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By Root 1524 0

with scarlet fruits, in the oriental style. She would even ask me what time my parents dined, as if I still knew, as if the agitation which overwhelmed me had allowed the sensation of satiety or of hunger, the notion of dinner or the image of my family, to persist in my empty memory and paralysed stomach. Alas, its paralysis was but momentary. A time would come when I should have to digest the cakes that I took without noticing them. But that time was still remote. Meanwhile Gilberte was making “my” tea. I would go on drinking it indefinitely, although a single cup would keep me awake for twenty-four hours. As a consequence of which my mother used always to say: “What a nuisance it is; this child can never go to the Swanns’ without coming home ill.” But was I aware even, when I was at the Swanns’, that it was tea that I was drinking? Had I known, I should have drunk it just the same, for even supposing that I had recovered for a moment the sense of the present, that would not have restored to me the memory of the past or the apprehension of the future. My imagination was incapable of reaching to the distant time in which I might have the idea of going to bed and the need to sleep.

Gilberte’s girl friends were not all plunged in that state of intoxication in which it is impossible to make any decisions. Some of them even refused tea! Then Gilberte would say, using a phrase that was very popular that year: “I can see I’m not having much of a success with my tea!” And to eradicate even more completely any notion of ceremony, she would disarrange the chairs that were drawn up round the table, saying: “It’s just like a wedding breakfast. Goodness, how stupid servants are!”

She would nibble away, perched sideways upon a cross-legged seat placed at an angle to the table. And then, just as though she could have had all those cakes at her disposal without having asked her mother’s permission, when Mme Swann, whose “day” coincided as a rule with Gilberte’s tea-parties, having shown one of her visitors to the door, came sweeping in a moment later, dressed sometimes in blue velvet, more often in a black satin gown draped with white lace, she would say with an air of astonishment: “I say, that looks good, what you’ve got there. It makes me quite hungry to see you all eating cake.”

“But, Mamma, do! We invite you,” Gilberte would answer.

“Thank you, no, my precious; what would my visitors say? I’ve still got Mme Trombert and Mme Cottard and Mme Bontemps. You know dear Mme Bontemps never pays very short visits, and she has only just come. What would all those good people say if I didn’t go back to them? If no one else calls, I’ll come back and have a chat with you (which will be far more amusing) after they’ve all gone. I really think I’ve earned a little rest. I’ve had forty-five different people today, and forty-two of them have told me about Gérôme’s picture! But you must come along one of these days,” she turned to me, “and take ‘your’ tea with Gilberte. She’ll make it for you just as you like it, as you have it in your own little ‘den’,” she added as she rushed off to her visitors and as if it had been something as familiar to me as my own habits (such as the habit I might have had of drinking tea, had I ever done so; as for my “den,” I was uncertain whether I had one or not) that I had come to seek in this mysterious world. “When can you come? Tomorrow? We’ll make you some toast that’s every bit as good as you get at Colombin’s. No? You are horrid!”—for, since she too had begun to form a salon, she was adopting Mme Verdurin’s mannerisms, and notably her tone of simpering autocracy. “Toast” being as unfamiliar to me as “Colombin’s,” this further promise could not have added to my temptation. It will appear stranger, now that everyone uses such expressions—perhaps even at Combray—that I had not at first understood who Mme Swann was speaking of when I heard her sing the praises of our old “nurse.” I did not know any English; I soon gathered, however, that the word was intended to denote Françoise. Having been so terrified in the