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I encountered no one at first but a footman who, after leading me through several large drawing-rooms, showed me into one that was quite small, empty, its windows beginning to dream already in the blue light of afternoon. I was left alone there in the company of orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire, preciously ensconced behind a crystal screen, in a basin of white marble over which it spilled from time to time its dangerous rubies.

I had sat down, but rose hurriedly on hearing the door open; it was only another footman, and then a third, and the slender result that their vainly alarming entrances and exits achieved was to put a little more coal on the fire or water in the vases. They departed, and I found myself alone again, once that door was shut which Mme Swann was surely soon to open. Of a truth, I should have been less ill at ease in a magician’s cave than in this little waiting-room where the fire appeared to me to be performing alchemical transmutations as in Klingsor’s laboratory. Footsteps sounded afresh, but I did not get up; it was sure to be yet another footman. It was M. Swann. “What! all by yourself? What is one to do? That poor wife of mine has never been able to remember what time means! Ten minutes to one. She gets later every day. And as you’ll see, she will come sailing in without the least hurry, and imagine she’s in heaps of time.” And since he was still subject to neuritis, and was becoming a trifle ridiculous, the fact of possessing so unpunctual a wife, who came in so late from the Bois, forgot everything at her dressmaker’s and was never in time for lunch, made Swann anxious for his digestion but flattered his self-esteem.

He would show me his latest acquisitions and explain to me the interesting points about them, but my emotion, added to the unfamiliarity of being still unfed at this hour, stirred my mind while leaving it void, so that while I was capable of speech I was incapable of hearing. In any event, as far as the works of art in Swann’s possession were concerned, it was enough for me that they were contained in his house, formed a part there of the delicious hour that preceded luncheon. The Gioconda herself might have appeared there without giving me any more pleasure than one of Mme Swann’s indoor gowns, or her bottles of smelling-salts.

I continued to wait, alone, or with Swann and often Gilberte, who came in to keep us company. The arrival of Mme Swann, prepared for me by all those majestic apparitions, must, I felt, be something truly immense. I strained my ears to catch the slightest sound. But one never finds a cathedral, a wave in a storm, a dancer’s leap in the air quite as high as one has been expecting; after those liveried footmen, suggesting the chorus whose processional entry upon the stage leads up to and at the same time diminishes the final appearance of the queen, Mme Swann, creeping furtively in, in a little otter-skin coat, her veil lowered to cover a nose pink-tipped by the cold, did not fulfil the promises lavished upon my imagination during my vigil.

But if she had stayed at home all morning, when she arrived in the drawing-room she would be clad in a brightly coloured crêpe-de-Chine housecoat which seemed to me more exquisite than any of her dresses.

Sometimes the Swanns decided to remain in the house all afternoon, and then, as we had lunched so late, very soon I would see, beyond the garden-wall, the sun setting on that day which had seemed to me bound to be different from other days; and in vain might the servants bring in lamps of every size and shape, burning each upon the consecrated altar of a console, a wall-bracket, a corner-cupboard, an occasional table, as though for the celebration of some strange and secret rite, nothing extraordinary transpired in the conversation, and I went home disappointed,