met her wearing a gown of bright red velvet, cut slightly open at the throat. The face of Mme. de Guermantes appeared to be dreaming, beneath its pile of fair hair. I was less sad than usual because the melancholy of her expression, the sort of claustration which the startling hue of her gown set between her and the rest of the world, made her seem somehow lonely and unhappy, and this comforted me. The gown struck me as being the materialisation round about her of the scarlet rays of a heart which I did not recognise as hers and might have been able, perhaps, to console; sheltered in the mystical light of the garment with its gently flowing folds, she made me think of some Saint of the early ages of Christianity. After which I felt ashamed of afflicting with the sight of myself this holy martyr. “But, after all, the streets are public.”
The streets are public, I reminded myself, giving a different meaning to the words, and marvelling that indeed in the crowded thoroughfare often soaked with rain, which made it beautiful and precious as a street sometimes is in the old towns of Italy, the Duchesse de Guermantes mingled with the public life of the world moments of her own secret life, shewing herself thus to all and sundry, jostled by every passer-by, with the splendid gratuitousness of the greatest works of art. As I had been out in the morning, after staying awake all night, in the afternoon my parents would tell me to lie down for a little and try to sleep. There is no need, when one is trying to find sleep, to give much thought to the quest, but habit is very useful, and even freedom from thought. But in these afternoon hours both were lacking. Before going to sleep, I devoted so much time to thinking that I should not be able to sleep, that even after I was asleep a little of my thought remained. It was no more than a glimmer in the almost total darkness, but it was bright enough to cast a reflexion in my sleep, first of the idea that I could not sleep, and then, a reflexion of this reflexion, that it was in my sleep that I had had the idea that I was not asleep, then, by a further refraction, my awakening… to a fresh doze in which I was trying to tell some friends who had come into my room that, a moment earlier, when I was asleep, I had imagined that I was not asleep. These shades were barely distinguishable; it would have required a keen — and quite useless — delicacy of perception to seize them all. Similarly, in later years, at Venice, long after the sun had set, when it seemed to be quite dark, I have seen, thanks to the echo, itself imperceptible, of a last note of light, held indefinitely on the surface of the canals, as though some optical pedal were being pressed, the reflexion of the palaces unfurled, as though for all time, in a darker velvet, on the crepuscular greyness of the water. One of my dreams was the synthesis of what my imagination had often sought to depict, in my waking hours, of a certain seagirt place and its mediaeval past. In my sleep I saw a gothic fortress rising from a sea whose waves were stilled as in a painted window. An arm of the sea cut the town in two; the green water stretched to my feet; it bathed on the opposite shore the foundations of an oriental church, and beyond it houses which existed already in the fourteenth century, so that to go across to them would have been to ascend the stream of time. This dream in which nature had learned from art, in which the sea had turned gothic, this dream in which I longed to attain, in which I believed that I was attaining to the impossible, it seemed to me that I had often dreamed it before. But as it is the property of what we imagine in our sleep to multiply itself in the past, and to appear, even when novel, familiar, I supposed that I was mistaken. I noticed, however, that I did frequently have this dream.
The limitations, too, that are common to all sleep were reflected in mine, but in a symbolical manner; I could not in the darkness make out the faces of the friends who were in the room, for we sleep with our eyes shut. I, who could carry on endless arguments with myself while I dreamed, as soon as I tried to speak to these friends felt the words stick in my throat, for we do not speak distinctly in our sleep; I wanted to go to them, and I could not move my limbs, for we do not walk when we are asleep either; and suddenly I was ashamed to be seen by them, for we sleep without our clothes. So, my eyes blinded, my lips sealed, my limbs fettered, my body naked, the figure of sleep which my sleep itself projected had the appearance of those great allegorical figures (in one of which Giotto has portrayed Envy with a serpent in her mouth) of which Swann had given me photographs.
Saint-Loup came to Paris for a few hours only. He came with assurances that he had had no opportunity of mentioning me to his aunt. “She’s not being at all nice just now, Oriane isn’t,” he explained, with innocent self-betrayal. “She’s not my old Oriane any longer, they’ve gone and changed her. I assure you, it’s not worth while bothering your head about her. You pay her far too great a compliment. You wouldn’t care to meet my cousin Poictiers?” he went on, without stopping to reflect that this could not possibly give me any pleasure. “Quite an intelligent young woman, she is; you’d like her. She’s married to my cousin, the Duc de Poictiers, who is a good fellow, but a bit slow for her. I’ve told her about you. She said I was to bring you to see her. She’s much better looking than Oriane, and younger, too. Really a nice person, don’t you know, really a good sort.” These were expressions recently — and all the more ardently — taken up by Robert, which meant that the person in question had a delicate nature. “I don’t go so far as to say she’s a Dreyfusard, you must remember the sort of people she lives among; still, she did say to me: ‘If he is innocent, how ghastly for him to be shut up on the Devil’s Isle.’ You see what I mean, don’t you? And then she’s the sort of woman who does a tremendous lot for her old governesses; she’s given orders that they’re never to be sent in by the servants’ stair, when they come to the house. She’s a very good sort, I assure you. The real reason why Oriane doesn’t like her is that she feels she’s the cleverer of the two.”
Although completely absorbed in the pity which she felt for one of the Guermantes footmen — who had no chance of going to see his girl, even when the Duchess was out, for it would immediately have been reported to her from the lodge, — Françoise was heartbroken at not having been in the house at the moment of Saint-Loup’s visit, but this was because now she herself paid visits also. She never failed to go out on the days when I most wanted her. It was always to see her brother, her niece and, more particularly, her own daughter, who had recently come to live in Paris. The intimate nature of these visits itself increased the irritation that I felt at being deprived of her services, for I had a foreboding that she would speak of them as being among those duties from which there was no dispensation, according to the laws laid down at Saint-André-des-Champs.
And so I never listened to her excuses without an ill humour which was highly unjust to her, and was brought to a climax by the way Françoise had of saying not: “I have been to see my brother,” or “I have been to see my niece,” but “I have been to see the brother,” “I just looked in as I passed to bid good day to the niece” (or “to my niece the butcheress”). As for her daughter, Françoise would have been glad to see her return to Combray. But this recent Parisian, making use, like a woman of fashion, of abbreviations, though hers were of a vulgar kind, protested that the week she was going shortly to spend at Combray would seem quite long enough without so much as a sight of “the Intran.” She was still less willing to go to Franchise’s sister, who lived in a mountainous country, for “mountains,” said the daughter, giving to the adjective a new and terrible meaning, “aren’t really interesting.” She could not make Up her mind to go back to Méséglise, where “the people are so stupid,” where in the market the gossips at their stalls would call cousins with her, and say “Why, it’s never poor Bazireau’s daughter?” She would sooner die than go back and bury herself down there, now that she had “tasted the life of Paris,” and Françoise, traditionalist as she was, smiled complacently nevertheless at the spirit of innovation that was incarnate in this new Parisian when she said: “Very