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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In his monumental work, "In Search of Lost Time," Marcel Proust intricately weaves a narrative that transcends linear storytelling, utilizing a stream-of-consciousness style that captures the intricacies of memory and time. This complete collection, comprising seven volumes, delves into the dualities of love and loss, the passage of time, and the nuances of social interactions in early 20th-century France. Proust's masterful prose is rich with introspection and deeply philosophical musings, making it a quintessential modern classic that redefined literary boundaries and influenced generations of writers and thinkers alike. Marcel Proust, a French writer born into a wealthy Jewish family, was deeply affected by the complexities of societal norms and personal relationships, which are vividly reflected in his characters and their quests for meaning. Proust incorporated elements of his own life experiences, including his struggles with illness and his poignant reflections on love and art, making his exploration of memory both intensely personal and universally relatable. His distinctive narrative style emerged from extensive literary experimentation, positioning him as a pioneer in modernist literature. This complete collection is a must-read for anyone seeking to explore the intricate layers of human experience and the inexorable passage of time. Proust's profound insights and elegant prose invite readers to reflect on their own memories and the fleeting nature of existence, making this work an enduring classic that resonates with the complexities of life. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME - Complete 7 Book Collection (Modern Classics Series)
Table of Contents
Introduction
This Modern Classics Series volume presents the complete seven-volume novel sequence In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, published in French between 1913 and 1927, here gathered as a single, continuous reading experience. Conceived as an indivisible project, the cycle follows a reflective narrator across decades, places, and social circles to examine how lived time becomes remembered time. Bringing all seven books together restores the architecture Proust designed: motifs echo across volumes, characters reappear with altered light, and earlier scenes acquire new resonance. The aim of this edition is to offer readers the full scope of the work’s design and cumulative power.
The contents comprise a single work of long-form literary fiction often described as a roman-fleuve: one continuous novel published in seven parts. It is narrated in the first person and integrates multiple modes—narrative, social observation, and meditative criticism—within the fabric of the story. While the book contains passages that discuss painting, music, and literature with analytical rigor, these are not separate essays but elements of the novel’s voice and method. There are no plays, poems, or correspondence here; rather, a sustained narrative whose texture includes reflective digressions, descriptive set pieces, and scenes of conversation that together form a comprehensive fictional world.
At the heart of the sequence is an investigation of time and memory: how moments vanish, return, and alter when revisited by consciousness. Proust distinguishes between deliberate recollection and sudden, involuntary remembrance, treating memory not as a record but as a creative act that reshapes experience. The narrator’s search becomes a disciplined inquiry into how perception, habit, and desire veil or disclose the past. The work’s title signals its ambition—lost time is not merely measured time but the felt life we cannot command. The novel asks what kind of attention can recover that life and what art can do with it.
Equally central is the anatomy of society. The narrative moves from provincial households to urban salons and aristocratic drawing rooms, mapping the subtle hierarchies that govern inclusion and prestige. Proust tracks how reputations are made, how names gain or lose luster, and how conversation choreographs power. The comedy of manners is precise and often merciless, yet it is balanced by empathy for human frailty. Social life becomes a laboratory for perception: the same person appears different as perspectives shift, and received ideas prove stubbornly resilient. Through this patient scrutiny, the novel records a world in motion and the illusions that sustain it.
Love, jealousy, and desire provide the work’s most intimate theater. Proust examines attachment as a force that both creates and distorts value, revealing how longing binds itself to signs, rumors, and rituals of attention. He traces the mechanisms of suspicion and the ways imagination amplifies absence. The result is not a moral treatise but a phenomenology of feeling, attentive to the cycles of infatuation, boredom, and grief. The novel’s psychology remains compelling because it is unsimplified: motives are mixed, knowledge is partial, and self-understanding lags behind action. Across the volumes, the narrator learns how emotion reframes memory and memory reframes emotion.
Art and the vocation of the artist shape the sequence’s horizon. Musical, pictorial, and literary experiences punctuate the narrator’s development, each offering models for transmuting life into form. Proust explores how style arises from attention to particularity, how technique clarifies perception, and how works of art outlast the contingencies that produced them. Reflections on aesthetic experience are woven into scenes of daily life, suggesting that insight often arrives obliquely—through a melody remembered, a play of light, or the cadence of a sentence. The novel ultimately asks what kind of discipline and patience allow an individual to discover a personal method.
Stylistically, the work is marked by long, sinuous sentences, extended metaphor, and a supple syntax that can hold analysis and sensation together. Proust’s pages move with recursive attention: a detail is noticed, turned, and set within widening circles of association. Humor and irony thread the narrative, even in its most exacting passages, as do a dramatist’s instincts for scene and timing. The voice alternates between intimacy and distance, anchoring abstract reflection in concrete images. This distinctive cadence has made the novel a touchstone of modern prose, a demonstration of how the sentence itself can register the gradations of consciousness.
The seven volumes unfold as a life story that is not strictly linear but deliberately refractive. Early chapters dwell on childhood and the first awakenings of curiosity; later sections follow the narrator into new milieus where manners and language change with the company kept. Across the books, recurring places and faces form a constellation whose meanings adjust over time. What seems peripheral in one moment becomes central in another. Without relying on suspense in the usual sense, the cycle builds momentum through recognition: patterns ripen, memories accrue, and the reader experiences the slow revelation of a world studied from within.
Reading this work as a whole rewards sustained attention. Motifs recur—an architectural feature, a flower, a musical phrase—and their echoes carry interpretive weight. Characters reappear altered by circumstances and by the narrator’s revised understanding, inviting readers to reconsider first impressions. The prose encourages an unhurried pace, asking one to dwell in scenes rather than rush through them. Many find that the novel invites rereading, since later passages illuminate earlier ones and vice versa. In this complete collection, those resonances are immediate and audible, preserving the continuity that is essential to the experience Proust designed for his audience.
The setting spans the closing years of the nineteenth century into the transformations of the early twentieth, capturing shifts in fashion, technology, and public life as they refract through personal histories. Proust registers change less through event than through texture—how routines alter, how conversations acquire new preoccupations, and how social boundaries blur or harden. The novel’s attention to historical atmosphere enhances rather than dominates its themes. Time’s passage touches every level of the narrative, from the aging of faces to the revaluation of names. In showing how eras change what is thinkable and sayable, the book deepens its meditation on memory.
As a landmark of literary modernism, this sequence reshaped expectations of what the novel can do. Its fusion of psychological insight, social analysis, and aesthetic reflection has influenced readers, writers, and critics for generations. The book’s methods—precision of observation, recursive structure, and the elevation of everyday life to the level of art—continue to inform discussions of narrative and consciousness. That influence rests not on doctrine but on demonstration: the pages enact their arguments by the experience they create. Encountered in full, the work stands as both an artistic achievement and an enduring reference point in the study of narrative form.
Gathered here complete, the seven volumes invite immersion in a world whose subject is nothing less than the making of a self in time. This edition’s purpose is simple: to present the work as the continuous, interdependent design its author intended, so that readers may feel its cumulative force. Whether approached for its portrait of society, its analysis of love, or its inquiry into art and memory, the sequence offers a rare combination of intellectual rigor and sensuous detail. It endures because it clarifies experience without reducing it, allowing the reader to recognize life more exactly by seeing it anew.
Author Biography
Marcel Proust (1871–1922) was a French novelist, essayist, and critic whose seven-volume cycle In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) reshaped the modern novel. Writing from the Belle Époque into the post–First World War period, he fashioned a vast meditation on memory, time, desire, and art, set against the salons and drawing rooms of Paris and provincial France. His long, sinuous sentences and interior focus redirected narrative attention from external action to the movements of consciousness. Blending psychological acuity with social satire and reflections on music, painting, and literature, Proust became a central figure of high modernism and an enduring touchstone in world literature.
Raised in Paris and prone to severe asthma from childhood, Proust navigated education and early work amid fragile health. He attended the Lycée Condorcet and later studied law and literature at the University of Paris, while immersing himself in literary and artistic circles. In the late 1880s he completed military service, then briefly held a civil-service post in a library before devoting himself more fully to writing. Early journalism, salon culture, and keen observation of manners honed his sense of social nuance. The aesthetics of Symbolism and contemporary painting, along with philosophical debates circulating in Paris, shaped his developing artistic outlook.
Proust published Les Plaisirs et les Jours in the mid‑1890s, a collection of stories, poems, and pastiches that revealed refined style but attracted mixed reviews. He then undertook significant translation projects, rendering into French two works by John Ruskin, The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies, with extensive notes that deepened his thinking about art, perception, and moral attention. He contributed essays and society pieces to newspapers, including Le Figaro, gaining experience in portraiture and tone. Publicly supporting the Dreyfusard cause during the late 1890s, he witnessed the fault lines of French society, an experience that inflected his later depictions of class, prejudice, and institutional power.
Before his masterpiece, Proust explored large-scale fiction in Jean Santeuil, an ambitious but unfinished narrative published posthumously. He also drafted the critical-essay project Contre Sainte‑Beuve, challenging biographical criticism and arguing that the deepest self of the writer emerges in the act of creation, not in social life. These experiments crystallized into the architecture of In Search of Lost Time, which fuses narrative, essay, and reflection through the workings of involuntary memory. Increasingly reclusive for reasons of health and concentration, Proust wrote at night, revising obsessively, and famously lined his bedroom with cork to keep out noise while he pursued a novel that would absorb nearly all his remaining years.
Publication proved arduous. The first volume, Swann’s Way, was rejected by several publishers before appearing in 1913 with Grasset, at the author’s expense. The war slowed progress, but a shift to the Nouvelle Revue Française/Gallimard followed, accompanied by a notable change of heart from earlier skeptics. The second volume, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, won the Prix Goncourt in 1919, bringing wider recognition. Subsequent parts—The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah—appeared in the early 1920s. The remaining volumes, The Prisoner, The Fugitive (also known as Albertine Disparue), and Time Regained, were published after his death from the extensive drafts he left behind.
In Search of Lost Time is narrated by a reflective voice tracing the emergence of an artistic vocation while scrutinizing memory’s sudden illuminations and time’s relentless erosion. The cycle anatomizes elite and provincial milieus, observing snobbery, political shifts, and cultural fashions with irony and sympathy. Music, painting, and literary debate—epitomized by the fictional composer Vinteuil—frame an inquiry into how art redeems experience. Proust’s treatment of desire and jealousy is searching, including frank attention to same‑sex desire and secrecy as social realities. His famously extended sentences, intricate metaphors, and recursive structure build a cumulative rhythm that rewards slow reading without depending on conventional plot surprises.
Proust’s later years were marked by fragile health, nocturnal work, and relentless revision aimed at harmonizing the cycle’s parts. He died in 1922, leaving the final volumes to be prepared from his manuscripts, a process that sparked continuing editorial discussions but preserved the work’s overarching design. His influence radiated across twentieth‑century literature and criticism, shaping conceptions of narrative time, interiority, and the novel’s relation to memory and art. Writers and thinkers from multiple traditions have engaged his methods and insights. Today, new translations, annotated editions, and interdisciplinary scholarship sustain his presence, while readers continue to discover a work that reframes how a life can be remembered and told.
Historical Context
Composed and published between 1913 and 1927, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time traverses the Belle Époque, the Dreyfus years, and the First World War. The seven parts—Swann’s Way (Du Côté de Chez Swann, 1913), Within a Budding Grove (À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 1919), The Guermantes Way (Le Côté de Guermantes, 1920–1921), Cities of the Plain (Sodome et Gomorrhe, 1921–1922), The Captive (La Prisonnière, 1923), The Sweet Cheat Gone (Albertine Disparue, 1925), and Time Regained (Le Temps Retrouvé, 1927)—were drafted by Proust (1871–1922) largely in Paris. Their world is the Third Republic’s, with its salons, scandals, technological upheavals, and eventual wartime rupture. They intertwine private recollection with public history, so that shifts in class, taste, and politics become the very texture of memory.
Parisian high society under the Third Republic (founded 1870) forms a decisive background. The Faubourg Saint‑Germain’s hereditary aristocracy mingled uneasily with wealthy bourgeois dynasties created by banking, railways, and colonial commerce. Proust frequented salons hosted by Geneviève Straus, the Comtesse Greffulhe, and the Comtesse de Chevigné, listening as artists, politicians, and princes practiced a code of wit, coded slights, and ritualized exclusions. The Ritz (opened 1898) and the Jockey Club acted as stages for display and stratification. This milieu supplied types, idioms, and rituals that recur across the cycle: titles, invitations, social evenings, and the invisible boundaries that govern who is seen, and how.
Another constant horizon is the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906), which polarized France along lines of class, religion, and ideology. The wrongful conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, Zola’s “J’Accuse…!” (1898), the Rennes retrial (1899), and the final rehabilitation (1906) divided salons and newspapers. Proust, whose mother Jeanne Weil was from an Alsatian Jewish family, publicly supported Dreyfus and gathered signatures in 1898. Anti‑Semitism, social opportunism, and moral courage are threaded throughout the fiction, not as thesis but as atmosphere: the small betrayals at dinner tables, the coded remarks at soirées, the reputational risks for hosts and guests. The Affair reshaped reputations and alliances that the novels anatomize.
The Belle Époque’s modern conveniences and displays of power frame journeys, courtships, and delays. The Expositions Universelles of 1889 and 1900 (with the Eiffel Tower and the Paris Métro’s debut) celebrated electrification, telephones, elevators, and steel. Automobiles and faster trains altered leisure, enabling seasonal migration to seaside resorts such as Cabourg on the Norman coast, the model for Balbec. Telegraphs and telephones accelerate gossip and miscommunication; electric light changes interiors, faces, and evenings. These inventions do not merely decorate scenes: they organize tempo, create new forms of waiting and pursuit, and make time measurable and disorienting, an objective counterpoint to memory’s elastic durations.
The cycle is saturated with the period’s arts. Impressionist and post‑Impressionist painting (Monet’s serial cathedrals; Whistler’s tonalities) reshaped ideas of perception and atmosphere; Symbolism reframed interiority and suggestion. Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) and the cult of Wagner haunted musical salons Proust attended with Reynaldo Hahn, his close friend. The actress Sarah Bernhardt’s star system, the Goncourt brothers’ diaries, and the vogue for Japanese prints shaped taste and talk. Proust translated Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens (1904) and Sesame and Lilies (1906), sharpening his sense of Gothic form, piety, and looking. These currents inform the fictional artist figures and the narrator’s apprenticeship.
Proust wrote amid new sciences of mind and habit. Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1896) and Creative Evolution (1907)—Bergson was related to Proust by marriage—popularized durée, the layered time of consciousness. At the Salpêtrière, Jean‑Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet studied hysteria, memory, and automatism, shaping public idioms of the psyche. Hypnosis, suggestion, neurasthenia, and fatigue entered everyday explanation. Without becoming doctrine, these ideas offered metaphors and problems: how memory returns unbidden; how habit dulls perception; how the self is discontinuous across situations. The books elaborate a poetics of involuntary memory that is inseparable from this broader fin‑de‑siècle fascination with inner life.
The work’s publication history is itself a document of French literary institutions. In 1912 the Nouvelle Revue Française, guided by André Gide, rejected the manuscript; in 1913 Proust paid Grasset to publish Swann’s Way. During war disruptions, Gide reversed himself, and Gallimard’s NRF took over the series. Within a Budding Grove appeared in 1919 and won the Prix Goncourt, establishing the project’s authority. The Guermantes Way followed in 1920–1921, Sodom and Gomorrah in 1921–1922. Proust died in Paris on 18 November 1922; The Captive (1923), The Sweet Cheat Gone (1925), and Time Regained (1927) were edited for publication from his dense, revised drafts.
Settings condense real geographies into composite places. Illiers in Eure‑et‑Loir, near Chartres, inspired “Combray”; in 1971, for Proust’s centenary, it officially became Illiers‑Combray. Cabourg, where Proust stayed repeatedly at the Grand Hôtel between 1907 and 1914, informs “Balbec,” a resort watched through ocean weather and seasonal society. Venice, which Proust visited in 1900, and certain Paris arrondissements provide touchstones for art, ritual, and labyrinth. The rail lines that link Paris to Normandy and the enclosed circuits of the grands boulevards trace the novel’s motion: departures and returns, promenades and detours, all shaped by the era’s infrastructure and its social checkpoints.
French Jews had been emancipated since 1791, yet the Third Republic’s elite culture oscillated between liberal rhetoric and exclusionary practice. Banking dynasties such as the Rothschilds flourished; universities and the professions opened, but salons and the army could be hostile. Proust’s father, Adrien Proust, was a Catholic physician; his mother, Jeanne Weil, came from an Alsatian Jewish family. The household’s hybrid milieu sharpened his ear for prejudice, passing, and courtesy. The Dreyfus years made the costs visible: invitations rescinded, careers stalled, allegiances policed. Across the cycle, Jewishness is not a thesis but a social fact whose pressure organizes friendships, marriages, and conversational evasions.
Questions of desire and secrecy unfold against a legal and medical background. Male homosexual acts were not criminalized in France after 1791, yet social stigma, police surveillance of “public scandal,” and the threat of blackmail persisted. Sexologists coined new taxonomies of “inversion”; gossip circulated in salons and clubs. Proust’s own life intersected these risks: in 1897 he fought a duel with the decadent writer Jean Lorrain over insinuations about his friendships, and his bond with composer Reynaldo Hahn informed his understanding of discretion. The novels render clandestine networks, jealousies, and codes of recognition as part of the era’s broader management of appearances.
The First World War reorders the cycle’s world. Mobilization in 1914 emptied salons, transformed hotels into hospitals, and brought rationing and mourning to Paris. Zeppelins and the long‑range “Paris Gun” shelled the capital in 1918; refugees arrived from the north and east. Aristocratic families sent sons to officers’ schools; women organized aid and staffed medical services. Proust, too ill and too old for combat, wrote at night in shuttered rooms, noting how uniforms and decorations refashion reputations. The war accelerates the displacement already underway since 1870: old titles lose currency, financiers gain influence, and the map of loyalty is rewritten by absence and loss.
Health, diagnosis, and treatment shape everyday choices in the narrative because they did so in Proust’s life. Adrien Proust (1834–1903), professor of hygiene and a specialist in cholera and quarantine, exemplified the era’s public‑health ambition. Marcel suffered severe asthma from childhood, organizing days around attacks, drafts, and remedies. In his late years he cork‑lined his bedroom to dampen noise and wrote through the night, sleeping by day. The medicalization of fatigue, nerves, and digestion provided a shared language for characters, while clinics, sanatoria, and specialists formed new circuits of authority. Physicians, patients, and regimens become social actors whose pronouncements alter marriages and itineraries.
The built environment registers modernity’s promise and menace. Haussmann’s boulevards had remade Paris earlier, but the fin‑de‑siècle added Art Nouveau’s organic curves—Hector Guimard’s Métro entrances (from 1900)—and a cult of the grand hotel, notably the Ritz and Cabourg’s seaside palace. The 1900 Exposition bequeathed the Grand and Petit Palais, monuments to display and spectacle. Against these ephemeral shows stand cathedrals, whose endurance and iconography Proust studied through John Ruskin’s work, which he translated in 1904 and 1906. Gothic portals, stained glass, and chapels offer a counter‑tempo to seasonal fashion, an architecture of memory that anchors the novels’ reflections on time.
Third Republic politics supplied a constant murmur: the Boulanger crisis (1888–1889), the Panama scandals (1892–1893), the law of 1905 separating Church and State, and nationalist leagues like Action Française (founded 1899) intensified polemic. Parliamentary crises, ministerial reshuffles, and press campaigns crisscrossed dinner tables. Proust, not a militant, nonetheless watched how political talk functioned as a social test—who dared speak, who hedged, who sent anonymous letters. The novels chart how careers depended on combinations of birth, patronage, and newspaper reputation. Scandal worked like fashion: contagious, tiring, and revealing, circulating through the same networks that organized invitations, theatricals, charities, and country‑house weekends.
The period’s media ecology underpins voice and scene. Proust contributed society pieces to Le Figaro, honing an ear for conversational nuance and the choreography of appearances. Letter‑writing, calling cards, and the post regulated approach; the telephone, increasingly common after 1900, introduced urgency and misconnection. The Comédie‑Française, private theatricals, and touring stars such as Sarah Bernhardt made acting part of social life; rehearsals and first nights functioned as auditions for belonging. Journalism amplified the Goncourt Prize’s power (which crowned Proust in 1919), and gossip columns shaped reputations. The cycle steals the tempo of these circuits, turning their evanescence into the very fabric of narrative.
New media changed how time could be stored and replayed. Studio photography and cartes de visite fixed faces for exchange; Nadar’s portraits canonized celebrity. The phonograph and gramophone brought voices and songs into parlors; early cinema, after the Lumière screenings of 1895, offered ghostly repetitions. France standardized legal time in 1911 and adopted daylight saving in 1916, adding bureaucratic overlays to daily rhythm. Timetables, watches, and schedules ordered movement while throwing subjective time into relief. Proust’s poetics of involuntary memory, with its sudden returns, constantly negotiates this background of mechanical repetition, asking what human meaning survives the empire of clocks and copies.
The collection we read is also an editorial monument. After Proust’s death in 1922 at 44 rue Hamelin, his brother Robert Proust, with Gallimard editors such as Jacques Rivière and later Jean Paulhan, prepared the last volumes from notebooks, typescripts, and annotated proofs. Titles like Cities of the Plain and The Sweet Cheat Gone follow C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s influential English translation (begun 1922), itself part of the work’s international canonization. Early readers—Gide, Cocteau, Mauriac—recognized a new scale for the modern novel. The postwar decades confirmed the sequence as a key document of the Belle Époque’s passage into catastrophe, and of art’s power to redeem time.
Synopsis (Selection)
SWANN'S WAY (Du Côté De Chez Swann)
The narrator recalls his childhood in Combray and the emergence of involuntary memory, introducing the social worlds that will shape his life. A parallel narrative follows Charles Swann’s obsessive affair with Odette and his integration into the Verdurins’ circle.
WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE (À L'ombre Des Jeunes Filles En Fleurs)
Charting adolescence and first loves, the narrator frequents Mme Swann’s milieu and travels to Balbec, becoming captivated by a group of girls, especially Albertine. The volume deepens social observation while tracing the awakening of desire.
THE GUERMANTES WAY (Le Côté De Guermantes)
After moving near the Guermantes, the narrator gains entry to aristocratic salons and fixates on the Duchesse de Guermantes. Public affairs and private upheavals reveal the fragility of status and the limits of idealization.
CITIES OF THE PLAIN (Sodome Et Gomorrhe)
The novel exposes hidden sexualities and social hypocrisies, notably through Baron de Charlus, while the narrator’s connection with Albertine intensifies. Alternating between seaside Balbec and Parisian salons, it scrutinizes desire, secrecy, and reputation.
THE CAPTIVE (La Prisonnière)
Keeping Albertine in his Paris apartment, the narrator’s jealousy and need for control create a claustrophobic routine. His attempts to decode her life only amplify uncertainty and obsession.
THE SWEET CHEAT GONE (Albertine Disparue)
In the wake of Albertine’s departure, the narrator confronts grief and the elusive nature of truth, pursuing fragments of her past and reconsidering their relationship. Travel and recollection gradually shift passion into perspective.
TIME REGAINED (Le Temps Retrouvé)
Amid wartime and postwar Paris, the narrator observes the transformations of society and friends while recognizing how memory reframes experience. He arrives at the resolve to write, discovering a method that gives meaning to the years portrayed.
IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME - Complete 7 Book Collection (Modern Classics Series)
SWANN'S WAY (Du Côté De Chez Swann)
"When the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past. . ."
TRANSLATOR'S DEDICATION
To E. J. C.
Here, Summer lingering, loiter I When I, with Summer, should be gone . . . Where only London lights the sky I go, and with me journeys "Swann"
Whose pages' dull, laborious woof Covers a warp of working-times, Of firelit nights beneath your roof And sunlit days beneath your limes,
While, both at once or each in turn, Sharp-tongued but smooth, like buttered knives, We pared with studied unconcern The problems of our private lives;
Those tiny problems, dense yet clear, Like ivory balls by Chinese craft, Pierced (where each hole absorbed a tear And rounded (where the assembly laughed).
Did all our laughter muffle pain, Our candour simulate pretence? Fear not. I shall not come again To tease you with indifference.
Yet I may gaze for Oakham spire Where London suns set, watery-pale, And dream, while tides of crimson fire Sweep, smoking, over Catmos vale.
C. K. S. M. Michaelmas 1921
Table of Contents
Overture
For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say "I'm going to sleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not disturb my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed.
I would ask myself what o'clock it could be; I could hear the whistling of trains, which, now nearer and now farther off, punctuating the distance like the note of a bird in a forest, shewed me in perspective the deserted countryside through which a traveller would be hurrying towards the nearest station: the path that he followed being fixed for ever in his memory by the general excitement due to being in a strange place, to doing unusual things, to the last words of conversation, to farewells exchanged beneath an unfamiliar lamp which echoed still in his ears amid the silence of the night; and to the delightful prospect of being once again at home.
I would lay my cheeks gently against the comfortable cheeks of my pillow, as plump and blooming as the cheeks of babyhood. Or I would strike a match to look at my watch. Nearly midnight. The hour when an invalid, who has been obliged to start on a journey and to sleep in a strange hotel, awakens in a moment of illness and sees with glad relief a streak of daylight shewing under his bedroom door. Oh, joy of joys! it is morning. The servants will be about in a minute: he can ring, and some one will come to look after him. The thought of being made comfortable gives him strength to endure his pain. He is certain he heard footsteps: they come nearer, and then die away. The ray of light beneath his door is extinguished. It is midnight; some one has turned out the gas; the last servant has gone to bed, and he must lie all night in agony with no one to bring him any help.
I would fall asleep, and often I would be awake again for short snatches only, just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wainscot, or to open my eyes to settle the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness, to savour, in an instantaneous flash of perception, the sleep which lay heavy upon the furniture, the room, the whole surroundings of which I formed but an insignificant part and whose unconsciousness I should very soon return to share. Or, perhaps, while I was asleep I had returned without the least effort to an earlier stage in my life, now for ever outgrown; and had come under the thrall of one of my childish terrors, such as that old terror of my great-uncle's pulling my curls, which was effectually dispelled on the day—the dawn of a new era to me—on which they were finally cropped from my head. I had forgotten that event during my sleep; I remembered it again immediately I had succeeded in making myself wake up to escape my great-uncle's fingers; still, as a measure of precaution, I would bury the whole of my head in the pillow before returning to the world of dreams.
Sometimes, too, just as Eve was created from a rib of Adam, so a woman would come into existence while I was sleeping, conceived from some strain in the position of my limbs. Formed by the appetite that I was on the point of gratifying, she it was, I imagined, who offered me that gratification. My body, conscious that its own warmth was permeating hers, would strive to become one with her, and I would awake. The rest of humanity seemed very remote in comparison with this woman whose company I had left but a moment ago: my cheek was still warm with her kiss, my body bent beneath the weight of hers. If, as would sometimes happen, she had the appearance of some woman whom I had known in waking hours, I would abandon myself altogether to the sole quest of her, like people who set out on a journey to see with their own eyes some city that they have always longed to visit, and imagine that they can taste in reality what has charmed their fancy. And then, gradually, the memory of her would dissolve and vanish, until I had forgotten the maiden of my dream.
When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth's surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks. Suppose that, towards morning, after a night of insomnia, sleep descends upon him while he is reading, in quite a different position from that in which he normally goes to sleep, he has only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back in its course, and, at the moment of waking, he will have no idea of the time, but will conclude that he has just gone to bed. Or suppose that he gets drowsy in some even more abnormal position; sitting in an armchair, say, after dinner: then the world will fall topsy-turvy from its orbit, the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and space, and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep months earlier and in some far distant country. But for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal's consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse and surmount centuries of civilisation, and out of a half-visualised succession of oil-lamps, followed by shirts with turned-down collars, would put together by degrees the component parts of my ego.
Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them. For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would make an effort to construe the form which its tiredness took as an orientation of its various members, so as to induce from that where the wall lay and the furniture stood, to piece together and to give a name to the house in which it must be living. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulder-blades offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept; while the unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirling madly through the darkness. And even before my brain, lingering in consideration of when things had happened and of what they had looked like, had collected sufficient impressions to enable it to identify the room, it, my body, would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where the doors were, how daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had found there when I awoke. The stiffened side underneath my body would, for instance, in trying to fix its position, imagine itself to be lying, face to the wall, in a big bed with a canopy; and at once I would say to myself, "Why, I must have gone to sleep after all, and Mamma never came to say good night!" for I was in the country with my grandfather, who died years ago; and my body, the side upon which I was lying, loyally preserving from the past an impression which my mind should never have forgotten, brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the night-light in its bowl of Bohemian glass, shaped like an urn and hung by chains from the ceiling, and the chimney-piece of Siena marble in my bedroom at Combray, in my great-aunt's house, in those far distant days which, at the moment of waking, seemed present without being clearly penned, but would become plainer in a little while when I was properly awake.
Then would come up the memory of a fresh position; the wall slid away in another direction; I was in my room in Mme. de Saint-Loup's house in the country; good heavens, it must be ten o'clock, they will have finished dinner! I must have overslept myself, in the little nap which I always take when I come in from my walk with Mme. de Saint-Loup, before dressing for the evening. For many years have now elapsed since the Combray days, when, coming in from the longest and latest walks, I would still be in time to see the reflection of the sunset glowing in the panes of my bedroom window. It is a very different kind of existence at Tansonville now with Mme. de Saint-Loup, and a different kind of pleasure that I now derive from taking walks only in the evenings, from visiting by moonlight the roads on which I used to play, as a child, in the sunshine; while the bedroom, in which I shall presently fall asleep instead of dressing for dinner, from afar off I can see it, as we return from our walk, with its lamp shining through the window, a solitary beacon in the night.
These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted for more than a few seconds; it often happened that, in my spell of uncertainty as to where I was, I did not distinguish the successive theories of which that uncertainty was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscope. But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper, all of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of birds building their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great cloak of snug and savoury air, shot with the glow of the logs which would break out again in flame: in a sort of alcove without walls, a cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature as gusts of air ran across them to strike freshly upon my face, from the corners of the room, or from parts near the window or far from the fireplace which had therefore remained cold—or rooms in summer, where I would delight to feel myself a part of the warm evening, where the moonlight striking upon the half-opened shutters would throw down to the foot of my bed its enchanted ladder; where I would fall asleep, as it might be in the open air, like a titmouse which the breeze keeps poised in the focus of a sunbeam—or sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful that I could never feel really unhappy, even on my first night in it: that room where the slender columns which lightly supported its ceiling would part, ever so gracefully, to indicate where the bed was and to keep it separate; sometimes again that little room with the high ceiling, hollowed in the form of a pyramid out of two separate storeys, and partly walled with mahogany, in which from the first moment my mind was drugged by the unfamiliar scent of flowering grasses, convinced of the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of a clock that chattered on at the top of its voice as though I were not there; while a strange and pitiless mirror with square feet, which stood across one corner of the room, cleared for itself a site I had not looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of vision: that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils sniffing uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling. Custom! that skilful but unhurrying manager who begins by torturing the mind for weeks on end with her provisional arrangements; whom the mind, for all that, is fortunate in discovering, for without the help of custom it would never contrive, by its own efforts, to make any room seem habitable.
Certainly I was now well awake; my body had turned about for the last time and the good angel of certainty had made all the surrounding objects stand still, had set me down under my bedclothes, in my bedroom, and had fixed, approximately in their right places in the uncertain light, my chest of drawers, my writing-table, my fireplace, the window overlooking the street, and both the doors. But it was no good my knowing that I was not in any of those houses of which, in the stupid moment of waking, if I had not caught sight exactly, I could still believe in their possible presence; for memory was now set in motion; as a rule I did not attempt to go to sleep again at once, but used to spend the greater part of the night recalling our life in the old days at Combray with my great-aunt, at Balbec, Paris, Doncières, Venice, and the rest; remembering again all the places and people that I had known, what I had actually seen of them, and what others had told me.
At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should have to go up to bed, and to lie there, unsleeping, far from my mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred. Some one had had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come: in the manner of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window. But my sorrows were only increased, because this change of lighting destroyed, as nothing else could have done, the customary impression I had formed of my room, thanks to which the room itself, but for the torture of having to go to bed in it, had become quite endurable. For now I no longer recognised it, and I became uneasy, as though I were in a room in some hotel or furnished lodging, in a place where I had just arrived, by train, for the first time.
Riding at a jerky trot, Golo, his mind filled with an infamous design, issued from the little three-cornered forest which dyed dark-green the slope of a convenient hill, and advanced by leaps and bounds towards the castle of poor Geneviève de Brabant. This castle was cut off short by a curved line which was in fact the circumference of one of the transparent ovals in the slides which were pushed into position through a slot in the lantern. It was only the wing of a castle, and in front of it stretched a moor on which Geneviève stood, lost in contemplation, wearing a blue girdle. The castle and the moor were yellow, but I could tell their colour without waiting to see them, for before the slides made their appearance the old-gold sonorous name of Brabant had given me an unmistakable clue. Golo stopped for a moment and listened sadly to the little speech read aloud by my great-aunt, which he seemed perfectly to understand, for he modified his attitude with a docility not devoid of a degree of majesty, so as to conform to the indications given in the text; then he rode away at the same jerky trot. And nothing could arrest his slow progress. If the lantern were moved I could still distinguish Golo's horse advancing across the window-curtains, swelling out with their curves and diving into their folds. The body of Golo himself, being of the same supernatural substance as his steed's, overcame all material obstacles—everything that seemed to bar his way—by taking each as it might be a skeleton and embodying it in himself: the door-handle, for instance, over which, adapting itself at once, would float invincibly his red cloak or his pale face, never losing its nobility or its melancholy, never shewing any sign of trouble at such a transubstantiation.
And, indeed, I found plenty of charm in these bright projections, which seemed to have come straight out of a Merovingian past, and to shed around me the reflections of such ancient history. But I cannot express the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until I thought no more of the room than of myself. The anaesthetic effect of custom being destroyed, I would begin to think and to feel very melancholy things. The door-handle of my room, which was different to me from all the other doorhandles in the world, inasmuch as it seemed to open of its own accord and without my having to turn it, so unconscious had its manipulation become; lo and behold, it was now an astral body for Golo. And as soon as the dinner-bell rang I would run down to the dining-room, where the big hanging lamp, ignorant of Golo and Bluebeard but well acquainted with my family and the dish of stewed beef, shed the same light as on every other evening; and I would fall into the arms of my mother, whom the misfortunes of Geneviève de Brabant had made all the dearer to me, just as the crimes of Golo had driven me to a more than ordinarily scrupulous examination of my own conscience.
But after dinner, alas, I was soon obliged to leave Mamma, who stayed talking with the others, in the garden if it was fine, or in the little parlour where everyone took shelter when it was wet. Everyone except my grandmother, who held that "It is a pity to shut oneself indoors in the country," and used to carry on endless discussions with my father on the very wettest days, because he would send me up to my room with a book instead of letting me stay out of doors. "That is not the way to make him strong and active," she would say sadly, "especially this little man, who needs all the strength and character that he can get." My father would shrug his shoulders and study the barometer, for he took an interest in meteorology, while my mother, keeping very quiet so as not to disturb him, looked at him with tender respect, but not too hard, not wishing to penetrate the mysteries of his superior mind. But my grandmother, in all weathers, even when the rain was coming down in torrents and Françoise had rushed indoors with the precious wicker armchairs, so that they should not get soaked—you would see my grandmother pacing the deserted garden, lashed by the storm, pushing back her grey hair in disorder so that her brows might be more free to imbibe the life-giving draughts of wind and rain. She would say, "At last one can breathe!" and would run up and down the soaking paths—too straight and symmetrical for her liking, owing to the want of any feeling for nature in the new gardener, whom my father had been asking all morning if the weather were going to improve—with her keen, jerky little step regulated by the various effects wrought upon her soul by the intoxication of the storm, the force of hygiene, the stupidity of my education and of symmetry in gardens, rather than by any anxiety (for that was quite unknown to her) to save her plum-coloured skirt from the spots of mud under which it would gradually disappear to a depth which always provided her maid with a fresh problem and filled her with fresh despair.
When these walks of my grandmother's took place after dinner there was one thing which never failed to bring her back to the house: that was if (at one of those points when the revolutions of her course brought her, moth-like, in sight of the lamp in the little parlour where the liqueurs were set out on the card-table) my great-aunt called out to her: "Bathilde! Come in and stop your husband from drinking brandy!" For, simply to tease her (she had brought so foreign a type of mind into my father's family that everyone made a joke of it), my great-aunt used to make my grandfather, who was forbidden liqueurs, take just a few drops. My poor grandmother would come in and beg and implore her husband not to taste the brandy; and he would become annoyed and swallow his few drops all the same, and she would go out again sad and discouraged, but still smiling, for she was so humble and so sweet that her gentleness towards others, and her continual subordination of herself and of her own troubles, appeared on her face blended in a smile which, unlike those seen on the majority of human faces, had no trace in it of irony, save for herself, while for all of us kisses seemed to spring from her eyes, which could not look upon those she loved without yearning to bestow upon them passionate caresses. The torments inflicted on her by my great-aunt, the sight of my grandmother's vain entreaties, of her in her weakness conquered before she began, but still making the futile endeavour to wean my grandfather from his liqueur-glass—all these were things of the sort to which, in later years, one can grow so well accustomed as to smile at them, to take the tormentor's side with a happy determination which deludes one into the belief that it is not, really, tormenting; but in those days they filled me with such horror that I longed to strike my great-aunt. And yet, as soon as I heard her "Bathilde! Come in and stop your husband from drinking brandy!" in my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see them; I ran up to the top of the house to cry by myself in a little room beside the schoolroom and beneath the roof, which smelt of orris-root, and was scented also by a wild currant-bush which had climbed up between the stones of the outer wall and thrust a flowering branch in through the half-opened window. Intended for a more special and a baser use, this room, from which, in the daytime, I could see as far as the keep of Roussainville-le-Pin, was for a long time my place of refuge, doubtless because it was the only room whose door I was allowed to lock, whenever my occupation was such as required an inviolable solitude; reading or dreaming, secret tears or paroxysms of desire. Alas! I little knew that my own lack of will-power, my delicate health, and the consequent uncertainty as to my future weighed far more heavily on my grandmother's mind than any little breach of the rules by her husband, during those endless perambulations, afternoon and evening, in which we used to see passing up and down, obliquely raised towards the heavens, her handsome face with its brown and wrinkled cheeks, which with age had acquired almost the purple hue of tilled fields in autumn, covered, if she were walking abroad, by a half-lifted veil, while upon them either the cold or some sad reflection invariably left the drying traces of an involuntary tear.
My sole consolation when I went upstairs for the night was that Mamma would come in and kiss me after I was in bed. But this good night lasted for so short a time: she went down again so soon that the moment in which I heard her climb the stairs, and then caught the sound of her garden dress of blue muslin, from which hung little tassels of plaited straw, rustling along the double-doored corridor, was for me a moment of the keenest sorrow. So much did I love that good night that I reached the stage of hoping that it would come as late as possible, so as to prolong the time of respite during which Mamma would not yet have appeared. Sometimes when, after kissing me, she opened the door to go, I longed to call her back, to say to her "Kiss me just once again," but I knew that then she would at once look displeased, for the concession which she made to my wretchedness and agitation in coming up to me with this kiss of peace always annoyed my father, who thought such ceremonies absurd, and she would have liked to try to induce me to outgrow the need, the custom of having her there at all, which was a very different thing from letting the custom grow up of my asking her for an additional kiss when she was already crossing the threshold. And to see her look displeased destroyed all the sense of tranquillity she had brought me a moment before, when she bent her loving face down over my bed, and held it out to me like a Host, for an act of Communion in which my lips might drink deeply the sense of her real presence, and with it the power to sleep. But those evenings on which Mamma stayed so short a time in my room were sweet indeed compared to those on which we had guests to dinner, and therefore she did not come at all. Our 'guests' were practically limited to M. Swann, who, apart from a few passing strangers, was almost the only person who ever came to the house at Combray, sometimes to a neighbourly dinner (but less frequently since his unfortunate marriage, as my family did not care to receive his wife) and sometimes after dinner, uninvited. On those evenings when, as we sat in front of the house beneath the big chestnut-tree and round the iron table, we heard, from the far end of the garden, not the large and noisy rattle which heralded and deafened as he approached with its ferruginous, interminable, frozen sound any member of the household who had put it out of action by coming in 'without ringing,' but the double peal—timid, oval, gilded—of the visitors' bell, everyone would at once exclaim "A visitor! Who in the world can it be?" but they knew quite well that it could only be M. Swann. My great-aunt, speaking in a loud voice, to set an example, in a tone which she endeavoured to make sound natural, would tell the others not to whisper so; that nothing could be more unpleasant for a stranger coming in, who would be led to think that people were saying things about him which he was not meant to hear; and then my grandmother would be sent out as a scout, always happy to find an excuse for an additional turn in the garden, which she would utilise to remove surreptitiously, as she passed, the stakes of a rose-tree or two, so as to make the roses look a little more natural, as a mother might run her hand through her boy's hair, after the barber had smoothed it down, to make it stick out properly round his head.
And there we would all stay, hanging on the words which would fall from my grandmother's lips when she brought us back her report of the enemy, as though there had been some uncertainty among a vast number of possible invaders, and then, soon after, my grandfather would say: "I can hear Swann's voice." And, indeed, one could tell him only by his voice, for it was difficult to make out his face with its arched nose and green eyes, under a high forehead fringed with fair, almost red hair, dressed in the Bressant style, because in the garden we used as little light as possible, so as not to attract mosquitoes: and I would slip away as though not going for anything in particular, to tell them to bring out the syrups; for my grandmother made a great point, thinking it 'nicer' of their not being allowed to seem anything out of the ordinary, which we kept for visitors only. Although a far younger man, M. Swann was very much attached to my grandfather, who had been an intimate friend, in his time, of Swann's father, an excellent but an eccentric man in whom the least little thing would, it seemed, often check the flow of his spirits and divert the current of his thoughts. Several times in the course of a year I would hear my grandfather tell at table the story, which never varied, of the behaviour of M. Swann the elder upon the death of his wife, by whose bedside he had watched day and night. My grandfather, who had not seen him for a long time, hastened to join him at the Swanns' family property on the outskirts of Combray, and managed to entice him for a moment, weeping profusely, out of the death-chamber, so that he should not be present when the body was laid in its coffin. They took a turn or two in the park, where there was a little sunshine. Suddenly M. Swann seized my grandfather by the arm and cried, "Oh, my dear old friend, how fortunate we are to be walking here together on such a charming day! Don't you see how pretty they are, all these trees—my hawthorns, and my new pond, on which you have never congratulated me? You look as glum as a night-cap. Don't you feel this little breeze? Ah! whatever you may say, it's good to be alive all the same, my dear Amédée!" And then, abruptly, the memory of his dead wife returned to him, and probably thinking it too complicated to inquire into how, at such a time, he could have allowed himself to be carried away by an impulse of happiness, he confined himself to a gesture which he habitually employed whenever any perplexing question came into his mind: that is, he passed his hand across his forehead, dried his eyes, and wiped his glasses. And he could never be consoled for the loss of his wife, but used to say to my grandfather, during the two years for which he survived her, "It's a funny thing, now; I very often think of my poor wife, but I cannot think of her very much at any one time." "Often, but a little at a time, like poor old Swann," became one of my grandfather's favourite phrases, which he would apply to all kinds of things. And I should have assumed that this father of Swann's had been a monster if my grandfather, whom I regarded as a better judge than myself, and whose word was my law and often led me in the long run to pardon offences which I should have been inclined to condemn, had not gone on to exclaim, "But, after all, he had a heart of gold."
