SWANN'S WAY (Modern Classics Series): In Search of Lost Time (Du Côté De Chez Swann) - Philosophical and Aesthetic Masterpiece that Titillated Even Virginia Woolf's Desire for Expression

by Marcel Proust

a respect which I should perhaps have found touching in a book, but which never failed to irritate me on her lips,

Then she went out with an air of resignation which seemed to imply: "What a dreadful thing for parents to have a child like this!"

it was now no longer (as it had been a moment ago) until to-morrow that I had lost my mother,

Now I was no longer separated from her; the barriers were down; an exquisite thread was binding us.

I imagined that Swann would have laughed heartily at it if he had read my letter and had guessed its purpose; whereas, on the contrary, as I was to learn in due course, a similar anguish had been the bane of his life for many years, and no one perhaps could have understood my feelings at that moment so well as himself;

that anguish which lies in knowing that the creature one adores is in some place of enjoyment where oneself is not and cannot follow—to

when, as had befallen me, such an anguish possesses one's soul before Love has yet entered into one's life, then it must drift, awaiting Love's coming, vague and free, without precise attachment, at the disposal of one sentiment to-day, of another to-morrow, of filial piety or affection for a comrade.

the inconceivable, infernal scene of gaiety in the thick of which we had been imagining swarms of enemies, perverse and seductive, beguiling away from us, even making laugh at us, the woman whom we love.

Swann had learned by experience that the good intentions of a third party are powerless to control a woman who is annoyed to find herself pursued even into a ball-room by a man whom she does not love.

"There is no answer"—words I have so often, since then, heard the hall-porters in 'mansions' and the flunkeys in gambling-clubs and the like, repeat to some poor girl, who replies in bewilderment: "What! he's said nothing? It's not possible. You did give him my letter, didn't you?

Then, suddenly, my anxiety subsided, a feeling of intense happiness coursed through me, as when a strong medicine begins to take effect and one's pain vanishes: I had formed a resolution

my thirst for and my fear of danger.

finished to the least detail and with utmost delicacy of gesture, made no discord with the rest of the scene, and yet was not merged in it, remaining clearly outlined.

Most peculiar. Aesthete

the most distant sounds, those which must have come from gardens at the far end of the town, could be distinguished with such exact 'finish' that the impression they gave of coming from a distance seemed due only to their 'pianissimo' execution,

in the system of education which they had given me faults were not classified in the same order as in that of other children,

yielding to a nervous impulse.

no one had yet accounted for my temptations in a way which might have led me to believe that there was some excuse for my giving in to them, or that I was actually incapable of holding out against them.

I could easily recognise this class of transgressions by the anguish of mind which preceded, as well as by the rigour of ...

a celibate, in one of that class for whom it seems that the great day which knows no morrow must be longer than for other men, since for such a one it is void of promise, and from its dawn the moments steadily accumulate without any subsequent partition among his offspring.

that wretched wife of his, who 'lives' with a certain Monsieur de Charlus, as all Combray knows.

My father used constantly to refuse to let me do things which were quite clearly allowed by the more liberal charters granted me by my mother and grandmother, because he paid no heed to 'Principles,' and because in his sight there were no such things as 'Rights of Man.' For

But then again, simply because he was devoid of principles (in my grandmother's sense), so he could not, properly speaking, be called inexorable.

we must not make the child accustomed..."

I'm not nervous like you.

what he called my sentimentality would have exasperated him.

Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished.

It is a long time, too, since my father has been able to tell Mamma to "Go with the child." Never again will such hours be possible for me.

of late I have been increasingly able to catch,

it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them afresh, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the streets that one would suppose them to have been stopped for ever, until they sound out again through the silent evening air.

his actions were generally dictated by chance expediencies rather than based on any formal plan.

they loved me enough to be unwilling to spare me that suffering, which they hoped to teach me to overcome, so as to reduce my nervous sensibility and to strengthen my will.

thus for the first time my unhappiness was regarded no longer as a fault for which I must be punished, but as an involuntary evil which had been officially recognised a nervous condition for which I was in no way responsible:

I ought then to have been happy; I was not.

it was a first step down from the ideal she had formed for me,

It struck me that if I had just scored a victory it was over her;

I had succeeded, as sickness or sorrow or age might have succeeded, in relaxing her will,...

her anger would have been less difficult to endure than this new kindness which my childhood had not known; I felt that I had with an impious and secret finger traced a first wrinkle upon her soul and made the first white hair shew upon her head.

we must do something; I'll get one of your books."

she considered light reading as unwholesome as sweets and cakes,

the four pastoral novels of George Sand.

"My dear," she had said to Mamma, "I could not allow myself to give the child anything that was not well written."

Even when she had to make some one a present of the kind called 'useful,' when she had to give an armchair or some table-silver or a walking-stick, she would choose 'antiques,' as though their long desuetude had effaced from them any semblance of utility and fitted them rather to instruct us in the lives of the men of other days than to serve the common requirements of our own.

she would find that vulgarity and utility had too prominent a part in them, through the mechanical nature of their reproduction by photography.

instead of photographs of Chartres Cathedral, of the Fountains of Saint-Cloud, or of Vesuvius she would inquire of Swann whether some great painter had not made pictures of them, and preferred to give me photographs of 'Chartres Cathedral' after Corot, of the 'Fountains of Saint-Cloud' after Hubert Robert, and of 'Vesuvius' after Turner,

The idea which I formed of Venice, from a drawing by Titian which is supposed to have the lagoon in the background, was certainly far less accurate than what I have since derived from ordinary photographs.

as charming to her as one of those old forms of speech in which we can still see traces of a metaphor whose fine point has been worn away by the rough usage of our modern tongue.

the pastoral novels of George Sand, which she was giving me for my birthday, were regular lumber-rooms of antique furniture,

some other such piece of antiquity as would have a pleasant effect on the mind, filling it with a nostalgic longing for impossible journeys through the realms of time.

for to me a new book was not one of a number of similar objects, but was like an individual man, unmatched, and with no cause of existence beyond himself—an

Beneath the everyday incidents, the commonplace thoughts and hackneyed words, I could hear, or overhear, an intonation, a rhythmic utterance fine and strange.