In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [200]
It was from my bed that I was contemplating these memories that afternoon, for I had returned to it to wait until the hour came at which, taking advantage of the absence of my parents who had gone for a few days to Combray, I proposed to get up and go to a little play which was being given that evening in Mme de Villeparisis’s drawing-room. Had they been at home I should perhaps not have ventured to do so; my mother, in the delicacy of her respect for my grandmother’s memory, wished the tokens of regret that were paid to it to be freely and sincerely given; she would not have forbidden me this outing, but she would have disapproved of it. From Combray, on the other hand, had I consulted her wishes, she would not have replied with a melancholy: “Do just as you like; you’re old enough now to know what is right or wrong,” but, reproaching herself for having left me alone in Paris, and measuring my grief by her own, would have wished for it distractions of a sort which she herself would have eschewed and which she persuaded herself that my grandmother, solicitous above all things for my health and my nervous equilibrium, would have recommended for me.
That morning the boiler of the new central heating installation had been turned on for the first time. Its disagreeable sound—an intermittent hiccup—had no connexion with my memories of Doncières. But its prolonged encounter with them in my thoughts that afternoon was to give it so lasting an affinity with them that whenever, after succeeding more or less in forgetting it, I heard the central heating again it would bring them back to me.
There was no one else in the house but Françoise. The fog had lifted. The grey light, falling like a fine rain, wove without ceasing a transparent web through which the Sunday strollers appeared in a silvery sheen. I had flung to the foot of my bed the Figaro, for which I had been sending out religiously every morning ever since I had sent in an article which it had not yet printed; despite the absence of sun, the intensity of the daylight was an indication that we were still only half-way through the afternoon. The tulle window-curtains, vaporous and friable as they would not have been on a fine day, had that same blend of softness and brittleness that dragon-flies’ wings have, and Venetian glass. It depressed me all the more that I should be spending this Sunday alone because I had sent a note that morning to Mlle de Stermaria. Robert de Saint-Loup, whom his mother had at length succeeded—after painful abortive attempts—in parting from his mistress, and who immediately afterwards had been sent to Morocco in the hope of forgetting the woman he had already for some time ceased to love, had sent me a line, which had reached me the day before, announcing his imminent arrival in France for a short spell of leave. As he would only be passing through Paris (where his family were doubtless afraid of seeing him renew relations with Rachel), he informed me, to show me that he had been thinking of me, that he had met at Tangier Mlle or rather Mme (for she had divorced her husband after three months of marriage) de Stermaria. And Robert, remembering what I had said to him at Balbec, had asked on my behalf for an assignation with the young woman. She would be delighted to dine with me, she had told him, on one of the evenings which she would be spending in Paris before her return to Brittany. He told me to lose no time in writing to Mme de Stermaria, for she must certainly have arrived.
Saint-Loup’s letter had come as no surprise to me, even though I had had no news of him since, at the time of my grandmother’s illness, he had accused me of perfidy and treachery. I had grasped at once what must have happened. Rachel, who liked to provoke his jealousy (she also had other causes