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

by Marcel Proust

Albertine had made me so late that the play had just finished when I entered Mme de Villeparisis’s drawing room;

As she swept through the room in which I was sitting,

Mme de Guermantes caught sight of me on my bergère,

“You wouldn’t care to dine with her here on Thursday?”

It was the day on which I was to dine with Mme de Stermaria, so I declined.

Two minutes earlier I would have been astonished had anyone told me that Mme de Guermantes was going to ask me to call on her, let alone to dine with her.

when I had seen her deviate from her stellar path, come to sit down beside me, and invite me to dinner,

like a meteorite engraved with our name

an invitation to dinner or a piece of malicious gossip.

“What, so you know Palamède, do you?”

You must admit he’s odd,

at times, a trifle mad.”

The days that preceded my dinner with Mme de Stermaria were for me by no means delightful, in fact they were nearly unbearable.

the shorter the interval is that separates us from our planned objective, the longer it seems to us,

To take possession of Mme de Stermaria on the island in the Bois de Boulogne where I had asked her to dine with me,

a pink cloud paints a last touch of vivid color in the tranquil sky.

was beginning to shave myself before going to the island

when Françoise came in to announce the arrival of Albertine.

Accordingly I asked Albertine to come with me there and then to the island to choose the menu.

seemed to hesitate.

would have made an appointment for later the same evening with Albertine,

the emotions and perhaps the regrets of this first phase of love for Mme de Stermaria.

I could trust Saint-Loup’s letter for that. Mme de Stermaria would give herself to me on the very first evening,

so I would have no need therefore to engage Albertine to come to my house as a last resort later in the evening.

Albertine asked me to take her on to Saint-Cloud.

St Cloud is Preti far away from the Bois de Boulogne

When I found myself alone again at home, and remembered that I had taken a drive that afternoon with Albertine,

if the sketch is not too old, it may happen that we return to it and make of it a work wholly different, and possibly more important than the one we had originally planned.

decided to send a carriage for Mme de Stermaria.

but I gave the driver a note for her in which I asked whether she would mind my coming to call for her.

I hesitated for a moment before looking to see what Mme de Stermaria had written,

“Am so sorry—am unfortunately prevented from dining with you this evening on the island in the Bois.

just as a student, who has just been failed by the examiners, tries to answer one question more.

What added to my despair at not seeing Mme de Stermaria

she had presumably never given it a second thought.

who had presumably made her forget my invitation.

Now my disappointment, my rage, my desperate desire to recapture her

I began to sob.

“May I come in?

I came to see whether you would care to come out and dine somewhere,

but at the moment when I had ceased to feel in my heart any reason for happiness, Saint-Loup’s arrival was like a sudden apparition of kindness, gaiety, life,

We set off together to dine,

I thought of Doncières,

which was not in the hotel where Saint-Loup dined but in another, far humbler,

where the waiting was done by the landlady and one of her servants.

Besides, Robert was not to be dining at the ho...

before there was revealed to me that invisible vocation of which this work is the history.

we relive our past years not in their continuous sequence,

there was a good deal of fog outside,

it had grown steadily thicker.

the spinning door,