• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1586 0

on a couple of chairs, that as he read my letter, which she had now brought back to me, her father had shrugged his shoulders and said: “All this means nothing; it only goes to prove how right I was.” I who knew the purity of my intentions, the goodness of my soul, was furious that my words should not even have impinged upon the surface of Swann’s ridiculous error. For it was an error; of that I had then no doubt. I felt that I had described with such accuracy certain irrefutable characteristics of my generous sentiments that, if Swann had not at once recognised their authenticity, had not come to ask my forgiveness and to admit that he had been mistaken, it must be because he himself had never experienced these noble sentiments, and this would make him incapable of understanding their existence in other people.

But perhaps it was simply that Swann knew that nobility is often no more than the inner aspect which our egotistical feelings assume when we have not yet named and classified them. Perhaps he had recognised in the regard that I expressed for him simply an effect—and the strongest possible proof—of my love for Gilberte, by which—and not by my secondary veneration for himself—my subsequent actions would be inevitably controlled. I was unable to share his predictions, since I had not succeeded in abstracting my love from myself, in fitting it into the common experience of humanity and computing, experimentally, its consequences; I was in despair. I was obliged to leave Gilberte for a moment; Françoise had called me. I had to accompany her into a little pavilion covered in a green trellis, not unlike one of the disused toll-houses of old Paris, in which had recently been installed what in England they call a lavatory but in France, by an ill-judged piece of Anglomania, “water-closets.” The old, damp walls of the entrance, where I stood waiting for Françoise, emitted a cool, fusty smell which, relieving me at once of the anxieties that Swann’s words, as reported by Gilberte, had just awakened in me, filled me with a pleasure of a different kind from other pleasures, which leave one more unstable, incapable of grasping them, of possessing them, a pleasure that was solid and consistent, on which I could lean for support, delicious, soothing, rich with a truth that was lasting, unexplained and sure. I should have liked, as, long ago, in my walks along the Guermantes way, to endeavour to penetrate the charm of this impression which had seized hold of me, and, remaining there motionless, to explore this antiquated emanation which invited me not to enjoy the pleasure which it was offering me only as a bonus, but to descend into the underlying reality which it had not yet disclosed to me. But the keeper of the establishment, an elderly dame with painted cheeks and an auburn wig, began to talk to me. Françoise thought her “a proper lady.” Her young “missy” had married what Françoise called “a young man of family,” which meant that he differed more, in her eyes, from a workman than, in Saint-Simon’s, a duke did from a man “risen from the dregs of the people.” No doubt the keeper, before entering upon her tenancy, had suffered setbacks. But Françoise was positive that she was a “marquise,” and belonged to the Saint-Ferréol family. This “marquise” now warned me not to stand outside in the cold, and even opened one of her doors for me, saying: “Won’t you go inside for a minute? Look, here’s a nice clean one, and I shan’t charge you anything.” Perhaps she made this offer simply in the spirit in which the young ladies at Gouache’s, when we went in there to order something, used to offer me one of the sweets which they kept on the counter under glass bells, and which, alas, Mamma would never allow me to accept; perhaps, less innocently, like the old florist whom Mamma used to have in to replenish her flower-stands, who rolled languishing eyes at me as she handed me a rose. In any event, if the “marquise” had a weakness for little boys, when she threw open to them the hypogean doors of those cubicles of stone in which men crouch like