Finding Time Again: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 7 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Marcel Proust

A woman whom we love seldom satisfies all our needs, and we deceive her with a woman we do not love.

On the other hand, the state of ill-health which was about to confine me to a sanatorium also seemed less regrettable, if the fine things spoken of in books were no finer than those I had seen myself.

Just as a geometrician, stripping things of their physical qualities, sees only their linear substratum, so what people said escaped me, because what interested me was not what they wanted to say, but the manner in which they said it, in so far as this revealed their character or their absurdities; or, rather, the object that had always been the aim of my researches, because it gave me a specific pleasure, was the point that was common to one being and another. It was only when I glimpsed this that my intelligence—thitherto sleeping, even behind the apparent alertness of my conversation, the animation of which masked from the others a complete intellectual torpor—set out joyously in pursuit, but what it was then pursuing—for example, the identity of the Verdurin salon in different places and at different times—was situated at a somewhat deeper point, beyond appearances themselves, in a zone set slightly further back. Thus the visible, reproducible charm of individuals escaped me, because I did not have the ability to dwell on it, like a surgeon who will see, beneath the sleek surface of a woman’s belly, the internal disease which is gnawing at it. However often I dined out, I did not see the other guests, because when I thought I was looking at them, I was in fact radiographing them. It followed from this that, by combining all the observations I had been able to make of the guests at a dinner, the pattern of the lines I had traced formed a cluster of psychological laws in...

How many times, as I was well aware even without the Goncourt pages reminding me of it, have I remained incapable of bestowing my attention on things or people that subsequently, once their image had been presented to me in solitude by an artist, I would have traveled miles, risked death, to encounter again! Only then had my imagination started to work, begun to paint. And of something which a year before had made me yawn, I would say to myself anxiously, contemplating it in advance, desiring it: “Will it really be impossible to see it? What I wouldn’t give to be able to!”

When one reads articles about people, even just society people, described as “the last representatives of a world to which no witness any longer exists,” one may of course exclaim: “To think that they should speak so generously and so fulsomely about such an insignificant person! That is what I should so have regretted not having known, if I had only read the newspapers and magazines and not met the man!” But I was tempted instead, reading such pages in the newspapers, to think: “What a pity that—when I was solely preoccupied with my next meeting with Gilberte or Albertine—I did not pay more attention to this gentleman! I took him for a society bore, a stuffed shirt, but he was a major figure!”

The pages of Goncourt that I read made me regret this tendency. For it may be that I might have inferred from them that life teaches us to diminish the value of what we read, and shows us that the things which the writer commends to us were never worth very much; yet I might equally well have come to the opposite conclusion, that reading teaches us to place a higher value on life, a value which w...

even if it were the writer of the memoir who was wrong, that would prove nothing against the value of the life that produced such genius. (After all, what man of genius has not adopted the irritating conversational mannerisms of the artists of his set, before achieving, as did Elstir, and as happens all too rarely, a higher level of taste? Are not Balzac’s letters, for instance, strewn with vulgar turns of phrase which Swann would have died a thousand deaths rather than employ? And yet in all probability Swann, discriminating as he was, so free of every dislikable absurdity, would have been incapable of writing La Cousine Bette or Le Curé de Tours.)

What was perhaps more unsettling were the cases in between, were those people of whom what is said implies that there was more to them than simply a memory that could retain a revealing anecdote, yet without allowing one, as one has with the Vinteuils, the Bergottes, the recourse of judging them on their work, as they have not created any: they have merely—to the great astonishment of us, who found them so ordinary—inspired it.

because for things to seem new, even if they are old, indeed even if they are actually new, there must in art, as in medicine, as in fashionable society, be new names.

Nobody even remembered that he had been a Dreyfusard, partly because people in society are inattentive and forgetful, also because it had all been a very long time ago, a time which people affected to believe was even longer ago, as one of the most fashionable ideas was the claim that the prewar period was separated from the war by something as deep, something seemingly as long-lasting, as a geological period, and Brichot himself, the great nationalist, whenever he made allusion to the Dreyfus case, would say: “In those prehistoric times.”

(Truth to tell, this profound change brought about by the war was in inverse ratio to the quality of the minds affected by it, at least above a certain level. Right at the bottom of the scale the utterly foolish, the pure pleasure-seekers, took no notice of the fact that there was a war on. But at the top end, too, those who have made for themselves an environing interior life have little regard for the importance of events. What profoundly modifies the pattern of their thoughts is much more likely to be something that seems quite unimportant in itself but which reverses their experience of the order of time by making them contemporaneous with another period of their life.

M. Bontemps was unwilling to hear any talk of peace before Germany had been reduced to the same fragmented state as in the Middle Ages, the fall of the House of Hohenzollern pronounced, and Kaiser Wilhelm put up before a firing squad. In a word, he was what Brichot called a “diehard,” the highest warrant of good-citizenship that could be conferred upon him.

It was also noticeable that, as the number of socially glittering people making advances to Mme Verdurin increased, so the number of those she called “bores” diminished. By a sort of magical transformation, every “bore” who came to pay a visit and solicited an invitation instantly became somebody charming and intelligent. In short, by the end of a year the number of bores was proportionately so far reduced that “the fear of being unbearably bored,” which had occupied such a considerable place in Mme Verdurin’s conversation and played such a large part in her life, had almost entirely disappeared.

taking the same pleasure in saying “bowler-hatted”: for with duchesses—in the eyes of commoners with a little poetry in their hearts—it is only the name that sets them apart; they actually express themselves in ways that are typical of the category of minds to which they belong, the membership of which is overwhelmingly middle-class. Classes of the mind have nothing at all to do with birth.

By dinnertime the restaurants were full; and if passing in the street I saw a poor soldier, home on leave, having had six days’ escape from the constant risk of death, and now ready to set off back to the trenches, allow his eyes to rest for a moment on the lighted windows, I suffered as I had in the hotel at Balbec when fishermen had watched us eating, yet this time the pain was greater because I knew that the misery of the soldier is worse than that of the poor, as it combines every variety of misery, and even more touching because it is more resigned and nobler, and because it was with a philosophical shake of the head, without hatred, that, ready to set off back to the war, he would say, as he saw the shirkers rushing to grab their tables: “You’d never know there was a war on here.”

Then at half past nine, even though nobody had yet had time to finish eating, all the lights were abruptly turned off because of the police regulations, and the new rush of shirkers snatching their overcoats from the attendants, in that restaurant where I had dined with Saint-Loup one evening when he was on leave, took place at 9:35 in a mysterious semi-darkness, as of a room during a magic-lantern show, or of the film-projection hall of one of the cinemas to which the men and women diners would soon be hurrying. But after that time, for those who, like me, on the evening I am talking about, had stayed at home to dine and were then going out to see friends, Paris was, at least in certain quarters, even darker than the Combray of my childhood; when people went to call on each other, it felt like a visit to a neighbor in the country.

On rare days such as these the houses were all completely dark. But in the spring, on the other hand, every now and then, in defiance of police regulations, a private town house, or just one floor of a house, or even just one room of one floor, not having closed its shutters, appeared, as if independently supported by the impalpable darkness, like a projection of pure light, like an apparition without substance. And the woman whom, lifting up one’s eyes, one could make out in that gilded shadow, took on, in this night in which one was lost and in which she too seemed cloistered, the veiled and mysterious charm of an Oriental vision. Then one walked on, and nothing else interrupted the monotonous tramp of one’s constitutional in the rustic darkness.

Although Bloch had given us some extreme anti-militarist declarations of faith once he had been passed “fit,” he had earlier, when he thought he would be rejected because of his short sight, made the most chauvinistic declarations. Saint-Loup would have been incapable of making any statement of that sort, principally because of a kind of moral delicacy that prevents the expression of sentiments which are so deeply rooted that they seem a part of one’s nature. There was a time when my mother would not only not have hesitated for a moment to die for my grandmother but would have suffered terribly if anybody had prevented her from doing so. Nevertheless it is impossible for me retrospectively to imagine her uttering a sentence like: “I would lay down my life for my mother.” Equally unspoken was Robert’s love of France;

Among really serious and intelligent workers, there is a certain aversion toward those who advertise what they do by turning it into fine words. We had not been at the Lycée or at the Sorbonne together, but we did separately follow courses given by some of the same lecturers (and I remember Saint-Loup’s smile) who, when they gave a particularly noteworthy course, as some of them did, tried to make themselves look like men of genius by giving an ambitious name to their theories. Whenever we talked about this Robert would laugh out loud. Naturally, our instinctive predilection was not for the Cottards or the Brichots, but we did have a certain respect for the men who had a thorough knowledge of Greek or medicine but did not believe themselves thereby entitled to behave like charlatans.

As a result of this mixture of pride and humility, of acquired intellectual curiosity and innate authority, M. de Charlus and Saint-Loup, by different paths, and with opposite opinions, had become, a generation apart, intellectuals interested in every new idea and talkers whom no interruption could silence. The result of which was that people with more commonplace minds tended to find them both, depending on the situation, either dazzling or a complete bore.

All the time I was recollecting Saint-Loup’s visit, I had been walking and had come far out of my way; I was almost at the Pont des Invalides. The lamps, of which there were only a few (because of the Gothas),[42] had been lighted, slightly too early because the “time change”[43] had been made slightly too early, when the night still came fairly quickly, but had been fixed then for the whole of the summer (just as heating-stoves are lit or turned off from a certain date) and, above the nocturnally illuminated city, in a whole section of the sky—the sky which was unaware of summertime and wintertime, and which did not deign to know that half past eight had become half past nine—in a whole section of the bluish sky the day still lingered. Across all that part of the city dominated by the towers of the Trocadéro, the sky looked like a vast turquoise-colored sea on the ebb, disclosing a whole slender line of black rocks, which might even perhaps have been a row of simple fishing nets, but which were really small clouds. Sea for that moment colored turquoise, and carrying all mankind, unawares, away with it, swept up by the immense revolution of the earth, that earth on which they are mad enough to continue their own revolutions, and their pointless wars, like the one that was at that moment steeping France in blood. Then as I continued to gaze at the lazy and impossibly beautiful sky, which regarded it as beneath its dignity to change its time-table and above the illuminated c...

People thought him “prewar,” old-fashioned, because the very people who are least capable of assessing merit are the ones who, in order to classify people, are quickest to follow the dictates of fashion. They have not exhausted, not even skimmed the surface of the men of merit in one generation, and suddenly they have to condemn them all en bloc, because now there is a new generation, with its new label, which they will not understand any better than the last.

For all this, life continued almost unchanged for plenty of the characters who have figured in this narrative, not least for M. de Charlus and the Verdurins, just as if the Germans were not in fact so close to them, the permanent presence of a threat of danger, even if temporarily checked, leaving us completely indifferent as long as we do not think about it. People generally go about their pleasures without ever thinking that, if the moderating and etiolating influences should ever stop, the proliferation of infusoria would reach its maximum, that is, in the space of a few days would make a leap of many millions of miles, would change from occupying a cubic millimeter to become a mass a million times bigger than the sun, at the same time destroying all the oxygen and the other substances by which we live, and that there would no longer be any humanity, or animals or earth; and also without imagining that an irremediable and entirely probable catastrophe may be induced in the ether by the incessant and frenetic activity normally hidden by the apparent immutability of the sun: they carry on with their own affairs without giving a thought to those two worlds, the one too small, the other too big for them to perceive the cosmic dangers that hover all around us.

So the Verdurins continued to give dinners (then after a little while, Mme Verdurin gave them on her own, for M. Verdurin died shortly afterward) and M. de Charlus went about his pleasures, never dreaming that the Germans—albeit immobilized by a bloody yet constantly replenished barrier—were an hour by car from Paris. The Verdurins must have thought about it, one would have imagined, as they held a political salon at which people every evening discussed the situation not only of the army but of the fleet as well. And they did, it is true, think about the hecatombs of regiments annihilated and passengers swallowed by the sea; but a reciprocal process both so far multiplies whatever concerns our own well-being, and divides by such a formidable number whatever does not concern us, that the death of millions of unknown people hardly troubles us, and we find it scarcely as disagreeable as a cold draft. Mme Verdurin, suffering from migraines again now that there were no more croissants to dip in her coffee, had finally obtained an order from Cottard allowing her to have them made for her at a certain restaurant we have spoken about. This had been almost as hard to obtain from the authorities as the appointment of a general. She received the first of these croissants on the morning when the newspapers reported the wreck of the Lusitania. As she dipped it in her coffee, and flicked her newspaper with one hand so that it would stay open without her having to remove her other hand f...

Brainwashing is a term that makes no sense. If the French had been told that they were going to be beaten, no one Frenchman would have been in despair any more than if he had been told he was going to be killed by a Big Bertha. The real brainwashing is what we tell ourselves because of hope, which is one form of the instinct of national self-preservation, if we are really a living member of the nation. The best way to remain blind to what was unjust in the cause of the Germany-individual and to be aware at every moment of what was just in the cause of the France-individual was not for a German to have no judgment and for a Frenchman to possess it, the best way for both was to be patriotic.

in all countries most of the people are silly;

In such situations we feel sorry for the people we do not know, those whom we imagine, rather than those who are close to us in the vulgarity of everyday life, unless we are completely the same as them and form one flesh with them; that is the miracle of patriotism, which makes one take the side of one’s country just as one takes one’s own side in a quarrel between lovers.

because life disappoints us so often that we end up by believing that literature has no connection with it, and so we are amazed to see the precious ideas which we have found in books on display, without fear of getting spoiled, gratuitously, naturally, in the midst of everyday life, amazed, for instance, to find that a dinner and a murder occurring in Russia should have anything Russian about them.

“I do not wish to speak ill of the Americans, monsieur, he continued, it seems that they are inexhaustibly generous and, as there has not been a conductor in this war, and each performer has joined in long after the last, and the Americans have come in when we are almost finished, they may have an enthusiasm which four years of war have somewhat dulled in us. Even before the war they exhibited a love for our country and our art, and paid high prices for our masterpieces. Many of them are now in their country. But this deracinated art, as M. Barrès would call it,[59] is precisely the opposite of what used to make up the exquisite charm of France. The chateau explained the church, which itself, because it had been a site of pilgrimage, explained the chanson de geste.

He had developed the habit of almost shouting some of the things he said, out of excitability, out of his attempt to find outlets for impressions of which he needed—never having cultivated any of the arts—to unburden himself, as an aviator looses his bombs, if necessary in open country, in places where his words affected nobody, especially in society, where they fell equally randomly and where he was listened to out of snobbery or dependence, and, so much did he tyrannize his audience, one may say under obligation and even out of fear. On the boulevards this harangue was also a mark of his contempt for passers-by, for whom he no more lowered his voice than he would have moved out of their way. But it was out of place there, caused surprise, and above all rendered audible to the people who turned around remarks which might have had us taken for defeatists. I commented on this to M. de Charlus but succeeded only in arousing his mirth. “That would be very funny, you must admit, he said. After all, he added, one never knows, we all run the risk every evening of being an item in the next day’s news. Is there really any reason why I should not end up shot in the moat at Vincennes? After all, that is what happened to my great-uncle, the Duc d’Enghien.[65] The thirst for noble blood maddens a certain kind of rabble, and in that they are more discriminating than lions are. You know that for those animals it would take no more than a scratch on her nose for them to leap onto Mme Ver...

In this Paris, whose almost defenseless beauty, in 1914, I had seen awaiting the threat of the approaching enemy, there was, certainly, now as then, the ancient, unchanged splendor of a moon cruelly and mysteriously serene which poured over the still intact monuments the useless beauty of its light, but as in 1914, and to a greater extent than in 1914, there was also something else, different lights, intermittent beams which, whether they came from airplanes or from the searchlights on the Eiffel Tower, one knew to be directed by an intelligent will, by a friendly vigilance which gave one the same kind of feeling, inspired the same sort of thankfulness and calm as I had experienced in Saint-Loup’s room, in the cell of that military cloister where so many eager-hearted and disciplined young men were in training for the day when, unhesitatingly and in the prime of their youth, they would consummate their sacrifice.

How can one be afraid of cannon fire when one is convinced that it is not going to hit one that day? Anyway, isolated thoughts about bombs being thrown, or about the possibility of death, added nothing tragic to the image I had formed of the passing German airships, until, from one of them, buffeted by winds and partly hidden from my gaze by the billowing mists of a troubled sky, from an airplane which, even though I knew it was murderous, I still imagined only to be stellar and heavenly, I had seen, one evening, the gesture of a bomb dropped down toward us. For the true reality of a danger is perceived only in that new thing, irreducible to what one already knows, which we call an impression and which is often, as in this instance, summed up in a line, a line describing an intention, a line which contains the latent potentiality of its distorting fulfillment, while on the Pont de la Concorde, all around the menacing, hunted airplane, as if they were reflections in the clouds of the fountains of the Champs-Élysées, the Place de la Concorde and the Tuileries, the luminous water-jets of the searchlights curved across the sky, in lines equally full of intention, of the far-sighted and protective intentions of wise and powerful men to whom I was grateful, as I had been one night in the army quarters in Doncières, that they were prepared to use their might to watch over us with such beautiful precision.

The horror that grand people have for the snobs who strive so hard to make their acquaintance is also felt by masculine men for inverts, and by women for every man who is too much in love with them.

This After all, what does it matter? was a very good example of that wonderful language, so different from the one we normally speak, in which emotion deflects what we wanted to say and in its place brings into being a quite different phrase, which emerges from an unknown lake where all these expressions live that are unrelated to thought but which for precisely that reason reveal what we are thinking.

It was that very rare thing, almost unheard of in France, a rotten priest.

Our own epoch, to anybody who reads its history in two thousand years’ time, will probably seem just as guilty of immersing certain pure and tender consciences in settings which then will look monstrously pernicious, but to which they managed to adapt themselves.

Françoise, if I spoke to her about a church in Milan—a town to which she would probably never go—or the cathedral at Reims—or even just the one at Arras!—which she would not be able to see since it had been more or less destroyed, would express her envy of the rich who could afford to go and look at such treasures, and exclaim, with nostalgic regret: “Ah! how beautiful that must have been!” even though she, who had lived in Paris for so many years, had never had the curiosity to go and look at Notre-Dame. The reason for this, though, was because Notre-Dame was so much a part of Paris, of the town in which the everyday life of Françoise took place, and in which it was difficult for our old servant—as it would have been for me if the study of architecture had not in certain respects corrected in me the instincts of Combray—to situate the objects of her dreams.

And what a great expanse of sea had been hidden away in that most painful, jealous and seemingly most individual love of mine, for Albertine!

Who can ever say what enduring and unconscious dream lies beneath the desire that is re-awakened by every glimpse of a woman on horseback, a dream as unconscious and mysterious as is, for example, to someone who has suffered all his life from severe asthma, the influence of a certain town, in appearance just like any other town, where for the first time he is able to breathe easily?)

And then, the war having given conversational currency among the working class to a quantity of terms which they had come across only visually, from reading newspapers, and consequently did not know how to pronounce, the butler added: “I don’t know how everyone can be so stupid . . . Look at this, Françoise, they’re preparing a new attack using more battle-lions than ever before.” Unable to contain myself, if not in the name of pity for Françoise and strategic good sense, at least in the name of grammar, I told him that the proper pronunciation was “battalions,” but achieved nothing except to make him repeat the terrible phrase to Françoise every time I entered the kitchen, for the butler, almost as much as he enjoyed frightening his companion, enjoyed showing his master that, although he had once been a gardener at Combray and was still only a butler, he was nonetheless a good Frenchman according to the rule of Saint-André-des-Champs, and that the Declaration of the Rights of Man gave him a perfect independent right to pronounce it “battle-lion” if he wanted to, and not to let himself be ordered about on a matter that had nothing to do with his service, and on which consequently, since the Revolution, nobody had a right to say anything to him, as he was my equal. So I had the irritation of hearing him talk to Françoise about an operation using many “battle-lions” with an emphasis which was meant to show me that this pronunciation was the effect not of ignorance but of a m...

And the fact that I had really seen him so seldom, in such diverse settings, in such different circumstances and at such long intervals, in that hall in Balbec, in the café at Rivebelle, in the cavalry barracks and at the military dinners at Doncières, at the theater when he slapped the journalist, in the house of the Princesse de Guermantes, all this meant only that I had a sharper, more vivid picture of his life, and a clearer sense of grief at his death, than often one has for people more dearly loved but so regularly seen that the image we retain of them is no more than a sort of vague composite of an infinite number of subtly different images, where also, our affections being fully gratified, we do not have, as we may with those we have seen only for brief moments, in the course of meetings inconclusive despite the wishes of both parties, the illusion of the possibility of a greater affection thwarted only by circumstance.

Yet by consoling myself with the thought that social observation might come to take the place of vanished inspiration, I knew that I was just trying to find some consolation, and that I knew myself to be worthless. If I truly had the soul of an artist, what pleasure should I not experience at the sight of this screen of trees lit by the setting sun, these little flowers on the embankment that reached almost up to the carriage step, whose petals I could count, and whose colors I was careful not to describe, as so many good men of letters would, for could one hope to transmit to the reader a pleasure one has not felt oneself?

Materially, nothing was different; but I suddenly felt the elimination of those external obstacles because in fact I was no longer having to make the effort of adaptation or attention which we make, without even being aware of it, when we come across something new: the streets through which I was now passing were those, forgotten for so long, through which I had walked with Françoise on the way to the Champs-Élysées. The ground knew of its own accord where it had to lead; its resistance was overcome. And, like an aviator, who has up to that point traveled laboriously along the ground, suddenly “taking off,” I rose up slowly toward the silent heights of memory. In Paris, these streets will always stand out for me, as if made of a different material from the rest. When I reached the corner of the rue Royale, where once had stood the open-air vendor of the photographs of which Françoise had been so fond, I felt that the cab, carried forward by so many hundreds of previous turnings, would be unable to resist turning of its own accord. I was not passing through the same streets as those who were out walking along them that day, but instead moving through a shifting past, sad and gentle. Yet it was composed of so many different pasts that it was hard to define what was causing my feeling of melancholy, whether it was due to those walks on the way to see Gilberte, simultaneously fearful that she would not come, or to the proximity of a certain house to which I had been told that ...

Yet continuing to speak to me about the past, probably as much as anything else to show me that he had not lost his memory, he evoked it in a funereal manner, yet without any sadness. He enumerated at endless length all the members of his family or his social circle who were no longer alive, less, it seemed, with any sadness that they were no longer with us than with a sense of satisfaction at surviving them. Recalling their demise seemed to make him more aware of his own return to health. It was with an almost triumphal severity that he repeated monotonously, with his slight stammer and a faintly sepulchral resonance: “Hannibal de Bréauté, dead! Antoine de Mouchy, dead! Charles Swann, dead! Adalbert de Montmorency, dead! Boson de Talleyrand, dead! Sosthène de Doudeauville, dead!” and, every time, the word “dead” seemed to fall on the deceased man like a spadeful of earth, each one heavier than the last, thrown down by a gravedigger trying to pin them more securely in their graves.

Turning over the dismal thoughts which I have just set down, I had entered the Guermantes’ courtyard and in my distraction had failed to see an approaching car; at the chauffeur’s shout I had time only to step smartly aside, and as I retreated I could not help tripping up against the unevenly laid paving stones, behind which was a coach house. But at the moment when, regaining my balance, I set my foot down on a stone which was slightly lower than the one next to it, all my discouragement vanished in the face of the same happiness that, at different points in my life, had given me the sight of trees I had thought I recognized when I was taking a drive around Balbec, the sight of the steeples of Martinville, the taste of a madeleine dipped in herb tea, and all the other sensations I have spoken about, and which the last works of Vinteuil had seemed to me to synthesize. Just as at the moment when I tasted the madeleine, all uneasiness about the future and all intellectual doubt were gone. Those that had assailed me a moment earlier about the reality of my literary talent, even the reality of literature, were lifted as if by enchantment. Without my having started a new line of thought, or discovered a decisive argument, the difficulties which just now were insoluble had lost all their importance. This time, though, I had decided not to resign myself to not knowing the reason for it, as I had done on the day I tasted the madeleine dipped in herb tea. The happiness that I had j...

feeling of renewal if it had not already been breathed, for the only true paradise is a paradise that we have lost.

I slid rapidly over all that, being more imperiously required to seek out the cause of this happiness and the nature of the certainty with which it imposed itself, an inquiry I had hitherto postponed. And I began to divine this cause as I compared these varied impressions of well-being with each other, all of which, the sound of the spoon on the plate, the uneven flagstones, the taste of the madeleine, had something in common, which I was experiencing in the present moment and at the same time in a moment far away, so that the past was made to encroach upon the present and make me uncertain about which of the two I was in; the truth was that the being within me who was enjoying this impression was enjoying it because of something shared between a day in the past and the present moment, something extra-temporal, and this being appeared only when, through one of these moments of identity between the present and the past, it was able to find itself in the only milieu in which it could live and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say outside of time. This explained why my anxieties on the subject of my death had ceased the moment when I unconsciously recognized the taste of the little madeleine, since at that very moment the being that I had been was an extra-temporal being, and consequently unconcerned with the vicissitudes of the future. It lived only through the essence of things, and was unable to grasp this in the present, where, as the imagination does not come into ...

So many times in the course of my life reality had disappointed me because at the moment when I perceived it, my imagination, which was my only organ for the enjoyment of beauty, could not be applied to it, by virtue of the inevitable law which means that one can imagine only what is absent. But now all the consequences of that iron law had suddenly been neutralized, suspended, by a wonderful natural expedient, which had held out the prospect of a sensation—sound of a fork and a hammer, same book title, etc.—both in the past, which enabled my imagination to enjoy it, and in the present, where the actual shock to my senses of experiencing the sound, the touch of linen, etc., had added to the dreams of the imagination the thing which they were habitually deprived of, the idea of existence—and, thanks to this subterfuge, had allowed my being to obtain, to isolate, to immobilize—for the duration of a flash of lightning—the one thing it never apprehends: a little bit of time in its pure state.

The being which had been reborn in me when, with such a tremor of happiness, I had heard the sound common at once both to the spoon touching the plate and the hammer hitting the wheel, or felt the unevenness beneath my feet common to the stones of the Guermantes’ courtyard and St. Mark’s baptistery, etc., this spirit draws its nourishment only from the essence of things, and only in them does it find its sustenance and its delight. It languishes in the observation of the present where the senses cannot bring this to it, in the consideration of a past where the intelligence desiccates it, and in the expectation of a future which the will constructs out of fragments of the present and the past from which it extracts even more of their reality without retaining any more than is useful for the narrowly human, utilitarian ends that it assigns to them. Yet a single sound, a single scent, already heard or breathed long ago, may once again, both in the present and the past, be real without being present, ideal without being abstract, as soon as the permanent and habitually hidden essence of things is liberated, and our true self, which may sometimes have seemed to be long dead, but never was entirely, is re-awoken and re-animated when it receives the heavenly food that is brought to it. One minute freed from the order of time has re-created in us, in order to feel it, the man freed from the order of time. And because of that we can understand why he trusts his joy, and even if the...

The scenes played out by our voluntary memory, of course, can be prolonged, as they require no more effort on our part than leafing through a picture book. Long ago, for example, on the day when I had to go to the house of the Princesse de Guermantes for the first time, from the sun-filled courtyard of our house in Paris, I had idly gazed on images of my choice, of the place de l’Église in Combray, or the beach at Balbec, as if I had been leafing through an album of water-colors painted in the different places I had been to choose illustrations of each of these days, enabling me to say, with the selfish pleasure of a collector, as I cataloged the illustrations of my memory: “I’ve certainly seen some beautiful things in my life.” My memory probably then affirmed the difference between these sensations; but all it could do was to rearrange homogeneous elements in different ways. The same was not true of the three recollections I had just had and in which, instead of giving me a more flattering idea of my self, I had on the contrary almost doubted that self’s current reality. Just as on the day when I had dipped the madeleine in the warm herb tea, in the place where I happened to be, wherever that were, then in my bedroom in Paris, or today, at this moment, in the library of the Prince de Guermantes, or a little earlier in the courtyard of his hôtel, there had been within me, irradiating a small area around me, a sensation (taste of the soaked madeleine, the sound of metal, a...