103
" And I, who derived from the names Guermantes, Bavière, and Condé my notions of the life and thoughts of the two cousins (something I could no longer do from their faces, now that I had seen them), would rather have had their opinion of Phèdre than that of the greatest critic in the world. For in the critic’s opinion I would have found merely intelligence, intelligence superior to my own but of the same kind. But the opinion of the Duchesse and Princesse de Guermantes, which would have furnished me with invaluable facts about the nature of these two poetic creatures, was something I imagined through the power of their names and credited with an irrational charm, and, with the thirst and longing of a man in a fever, what I demanded that their opinion of Phèdre should restore to me was the charm of the summer afternoons I had spent on walks along the Guermantes way. "
― Marcel Proust , The Guermantes Way
105
" It has been said that silence is a powerful weapon; in a quite different sense, it has a terrible power when wielded by those who are loved. It increases the anxiety of the one who waits. Nothing so tempts us to approach another person as the thing that is keeping us apart, and what greater barrier is there than silence? It has been said, too, that silence is torture, capable of driving the man condemned to it in a prison cell to madness. But what an even greater torture it is, greater than having to keep silent, to endure the silence of the person one loves! Robert asked himself: “What can she be doing, to stay silent like this? Is it that she’s being unfaithful to me?” And again: “What have I done to make her keep so silent? Perhaps she hates me, and will go on hating me forever.” And he blamed himself for it. So silence was in fact driving him mad, with jealousy and remorse. More cruel than the silence of the prison cell, the silence he endured was its own kind of prison. An intangible kind of enclosure, perhaps, but an impenetrable one, this segment of empty atmosphere between them, through which the visual rays of the abandoned lover cannot pass. Is there a more terrible form of illumination than silence, which casts its light on not one absent love but a thousand, each one involved in some new act of betrayal? Occasionally, in sudden moments of diminished stress, Robert would imagine that this silence was about to be broken, that a letter from her was on its way. "
― Marcel Proust , The Guermantes Way
111
" May you learn something from this present instance. Remember it well. Affection is always precious. What we cannot do alone in life, because there are things we cannot ask, or do, or wish, or learn by ourselves, we can do together, without there needing to be thirteen of us, as in the Balzac novel,107 or four, as in The Three Musketeers. I bid you farewell.” He "
― Marcel Proust , The Guermantes Way
116
" And indeed at the hotel where I was to meet Saint-Loup and his friends the beginning of the festive season was attracting a great many people from near and far; as I hastened across the courtyard with its glimpses of glowing kitchens in which chickens were turning on spits, pigs were roasting, and lobsters were being flung alive into what the landlord called the ‘everlasting fire’, I discovered an influx of new arrivals (worthy of some Census of the People at Bethlehem such as the Old Flemish Masters painted), gathering there in groups, asking the landlord or one of his staff (who, if they did not like the look of them; would recommend accommodation elsewhere in the town) for board and lodging, while a kitchen-boy passed by holding a struggling fowl by its neck. Similarly, in the big dining-room, which I had passed through on my first day here on my way to the small room where my friend awaited me, one was again reminded of some Biblical feast, portrayed with the naïvety of former times and with Flemish exaggeration, because of the quantity of fish, chickens, grouse, woodcock, pigeons, brought in garnished and piping hot by breathless waiters who slid along the floor in their haste to set them down on the huge sideboard where they were carved immediately, but where – for many of the diners were finishing their meal as I arrived – they piled up untouched; it was as if their profusion and the haste of those who carried them in were prompted far less by the demands of those eating than by respect for the sacred text, scrupulously followed to the letter but naïvely illustrated by real details taken from local custom, and by a concern, both aesthetic and devotional, to make visible the splendour of the feast through the profusion of its victuals and the bustling attentiveness of those who served it. One of them stood lost in thought by a sideboard at the end of the room; and in order to find out from him, who alone appeared calm enough to give me an answer, where our table had been laid, I made my way forward through the various chafing-dishes that had been lit to keep warm the plates of latecomers (which did not prevent the desserts, in the centre of the room, from being displayed in the hands of a huge mannikin, sometimes supported on the wings of a duck, apparently made of crystal but actually of ice, carved each day with a hot iron by a sculptor-cook, in a truly Flemish manner), and, at the risk of being knocked down by the other waiters, went straight towards the calm one in whom I seemed to recognize a character traditionally present in these sacred subjects, since he reproduced with scrupulous accuracy the snub-nosed features, simple and badly drawn, and the dreamy expression of such a figure, already dimly aware of the miracle of a divine presence which the others have not yet begun to suspect. In addition, and doubtless in view of the approaching festive season, the tableau was reinforced by a celestial element recruited entirely from a personnel of cherubim and seraphim. A young angel musician, his fair hair framing a fourteen-year-old face, was not playing any instrument, it is true, but stood dreaming in front of a gong or a stack of plates, while less infantile angels were dancing attendance through the boundless expanse of the room, beating the air with the ceaseless flutter of the napkins, which hung from their bodies like the wings in primitive paintings, with pointed ends. Taking flight from these ill-defined regions, screened by a curtain of palms, from which the angelic waiters looked, from a distance, as if they had descended from the empyrean, I squeezed my way through to the small dining-room and to Saint-Loup’s table. "
― Marcel Proust , The Guermantes Way
117
" But with this one exception, Saint-Loup’s mistress spoke about all acting celebrities in a tone of ironic superiority, which irritated me because I believed—quite wrongly, as it happened—that it was she who was inferior to them. She was plainly aware that I must regard her as a mediocre actress and, conversely, hold in high esteem the ones she despised. But she showed no resentment, because in all great talent that is not yet recognized, as hers was not at the time, however selfconfident it may be, there is an element of humility, and because we calculate the amount of esteem we expect from others in terms not of our latent potential but of our present achievements. (An hour later, at the theater, I was to see Saint-Loup’s mistress show great deference toward the very artists she now judged so harshly.) "
― Marcel Proust , The Guermantes Way
119
" When my lips touched her face, my grandmother’s hands quivered and a long shudder ran through her whole body – possibly an automatic reflex, or perhaps it is that certain forms of affection are hypersensitive enough to recognize through the veil of unconsciousness what they scarcely need the senses to enable them to love. Suddenly my grandmother started up, made a violent effort, like someone struggling to hold on to her life. Françoise was unable to offer any resistance to the sight of this and burst out sobbing. Remembering what the doctor had said, I tried to make her leave the room. At that moment my grandmother opened her eyes. I hurriedly thrust myself in front of Françoise to hide her tears while my parents were speaking to the dying woman. The hissing drone of oxygen had stopped; the doctor moved away from the bedside. My grandmother was dead.
A few hours later, Françoise was able for the last time, and without causing pain, to comb that beautiful hair which was only slightly greying and had thus far seemed much younger than my grandmother herself. But this was now reversed: the hair was the only feature to set the crown of age on a face grown young again, free of the wrinkles, the shrinkage, the puffiness, the tensions, the sagging flesh which pain had brought to it for so long. As in the distant days when her parents had chosen a husband for her, her features were delicately traced by purity and submission, her cheeks glowed with a chaste expectation, a dream of happiness, an innocent gaiety even, which the years had gradually destroyed. As it ebbed from her, life had borne away its disillusions. A smile seemed to hover on my grandmother’s lips. On that funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the Middle Ages, had laid her to rest with the face of a young girl. "
― Marcel Proust , The Guermantes Way
