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By Root 1370 0

of which the manager had as yet read only “the first paraph,” in which M. Caillaux’s foreign policy was severely trounced. “I consider they’re quite right,” he said. “He is putting us too much under the thimble of Germany” (under the thumb). As the discussion of a subject of this sort with a hotel-keeper seemed to me boring, I ceased to listen. I thought of the visual images that had made me decide to return to Balbec. They were very different from those of the earlier time, for the vision in quest of which I had come was as dazzlingly clear as the former had been hazy; they were to prove no less disappointing. The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams. And besides, a fresh reality will perhaps make us forget, detest even, the desires on account of which we set out on our journey.

Those that had made me set out for Balbec sprang to some extent from my discovery that the Verdurins (whose invitations I had never taken up, and who would certainly be delighted to see me, if I went to call upon them in the country with apologies for never having been able to call upon them in Paris), knowing that several of the faithful would be spending the holidays on that part of the coast, and having, for that reason, taken for the whole season one of M. de Cambremer’s houses (La Raspelière), had invited Mme Putbus to stay with them. The evening on which I learned this (in Paris) I lost my head completely and sent our young footman to find out whether that lady would be taking her chambermaid to Balbec with her. It was eleven o’clock at night. The porter was a long time opening the front door, and for a wonder did not send my messenger packing, did not call the police, merely gave him a dressing-down, but with it the information that I desired. He said that the head lady’s-maid would indeed be accompanying her mistress, first of all to the waters in Germany, then to Biarritz, and at the end of the season to Mme Verdurin’s. From that moment my mind had been set at rest, content to have this iron in the fire. I had been able to dispense with those pursuits in the streets, wherein I lacked that letter of introduction to the beauties I encountered which I should have to the “Giorgione” in the fact of my having dined that very evening with her mistress at the Verdurins’. Besides, she might perhaps form a still better opinion of me when she learned that I knew not merely the middle-class tenants of La Raspelière but its owners, and above all Saint-Loup who, unable to commend me to the chambermaid from a distance (since she did not know him by name), had written an enthusiastic letter about me to the Cambremers. He believed that, quite apart from any service that they might be able to render me, Mme de Cambremer, the Legrandin daughter-in-law, would interest me by her conversation. “She is an intelligent woman,” he had assured me. “She won’t say anything definitive” (definitive having taken the place of sublime with Robert, who, every five or six years, would modify a few of his favourite expressions while preserving the more important intact), “but she’s a real personality, she has character and intuition, and throws out quite pertinent remarks. From time to time she’s maddening, she dashes off nonsense to ‘put on dog,’ which is all the more ridiculous as nobody could be less grand than the Cambremers, she’s not always ‘in the swim,’ but, taking her all round, she is one of the people it’s most bearable to talk to.”

No sooner had Robert’s letter of introduction reached them than the Cambremers, whether from a snobbishness that made them anxious to oblige Saint-Loup, even indirectly, or from gratitude for what he had done for one of their nephews at Doncières, or (most probably) from kindness of heart and traditions of hospitality, had written long letters insisting that I should stay with them, or, if I preferred