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

by Marcel Proust

So it began to seem that what the being which had now been resuscitated in me three or four times had just enjoyed might well have been fragments of existence which had escaped from time, but that the contemplation of them, while a contemplation of eternity, was itself fugitive. And yet I felt that the pleasure it had brought to my life, albeit at rare intervals, was the only one that was both real and fertile. The sign of the unreality of the others is surely shown clearly enough, either by the impossibility of their satisfying us, as for instance in the case of social pleasures, which at best result in discomfort caused by the ingestion of awful food, or friendship, which is a fiction because the artist who, for whatever reason, gives up an hour of work to spend an hour chatting with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist (friends being friends only within the ambit of that mild eccentricity which accompanies our lives, and which we acquiesce in, but which in our heart of hearts we know is like the wanderings of a madman who believes the furniture is alive and talks to it), or else by the sadness which follows their satisfaction, as with the sadness I felt on the day when I had been introduced to Albertine, for the trouble I had gone to, slight though it was, in order to obtain something—the acquaintance of a young girl—which seemed a slight thing only because I had obtained it. Even a more profound pleasure, like the one I shou...

But even when it came down to images of an altogether different kind, those of memory, I knew that the beauty of Balbec was something I had never experienced when I was there, and that the beauty it left me with, the beauty of memory, was something I was unable to discover when I went back there to stay for a second time.

For the truths that the intellect grasps directly as giving access to the world of full enlightenment have something less profound, less necessary about them than those that life has, despite ourselves, communicated in an impression, a material impression because it enters us through our senses, but one from which it is also possible to extract something spiritual.

So in each case, whether we are dealing with impressions such as that made on me by the sight of the steeples of Martinville, or recollections like that of the unevenness of the two steps or the taste of the madeleine, I had to try to interpret the sensations as the signs of so many laws and ideas, at the same time as trying to think, that is to draw out from the penumbra what I had felt, and convert it into a spiritual equivalent. And what was this method, which seemed to me to be the only one, but the making of a work of art?

As for the inner book of unknown signs (signs which seemed to stand out, as it were, in relief, and which my attention, exploring my unconscious, cast around for, stumbled over, and traced the shapes of, like a diver feeling his way underwater), for the reading of which nobody else could provide me with any rules, reading them becomes one of those acts of creation in which nobody can take our place or even collaborate with us. So many people are discouraged from writing because of this! There are almost no tasks they will not take on in order to avoid it.

For instinct shows us the work we have to do and intelligence provides the pretexts for evading it. Excuses have absolutely no place in art, mere intentions do not count for anything, the artist has to listen to his instinct all the time, with the result that art is the most real thing there is, the most austere school of life, and the true Last Judgment. That book, the most painful of all to decipher, is also the only one dictated to us by reality, the only one whose “impression” has been made in us by reality itself. Whatever the ideas that may have been left in us by our life, their material outline, the trace of the impression they originally made on us, is always the indispensable warrant of their truth. The ideas formed by pure intelligence contain no more than a logical truth, a possible truth; their choice is arbitrary. The book whose characters are forged within us, rather than sketched by us, is the only book we have.

An impression is for the writer what an experiment is for the scientist, except that for the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes it, and for the writer it comes afterward. Anything we have not had to decipher, to bring to light by our own effort, anything which was already clearly visible, is not our own. The only things that come from ourselves are those we draw out of the obscurity within us, which can never be known by other people.

And, seeing how the memory of an old servant’s little bedroom suddenly added such a different and delightful stretch of time to my past life, I contrasted this with the utter absence of impressions left on my life by the most sumptuous celebrations in the most princely mansions.

The only slightly bad thing about this room of Eulalie’s was that in the evenings, because of the proximity of the viaduct, one heard the hooting of the trains. But because I knew that these bellowings proceeded from properly regulated machines, they did not frighten me in the way that I might have been frightened, in prehistoric times, by the cries of a nearby mammoth on its wild and unpredictable path.

So I had already come to the conclusion that we have no freedom at all in the face of the work of art, that we cannot shape it according to our wishes, but that as it pre-exists us, and both because it is necessary and hidden, and because it is, as it were, a law of nature, we have to discover it. But is not this discovery, which art can cause us to make, the discovery, fundamentally, of the thing that ought to be most precious to us, and of which we normally remain unaware forever, our true life, our reality as we have experienced it, which is often so different from what we believe it to be that we are filled with happiness when some chance event brings the real memory back to us? I found further support for this view in the falsity of so-called realist art, which...

But anyway, quite apart from their intellectual content, these theories seemed to me to indicate the inferiority of their supporters, in the same way that a really well brought-up child who hears the people with whom he has been taken to lunch saying: “We don’t hide anything here, we say whatever we think,” senses that this indicates a moral quality inferior to that inherent in good deeds, pure and simple, which do not need words. Real art has nothing to do with proclamations of this sort, and carries out its work in silence. Also, the people who indulged in this kind of theorizing used ready-made expressions which had a curious similarity to those of the idiots they were attacking. Indeed it may well be that quality of language is a better gauge of the level of moral or intellectual endeavor than aesthetic approach. Conversely, though, this quality of language (and the laws of character can be equally well studied in a frivolous subject and in a serious one, just as an anatomist can as easily study the laws of anatomy on the body of an imbecile as on that of a man of talent, the great moral laws, as much as those of the circulation of the blood or renal filtration, differing very little with the intellectual level of the individual), which the theoreticians think they can do without, those who admire the theoreticians believe simplistically that it shows no great intellectual worth, worth which they need, if they are to discern it, to see expressed directly and which they...

The reality to be expressed resided, I now realized, not in the subject’s appearance but at a depth where appearance hardly matters, as in the case of its symbolization by the sound of the spoon on a plate, or the starched stiffness of the napkin, which had been more valuable for my spiritual renewal than any number of humanitarian, patriotic, internationalist or metaphysical conversations.

For all those who do not have an artistic sense, by which I mean the submission to an interior reality, may still be endowed with the capacity to argue about art till the cows come home. And to the extent that they are also diplomats or financiers, deeply involved in the “realities” of the present time, they are all the more willing to believe that literature is just a form of intellectual amusement destined to be gradually eliminated. Some even wanted the novel to be a sort of cinematographic stream of things. This was an absurd idea. Nothing sets us further apart from what we have really perceived than that sort of cinematographic approach.

So this book which my mother had read aloud to me in Combray until it was almost morning had retained for me all the wonder of that night. It is true that the “pen” of George Sand, to use an expression of Brichot’s, who was so fond of saying that a book had been written “with a nimble pen,” did not at all seem to me, as it had seemed so long ago to my mother before she slowly began to model her literary tastes on mine, a magical pen. But it was a pen which, without meaning to, I had charged with electricity, as schoolboys often do for fun, and now a thousand insignificant details from Combray, unglimpsed for a very long time, came tumbling helter-skelter of their own accord to hang from the magnetized nib in an endless, flickering line of memories.

Some mystery-loving minds maintain that objects retain something of the eyes that have looked at them, that we can see monuments and pictures only through an almost tangible veil woven over them through the centuries by the love and contemplation of so many admirers. This fantasy would become truth if they transposed it into the realm of the only reality each person knows, into the domain of their own sensitivity. Yes, in that sense and that sense only (but it is much the more important one), a thing which we have looked at long ago, if we see it again, brings back to us, along with our original gaze, all the images which that gaze contained. This is because things—a book in its red binding, like the rest—at the moment we notice them, turn within us into something immaterial, akin to all the preoccupations or sensations we have at that particular time, and mingle indissolubly with them. Some name, read long ago in a book, contains among its syllables the strong wind and bright sunlight of the day when we were reading it. Thus the sort of literature which is content to “describe things,” to provide nothing more of them than a miserable list of lines and surfaces, despite calling itself realist, is the furthest away from reality, the most impoverishing and depressing, because it unceremoniously cuts all communication between our present self and the past, the essence of which is retained in things, and the future, where things prompt us to enjoy it afresh. It is this that an...

More than that, a thing which we saw at a certain time in our lives, a book which we read, does not remain forever a part solely of what there was around us; it remains just as faithfully part of what we then were, and can be re-experienced, re-thought, only by the sensibility, the thought processes, the person that we then were; if in the library I take down François le Champi, a child immediately rises up within me and takes my place, the only one who has the right to read the title François le Champi and who reads it as he read it then, with the same impressio...

I say each thing that we see again, because books in this respect behave as things; the way a book opened along the spine, the texture of the paper, may have retained within it as vivid a memory of the way I imagined Venice then, and of my wish to go there, as the book’s actual sentences. More vivid even, for words sometimes get in the way, like those photographs of a person, looking at which one remembers him less well than if one had been content just to think about him. Certainly with many of the books of my childhood, even, sadly, some by Bergotte himself, if I happen to pick them up some evening when I am feeling tired, I do so only as I might take a train, in the hope of finding some repose by looking at different things and breathing the atmosphere of times past. But it sometimes happens that this sought-for evocation is hindered by prolonged reading of the book. There is, for instance, one of Bergotte’s books (the copy of which in the Prince’s library bore a dedication that was fawning and platitudinous in the extreme), which I read one winter day when I was unable to see Gilberte, in which I can never manage to find the phrases I used to love so much. Certain words almost make me believe that I’ve found them again, but it’s impossible. Where could the beauty be that I used to find in them? Yet from the volume itself, the snow that covered the Champs-Élysées on the day I read it has not been removed: I can see it still.

As for individual copies of books, I could have been interested in them, too, in a living sense. The first edition of a work would have been more precious to me than the others, but by that I would have meant the edition in which I had read it for the first time. I would look for the original editions, by which I mean those from which I had received an original impression of the book. Because subsequent impressions are not original. In the case of novels, I would collect old-fashioned bindings, the ones from the period when I read my first novels and which so often would have heard Papa telling me to “Sit up straight!” Like the dress a woman was wearing when we saw her for the first time, they would help me to rediscover the love I had then, the beauty over which I have superimposed too many decreasingly loved images in my attempt to rediscover the first one, I who am not the I who saw it and who must give way to the I that I was then, if it calls up the thing it knew and that my I of today does not recognize at all.

And yet even to open these books read long ago just to look at the pictures which did not adorn them then would still seem so dangerous that, even in this sense, the only one I could understand, I would not be tempted to be a bibliophile. I know all too well how easily these images left by the mind are effaced by the mind. For the old ones they substitute new ones which do not have the same power of resurrection.

The idea of a popular art, like that of a patriotic art, seemed to me, if indeed not dangerous, certainly laughable. If it was a question of making it accessible to the people, by sacrificing the refinements of form, “only good for the idle rich,” I had spent enough time among society people to know that they are the real illiterates, not the electrical workers.

An hour is not just an hour, it is a vessel full of perfumes, sounds, plans and atmospheres.

I slowly became aware that the essential book, the only true book, was not something the writer needs to invent, in the usual sense of the word, so much as to translate, because it already exists within each of us. The writer’s task and duty are those of a translator.

Very many people, therefore, leave it at that, extracting nothing from their impressions, growing old useless and unsatisfied, like celibates at the shrine of art! They have the bitterness that goes with virginity and indolence, but which in those instances can be cured by pregnancy or work. They get more excited by works of art than real artists do, because their excitement, not being for them the result of hard introspective investigation, bursts outward, overheats their conversation and makes them go red in the face. They think they are accomplishing something by shouting “Bravo, bravo” at the tops of their voices after the performance of a work they enjoy. But these demonstrations do not force them to clarify the nature of their enjoyment, and they remain unaware of it. Yet, untapped, it overflows even into their calmest conversations, makes them make grand gestures, and grimace and toss their heads whenever they talk about art. “I went to this concert. I must say it didn’t do anything for me. Then they started playing the quartet. Lord, what a difference!” (At this point, the music lover’s face expresses anxious concern, as if he was thinking: “I can see sparks, there’s a smell of burning, something must be on fire.”) “Damn it all, what I heard was exasperating, it’s badly written, but it’s astounding, though, mind you, it wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea.” The look is also accompanied by a worried tone of voice, head on one side, more gesticulation, the whole absurd...

New battles of words take place in every decade (for the kaleidoscope is not only made up of fashionable groupings, but also of social, political and religious ideas which become widespread for a short while thanks to their refraction among ordinary people, but which are nonetheless still subject to the brief lifespan of ideas whose novelty has been able to seduce only those minds which do not require strict standards of proof). So one school or party had followed another, always winning adherents among the same minds, men with a limited amount of intelligence, always liable to become caught up with things which other minds, more scrupulous and more difficult to convince, keep away from. Unfortunately, precisely because the former are only half-minds, they need to supplement themselves by doing things, so they are more active than the better minds, and attract crowds of followers, and create around them not only exaggerated reputations and unjustified contempt, but civil and foreign wars, which a little Port-Royalist[85] self-criticism might have prevented.

The greatness of true art, on the other hand, the sort of art that M. de Norpois would have called dilettante amusement, lies in rediscovering, grasping hold of, and making us recognize this reality, distant as it is from our daily lives, and growing more and more distant as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes denser and more impermeable, this reality which we run a real risk of dying without having known, and which is quite simply our life. Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as in the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it. And so their past is cluttered with countless photographic negatives, which continue to be useless because their intellect has never “developed” them. Our lives; and the lives of other people, too; because style for a writer, like color for a painter, is a question not of technique but of vision. It is the revelation, which would be impossible by direct or conscious means, of the qualitative difference in the ways we perceive the world, a difference which, if there were no art, would remain the eternal secret of each individual. It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon. Than...

This labor of the artist, this attempt to see something different beneath the material, beneath experience, beneath words, is the exact inverse of that which is accomplished within us from minute to minute, as we live our lives heedless of ourselves, by vanity, passion, intellect and habit, when they overlay our true impressions, so as to hide them from us completely, with the repertoire of words, and the practical aims, which we wrongly call life. To put it briefly, this art, complicated though it be, is actually the only art that is alive. It alone can express for others, and make us see for ourselves, our own lives, lives which are unable to keep a watch on themselves, and whose visible manifestations, such as they are, need to be translated and frequently to be read against the grain and painstakingly deciphered. The work carried out by our vanity, our passion, our imitative faculties, our abstract intelligence, our habits, is the work that art undoes, making us follow a contrary path, in a return to the depths where whatever has really existed lies unrecognized within us.

But I also realized that the suffering I had first known because of Gilberte, that our love does not belong to the creature who inspires it, is salutary. To a lesser extent as a means to an end (because, short as our life may be, it is only during suffering that our thoughts, in a sense shaken up by endless and shifting impulses, elevate, as in a storm, to a level at which it becomes visible, all that regulated immensity, which we, stationed at a badly placed window, do not normally see, because the calm of happiness leaves it smooth and at too low a level;

Most of all, I would eliminate all words which come from the tongue rather than the mind, humorous remarks of the sort we make in conversation and which after a long conversation with other people we continue to address artificially to ourselves and which fill our minds with untruths, these purely automatic remarks which, in the writer who sinks so far as to transcribe them, are accompanied by the little smile, the little grimace which constantly spoils, for example, the spoken sentence of a Sainte-Beuve, whereas true books must be the product not of daylight and chitchat but of darkness and silence. And as art exactly reconstructs life, an atmosphere of poetry will always hover around the truths that one has reached in oneself, a gentle sense of mystery which is merely the remains of the semi-darkness we have had to pass through, the indication, as precisely marked as on an altimeter, of the depth of a work.

As for the truths which the intellect—even of the finest minds—gathers in the open, in front of it, in broad daylight, their value may be very great; but their outlines are starker and they are featureless, without any depth, because no depths had to be negotiated in order to reach them, because they have not been re-created. It is often the case that writers in whose deeps those mysterious truths no longer appear write, after a certain age, only with their intelligence, which becomes increasingly powerful; because of this, the books of their mature years have greater power than those of their youth, but none of the same aura of sweetness.

The whole art of living is to use the people who make us suffer simply as steps enabling us to obtain access to their divine form and thus joyfully to people our lives with divinities.

Then, less dazzling no doubt than the one which had shown me that the work of art was the only means of finding Lost Time again, a new light dawned on me. And I understood that all these raw materials for a literary work were actually my past life; I understood that they had come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in idleness, in tenderness, in sorrow, that they had been stored up by me without my divining their ultimate purpose, even their survival, any more than a seed does as it lays up a reserve of all the nutrients which will feed the plant. Like the seed, I would be able to die when the plant had developed, and I began to see that I had lived for its sake without knowing it, without ever having realized that there should be some contact between my life and the books I had wanted to write and for which, when I used to sit down at my table, I could not find a subject. So all my life up to that day could, and at the same time could not, have been summed up under the title: A Vocation. It could not have been, in the sense that literature had not played any role in my life. It could have been, to the extent that this life, the memories of its times of sadness, its times of joy, formed a reserve comparable to that of the albumen stored in the ovule of a plant and from which it draws the nourishment it needs to transform itself into a seed, before anybody is aware that the embryo of a plant is developing, despite the fact that it is the site of secret but very active chemical a...

The only things he remembers are the general. It was by tones of voice like these, by such facial movements, even if seen in his earliest childhood, that the life of others was represented in his mind, and when later he comes to write, he will describe a common movement of the shoulders, as realistically as if it had been written in an anatomist’s note-book, but in order here to express a psychological truth, and then onto those shoulders graft somebody else’s neck movement, each person having contributed his momentary pose.

A man born sensitive but with no imagination might nonetheless write admirable novels.

The stupidest people manifest by their gestures, their comments, their involuntarily expressed feelings, laws of which they are unaware but which the artist manages to catch in them. Because of observations of this sort, the writer is commonly thought to be malicious, wrongly so, because in an idiosyncrasy the artist sees a beautiful generality and no more holds it against the person observed than a surgeon would dismiss someone for suffering from a common circulation disorder; indeed, he is less likely than anyone to make fun of people’s foibles.

All those people who had revealed truths to me, and who now were no longer living, appeared to me to have lived lives which had profited only myself, and to have died for my benefit.

As for happiness, almost its only useful quality is to make unhappiness possible.

Years of happiness are years wasted, waiting for a bout of suffering to make one work.

And it was perhaps also because of the extraordinary tricks it plays with Time that the Dream fascinated me. Had I not often seen in one night, in one minute of one night, remote periods of time, consigned to those vast distances at which we can no longer distinguish the feelings we had then, rushing to overwhelm us, blinding us with their clarity, as if they were giant airplanes rather than the pale stars we believed them to be, bringing back before our eyes everything they had ever held for us, giving us the emotion, the shock, the clarity of their immediate proximity, only to resume, the moment we awake, the distance they had miraculously overcome, to the point of making us believe, wrongly in fact, that they are one of the means of finding Lost Time again?

In short, when I thought about it, the raw material of my experience, which was to be the raw material of my book, came to me from Swann, and not merely because of everything that concerned him and Gilberte. It was also he who, ever since the Combray days, had given me the wish to go to Balbec, where without that my parents would never have thought of sending me, and without which I would never have known Albertine, or even the Guermantes, since my grandmother would not have rediscovered Mme de Villeparisis nor I have made the acquaintance of Saint-Loup and M. de Charlus, who had introduced me to the Duchesse de Guermantes, and through her, her cousin, the result of which was that my very presence at this moment in the house of the Prince de Guermantes, where the idea for my work had just suddenly come to me (which meant that I owed Swann not just the material but the decision, too), also came to me from Swann. Rather a slender stem, perhaps, to support in this way the whole span of my life (the “Guermantes way” thus being seen to derive from the “way by Swann’s”). But this source of the different aspects of our life is frequently a person much inferior to Swann, somebody of complete insignificance.

If Swann had not talked to me about Balbec, I would not have known Albertine, the dining-room in the hotel, the Guermantes. But I would have gone somewhere else, met different people, and my memory, like my books, would be full of quite other pictures which I cannot even imagine, and the novelty of which, in its unfamiliarity, is appealing enough to make me regret not having gone in that direction instead, and regret too that Albertine and the beach at Balbec and Rivebelle and the Guermantes had not remained forever unknown to me.

I was about to try to remember the passages in Baudelaire at the heart of which there is this sort of transposed sensation, in order finally to establish a place for myself in such a noble tradition, and thereby to give myself the assurance that the work which I no longer had the slightest hesitation in undertaking was worth the effort I was going to devote to it, when having arrived at the foot of the staircase leading down from the library, I found myself suddenly in the great drawing-room and in the midst of a party which was going to seem very different from any I had been present at before, and for me was going to take an unusual turn and assume a new meaning.

“As for you, she went on, you don’t ever change. Yes, she told me, you’re astonishing, you always look so young,” a saddening remark, because, however we may look, it only means anything if we have in fact grown old.

And now it dawned upon me what old age was—old age, which of all realities is perhaps the one we continue longest to think of in purely abstract terms, looking at calendars, dating our letters, seeing our friends marry, and then our friends’ children, without understanding, whether out of fear or laziness, what it all means, until the day when we see a silhouette we do not recognize, like that of M. d’Argencourt, which makes us realize that we are living in a new world; until the day when the grandson of one of our friends, a young man whom we instinctively treat as an equal, smiles as if we were making fun of him, as to him we have always seemed like a grandfather; now I understood the meaning of death, loves, the pleasures of the mind, the use of suffering, a vocation, etc. For while names had lost their individuality for me, words were yielding up their full meaning. The beauty of images lies behind things, the beauty of ideas in front of them. So that the former cease to impress us when we reach them, whereas we have to go beyond the latter in order to understand them.

As for the old men whose features had changed, they still tried to keep permanently fixed on their faces one of those fleeting expressions one adopts for a second in front of a camera in an attempt either to make the most of one’s best features or else to compensate for some defect; they looked rather as if they had finally become immutable snapshots of themselves.

One knows that there are no two mouths alike in Paris, and each one of this group demanded my recognition, even at this party where I did not recognize anybody else. And on top of that, they did not really look as if they had aged. Old age is something human; they were monsters, and they no more seemed to have “changed” than whales do.

The mere presence of this monocle on Bloch’s face exempted people, first of all, from wondering whether or not he was good-looking, just like looking over some English things in a shop which the assistant has said “are the latest thing,” after which one does not dare wonder whether one actually likes it. Also he was able to take up a position behind the glass of the monocle where he was as aloof, distant and comfortable as if it had been the glass window of an elegant, well-sprung carriage, and his other features, in keeping with the flattened hair and the monocle, never expressed anything now at all.

It is in vain that we know that the years pass, that youth gives way to age, that the most solid of thrones and fortunes crumble, that fame is ephemeral, the manner by which we become aware, and so to speak take a snapshot of this moving universe, swept along by Time, contradictorily, immobilizes it. With the result that we see as still young the people whom we knew when they were young, while those who were old when we met them we retrospectively adorn in the past with the virtues of old age, that we trust unreservedly in the credit of a millionaire and in the support of a sovereign, understanding rationally, but not actually believing, that they may tomorrow be fugitives, stripped of power.

More than one of the individuals assembled at this afternoon party, or whose memory was evoked by it, by making me remember the aspects he or she had in turn presented to me through the different, or opposite, circumstances from which they had, one after the other, arisen before me, caused the varied aspects of my life to emerge in my mind’s eye, the differences of perspective, just as a feature in the landscape, a chateau or a hill, appearing sometimes on the right, sometimes on the left, seems first to look down over a forest, then to emerge from a valley, and thereby reveals to the traveler the changes of direction and the differences in altitude along the road he is following.

Just as a bucket being hauled up on a pulley swings around and knocks into the rope here and there on different sides, there was no character with a place in my life, and hardly even any things, that had not in their turn played different roles. A simple social relationship, even a material object, if I rediscovered it in my memory after a few years, I saw that life had gone on weaving different threads around it which eventually became dense enough to form that inimitable, lovely, velvety bloom on the years, like the accretion which in old parks shrouds a simple water pipe in a sheath of emerald. It was not only the appearance of these characters that made one think of them as people in a dream. They themselves were finding that life, already drowsy in youth and in love, had become more and more of a dream. They had even forgotten their resentments and their hatreds, and in order to be certain that it was the person now in front of them with whom they had not been on speaking terms ten years ago, they would have had to consult a register, which, however, would have been just as vague as a dream in which one had been insulted, without it being clear by whom. All these dreams helped to shape the contradictory appearances of political life, with men who had accused each other of murder or treason being members of the same government. And the dream became as murky as death in some old men on the days after those on which they had made love. On those days, there was no point i...

Nor are the memories we all have of one another, even in love, the same. I had known Albertine recall in extraordinary detail some remark I had made to her at one of our first meetings, and which I had completely forgotten. Yet of another incident, permanently settled deep in my mind like a pebble, she would have no memory at all. Our parallel lives seemed like those garden walks where, at regularly positioned intervals, tubs of flowers are placed symmetrically but never opposite each other.