Swann's Way (Volume One, 1913)

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 to myself, "I'm falling asleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would wake me; I would try to put away the book which I imagined I was still holding, and blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn: it seemed to me that I myself was the subject of my book — a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V.

When I woke like this in the middle of the night, I did not know where I was, nor even, for a moment, who I was; I had only, in its first simplicity, the sense of existence, as it may quiver in the depths of an animal. Then memory came — not yet of the place where I was, but of several of the places where I had lived, and might be — to pull me out of the void. My body, too numb to move, tried to guess, from the shape of its tiredness, the position of its limbs, and so the direction of the wall and the place of the furniture; and the rooms I had slept in, one after another, went round me in the dark: my room at my great-aunt's at Combray, my room at Balbec by the sea, rooms in Paris, in Doncières, in Venice.

Combray. Of Combray, for many years, I remembered only one thing: the staircase that I had to climb, every evening, to go to bed — the drama of my going to bed. Combray was a little town near Chartres where we spent our Easter and summer holidays, in the house of my great-aunt, whose invalid daughter, my aunt Léonie, had not left her bedroom since her husband's death. In the evenings, after dinner, I had to go up to bed alone, leaving my mother and grandmother in the garden; and my one consolation was that my mother would come up to kiss me good night. But when we had visitors, she did not come up.

The visitor was nearly always Monsieur Swann — a friend of my grandfather's, a rich man, the son of a stockbroker, whom we thought of as a pleasant, unimportant neighbour, without suspecting that he was one of the most elegant men in Paris, a member of the Jockey Club and a friend of the Prince of Wales and the Comte de Paris. He had made a bad marriage, to a woman of no reputation, and so he came to Combray alone. When the little bell at the garden gate gave its two hesitant, oval, golden peals, everyone said, "A visitor! Who can it be?" and it was Swann; and I knew that I would have to say good night at the table, and go up without my kiss.

One evening I could not bear it. I wrote a note to my mother and begged Françoise, our old cook, to take it to her; she would not come. I waited at the head of the stairs. And when she and my father came up, my father, who never followed principles, and who might have punished me, saw my face and said: "Go with the boy. You can see he's unhappy. Sleep in his room tonight." That night my mother sat by my bed and read to me from George Sand's François le Champi; and I knew that I had won a victory over her, and that it was a defeat; that this night was the beginning of a weakness that would last all my life.

For many years that was all I remembered of Combray. And then one winter's day, when I came home cold, my mother offered me some tea, which I did not usually take. She sent out for one of those squat, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy?

I drank a second mouthful, and a third, and found less in each. It was clear that the truth I was seeking lay not in the cup but in myself. I put down the cup and searched my mind. And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray, when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of lime-blossom tea. And as soon as I had recognised it, immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set, and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

Then I remembered everything: aunt Léonie in her bed, between her pepsin and her Vichy water and her rosary, watching the street from her window and knowing every dog and every passer-by in Combray, so that if she saw a dog she "didn't know" it was an event for the whole day; Françoise in her kitchen, faithful, tyrannical, who killed chickens with ferocity and wept over the sufferings of strangers in the newspaper; the church of Saint-Hilaire, with its steeple which seemed to give the town its face, and its old windows and its tapestries; our neighbour Legrandin, an engineer and a writer, who talked of sunsets and of the poetry of solitude, and despised snobs — and who, when he met us in the company of a great lady, pretended not to see us; my school friend Bloch, who talked in pompous, mocking, Homeric phrases, and whom my grandfather suspected, whenever I brought a new friend home, of being Jewish, humming tunes from La Juive under his breath; and the novelist Bergotte, whose books I loved, and whose sentences seemed to me to flow like a hidden music.

There were two "ways" for our walks at Combray, and they were so opposite that we left the house by different doors. One was Méséglise way, which was also called Swann's way, because it passed along the edge of M. Swann's estate at Tansonville; the other was the Guermantes way, along the river Vivonne towards the château of the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, the great family of the region, descended from Geneviève de Brabant. The two ways seemed to me, for all my childhood, two separate worlds which could never meet.

On Swann's way there was a hedge of hawthorns, all in flower, white and pink, smelling of almonds and honey, which I could never tire of looking at; and one day, through a gap in the hedge, I saw in Swann's park a little girl with reddish-fair hair and black eyes, holding a spade, who looked at me, and made an indecent gesture, or so I thought; and her mother called her: "Gilberte!" It was Swann's daughter. I fell in love with her, and with her name. Near there too, at Montjouvain, lived the old composer Vinteuil, a shy music teacher who died of grief at the rumours about his daughter and her woman friend; and once, hidden in the bushes, I saw through a window how the daughter, in her mourning clothes, with her friend beside her, mocked her dead father's photograph. I did not understand it then; it was the first glimpse of something I would understand much later.

The Guermantes way led along the river, past the water-lilies, towards a château I never reached, for it was too far. The Guermantes were for me creatures of legend, almost of the Middle Ages, like the figures in the stained-glass windows of the church; and when I saw the Duchesse de Guermantes at last, one Sunday, at a wedding in the church — a lady with a large nose, blue eyes, a red face, a pimple at the side of her nose — I was disappointed; and then she looked at me, and I fell in love with her too. On that way, too, driving home one evening in Dr Percepied's carriage, I saw the twin steeples of Martinville, and the steeple of Vieuxvicq, changing places as the road turned, like three girls in a legend; and I felt a strange pleasure, as if they were hiding something behind them; and I borrowed a pencil and wrote a little description of them on my knee. It was the first thing I ever wrote; and I felt so happy that I sang aloud, like a hen that has laid an egg.

Swann in Love. Long before I was born, Charles Swann had fallen in love — with Odette de Crécy, a woman of the demi-monde, who had been the mistress of many men, and was not even his type. He met her at the theatre; she visited him; he found her at first rather plain, with her large eyes and tired cheeks. But she took him to the salon of the Verdurins, a rich bourgeois couple who gathered round them a "little clan" of the "faithful": a doctor, Cottard, who made dreadful puns; a painter; a pianist; Madame Verdurin, who laughed so much at her own jokes that she had once dislocated her jaw, and who called all bores and aristocrats "the boring ones." There, one evening, the pianist played a sonata by an unknown composer, Vinteuil; and Swann recognised in it a "little phrase" he had heard once before and loved — a phrase from the andante, that rose and fell, airy and fragrant, which became for him the very anthem of his love.

He saw in Odette a resemblance to a figure in a fresco by Botticelli, Zipporah, the daughter of Jethro; and from that day he loved her. Their first embrace was in a carriage, when the horse shied, and he asked to rearrange the cattleya orchids she wore at her bosom; and afterwards, between them, "to do a cattleya" became their word for making love.

Then he grew jealous. Odette was cool to him; she lied; she went out with another man, Forcheville; the Verdurins, who had taken Swann up, now turned against him because he was too elegant for them, and shut him out of their little clan; he spent his nights wandering the streets of Paris, looking for her; once he stood outside a lighted window he thought was hers, tormented, and knocked — and it was the wrong window. He learned, by an anonymous letter, that she had had love affairs with women as well as men; he questioned her, and she confessed, and lied again. He suffered as only a lover can suffer. He heard the little phrase of Vinteuil again, at a party given by the Marquise de Saint-Euverte, and it told him everything that he had lost.

And then, little by little, his love wore itself out. One morning, after a dream, he said to himself: "To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed to die, that I have felt my greatest love, for a woman who didn't appeal to me, who wasn't even my type!" Later, all the same, he married her: Odette was the "bad marriage" that kept him from bringing his wife to Combray.

Place-Names: The Name. In Paris, as a boy, I dreamed of travelling: to Balbec, a seaside town in Normandy, which Swann said had a church half Persian in style; to Venice and Florence. But I was too delicate; the doctor forbade it. Instead I was sent to play in the gardens of the Champs-Élysées, with Françoise; and there one day I heard a voice call "Gilberte!" — and there she was again, Swann's daughter, playing prisoner's base with other girls. She let me play. I loved her. I lived only for the days when she came to the Champs-Élysées; I watched the sky for snow and rain that might keep her away. She gave me an agate marble; she gave me a pamphlet by Bergotte on Racine. I adored her parents for being hers: Swann, whom my family had thought so ordinary; Madame Swann, Odette, who walked in the Bois de Boulogne in the morning in splendid dresses, with a train of admirers, and whom I waited for in the Allée des Acacias.

Years later — this is the end of the first volume — on a cold, bright November morning, I went back to the Bois de Boulogne, and found that everything had changed. The women in their motor cars, in hats that looked like lamp-shades, were not the ones I had admired; there were no carriages, no Madame Swann. The reality that I had known no longer existed. The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.