For this photograph was like a supplementary encounter added to all those that I had already had with Mme de Guermantes; better still, a prolonged encounter, as if, by a sudden stride forward in our relations, she had stopped beside me, in a garden hat, and had allowed me for the first time to gaze at my leisure at that rounded cheek, that arched neck, that tapering eyebrow (veiled from me hitherto by the swiftness of her passage, the bewilderment of my impressions, the imperfection of memory); and the contemplation of them, as well as of the bare throat and arms of a woman whom I had never seen save in a high-necked and long-sleeved dress, was to me a voluptuous discovery, a priceless favour. Those forms, which had seemed to me almost a forbidden spectacle, I could study there as in a text-book of the only geometry that had any value for me. Later on, looking at Robert, it struck me that he too was a little like the photograph of his aunt, by a mysterious process which I found almost as moving, since, if his face had not been directly produced by hers, the two had nevertheless a common origin. The features of the Duchesse de Guermantes, which were pinned to my vision of Combray, the nose like a falcon’s beak, the piercing eyes, seemed to have served also as a pattern for the cutting out—in another copy analogous and slender, with too delicate a skin—of Robert’s face, which might almost be superimposed upon his aunt’s. I looked longingly at those features of his so characteristic of the Guermantes, of that race which had remained so individual in the midst of a world in which it remained isolated in its divinely ornithological glory, for it seemed to have sprung, in the age of mythology, from the union of a goddess with a bird.

Robert, without being aware of its cause, was touched by my evident affection. This was moreover increased by the sense of well-being inspired in me by the heat of the fire and by the champagne which simultaneously bedewed my forehead with beads of sweat and my eyes with tears; it washed down some young partridges which I ate with the wonderment of a layman, of whatever sort he may be, who finds in a way of life with which he is not familiar what he has supposed it to exclude—the wonderment, for instance, of an atheist who sits down to an exquisitely cooked dinner in a presbytery. And next morning, when I awoke, I went over to Saint-Loup’s window, which being at a great height overlooked the whole countryside, curious to make the acquaintance of my new neighbour, the landscape which I had not been able to see the day before, having arrived too late, at an hour when it was already sleeping beneath the outspread cloak of night. And yet, early as it had awoken, I could see it, when I opened the window and looked out, only as though from the window of a country house overlooking the lake, shrouded still in its soft white morning gown of mist which scarcely allowed me to make out anything at all. But I knew that, before the troopers who were busy with their horses in the square had finished grooming them, it would have cast its gown aside. In the meantime, I could see only a bare hill, raising its lean and rugged flanks, already swept clear of darkness, over the back of the barracks. Through the translucent screen of hoar-frost I could not take my eyes from this stranger who was looking at me too for the first time. But when I had formed the habit of coming to the barracks, my consciousness that the hill was there, more real, consequently, even when I did not see it, than the hotel at Balbec, than our house in Paris, of which I thought as of absent—or dead—friends, that is to say scarcely believing any longer in their existence, caused its reflected form, even without my realising it, to be silhouetted against the slightest impressions that I formed at Doncières, and among them, to begin with this first morning, the pleasing impression of warmth given me by the cup of chocolate, prepared by Saint-Loup’s batman in this comfortable room, which seemed like a sort of optical centre from which to look out at the hill—the idea of doing anything else but just gaze at it, the idea of actually climbing it, being rendered impossible by this same mist. Imbued with the shape of the hill, associated with the taste of hot chocolate and with the whole web of my fancies at that particular time, this mist, without my having given it the least thought, came to infuse all my thoughts of that time, just as a massive and unmelting lump of gold had remained allied to my impressions of Balbec, or as the proximity of the outside steps of sandstone gave a greyish background to my impressions of Combray. It did not, however, persist late into the day; the sun began by hurling at it in vain a few darts which sprinkled it with brilliants, then finally overcame it. The hill might expose its grizzled rump to the sun’s rays, which, an hour later, when I went into the town, gave to the russet tints of the autumn leaves, to the reds and blues of the election posters pasted on the walls, an exaltation which raised my spirits also and made me stamp, singing as I went, on the paving-stones from which I could hardly keep myself from jumping in the air for joy.

But after that first night I had to sleep at the hotel. And I knew beforehand that I was doomed to find sadness there. It was like an unbreathable aroma which all my life long had been exhaled for me by every new bedroom, that is to say by every bedroom—for in the one which I usually occupied I was not present, my mind remained elsewhere and sent mere Habit to take its place. But I could not employ this servant, less sensitive than myself, to look after things for me in a new place, where I preceded him, where I arrived alone, where I must bring into contact with its environment that “Self” which I rediscovered only at year-long intervals, but always the same, not having grown at all since Combray, since my first arrival at Balbec, weeping inconsolably on the edge of an unpacked trunk.

As it happened, I was mistaken. I had no time to be sad, for I was not alone for an instant. The fact of the matter was that there remained of the old palace a surplus refinement of structure and decoration, out of place in a modern hotel, which, released from any practical assignment, had in its long spell of leisure acquired a sort of life: passages winding about in all directions, which one was continually crossing in their aimless wanderings, lobbies as long as corridors and as ornate as drawing-rooms, which had the air rather of dwelling there themselves than of forming part of the dwelling, which could not be induced to enter and settle down in any of the rooms but roamed about outside mine and came up at once to offer me their company—neighbours of a sort, idle but never noisy, menial ghosts of the past who had been granted the privilege of staying quietly by the doors of the rooms which were let to visitors, and who whenever I came across them greeted me with a silent deference. In short, the idea of a lodging, a mere container for our present existence, simply shielding us from the cold and from the sight of other people, was absolutely inapplicable to this dwelling, an assembly of rooms, as real as a colony of people, living, it was true, in silence, but which one was obliged to encounter, to avoid, to greet when one came in. One tried not to disturb, and one could not look at without respect, the great drawing-room which had formed, far back in the eighteenth century, the habit of stretching itself at its ease among its hangings of old gold beneath the clouds of its painted ceiling. And one was seized with a more personal curiosity as regards the smaller rooms which, without the least concern for symmetry, ran all round it, innumerable, startled, fleeing in disorder as far as the garden, to which they had so easy an access down three broken steps.

If I wished to go out or come in without taking the lift or being seen on the main staircase, a smaller private staircase, no longer in use, offered me its steps so skilfully arranged, one close above another, that there seemed to exist in their gradation a perfect proportion of the same kind as those which, in colours, scents, savours, often arouse in us a peculiar sensuous pleasure. But the pleasure to be found in going up and downstairs was one I had had to come here to learn, as once in an alpine resort I had found that the act—as a rule not noticed—of breathing can be a perpetual delight. I received that dispensation from effort which is granted to us only by the things to which long use has accustomed us, when I set my feet for the first time on those steps, familiar before ever I knew them, as if they possessed, stored up, incorporated in them perhaps by the masters of old whom they used to welcome every day, the prospective charm of habits which I had not yet contracted and which indeed could only dwindle once they had become my own. I went into a room; the double doors closed behind me, the hangings let in a silence in which I felt myself invested with a sort of exhilarating royalty; a marble fireplace with ornaments of wrought brass—of which one would have been wrong to think that its sole idea was to represent the art of the Directory—offered me a fire, and a little easy chair on short legs helped me to warm myself as comfortably as if I had been sitting on the hearthrug. The walls held the room in a close embrace, separating it from the rest of the world and, to let into it, to enclose in it what made it complete, parted to make way for the bookcase, reserved a place for the bed, on either side of which columns airily upheld the lofty ceiling of the alcove. And the room was prolonged in depth by two closets as wide as itself, one of which had hanging from its wall, to scent the occasion on which one had recourse to it, a voluptuous rosary of orris-roots; the doors, if I left them open when I withdrew into this innermost retreat, were not content with tripling its dimensions without spoiling its harmonious proportions, and not only allowed my eyes to enjoy the delights of extension after those of concentration, but added further to the pleasure of my solitude—which, while still inviolable, was no longer shut in—the sense of liberty. This closet gave on to a courtyard, a solitary fair stranger whom I was glad to have for a neighbour when next morning my eyes fell on her, a captive between her high walls in which no other window opened, with nothing but two yellowing trees which contrived to give a mauve softness to the pure sky above.

Before going to bed I left the room to explore the whole of my enchanted domain. I walked down a long gallery which displayed to me successively all that it had to offer me if I could not sleep, an armchair placed in a corner, a spinet, a blue porcelain vase filled with cinerarias on a console table, and, in an old frame, the phantom of a lady of long ago with powdered hair mingled with blue flowers, holding in her hand a bunch of carnations.