“Oh, Monsieur,” I assured M. de Norpois, when he told me that he would inform Gilberte and her mother how much I admired them, “if you would do that, if you would speak of me to Mme Swann my whole life would not be long enough to prove my gratitude, and that life would be all at your service. But I feel bound to point out to you that I do not know Mme Swann, and that I have never been introduced to her.”

I had added these last words from a scruple of conscience, and so as not to appear to be boasting of an acquaintance which I did not possess. But as I uttered them I sensed that they were already superfluous, for from the beginning of my speech of thanks, with its chilling ardour, I had seen flitting across the face of the Ambassador an expression of hesitation and displeasure, and in his eyes that vertical, narrow, slanting look (like, in the drawing of a solid body in perspective, the receding line of one of its surfaces), that look which one addresses to the invisible interlocutor whom one has within oneself at the moment when one is telling him something that one’s other interlocutor, the person to whom one has been talking up till then—myself, in this instance—is not meant to hear. I realised in a flash that the words I had pronounced, which, feeble as they were when measured against the flood of gratitude that was coursing through me, had seemed to me bound to touch M. de Norpois and to confirm his decision upon an intervention which would have given him so little trouble and me so much joy, were perhaps (out of all those that could have been chosen with diabolical malice by persons anxious to do me harm) the only ones that could result in his abandoning his intention. Indeed, on hearing them, in the same way as when a stranger with whom we have been pleasantly exchanging impressions which we might have supposed to be similar about passers-by whom we agreed in regarding as vulgar, reveals suddenly the pathological abyss that divides him from us by adding carelessly as he feels his pocket: “What a pity I haven’t got my revolver with me; I could have picked off the lot of them,” M. de Norpois, who knew that nothing was less costly or more simple than to be commended to Mme Swann and taken to her house, and saw that to me, on the contrary, such favours bore so high a price and must consequently be very difficult to obtain, thought that the desire I had expressed, though ostensibly normal, must cloak some different motive, some suspect intention, some prior transgression, on account of which, in the certainty of displeasing Mme Swann, no one had hitherto been willing to undertake the responsibility for conveying a message to her from me. And I realised that this mission was one he would never discharge, that he might see Mme Swann daily, for years to come, without ever mentioning my name. He did indeed ask her, a few days later, for some information which I required, and charged my father to convey it to me. But he had not thought fit to tell her on whose behalf he was inquiring. So she would never discover that I knew M. de Norpois and that I so longed to be asked to her house; and this was perhaps a lesser misfortune than I supposed. For the second of these discoveries would probably not have added much to the efficacy of the first, which was in any event dubious: for Odette, the idea of her own life and of her own home awakened no mysterious uneasiness, and a person who knew her, who came to her house, did not seem to her a fabulous creature such as he seemed to me who would have flung a stone through Swann’s windows if I could have written upon it that I knew M. de Norpois; I was convinced that such a message, even when transmitted in so brutal a fashion, would have given me far more prestige in the eyes of the lady of the house than it would have prejudiced her against me. But even if I had been capable of understanding that the mission which M. de Norpois did not perform must have remained futile, indeed that it might have damaged my credit with the Swanns, I should not have had the courage, had he proved himself willing, to relieve the Ambassador of it and to renounce the pleasure—however fatal its consequences might prove—of feeling that my name and my person were thus brought for a moment into Gilberte’s presence, into her unknown life and home.

After M. de Norpois had gone my father cast an eye over the evening paper, and I thought once more of Berma. The pleasure which I had experienced in listening to her required all the more to be reinforced in that it had fallen far short of what I had promised myself; and so it at once assimilated everything that was capable of giving it nourishment, for instance those merits which M. de Norpois had ascribed to her and which my mind had imbibed at a single draught, like a dry lawn when water is poured on it. Then my father handed me the newspaper, pointing out to me a paragraph which ran more or less as follows:—


The performance of Phèdre, given this afternoon before an enthusiastic audience which included the foremost representatives of the artistic and critical world, was for Mme Berma, who played the heroine, the occasion of a triumph as brilliant as any that she has known in the course of her phenomenal career. We shall return at greater length to this performance, which is indeed an event in the history of the stage; suffice it to say here that the best qualified judges were unanimous in declaring that this interpretation shed an entirely new light on the role of Phèdre, which is one of the finest and most complex of Racine’s creations, and that it constituted the purest and most exalted manifestation of dramatic art which it has been the privilege of our generation to witness.


As soon as my mind had conceived this new idea of “the purest and most exalted manifestation of dramatic art,” it, the idea, sped to join the imperfect pleasure which I had felt in the theatre, adding to it a little of what it lacked, and the combination formed something so exalting that I exclaimed to myself: “What a great artist!” It will doubtless be argued that I was not absolutely sincere. But let us bear in mind, rather, the countless writers who, dissatisfied with the passage they have just written, read some eulogy of the genius of Chateaubriand, or evoke the spirit of some great artist whose equal they aspire to be, humming to themselves, for instance, a phrase of Beethoven the melancholy of which they compare with what they have been trying to express in their prose, and become so imbued with this idea of genius that they add it to their own productions when they return to them, no longer see them in the light in which they appeared at first, and, hazarding an act of faith in the value of their work, say to themselves: “After all!” without taking into account that, into the total which determines their ultimate satisfaction, they have introduced the memory of marvellous pages of Chateaubriand which they assimilate to their own but which, after all, they did not write; let us bear in mind the numberless men who believe in the love of a mistress who has done nothing but betray them; all those, too, who are sustained by the alternative hopes, on the one hand of an incomprehensible survival after death, when they think, inconsolable husbands, of the wives whom they have lost but have not ceased to love, or, artists, of the posthumous glory which they may thus enjoy, and on the other of a reassuring void, when their thoughts turn to the misdeeds that otherwise they must expiate after their death; let us bear in mind also the travellers who come home enraptured by the over-all splendour of a journey from which day by day they experienced nothing but tedium; and let us then declare whether, in the communal life that is led by our ideas in the enclosure of our minds, there is a single one of those that makes us most happy which has not first sought, like a real parasite, and won from an alien but neighbouring idea the greater part of the strength that it originally lacked.

My mother appeared none too pleased that my father no longer thought of a diplomatic career for me. I fancy that, anxious above all else that a definite rule of life should discipline the vagaries of my nervous system, what she regretted was not so much seeing me abandon diplomacy as the prospect of my devoting myself to literature. “Don’t worry,” my father told her, “the main thing is that a man should find pleasure in his work. He’s no longer a child. He knows pretty well now what he likes, it’s very unlikely that he will change, and he’s quite capable of deciding for himself what will make him happy in life.”

That evening, as I waited for the time to arrive when, thanks to the freedom of choice which they allowed me, I should or should not begin to be happy in life, my father’s words caused me great uneasiness.