• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Albertine spoke hardly at all, sensing that my thoughts were elsewhere. We went a little way on foot into the greenish, almost submarine grotto of a dense grove on the dome of which we heard the wind howl and the rain splash. I trod underfoot dead leaves which sank into the soil like sea-shells, and poked with my stick at fallen chestnuts prickly as sea-urchins.

On the boughs of the trees, the last clinging leaves, shaken by the wind, followed it only as far as their stems would allow, but sometimes these broke and they fell to the ground, along which they coursed to overtake it. I thought joyfully how much more remote still, if this weather lasted, the island would be the next day, and in any case quite deserted. We returned to our carriage and, as the squall had subsided, Albertine asked me to take her on to Saint-Cloud. As on the ground the drifting leaves, so up above the clouds were chasing the wind. And a stream of migrant evenings, of which a sort of conic section cut into the sky made visible the successive layers, pink, blue and green, were gathered in readiness for departure to warmer climes. To obtain a closer view of a marble goddess who had been carved in the act of springing from her pedestal and, alone in a great wood which seemed to be consecrated to her, filled it with the mythological terror, half animal, half divine, of her frenzied leaps, Albertine climbed a knoll while I waited for her in the road. She herself, seen thus from below, no longer coarse and plump as a few days earlier on my bed when the grain of her neck appeared under the magnifying-glass of my eyes, but delicately chiselled, seemed like a little statue on which our happy hours together at Balbec had left their patina. When I found myself alone again at home, remembering that I had been for an expedition that afternoon with Albertine, that I was to dine in two days’ time with Mme de Guermantes and that I had to answer a letter from Gilberte, three women I had loved, I said to myself that our social existence, like an artist’s studio, is filled with abandoned sketches in which we fancied for a moment that we could set down in permanent form our need of a great love, but it did not occur to me that sometimes, if the sketch is not too old, it may happen that we return to it and make of it a wholly different work, and one that is possibly more important than what we had originally planned.

The next day was cold and fine; winter was in the air—indeed the season was so far advanced that it was a miracle that we should have found in the already ravaged Bois a few domes of gilded green. When I awoke I saw, as from the window of the barracks at Doncières, a uniform, dead white mist which hung gaily in the sunlight, thick and soft as a web of spun sugar. Then the sun withdrew, and the mist thickened still further in the afternoon. Night fell early, and I washed and changed, but it was still too soon to start. I decided to send a carriage for Mme de Stermaria. I did not like to go for her in it myself, not wishing to force my company on her, but I gave the driver a note for her in which I asked whether she would mind my coming to call for her. Meanwhile I lay down on my bed, shut my eyes for a moment, then opened them again. Over the top of the curtains there was now only a thin strip of daylight which grew steadily dimmer. I recognised that vacant hour, the vast ante-room of pleasure, the dark, delicious emptiness of which I had learned at Balbec to know and to enjoy when, alone in my room as I was now, while everyone else was at dinner, I saw without regret the daylight fade from above my curtains, knowing that presently, after a night of polar brevity, it was to be resuscitated in a more dazzling brightness in the lighted rooms at Rivebelle. I sprang from my bed, tied my black tie, brushed my hair, final gestures of a belated tidying-up, carried out at Balbec with my mind not on myself but on the women whom I should see at Rivebelle, while I smiled at them in anticipation in the mirror that stood across a corner of my room, gestures