world in which at certain moments there rises from the depths of the barely translucent element the avowal of a secret which we shall not understand. But as a rule, when Albertine was asleep, she seemed to have recaptured her innocence. In the attitude which I had imposed upon her, but which in her sleep she had speedily made her own, she seemed to trust herself to me. Her face had lost any expression of cunning or vulgarity, and between herself and me, towards whom she raised her arm, on whom she rested her hand, there seemed to be an absolute surrender, an indissoluble attachment. Her sleep moreover did not separate her from me and allowed her to retain the consciousness of our affection; its effect was rather to abolish everything else; I would kiss her, tell her that I was going to take a turn outside, and she would half-open her eyes and say to me with a look of surprise—for the hour was indeed late—“But where are you off to, my darling—” (calling me by my Christian name), and at once fall asleep again. Her sleep was no more than a sort of blotting out of the rest of her life, an even silence over which from time to time familiar words of tenderness would pass in their flight. By putting these words together, one might have arrived at the unalloyed conversation, the secret intimacy of a pure love. This calm slumber delighted me, as a mother, reckoning it a virtue, is delighted by her child’s sound sleep. And her sleep was indeed that of a child. Her awakening also, so natural and so loving, before she even knew where she was, that I sometimes asked myself with dread whether she had been in the habit, before coming to live with me, of not sleeping alone but of finding, when she opened her eyes, someone lying by her side. But her childlike grace was more striking. Like a mother again, I marvelled that she should always awake in such a good humour. After a few moments she would recover consciousness, would utter charming words, unconnected with one another, mere twitterings. By a sort of reversal of roles, her throat, which as a rule one seldom remarked, now almost startlingly beautiful, had acquired the immense importance which her eyes, by being closed in sleep, had lost, her eyes, my regular interlocutors to which I could no longer address myself after the lids had closed over them. Just as the closed lids impart an innocent, grave beauty to the face by suppressing all that the eyes express only too plainly, there was in the words, not devoid of meaning but interrupted by moments of silence, which Albertine uttered as she awoke, a pure beauty of a kind that is not constantly tarnished, as is conversation, by habits of speech, stale repetitions, traces of familiar defects. Moreover, when I had decided to wake Albertine, I would have been able to do so without fear, knowing that her awakening would bear no relation to the evening that we had passed together, but would emerge from her sleep as morning emerges from night. As soon as she had begun to open her eyes with a smile, she would have offered me her lips, and before she had even said a word, I would have savoured their freshness, as soothing as that of a garden still silent before the break of day.
The day after the evening when Albertine had told me that she might perhaps, then that she might not, be going to see the Verdurins, I awoke early, and, while I was still half asleep, my joy informed me that it was a spring day interpolated in the middle of the winter. Outside, popular themes skilfully transposed for various instruments, from the horn of the china repairer, or the trumpet of the chair mender, to the flute of the goatherd who seemed, on a fine morning, to be a Sicilian drover, were lightly orchestrating the matutinal air with an “Overture for a Public Holiday.” Our hearing, that delightful sense, brings us the company of the street, of which it traces every line for us, sketches all the figures that pass along it, showing us their colours. The iron shutters of the baker’s shop and of the dairy, which had been lowered last night over every possibility of