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By Root 1261 0

prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world. My aunt must have been perfectly well aware that she would never see Swann again, that she would never leave the house again, but this ultimate reclusion seemed to be made bearable to her by the very factor which, to our minds, ought to have made it more painful; namely, that this reclusion was forced upon her by the gradual diminution in her strength which she was able to measure daily and which, by making every action, every movement exhausting if not actually painful, gave to inaction, isolation and silence the blessed and restoring charm of repose.

My aunt did not go to see the pink hawthorn in the hedge, but at all hours of the day I would ask the rest of my family whether she was not going to do so, whether she used not, at one time, to go often to Tansonville, trying to make them speak of Mlle Swann’s parents and grandparents, who appeared to me to be as great and glorious as gods. The name Swann had for me become almost mythological, and when I talked with my family I would grow sick with longing to hear them utter it; I dared not pronounce it myself, but I would draw them into the discussion of matters which led naturally to Gilberte and her family, in which she was involved, in speaking of which I would feel myself not too remotely exiled from her; and I would suddenly force my father (by pretending, for instance, to believe that my grandfather’s appointment had been in our family before his day, or that the hedge with the pink hawthorn which my aunt Léonie wished to visit was on common land) to correct my assertions, to say, as though in opposition to me and of his own accord: “No, no, that appointment belonged to Swann’s father, that hedge is part of Swann’s park.” And then I would be obliged to catch my breath, so suffocating was the pressure, upon that part of me where it was for ever inscribed, of that name which, at the moment when I heard it, seemed to me fuller, more portentous than any other, because it was heavy with the weight of all the occasions on which I had secretly uttered it in my mind. It caused me a pleasure which I was ashamed to have dared to demand from my parents, for so great was this pleasure that to have procured it for me must have caused them a good deal of effort, and with no recompense, since it was no pleasure for them. And so I would turn the conversation, out of tact, and out of scruple too. All the singular seductions with which I had invested the name Swann came back to me as soon as they uttered it. And then it seemed to me suddenly that my parents could not fail to experience the same emotions, that they must find themselves sharing my point of view, that they perceived in their turn, that they condoned, that they even embraced my visionary longings, and I was as wretched as though I had ravished and corrupted the innocence of their hearts.

That year my family fixed the day of our return to Paris rather earlier than usual. On the morning of our departure I had had my hair curled, to be ready to face the photographer, had had a new hat carefully set upon my head, and had been buttoned into a velvet jacket; a little later my mother, after searching everywhere for me, found me standing in tears on the steep little path near Tansonville, bidding farewell to my hawthorns, clasping their sharp branches in my arms and, like a princess in a tragedy oppressed by the weight of these vain ornaments, with no gratitude towards the importunate hand which, in curling all those ringlets, had been at pains to arrange my hair upon my forehead,7 trampling underfoot the curl-papers which I had torn from my head, and my new hat with them. My mother was not at all moved by my