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By Root 1335 0

I fell back on subjects which still concerned Gilberte, I repeated over and over again the same words, and although I knew that they were only words—words uttered in her absence, which she could not hear, words without virtue in themselves, repeating what were facts but powerless to modify them—it seemed to me none the less that by dint of thus manipulating, stirring up everything that had reference to Gilberte, I might perhaps elicit from it something that would bring me happiness. I told my parents again that Gilberte was fond of her governess, as if that proposition, voiced for the hundredth time, would at last have the effect of making Gilberte suddenly burst into the room, come to live with us for ever. I had already sung the praises of the old lady who read the Débats (I had hinted to my parents that she was an ambassadress, if not actually a Highness) and I continued to descant on her beauty, her splendour, her nobility, until the day I mentioned that, from what I had heard Gilberte call her, she appeared to be a Mme Blatin.

“Oh, now I know who you mean,” exclaimed my mother, while I felt myself blushing with shame. “On guard! on guard!—as your poor grandfather would have said. So she’s the one you find so beautiful! Why, she’s perfectly horrible, and always has been. She’s the widow of a bailiff. Don’t you remember, when you were little, all the trouble I used to go to in order to avoid her at your gym lessons, where she was always trying to get hold of me—I didn’t know the woman, of course—to tell me that you were ‘too beautiful for a boy.’ She has always had a mania for getting to know people, and she really must be a sort of maniac, as I’ve always thought, if she does in fact know Mme Swann. For even if she does come from a very common background, I’ve never heard anything against her. But she must always be forcing herself upon strangers. She really is a horrible woman, frightfully vulgar, and affected as well.”

As for Swann, in order to try to resemble him, I spent all my time at table pulling my nose and rubbing my eyes. My father would exclaim: “The child’s an idiot, he’ll make himself quite hideous.” More than anything else I should have liked to be as bald as Swann. He seemed to me a being so extraordinary that I found it miraculous that people of my acquaintance knew him too and in the course of the day might run into him. And once my mother, while she was telling us, as she did every evening at dinner, where she had been and what she had done that afternoon, merely by the words: “By the way, guess whom I saw in the Trois Quartiers—at the umbrella counter—Swann!” brought forth in the midst of her narrative (an arid desert to me) a mystic blossom. What a melancholy pleasure to learn that Swann, that very afternoon, his supernatural form silhouetted against the crowd, had gone to buy an umbrella. Among the events of the day, great and small, but all equally insignificant, that one alone aroused in me those peculiar vibrations by which my love for Gilberte was perpetually stirred. My father complained that I took no interest in anything because I did not listen while he was speaking of the political consequences that might follow the visit of King Theodosius, at the moment in France as the nation’s guest and (it was claimed) ally. But how I longed, on the other hand, to know whether Swann had been wearing his hooded cape!

“Did you speak to him?” I asked.

“Why, of course I did,” answered my mother, who always seemed afraid lest, were she to admit that we were not on the best of terms with Swann, people would seek to reconcile us more than she cared for, in view of Mme Swann, whom she did not wish to know. “It was he who came up and spoke to me. I hadn’t seen him.”

“Then you haven’t quarrelled?”

“Quarrelled? What on earth makes you think we’ve quarrelled?” she briskly parried, as though I had cast doubt on the fiction of her friendly relations with Swann, and tried to bring about a reconciliation.

“He might be cross with you for never asking him here.”

“One isn’t obliged to ask everyone to one’s house,