But he was not travelling alone, and moreover he let it be understood that he was not to be invited without his companion. I trust that I am no more of a prude than most men, and, being a bachelor, I was perhaps in a position to throw open the doors of the Embassy a little wider than if I had been married and the father of a family. Nevertheless, I confess that there are depths of ignominy to which I refuse to accommodate myself and which are made more repulsive still by the tone, more than just moral, but frankly moralising, that Bergotte adopts in his books, where one finds nothing but perpetual and, between ourselves, somewhat wearisome analyses, painful scruples, morbid remorse, and, for the merest peccadilloes, veritable preachifying (one knows what that’s worth), while all the time he is showing such frivolity and cynicism in his private life. To cut a long story short, I avoided answering, the Princess returned to the charge, but with no greater success. So that I do not suppose that I appear exactly in the odour of sanctity to the gentleman, and I am not sure how far he appreciated Swann’s kindness in inviting him and myself on the same evening. Unless of course it was he who asked for the invitation. One can never tell, for really he is a sick man. Indeed that is his sole excuse.”

“And was Mme Swann’s daughter at the dinner?” I asked M. de Norpois, taking advantage, to put this question, of a moment in which, as we all moved towards the drawing-room, I could more easily conceal my emotion than would have been possible at table, where I was held fast in the glare of the lamplight.

M. de Norpois appeared to be trying for a moment to remember:

“Ah, yes, you mean a young person of fourteen or fifteen? Yes, of course, I remember now that she was introduced to me before dinner as the daughter of our Amphitryon. I’m afraid that I saw little of her; she retired to bed early. Or else she went out to see some friends—I forget which. But I can see that you are very intimate with the Swann household.”

“I play with Mlle Swann in the Champs-Elysées, and she’s delightful.”

“Oh! so that’s it? But I assure you, I too thought her charming. I must confess to you, however, that I do not believe that she will ever come anywhere near her mother, if I may say as much without hurting your feelings.”

“I prefer Mlle Swann’s face, but I admire her mother, too, enormously. I go for walks in the Bois simply in the hope of seeing her pass.”

“Ah! But I must tell them that; they will be highly flattered.”

While he was uttering these words, and for a few seconds after he had uttered them, M. de Norpois was still in the same position as anyone else who, hearing me speak of Swann as an intelligent man, of his family as respectable stockbrokers, of his house as a fine house, imagined that I would speak just as readily of another man equally intelligent, of other stockbrokers equally respectable, of another house equally fine; it was the moment in which a sane man who is talking to a lunatic has not yet perceived that he is a lunatic. M. de Norpois knew that there is nothing unnatural in the pleasure one derives from looking at pretty women, that it is good manners, when someone speaks to you of a pretty woman with any warmth, to pretend to think that he is in love with her, and to promise to further his designs. But in saying that he would speak of me to Gilberte and her mother (which would enable me, like an Olympian deity who has taken on the fluidity of a breath of wind, or rather the aspect of the old greybeard whose form Minerva borrows, to insinuate myself, unseen, into Mme Swann’s drawing-room, to attract her attention, to occupy her thoughts, to arouse her gratitude for my admiration, to appear before her as the friend of an important person, to seem to her worthy to be invited by her in the future and to enter into the intimate life of her family), this important person who was going to use on my behalf the great influence which he must have with Mme Swann inspired in me suddenly an affection so compelling that I had difficulty in restraining myself from kissing his soft, white, wrinkled hands, which looked as though they had been left lying too long in water. I almost made as if to do so, in an impulsive movement which I believed that I alone had noticed. For it is difficult for any of us to calculate exactly the extent to which our words or gestures are apparent to others. Partly from the fear of exaggerating our own importance, and also because we enlarge to enormous proportions the field over which the impressions formed by other people in the course of their lives are obliged to extend, we imagine that the incidentals of our speech and of our postures scarcely penetrate the consciousness, still less remain in the memory of those with whom we converse. It is, no doubt, to a supposition of this sort that criminals yield when they touch up the wording of a statement already made, thinking that the new variant cannot be confronted with any existing version. But it is quite possible that, even with respect to the millennial existence of the human race, the philosophy of the journalist, according to which everything is doomed to oblivion, is less true than a contrary philosophy which would predict the conservation of everything. In the same newspaper in which the moralist of the leader column says to us of an event, of a work of art, a fortiori of a singer who has enjoyed her “hour of fame”: “Who will remember this in ten years’ time?”, does not the report of the Académie des Inscriptions overleaf speak often of a fact in itself of smaller importance, of a poem of little merit, which dates from the epoch of the Pharaohs and is still known in its entirety? Perhaps this does not quite hold true for the brief life of a human being. And yet, some years later, in a house in which M. de Norpois, who was also a guest there, seemed to me the most solid support that I could hope to find, because he was a friend of my father, indulgent, inclined to wish us all well, and moreover, by profession and upbringing trained to discretion, when, after the Ambassador had gone, I was told that he had alluded to an evening long ago when he had “seen the moment in which I was about to kiss his hand,” not only did I blush to the roots of my hair but I was stupefied to learn how different from what I might have believed was not only the manner in which M. de Norpois spoke of me but also the composition of his memory. This piece of gossip enlightened me as to the incalculable proportions of absence and presence of mind, of recollection and forgetfulness, of which the human mind is composed; and I was as marvellously surprised as on the day on which I read for the first time, in one of Maspero’s books, that there existed a precise list of the sportsmen whom Assurbanipal used to invite to his hunts a thousand years before the birth of Christ.