The Guermantes Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 3

by Marcel Proust

it was as though I had seen,

the assembly of the Gods

now that I had learned that the streets of Paris, like the roads around Balbec, were aflower with those unknown beauties

Mme de Guermantes, by whom I had let myself be greeted without my even acknowledging her.

all reality is perhaps equally dissimilar from what we think ourselves to be directly perceiving and that we compose with the aid of ideas that do not reveal themselves but are nevertheless effective;

I came to visit him at that garrison town,

Doncieres

One of the guards went to find him,

as if they were coming ashore in some exotic port

Saint-Loup arrived, moving like a whirlwind,

No, you’d better go to the Hôtel de Flandre; it is a little eighteenth-century palace with old tapestries.

Doncières,

I was shown Saint-Loup’s room.

I sensed that the room was not empty,

But it was only the freshly lighted fire beginning to burn.

in that great community called a barracks

“So you’d rather stay with me and sleep here, would you, than go to the hotel by yourself?” Saint-Loup asked me, smiling.

its divinely ornithological glory,

the union of a goddess with a bird.

But after that first night I had to sleep at the hotel.

The resurrection at our awakening—

And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is to be conceived as a phenomenon of memory.

But you will find certain generals slavishly imitating one of Napoléon’s maneuvers and arriving at a diametrically opposite result.

1870.

the Demoiselles of the Telephone.

I was wretched at not having said goodbye to Saint-Loup, but I left nevertheless, for my sole concern was to return to my grandmother;

that formed part of a new world, that of Time,

then, a reflection of this reflection, that it was in my sleep that I had had the idea that I was not asleep, then, by a further refraction, my awakening .

in their fresh mauve gowns,

young clusters of lilacs

the platoons in violet uniform

Suddenly Saint-Loup appeared, accompanied by his mistress,

in this woman I recognized at once “Rachel when from the Lord,”

(because I had known “Rachel when from the Lord” in a house of ill repute),

No doubt it was the same thin and narrow face that we saw, Robert and I.

But we had arrived at it by two opposite ways, between which there was no communication, and we would never both see it from the same side.

He had given more than a million francs

what had been offered to me, as to all and sundry, for twenty.

to commit the crowning folly of making an inaccessible idol of a whore,

And indeed, when we were both looking at her, Robert and I did not see her from the same side of the mystery.

it was the power of the human imagination, the illusion on which were based the pains of love, that I found so great.

pair of common little “tarts” like herself,

They were two poor little “tarts”

louis

more than a hundred thousand francs

a Rachel like those two little tarts,

a twenty-franc Rachel.

Robert longed to ask her who Lucienne and Germaine were,

“Anything especially interesting about that waiter, Zézette?”

I had heard Mme de Villeparisis declare that she had no talent,

the defense of Berma,