Again, the opportunity which had arisen for me to be admitted into the Guermantes circle had seemed something exceptional to me. But if I looked outside myself and my immediate social surroundings, I saw that this social phenomenon was not so isolated as had at first appeared to me, and that from the fountain-basin of Combray where I was born quite a number of water-jets turned out to have been raised in symmetry with me above the liquid mass which had fed them all. No doubt, circumstances always having something particular about them, and characters something individual, it was in a quite different manner that Legrandin, in his turn (through the curious marriage of his nephew), had penetrated into these circles, or that Odette’s daughter had married into them, or that Swann himself, and then finally I had come to them. For me, who had always been wrapped up in my own life, and seen it from within, Legrandin’s seemed to have no connection with mine, seemed to have followed quite opposite paths, in the same way as a stream in a deep valley does not see a divergent stream, even though, despite the deviations of its course, it issues into the same river. But taking a bird’s-eye view, as does the statistician, who disregards the reasons of sentiment or the unavoidable acts of imprudence which may lead to the death of any individual, and counts only the number of people who die per year, one would see that a number of individuals who shared the same social background, the depiction of which occupied the first part of this narrative, had ended up in a completely different one, and it is probable that, since an average number of marriages takes place each year in Paris, every other rich and cultivated middle-class circle would have contributed an approximately equal proportion of people like Swann, like Legrandin, like me and like Bloch, all of whom would be found flowing into the ocean of “high society.” Moreover, they recognized one another there, for if the young Comte de Cambremer astonished the whole of society with his distinction, his refinement, his sober elegance, I recognized in these—at the same time as in his winning looks and his burning desire to succeed—the same characteristics as those of his uncle Legrandin, that is, of an old friend, supremely middle-class for all his aristocratic appearance, of my parents.

  Kindness, a simple process of maturation which has succeeded eventually in sweetening natures more initially acidic than Bloch’s, is as widespread as the feeling of justice which makes us believe that if our cause is good we can have no more to fear from a prejudiced judge than from a friendly one. And Bloch’s grandchildren will be good and unassuming almost from birth. Bloch was perhaps not quite there yet. But I observed that he, who once pretended to believe himself obliged to undertake a two-hour railway journey to go to see someone who had only quite casually asked him, now that he received so many invitations not only to lunch and to dinner, but also to spend a fortnight here and a fortnight there, declined many of them, without mentioning them, without boasting of having received them, nor of having declined them. Discretion, discretion in actions and in words, had come to him with social position and with age, with a sort of social age, if one can say that. No doubt Bloch was once as indiscreet as he was incapable of benevolence or thoughtfulness. But certain defects, certain qualities, are not so much attached to this or that individual as to this or that moment of existence considered from the social point of view. They are almost external to individuals, who move in their light as if beneath a variety of solstices, pre-existent, general, unavoidable. Doctors who are trying to discover whether some medicament diminishes or increases the acidity of the stomach, stimulates or slows down its secretions, obtain differing results, not in relation to the stomach from whose secretions they have taken a small amount of gastric juice, but in relation to whether they take it earlier or later in the process of ingesting the remedy.

  Thus at all moments in its history, the name of Guermantes, considered as an agglomeration of all the names which it admitted into itself, around itself, suffered decline, recruited new elements, like those gardens in which, at any moment, flowers scarcely in bud and the ones already beginning to wither which they are preparing to replace, all blend into a single mass which looks the same, save to those who have not yet seen the new arrivals and retain in their memory the precise image of the ones that no longer exist.

  More than one of the individuals assembled at this afternoon party, or whose memory was evoked by it, by making me remember the aspects he or she had in turn presented to me through the different, or opposite, circumstances from which they had, one after the other, arisen before me, caused the varied aspects of my life to emerge in my mind’s eye, the differences of perspective, just as a feature in the landscape, a chateau or a hill, appearing sometimes on the right, sometimes on the left, seems first to look down over a forest, then to emerge from a valley, and thereby reveals to the traveler the changes of direction and the differences in altitude along the road he is following. As I went further and further back, I eventually came across images of the same person separated by such a long interval of time, retained by such distinct selves, and themselves having such different meanings, that I habitually omitted them when I believed I was considering the whole past course of my relations with them, that I had even ceased to think of them as the same people I had once known, and that it needed a chance flash of attention to reconnect them, etymologically as it were, to the original meaning they had had for me. Mlle Swann threw me, from the other side of the pink hawthorn hedge, a look the significance of which I would later, in fact, have to retrospectively retouch, it being a look of desire. Mme Swann’s lover, as all Combray regarded him, looked at me behind the same hedge with an unfriendly stare which equally did not have the meaning I then attributed to it, and subsequently changed so much that I had completely failed to recognize him at Balbec as the gentleman perusing a poster by the casino, a look which I would perhaps recall once every ten years and say to myself: “And that was M. de Charlus, even then! It’s very strange!” Mme de Guermantes at Dr. Percepied’s wedding, Mme Swann wearing pink at my great-uncle’s, Mme de Cambremer, Legrandin’s sister, so smart that he was terrified we were going to ask him to give us an introduction to her, these, as well as a number of others concerning Swann, Saint-Loup, etc., were just so many images which I sometimes amused myself with, when I came across them, in setting up as frontispieces at the threshold of my relations with different individuals, but which did in fact seem no more than images, not something lodged within me by the individuals themselves, to whom nothing any longer connected them. Not only do some people have good memories and others bad (without going as far as the constant forgetfulness in which the Turkish Ambassadress lives, and others like her, which enables them always to find—since recent news evaporates after a week, and fresh reports have the knack of exorcizing it—always to find room for the contradictory news people tell them), but two people with equally good memories do not even remember the same things. One will have paid little attention to an act for which the other will always retain a feeling of great remorse, and he, conversely, will have instantly seized upon some remark which the other just let fall almost without thinking, and elevated it as a characteristic sign of congeniality. One’s investment in not having been wrong when one has issued a mistaken forecast shortens the lifetime of one’s memory of it, and allows one very quickly to affirm that one did not issue it. Lastly, a deeper and more disinterested investment diversifies people’s memories, so that the poet who has almost completely forgotten the facts which one is recalling to him still retains a fleeting impression of them. All this shows why it is that, after an absence of twenty years, where one had expected bitterness one finds involuntary and unconscious forgiveness, while on the other hand one encounters numerous instances of hatred for which (because one has forgotten in one’s turn the bad impression one once made) one can find no explanatory reason. When it comes to the sequence of events in the lives even of those one has known best, one has forgotten the dates. And because it was at least twenty years since she had met Bloch for the first time, Mme de Guermantes would have been prepared to swear that he had been born into her world and been dandled on the knee of the Duchesse de Chartres when he was two years old.

  And how many times these people had reappeared before me in the course of their lives, the diverse circumstances of which seemed to present me with the same individuals, but in various forms and for various ends; and the diversity of the points of my life through which had passed the thread of the life of each of these characters had ended up mingling those which seemed furthest apart, as if life possessed only a limited number of threads with which to achieve the most widely differing patterns. What could be more separate, for example, in my various pasts, than my visits to my uncle Adolphe, the nephew of Mme de Villeparisis, the Maréchal’s cousin, Legrandin and his sister, and Françoise’s friend, the old waistcoat-maker in the courtyard? And today all those different threads had come together to create the web, here of the Saint-Loup household, there of the young Cambremer couple, not to mention Morel, and so many others whose conjunction had combined to create a set of circumstances that it seemed to me that the circumstances were the complete unity, and the characters merely component parts. And my life was already sufficiently long that, for more than one of the individuals that it presented me with, I could find in opposite regions of my memories, to complete him or her, another being. Even to the Elstirs which I saw here hung in positions which were an indication of his fame, I was able to add very old memories of the Verdurins, the Cottards, the conversation in the Rivebelle restaurant, the reception at which I had met Albertine, and numerous other things. In the same way a connoisseur of art, shown one wing of an altarpiece, remembers in which church, what museums, what private collection, the others are dispersed (just as by keeping abreast of the sale catalogs or by regularly visiting the antique shops he will eventually find the object that is twin to the one he possesses and which forms its pair); he is able to reconstitute the predella, and the entire altar, in his head. Just as a bucket being hauled up on a pulley swings around and knocks into the rope here and there on different sides, there was no character with a place in my life, and hardly even any things, that had not in their turn played different roles. A simple social relationship, even a material object, if I rediscovered it in my memory after a few years, I saw that life had gone on weaving different threads around it which eventually became dense enough to form that inimitable, lovely, velvety bloom on the years, like the accretion which in old parks shrouds a simple water pipe in a sheath of emerald.

  It was not only the appearance of these characters that made one think of them as people in a dream. They themselves were finding that life, already drowsy in youth and in love, had become more and more of a dream. They had even forgotten their resentments and their hatreds, and in order to be certain that it was the person now in front of them with whom they had not been on speaking terms ten years ago, they would have had to consult a register, which, however, would have been just as vague as a dream in which one had been insulted, without it being clear by whom. All these dreams helped to shape the contradictory appearances of political life, with men who had accused each other of murder or treason being members of the same government. And the dream became as murky as death in some old men on the days after those on which they had made love. On those days, there was no point in asking any questions of the President of the Republic, he forgot everything. Then, if one left him in peace for a few days, his memory of public affairs returned, as fortuitously as the memory of a dream.

  Sometimes it was not in a single image that this individual, so very different from the person I had subsequently come to know, appeared. For years I had imagined Bergotte as a gentle, godlike old man, I had felt paralyzed as if by a ghost at the sight of Swann’s gray hat or his wife’s violet cloak, or the mystery in which the family name shrouded the Duchesse de Guermantes, even in a drawing-room; almost legendary origins, a fascinating mythology of relations which subsequently became so banal, but which are thus extended back into the past as if into the depths of the sky, with a brilliance equal to the light emanating from the glittering tail of a comet. And even the ones which had not begun in mystery, like my relations with Mme de Souvré, so dry and purely social these days, still retained from their earliest phase that first smile, calmer, sweeter and so smoothly traced in the fullness of an afternoon by the sea, or the close of a spring day in Paris, with the noise of carriages, dust in the air, and sunlight rippling like water. And while Mme de Souvré might not, perhaps, have been worth very much if taken out of this frame, like those monuments—the Salute,[107] for example—which, while having no great beauty of their own, do admirably in their place, she was part and parcel of a whole bundle of memories which I valued at a certain price as a “job lot,” without asking myself exactly how much of it the person of Mme de Souvré accounted for.

  One thing about all these beings struck me even more forcibly than the social and physical changes they had undergone, and that was the change in the different ideas they all had about each other. Legrandin used to despise Bloch and would never speak to him. Now he was on the best of terms with him. This was not entirely due to the more elevated position that Bloch had taken, which in this instance would not be worth noting, because social changes necessarily lead to alterations in the respective positions of those concerned. No: it was because in our memories people—and by people I mean as they are for us—do not have the same uniformity as a picture. Their development is subject to the arbitrary whims of our forgetting. Sometimes we go so far as to confuse them with other people: “Bloch, that’s somebody who used to come to Combray,” saying Bloch, when in fact it was me they meant. Conversely, Mme Sazerat was convinced that I was the author of a certain historical treatise about Philip II (which was actually by Bloch). Without going to these extremes of transposition, one does forget the dirty tricks which somebody has played on you, his defects, and how the last time you met you left without shaking hands, and one remembers instead an earlier occasion when you got on very well together. And it is to that earlier occasion that Legrandin’s manners were responding, in his friendliness toward Bloch, either because he had lost the memory of some part of the past, or because he judged it taboo, from a mixture of forgiveness, forgetting and indifference, which is another of the effects of Time. Nor are the memories we all have of one another, even in love, the same. I had known Albertine recall in extraordinary detail some remark I had made to her at one of our first meetings, and which I had completely forgotten. Yet of another incident, permanently settled deep in my mind like a pebble, she would have no memory at all. Our parallel lives seemed like those garden walks where, at regularly positioned intervals, tubs of flowers are placed symmetrically but never opposite each other. This makes it all the more understandable that when it comes to people with whom we have only a slight acquaintance we should have difficulty remembering who they are, or else that we should remember something different from how we used to think of them, something from an earlier time, something suggested by the people among whom we meet them again, who have only known them for a short while, adorned with qualities and a social position which they used not to have, but which we, oblivious, instantly accept.

 

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