown pleasures  behold a breach in the wall and we are through it behold one of the moments whose series will go to make up their sum a moment as genuine as the rest if not actually more important to ourself because our mistress is more intensely a part of it we picture it to ourselves we possess it we intervene upon it almost we have created it namely the moment in which he goes to tell her that we are waiting there below and very probably the other moments of the party will not be essentially different will contain nothing else so exquisite or so well able to make us suffer since this kind friend has assured us that of course she will be delighted to come down it will be far more amusing for her to talk to you than to be bored up there alas swann had learned by experience that the good intentions of a third party are powerless to control a woman who is annoyed to find herself pursued even into a ball room by a man whom she does not love too often the kind friend comes down again alone  my mother did not appear but with no attempt to safeguard my self respect which depended upon her keeping up the fiction that she had asked me to let her know the result of my search for something or other madee tell me in so many words there is no answer  words i have so often since then heard the hall porters in mansions and the flunkeys in gambling clubs and the like repeat to some poor girl who replies in bewilderment what hes said nothing its not possible you did give him my letter didnt you very well i shall wait a little longer and just as she invariably protests that she does not need the extra gas which the porter offers to light for her and sits on there hearing nothing further except an occasional remark on the weather which the porter exchanges with a messenger whom he will send off suddenly when he notices the time to put some customers wine on the ice so having declinedes offer to make me some tea or to stay beside me i let her go off again to the servants hall and lay down and shut my eyes and tried not to hear the voices of my family who were drinking their coffee in the garden  but after a few seconds i realised that by writing that line to mamma by approaching  at the risk of making her angry  so near to her that i felt i could reach out and grasp the moment in which i should see her again i had cut myself off from the possibility of going to sleep until i actually had seen her and my heart began to beat more and more painfully as i increased my agitation by ordering myself to keep calm and to acquiesce in my ill fortune then suddenly my anxiety subsided a feeling of intense happiness coursed through me as when a strong medicine begins to take effect and ones pain vanishes i had formed a resolution to abandon all attempts to go to sleep without seeing mamma and had decided to kiss her at all costs even with the certainty of being in disgrace with her for long afterwards when she herself came up to bed the tranquillity which followed my anguish made me extremely alert no less than my sense of expectation my thirst for and my fear of danger  noiselessly i opened the window and sat down on the foot of my bed hardly daring to move in case they should hear me from below things outside seemed also fixed in mute expectation so as not to disturb the moonlight which duplicating each of them and throwing it back by the extension forwards of a shadow denser and more concrete than its substance had made the whole landscape seem at once thinner and longer like a map which after being folded up is spread out upon the ground  what had to move  a leaf of the chestnut tree for instance  moved but its minute shuddering complete finished to the least detail and with utmost delicacy of gesture made no discord with the rest of the scene and yet was not merged in it remaining clearly outlined exposed upon this surface of silence which absorbed nothing from them the most distant sounds those which must have come from gardens at the far end of the town could be distinguished with such exact finish that the impression they gave of coming from a distance seemed due only to their pianissimo execution like those movements on muted strings so well performed by the orchestra of the conservatoire that although one does not lose a single note one thinks all the same that they are being played somewhere outside a long way from the concert hall so that all the old subscribers and my grandmothers sisters too when swann had given them his seats used to strain their ears as if they had caught the distant approach of an army on the march which had not yet rounded the corner of the rue i was well aware that i had placed myself in a position than which none could be counted upon to involve me in graver consequences at my parents hands consequences far graver indeed than a stranger would have imagined and such as he would have thought could follow only some really shameful fault but in the system of education which they had given me faults were not classified in the same order as in that of other children and i had been taught to place at the head of the list doubtless because there was no other class of faults from which i needed to be more carefully protected those in which i can now distinguish the common feature that one succumbs to them by yielding to a nervous impulse but such words as these last had never been uttered in my hearing no one had yet accounted for my temptations in a way which might have led me to believe that there was some excuse for my giving in to them or that i was actually incapable of holding out against them yet i could easily recognise this class of transgressions by the anguish of mind which preceded as well as by the rigour of the punishment which followed them and i knew that what i had just done was in the same category as certain other sins for which i had been severely chastised though infinitely more serious than they when i went out to meet my mother as she herself came up to bed and when she saw that i had remained up so as to say good night to her again in the passage i should not be allowed to stay in the house a day longer i should be packed off to school next morning so much was certain  very good had i been obliged the next moment to hurl myself out of the window i should still have preferred such a fate for what i wanted now was mamma and to say good night to her i had gone too far along the road which led to the realisation of this desire to be able to retrace my steps  i could hear my parents footsteps as they went with swann and when the rattle of the gate assured me that he had really gone i crept to the window mamma was asking my father if he had thought the lobster good and whether m swann had had some of the coffee and pistachio ice i thought it rather so so she was saying next time we shall have to try another flavour  i cant tell you said my great aunt what a change i find in swann he is quite antiquated she had grown so accustomed to seeing swann always in the same stage of adolescence that it was a shock to her to find him suddenly less young than the age she still attributed to him and the others too were beginning to remark in swann that abnormal excessive scandalous senescence meet only in a celibate in one of that class for whom it seems that the great day which knows no morrow must be longer than for other men since for such a one it is void of promise and from its dawn the moments steadily accumulate without any subsequent partition among his offspring  i fancy he has a lot of trouble with that wretched wife of his who lives with a certain monsieur de charlus as all combray knows its the  talk of the town  my mother observed that in spite of this he had looked much less unhappy of late and he doesnt nearly so often do that trick of his so like his father of wiping his eyes and passing his hand across his forehead i think myself that in his heart of hearts he doesnt love his wife any more  why of course he doesnt answered my grandfather he wrote me a letter about it ages ago to which i took care to pay no attention but it left no doubt as to his feelings let alone his love for his wife hullo you two you never thanked him for the asti he went on turning to his sisters in law  what we never thanked him i think between you and me that i put it to him quite neatly replied my aunt flora  yes you managed it very well i admired you for it said my aunt   but you did it very prettily too  yes i liked my expression about nice neighbours  what do you call that thanking him shouted my grandfather i heard that all right but devil take me if i guessed it was meant for swann you may be quite sure he never noticed it  come come swann is not a fool i am positive he appreciated the compliment  you didnt expect me to tell him the number of bottles or to guess what he paid for them  my father and mother were left alone and sat down for a moment then my father said well shall we go up to bed  as you wish dear though i dont feel in the least like sleeping i dont know why it cant be the coffee ice  it wasnt strong enough to keep me awake like this but i see a light in the servants hall poore has been sitting up for me so i will get her to unhook me while you go and undress  my mother opened the latticed door which led from the hall to the staircase  presently i heard her coming upstairs to close her window i went quietly into the passage my heart was beating so violently that i could hardly move but at least it was throbbing no longer with anxiety but with terror and with joy i saw in the well of the stair a light coming upwards from mammas candle then i saw mamma herself i threw myself upon her for an instant she looked at me in astonishment not realising what could have happened then her face assumed an expression of anger she said not a single word to me and for that matter i used to go for days on end without being spoken to for far less offences than this a single word from mamma would have been an admission that further intercourse with me was within the bounds of possibility and that might perhaps have appeared to me more terrible still as indicating that with such a punishment as was in store for me mere silence and even anger were relatively puerile  a word from her then would have implied the false calm in which one converses with a servant to whom one has just decided to give notice the kiss one bestows on a son who is being packed off to enlist which would have been denied him if it had merely been a matter of being angry with him for a few days but she heard my father coming from the dressing room where he had gone to take off his clothes and to avoid the scene which he would make if he saw me she said in a voice half stifled by her anger run away at once dont let your father see you standing there like a crazy jane  but i begged her again to come and say good night to me terrified as i saw the light from my fathers candle already creeping up the wall but also making use of his approach as a means of blackmail in the hope that my mother not wishing him to find me there as find me he must if she continued to hold out would give in to me and say go back to your room i will come  too late my father was upon us instinctively i murmured though no one heard me i am done for  i was not however my father used constantly to refuse to let me do things which were quite clearly allowed by the more liberal charters granted me by my mother and grandmother because he paid no heed to principles and because in his sight there were no such things as rights of man for some quite irrelevant reason or for no reason at all he would at the last moment prevent me from taking some particular walk one so regular and so consecrated to my use that to deprive me of it was a clear breach of faith or again as he had done this evening long before the appointed hour he would snap out run along up to bed now no excuses but then again simply because he was devoid of principles in my grandmothers sense so he could not properly speaking be called inexorable he looked at me for a moment with an air of annoyance and surprise and then when mamma had told him not without some embarrassment what had happened said to her go along with him then you said just now that you didnt feel like sleep so stay in his room for a little i dont need anything  but dear my mother answered timidly whether or not i feel like sleep is not the point we must not make the child accustomed  theres no question of making him accustomed said my father with a shrug of the shoulders you can see quite well that the child is unhappy after all we arent gaolers youll end by making him ill and a lot of good that will do there are two beds in his room telle to make up the big one for you and stay beside him for the rest of the night im off to bed anyhow im not nervous like you good night  it was impossible for me to thank my father what he called my sentimentality would have exasperated him i stood there not daring to move he was still confronting us an immense figure in his white nightshirt crowned with the pink and violet scarf of indian cashmere in which since he had begun to suffer from neuralgia he used to tie up his head standing like abraham in the engraving after benozzo gozzoli which m swann had given me telling sarah that she must tear herself away from isaac many years have passed since that night the wall of the staircase up which i had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished  and in myself too many things have perished which i imagined would last for ever and new structures have arisen giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days i could not have foreseen just as now the old are difficult of comprehension it is a long time too since my father has been able to tell mamma to go with the child never again will such hours be possible for me but of late i have been increasingly able to catch if i listen attentively the sound of the sobs which i had the strength to control in my fathers presence and which broke out only when i found myself alone with mamma actually their echo has never ceased it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that i hear them afresh like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the streets that one would suppose them to have been stopped for ever until they sound out again through the silent evening air  mamma spent that night in my room when i had just committed a sin so deadly that i was waiting to be banished from the household my parents gave me a far greater concession than i should ever have won as the reward of a good action even at the moment when it manifested itself in this crowning mercy my fathers conduct towards me was still somewhat arbitrary and regardless of my deserts as was characteristic of him and due to the fact that his actions were generally dictated by chance expediencies rather than based on any formal plan and perhaps even what i called his strictness when he sent me off to bed deserved that title less really than my mothers or grandmothers attitude for his nature which in some respects differed more than theirs from my own had probably prevented him from guessing until then how wretched i was every evening a thing which my mother and grandmother knew well but they loved me enough to be unwilling to spare me that suffering which they hoped to teach me to overcome so as to reduce my nervous sensibility and to strengthen my will as for my father whose affection for me was of another kind i doubt if he would have shewn so much courage for as soon as he had grasped the fact that i was unhappy he had said to my mother go and comfort him mamma stayed all night in my room and it seemed that she did not wish to mar by recrimination those hours so different from anything that i had had a right to expect for whene who guessed that something extraordinary must have happened when she saw mamma sitting by my side holding my hand and letting me cry unchecked said to her but madame what is little master crying for she replied whye he doesnt know himself it is his nerves make up the big bed for me quickly and then go off to your own and thus for the first time my unhappiness was regarded no longer as a fault for which i must be punished but as an involuntary evil which had been officially recognised a nervous condition for which i was in no way responsible i had the consolation that i need no longer mingle apprehensive scruples with the bitterness of my tears i could weep henceforward without sin i felt no small degree of pride either in franchises presence at this return to humane conditions which not an hour after mamma had refused to come up to my room and had sent the snubbing message that i was to go to sleep raised me to the dignity of a grown up person brought me of a sudden to a sort of puberty of sorrow to emancipation from tears i ought then to have been happy i was not it struck me that my mother had just made a first concession which must have been painful to her that it was a first step down from the ideal she had formed for me and that for the first time she with all her courage had to confess herself beaten it struck me that if i had just scored a victory it was over her that i had succeeded as sickness or sorrow or age might have succeeded in relaxing her will in altering her judgment that this evening opened a new era must remain a black date in the calendar  and if i had dared now i should have said to mamma no i dont want you you mustnt sleep here but i was conscious of the practical wisdom of what would be called nowadays the realism with which she tempered the ardent idealism of my grandmothers nature and i knew that now the mischief was done she would prefer to let me enjoy the soothing pleasure of her company and not to disturb my father again certainly my mothers beautiful features seemed to shine again with youth that evening as she sat gently holding my hands and trying to check my tears but just for that reason it seemed to me that this should not have happened her anger would have been less difficult to endure than this new kindness which my childhood had not known i felt that i had with an impious and secret finger traced a first wrinkle upon her soul and made the first white hair shew upon her head this thought redoubled my sobs and then i saw that mamma who had never allowed herself to go to any length of tenderness with me was suddenly overcome by my tears and had to struggle to keep back her own then as she saw that i had noticed this she said to me with a smile why my little buttercup my little canary boy hes going to make mamma as silly as himself if this goes on look since you cant sleep and mamma cant either we mustnt go on in this stupid way we must do something ill get one of your books but i had none there would you like me to get out the books now that your grandmother is going to give you for your birthday just think it over first and dont be disappointed if there is nothing new for you then  i was only too delighted and mamma went to find a parcel of books in which i could not distinguish through the paper in which it was wrapped any more than its squareness and size but which even at this first glimpse brief and obscure as it was bade fair to eclipse already the paint box of last new years day and the silkworms of the year before it contained la mare au diable le champi la petite fadette and sonneurs my grandmother as i learned afterwards had at first chosen mussels poems a volume of rousseau and indiana for while she considered light reading as unwholesome as sweets and cakes she did not reflect that the strong breath of genius must have upon the very soul of a child an influence at once more dangerous and less quickening than those of fresh air and country breezes upon his body but when my father had seemed almost to regard her as insane on learning the names of the books she proposed to give me she had journeyed back by herself to jouy le vicomte to the booksellers so that there should be no fear of my not having my present in time it was a burning hot day and she had come home so unwell that the doctor had warned my mother not to allow her again to tire herself in that way and had there fallen back upon the four pastoral novels of george sand  my dear she had said to mamma i could not allow myself to give the child anything that was not well written  the truth was that she could never make up her mind to purchase anything from which no intellectual profit was to be derived and above all that profit which good things bestowed on us by teaching us to seek our pleasures elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth even when she had to make some one a present of the kind called useful when she had to give an armchair or some table silver or a walking stick she would choose antiques as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own she would have liked me to have in my room photographs of ancient buildings or of beautiful places but at the moment of buying them and for all that the subject of the picture had an aesthetic value of its own she would find that vulgarity and utility had too prominent a part in them through the mechanical nature of their reproduction by photography she attempted by a subterfuge if not to eliminate altogether their commercial banality at least to minimise it to substitute for the bulk of it what was art still to introduce as it might be several thicknesses of art instead of photographs of chartres cathedral of the fountains of saint cloud or of vesuvius she would inquire of swann whether some great painter had not made pictures of them and preferred to give me photographs of chartres cathedral after corot of the fountains of saint cloud after hubert robert and of vesuvius after turner which were a stage higher in the scale of art but although the photographer had been prevented from reproducing directly the masterpieces or the beauties of nature and had there been replaced by a great artist he resumed his odious position when it came to reproducing the artists interpretation  accordingly having to reckon again with vulgarity my grandmother would endeavour to postpone the moment of contact still further she would ask swann if the picture had not been engraved preferring when possible old engravings with some interest of association apart from themselves such for example as shew us a masterpiece in a state in which we can no longer see it to day as morghens print of the cenacolo of leonardo before it was spoiled by restoration it must be admitted that the results of this method of interpreting the art of making presents were not always happy  the idea which i formed of venice from a drawing by titian which is supposed to have the lagoon in the background was certainly far less accurate than what i have since derived from ordinary photographs we could no longer keep count in the family when my great aunt tried to frame an indictment of my grandmother of all the armchairs she had presented to married couples young and old which on a first attempt to sit down upon them had at once collapsed beneath the weight of their recipient but my grandmother would have thought it sordid to concern herself too closely with the solidity of any piece of furniture in which could still be discerned a flourish a smile a brave conceit of the past and even what in such pieces supplied a material need since it did so in a manner to which we are no longer accustomed was as charming to her as one of those old forms of speech in which we can still see traces of a metaphor whose fine point has been worn away by the rough usage of our modern tongue in precisely the same way the pastoral novels of george sand which she was giving me for my birthday were regular lumber rooms of antique furniture full of expressions that have fallen out of use and returned as imagery such as one finds now only in country dialects and my grandmother had bought them in preference to other books just as she would have preferred to take a house that had a gothic dovecot or some other such piece of antiquity as would have a pleasant effect on the mind filling it with a nostalgic longing for impossible journeys through the realms of time  mamma sat down by my bed she had chosen le champi whose reddish cover and incomprehensible title gave it a distinct personality in my eyes and a mysterious attraction i had not then read any real novels i had heard it said that george sand was a typical novelist that prepared me in advance to imagine that le champi contained something inexpressibly delicious the course of the narrative where it tended to arouse curiosity or melt to pity certain modes of expression which disturb or sadden the reader and which with a little experience he may recognise as common form in novels seemed to me then distinctive  for to me a new book was not one of a number of similar objects but was like an individual man unmatched and with no cause of existence beyond himself  an intoxicating whiff of the peculiar essence of le champi beneath the everyday incidents the commonplace thoughts and hackneyed words i could hear or overhear an intonation a rhythmic utterance fine and strange the action began to me it seemed all the more obscure because in those days when i read to myself i used often while i turned the pages to dream of something quite different and to the gaps which this habit made in my knowledge of the story more were added by the fact that when it was mamma who was reading to me aloud she left all the love scenes out and so all the odd changes which take place in the relations between the millers wife and the boy changes which only the birth and growth of love can explain seemed to me plunged and steeped in a mystery the key to which as i could readily believe lay in that strange and pleasant sounding name of champi which draped the boy who bore it i knew not why in its own bright colour purpurate and charming if my mother was not a faithful reader she was none the less admirable when reading a work in which she found the note of true feeling by the respectful simplicity of her interpretation and by the sound of her sweet and gentle voice it was the same in her daily life when it was not works of art but men and women whom she was moved to pity or admire it was touching to observe with what deference she would banish from her voice her gestures from her whole conversation now the note of joy which might have distressed some mother who had long ago lost a child now the recollection of an event or anniversary which might have reminded some old gentleman of the burden of his years now the household topic which might have bored some young man of letters and so when she read aloud the prose of george sand prose which is everywhere redolent of that generosity and moral distinction which mamma had learned from my grandmother to place above all other qualities in life and which i was not to teach her until much later to refrain from placing in the same way above all other qualities in literature taking pains to banish from her voice any weakness or affectation which might have blocked its channel for that powerful stream of language she supplied all the natural tenderness all the lavish sweetness which they demanded to phrases which seemed to have been composed for her voice and which were all so to speak within her compass  she came to them with the tone that they required with the cordial accent which existed before they were which dictated them but which is not to be found in the words themselves and by these means she smoothed away as she read on any harshness there might be or discordance in the tenses of verbs endowing the imperfect and the preterite with all the sweetness which there is in generosity all the melancholy which there is in love guided the sentence that was drawing to an end towards that which was waiting to begin now hastening now slackening the pace of the syllables so as to bring them despite their difference of quantity into a uniform rhythm and breathed into this quite ordinary prose a kind of life continuous and full of feeling  my agony was soothed i let myself be borne upon the current of this gentle night on which i had my mother by my side i knew that such a night could not be repeated that the strongest desire i had in the world namely to keep my mother in my room through the sad hours of darkness ran too much counter to general requirements and to the wishes of others for such a concession as had been granted me this evening to be anything but a rare and casual exception to morrow night i should again be the victim of anguish and mamma would not stay by my side but when these storms of anguish grew calm i could no longer realise their existence besides tomorrow evening was still a long way off i reminded myself that i should still have time to think about things albeit that remission of time could bring me no access of power albeit the coming event was in no way dependent upon the exercise of my will and seemed not quite inevitable only because it was still separated from me by this short interval