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By Root 1642 0

to Friday. A message was brought back that I should hear from her in writing that very evening at about eight o’clock. This time would have passed quickly enough if I had had, during the afternoon that separated me from her letter, the help of a visit from someone else. When the hours are wrapped in conversation one ceases to measure, or indeed to notice them; they vanish, and suddenly it is a long way beyond the point at which it escaped you that the nimble truant time impinges once more on your attention. But if we are alone, our preoccupation, by bringing before us the still distant and incessantly awaited moment with the frequency and uniformity of a ticking pendulum, divides, or rather multiplies, the hours by all the minutes which, had we been with friends, we should not have counted. And confronted, by the incessant return of my desire, with the ardent pleasure which I was to enjoy—not for some days, though, alas!—in Mme de Stermaria’s company, this afternoon, which I was going to have to spend alone, seemed to me very empty and very melancholy.

Every now and then I heard the sound of the lift coming up, but it was followed by a second sound, not the one I was hoping for, namely its coming to a halt at our landing, but another very different sound which the lift made in continuing its progress to the floors above and which, because it so often meant the desertion of my floor when I was expecting a visitor, remained for me later, even when I had ceased to wish for visitors, a sound lugubrious in itself, in which there echoed, as it were, a sentence of solitary confinement. Weary, resigned, occupied for several hours still with its immemorial task, the grey day stitched its shimmering needlework of light and shade, and it saddened me to think that I was to be left alone with a thing that knew me no more than would a seamstress who, installed by the window so as to see better while she finishes her work, pays no attention to the person present with her in the room. Suddenly, although I had heard no bell, Françoise opened the door to introduce Albertine, who entered smiling, silent, plump, containing in the plenitude of her body, made ready so that I might continue living them, come to seek me out, the days we had spent together in that Balbec to which I had never since returned. No doubt, whenever we see again a person with whom our relations—however trivial they may be—have now changed, it is like a juxtaposition of two different periods. For this, there is no need for a former mistress to call round to see us as a friend; all that is required is the visit to Paris of someone we have known day by day in a certain kind of life, and that this life should have ceased for us, if only a week ago. On each of Albertine’s smiling, questioning, self-conscious features I could read the questions: “And what about Madame de Villeparisis? And the dancing-master? And the pastry-cook?” When she sat down, her back seemed to be saying: “Well, well, there are no cliffs here, but you don’t mind if I sit down beside you, all the same, as I used to do at Balbec?” She was like an enchantress offering me a mirror that reflected time. In this she resembled all the people whom we seldom see now but with whom at one time we lived on more intimate terms. With Albertine, however, there was something more than this. True, even in our daily encounters at Balbec, I had always been surprised when I caught sight of her, so changeable was her appearance. But now she was scarcely recognisable. Freed from the pink haze that shrouded them, her features had emerged in sharp relief like those of a statue. She had another face, or rather she had a face at last; her body too had grown. There remained scarcely anything now of the sheath in which she had been enclosed and on the surface of which, at Balbec, her future outline had been barely visible.

This time, Albertine had returned to Paris earlier than usual. As a rule she did not arrive until the spring, so that, already disturbed for some weeks past by the storms that were beating down the first flowers,