In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [141]
While I heard my grandmother, who betrayed no sign of annoyance at his listening to her with his hat on his head and whistling through his teeth, ask him in an artificial tone of voice “And what are . . . your charges? . . . Oh! far too high for my little budget,” waiting on a bench, I took refuge in the innermost depths of my being, strove to migrate to a plane of eternal thoughts, to leave nothing of myself, nothing living, on the surface of my body—anaesthetised like those of certain animals, which, by inhibition, feign death when they are wounded—so as not to suffer too keenly in this place, my total unfamiliarity with which was impressed upon me all the more forcibly by the familiarity with it that seemed to be evinced at the same moment by a smartly dressed lady to whom the manager showed his respect by taking liberties with the little dog that followed her across the hall, the young dandy with a feather in his hat who came in asking if there were “any letters,” all these people for whom climbing those imitation marble stairs meant going home. And at the same time the triple stare of Minos, Aeacus and Rhadamanthus (into which I plunged my naked soul as into an unknown element where there was nothing now to protect it) was bent sternly upon me by a group of gentlemen who, though little versed perhaps in the art of receiving, yet bore the title “reception clerks,” while beyond them again, behind a glass partition, were people sitting in a reading-room for the description of which I should have had to borrow from Dante alternately the colours in which he paints Paradise and Hell, according as I was thinking of the happiness of the elect who had the right to sit and read there undisturbed, or of the terror which my grandmother would have inspired in me if, in her insensibility to this sort of impression, she had asked me to go in there.
My sense of loneliness was further increased a moment later. When I had confessed to my grandmother that I did not feel well, that I thought that we should be obliged to return to Paris, she had offered no protest, saying merely that she was going out to buy a few things which would be equally useful whether we left or stayed (and which, I afterwards learned, were all intended for me, Françoise having gone off with certain articles which I might need). While I waited for her I had taken a turn through the streets, which were packed with a crowd of people who imparted to them a sort of indoor warmth, and in which the hairdresser’s shop and the pastry-cook’s were still open, the latter filled with customers eating ices opposite the statue of Duguay-Trouin. This crowd gave me just about as much pleasure as a photograph of it in one of the “illustrateds” might give a patient who was turning its pages in the surgeon’s waiting-room. I was astonished to find that there were people so different from myself that this stroll through the town had actually been recommended to me by the manager as a diversion, and also that the torture chamber which a new place of residence is could appear to some people a “delightful abode,” to quote the hotel prospectus, which might perhaps exaggerate but was none the less addressed to a whole army of clients to whose tastes it must appeal. True, it invoked, to make them come to the Grand Hotel, Balbec, not only the “exquisite fare” and the “magical view across the Casino gardens,” but also the “ordinances of Her Majesty Queen Fashion, which no one may violate with impunity without being taken for a philistine, a charge that no well-bred man would willingly incur.”
The need that I now felt for my grandmother was enhanced by my fear that I had shattered another of her illusions. She must be feeling discouraged, feeling that if I could not stand the fatigue of this journey there was no hope that any change of air could ever do me good. I decided to return to the hotel and to wait for her there;