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

by Marcel Proust

From being vexed, Mme de Villeparisis seemed to have grown anxious.

You’d much better go now, quickly, while his back is turned.”

“So this is how you wait for me, Monsieur?”

It was M. de Charlus.

M. de Charlus now fastened his gaze on me with that intense fixity,

examine the fiacres that at this time of the day were passing in considerable numbers on the way to their stables,

in. I hope, Monsieur,” he went on, “that you will not in any way misinterpret the purely disinterested and charitable nature of the proposal that I am going to make to you.”

chain of circumstances.”

As he poured out these terrible, almost insane words, M. de Charlus squeezed my arm until it hurt.

But as soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid.543

There are maladies that we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious.

On seeing us, M. d’Argencourt appeared annoyed, cast at me a look of distrust, almost that look intended for a creature of another race

distinctly colder to me

He observed me now with a curiosity in which there was no sign of friendliness,

My sister-in-law is a charming woman who imagines that we are still living in the days of Balzac’s novels,

The first sacrifice that you must make for me—I will claim them from you in proportion to the gifts I bestow on you—is to give up going into society.

Now that she had become once again what I had supposed her to be in my childhood,

But I had never any impression that she belonged to the Faubourg Saint-Germain,

the point at which a certain pleasantry will become too technical, too shocking, will be a proof rather of corruption than of naïveté.)

“Which way are you going?” “Yours.”

I went upstairs, and found my grandmother not so well.

the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years’ time.

So that to believe in medicine would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were not greater folly still,

She had realized that there was no need to hide from me what I had at once guessed, that she had had a slight stroke.

she had seemed to be foundering, sliding into the abyss,

plunged in that unknown world

when death has hideously come to dwell in us.

The sufferer makes the acquaintance of the stranger whom she hears coming and going in her brain.

“There is not the slightest hope for your grandmother,”

In any case, you have Cottard, you’re in excellent hands.

The ferocious ogre whom we were anxious to exterminate we barely succeeded in grazing,

“I was not asleep,” I answered as I awoke.

as that of making us lose all memory of that other, rather more diffused light in which our mind has been resting, as in the opaline depths of the sea.

simply taking with him the sealed envelope that was slipped into his hand.

the great consultant in his long frock coat with its silken lapels,

Rachel, who liked to provoke his jealousy—she had other reasons also for wishing me harm—had persuaded her lover that I had made sly attempts to have relations with her in his absence.

Now frequent demands for money from a cast-off mistress

Suddenly, although I had heard no bell, Françoise opened the door to let in Albertine,

She was like an enchantress handing me a mirror that reflected time.

Not only did I no longer feel any love for her,

There could be no doubt that she had long since become quite indifferent to me.

horripliant.

but that Albertine should be now so accessible to me gave me more than pleasure,

behind the lens of a stereoscope.23

I felt that it was possible for me, by kissing the girl’s two cheeks, to kiss the whole of the beach at Balbec.

I let my eyes glide over the charming pink globe of her cheeks, the gently curving surfaces of which ran up to expire beneath the first foothills of her beautiful black tresses,

in this brief passage of my lips toward her cheek it was ten Albertines that I saw;

the satisfaction that she could not have failed to notice,

I dared not let her know that I was subordinating everything else to the chance of seeing Mme de Stermaria.

Mme de Stermaria, who accepted my invitation to dinner for Wednesday.