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By Root 1423 0

Champs-Elysées of the bad impression that she must make, I now learned from Mme Swann that it was all the things that Gilberte had told them about my “nurse” that had attracted her husband and her to me. “One feels that she is so devoted to you, that she must be so nice!” (At once my opinion of Françoise was diametrically changed. Conversely, to have a governess equipped with a waterproof and a feather in her hat no longer appeared quite so essential.) Finally I learned from some words which Mme Swann let fall with regard to Mme Blatin (whose good nature she acknowledged but whose visits she dreaded) that personal relations with that lady would have been of less value to me than I had supposed, and would not in any way have improved my standing with the Swanns.

If I had now begun to explore with tremors of reverence and joy the enchanted domain which, against all expectations, had opened to me its hitherto impenetrable approaches, this was still only in my capacity as a friend of Gilberte. The realm into which I was admitted was itself contained within another, more mysterious still, in which Swann and his wife led their supernatural existence and towards which they made their way, after shaking my hand, when they crossed the hall at the same moment as myself but in the other direction. But soon I was to penetrate also to the heart of the Sanctuary. For instance, Gilberte might be out when I called, but M. or Mme Swann was at home. They would ask who had rung, and on being told that it was I, would send out to ask me to come in for a moment and talk to them, desiring me to use in one way or another, with this or that object in view, my influence over their daughter. I remembered the letter, so complete and so persuasive, which I had written to Swann only the other day, and which he had not deigned even to acknowledge. I marvelled at the impotence of the mind, the reason and the heart to effect the least conversion, to solve a single one of those difficulties which subsequently life, without one’s so much as knowing how it went about it, so easily unravels. My new position as the friend of Gilberte, endowed with an excellent influence over her, now enabled me to enjoy the same favours as if, having had as a companion at some school where I was always at the top of my class the son of a king, I had owed to that accident the right of informal entry into the palace and to audiences in the throne-room. Swann, with an infinite benevolence and as though he were not over-burdened with glorious occupations, would take me into his library and there allow me for an hour on end to respond in stammered monosyllables, timid silences broken by brief and incoherent bursts of courage, to observations of which my excitement prevented me from understanding a single word; would show me works of art and books which he thought likely to interest me, things as to which I had no doubt that they infinitely surpassed in beauty anything that the Louvre or the Bibliothèque Nationale possessed, but at which I found it impossible to look. At such moments I should have been delighted if Swann’s butler had demanded from me my watch, my tie-pin, my boots, and made me sign a deed acknowledging him as my heir; in the admirable words of a popular expression of which, as of the most famous epics, we do not know the author, although, like these epics, and with all deference to Wolf and his theory,5 it most certainly had one (one of those inventive and modest souls such as we come across every year, who light upon such gems as “putting a name to a face,” though their own names they never reveal), I no longer knew what I was doing. The most I was capable of was astonishment, when my visit was at all prolonged, at the nullity of achievement, at the utter inconclusiveness of those hours spent in the enchanted dwelling. But my disappointment arose neither from the inadequacy of the works of art that were shown to me nor from the impossibility of fixing upon them my distracted gaze. For it was not the intrinsic beauty of the objects themselves that made it miraculous