I was told that at that period he was nearly every day a prey to attacks of mental depression characterised not exactly by divagation but by confessing at the top of his voice—in front of third parties whose presence and censoriousness he had forgotten—opinions he usually hid, such as his Germanophilism. So, long after the end of the war he was bewailing the defeat of the Germans, amongst whom he included himself and said bitterly: “We shall have to be revenged. We have proved the power of our resistance and we were the best organised,” or else his confidences took another form and he exclaimed in a rage: “Don’t let Lord X—or the Prince of X–, come and tell me again what they said the other day for it was all I could do to prevent myself replying, ‘You know, because you’re one of them, at least, as much as I am.’” Needless to add that when M. de Charlus thus gave vent at times when he was, as they say, not all there, to these Germanophile and other avowals, people in his company such as Jupien or the Duchesse de Guermantes were in the habit of interrupting his imprudent words and giving to the third party who was less intimate and more indiscreet a forced but honourable interpretation of his words. “Oh, my God,” called Jupien, “I had good reason not to want to go far away. There he is starting a conversation with a gardener boy. Good-day, sir, it’s better I should go, I can’t leave my invalid alone a moment; he’s nothing but a great baby.”
I got out of the carriage again a little before reaching the Princesse de Guermantes’ and began thinking again of that lassitude, that weariness with which I had tried the evening before to note the railway line which separated the shadow from the light upon the trees in one of the most beautiful countrysides in France. Certainly such intellectual conclusions as I had drawn from these thoughts did not affect my sensibility so cruelly to-day, but they re-mained the same, for, as always happened when I suc-ceeded in breaking away from my habits, going out at an unaccustomed hour to some new place, I derived a lively pleasure from it.
To-day, the pleasure of going to a reception at Mme de Guermantes’, seemed to me purely frivolous, but since I now knew that I could expect to have no other than frivolous pleasures, what was the use of my not accepting them? I repeated to myself that in attempting this description I had experienced none of that enthusiasm which I is not the only but the first criterion of talent. I began now to draw on my memory for “snapshots”, notably snapshots it had taken at Venice but the mere mention of the word made Venice as boring to me as a photographic exhibition and I was conscious of no more taste or talent in visualising what I had formerly seen than yesterday in describing what I had observed with a meticulous and mournful eye. In a few minutes so many charming friends I had not seen for so long would doubtless be asking me not to cut myself off and to spend some time with them. I had no reason to refuse them since I now had the proof that I was good for nothing, that literature could no longer give me any joy whether because of my lack of talent or because it was a less real thing than I had believed.
When I remembered what Bergotte had said to me: “You are ill but one
cannot be sorry for you because you possess the delights of the mind,”
I saw how much he had been mistaken. How little delight I got out of
this sterile lucidity. I might have added that if sometimes I had
tasted pleasures—not those of the mind—I had always exhausted them
with a different woman so that even if destiny were to grant me a
hundred years of healthy life it would only be adding successive
lengths to an existence already in a straight line which there was no
object in lengthening further. As to the “delights of the mind”, could
I thus name those cold and sterile reflections which my clear-sighted
eye or my logical reasoning joylessly summarised? But sometimes
illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems
lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at
last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we
can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years—and it
opens.*
In the French text of Le Temps Retrouvé, vol. I ends here.
Reviewing the painful reflections of which I have just been speaking, I had entered the courtyard of the Guermantes’ mansion and in my distraction I had not noticed an approaching carriage; at the call of the link-man I had barely time to draw quickly to one side, and in stepping backwards I stumbled against some unevenly placed paving stones behind which there was a coach-house. As I recovered myself, one of my feet stepped on a flagstone lower than the one next it. In that instant all my discouragement disappeared and I was possessed by the same felicity which at different moments of my life had given me the view of trees which seemed familiar to me during the drive round Balbec, the view of the belfries of Martinville, the savour of the madeleine dipped in my tea and so many other sensations of which I have spoken and which Vinteuil’s last works had seemed to synthesise. As at the moment when I tasted the madeleine, all my apprehensions about the future, all my intellectual doubts, were dissipated. Those doubts which had assailed me just before, regarding the reality of my literary gifts and even regarding the reality of literature itself were dispersed as though by magic.
This time I vowed that I should not resign myself to ignoring why, without any fresh reasoning, without any definite hypothesis, the insoluble difficulties of the previous instant had lost all importance as was the case when I tasted the madeleine. The felicity which I now experienced was undoubtedly the same as that I felt when I ate the madeleine, the cause of which I had then postponed seeking. There was a purely material difference in the images evoked. A deep azure intoxicated my eyes, a feeling of freshness, of dazzling light enveloped me and in my desire to capture the sensation, just as I had not dared to move when I tasted the madeleine because of trying to conjure back that of which it reminded me, I stood, doubtless an object of ridicule to the link-men, repeating the movement of a moment since, one foot upon the higher flagstone, the other on the lower one. Merely repeating the movement was useless; but if, oblivious of the Guermantes’ reception, I succeeded in recapturing the sensation which accompanied the movement, again the intoxicating and elusive vision softly pervaded me as though it said “Grasp me as I float by you, if you can, and try to solve the enigma of happiness I offer you.” And then, all at once, I recognised that Venice which my descriptive efforts and pretended snapshots of memory had failed to recall; the sensation I had once felt on two uneven slabs in the Baptistry of St. Mark had been given back to me and was linked with all the other sensations of that and other days which had lingered expectant in their place among the series of forgotten years from which a sudden chance had imperiously called them forth. So too the taste of the little madeleine had recalled Combray. But how was it that these visions of Combray and of Venice at one and at another moment had caused me a joyous certainty sufficient without other proofs to make death indifferent to me?
Asking myself this and resolved to find the answer this very day, I entered the Guermantes’ mansion, because we always allow our inner needs to give way to the part we are apparently called upon to play and that day mine was to be a guest. On reaching the first floor a footman requested me to enter a small boudoir-library adjoining a buffet until the piece then being played had come to an end, the Princesse having given orders that the doors should not be opened during the performance. At that very instant a second premonition occurred to reinforce the one which the uneven paving-stones had given me and to exhort me to persevere in my task. The servant in his ineffectual efforts not to make a noise had knocked a spoon against a plate. The same sort of felicity which the uneven paving-stones had given me invaded my being; this time my sensation was quite different, being that of great heat accompanied by the smell of smoke tempered by the fresh air of a surrounding forest and I realised that what appeared
