Download the full version of the ebook at

https://ebookgate.com

The Case of the Frozen Addicts How the

Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized
the Understanding of Parkinson s Disease 1st
Edition J. W. Langston
https://ebookgate.com/product/the-case-of-the-
frozen-addicts-how-the-solution-of-a-medical-
mystery-revolutionized-the-understanding-of-
parkinson-s-disease-1st-edition-j-w-langston/

Explore and download more ebook at https://ebookgate.com

 Recommended digital products (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) that
you can download immediately if you are interested.

Parkinson s Disease and the Family A New Guide 1st Edition

Nutan Sharma

https://ebookgate.com/product/parkinson-s-disease-and-the-family-a-
new-guide-1st-edition-nutan-sharma/

ebookgate.com

Mystery of the Ages 2nd Edition Edition Herber W.

Armstrong

https://ebookgate.com/product/mystery-of-the-ages-2nd-edition-edition-
herber-w-armstrong/

ebookgate.com

Handbook of Parkinson s Disease Neurological Disease and

Therapy Fourth Edition Rajesh Pahwa

https://ebookgate.com/product/handbook-of-parkinson-s-disease-
neurological-disease-and-therapy-fourth-edition-rajesh-pahwa/

ebookgate.com

The Burdens of Disease J. N. Hays

https://ebookgate.com/product/the-burdens-of-disease-j-n-hays/

ebookgate.com
Life in the Balance A Physician s Memoir of Life Love and
Loss with Parkinson s Disease and Dementia 1st Edition
Thomas Graboys
https://ebookgate.com/product/life-in-the-balance-a-physician-s-
memoir-of-life-love-and-loss-with-parkinson-s-disease-and-
dementia-1st-edition-thomas-graboys/
ebookgate.com

Parkinson s Disease Genes Disease 1st Edition Natalie

Goldstein

https://ebookgate.com/product/parkinson-s-disease-genes-disease-1st-
edition-natalie-goldstein/

ebookgate.com

The Seven Ages of a Medical Scientist An Autobiography

George W. Corner

https://ebookgate.com/product/the-seven-ages-of-a-medical-scientist-
an-autobiography-george-w-corner/

ebookgate.com

Case Closed 1 Mystery in the Mansion Magaziner

https://ebookgate.com/product/case-closed-1-mystery-in-the-mansion-
magaziner/

ebookgate.com

Parkinson s Disease and other Movement Disorders 2nd

Edition Mark J Edwards

https://ebookgate.com/product/parkinson-s-disease-and-other-movement-
disorders-2nd-edition-mark-j-edwards/

ebookgate.com
 THE CASE OF THE FROZEN ADDICTS
Copyright © 2013. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Case of the Frozen

palfremanboek.indb 1 Addicts : How the Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized the Understanding of Parkinson's Disease, 13-11-13 15:54
 This page intentionally left blank
Copyright © 2013. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Case of the Frozen

palfremanboek.indb 2 Addicts : How the Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized the Understanding of Parkinson's Disease, 13-11-13 15:54
 The Case of the Frozen Addicts
How the Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized
the Understanding of Parkinson’s Disease

by
Dr. J. William Langston and Jon Palfreman
Copyright © 2013. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

IOS Press

The Case of the Frozen

palfremanboek.indb 3 Addicts : How the Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized the Understanding of Parkinson's Disease,
 © 2014 The authors and IOS Press. All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-61499-331-5 (print)

ISBN 978-1-61499-332-2 (online)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013955221
doi: 10.3233/978-1-61499-332-2-i

Published by IOS Press

IOS Press BV
Nieuwe Hemweg 6b
1013 BG Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Tel: +31-20-688 3355
Fax: +31-20-687 0019
email: [email protected]
www.iospress.nl
Copyright © 2013. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

LEGAL NOTICE
The publisher is not responsible for the use which might be made of the following information

PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS

The Case of the Frozen

palfremanboek.indb 4 Addicts : How the Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized the Understanding of Parkinson's Disease, 13-11-13 15:54
 To Connie, George, Juanita, David, Bill, and Toby
Copyright © 2013. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Case of the Frozen

palfremanboek.indb 5 Addicts : How the Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized the Understanding of Parkinson's Disease, 13-11-13 15:54
 This page intentionally left blank
Copyright © 2013. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Case of the Frozen

palfremanboek.indb 6 Addicts : How the Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized the Understanding of Parkinson's Disease, 13-11-13 15:54
 Contents
Authors’ Note...................................................................................................1
Prologue.......................................................................................................... 3

Part One
1 All in the Mind ......................................................................................... 11
2 Drugs by Design.......................................................................................25
3 The Forgotten Case...................................................................................33
4 Brain Damage ..........................................................................................41
5 Research Wars.......................................................................................... 49
6 A New Start for Parkinson’s Disease......................................................... 57
7 Starting Over ........................................................................................... 65
8 Fame and Misfortune .............................................................................. 69
9 Side Effects ...............................................................................................83
10 The Cause ................................................................................................ 89
11 To Catch a Chemist ................................................................................ 101
12 Trail of Ironies .........................................................................................113
Copyright © 2013. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

13 New Treatments ..................................................................................... 119

Part Two
14 Mending the Brain .................................................................................129
15 Miracles .................................................................................................. 141
16 Nemesis ..................................................................................................147
17 Doing the Unthinkable........................................................................... 157
18 Embryonic Conflicts............................................................................... 165

vii

The Case of the Frozen

palfremanboek.indb 7 Addicts : How the Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized the Understanding of Parkinson's Disease, 13-11-13 15:54
 19 The Long Journey ................................................................................... 183
20 Out on a Limb........................................................................................197
21 The Turning Point ..................................................................................201
22 Going Public ......................................................................................... 207
23 Unending Quest ..................................................................................... 211
Epilogue .......................................................................................................223

Additional material for 2014 edition

What’s New in Parkinson’s Disease Research? .............................................. 227

Acknowledgments ........................................................................................241
About the authors ........................................................................................243
Index............................................................................................................245
Copyright © 2013. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

viii

The Case of the Frozen

palfremanboek.indb 8 Addicts : How the Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized the Understanding of Parkinson's Disease, 13-11-13 15:54
 Authors’ Note

W
hile the story told in this book arose directly from the experiences
of one of its authors, Bill Langston, we decided nevertheless to write
the book in the third person. This gave us more freedom to handle
the complexities of the plot, and to include key events at which Bill
Langston was not present.
The events described in this book are based on hundreds of documents gathered
between 1982 and 1995 and on extensive interviews with all the major participants.
Where unwitnessed or unrecorded personal exchanges have been cast in dialogue form,
the participants have had an opportunity to see the passages to check that they are a
fair depiction of what actually occurred. For legal reasons, some of the names of those
involved in illegal drug manufacture have been changed.
Copyright © 2013. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Case of the Frozen

palfremanboek.indb 1 Addicts : How the Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized the Understanding of Parkinson's Disease, 13-11-13 15:54
 This page intentionally left blank
Copyright © 2013. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Case of the Frozen

palfremanboek.indb 2 Addicts : How the Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized the Understanding of Parkinson's Disease, 13-11-13 15:54
 Prologue

San Jose, California, July 1, 1982

G
eorge Carillo knew something was wrong the moment he injected the
heroin. His arm burned as if hot lead were flowing into his veins, giving
him a stunning high, the best he had had for years. Then he began to
hallucinate strangely, trying to walk through doors that weren’t there,
hurting himself each time he plowed into a wall. George vaguely wondered about those
four bindles he had bought on the street in Mountain View, but then he fell into an
uncomfortable sleep.
The next morning George awoke feeling as if his body had turned to stone.
Copyright © 2013. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

His girlfriend Juanita was sleeping quietly on his shoulder, but when he tried to move
his right arm he couldn’t. It was stuck, wrapped around her body. Juanita pried herself
free and helped George out of bed. Everything George did that day happened in slow
motion – going to the bathroom, getting dressed, making breakfast. He had no desire
to go out, but he had to show up in court or his parole would be revoked. If he failed to
appear he would be back in prison before the day was out. Moving with glacial speed,
George struggled out to his old Volkswagen and drove to the courthouse on Julian
Street.

The Case of the Frozen

palfremanboek.indb 3 Addicts : How the Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized the Understanding of Parkinson's Disease, 13-11-13 15:54
 The courthouse guard noticed a strange figure shuffling past the metal detector
and assumed that he was intoxicated. George never made it through the door. He was
arrested on the spot for being under the influence, a parole violation. Within hours he
was in the San Jose jail.
Each day in his cell, George’s stiffness got worse. By the fourth day he could
hardly move his arms. By the sixth, he could not talk. He could see people and hear
them, he could feel the sensation if someone jostled him. But he couldn’t turn his head
or reply if someone called his name. He was terrified.
Finally, a doctor was called. Struck by George’s appearance, he immediately sent
him to the emergency room at the county hospital, the Santa Clara Valley Medical Cen-
ter. The emergency room doctors were skeptical. Prisoners will try anything to get out of
their cells to a hospital, where the treatment and food (and the opportunities for escape)
are much better. There was a good chance this patient was faking his bizarre condition.
But there were other possibilities. Prison doctors sometimes give large doses of potent
tranquilizers called neuroleptics to chemically restrain agitated or violent patients. On
the chance that George had been overtranquilized, the emergency room staff took blood
and urine samples and sent them off to the lab. Since the results would take time, they
injected 25 milligrams of Benadryl – a drug known to reverse the effects of neuroleptics
– in an effort to reverse the condition, and sent George back to prison.
But the Benadryl didn’t work. Frustrated at seeing his patient no better, the jail
doctor sent George back to the emergency room. This time the Valley physicians tried a
stronger antidote, Cogentin, to overcome the effects of any tranquilizers George might
have received in jail. It had no effect. They returned him to the jail frozen and mute.
The next day both George and the tests came back. The tests were negative – there were
no traces of tranquilizer in his blood or urine. Not having any idea what they were
dealing with, but still suspecting that their patient was desperate to get out of jail, the
emergency room physicians decided to push even harder to see if their immobile patient
was faking his bizarre condition.
First, they scraped the soles of his feet with the pointed end of a reflex hammer
to jolt him out of his state. No response. They applied blunt pressure to the base of his
Copyright © 2013. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

fingernails (an excruciatingly painful maneuver that does not cause any tissue dam-
age). Most people jump up howling with pain when this is done, but George remained
motionless. Finally, in exasperation, they tried ammonium sulfate (smelling salts), which
is so pungent it can raise a patient out of a dead faint. They broke a capsule and held
it up to George’s nostrils, but again – no response. Their mysterious patient remained
absolutely frozen.
Inside, George was consumed with anger. He could hear everything they said.
He could feel everything they did to him. He had screamed inside when they jabbed

The Case of the Frozen

palfremanboek.indb 4 Addicts : How the Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized the Understanding of Parkinson's Disease, 13-11-13 15:54
 the soles of his feet, and felt like throwing up when they passed the ammonia under his
nose. At one point, he was so angry that he tried to hit one of the doctors. He willed his
arm to move, and it did start, but it moved so slowly that nobody in the room noticed.
Satisfied that he wasn’t a malingerer but having no idea what was wrong with
him, the emergency room physicians sent George to the place where such unexplained
disorders are sent – the psychiatry ward. The admitting psychiatrist made an initial
diagnosis of catatonic schizophrenia, a rare condition in which an individual becomes
rigid and mute as an emotional response to some devastating crisis. The diagnosis
seemed reasonable to the resident who made it (who had never seen an actual case), but
the senior psychiatrist, who had some experience with catatonic schizophrenia, decided
the diagnosis just didn’t feel right. A catatonic schizophrenic from jail? No, more likely
there was a physical basis for the patient’s condition. George needed to be seen by a
specialist in physical disorders of the brain: a neurologist.
The neurologists had never seen a patient anything like George either. They dis-
cussed his case at length, standing over his frozen form. Trapped inside his body, George
watched helplessly as the academic arguments flew back and forth. Maybe the heroin he
had bought in Mountain View was to blame, but there was no way he could tell them.
Various doctors came and went. They prodded him, pricked him with pins,
banged him with reflex hammers, and shone lights in his eyes. After a few days, two aids
came into his room pushing a gurney: George was to be transferred to a special unit.

Watsonville, California, July 4, 1982

David Silvey was hungry, thirsty, and frightened. For several days he had lain
motionless in his apartment, unable to move. Somewhere in the apartment was his
brother Bill. He could hear him breathing, but he couldn’t move his head to see him.
David was more scared than he had ever been in his life. He made a huge effort to lift
himself up but nothing happened – his limbs just wouldn’t move where he wanted them
to. He tried to shout aloud, but no sound emerged from his dry lips.
Copyright © 2013. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

If someone didn’t come soon, they would be finished. Even if someone did
come and ring the bell, the odds were they would leave when they got no answer. The
telephone started ringing. Maybe it was his mother; maybe she would suspect that
something was wrong.
David and Bill had had a good couple of days earlier in the week dealing a new
shipment of heroin, and had decided to use the rest themselves. It was terrific stuff,
unlike anything David had used before, although his veins burned when he fixed. They
had gone on a run with their friend Big Mike, taking it for a solid five days, and it was

The Case of the Frozen

palfremanboek.indb 5 Addicts : How the Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized the Understanding of Parkinson's Disease, 13-11-13 15:54
 great. But as the week wore on, David had felt himself slowing down. Big Mike didn’t
seem to be much affected and left the apartment, but Bill and David had not felt like
going out. In the end they stayed home watching TV. Now, on the Fourth of July,
David was not even capable of changing the channel. As the phone stopped ringing, he
drifted off into a strange sleep.
The next morning their mother arrived to find Bill and David lying there, totally
paralyzed. She called an ambulance which took them to the Watsonville Community
Hospital. The admitting physician could see no obvious reason why two apparently
healthy young men in their twenties should become rigid and frozen, and he listed a
diagnosis of catatonic schizophrenia. The problem, he concluded, was probably in their
minds.

Department of Psychiatry, Stanford University Medical Center, California, July 5, 1982

Connie Sainz was in pain. Unable to move, she just lay in the bed surrounded by
doctors and nurses. They asked her questions, she tried to answer them, but no words
emerged from her lips.
Connie’s nightmare had begun a month before, when she was resting in her
apartment in San Jose. First Connie had felt tired, then stiff, then rigid. It was as if some
evil spell were slowly encaging her in her body. By the time her sister Stella returned
from work, Connie was lying completely immobile with her eyes wide open, unable to
respond or talk. At first, Stella thought that it was the effects of heroin withdrawal. That
summer, much to the consternation and shame of her family, Connie had started using
heroin. After lots of family arguments, she had agreed to try and kick the habit. Perhaps
this was the gruesome first effect of withdrawal.
After three days, Connie was worse. Her face lost all expression and now looked
like a mask. Her body became twisted and contorted and underwent sudden jerks. By
the tenth day, she looked more like a marble sculpture than a living woman. Stella had
no idea what to do. In desperation she lifted Connie into the backseat of her car and
Copyright © 2013. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

drove north on Route 101. She had heard that Stanford had some of the best doctors in
the world. That was where she would take Connie. Surely they would be able to cure her.
The emergency room doctors at Stanford had seen nothing like this and carried
out a series of tests. Unable to discover a physical reason for Connie’s condition, they
focused on a detail in her medical history that Stella had provided. Apparently Con-
nie’s problems had begun after word reached her that her boyfriend Toby, a Salinas drug
dealer, had become paralyzed. Perhaps this was a case of sympathetic paralysis – Connie
had been so affected by the news of Toby’s paralysis that she had undergone a hysterical

The Case of the Frozen

palfremanboek.indb 6 Addicts : How the Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized the Understanding of Parkinson's Disease, 13-11-13 15:54
 conversion reaction, developing paralysis in sympathy. The problem was, as they put it,
“all in her mind.” This line of reasoning led them to admit Connie to the psychiatric
ward, where she was subjected to a number of tests, including sodium amobarbitol
(truth serum), to try to get to the bottom of her hysterical paralysis and what they saw
as her “deeply rooted psychological problems.”
To Connie, trapped inside her body listening to all this earnest theorizing, it
was living a nightmare. She knew what she felt, but she couldn’t communicate with the
doctors. There was absolutely nothing wrong with her mind; the problem was that her
body no longer did what her mind wanted. To make things worse, she was in terrible
pain. She had been stuck in a frozen position so long that one of the nerves in her right
leg had been crushed.
After two weeks of frustration, the psychiatrists finally gave up in their therapeu-
tic attempts and sent her home with a diagnosis of “functional paralysis.” Her mother
was told that Connie would eventually get better; the problem was all in her mind.
Copyright © 2013. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Case of the Frozen

palfremanboek.indb 7 Addicts : How the Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized the Understanding of Parkinson's Disease, 13-11-13 15:54
 This page intentionally left blank
Copyright © 2013. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Case of the Frozen Addicts : How the Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized the Understanding of Parkinson's Disease,
 Part One
Copyright © 2013. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Case of the Frozen

palfremanboek.indb 9 Addicts : How the Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized the Understanding of Parkinson's Disease, 13-11-13 15:54
 This page intentionally left blank
Copyright © 2013. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Case of the Frozen

palfremanboek.indb 10 Addicts : How the Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized the Understanding of Parkinson's Disease, 13-11-13 15:54
 1
All in the Mind

Santa Clara Valley Medical Center Neurobehavior Unit, San Jose, California, July 16, 1982

T
he patient lay there frozen. Looking more like a mannequin than a person,
he made no movement and uttered no sound. His face was expressionless
and his eyes stared eerily ahead. Dr. Phil Ballard, the physician on duty,
flipped through the patient’s chart. He was a 42-year-old Hispanic man
named George Carillo who had become catatonic two weeks earlier, shortly after being
incarcerated in the San Jose jail. Since then he had been seen by a dozen or more doc-
tors in different parts of the hospital, but it was clear that none of them had the slightest
idea what was wrong.
Copyright © 2013. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The case notes told a bizarre story. Carillo had turned up for a court hearing
intoxicated on PCP and was jailed on the spot. But in his cell, he became less and less
able to function. For three days he had bounced back and forth between jail and the
Valley emergency room before finally being admitted to the psychiatry unit. Within the
department of psychiatry there was a specialized ward called the neurobehavior unit,
designed to deal with unusual cases which did not seem to fit classic psychiatric classifi-
cations and where an underlying physical or “organic” cause was suspected. And so, on
July 16, the mysterious case of George Carillo had been sent to them.

11

The Case of the Frozen

palfremanboek.indb 11 Addicts : How the Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized the Understanding of Parkinson's Disease, 13-11-13 15:54
 Ballard, who was doing a fellowship in behavioral neurology on the unit, put
the chart down and looked at his patient. George Carillo hadn’t moved the entire time
that he had been reading the medical records. If his new patient was faking it, he sure
was some actor. Ballard looked at his watch: 10:00 am. His boss Bill Langston would
be swamped with patients in the general neurology clinic, and would not want to be
dragged out. But George needed a diagnosis, and the sooner the better.

General Neurology Clinic, Valley Medical Center

That Friday morning the neurology clinic was especially busy. A dozen pa-
tients filled the small waiting room and another twenty lined the corridor outside. Bill
Langston, the head of the department of neurology, was used to it. Already that day he
had seen two stroke victims, one with frontal lobe syndrome, two Alzheimer’s patients,
a case of temporal lobe epilepsy, and three patients with migraine headaches. It wasn’t
glamorous or well-paid work, but it was important. For tens of thousands of poor
people in Santa Clara County, some fifty miles south of San Francisco, Valley Medical
Center was the only place they could go for medical treatment.
And it was interesting. Given the complexity of the brain, neurological cases are
often difficult and challenging. While sophisticated imaging systems exist to image the
brain, they are not sensitive enough to detect small lesions. With the exception of the
nerve fiber layer in the eye, which can be seen through an ophthalmoscope, the nervous
system cannot be observed directly. A dermatologist can see a rash, a cardiologist can
listen to a heart, but a neurologist must localize any damage to the brain through a
complex process of deduction and inference from the clinical signs and the patient’s
symptoms. For example, paralysis on the right side of the face and weakness of the left
arm and leg means that the lesion – whether it is a stroke, tumor, or something else –
must be located at the level of the facial nucleus on the right side of the brain stem. A
lesion in this location can knock out the nerve fibers that innervate the muscles on the
right side of the face (which are uncrossed), and at the same time damage motor tracts
Copyright © 2013. IOS Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

that run from the right side of the brain to the left side of the body, before they have
crossed to the left at the junction of the lower end of the brain stem and spinal cord.
The symptoms vary greatly from patient to patient. One of Langston’s patients
had been walking down the street one day when he started to hear the voice of Walter
Cronkite introducing the CBS Evening News and wondered if he was losing his mind.
Neurological evaluation revealed that his auditory hallucinations were the first sign of a
brain tumor in the speech area on the left side of his brain.
For all this, Langston had a sense that his career was going nowhere fast. At age

12

The Case of the Frozen

palfremanboek.indb 12 Addicts : How the Solution of a Medical Mystery Revolutionized the Understanding of Parkinson's Disease, 13-11-13 15:54
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
one saw her on those days and not on others, which made one
tremble to think that one might not see her again. Life had obligingly
revealed to one in its whole extent the romance of this little girl, had
lent one, for the study of her, first one optical instrument, then
another, and had added to one’s carnal desire an accompaniment
which multiplied it an hundredfold and diversified it with those other
desires, more spiritual and less easily assuaged, which do not
emerge from their torpor, leaving carnal desire to move by itself,
when it aims only at the conquest of a piece of flesh, but which to
gain possession of a whole tract of memories, whence they have felt
the wretchedness of exile, rise in a tempest round about it, enlarge,
extend it, are unable to follow it to the accomplishment, the
assimilation, impossible in the form in which it is looked for, of an
immaterial reality, but wait for this desire half way and at the moment
of recollection, of return furnish it afresh with their escort; to kiss,
instead of the cheeks of the first comer, however cool and fresh they
might be, but anonymous, with no secret, with no distinction, those of
which I had so long been dreaming, would be to know the taste, the
savour of a colour on which I had endlessly gazed. One has seen a
woman, a mere image in the decorative setting of life, like Albertine,
outlined against the sea, and then one has been able to take that
image, to detach it, to bring it close to oneself, gradually to discern
its solidity, its colours, as though one had placed it behind the
glasses of a stereoscope. It is for this reason that the women who
are a little difficult, whose resistance one does not at once
overcome, of whom one does not indeed know at first whether one
ever will overcome it, are alone interesting. For to know them, to
approach them, to conquer them is to make fluctuate in form, in
dimensions, in relief the human image, is an example of relativity in
the appreciation of an image which it is delightful to see afresh when
it has resumed the slender proportions of a silhouette in the setting
of one’s life. The women one meets first of all in a brothel are of no
interest because they remain invariable.
In addition, Albertine preserved, inseparably attached to her, all
my impressions of a series of seascapes of which I was particularly
fond. I felt that it was possible for me, on the girl’s two cheeks, to
kiss the whole of the beach at Balbec.
 “If you really don’t mind my kissing you, I would rather put it off for
a little and choose a good moment. Only you mustn’t forget that
you’ve said I may. I shall want a voucher: ‘Valid for one kiss.’”
“Shall I have to sign it?”
“But if I took it now, should I be entitled to another later on?”
“You do make me laugh with your vouchers; I shall issue a new
one every now and then.”
“Tell me; just one thing more. You know, at Balbec, before I had
been introduced to you, you used often to have a hard, calculating
look; you can’t tell me what you were thinking about when you
looked like that?”
“No; I don’t remember at all.”
“Wait; this may remind you: one day your friend Gisèle put her feet
together and jumped over the chair an old gentleman was sitting in.
Try to remember what was in your mind at that moment.”
“Gisèle was the one we saw least of; she did belong to the band, I
suppose, but not properly. I expect I thought that she was very ill-
bred and common.”
“Oh, is that all?”
I should certainly have liked, before kissing her, to be able to fill
her afresh with the mystery which she had had for me on the beach
before I knew her, to find latent in her the place in which she had
lived earlier still; for that, at any rate, if I knew nothing of it, I could
substitute all my memories of our life at Balbec, the sound of the
waves rolling up and breaking beneath my window, the shouts of the
children. But when I let my eyes glide over the charming pink globe
of her cheeks, the gently curving surfaces of which ran up to expire
beneath the first foothills of her piled black tresses which ran in
undulating mountain chains, thrust out escarped ramparts and
moulded the hollows of deep valleys, I could not help saying to
myself: “Now at last, after failing at Balbec, I am going to learn the
fragrance of the secret rose that blooms in Albertine’s cheeks, and
since the cycles through which we are able to make things and
people pass in the course of our existence are comparatively few,
perhaps I ought now to regard mine as nearing its end when, having
made to emerge from its remoteness the flowering face that I had
chosen from among all others, I shall have brought it into this new
plane in which I shall at last acquire a tactual experience of it with my
lips.” I told myself this because I believed that there was such a thing
as knowledge acquired by the lips; I told myself that I was going to
know the taste of this fleshly rose, because I had never stopped to
think that man, a creature obviously less rudimentary in structure
than the sea-urchin or even the whale, is nevertheless still
unprovided with a certain number of essential organs, and notably
possesses none that will serve for kissing. The place of this absent
organ he supplies with his lips, and thereby arrives perhaps at a
slightly more satisfying result than if he were reduced to caressing
the beloved with a horny tusk. But a pair of lips, designed to convey
to the palate the taste of whatever whets the appetite, must be
content, without ever realising their mistake or admitting their
disappointment, with roaming over the surface and with coming to a
halt at the barrier of the impenetrable but irresistible cheek. Besides,
at such moments at the actual contact between flesh and flesh, the
lips, even supposing them to become more expert and better
endowed, could taste no better probably the savour which nature
prevents their ever actually grasping, for in that desolate zone in
which they are unable to find their proper nourishment, they are
alone; the sense of sight, then that of smell have long since deserted
them. To begin with, as my mouth began gradually to approach the
cheeks which my eyes had suggested to it that it should kiss, my
eyes, changing their position, saw a different pair of cheeks; the
throat, studied at closer range and as though through a magnifying
glass shewed in its coarse grain a robustness which modified the
character of the face.
Apart from the most recent applications of the art of photography
—which set crouching at the foot of a cathedral all the houses which,
time and again, when we stood near them, have appeared to us to
reach almost to the height of the towers, drill and deploy like a
regiment, in file, in open order, in mass, the same famous and
familiar structures, bring into actual contact the two columns on the
Piazzetta which a moment ago were so far apart, thrust away the
adjoining dome of the Salute, and in a pale and toneless background
manage to include a whole immense horizon within the span of a
bridge, in the embrasure of a window, among the leaves of a tree
that stands in the foreground and is portrayed in a more vigorous
tone, give successively as setting to the same church the arched
walls of all the others—I can think of nothing that can so effectively
as a kiss evoke from what we believe to be a thing with one definite
aspect, the hundred other things which it may equally well be since
each is related to a view of it no less legitimate. In short, just as at
Balbec Albertine had often appeared to me different, so now, as if,
wildly accelerating the speed of the changes of aspect and changes
of colouring which a person presents to us in the course of our
various encounters, I had sought to contain them all in the space of a
few seconds so as to reproduce experimentally the phenomenon
which diversifies the individuality of a fellow creature, and to draw
out one from another, like a nest of boxes, all the possibilities that it
contains, in this brief passage of my lips towards her cheek it was
ten Albertines that I saw; this single girl being like a goddess with
several heads, that which I had last seen, if I tried to approach it,
gave place to another. At least so long as I had not touched it, that
head, I could still see it, a faint perfume reached me from it. But alas
—for in this matter of kissing our nostrils and eyes are as ill placed
as our lips are shaped—suddenly my eyes ceased to see; next, my
nose, crushed by the collision, no longer perceived any fragrance,
and, without thereby gaining any clearer idea of the taste of the rose
of my desire, I learned, from these unpleasant signs, that at last I
was in the act of kissing Albertine’s cheek.
Was it because we were enacting—as may be illustrated by the
rotation of a solid body—the converse of our scene together at
Balbec, because it was I, now, who was lying in bed and she who sat
beside me, capable of evading any brutal attack and of dictating her
pleasure to me, that she allowed me to take so easily now what she
had refused me on the former occasion with so forbidding a frown?
(No doubt from that same frown the voluptuous expression which her
face assumed now at the approach of my lips differed only by a
deviation of its lines immeasurably minute but one in which may be
contained all the disparity that there is between the gesture of
“finishing off” a wounded man and that of bringing him relief,
between a sublime and a hideous portrait.) Not knowing whether I
had to give the credit, and to feel grateful for this change of attitude
to some unwitting benefactor who in these last months, in Paris or at
Balbec, had been working on my behalf, I supposed that the
respective positions in which we were now placed might account for
it. It was quite another explanation, however, that Albertine offered
me; this, in short: “Oh, well, you see, that time at Balbec I didn’t
know you properly. For all I knew, you might have meant mischief.”
This argument left me in perplexity. Albertine was no doubt sincere in
advancing it. So difficult is it for a woman to recognise in the
movements of her limbs, in the sensations felt by her body in the
course of an intimate conversation with a friend, the unknown sin
into which she would tremble to think that a stranger was planning
her fall.
In any case, whatever the modifications that had occurred at some
recent time in her life, which might perhaps have explained why it
was that she now readily accorded to my momentary and purely
physical desire what at Balbec she had with horror refused to allow
to my love, another far more surprising manifested itself in Albertine
that same evening as soon as her caresses had procured in me the
satisfaction which she could not have failed to notice, which, indeed,
I had been afraid might provoke in her the instinctive movement of
revulsion and offended modesty which Gilberte had given at a
corresponding moment behind the laurel shrubbery in the Champs-
Elysées.
The exact opposite happened. Already, when I had first made her
lie on my bed and had begun to fondle her, Albertine had assumed
an air which I did not remember in her, of docile good will, of an
almost childish simplicity. Obliterating every trace of her customary
anxieties and interests, the moment preceding pleasure, similar in
this respect to the moment after death, had restored to her
rejuvenated features what seemed like the innocence of earliest
childhood. And no doubt everyone whose special talent is suddenly
brought into play becomes modest, devoted, charming; especially if
by this talent he knows that he is giving us a great pleasure, he is
himself happy in the display of it, anxious to present it to us in as
complete a form as possible. But in this new expression on
Albertine’s face there was more than a mere profession of
disinterestedness, conscience, generosity, a sort of conventional and
unexpected devotion; and it was farther than to her own childhood, it
was to the infancy of the race that she had reverted. Very different
from myself who had looked for nothing more than a physical
alleviation, which I had finally secured, Albertine seemed to feel that
it would indicate a certain coarseness on her part were she to seem
to believe that this material pleasure could be unaccompanied by a
moral sentiment or was to be regarded as terminating anything. She,
who had been in so great a hurry a moment ago, now, presumably
because she felt that kisses implied love and that love took
precedence of all other duties, said when I reminded her of her
dinner:
“Oh, but that doesn’t matter in the least; I have plenty of time.”
She seemed embarrassed by the idea of getting up and going
immediately after what had happened, embarrassed by good
manners, just as Françoise when, without feeling thirsty, she had felt
herself bound to accept with a seemly gaiety the glass of wine which
Jupien offered her, would never have dared to leave him as soon as
the last drops were drained, however urgent the call of duty.
Albertine—and this was perhaps, with another which the reader will
learn in due course, one of the reasons which had made me
unconsciously desire her—was one of the incarnations of the little
French peasant whose type may be seen in stone at Saint-André-
des-Champs. As in Françoise, who presently nevertheless was to
become her deadly enemy, I recognised in her a courtesy towards
friend and stranger, a sense of decency, of respect for the bedside.
Françoise who, after the death of my aunt, felt obliged to speak
only in a plaintive tone, would, in the months that preceded her
daughter’s marriage, have been quite shocked if, when the young
couple walked out together, the girl had not taken her lover’s arm.
Albertine lying motionless beside me said:
“What nice hair you have; what nice eyes; you are a dear boy.”
When, after pointing out to her that it was getting late, I added:
“You don’t believe me?” she replied, what was perhaps true but
could be so only since the minute before and for the next few hours:
“I always believe you.”
She spoke to me of myself, my family, my social position. She
said: “Oh, I know your parents know some very nice people. You are
a friend of Robert Forestier and Suzanne Delage.” For the moment
these names conveyed absolutely nothing to me. But suddenly I
remembered that I had indeed played as a child in the Champs-
Elysées with Robert Forestier, whom I had never seen since then. As
for Suzanne Delage, she was the great-niece of Mme. Blatin, and I
had once been going to a dancing lesson, and had even promised to
take a small part in a play that was being acted in her mother’s
drawing-room. But the fear of being sent into fits of laughter, and of a
bleeding nose, had made me decline, so that I had never set eyes
on her. I had at the most a vague idea that I had once heard that the
Swanns’ governess with the feather in her hat had at one time been
with the Delages, but perhaps it was only a sister of this governess,
or a friend. I protested to Albertine that Robert Forestier and
Suzanne Delage occupied a very small place in my life. “That may
be; but your mothers are friends, I can place you by that. I often pass
Suzanne Delage in the Avenue de Messine, I admire her style.” Our
mothers were acquainted only in the imagination of Mme. Bontemps,
who having heard that I had at one time played with Robert
Forestier, to whom, it appeared, I used to recite poetry, had
concluded from that that we were bound by family ties. She could
never, I gathered, hear my mother’s name mentioned without
observing: “Oh yes, she is in the Delage Forestier set,” giving my
parents a good mark which they had done nothing to deserve.
Apart from this, Albertine’s social ideas were fatuous in the
extreme. She regarded the Simonnets with a double ‘n’ as inferior
not only to the Simonets with a single ‘n’ but to everyone in the
world. That some one else should bear the same name as yourself
without belonging to your family is an excellent reason for despising
him. Of course there are exceptions. It may happen that two
Simonnets (introduced to one another at one of those gatherings
where one feels the need to converse, no matter on what subject,
and where moreover one is instinctively well disposed towards
strangers, for instance in a funeral procession on its way to the
cemetery), finding that they have the same name, will seek with a
mutual friendliness though without success to discover a possible
connexion. But that is only an exception. Plenty of people are of
dubious character, but we either know nothing or care nothing about
them. If, however, a similarity of names brings to our door letters
addressed to them, or vice versa, we at once feel a mistrust, often
justified, as to their moral worth. We are afraid of being confused
with them, we forestall the mistake by a grimace of disgust when
anyone refers to them in our hearing. When we read our own name,
as borne by them, in the newspaper, they seem to have usurped it.
The transgressions of other members of the social organism leave
us cold. We lay the burden of them more heavily upon our
namesakes. The hatred which we bear towards the other Simonnets
is all the stronger in that it is not a personal feeling but has been
transmitted by heredity. After the second generation we remember
only the expression of disgust with which our grandparents used to
refer to the other Simonnets, we know nothing of the reason, we
should not be surprised to learn that it had begun with a murder.
Until, as is not uncommon, the time comes when a male and female
Simonnet, who are not related in any way, are joined together in
matrimony and so repair the breach.
Not only did Albertine speak to me of Robert Forestier and
Suzanne Delage, but spontaneously, with that impulse to confide
which the approximation of two human bodies creates, that is to say
at first, before it has engendered a special duplicity and reticence in
one person towards the other, she told me a story about her own
family and one of Andrée’s uncles, as to which, at Balbec, she had
refused to utter a word; thinking that now she ought not to appear to
have any secrets in which I might not share. From this moment, had
her dearest friend said anything to her against me, she would have
made it her duty to inform me. I insisted upon her going home, and
finally she did go, but so ashamed on my account at my discourtesy
that she laughed almost as though to apologise for me, as a hostess
to whose party you have gone without dressing makes the best of
you but is offended nevertheless.
“Are you laughing at me?” I inquired.
“I am not laughing, I am smiling at you,” she replied lovingly.
“When am I going to see you again?” she went on, as though
declining to admit that what had just happened between us, since it
is generally the crowning consummation, might not be at least the
prelude to a great friendship, a friendship already existing which we
should have to discover, to confess, and which alone could account
for the surrender we had made of ourselves.
“Since you give me leave, I shall send for you when I can.” I dared
not let her know that I was subordinating everything else to the
chance of seeing Mme. de Stermaria. “It will have to be at short
notice, unfortunately,” I went on, “I never know beforehand. Would it
be possible for me to send round for you in the evenings, when I am
free?”
“It will be quite possible in a little while, I am going to have a latch-
key of my own. But just at present it can’t be done. Anyhow I shall
come round to-morrow or next day in the afternoon. You needn’t see
me if you’re busy.”
On reaching the door, surprised that I had not anticipated her, she
offered me her cheek, feeling that there was no need now for any
coarse physical desire to prompt us to kiss one another. The brief
relations in which we had just indulged being of the sort to which an
absolute intimacy and a heartfelt choice often tend, Albertine had felt
it incumbent upon her to improvise and add provisionally to the
kisses which we had exchanged on my bed the sentiment of which
those kisses would have been the symbol for a knight and his lady
such as they might have been conceived in the mind of a gothic
minstrel.
When she had left me, this young Picard, who might have been
carved on his porch by the image-maker of Saint-André-des-
Champs, Françoise brought me a letter which filled me with joy, for it
was from Mme. de Stermaria, who accepted my invitation to dinner.
From Mme. de Stermaria, that was to say for me not so much from
the real Mme. de Stermaria as from her of whom I had been thinking
all day before Albertine’s arrival. It is the terrible deception of love
that it begins by engaging us in play not with a woman of the
external world but with a puppet fashioned and kept in our brain, the
only form of her moreover that we have always at our disposal, the
only one that we shall ever possess, one which the arbitrary power
of memory, almost as absolute as that of imagination, may have
made as different from the real woman as had been from the real
Balbec the Balbec of my dreams; an artificial creation to which by
degrees, and to our own hurt, we shall force the real woman into
resemblance.
Albertine had made me so late that the play had just finished when
I entered Mme. de Villeparisis’s drawing-room; and having little
desire to be caught in the stream of guests who were pouring out,
discussing the great piece of news, the separation, said to be
already effected, of the Duc de Guermantes from his wife, I had, until
I should have an opportunity of shaking hands with my hostess,
taken my seat on an empty sofa in the outer room, when from the
other, in which she had no doubt had her chair in the very front row
of all, I saw emerging, majestic, ample and tall in a flowing gown of
yellow satin upon which stood out in relief huge black poppies, the
Duchess herself. The sight of her no longer disturbed me in the
least. There had been a day when, laying her hands on my forehead
(as was her habit when she was afraid of hurting my feelings) and
saying: “You really must stop hanging about trying to meet Mme. de
Guermantes. All the neighbours are talking about you. Besides, look
how ill your grandmother is, you really have something more serious
to think about than waylaying a woman who only laughs at you,” in a
moment, like a hypnotist who brings one back from the distant
country in which one imagined oneself to be, and opens one’s eyes
for one, or like the doctor who, by recalling one to a sense of duty
and reality, cures one of an imaginary disease in which one has
been indulging one’s fancy, my mother had awakened me from an
unduly protracted dream. The rest of the day had been consecrated
to a last farewell to this malady which I was renouncing; I had sung,
for hours on end and weeping as I sang, the sad words of Schubert’s
Adieu:
 Farewell, strange voices call thee
Away from me, dear sister of the angels.

And then it had finished. I had given up my morning walks, and

with so little difficulty that I thought myself justified in the prophecy
(which we shall see was to prove false later on) that I should easily
grow accustomed in the course of my life to ceasing to see a
woman. And when, shortly afterwards, Françoise had reported to me
that Jupien, anxious to enlarge his business, was looking for a shop
in the neighbourhood, wishing to find one for him (quite happy,
moreover, when strolling along a street which already from my bed I
had heard luminously vociferous like a peopled beach, to see behind
the raised iron shutters of the dairies the young milk-girls with their
white sleeves), I had been able to begin these excursions again. Nor
did I feel the slightest constraint; for I was conscious that I was no
longer going out with the object of seeing Mme. de Guermantes;
much as a married woman who takes endless precautions so long
as she has a lover, from the day on which she has broken with him
leaves his letters lying about, at the risk of disclosing to her husband
an infidelity which ceased to alarm her the moment she ceased to be
guilty of it. What troubled me now was the discovery that almost
every house sheltered some unhappy person. In one the wife was
always in tears because her husband was unfaithful to her. In the
next it was the other way about. In another a hardworking mother,
beaten black and blue by a drunkard son, was endeavouring to
conceal her sufferings from the eyes of the neighbours. Quite half of
the human race was in tears. And when I came to know the people
who composed it I saw that they were so exasperating that I asked
myself whether it might not be the adulterous husband and wife (who
were so simply because their lawful happiness had been withheld
from them, and shewed themselves charming and faithful to
everyone but their respective wife and husband) who were in the
right. Presently I ceased to have even the excuse of being useful to
Jupien for continuing my morning wanderings. For we learned that
the cabinet-maker in our courtyard, whose workrooms were
separated from Jupien’s shop only by the flimsiest of partitions, was
shortly to be “given notice” by the Duke’s agent because his
hammering made too much noise. Jupien could have hoped for
nothing better; the workrooms had a basement for storing timber,
which communicated with our cellars. He could keep his coal in this,
he could knock down the partition, and would then have a huge shop
all in one room. But even without the amusement of house-hunting
on his behalf I had continued to go out every day before luncheon,
just as Jupien himself, finding the rent that M. de Guermantes was
asking him exorbitant, was allowing the premises to be inspected in
the hope that, discouraged by his failure to find a tenant, the Duke
would resign himself to accepting a lower offer. Françoise, noticing
that, even at an hour when no prospective tenant was likely to call,
the porter left the door of the empty shop on the latch, scented a trap
laid by him to entice the young woman who was engaged to the
Guermantes footman (they would find a lovers’ retreat there) and to
catch them red-handed.
However that might be, and for all that I had no longer to find
Jupien a new shop, I still went out before luncheon. Often, on these
excursions, I met M. de Norpois. It would happen that, conversing as
he walked with a colleague, he cast at me a glance which after
making a thorough scrutiny of my person returned to his companion
without his having smiled at me or given me any more sign of
recognition than if he had never set eyes on me before. For, with
these eminent diplomats, looking at you in a certain way is intended
to let you know not that they have seen you but that they have not
seen you and that they have some serious question to discuss with
the colleague who is accompanying them. A tall woman whom I
frequently encountered near the house was less discreet with me.
For in spite of the fact that I did not know her, she would turn round
to look at me, would wait for me, unavailingly, before shop windows,
smile at me as though she were going to kiss me, make gestures
indicative of a complete surrender. She resumed an icy coldness
towards me if anyone appeared whom she knew. For a long time
now in these morning walks, thinking only of what I had to do, were it
but the most trivial purchase of a newspaper, I had chosen the
shortest way, with no regret were it outside the ordinary course
which the Duchess followed in her walks, and if on the other hand it
lay along that course, without either compunction or concealment,
because it no longer appeared to me the forbidden way on which I
should snatch from an ungrateful woman the favour of setting eyes
on her against her will. But it had never occurred to me that my
recovery, when it restored me to a normal attitude towards Mme. de
Guermantes, would have a corresponding effect on her, and so
render possible a friendliness, even a friendship in which I no longer
felt any interest. Until then, the efforts of the entire world banded
together to bring me into touch with her would have been powerless
to counteract the evil spell that is cast by an ill-starred love. Fairies
more powerful than mankind have decreed that in such cases
nothing can avail us until the day on which we have uttered sincerely
and from our hearts the formula: “I am no longer in love.” I had been
vexed with Saint-Loup for not having taken me to see his aunt. But
he was no more capable than anyone else of breaking an
enchantment. So long as I was in love with Mme. de Guermantes,
the marks of politeness that I received from others, their
compliments actually distressed me, not only because they did not
come from her but because she would never hear of them. And yet
even if she had known of them it would not have been of the
slightest use to me. Indeed, among the lesser auxiliaries to success
in love, an absence, the declining of an invitation to dinner, an
unintentional, unconscious harshness are of more service than all
the cosmetics and fine clothes in the world. There would be plenty of
social success, were people taught upon these lines the art of
succeeding.
As she swept through the room in which I was sitting, her mind
filled with thoughts of friends whom I did not know and whom she
would perhaps be meeting presently at some other party, Mme. de
Guermantes caught sight of me on my sofa, genuinely indifferent
and seeking only to be polite whereas while I was in love I had tried
so desperately, without ever succeeding, to assume an air of
indifference; she swerved aside, came towards me and, reproducing
the smile she had worn that evening at the Opéra-Comique, which
the unpleasant feeling of being cared for by some one for whom she
did not care was no longer there to obliterate: “No, don’t move; you
don’t mind if I sit down beside you for a moment?” she asked,
gracefully gathering in her immense skirt which otherwise would
have covered the entire sofa.
Of less stature than she, who was further expanded by the volume
of her gown, I was almost brushed by her exquisite bare arm round
which a faint, innumerable down rose in perpetual smoke like a
golden mist, and by the fringe of her fair tresses which wafted their
fragrance over me. Having barely room to sit down, she could not
turn easily to face me, and so, obliged to look straight before her
rather than in my direction, assumed the sort of dreamy, sweet
expression one sees in a portrait.
“Have you any news of Robert?” she inquired.
At that moment Mme. de Villeparisis entered the room.
“Well, sir, you arrive at a fine time, when we do see you here for
once in a way!” And noticing that I was talking to her niece,
concluding, perhaps, that we were more intimate than she had
supposed: “But don’t let me interrupt your conversation with Oriane,”
she went on, and (for these good offices as pander are part of the
duties of the perfect hostess): “You wouldn’t care to dine with her
here on Thursday?”
It was the day on which I was to entertain Mme. de Stermaria, so I
declined.
“Saturday, then?”
As my mother was returning on Saturday or Sunday, it would
never do for me not to stay at home every evening to dine with her; I
therefore declined this invitation also.
“Ah, you’re not an easy person to get hold of.”
“Why do you never come to see me?” inquired Mme. de
Guermantes when Mme. de Villeparisis had left us to go and
congratulate the performers and present the leading lady with a
bunch of roses upon which the hand that offered it conferred all its
value, for it had cost no more than twenty francs. (This, incidentally,
was as high as she ever went when an artist had performed only
once. Those who gave their services at all her afternoons and
evenings throughout the season received roses painted by the
Marquise.)
“It’s such a bore that we never see each other except in other
people’s houses. Since you won’t meet me at dinner at my aunt’s,
why not come and dine with me?” Various people who had stayed to
the last possible moment, upon one pretext or another, but were at
length preparing to leave, seeing that the Duchess had sat down to
talk to a young man on a seat so narrow as just to contain them
both, thought that they must have been misinformed, that it was the
Duchess, and not the Duke, who was seeking a separation, and on
my account. Whereupon they hastened to spread abroad this
intelligence. I had better grounds than anyone to be aware of its
falsehood. But I was myself surprised that at one of those difficult
periods in which a separation that is not yet completed is beginning
to take effect, the Duchess, instead of withdrawing from society
should go out of her way to invite a person whom she knew so
slightly. The suspicion crossed my mind that it had been the Duke
alone who had been opposed to her having me in the house, and
that now that he was leaving her she saw no further obstacle to her
surrounding herself with the people that she liked.
A minute earlier I should have been stupefied had anyone told me
that Mme. de Guermantes was going to ask me to call on her, let
alone to dine with her. I might be perfectly aware that the
Guermantes drawing-room could not furnish those particular
refinements which I had extracted from the name of its occupants,
the fact that it had been forbidden ground to me, by obliging me to
give it the same kind of existence that we give to the drawing-rooms
of which we have read the description in a novel, or seen the image
in a dream, made me, even when I was certain that it was just like
any other, imagine it as quite different. Between myself and it was
the barrier at which reality ends. To dine with the Guermantes was
like travelling to a place I had long wished to see, making a desire
emerge from my brain and take shape before my eyes, forming
acquaintance with a dream. At the most, I might have supposed that
it would be one of those dinners to which one’s hosts invite one with:
“Do come; there’ll be absolutely nobody but ourselves,” pretending to
attribute to the pariah the alarm which they themselves feel at the
thought of his mixing with their other friends, seeking indeed to
convert into an enviable privilege, reserved for their intimates alone,
the quarantine of the outsider, hopelessly uncouth, whom they are
befriending. I felt on the contrary that Mme. de Guermantes was
anxious for me to enjoy the most delightful society that she had to
offer me when she went on, projecting as she spoke before my eyes
as it were the violet-hued loveliness of a visit to Fabrice’s aunt with
the miracle of an introduction to Count Mosca:
“On Friday, now, couldn’t you? There are just a few people
coming; the Princesse de Parme, who is charming, not that I’ld ask
you to meet anyone who wasn’t nice.”
Discarded in the intermediate social grades which are engaged in
a perpetual upward movement, the family still plays an important part
in certain stationary grades, such as the lower middle class and the
semi-royal aristocracy, which latter cannot seek to raise itself since
above it, from its own special point of view, there exists nothing
higher. The friendship shewn me by her “aunt Villeparisis” and
Robert had perhaps made me, for Mme. de Guermantes and her
friends, living always upon themselves and in the same little circle,
the object of a curious interest of which I had no suspicion.
She had of those two relatives a familiar, everyday, homely
knowledge, of a sort, utterly different from what we imagine, in which
if we happen to be comprised in it, so far from our actions being at
once ejected, like the grain of dust from the eye or the drop of water
from the windpipe, they are capable of remaining engraved, and will
still be related and discussed years after we ourselves have
forgotten them, in the palace in which we are astonished to find them
preserved, like a letter in our own handwriting among a priceless
collection of autographs.
People who are merely fashionable may set a guard upon doors
which are too freely invaded. But the Guermantes door was not that.
Hardly ever did a stranger have occasion to pass by it. If, for once in
a way, the Duchess had one pointed out to her, she never dreamed
of troubling herself about the social increment that he would bring,
since this was a thing that she conferred and could not receive. She
thought only of his real merits. Both Mme. de Villeparisis and Saint-
Loup had testified to mine. Doubtless she might not have believed
them if she had not at the same time observed that they could never
manage to secure me when they wanted me, and therefore that I
attached no importance to worldly things, which seemed to the
Duchess a sign that the stranger was to be numbered among what
she called “nice people”.
It was worth seeing, when one spoke to her of women for whom
she did not care, how her face changed as soon as one named, in
connexion with one of these, let us say, her sister-in-law. “Oh, she is
charming!” the Duchess would exclaim in a judicious, confident tone.
The only reason that she gave was that this lady had declined to be
introduced to the Marquise de Chaussegros and the Princesse de
Silistrie. She did not add that the lady had declined also an
introduction to herself, the Duchesse de Guermantes. This had,
nevertheless, been the case, and ever since the mind of the
Duchess had been at work trying to unravel the motives of a woman
who was so hard to know, she was dying to be invited to call on her.
People in society are so accustomed to be sought after that the
person who shuns them seems to them a phoenix and at once
monopolises their attention.
Was the true motive in the mind of Mme. de Guermantes for thus
inviting me (now that I was no longer in love with her) that I did not
run after her relatives, although apparently run after myself by them?
I cannot say. In any case, having made up her mind to invite me, she
was anxious to do me the honours of the best company at her
disposal and to keep away those of her friends whose presence
might have dissuaded me from coming again, those whom she knew
to be boring. I had not known to what to attribute her change of
direction, when I had seen her deviate from her stellar path, come to
sit down beside me and had heard her invite me to dinner, the effect
of causes unknown for want of a special sense to enlighten us in this
respect. We picture to ourselves the people who know us but slightly
—such as, in my case, the Duchesse de Guermantes—as thinking of
us only at the rare moments at which they set eyes on us. As a
matter of fact this ideal oblivion in which we picture them as holding
us is a purely arbitrary conception on our part. So that while, in our
solitary silence, like that of a cloudless night, we imagine the various
queens of society pursuing their course in the heavens at an infinite
distance, we cannot help an involuntary start of dismay or pleasure if
there falls upon us from that starry height, like a meteorite engraved
with our name which we supposed to be unknown on Venus or
Cassiopeia, an invitation to dinner or a piece of malicious gossip.
Perhaps now and then when, following the example of the Persian
princes who, according to the Book of Esther, made their scribes
read out to them the registers in which were enrolled the names of
those of their subjects who had shewn zeal in their service, Mme. de
Guermantes consulted her list of the well-disposed, she had said to
herself, on coming to my name: “A man we must ask to dine some
day.” But other thoughts had distracted her

(Beset by surging cares, a Prince’s mind

Towards fresh matters ever is inclined)

until the moment when she had caught sight of me sitting alone like
Mordecai at the palace gate; and, the sight of me having refreshed
her memory, sought, like Ahasuerus, to lavish her gifts upon me.
I must at the same time add that a surprise of a totally different
sort was to follow that which I had felt on hearing Mme. de
Guermantes ask me to dine with her. Since I had decided that it
would shew greater modesty, on my part, and gratitude also not to
conceal this initial surprise, but rather to exaggerate my expression
of the delight that it gave me, Mme. de Guermantes, who was getting
ready to go on to another, final party, had said to me, almost as a
justification and for fear of my not being quite certain who she was,
since I appeared so astonished at being invited to dine with her: “You
know I’m the aunt of Robert de Saint-Loup, who is such a friend of
yours; besides we have met before.” In replying that I was aware of
this I added that I knew also M. de Charlus, “who had been very
good to me at Balbec and in Paris.” Mme. de Guermantes appeared
dumbfoundered, and her eyes seemed to turn, as though for a
verification of this statement, to some page, already filled and turned,
of her internal register of events. “What, so you know Palamède, do
you?” This name assumed on the lips of Mme. de Guermantes a
great charm, due to the instinctive simplicity with which she spoke of
a man who was socially so brilliant a figure, but for her was no more
than her brother-in-law and the cousin with whom she had grown up.
And on the confused greyness which the life of the Duchesse de
Guermantes was for me this name, Palamède, shed as it were the
radiance of long summer days on which she had played with him as
a girl, at Guermantes, in the garden. Moreover, in this long outgrown
period in their lives, Oriane de Guermantes and her cousin
Palamède had been very different from what they had since become;
M. de Charlus in particular, entirely absorbed in the artistic pursuits
from which he had so effectively restrained himself in later life that I
was stupefied to learn that it was he who had painted the huge fan
with black and yellow irises which the Duchess was at this moment
unfurling. She could also have shewn me a little sonatina which he
had once composed for her. I was completely unaware that the
Baron possessed all these talents, of which he never spoke. Let me
remark in passing that M. de Charlus did not at all relish being called
“Palamède” by his family. That the form “Mémé” might not please
him one could easily understand. These stupid abbreviations are a
sign of the utter inability of the aristocracy to appreciate its own
poetic beauty (in Jewry, too, we may see the same defect, since a
nephew of Lady Israels, whose name was Moses, was commonly
known as “Momo”) concurrently with its anxiety not to appear to
attach any importance to what is aristocratic. Now M. de Charlus
had, in this connexion, a greater wealth of poetic imagination and a
more blatant pride. But the reason for his distaste for “Mémé” could
not be this, since it extended also to the fine name Palamède. The
truth was that, considering, knowing himself to come of a princely
stock, he would have liked his brother and sister-in-law to refer to
him as “Charlus”, just as Queen Marie-Amélie and Duc d’Orléans
might have spoken of their sons and grandsons, brothers and
nephews as “Joinville, Nemours, Chartres, Paris.”
“What a humbug Mémé is!” she exclaimed. “We talked to him
about you for hours; he told us that he would be delighted to make
your acquaintance, just as if he had never set eyes on you. You must
admit he’s odd, and—though it’s not very nice of me to say such a
thing about a brother-in-law I’m devoted to, and really do admire
immensely—a trifle mad at times.”
I was struck by the application of this last epithet to M. de Charlus,
and said to myself that this half-madness might perhaps account for
certain things, such as his having appeared so delighted by his own
proposal that I should ask Bloch to castigate his mother. I decided
that, by reason not only of the things he said but of the way in which
he said them, M. de Charlus must be a little mad. The first time that
one listens to a barrister or an actor, one is surprised by his tone, so
different from the conversational. But, observing that everyone else
seems to find this quite natural, one says nothing about it to other
people, one says nothing in fact to oneself, one is content with
appreciating the degree of talent shewn. At the most, one may think,
of an actor at the Théâtre-Français: “Why, instead of letting his
raised arm fall naturally, did he make it drop in a series of little jerks
broken by pauses for at least ten minutes?” or of a Labori: “Why,
whenever he opened his mouth, did he utter those tragic,
unexpected sounds to express the simplest things?” But as
everybody admits these actions to be necessary and obvious one is
not shocked by them. So, upon thinking it over, one said to oneself
that M. de Charlus spoke of himself with undue emphasis in a tone
which was not in the least that of ordinary speech. It seemed as
though one might have at any moment interrupted him with: “But why
do you shout so? Why are you so offensive?” only everyone seemed
to have tacitly agreed that it was all right. And one took one’s place
in the circle which applauded his outbursts. But certainly, at certain
moments, a stranger might have thought that he was listening to the
ravings of a maniac.
“But are you sure you’re not thinking of some one else? Do you
really mean my brother-in-law Palamède?” went on the Duchess, a
trace of impertinence grafted upon her natural simplicity.
I replied that I was absolutely sure, and that M. de Charlus must
have failed to catch my name.
“Oh well! I shall leave you now,” said Mme. de Guermantes, as
though she regretted the parting. “I must look in for a moment at the
Princesse de Ligne’s. You aren’t going on there? No? You don’t care
for parties? You’re very wise, they are too boring for words. If only I
hadn’t got to go. But she’s my cousin; it wouldn’t be polite. I am
sorry, selfishly, for my own sake, because I could have taken you
there, and brought you back afterwards, too. So I shall say good-bye
now, and look forward to Friday.”