Du côté de chez Swann

For a long time, he went to bed early. And in that half-sleep where the candle has just gone out, where the book slips from one's hands, where one becomes oneself what the work was about—a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francis I and Charles V—a child gropes in the darkness of successive bedrooms for the contours of his own self. The body remembers before the mind: the memory of ribs, knees, and shoulders presents, one by one, the Bohemian glass nightlight suspended from the ceiling by little chains, the Siena marble fireplace, the bedroom at his grandparents' house in Combray, in distant days that turn and blur in the darkness like the positions of a horse on a kinetoscope. And it is Combray that returns first, Combray which is still but a luminous panel cut out of the night: the little sitting room, the dining room, the beginning of the dark lane by which M. Swann will arrive, the cruel staircase to climb, and at the very top, the bedroom where the child waits, his heart pounding, for his mother's kiss.

For everything begins with this kiss. Every evening, when there are no visitors, Maman comes upstairs to kiss the little boy in his bed, and this goodnight, so brief, so fragile, is the only viaticum against the night. But on the evenings when M. Swann comes to dinner—Swann the neighbor, the stockbroker's son, whose family is unaware that he is one of the most pampered men in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, a friend of the Prince of Wales, a member of the Jockey Club, received by duchesses whose very existence is unsuspected on the Quai d'Orléans—on those evenings, Maman does not come up. The child dines before everyone else, steals a furtive kiss in the dining room, and goes back up to his bedroom, where the smell of the staircase's varnish fixes his sorrow in a way even more cruel than thought ever could, because in this olfactory form, the intellect can no longer take its share of it. One evening, he dares to write a note to his mother, entrusts it to Françoise—the cook with her imperious and subtle code, who hesitates before the envelope as before an ancient article of law—and waits, waits, until Françoise returns with this terrible response: there is no answer. Then the child resolves not to try to sleep anymore, to intercept his mother in the hallway when she comes up to bed. He opens the window soundlessly; the moonlight has thinned and expanded the landscape, the most distant noises can be heard with the exquisite finish of muted motifs, and his heart no longer beats with anxiety, but with terror and joy. Maman finally appears in the stairwell, candle in hand; he rushes forward; she looks at him angrily, without a word—and then his father suddenly appears, tall in his white nightshirt beneath the violet and pink cashmere, and instead of the expected scene, instead of the threatened boarding school, he simply says: go with him then, stay in his room, I don't need anything. The child has won, and this victory is a defeat: he feels he has just traced the first wrinkle in his mother's soul, brought forth a first white hair. Maman sits near the bed, brings out the books his grandmother intended for his name day—four rustic novels by George Sand, whose reddish cover and incomprehensible title of François le Champi hold a mysterious allure—and she reads, her voice breathing into this very ordinary prose a sort of continuous, sentimental life, while the child weeps without sin, emancipated at last from his tears.

But of Combray thus resurrected by voluntary memory, there remains only a narrow stage set, the theater of bedtime, seven o'clock in the evening forever. All the rest is dead—dead forever, perhaps. Until the day when, on a winter afternoon, his mother proposes a little tea, and he raises to his lips a spoonful of the brew in which a piece of madeleine has softened. At the very instant the sip mixed with cake crumbs touches his palate, a delicious pleasure invades him, isolated, without known cause, rendering the vicissitudes of life indifferent, its disasters harmless, its brevity illusory. Something shifts deep within him, trying to rise, something he had unanchored from a great depth. Ten times he must begin again, lean toward this memory that rises and falls back. And suddenly it appears: this taste is that of the piece of madeleine which, on Sunday mornings in Combray, when he went to say good morning in her bedroom, Aunt Léonie would offer him after dipping it in her lime-blossom tea. Then the old gray house on the street comes like a theatrical set to attach itself to the little pavilion facing the garden, and with the house the entire town, the streets, the country roads, the flowers in M. Swann's park, the water lilies of the Vivonne, the good people of the village and the church—all of Combray and its surroundings, town and gardens alike, sprung from a cup of tea.

And Combray is reborn in its entire expanse. Aunt Léonie, who since her husband's death no longer leaves her bed, reigns over two adjoining rooms saturated with homely and devout odors, surveils the Rue Saint-Jacques like Persian princes their daily chronicles, and dips madeleines in her lime-blossom tea while monologuing endlessly. Françoise, her servant, cooks meat jelly with the ferocity of a Michelangelo and weeps over the misfortunes of others in books while tormenting the kitchen maid. The curé explains the etymologies of Combray. Legrandin, the engineer and man of letters, makes grand lyrical gestures before sunsets while hiding his aristocratic acquaintances. Eulalie brings the parish news. And above it all, the church of Saint-Hilaire sums up the town, represents it, speaks of it to the distance, with its steeple that changes shape depending on whether it is seen from the railway, the Square, or the banks of the Vivonne.

Two directions govern their walks: the Méséglise way, also called Swann's way because one passes his estate to get there, and the Guermantes way, so far away that one never quite reaches it. On the Méséglise way, the pink and white hawthorns in the hedge of Swann's park exalt the child to the point of tears; it is there that he sees for the first time, among the flowers, a red-haired little girl with dark eyes—Gilberte Swann—who makes a gesture to him whose meaning he cannot decipher; it is also there that, through the window at Montjouvain, he surprises Vinteuil's daughter and her friend in a scene of profanation and desire that chills him to the bone. On the Guermantes way, it is the Vivonne flowing among its water lilies, it is the steeples of Martinville turning in the setting sun, whose impression he manages, for the first and perhaps the only time in his youth, to capture in a written piece—the pleasure of writing multiplying the pleasure of seeing tenfold.

Then the narrative shifts in time, well before the narrator's birth, to recount Swann's love. Charles Swann, the dilettante aesthete, the friend of princes and painters, meets at the home of the Verdurins—that little bourgeois clan that believes itself an elite and excommunicates anyone who misses its soirées—a woman who is not his type: Odette de Crécy, whose profile reminds him of Botticelli's Zipporah. He does not love her at first; it is through a little musical phrase from Vinteuil's sonata, heard one evening at the Verdurins', that desire insinuates itself, attaches to a face, and crystallizes into passion. Swann begins to love Odette the evening he searches for her in all the boulevard cafés and finds her by chance, brushing against the chrysanthemums on her bodice to straighten them. From then on, he is lost. Jealousy devours him: he watches beneath her windows, he knocks on shutters in the night, he intercepts letters, he discovers that she has lied, that she is still lying, that she has had women, that she has had men, that every detail wrenched from her conceals another, more terrible one. The little phrase by Vinteuil, which had been the anthem of their love, becomes the very song of his suffering when he hears it at the Marquise de Saint-Euverte's, amidst a society that knows nothing of his distress. And one night he dreams that he is walking with Odette, that a stranger is explaining something to him, that Napoleon III is there as well, and he wakes up murmuring that he has wasted years of his life for a woman who was not even his type.

The third part opens on names themselves, on their power of enchantment. The child, whom illness prevents from traveling, dreams of Balbec through railway timetables, imagines a Norman church battered by storms, a golden and Gothic Venice, a Florence scented with lilies. And it is in the Champs-Élysées, on a winter afternoon, that he finds Gilberte Swann again and plays with her, watching the weather each day, begging Françoise to let him go out, trembling lest Gilberte not come—transposing into this childhood game the same anguish Swann had known in the drawing rooms, the same terror of not being loved, the same deceptive joy of a sign, a note, a rendezvous. He is received at the Swanns' home, he sees Odette in her drawing room cluttered with chrysanthemums and cattleyas, he hears Vinteuil's little phrase played on the piano, and everything he had imagined of Swann's life mingles with what he himself is living, as if the love of the father and the love of the son were but two variations of a single, bottomless anguish. And then one day Gilberte stops coming to the Champs-Élysées, the trees in the Bois de Boulogne have lost their leaves, the sun has retreated behind a cloud, and he who remembers all this now crosses those same paths where automobiles have replaced carriages, where women wear hats he does not recognize, where nothing resembles what he loved anymore—and the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment, and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.