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“Oh, Monsieur, my poor Madame will be so pleased at having her likeness taken. She’s going to wear the hat that her old Françoise has trimmed for her: you must let her.”

I persuaded myself that it was not cruel of me to mock Françoise’s sensibility, by reminding myself that my mother and grandmother, my models in all things, often did the same. But my grandmother, noticing that I seemed put out, said that if her sitting for her photograph offended me in any way she would give up the idea. I would not hear of it. I assured her that I saw no harm in it, and let her adorn herself, but, thinking to show how shrewd and forceful I was, added a few sarcastic and wounding words calculated to neutralise the pleasure which she seemed to find in being photographed, with the result that, if I was obliged to see my grandmother’s magnificent hat, I succeeded at least in driving from her face that joyful expression which ought to have made me happy. Alas, it too often happens, while the people we love best are still alive, that such expressions appear to us as the exasperating manifestation of some petty whim rather than as the precious form of the happiness which we should dearly like to procure for them. My ill-humour arose more particularly from the fact that, during that week, my grandmother had appeared to be avoiding me, and I had not been able to have her to myself for a moment, either by night or day. When I came back in the afternoon to be alone with her for a little I was told that she was not in the hotel; or else she would shut herself up with Françoise for endless confabulations which I was not permitted to interrupt. And when, after being out all evening with Saint-Loup, I had been thinking on the way home of the moment at which I should be able to go to my grandmother and embrace her, I waited in vain for her to give the three little knocks on the party wall which would tell me to go in and say good night to her. At length I would go to bed, a little resentful of her for depriving me, with an indifference so new and strange in her, of a joy on which I had counted so much, and I would lie there for a while, my heart throbbing as in my childhood, listening to the wall which remained silent, until I cried myself to sleep.

That day, as for some days past, Saint-Loup had been obliged to go to Doncières, where, until he returned there for good, he would be on duty now until late every afternoon. I was sorry that he was not at Balbec. I had seen some young women, who at a distance had seemed to me lovely, alighting from carriages and entering either the ballroom of the Casino or the ice-cream shop. I was going through one of those phases of youth, devoid of any particular love, as it were in abeyance, in which at all times and in all places—as a lover the woman by whose charms he is smitten—we desire, we seek, we see Beauty. Let but a single flash of reality—the glimpse of a woman from afar or from behind—enable us to project the image of Beauty before our eyes, and we imagine that we have recognised it, our hearts beat, and we will always remain half-persuaded that it was She, provided that the woman has vanished: it is only if we manage to overtake her that we realise our mistake.

Moreover, as I was becoming more and more unwell, I was inclined to overrate the simplest pleasures because of the very difficulty of attaining them. I seemed to see charming women all round me, because I was too tired, if it was on the beach, too shy if it was in the Casino or at a pastry-cook’s, to go anywhere near them. And yet, if I was soon to die, I should have liked to know beforehand what the prettiest girls that life had to offer looked like at close quarters, in reality, even if it should be another than myself or no one at all who was to take advantage of that offer (I did not, in fact, realise that a desire for possession underlay my curiosity). I should have had the courage to enter the ballroom if Saint-Loup had been with me. Left by myself, I was simply