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M. de Charlus bowed before the impossible and made a show of jocularity. “I can understand their recoiling from the idea of a new brougham. It might have swept them clean.”

At last we were warned that the train was about to start, and Saint-Loup left us. But this was the only day on which by getting into our carriage he unwittingly caused me pain, when I momentarily thought of leaving him with Albertine in order to go with Bloch. On every other occasion his presence did not torment me. For of her own accord Albertine, to spare me any uneasiness, would on some pretext or other place herself in such a position that she could not even unintentionally brush against Robert, almost too far away even to shake hands with him; turning her eyes away from him, she would plunge, as soon as he appeared, into ostentatious and almost affected conversation with one of the other passengers, continuing this make-believe until Saint-Loup had gone. So that the visits which he paid us at Doncières, causing me no pain, no worry even, were in no way discordant from the rest, all of which I found pleasing because they brought me so to speak the homage and the hospitality of this land. Already, as the summer drew to a close, on our journeys from Balbec to Douville, when I saw in the distance the little resort of Saint-Pierre-des-Ifs where, for a moment in the evening, the crest of the cliffs glittered pink like the snow on a mountain at sunset, it no longer recalled to my mind—let alone the melancholy which its strange, sudden emergence had aroused in me on the first evening, when it filled me with such a longing to take the train back to Paris instead of going on to Balbec—the spectacle that in the morning, Elstir had told me, might be enjoyed from there, at the hour before sunrise, when all the colours of the rainbow are refracted from the rocks, and when he had so often wakened the little boy who had served him as model one year, to paint him, nude, upon the sands. The name Saint-Pierre-desIfs announced to me merely that there would presently appear a strange, witty, painted fifty-year-old with whom I should be able to talk about Chateaubriand and Balzac. And now, in the mists of evening, behind that cliff of Incarville which had filled my mind with so many dreams in the past, what I saw, as though its old sandstone wall had become transparent, was the comfortable house of an uncle of M. de Cambremer in which I knew that I should always find a warm welcome if I did not wish to dine at La Raspelière or return to Balbec. So that it was not merely the place-names of this district that had lost their initial mystery, but the places themselves. The names, already half-stripped of a mystery which etymology had replaced by reasoning, had now come down a stage further still. On our homeward journeys, at Hermenonville, at Incarville, at Harambouville, as the train came to a standstill, we could make out shadowy forms which we did not at first identify and which Brichot, who could see nothing at all, might perhaps have mistaken in the darkness for the ghosts of Herimund, Wiscar and Herimbald. But they came up to our carriage. It was merely M. de Cambremer, now completely estranged from the Verdurins, who had come to see off his own guests and who, on behalf of his wife and his mother, came to ask me whether I would not let him “snatch me away” to spend a few days at Féterne where I should be entertained successively by a lady of great musical talent who would sing me the whole of Gluck, and a famous chess-player with whom I could have some splendid games, which would not interfere with the fishing expeditions and yachting trips in the bay, or even with the Verdurin dinner-parties, for which the Marquis gave me his word of honour that he would “lend” me, sending me there and fetching me back again, for my greater convenience and also to make sure of my returning. “But I cannot believe that it’s good for you to go so high up. I know my sister could never stand it. She would come back in a fine state! She’s not