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By Root 1438 0

that moment with a message for her; he too received a word, a smile and a tip, all this interspersed with simple, encouraging remarks intended to prove to them that she was only one of themselves. As Aimé, the wine waiter, the lift-boy and the rest felt that it would be impolite not to grin from ear to ear at a person who smiled at them, she was presently surrounded by a cluster of servants with whom she chatted benevolently; such ways being unfamiliar in smart hotels, the people who passed by, not knowing who she was, thought they were seeing a regular visitor to Balbec who because of her mean extraction or for professional reasons (she was perhaps the wife of an agent for champagne) was less different from the domestics than the really smart visitors. As for me, I thought of the palace at Parma, of the advice, partly religious, partly political, given to this Princess, who behaved towards the lower orders as though she had been obliged to conciliate them in order to reign over them one day; or indeed, as though she were already reigning.

I went upstairs to my room, but I was not alone there. I could hear someone mellifluously playing Schumann. No doubt it happens at times that people, even those whom we love best, become permeated with the gloom or irritation that emanates from us. There is however an inanimate object which is capable of a power of exasperation to which no human being will ever attain: to wit, a piano.

Albertine had made me take a note of the dates on which she would be going away for a few days to visit various friends, and had made me write down their addresses as well, in case I should want her on one of those evenings, for none of them lived very far away. This meant that in seeking her out, from one girlfriend to another, I found her more and more entwined in ropes of flowers. I must confess that many of her friends—I was not yet in love with her—gave me, at one watering-place or another, moments of pleasure. These obliging young playmates did not seem to me to be very many. But recently I thought of them again, and their names came back to me. I counted that, in that one season, a dozen conferred on me their ephemeral favours. Another name came back to me later, which made thirteen. I then had a sort of childish fear of settling on that number. Alas, I realised that I had forgotten the first, Albertine who was no more and who made the fourteenth.

To resume the thread of my narrative, I had written down the names and addresses of the girls with whom I should find her on the days when she was not to be at Incarville, but had decided that on those days I would rather take the opportunity to call on Mme Verdurin. In any case, our desires for different women vary in intensity. One evening we cannot bear to be deprived of one who, after that, for the next month or two, will trouble us scarcely at all. And then there are the laws of alternation—which it is not the place to study here—whereby, after an over-exertion of the flesh, the woman whose image haunts our momentary senility is one to whom we would barely give more than a kiss on the forehead. As for Albertine, I saw her seldom, and only on the very infrequent evenings when I felt that I could not do without her. If such a desire seized me when she was too far from Balbec for Françoise to be able to go and fetch her, I used to send the lift-boy to Epreville, to La Sogne, to Saint-Frichoux, asking him to finish his work a little earlier than usual. He would come into my room, but would leave the door open, for although he was conscientious at his “job” which was pretty hard, consisting in endless cleanings from five o’clock in the morning, he could never bring himself to make the effort to shut a door, and, if one pointed out to him that it was open, would turn back and, summoning up all his strength, give it a gentle push. With the democratic pride that marked him, a pride to which, in the liberal avocations, the members of a profession that is at all numerous never attain, barristers, doctors and men of letters speaking simply of a “brother” barrister,