In Search of Lost Time

by Marcel Proust

Suddenly Saint-Loup appeared, accompanied by his mistress, and then, in this woman who was for him all the love, every possible delight in life, whose personality, mysteriously enshrined in a body as in a Tabernacle, was the object that still occupied incessantly the toiling imagination of my friend, whom he felt that he would never really know, as to whom he was perpetually asking himself what could be her secret self, behind the veil of eyes and flesh, in this woman I recognised at once ‘Rachel when from the Lord,’ her who, but a few years since — women change their position so rapidly in that world, when they do change — used to say to the procuress: “To-morrow evening, then, if you want me for anyone, you will send round, won’t you?” And when they had ‘come round’ for her, and she found herself alone in the room with the ‘anyone,’ she had known so well what was required of her that after locking the door, as a prudent woman’s precaution or a ritual gesture, she would begin to take off all her things, as one does before the doctor who is going to sound one’s chest, never stopping in the process unless the ‘some one,’ not caring for nudity, told her that she might keep on her shift, as specialists do sometimes who, having an extremely fine ear and being afraid of their patient’s catching a chill, are satisfied with listening to his breathing and the beating of his heart through his shirt. On this woman whose whole life, all her thoughts, all her past, all the men who at ...