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By Root 1621 0

indeed the lines of Racine that had come into my head at the Princesse de Guermantes’s while M. de Vaugoubert stood watching young embassy secretaries greet M. de Charlus, but other lines of Racine, taken this time not from Esther but from Athalie: for in the doorway of the hall, what in the seventeenth century was called the portico, “a flourishing race” of young pages clustered, especially at tea-time, like the young Israelites of Racine’s choruses. But I do not believe that a single one of them could have given even the vague answer that Joas finds to satisfy Athalie when she inquires of the infant Prince: “What is your office, then?” for they had none. At the most, if one had asked of any of them, like the old Queen: “But all these people shut within this place, what is it that they do?” he might have said: “I watch the solemn order of these ceremonies—and bear my part.” Now and then one of the young supers would approach some more important personage, then this young beauty would rejoin the chorus, and, unless it was the moment for a spell of contemplative relaxation, they would all interweave their useless, respectful, decorative, daily movements. For, except on their “day off,” “reared in seclusion from the world” and never crossing the threshold, they led the same ecclesiastical existence as the Levites in Athalie, and as I gazed at that “young and faithful troop” playing at the foot of the steps draped with sumptuous carpets, I felt inclined to ask myself whether I was entering the Grand Hotel at Balbec or the Temple of Solomon.

I went straight up to my room. My thoughts kept constantly turning to the last days of my grandmother’s illness, to her sufferings which I relived, intensifying them with that element, still harder to bear than even the sufferings of others, which is added to them by our cruel pity; when we believe we are merely re-creating the grief and pain of a beloved person, our pity exaggerates them; but perhaps it is our pity that speaks true, more than the sufferers’ own consciousness of their pain, they being blind to that tragedy of their existence which pity sees and deplores. But my pity would have transcended my grandmother’s sufferings in a new surge had I known then what I did not know until long afterwards, that on the eve of her death, in a moment of consciousness and after making sure that I was not in the room, she had taken Mamma’s hand, and, after pressing her fevered lips to it, had said: “Good-bye, my child, good-bye for ever.” And this may also perhaps have been the memory upon which my mother never ceased to gaze so fixedly. Then sweeter memories returned to me. She was my grandmother and I was her grandson. Her facial expressions seemed written in a language intended for me alone; she was everything in my life, other people existed merely in relation to her, to the opinion she would express to me about them. But no, our relations were too fleeting to have been anything but accidental. She no longer knew me, I should never see her again. We had not been created solely for one another; she was a stranger to me. This stranger was before my eyes at the moment in the photograph taken of her by Saint-Loup. Mamma, who had met Albertine, had insisted upon my seeing her because of the nice things she had said about my grandmother and myself. I had accordingly made an appointment with her. I told the manager that she was coming, and asked him to put her in the drawing-room to wait for me. He told me that he had known her for years, herself and her friends, long before they had attained “the age of purity,” but that he was annoyed with them because of certain things they had said about the hotel. “They can’t be very ‘illegitimate’ if they talk like that. Unless people have been slandering them.” I had no difficulty in guessing that “purity” here meant “puberty.” “Illegitimate” puzzled me more. Was it perhaps a confusion with “illiterate,” which in that case was a further confusion with “literate”? As I waited until it was time to go down and meet Albertine, I kept my eyes fixed, as on a drawing