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By Root 1901 0

from friend to friend, from master to disciple, from lover to mistress, that ineffable something which differentiates qualitatively what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in which he can communicate with others only by limiting himself to externals, common to all and of no interest—are brought out by art, the art of a Vinteuil like that of an Elstir, which exteriorises in the colours of the spectrum the intimate composition of those worlds which we call individuals and which, but for art, we should never know? A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.

The andante had just ended on a phrase filled with a tenderness to which I had entirely surrendered. There followed, before the next movement, a short interval during which the performers laid down their instruments and the audience exchanged impressions. A duke, in order to show that he knew what he was talking about, declared: “It’s a difficult thing to play well.” Other more agreeable people chatted for a moment with me. But what were their words, which like every human and external word left me so indifferent, compared with the heavenly phrase of music with which I had just been communing? I was truly like an angel who, fallen from the inebriating bliss of paradise, subsides into the most humdrum reality. And, just as certain creatures are the last surviving testimony to a form of life which nature has discarded, I wondered whether music might not be the unique example of what might have been—if the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas had not intervened—the means of communication between souls. It is like a possibility that has come to nothing; humanity has developed along other lines, those of spoken and written language. But this return to the unanalysed was so intoxicating that, on emerging from that paradise, contact with more or less intelligent people seemed to me of an extraordinary insignificance. I had been able, while the music was playing, to remember people, to associate them with it; or rather I had associated with the music scarcely more than the memory of one person only, which was Albertine. And the phrase that ended the andante seemed to me so sublime that I told myself that it was a pity that Albertine did not know, and if she had known had not understood, what an honour it was to be associated with something so great as this which reunited us, and the heartbreaking voice of which she seemed to have assumed. But once the music was interrupted, the people who were there seemed too insipid. Refreshments were handed round. M. de Charlus hailed a footman now and then with: “How are you? Did you get my note? Can you come?” No doubt there was in these salutations the freedom of the great nobleman who thinks he is flattering his interlocutor and is more one of the people than the bourgeois, but there was also the cunning of the delinquent who imagines that anything one flaunts is on that account considered innocent. And he added, in the Guermantes tone of Mme de Villeparisis: “He’s a good boy, a friendly soul, I often employ him at home.” But his adroitness turned against the Baron, for people thought his intimate courtesies and correspondence with footmen extraordinary. The footmen themselves were not so much flattered as embarrassed in the presence of their comrades.

Meanwhile the septet, which had begun again, was moving towards its close; again and again one phrase or another