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By Root 1436 0

I had spent a whole afternoon with Gilberte in her room, to open myself so as to let in a little air and even to lean out of beside her, if it was her mother’s “at home” day, to watch the visitors arrive who would often look up as they stepped out of their carriages and greet me with a wave of the hand, taking me for some nephew of their hostess. At such moments Gilberte’s plaits used to brush my cheek. They seemed to me, in the fineness of their grain, at once natural and supernatural, and in the strength of their skilfully woven tracery, a matchless work of art in the composition of which had been used the very grass of Paradise. To a section of them, however infinitesimal, what celestial herbarium would I not have given as a reliquary? But since I never hoped to obtain an actual fragment of those plaits, if at least I had been able to have a photograph of them, how far more precious than one of a sheet of flowers drawn by Leonardo! To acquire one, I stooped to servilities, with friends of the Swanns and even with photographers, which not only failed to procure for me what I wanted, but tied me for life to a number of extremely boring people.

Gilberte’s parents, who for so long had prevented me from seeing her, now—when I entered the dark hall in which hovered perpetually, more formidable and more to be desired than, at Versailles, the apparition of the King, the possibility of my encountering them, in which too, invariably, after bumping into an enormous seven-branched hat-stand, like the Candlestick in Holy Writ, I would begin bowing profusely to a footman, seated among the skirts of his long grey coat upon the wood chest, whom in the dim light I had mistaken for Mme Swann—Gilberte’s parents, if one of them happened to be passing at the moment of my arrival, so far from seeming annoyed would come and shake hands with me with a smile, and say: “How d’ye do?” (which they both pronounced in the same clipped way, which, as may be imagined, I made it my incessant and delightful task to imitate when I was back at home). “Does Gilberte know you’re here? She does? Then I’ll leave you to her.”

Better still, the tea-parties themselves to which Gilberte invited her friends, parties which for so long had seemed to me the most insurmountable of the barriers heaped up between her and myself, became now an opportunity for bringing us together of which she would inform me in a few lines written (because I was still a comparative stranger) on writing-paper that was always different. Once it was adorned with a poodle embossed in blue, above a humorous inscription in English with an exclamation mark after it; another time it would be engraved with an anchor, or with the initials G. S. preposterously elongated in a rectangle which ran from top to bottom of the page, or else with the name Gilberte, now traced across one corner in letters of gold which imitated her signature and ended with a flourish, beneath an open umbrella printed in black, now enclosed in a monogram in the shape of a Chinaman’s hat which contained all the letters of the name in capitals without its being possible to make out a single one of them. Finally, as the series of different writing-papers which Gilberte possessed, numerous though it was, was not unlimited, after a certain number of weeks I saw reappear the sheet that bore (like the first letter she had written me) the motto Per viam rectam, and over it the helmeted head set in a medallion of tarnished silver. And each of them was chosen for one day rather than another by virtue of a certain ritual, as I then supposed, but more probably, I now think, because she tried to remember which of them she had already used, so as never to send the same one twice to any of her correspondents, of those at least whom she took special pains to please, save at the longest possible intervals. As, on account of the different times of their lessons, some of the friends whom Gilberte used to invite to her parties were obliged to leave just as the rest were arriving, while I was still on the stairs I could hear emanating from the