And thus it was she who first gave me the idea that a person does not, as I had imagined, stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourselves (like a garden at which we gaze through a railing with all its borders spread out before us), but is a shadow which we can never penetrate, of which there can be no such thing as direct knowledge, with respect to which we form countless beliefs, based upon words and sometimes actions, neither of which can give us anything but inadequate and as it proves contradictory information—a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.

I was genuinely in love with Mme de Guermantes. The greatest happiness that I could have asked of God would have been that he should send down on her every imaginable calamity, and that ruined, despised, stripped of all the privileges that separated her from me, having no longer any home of her own or people who would condescend to speak to her, she should come to me for asylum. I imagined her doing so. And indeed on those evenings when some change in the atmosphere or in my own state of health brought to the surface of my consciousness some forgotten scroll on which were recorded impressions of other days, instead of profiting by the forces of renewal that had been generated in me, instead of using them to unravel in my own mind thoughts which as a rule escaped me, instead of setting myself at last to work, I preferred to relate aloud, to excogitate in a lively, external manner, with a flow of invention as useless as was my declamation of it, a whole novel crammed with adventure, in which the Duchess, fallen upon misfortune, came to implore assistance from me—who had become, by a converse change of circumstances, rich and powerful. And when I had thus spent hours on end imagining the circumstances, rehearsing the sentences with which I should welcome the Duchess beneath my roof, the situation remained unaltered; I had, alas, in reality, chosen to love the woman who in her own person combined perhaps the greatest possible number of different advantages; in whose eyes, accordingly, I could not hope to cut any sort of figure; for she was as rich as the richest commoner—and noble also; not to mention that personal charm which set her at the pinnacle of fashion, made her among the rest a sort of queen.

I felt that I displeased her by crossing her path every morning; but even if I had had the heart to refrain from doing so for two or three days consecutively, Mme de Guermantes might not have noticed that abstention, which would have represented so great a sacrifice on my part, or might have attributed it to some obstacle beyond my control. And indeed I could not have brought myself to cease to dog her footsteps except by arranging that it should be impossible for me to do so, for the perpetually recurring need to meet her, to be for a moment the object of her attention, the person to whom her greeting was addressed, was stronger than my fear of arousing her displeasure. I should have had to go away for some time; and for that I had not the heart. I did think of it more than once. I would then tell Françoise to pack my boxes, and immediately afterwards to unpack them. (And as the spirit of imitation, the desire not to appear behind the times, alters the most natural and most positive form of oneself, Françoise, borrowing the expression from her daughter’s vocabulary, used to remark that I was “dippy.”) She did not approve of my tergiversations; she said that I was always “balancing,” for when she was not aspiring to rival the moderns, she employed the very language of Saint-Simon. It is true that she liked it still less when I spoke to her authoritatively. She knew that this was not natural to me, and did not suit me, a condition which she expressed in the phrase “where there isn’t a will.” I should never have had the heart to leave Paris except in a direction that would bring me closer to Mme de Guermantes. This was by no means an impossibility. Would I not indeed find myself nearer to her than I was in the morning, in the street, solitary, humiliated, feeling that not a single one of the thoughts which I should have liked to convey to her ever reached her, in that weary marking time of my daily walks, which might go on indefinitely without getting me any further, if I were to go miles away from Mme de Guermantes, but to someone of her acquaintance, someone whom she knew to be particular in the choice of his friends and who appreciated me, who might speak to her about me, and if not obtain from her at least make her aware of what I wanted, someone thanks to whom at all events, simply because I should discuss with him whether or not it would be possible for him to convey this or that message to her, I should give to my solitary and silent meditations a new form, spoken, active, which would seem to me an advance, almost a realisation? What she did during the mysterious daily life of the “Guermantes” that she was—this was the constant object of my thoughts; and to break into that life, even by indirect means, as with a lever, by employing the services of a person who was not excluded from the Duchess’s house, from her parties, from prolonged conversation with her, would not that be a contact more distant but at the same time more effective than my contemplation of her every morning in the street?

The friendship and admiration that Saint-Loup had shown me seemed to me undeserved and had hitherto left me unmoved. All at once I set great store by them; I would have liked him to disclose them to Mme de Guermantes, was quite prepared even to ask him to do so. For when we are in love, we long to be able to divulge to the woman we love all the little privileges we enjoy, as the deprived and the tiresome do in everyday life. We are distressed by her ignorance of them and we seek to console ourselves with the thought that precisely because they are never visible she has perhaps added to the opinion which she already has of us this possibility of further undisclosed virtues.

Saint-Loup had not for a long time been able to come to Paris, either, as he himself claimed, because of his military duties, or, as was more likely, because of the trouble he was having with his mistress, with whom he had twice now been on the point of breaking off. He had often told me what a pleasure it would be to him if I came to visit him in that garrison town the name of which, a couple of days after his leaving Balbec, had caused me so much joy when I had read it on the envelope of the first letter I had received from my friend. Not so far from Balbec as its wholly inland surroundings might have led one to think, it was one of those little fortified towns, aristocratic and military, set in a broad expanse of country over which on fine days there floats so often in the distance a sort of intermittent blur of sound which—as a screen of poplars by its sinuosities outlines the course of a river which one cannot see—indicates the movements of a regiment on manoeuvre that the very atmosphere of its streets, avenues and squares has been gradually tuned to a sort of perpetual vibrancy, musical and martial, and the most commonplace sound of cartwheel or tramway is prolonged in vague trumpet calls, indefinitely repeated, to the hallucinated ear, by the silence. It was not too far away from Paris for me to be able, if I took the express, to return to my mother and grandmother and sleep in my own bed. As soon as I realised this, troubled by a painful longing, I had too little will-power to decide not to return to Paris but rather to stay in the little town; but also too little to prevent a porter from carrying my luggage to a cab and not to adopt, as I walked behind him, the destitute soul of a traveller looking after his belongings with no grandmother in attendance, not to get into the carriage with the complete detachment of a person who, having ceased to think of what it is that he wants, has the air of knowing what he wants, and not to give the driver the address of the cavalry barracks. I thought that Saint-Loup might come and sleep that night in the hotel at which I should be staying, in order to make the first shock of contact with this strange town less painful for me. One of the guard went to find him, and I waited at the barracks gate, in front of that huge ship of stone, booming with the November wind, out of which, every moment, for it was now six o’clock, men were emerging in pairs into the street, staggering as if they were coming ashore in some exotic port where they found themselves temporarily anchored.

Saint-Loup appeared, moving like a whirlwind, his monocle spinning in the air before him. I had not given my name, and was eager to enjoy his surprise and delight.

“Oh, what a bore!” he exclaimed, suddenly catching sight of me, and blushing to the tips of his ears. “I’ve just had a week’s leave, and I shan’t be off duty again for another week.”

And, preoccupied by the thought of my having to spend this first night alone, for he knew better than anyone my bed-time agonies, which he had often noticed and soothed at Balbec, he broke off his lamentation to turn and look at me, coax me with little smiles, with tender though unsymmetrical glances, half of them coming directly from his eye, the other half through his monocle, but both sorts alike testifying to the emotion that he felt on seeing me again, testifying also to that important matter which I still did not understand but which now vitally concerned me, our friendship.

“I say, where are you going to sleep? Really, I can’t recommend the hotel where we mess; it’s next to the Exhibition ground, where there’s a show just starting; you’ll find it beastly crowded. No, you’d better go to the Hôtel de Flandre; it’s a little eighteenth-century palace with old tapestries. It’s quite the (ça fait assez) ‘old historical dwelling.’ ”

Saint-Loup employed in every connexion the verb faire for “have the air of,” because the spoken language, like the written, feels from time to time the need of these alterations in the meanings of words, these refinements of expression. And just as journalists often have not the least idea what school of literature the “turns of phrase” they use originate from, so the vocabulary, the very diction of Saint-Loup were formed in imitation of three different aesthetes none of whom he knew but whose modes of speech had been indirectly inculcated into him. “Besides,” he concluded, “the hotel I mean is more or less adapted to your auditory hyperaesthesia. You will have no neighbours.