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By Root 1782 0

in turning over the keepsakes that his memory has collected is keenest in those whom the tyranny of physical illness and the daily hope of its cure prevent, on the one hand, from going out to seek in nature scenes that resemble those memories and, on the other hand, leave so convinced that they will shortly be able to do so that they can remain gazing at them in a state of desire and appetite and not regard them merely as memories or pictures. But, even if they could never have been more than this for me, even if, in recalling them, I could see them as pictures only, they none the less suddenly re-created out of my present self, the whole of that self, by virtue of an identical sensation, the child or the youth who had first seen them. There had been not merely a change in the weather outside, or, inside the room, a change of smells; there had been in myself an alteration in age, the substitution of another person. The scent, in the frosty air, of the twigs of brushwood was like a fragment of the past, an invisible ice-floe detached from some bygone winter advancing into my room, often, moreover, striated with this or that perfume or gleam of light, as though with different years in which I found myself once more submerged, overwhelmed, even before I had identified them, by the exhilaration of hopes long since abandoned. The sun’s rays fell upon my bed and passed through the transparent shell of my attenuated body, warmed me, made me glow like crystal. Then, like a famished convalescent already battening upon all the dishes that are still forbidden him, I wondered whether marriage with Albertine might not spoil my life, not only by making me assume the too arduous task of devoting myself to another person, but by forcing me to live apart from myself because of her continual presence and depriving me for ever of the joys of solitude.

And not of these alone. Even if one asks of the day nothing but desires, there are some—those that are excited not by things but by people—whose character it is to be personal and particular. So that if, on rising from my bed, I went to the window and drew the curtain aside for a moment, it was not merely, as a pianist for a moment turns back the lid of his instrument, to ascertain whether, on the balcony and in the street, the sunlight was tuned to exactly the same pitch as in my memory, but also to catch a glimpse of some laundress carrying her linen-basket, a baker-woman in a blue apron, a dairymaid with a tucker and white linen sleeves, carrying the yoke from which her milk-churns are suspended, some haughty fair-haired girl escorted by her governess—an image, in short, which differences of outline, perhaps quantitatively insignificant, were enough to make as different from any other as, in a phrase of music, the difference between two notes, an image but for the vision of which I should have dispossessed my day of the goals which it might have to offer to my desires of happiness. But if the access of joy brought me by the spectacle of women whom it was impossible to imagine a priori made the street, the town, the world, more desirable, more deserving of exploration, it set me longing, for that very reason, to recover my health, to go out of doors and, without Albertine, to be a free man. How often, at the moment when the unknown woman who was to haunt my dreams passed beneath the window, sometimes on foot, sometimes at full speed in a motor-car, did I not suffer from the fact that my body could not follow my gaze which kept pace with her, and falling upon her as though shot from the embrasure of my window by an arquebus, arrest the flight of the face that held out for me the offer of a happiness which, thus cloistered, I should never know!

Of Albertine, on the other hand, I had nothing more to learn. Every day she seemed to me less pretty. Only the desire that she aroused in others, when, on learning of it, I began to suffer again and wanted to challenge their possession of her, raised her in my eyes to a lofty pinnacle. She was capable of causing me pain, but no longer any joy. Pain alone