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By Root 1517 0

laughter of childhood, a spasmodic explosion which, in those days, had continually sent their heads dipping out of the circle, as the clusters of minnows in the Vivonne used to scatter and vanish only to gather again a moment later; each of their physiognomies was now mistress of itself, their eyes were fixed on the goal they were pursuing; and it had taken, yesterday, the tremulous uncertainty of my first impression to make me confuse vaguely (as their childish hilarity and the old photograph had confused) the spores, now individualised and disjoined, of the pale madrepore.

Doubtless often enough before, when pretty girls went by, I had promised myself that I would see them again. As a rule, people thus seen do not appear a second time; moreover our memory, which speedily forgets their existence, would find it difficult to recall their features; our eyes would not recognise them, perhaps, and in the meantime we have seen others go by, whom we shall not see again either. But at other times, and this was what was to happen with the pert little band at Balbec, chance brings them back insistently before our eyes. Chance seems to us then a good and useful thing, for we discern in it as it were the rudiments of organisation, of an attempt to arrange our lives; and it makes it easy, inevitable, and sometimes—after interruptions that have made us hope that we may cease to remember—painful for us to retain in our minds images for the possession of which we shall come in time to believe that we were predestined, and which but for chance we should from the very first have managed to forget, like so many others, so easily.

Presently Saint-Loup’s visit drew to an end. I had not seen those girls again on the beach. He was too little at Balbec in the afternoons to have time to pay attention to them and attempt, in my interest, to make their acquaintance. In the evenings he was freer, and continued to take me regularly to Rivebelle. There are, in such restaurants, as there are in public gardens and railway trains, people enclosed in a quite ordinary appearance, whose names astonish us when, having happened to ask, we discover that they are not the mere inoffensive strangers whom we supposed but no less than the Minister or the Duke of whom we have so often heard. Two or three times already, in the Rivebelle restaurant, when everyone else was getting ready to leave, Saint-Loup and I had seen a man of large stature, very muscular, with regular features and a grizzled beard, come in and sit down at a table, where his pensive gaze remained fixed with concentrated attention upon the void. One evening, on our asking the landlord who this obscure, solitary and belated diner was, “What!” he exclaimed, “do you mean to say you don’t know the famous painter Elstir?” Swann had once mentioned his name to me, I had entirely forgotten in what connexion; but the omission of a particular memory, like that of part of a sentence when we are reading, leads sometimes not to uncertainty but to the birth of a premature certainty. “He’s a friend of Swann’s, and a very well-known artist, extremely good,” I told Saint-Loup. Immediately the thought swept through us both like a thrill of emotion, that Elstir was a great artist, a celebrated man, and that, confounding us with the rest of the diners, he had no suspicion of the excitement into which we were plunged by the idea of his talent. Doubtless, his unconsciousness of our admiration and of our acquaintance with Swann would not have troubled us had we not been at the seaside. But since we were still at an age when enthusiasm cannot keep silence, and had been transported into a life where anonymity is suffocating, we wrote a letter, signed with both our names, in which we revealed to Elstir in the two diners seated within a few feet of him two passionate admirers of his talent, two friends of his great friend Swann, and asked to be allowed to pay our homage to him in person. A waiter undertook to convey this missive to the celebrity.

A celebrity Elstir was perhaps not yet at this period quite to the extent claimed