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By Root 1655 0

scrutinises their intrinsic merit like an archaeologist? When he paints, haven’t a hospital, a school, a poster on a hoarding the same value as a matchless cathedral which stands by their side in a single indivisible image? Remember how the façade was baked by the sun, how that carved frieze of saints at Marcouville floated on the sea of light. What does it matter that a building is new, if it appears old, or even if it doesn’t? All the poetry that the old quarters contain has been squeezed out to the last drop, but if you look at some of the houses that have been built lately for well-to-do tradesmen in the new districts, where the stone is all freshly cut and still too white, don’t they seem to rend the torrid midday air of July, at the hour when the shopkeepers go home to lunch in the suburbs, with a cry as sharp and acidulous as the smell of the cherries waiting for the meal to begin in the darkened dining-room, where the prismatic glass knife-rests throw off a multicoloured light as beautiful as the windows of Chartres?”

“How wonderful you are! If I ever do become clever, it will be entirely owing to you.”

“Why, on a fine day, tear your eyes away from the Trocadéro, whose giraffe-neck towers remind one of the Charter-house of Pavia?”

“It reminded me also, standing up like that on its knoll, of a Mantegna that you have, I think it’s of St Sebastian, where in the background there’s a terraced city where you’d swear you’d find the Trocadéro.”

“There, you see! But how did you come across the Mantegna reproduction? You’re absolutely staggering.”

We had now reached a more plebeian neighbourhood, and the installation of an ancillary Venus behind each counter made it as it were a suburban altar at the foot of which I would gladly have spent the rest of my life. As one does on the eve of a premature death, I drew up a mental list of the pleasures of which I was deprived by the fact that Albertine had put a full stop to my freedom. At Passy it was in the middle of the street itself, so crowded were the footways, that some girls, their arms encircling one another’s waists, enthralled me with their smiles. I had not time to distinguish them clearly, but it is unlikely that I was overrating their charms; in any crowd, after all, in any crowd of young people, it is not unusual to come upon the effigy of a noble profile. So that these assembled masses on public holidays are as precious to the voluptuary as is to the archaeologist the disordered jumble of a site whose excavation will bring ancient medals to light. We arrived at the Bois. I reflected that, if Albertine had not come out with me, I might at this moment, in the enclosure of the Champs-Elysées, have been hearing the Wagnerian storm set all the tackle of the orchestra groaning, draw into its frenzy, like a light spindrift, the tune of the shepherd’s pipe which I had just been playing to myself, set it flying, mould it, distort it, divide it, sweep it away in an ever-increasing whirlwind. I was determined, at any rate, that our drive should be short and that we should return home early, for, without having mentioned it to Albertine, I had decided to go that evening to the Verdurins’. They had recently sent me an invitation which I had flung into the waste-paper basket with all the rest. But I had changed my mind as far as this evening was concerned, for I meant to try to find out who Albertine might have been hoping to meet there in the afternoon. To tell the truth, I had reached that stage in my relations with Albertine when, if everything remains the same, if things go on normally, a woman no longer serves any purpose for one except as a transitional stage before another woman. She still retains a corner in one’s heart, but a very small corner; one is impatient to go out every evening in search of unknown women, especially unknown women who are known to her and can tell one about her life. Herself, after all, we have possessed, and exhausted everything that she has consented to yield to us of herself. Her life is still herself, but precisely that part of her which