anew each evening to living in a different element from their day-time one, floated slowly to and fro in the rich liquid that after nightfall rose incessantly from the wells of the lamps to fill the rooms to the very brink of their outer walls of stone and glass, the displacement of their bodies sending oleaginous golden ripples through it. I proceeded on my way, and often, in the dark alley that ran past the cathedral, as long ago on the road to Méséglise, the force of my desire caught and held me; it seemed that a woman must be on the point of appearing, to satisfy it; if, in the darkness, I suddenly felt a skirt brush past me, the violence of the pleasure which I then felt made it impossible for me to believe that the contact was accidental and I attempted to seize in my arms a terrified stranger. This Gothic alley meant for me something so real that if I had been successful in picking up and enjoying a woman there, it would have been impossible for me not to believe that it was the ancient charm of the place that was bringing us together, even if she were no more than a common street-walker, stationed there every evening, whom the wintry night, the strange place, the darkness, the mediaeval atmosphere had invested with their mysterious glamour. I thought of what might be in store for me; to try to forget Mme de Guermantes seemed to me to be painful, but sensible, and for the first time possible, even perhaps easy. In the absolute quiet of this neighbourhood I could hear ahead of me shouted words and laughter which must come from tipsy revellers staggering home. I waited to see them; I stood peering in the direction from which I had heard the noise. But I was obliged to wait for some time, for the surrounding silence was so intense that it had allowed sounds that were still a long way off to penetrate it with the utmost clarity and force. Finally the revellers did appear; not, as I had supposed, in front of me, but far behind. Whether because the intersection of side streets and the interposition of buildings had, by reverberation, brought about this acoustic error, or because it is very difficult to locate a sound when its position is unknown to us, I had been as mistaken about direction as about distance.
The wind grew stronger. It was grainy and bristling with coming snow. I returned to the main street and jumped on board the little tram, from the platform of which an officer was acknowledging, without seeming to see them, the salutes of the uncouth soldiers who trudged past along the pavement, their faces daubed crimson by the cold, reminding me, in this little town which the sudden leap from autumn into early winter seemed to have transported further north, of the rubicund faces which Breughel gives to his merry, junketing, frostbound peasants.
And indeed at the hotel where I was to meet Saint-Loup and his friends and to which the festive season now beginning attracted a number of people from near and far, I found, as I hurried across the courtyard with its glimpses of glowing kitchens in which chickens were turning on spits, pigs were roasting, lobsters were being flung alive into what the landlord called the “everlasting fire,” an influx (worthy of some Numbering of the People at Bethlehem such as the Old Flemish masters used to paint) of new arrivals who assembled there in groups, asking the landlord or one of his staff (who, if they did not like the look of them, would recommend lodgings elsewhere in the town) for bed and board, while a scullion hurried past holding a struggling fowl by the neck. And similarly, in the big dining-room which I passed through on the first day before coming to the little room where my friend was waiting for me, it was of some Biblical repast portrayed with mediaeval naïvety and Flemish exaggeration that one was reminded by the quantity of fish, chickens, grouse, woodcock, pigeons, brought in dressed and garnished and piping hot by breathless waiters who slid along the polished floor for greater speed and set them down on the huge sideboard where they were carved at once, but where