Read Online The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle by Marcel Proust - Free Book Online

I was obliged to take it, to snatch it brusquely and in public, without even having the time or the equanimity to bring to what I was doing the single-minded attention of lunatics who compel themselves to exclude all other thoughts from their mindswhile they are shutting a door, so that when the sickness of uncertainty sweeps over them again they can triumphantly oppose it with the recollection of the precise moment when they shut the door.
    We were all in the garden when the double tinkle of the visitors’ bell sounded shyly. Everyone knew that it must be Swann, and yet they looked at one another inquiringly and sent my grandmother to reconnoitre.
    “See that you thank him intelligibly for the wine,” my grandfather warned his two sisters-in-law. “You know how good it is, and the case is huge.”
    “Now, don’t start whispering!” said my great-aunt. “How would you like to come into a house and find everyone muttering to themselves?”
    “Ah! There’s M. Swann,” cried my father. “Let’s ask him if he thinks it will be fine tomorrow.”
    My mother fancied that a word from her would wipe out all the distress which my family had contrived to cause Swann since his marriage. She found an opportunity to draw him aside for a moment. But I followed her: I could not bring myself to let her out of my sight while I felt that in a few minutes I should have to leave her in the dining-room and go up to my bed without the consoling thought, as on ordinary evenings, that she would come up later to kiss me.
    “Now, M. Swann,” she said, “do tell me about your daughter. I’m sure she already has a taste for beautiful things, like her papa.”
    “Come along and sit down here with us all on the verandah,” said my grandfather, coming up to him. My mother had to abandon her quest, but managed to extract from the restriction itself a further delicate thought, likegood poets whom the tyranny of rhyme forces into the discovery of their finest lines.
    “We can talk about her again when we are by ourselves,” she said, or rather whispered to Swann. “Only a mother is capable of understanding these things. I’m sure that hers would agree with me.”
    And so we all sat down round the iron table. I should have liked not to think of the hours of anguish which I should have to spend that evening alone in my room, without being able to go to sleep: I tried to convince myself that they were of no importance since I should have forgotten them next morning, and to fix my mind on thoughts of the future which would carry me, as on a bridge, across the terrifying abyss that yawned at my feet. But my mind, strained by this foreboding, distended like the look which I shot at my mother, would not allow any extraneous impression to enter. Thoughts did indeed enter it, but only on the condition that they left behind them every element of beauty, or even of humour, by which I might have been distracted or beguiled. As a surgical patient, thanks to a local anaesthetic, can look on fully conscious while an operation is being performed upon him and yet feel nothing, I could repeat to myself some favourite lines, or watch my grandfather’s efforts to talk to Swann about the Duc d’Audiffret-Pasquier, without being able to kindle any emotion from the one or amusement from the other. Hardly had my grandfather begun to question Swann about that orator when one of my grandmother’s sisters, in whose ears the question echoed like a solemn but untimely silence which her natural politeness bade her interrupt, addressed the other with:
    “Just fancy, Flora, I met a young Swedish governess today who told me some most interesting things about the co-operative movement in Scandinavia. We really must have her to dine here one evening.”
    “To be sure!” said her sister Flora, “but I haven’t wasted my time either. I met such a clever old gentleman at M. Vinteuil’s who knows Maubant quite well, and Maubant has told him every little thing about