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And once when she was being particularly loving with Swann, and I mentioned this to her when he was out of the room:

“Yes, poor Papa, it’s the anniversary of his father’s death round about now. You can understand what he must be feeling. You do understand, don’t you—you and I feel the same about things like that. So I just try to be a little less naughty than usual.” “But he doesn’t ever think you naughty. He thinks you’re quite perfect.” “Poor Papa, that’s because he’s far too good himself.”

But her parents were not content with singing the praises of Gilberte—that same Gilberte who, even before I had set eyes on her, used to appear to me standing in front of a church, in a landscape of the Ile-de-France, and later, awakening in me not dreams now but memories, was embowered always in a hedge of pink hawthorn, in the little lane that I took when I was going the Méséglise way. Once when I had asked Mme Swann (making an effort to assume the indifferent tone of a friend of the family, curious to know the preferences of a child) which among all her playmates Gilberte liked the best, Mme Swann replied: “But you ought to know a great deal better than I do, since you’re in her confidence, the great favourite, the crack, as the English say.”

Doubtless, in such perfect coincidences as this, when reality folds back and overlays what we have long dreamed of, it completely hides it from us, merges with it, like two equal superimposed figures which appear to be one, whereas, to give our happiness its full meaning, we would rather preserve for all those separate points of our desire, at the very moment in which we succeed in touching them—and to be quite certain that it is indeed they—the distinction of being intangible. And our thoughts cannot even reconstruct the old state in order to compare it with the new, for it has no longer a clear field: the acquaintance we have made, the memory of those first, unhoped-for moments, the talk we have heard, are there now to block the passage of our consciousness, and as they control the outlets of our memory far more than those of our imagination, they react more forcibly upon our past, which we are no longer able to visualise without taking them into account, than upon the form, still unshaped, of our future. For years I had believed that the notion of going to Mme Swann’s was a vague, chimerical dream to which I should never attain; after I had spent a quarter of an hour in her drawing-room, it was the time when I did not yet know her that had become chimerical and vague like a possibility which the realisation of an alternative possibility has destroyed. How could I ever dream again of her dining-room as of an inconceivable place, when I could not make the least movement in my mind without crossing the path of that inextinguishable ray cast backwards ad infinitum, into my own most distant past, by the lobster à l’Américaine which I had just been eating. And Swann must have observed in his own case a similar phenomenon: for this house in which he now entertained me might be regarded as the place into which had flowed, to merge and coincide, not only the ideal dwelling that my imagination had constructed, but another still, which his jealous love, as inventive as any fantasy of mine, had so often depicted to him, that dwelling common to Odette and himself which had appeared to him so inaccessible once, on an evening when Odette had taken him home with Forcheville to drink orangeade with her; and what had flowed in to be absorbed, for him, in the walls and furniture of the dining-room in which we now sat down to lunch was that unhoped-for paradise in which, in the old days, he could not without a pang imagine that he would one day be saying to their butler the very words, “Is Madame ready yet?” which I now heard him utter with a touch of impatience mingled with self-satisfaction. No more, probably, than Swann himself could I succeed in knowing my own happiness, and when Gilberte herself once broke out: “Who would ever have said that the little girl you watched