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By Root 1536 0

when I heard Albertine say: “In any case, whether he’s devoted or not, I sincerely hope I shall never see him again, since he’s made us quarrel. We must never quarrel again. It isn’t nice.” Since she had seemed to desire Saint-Loup, I felt more or less cured for the time being of the idea that she cared for women, assuming that the two things were irreconcilable. And, looking at Albertine’s mackintosh, in which she seemed to have become another person, the tireless vagrant of rainy days, and which, close-fitting, malleable and grey, seemed at that moment not so much intended to protect her clothes from the rain as to have been soaked by it and to be clinging to her body as though to take the imprint of her form for a sculptor, I tore off that tunic which jealously enwrapped a longed-for breast and, drawing Albertine towards me:

“But won’t you, indolent traveller, rest your head

And dream your dreams upon my shoulder?”

I said, taking her head in my hands, and showing her the wide meadows, flooded and silent, which extended in the gathering dusk to a horizon closed by the parallel chains of distant blue hills.

Two days later, on the famous Wednesday, in that same little train which I had again taken at Balbec to go and dine at La Raspelière, I was extremely anxious not to miss Cottard at Graincourt-Saint-Vast, where a second telephone message from Mme Verdurin had told me that I should find him. He was to join my train and would tell me where we had to get out to pick up the carriages that would be sent from La Raspelière to the station. And so, as the little train stopped for only a moment at Graincourt, the first station after Doncières, I had posted myself in readiness at the open window for fear of not seeing Cottard or of his not seeing me. Vain fears! I had not realised to what an extent the little clan had moulded all its regular members after the same type, so that, as they stood waiting on the platform, being moreover in full evening dress, they were immediately recognisable by a certain air of assurance, elegance and familiarity, by a look in their eyes which seemed to sweep across the serried ranks of the common herd as across an empty space in which there was nothing to arrest their attention, watching for the arrival of some fellow-member who had taken the train at an earlier station, and sparkling in anticipation of the talk that was to come. This sign of election, with which the habit of dining together had marked the members of the little group, was not all that distinguished them when they were massed together in full strength, forming a more brilliant patch in the midst of the troop of passengers—what Brichot called the pecus, the herd—upon whose drab faces could be discerned no notion relating to the name Verdurin, no hope of ever dining at La Raspelière. To be sure, these common travellers would have been less interested than myself—notwithstanding the fame that several of the faithful had achieved—had anyone quoted in their hearing the names of these men whom I was astonished to see continuing to dine out when many of them had already been doing so, according to the stories that I had heard, before my birth, at a period at once so distant and so vague that I was inclined to exaggerate its remoteness. The contrast between the continuance not only of their existence, but of the fullness of their powers, and the obliteration of so many friends whom I had already seen vanish here or there, gave me the same feeling that we experience when in the stop-press column of the newspapers we read the very announcement that we least expected, for instance that of an untimely death, which seems to us fortuitous because the causes that have led up to it have remained outside our knowledge. This is the feeling that death does not descend uniformly upon all men, but that a more advanced wave of its tragic tide carries off a life situated at the same level as others which the waves that follow will long continue to spare. We shall see later on that the diversity of the forms of death that circulate invisibly