than I had been in relation to Gilberte. I had merely had to take the trouble to write out my telegram, and thereafter the clerk had only to take it from me, and the swiftest channels of electric communication to transmit it, and the whole length and breadth of France and the Mediterranean, together with the whole of Robert’s roistering life applied to the identification of the person I had just met, would be placed at the service of the romance which I had just sketched out and to which I need no longer give a thought, for they would undertake to bring it to a conclusion one way or the other before twenty-four hours had passed. Whereas in the old days, brought home by Françoise from the Champs-Elysées, brooding alone in the house over my impotent desires, unable to make use of the practical devices of civilisation, I loved like a savage, or indeed, for I was not even free to move about, like a flower. From this moment onwards I was in a continual fever; a request from my father to go away with him for a couple of days, which would have obliged me to forgo my visit to the Duchess, filled me with such rage and despair that my mother intervened and persuaded my father to allow me to remain in Paris. But for several hours my fury refused to be allayed, while my desire for Mlle d’Eporcheville was increased a hundredfold by the obstacle that had been placed between us, by the fear which I had felt for a moment that those hours of my visit to Mme de Guermantes, at the prospect of which I smiled in constant anticipation, as at an assured blessing of which nothing could deprive me, might not occur. Certain philosophers assert that the external world does not exist, and that it is within ourselves that we develop our lives. However that may be, love, even in its humblest beginnings, is a striking example of how little reality means to us. Had I been obliged to draw from memory a portrait of Mlle d’Eporcheville, to furnish a description of her, or even to recognise her in the street, I should have found it impossible. I had glimpsed her in profile, on the move, and she had struck me as being simple, pretty, tall and fair; I could not have said more. But all the reflexes of desire, of anxiety, of the mortal blow struck by the fear of not seeing her if my father took me away, all these things, associated with an image of which on the whole I knew nothing, and as to which it was enough that I knew it to be agreeable, already constituted a state of love. At last, on the following morning, after a night of happy sleeplessness I received Saint-Loup’s telegram: “De l’Orgeville, de particle, orge barley, like rye, ville, like town, small, dark, plump, is at present in Switzerland.” It was not the girl.
A moment later my mother came into my room with the mail, put it down carelessly on my bed as though she were thinking of something else, and withdrew at once to leave me on my own. And I, who was familiar with my dear Mamma’s little subterfuges and knew that one could always read the truth in her face without fear of being mistaken, if one took as a key to the cipher her desire to give pleasure to others, I smiled and thought: “There must be something interesting for me in the post, and Mamma assumed that indifferent, absent-minded air so that my surprise might be complete and so as not to be like the people who take away half your pleasure by telling you of it beforehand. And she didn’t stay with me because she was afraid that out of pride I might conceal my pleasure and so feel it less keenly.” Meanwhile, on reaching the door, my mother had run into Françoise who was coming into the room, and forcing her to turn back, had dragged her out with her, somewhat alarmed, offended and surprised; for Françoise considered that her duties conferred upon her the privilege of entering my room at any hour of the day and of remaining there if she chose. But already, upon her features, astonishment and anger had vanished beneath a dark and sticky smile of transcendent pity and philosophical irony, a viscous liquid secreted, in order to heal her wound,