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By Root 1502 0

mercilessly from the outside the actions of a snob or supposed snob, but never place themselves inside his skin, at the moment when a whole social springtime is bursting into blossom in the imagination. I myself, when I sought to analyse the great pleasure that I found in going to Mme de Montmorency’s, was somewhat taken aback. She occupied, in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, an old mansion ramifying into pavilions which were separated by small gardens. In the outer hall a statuette, said to be by Falconet, represented a spring which did indeed exude a perpetual moisture. A little further on the concierge, her eyes always red, either from grief or neurasthenia, a headache or a cold in the head, never answered your inquiry, waved her arm vaguely to indicate that the Duchess was at home, and let a drop or two trickle from her eyelids into a bowl filled with forget-me-nots. The pleasure that I felt on seeing the statuette, because it reminded me of a “little gardener” in plaster that stood in one of the Combray gardens, was nothing to that which was given me by the great staircase, damp and resonant, full of echoes, like the stairs in certain old-fashioned bathing establishments, the vases filled with cinerarias—blue against blue—in the ante-room, and most of all the tinkle of the bell, which was exactly that of the bell in Eulalie’s room. This tinkle brought my enthusiasm to its peak, but seemed to me too humble a matter for me to be able to explain it to Mme de Montmorency, with the result that she invariably saw me in a state of rapture of which she never guessed the cause.

THE INTERMITTENCIES OF THE HEART

My second arrival at Balbec was very different from the first. The manager had come in person to meet me at Pont-à-Couleuvre, reiterating how greatly he valued his titled patrons, which made me afraid that he had ennobled me until I realised that, in the obscurity of his grammatical memory, titré meant simply attitré, or accredited. In fact, the more new languages he learned the worse he spoke the others. He informed me that he had placed me at the very top of the hotel. “I hope,” he said, “that you will not interpolate this as a want of discourtesy. I was worried about giving you a room of which you are unworthy, but I did it in connexion with the noise, because in that room you will not have anyone above your head to disturb your trepan” (tympan). “And do not worry, I shall have the windows closed, so that they don’t bang. Upon that point, I am intolerable” (this last word expressing not his own thought, which was that he would always be found inexorable in that respect, but, quite possibly, the thoughts of his underlings). The rooms were, as it proved, those we had had before. They were no lower down, but I had risen in the manager’s esteem. I could light a fire if I liked (for, on the doctors’ orders, I had left Paris at Easter), but he was afraid there might be “fixtures”in the ceiling. “See that you always wait before alighting a fire until the preceding one is extenuated” (extinguished). “The important thing is to take care not to avoid setting fire to the chimney, especially as, to cheer things up a bit, I have put an old china pottage on the mantelpiece which might become damaged.”

He informed me with great sorrow of the death of the president of the Cherbourg bar: “He was an old fogy,” he said (probably meaning “foxy”) and gave me to understand that his end had been hastened by the dissertations, otherwise the dissipations, of his life. “For some time past I noticed that after dinner he would take a catnip in the reading-room” (catnap, presumably). “The last times, he was so changed that if you hadn’t known who it was, to look at him, he was barely recognisant” (presumably recognisable).

A happy compensation: the senior judge from Caen had just received his “carton” (cordon) as Commander of the Legion of Honour. “Surely enough, he has capacities, but seems they gave him it principally because of his general impotence.” There was a mention of this decoration, as it happened, in the previous day’s Echo de Paris,