And my aunt Flora, who realised that this veiled utterance was Céline’s way of thanking Swann for the Asti, looked at him also with a blend of congratulation and irony, either because she simply wished to underline her sister’s little witticism, or because she envied Swann his having inspired it, or because she imagined that he was embarrassed, and could not help having a little fun at his expense.

“I think it would be worth while,” Flora went on, “to have this old gentleman to dinner. When you get him going on Maubant or Mme Materna he will talk for hours on end.”

“That must be delightful,” sighed my grandfather, in whose mind nature had unfortunately forgotten to include any capacity whatsoever for becoming passionately interested in the Swedish co-operative movement or in the methods employed by Maubant to get up his parts, just as it had forgotten to endow my grandmother’s two sisters with a grain of that precious salt which one has oneself to “add to taste” in order to extract any savour from a narrative of the private life of Molé or of the Comte de Paris.

“By the way,” said Swann to my grandfather, “what I was going to tell you has more to do than you might think with what you were asking me just now, for in some respects there has been very little change. I came across a passage in Saint-Simon this morning which would have amused you. It’s in the volume which covers his mission to Spain; not one of the best, little more in fact than a journal, but at least a wonderfully well written journal, which fairly distinguishes it from the tedious journals we feel bound to read morning and evening.”

“I don’t agree with you: there are some days when I find reading the papers very pleasant indeed,” my aunt Flora broke in, to show Swann that she had read the note about his Corot in the Figaro.

“Yes,” aunt Céline went one better, “when they write about things or people in whom we are interested.”

“I don’t deny it,” answered Swann in some bewilderment. “The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it—oh! I don’t know; shall we say Pascal’s Pensées?” He articulated the title with an ironic emphasis so as not to appear pedantic. “And then, in the gilt and tooled volumes which we open once in ten years,” he went on, showing that contempt for worldly matters which some men of the world like to affect, “we should read that the Queen of the Hellenes had arrived at Cannes, or that the Princesse de Léon had given a fancy dress ball. In that way we should arrive at a happy medium.” But at once regretting that he had allowed himself to speak of serious matters even in jest, he added ironically: “What a fine conversation we’re having! I can’t think why we climb to these lofty heights,” and then, turning to my grandfather: “Well, Saint-Simon tells how Maulévrier had had the audacity to try to shake hands with his sons. You remember how he says of Maulévrier, ‘Never did I find in that coarse bottle anything but ill-humour, boorishness, and folly.’ ”

“Coarse or not, I know bottles in which there is something very different,” said Flora briskly, feeling bound to thank Swann as well as her sister, since the present of Asti had been addressed to them both. Céline laughed.

Swann was puzzled, but went on: “ ‘I cannot say whether it was ignorance or cozenage,’ writes Saint-Simon. ‘He tried to give his hand to my children. I noticed it in time to prevent him.’ ”

My grandfather was already in ecstasies over “ignorance or cozenage,” but Mlle Céline—the name of Saint-Simon, a “man of letters,” having arrested the complete paralysis of her auditory faculties—was indignant:

“What! You admire that? Well, that’s a fine thing, I must say! But what’s it supposed to mean? Isn’t one man as good as the next? What difference can it make whether he’s a duke or a groom so long as he’s intelligent and kind? He had a fine way of bringing up his children, your Saint-Simon, if he didn’t teach them to shake hands with all decent folk. Really and truly, it’s abominable. And you dare to quote it!”

And my grandfather, utterly depressed, realising how futile it would be, against this opposition, to attempt to get Swann to tell him the stories which would have amused him, murmured to my mother: “Just tell me again that line of yours which always comforts me so much on these occasions. Oh, yes: ‘What virtues, Lord, Thou makest us abhor!’2 How good that is!”

I never took my eyes off my mother. I knew that when they were at table I should not be permitted to stay there for the whole of dinner-time, and that Mamma, for fear of annoying my father, would not allow me to kiss her several times in public, as I would have done in my room. And so I promised myself that in the dining-room, as they began to eat and drink and as I felt the hour approach, I would put beforehand into this kiss, which was bound to be so brief and furtive, everything that my own efforts could muster, would carefully choose in advance the exact spot on her cheek where I would imprint it, and would so prepare my thoughts as to be able, thanks to these mental preliminaries, to consecrate the whole of the minute Mamma would grant me to the sensation of her cheek against my lips, as a painter who can have his subject for short sittings only prepares his palette, and from what he remembers and from rough notes does in advance everything which he possibly can do in the sitter’s absence. But tonight, before the dinner-bell had sounded, my grandfather said with unconscious cruelty: “The little man looks tired; he’d better go up to bed. Besides, we’re dining late tonight.”

And my father, who was less scrupulous than my grandmother or my mother in observing the letter of a treaty, went on: “Yes; run along; off to bed.”

I would have kissed Mamma then and there, but at that moment the dinner-bell rang.

“No, no, leave your mother alone. You’ve said good night to one another, that’s enough. These exhibitions are absurd. Go on upstairs.”

And so I must set forth without viaticum; must climb each step of the staircase “against my heart,”3 as the saying is, climbing in opposition to my heart’s desire, which was to return to my mother, since she had not, by kissing me, given my heart leave to accompany me. That hateful staircase, up which I always went so sadly, gave out a smell of varnish which had, as it were, absorbed and crystallised the special quality of sorrow that I felt each evening, and made it perhaps even crueller to my sensibility because, when it assumed this olfactory guise, my intellect was powerless to resist it. When we have gone to sleep with a raging toothache and are conscious of it only as of a little girl whom we attempt, time after time, to pull out of the water, or a line of Molière which we repeat incessantly to ourselves, it is a great relief to wake up, so that our intelligence can disentangle the idea of toothache from any artificial semblance of heroism or rhythmic cadence. It was the converse of this relief which I felt when my anguish at having to go up to my room invaded my consciousness in a manner infinitely more rapid, instantaneous almost, a manner at once insidious and brutal, through the inhalation—far more poisonous than moral penetration—of the smell of varnish peculiar to that staircase.

Once in my room I had to stop every loophole, to close the shutters, to dig my own grave as I turned down the bed-clothes, to wrap myself in the shroud of my nightshirt. But before burying myself in the iron bed which had been placed there because, on summer nights, I was too hot among the rep curtains of the four-poster, I was stirred to revolt, and attempted the desperate stratagem of a condemned prisoner. I wrote to my mother begging her to come upstairs for an important reason which I could not put in writing. My fear was that Françoise, my aunt’s cook who used to be put in charge of me when I was at Combray, might refuse to take my note. I had a suspicion that, in her eyes, to carry a message to my mother when there was a guest would appear as flatly inconceivable as for the door-keeper of a theatre to hand a letter to an actor upon the stage. On the subject of things which might or might not be done she possessed a code at once imperious, abundant, subtle, and uncompromising on points themselves imperceptible or irrelevant, which gave it a resemblance to those ancient laws which combine such cruel ordinances as the massacre of infants at the breast with prohibitions of exaggerated refinement against “seething the kid in his mother’s milk,” or “eating of the sinew which is upon the hollow of the thigh.” This code, judging by the sudden obstinacy which she would put into her refusal to carry out certain of our instructions, seemed to have provided for social complexities and refinements of etiquette which nothing in Françoise’s background or in her career as a servant in a village household could have put into her head; and we were obliged to assume that there was latent in her some past existence in the ancient history of France, noble and little understood, as in those manufacturing towns where old mansions still testify to their former courtly days, and chemical workers toil among delicately sculptured scenes from Le Miracle de Théophile or Les quatres fils Aymon.4

In this particular instance, the article of her code which made it highly improbable that—barring an outbreak of fire—Françoise would go down and disturb Mamma in the presence of M.