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By Root 1366 0

in which I saw my life thus spread over three planes; and besides, when one becomes for an instant one’s former self, that is to say different from what one has been for some time past, one’s sensibility, being no longer dulled by habit, receives from the slightest stimulus vivid impressions which make everything that has preceded them fade into insignificance, impressions to which, because of their intensity, we attach ourselves with the momentary enthusiasm of a drunkard. It was already dark when we got into the omnibus or carriage which was to take us to the station to catch the little train. And in the hall the judge would say to us: “Ah! so you’re off to La Raspelière! Good God, she has a nerve, your Mme Verdurin, making you travel an hour by train in the dark, simply to dine with her. And then having to set out again at ten o’clock at night with a wind blowing like the very devil. It’s easy to see that you have nothing better to do,” he added, rubbing his hands together. No doubt he spoke thus from annoyance at not having been invited, and also from the self-satisfaction felt by “busy” men—however idiotic their business—at “not having time” to do what you are doing.

It is of course justifiable for the man who draws up reports, adds up figures, answers business letters, follows the movements of the stock exchange, to feel an agreeable sense of superiority when he says to you with a sneer: “It’s all very well for you; you having nothing better to do.” But he would be no less contemptuous, would be even more so (for dining out is a thing that the busy man does also), were your recreation writing Hamlet or merely reading it. Wherein busy men show a lack of forethought. For the disinterested culture which seems to them a comic pastime of idle people when they find them engaged in it is, they ought to reflect, the same as that which, in their own profession, brings to the fore men who may not be better judges or administrators than themselves but before whose rapid advancement they bow their heads, saying: “It appears he’s extremely well-read, a most distinguished individual.” But above all the judge was oblivious of the fact that what pleased me about these dinners at La Raspelière was that, as he himself said quite rightly, though as a criticism, they “represented a real journey,” a journey whose charm appeared to me all the more intense in that it was not an end in itself and one did not look to find pleasure in it—this being reserved for the gathering for which we were bound and which could not fail to be greatly modified by all the atmosphere that surrounded it. Night would already have fallen now when I exchanged the warmth of the hotel—the hotel that had become my home—for the railway carriage into which I climbed with Albertine, in which a glimmer of lamplight on the window showed, at certain halts of the wheezy little train, that we had arrived at a station. So that there should be no risk of Cottard’s missing us, and not having heard the name of the station being called, I would open the door, but what burst into the carriage was not any of the faithful, but the wind, the rain and the cold. In the darkness I could make out fields and hear the sea; we were in the open country. Before we joined the little nucleus, Albertine would examine herself in a little mirror, extracted from a gold vanity case which she carried about with her. The fact was that on our first visit, Mme Verdurin having taken her upstairs to her dressing-room so that she might tidy up before dinner, I had felt, amid the profound calm in which I had been living for some time, a slight stir of uneasiness and jealousy at being obliged to part from Albertine at the foot of the stairs, and had become so anxious while I was alone in the drawing-room among the little clan, wondering what she could be doing, that I had telegraphed the next day, after finding out from M. de Charlus what the correct thing was at the moment, to order from Cartier’s a vanity case which was the joy of Albertine’s life and also of mine. It was for me a guarantee of peace of