Sodom And Gomorrah Proust Quotes

It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.

But sometimes the future is latent in us without our knowing it, and our supposedly lying words foreshadow an imminent reality.

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to kindness and wisdom we make promises only; pain we obey.

Then from those profound slumbers we awake in a dawn, not knowing who we are, being nobody, newly born, ready for anything, the brain emptied of that past which was life until then. And perhaps it is more wonderful still when our landing at the waking-point is abrupt and the thoughts of our sleep, hidden by a cloak of oblivion, have no time to return to us gradually, before sleep ceases. Then, from the black storm through which we seem to have passed (but we do not even say we), we emerge prostrate, without a thought, a we that is void of content.

...that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.

...the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.

Parties of this sort are as a rule premature. They have little reality until the following day, when they occupy the attention of the people who were not invited.

The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.

I felt that I did not really remember her except through the pain, and I longed for the nails that riveted her to my consciousness to be driven yet deeper.

His nature was really like a sheet of paper that has been folded so often in every direction that it is impossible to straighten it out.

The theatre of the world is stocked with fewer settings than actors, and with fewer actors than situations.

M. de Charlus made no reply and looked as if he had not heard, which was one of his favourite forms of rudeness.

...the seaside life and the life of travel made me realise that the theatre of the world is stocked with fewer settings than actors, and with fewer actors than situations.

It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering.

Hence one meets in polite society few novelists, or poets, few of all those sublime creatures who speak of the things that are not to be mentioned.

After a certain age, and even if we develop in quite different ways, the more we become ourselves, the more our family traits are accentuated.

We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence.

The mistakes of doctors are innumerable. They err as a rule out of optimism as to the treatment, and pessimism as to the outcome.

There was a time when my ancestors were proud of the title of chamberlain or butler to the King," said the Baron. "There was also a time," replied Morel haughtily, "when my ancestors cut off your ancestors' heads.

A man who, night after night, falls like a lump of lead upon his bed, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will such a man ever dream of making, I do not say great discoveries, but even minute observations upon sleep? He barely knows that he does sleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. A memory without fault is not a very powerful incentive to studying the phenomena of memory.

...the rule among the human race – a rule that naturally admits of exceptions – is that the reputedly hard are the weak whom nobody wanted, and that the strong, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have alone that gentleness which the vulgar herd mistakes for weakness.

As by an electric current that gives us a shock, I have been shaken by my loves, I have lived them, I have felt them: never have I succeeded in seeing or thinking them.

When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy.

حسّ گذرایی همه چیز که موجب می‌شود بخواهیم همه کارمان به نتیجه بیانجامد منظرۀ هر عشقی را رقت‌انگیز می‌کند

Unfortunately, in the social as in the political world, the victims are such cowards that one cannot for long remain indignant with their executioners.

As profession recognizes profession, so, too, does vice.

بخشی از خستگی‌های حتی بسیار واقعی، بویژه نزد آدمهای عصبی، به توجه بستگی دارد و فقط حافظه از آن نگهداری می‌کند. همین که از خستگی می‌ترسیم احساس خستکی می‌کنیم و برای رفعش همین بس که از یادش ببریم

Composers were warned not to strain the attention of their audience, as though we had not at our disposal different degrees of attention, among which it rests precisely with the artist himself to arouse the highest. For those who yawn with boredom after ten lines of a mediocre article have journeyed year after year to Bayreuth to listen to the Ring.

I remained serious. For one thing, I thought it stupid of her to appear to believe or to wish other people to believe that nobody, really, was as smart as herself. For another thing, people who laugh so heartily at what they themselves have said, when it is not funny, dispense us accordingly, by taking upon themselves the responsibility for the mirth, from joining in it.

...infirmity alone makes us take notice and learn, and enables us to analyse mechanisms of which otherwise we should know nothing. A man who falls straight into bed night after night, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will surely never dream of making, I don't say great discoveries, but even minor observations about sleep. He scarcely knows that he is asleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. An unfailing memory is not a very powerful incentive to the study of the phenomena of memory.

But for the invert vice begins, not when he establishes a relationship (for too many reasons may govern that), but when he takes his pleasure with women.

It's far more difficult to disfigure a great work of art than to create one.

عیب‌های یک آشنای ساده، یا حتی یک دوست، زهرایی واقعی‌اند که خوشبختانه خود را در برابرشان به روش ذره ذره با همان زهر مصون کرده‌ایم

گاهی آینده در درون ماست بی آن که خود بدانیم، و گفته‌هایی از ما که دروغ انگاشته می‌شود از واقعیتی در آینده نزدیک خبر می‌دهد

کمی بیخوابی برای شناخت ارزش و مفهوم خواب، برای تابانیدن اندک روشنایی به این تاریکی، بیفایده نیست. حافظۀ بی‌خلل انگیزۀ چندان نیرومندی برای بررسی پدیده‌های حافظه نیست

واقعی با امکان‌های پنهان ماندن سازگاری دارد، تا زمانی که شرایطی این امکان‌ها را از آن بگیرد

اهل هر صنفی زود همدیگر را می‌شناسند، اهل هر عیبی همچنین

از همه‌ی پنهان‌گری‌ها خطرناک‌تر، اختفای خطا در ذهن خطاکارست.

انسان بسیار هوشمند کمتر از احمق به حماقت دیگران توجه نشان می‌دهد

از شکل انداختن یک شاهکار خیلی از ساختن‌اش مشکل‌تر است

هر خطای برطرف شده آدمی را از حس تازه‌ای برخوردا می‌کند

کار ذهنن تا زمانی که مطیع واقعیت نیست آسان است

Omul visează mult despre rai, sau mai degrabă desper numeroase raiuri succesive, dar toate sunt chiar înainte de a muri niște paradisuri pierdute sau în care s-au simțit pierduți.

Then came the deglutition of saliva, and the old lady instinctively wiped the stubble of her toothbrush moustache with her handkerchief.

This rubicund youth, with his blunt features, appeared for all the world to have a tomato instead of a head.

I never much like thus being told without possibility of reply what I am to think about people whom I know.

E seus olhares aliciantes, aumentados pelos seus sorrisos, não eram mais contidos pelos vidros dos óculos e transbordavam por todos os lados.

Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chooses the person one loves after endless deliberation and on the strength of diverse qualities and advantages.

And then one goes on to the next. Because love is all rot, you know

We should be forever cured of our romanticism were we willing, in order to think of the one we love, to try to be the person we shall be once we no longer love them.

For with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart.

We ought never to lose our tempers with people who, when we find them at fault, begin to snigger. They do so not because they are laughing at us, but because they are afraid of our displeasure.

We passionately long for there to be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years, we are unfaithful to what we once were, to what we wished to remain immortally. Even without supposing that death is to alter us more completely than the changes that occur in the course of our lives, if in that other life we were to encounter the self that we have been, we should turn away from ourselves as from those people with whom we were once on friendly terms but whom we have not seen for years… We dream much of a paradise, or rather of a number of successive paradises, but each of them is, long before we die, a paradise lost, in which we should feel ourselves lost too.

(...) emprestando-lhe formas encantadoras de simplicidade, de aparente franqueza, e até de uma altivez independente que parecia inspirada pelo desinteresse. Isso era falso, mas a vantagem da atitude estava bem mais a favor de Morel, considerando-se que, enquanto aquele que ama está sempre forçado a voltar à carga, a insistir, pelo contrário, é fácil ao que não ama seguir uma linha reta, inflexível e graciosa.

Soon, what was tedious was everything. 'Beautiful things, they're so tedious! Paintings, they're enough to drive you mad...How right you are, it's so tedious, writing letters!' In the end it was life itself that she declared to us was a bore, without one quite knowing from where she was taking her term of comparison.

I concluded all the same from this first evening that his [Morel's] must be a vile nature, that he would not shrink from any act of servility if the need arose, and was incapable of gratitude. In which he resembled the majority of mankind.

There is no need, in order to explain three-quarters of the opinions held about people, to go so far as a love that has been spurned or an exclusion from political power. Our judgment remains unsure: an invitation refused or received determines it.

In the case of Albertine, I felt that I should never discover anything, that, out of that tangled mass of details of fact and falsehood, I should never unravel the truth: and that it would always be so, unless I were to shut her up in prison (but prisoners escape) until the end.

É muita vez apenas por falta de espírito criador que não se vai bastante longe no sofrimento. E a realidade mais terrível dá, ao mesmo tempo que o sofrimento, a alegria de uma bela descoberta, porque não faz senão dar uma forma nova e clara ao que ruminávamos desde muito sem o saber.

Muitas vezes, é unicamente por falta de espírito criador que não se vai muito longe no sofrimento. E a mais terrível realidade nos concede, ao mesmo tempo que o sofrimento, a alegria de uma bela descoberta, porque só faz doar uma forma clara e nova ao que ruminávamos há muito sem desconfiar.

He lives at Balbec?” crooned the Baron in a tone so far from interrogatory that it is regrettable that the written language does not possess a sign other than the question mark to end such apparently unquestioning remarks. It is true that such a sign would be of little use except to M. de Charlus.

...Swann had, as he shook the Marquise's hand, seen her bosom from close to and from above, he plunged an attentive, serious, absorbed, almost anxious, gaze into the depths of her corsage, and his nostrils, intoxicated by the woman's perfume, quivered like a butterfly ready to go and settle on the half-glimpsed flower.

His [Morel's] nature was really like a sheet of paper that has been folded so often in every direction that it is impossible to straighten it out.

É singular que certa ordem de atos secretos tenha como consequência exterior um mode de falar ou gesticular que os revela.

When you come to live with a woman, you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love her; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy.

Love? I make it often, but I never talk about it.

wand. Until then, because I had not understood, I had not seen.

It is the explanation that opens our eyes; the dispelling of an error gives us an additional sense.

Ψυχή που δεν την αγγίζουν οι ματαιότητες, δεν τη συγκινούν οι φιλοφρονήσεις

all those individuals who are better at analyzing than at valuing themselves.

jealousy belonging to that family of unhealthy doubts far more easily removed by the vigor of an affirmation than by its plausibility.

But, don’t you see, since we happened to have M. de Cambremer here, and he is a Marquis, while you are only a Baron. . . . ” “Pardon me,” M. de Charlus replied with an arrogant air to the astonished Verdurin, “I am also Duc de Brabant, Damoiseau de Montargis, Prince d’Oloron, de Carency, de Viareggio and des Dunes. However, it is not of the slightest importance. Please do not distress yourself,” he concluded, resuming his subtle smile which spread itself over these final words: “I could see at a glance that you were not accustomed to society.

But you are our equal, if not our superior," the Guermantes seemed, in all their actions, to be saying; and they said it in the nicest way imaginable, in order to be loved and admired, but not to be believed; that one should discern the fictitious character of this affability was what they called being well-bred; to suppose it to be genuine, a sign of ill-breeding.

Talvez cada noite aceitemos o risco de viver, durante o sono, sofrimentos que consideramos nulos e não acontecidos, porque serão suportados no decurso de um sono que julgamos sem consciência.

In point of fact, we always discover after the event that our adversaries had a reason for taking the side they do take, and one that does not depend on the degree to which that side is in the right, and that those who think as we do have been constrained to do so by, if their moral nature is too contemptible to be invoked, intelligence, and if they have no great acumen, uprightness.

...As for all the little people who call themselves Marquis de Cambremerde or de Gotoblazes, there is no difference between them and the humblest rookie in your regiment. Whether you go and do wee-wee at the Countess Cack's or cack at the Baroness Wee-wee's, it's exactly the same, you will have compromised your reputation and have used a shitty rag instead of toilet paper. Which is unsavoury.

The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams. And besides, a fresh reality will perhaps make us forget, detest even, the desires on account of which we set out on our journey.

The hurt that his remarks concerning Albertine and Andrée had caused me was profound, but the worst of the pain was not felt by me right away, as happens in those cases of poisoning that take effect only after a certain interval of time.

So as not to see anything any more, I turned towards the wall, but alas, what was now facing me was that partition which used to serve us as a morning messenger, that partition which, as responsive as a violin in rendering every nuance of a feeling, reported so exactly to my grandmother my fear at once of waking her and, if she were already awake, of not being heard by her and so of her not coming, then immediately, like a second instrument taking up the melody, informing me of her coming and bidding me be calm. I dared not put out my hand to that wall, any more than to a piano on which my grandmother had been playing and which still vibrated from her touch. I knew that I might knock now, even louder, that nothing would wake her any more, that I should hear no response, that my grandmother would never come again. And I asked nothing more of God, if a paradise exists, than to be able, there, to knock on that wall with the three little raps which my grandmother would recognize among a thousand, and to which she would give those answering knocks which meant: "Don't fuss, little mouse, I know you're impatient, but I'm coming," and that he would let me stay with her throughout eternity, which would not be too long for the two of us.

Mme Verdurin asked him: "Did you have some of my orangeade?" Whereupon M. de Charlus, with a gracious smile, in a crystalline tone which he rarely adopted, and with endless simperings and wrigglings of the hips, replied: "No, I preferred its neighbour, which is strawberry-juice, I think. It's delicious."[...]But on hearing M. de Charlus say, in that shrill voice and with that smile and those gestures, "No, I preferred its neighbour, the strawberry-juice," one could say: "Ah, he likes the stronger sex,"[...]

World of sleep, where our inner knowledge, held in subjugation by the disturbances in our organs, quickens the rhythm of our heart or of our breathing, for the same dosage of alarm, of sadness, of remorse is a hundred times more potent when thus injected into out veins; as soon as, in order to travel along the arteries of the subterranean city, we have embarked on the dark waves of our own blood, as if on the sixfold meanders of some eternal Lethe, tall, solemn forms appear to us, accost us, and then go from us, leaving us in tears.

Who has not observed this fact with women, or even with men, endowed with a remarkable intelligence, but afflicted by nervousness? When they are happy, at peace, content with their surroundings, they cause us to admire their precious gifts; it is literally the truth that speaks through their mouths. A migraine, some small puncturing of their amour-propre is enough to change everything. The luminous intelligence, abrupt, convulsive, shrunken, now reflects only a self that is irritated, suspicious, coquettish, doing all it can to be unattractive.

When we are waiting, the double trajectory, from the ear that gathers in the sounds to the mind that processes and analyzes them, and from the mind to the heart to which it transmits its results, is so rapid that we are unable even to perceive its duration, and we seem to be listening directly with our hearts.

E recomecei a escutar, a sofrer; quando estamos à espera, do ouvido que recolhe os ruídos ao espírito que os despoja e analisa, e do espírito ao coração a quem ele transmite os seus resultados, tão rápido é o duplo trajeto que nem sequer lhe podemos perceber a duração, e parece estarmos escutando diretamente com o nosso coração.

But the second kind seek out the women who love women, who can procure a young man for them and add to the pleasure which they get from finding themselves with him; much more, they can, in the same way, find the same pleasure with them as with a man. [...] For in the relationships they have with them, they play the role of another woman for the women who love women, and the woman offers them at the same time more or less what they find in a man, so that the jealous friend suffers from feeling that the man he loves is inseparable from the woman who is for him almost a man, at the same time as he feels him almost escaping from him, because, for these women, he is something he does not know, a sort of woman.

Albertine, sentada à minha frente e vendo que chegara a seu destino, deu alguns passos do fundo do vagão onde estávamos e abriu a portinhola. Mas esse movimento, que ela assim fazia para descer, me dilacerava intoleravelmente o coração, como se, ao contrário da posição independente de meu corpo, que a dois passos dele parecia ocupar o de Albertine, tal separação espacial, que um desenhista verídico seria forçado a figurar entre nós, não passasse de uma aparência, e como se, para quem quisesse redesenhar as coisas conforme a realidade verdadeira, fosse preciso agora colocar Albertine, não a certa distância de mim, mas dentro de mim. Ela me fazia tanto mal ao se afastar que, agarrando-a, puxei-a desesperadamente pelo braço.

It is no doubt the existence of our body, similar for us to a vase in which our spirituality is enclosed, that induces us to suppose that all our inner goods, our past joys, all our sorrows, are perpetually in our possession. Perhaps this is as inaccurate as to believe that they escape or return. At all events, if they do remain inside us, it is for most of the time in an unknown domain where they are of no service to us, and where even the most ordinary of them are repressed by memories of a different order, which exclude all simultaneity with them in our consciousness. But if the framework of sensations in which they are preserved be recaptured, they have in their turn the same capacity to expel all that is incompatible with them, to install in us, on its own, the self that experienced them.

Pelo menos esses despertares, tal como os acabo de descrever, e que eram na maior parte do tempo os meus depois que eu havia jantado na Raspelière, tudo se passava como se assim fosse, e eu posso testemunhá-lo, eu, o estranho humano, que, esperando que a morte o liberte, vive com as persianas fechadas, nada sabe do mundo, permanece imóvel como um mocho e, como este, só vê com alguma nitidez nas trevas.

E depois, como tinha sobre a nobreza e a natureza dos nomes com que se formam os títulos as noções muito vagas que são as de muita gente que não é ascensorista , tanto mais verossímil lhe parecera o nome de Camembert porque, sendo esse queijo universalmente conhecido, não era de espantar que se tirasse um marquesado de tão glorioso renome, a menos que não fosse o marquesado que emprestara sua celebridade ao queijo.

World of sleep, where our inner knowledge, held in subjugation by the disturbances in our organs, quickens the rhythm of our heart or of our breathing, for the same dosage of alarm, of sadness, of remorse is a hundred times more potent when thus injected into our veins; as soon as, in order to travel along the arteries of the subterranean city, we have embarked on the dark waves of our own blood, as if on the sixfold meanders of some eternal Lethe, tall, solemn forms appear to us, accost us, and then go from us, leaving us in tears.

But by these very words which left it to me to decide my own happiness, my mother had plunged me into that state of doubt in which I had been plunged long ago when, my father having allowed me to go to Phèdre and, what was more, to take up writing as a career, I had suddenly felt myself burdened with too great a responsibility, the fear of distressing him, and that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.

The convenience of a grand hotel, or an establishment such as Rachel’s once was, is that, without intermediaries, the sight of a hundred-franc note, and even more of a thousand-franc note, even when being given on this occasion to someone else, causes the hitherto frozen face of an employee or of a woman to smile and show willingness. In politics, on the other hand, or the relationship of a lover and a mistress, too many things are interposed between the money and the docility. So many things that even those in whom money finally kindles a smile are often incapable of following the inner process that links the two, and believe themselves to be, indeed are, more delicate.

It is hard to imagine the extent to which this anxiety agitated the Baron’s mind, and by the very fact of doing so had momentarily enriched it. Love can thus be responsible for veritable geological upheavals of the mind. In that of M. de Charlus, which a few days earlier had resembled a plain so uniform that as far as the eye could reach it would have been impossible to make out an idea rising above the level surface, there had suddenly sprung into being, hard as stone, a range of mountains, but mountains as elaborately carved as if some sculptor, instead of quarrying and carting away the marble, had chiselled it on the spot, in which there writhed in vast titanic groups Fury, Jealousy, Curiosity, Envy, Hatred, Suffering, Pride, Terror and Love.

I thought then about all that I had learned of Swann’s love for Odette, and of the way in which Swann had been made a fool of all his life. Fundamentally, if I try to think about it, the hypothesis that led me little by little to construct Albertine’s whole character, and to interpret painfully each moment of a life I was unable to control in its entirety, was the memory, the idée fixe, of the character of Mme Swann, such as I had been told that it was like. These accounts helped to ensure that in future my imagination played the game of supposing that, instead of being a good girl, Albertine might have the same immorality, the same capacity for deception, as a former whore, and I thought of all the suffering that would have awaited me in that event had I ever had to love her.

He had (like a calculator who means to do nothing else until such time as he has resolved his problem) put down beside him the cigar that, a short while ago, he had had in his mouth, but which he no longer had the necessary freedom of mind to smoke. On remarking the two crouched divinities borne on its arms by the chair set facing, you might've thought the Baron was seeking to solve the riddle of the Sphinx... Now, the figure to which M. de Charlus was applying, and with such intensity, all his mental powers, was that proposed to him by the lineaments of the young Marquis de Surgis' face. It seemed to be, so profound was M. de Charlus' absorption before it, some heraldic motto, some conundrum, some problem in algebra, the riddle or formula of which he was seeking to penetrate.

Dominating every conversation could be heard the inexhaustible prattle of M. de Charlus, who was talking with His Excellency the Duc de Sidonia, whose acquaintance he had just made. As profession recognizes profession, so, too, does vice. M. de Charlus and M. de Sidonia had each immediately nosed out that of the other, which was, for both, to be, when in company, monologuists, to the extent of being unable to bear any interruption. Having at once adjudged that the malady was without remedy, as a famous sonnet has it,6 they had made a resolve, not to stay silent, but each to speak without concerning himself with what the other would say. This had created that jumble of sound which, in Molière’s comedies, is produced by several people saying different things at one and the same time. The Baron, with his resonant voice, was certain in any case of having the better of it, of drowning out the feeble voice of M. de Sidonia, without discouraging the latter, however, for, whenever M. de Charlus drew breath for a moment, the interval was filled by the susurration of the Spanish grandee, who had imperturbably continued discoursing.

E eu entrava no sono, o qual é como um segundo apartamento que possuíssemos e onde, abandonando o nosso, tivéssemos ido dormir. Tem campainhas próprias e ali somos algumas vezes violentamente despertados por um toque de campainha, perfeitamente ouvido por nossos ouvidos, quando no entanto ninguém tocou. Tem seus criados, seus visitantes particulares que nos vêm procurar para sairmos, de maneira que estamos prontos para levantar-nos, quando nos é forçoso verificar, com a nossa quase imediata transmigração para o outro apartamento, o da véspera, que o quarto está vazio, que ninguém chegou. A raça que o habita, como a dos primeiros humanos, é andrógina. Um homem aparece ao cabo de um instante sob o aspecto de uma mulher. As coisas têm tendência a tornar-se homens, os homens amigos e inimigos. O tempo que decorre para o adormecido, durante esse sono, é absolutamente diferente do tempo em que transcorre a vida do homem acordado. Ora o seu curso é muito mais rápido, um quarto de hora parece um dia, ora muito mais longo e julga-se haver apenas dormido um ligeiro sono quando se dormiu o dia inteiro. Então, sobre o carro do sono, desce às profundezas onde a recordação não mais pode alcançá-lo, e para aquém das quais foi o espírito obrigado a desandar caminho.

I remained alone in my room, that room with the too lofty ceiling in which I had been so wretched on my first arrival, in which I had thought with such longing of Mlle de Stermaria, had watched for the appearance of Albertine and her friends, like migratory birds alighting upon the beach, in which I had possessed her with such indifference after I had sent the lift-boy to fetch her, in which I had experienced my grandmother’s kindness, then realised that she was dead; those shutters, beneath which shone the early morning light, I had opened the first time to look out upon the first ramparts of the sea (those shutters which Albertine made me close in case anybody should see us kissing). I became aware of my own transformations by contrasting them with the unchangingness of my surroundings. One grows accustomed to these as to people, and when, all of a sudden, one recalls the different meaning that they used to convey to one and then, after they had lost all meaning, the events, very different from those of today, which they enshrined, the diversity of the acts performed beneath the same ceiling, between the same glazed bookshelves, the change in one’s heart and in one’s life which that diversity implies, seem to be increased still further by the unalterable permanence of the setting, reinforced by the unity of the scene.

From the height we had now reached, the sea no longer appeared, as it did from Balbec, like an undulating range of hills, but on the contrary like the view, from a mountain-peak or from a road winding round its flank, of a blue-green glacier or a glittering plain situated at a lower level. The ripples of eddies and currents seemed to be fixed upon its surface, and to have traced there for ever their concentric circles; the enamelled face of the sea, imperceptibly changing colour, assumed towards the head of the bay, where an estuary opened, the blue whiteness of milk in which little black boats that did not move seemed entangled like flies. I felt that from nowhere could one discover a vaster prospect. But at each turn in the road a fresh expanse was added to it and when we arrived at the Douville toll-house, the spur of the cliff which until then had concealed from us half the bay receded, and all of a sudden I saw upon my left a gulf as profound as that which I had already had in front of me, but one that changed the proportions of the other and doubled its beauty. The air at this lofty point had a keenness and purity that intoxicated me. I adored the Verdurins; that they should have sent a carriage for us seemed to me a touching act of kindness. I should have liked to kiss the Princess. I told her that I had never seen anything so beautiful. She professed that she too loved this spot more than any other. But I could see that to her as to the Verdurins the thing that really mattered was not to gaze at the view like tourists, but to partake of good meals there, to entertain people whom they liked, to write letters, to read books, in short to live in these surroundings, passively allowing the beauty of the scene to soak into them rather than making it the object of their conscious attention.

This is not to say that he was not qualified, though he concealed his beginnings as a scullion, to lend a hand like anyone else. It required some exceptional circumstance nevertheless to induce him one day to carve the turkeys himself. I was out, but I heard afterwards that he carved them with a sacerdotal majesty, surrounded, at a respectful distance from the service-table, by a ring of waiters who, endeavouring thereby not so much to learn the art as to curry favour with him, stood gaping in open-mouthed admiration. The manager, however, as he plunged his knife with solemn deliberation into the flanks of his victims, from which he no more deflected his eyes, filled with a sense of his high function, than if he were expecting to read some augury therein, was totally oblivious of their presence. The hierophant was not even conscious of my absence. When he heard of it, he was distressed: “What, you didn’t see me carving the turkeys myself?” I replied that having failed, so far, to see Rome, Venice, Siena, the Prado, the Dresden gallery, the Indies, Sarah in Phèdre, I had learned to resign myself, and that I would add his carving of turkeys to my list. The comparison with the dramatic art (Sarah in Phèdre) was the only one that he seemed to understand, for he had learned through me that on days of gala performances the elder Coquelin had accepted beginners’ roles, even those of characters who had only a single line or none at all. “All the same, I’m sorry for your sake. When shall I be carving again? It will need some great event, it will need a war.” (It needed the armistice, in fact.) From that day onwards, the calendar was changed, and time was reckoned thus: “That was the day after the day I carved the turkeys myself.” “It was exactly a week after the manager carved the turkeys himself.” And so this prosectomy furnished, like the Nativity of Christ or the Hegira, the starting point for a calendar different from the rest, but neither so extensively adopted nor so long observed.