[...] In an unfinished novel, Jean Santeuil (not published until 1952), he laid some of the groundwork for In Search of Lost Time, and in Against Sainte-Beuve, written in 1908–9, he stated as his aesthetic credo: “A book is the product of a different self from the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices. If we mean to try to understand this self it is only in our inmost depths, by endeavoring to reconstruct it there, that the quest can be achieved.” [...]

It was impossible for me to thank my father; he would have been exasperated by what he called mawkishness. I stood there, not daring to move; he was still in front of us, a tall figure in his white nightshirt, crowned with the pink and violet cashmere scarf which he used to wrap around his head since he had begun to suffer from neuralgia, standing like Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli which M. Swann had given me, telling Sarah that she must tear herself away from Isaac. Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand. It is a long time, too, since my father has been able to say to Mamma: “Go along with the child.” Never again will such moments be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father’s presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. In reality their echo has never ceased; and it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them anew, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the street that one would suppose them to have stopped, until they ring out again through the silent evening air.

[...] And perhaps even what I called his severity, when he sent me off to bed, deserved that title less than my mother’s or my grandmother’s attitude, for his nature, which in some respects differed more than theirs from my own, had probably prevented him from realising until then how wretched I was every evening, something which my mother and grandmother knew well; but they loved me enough to be unwilling to spare me that suffering, which they hoped to teach me to overcome, so as to reduce my nervous sensibility and to strengthen my will. Whereas my father, whose affection for me was of another kind, would not, I suspect, have had the same courage, for as soon as he had grasped the fact that I was unhappy he had said to my mother: “Go and comfort him.”

[...] She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called “petites madeleines,” which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature. Where did it come from? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?

These little eccentricities on my grandfather’s part implied no ill-will whatsoever towards my friends. But Bloch had displeased my family for other reasons. He had begun by irritating my father, who, seeing him come in with wet clothes, had asked him with keen interest:

“Why, M. Bloch, is there a change in the weather? Has it been raining? I can’t understand it; the barometer was set fair.”

Which drew from Bloch nothing more than: “Sir, I am absolutely incapable of telling you whether it has rained. I live so resolutely apart from physical contingencies that my senses no longer trouble to inform me of them.”

[...] But now I found myself slightly shocked by this attitude of Swann’s. He appeared unwilling even to risk having an opinion, and to be at his ease only when he could furnish, with meticulous accuracy, some precise detail. But did he not realise that to postulate that the accuracy of his information was of some importance was tantamount to professing an opinion? I thought again of the dinner that night when I had been so unhappy because Mamma would not be coming up to my room, and when he had dismissed the balls given by the Princesse de Léon as being of no importance. And yet it was to just that sort of amusement that he devoted his life. I found all this contradictory. What other life did he set apart for saying in all seriousness what he thought about things, for formulating judgments which he would not put between inverted commas, and for no longer indulging with punctilious politeness in occupations which at the same time he professed to find absurd? [...]

[...] The belief that a person has a share in an unknown life to which his or her love may win us admission is, of all the prerequisites of love, the one which it values most highly and which makes it set little store by all the rest. Even those women who claim to judge a man by his looks alone, see in those looks the emanation of a special way of life. That is why they fall in love with soldiers or with firemen; the uniform makes them less particular about the face; they feel they are embracing beneath the gleaming breastplate a heart different from the rest, more gallant, more adventurous, more tender; [...]

And it was at that moment, too—thanks to a peasant who went past, apparently in a bad enough humour already, but more so when he nearly got a poke in the face from my umbrella, and who replied somewhat coolly to my “Fine day, what! Good to be out walking!”—that I learned that identical emotions do not spring up simultaneously in the hearts of all men in accordance with a pre-established order. Later on, whenever a long spell of reading had put me in a mood for conversation, the friend to whom I was longing to talk would at that very moment have finished indulging himself in the delights of conversation, and wanted to be left to read undisturbed. And if I had just been thinking of my parents with affection, and forming resolutions of the kind most calculated to please them, they would have been using the same interval of time to discover some misdeed that I had already forgotten, and would begin to scold me severely as I was about to fling myself into their arms.

[...] For at such times desire, or love, would revive in him a feeling of vanity from which he was now quite free in his everyday life (although it was doubtless this feeling which had originally prompted him towards the career as a man of fashion in which he had squandered his intellectual gifts on frivolous amusements and made use of his erudition in matters of art only to advise society ladies what pictures to buy and how to decorate their houses), which made him eager to shine, in the eyes of any unknown beauty he had fallen for, with an elegance which the name Swann did not in itself imply. And he was most eager when the unknown beauty was in humble circumstances. Just as it is not by other men of intelligence that an intelligent man is afraid of being thought a fool, so it is not by a nobleman but by an oaf that a man of fashion is afraid of finding his social value underrated. Three-quarters of the mental ingenuity and the mendacious boasting squandered ever since the world began by people who are only cheapened thereby, have been aimed at inferiors. And Swann, who behaved simply and casually with a duchess, would tremble for fear of being despised, and would instantly begin to pose, when in the presence of a housemaid.

If on his travels he met a family whom it would have been more correct for him to make no attempt to cultivate, but among whom he glimpsed a woman possessed of a special charm that was new to him, to remain on his “high horse” and to stave off the desire she had kindled in him, to substitute a different pleasure for the pleasure which he might have tasted in her company by writing to invite one of his former mistresses to come and join him, would have seemed to him as cowardly an abdication in the face of life, as stupid a renunciation of a new happiness as if, instead of visiting the country where he was, he had shut himself up in his own rooms and looked at views of Paris. He did not immure himself in the edifice of his social relations, but had made of them, so as to be able to set it up afresh upon new foundations wherever a woman might take his fancy, one of those collapsible tents which explorers carry about with them. Any part of it that was not portable or could not be adapted to some fresh pleasure he would have given away for nothing, however enviable it might appear to others. How often had his credit with a duchess, built up over the years by her desire to ingratiate herself with him without having found an opportunity to do so, been squandered in a moment by his calling upon her, in an indiscreetly worded message, for a recommendation by telegraph which would put him in touch at once with one of her stewards whose daughter he had noticed in the country, just as a starving man might barter a diamond for a crust of bread. Indeed he would laugh about it afterwards, for there was in his nature, redeemed by many rare refinements, an element of caddishness. Then he belonged to that class of intelligent men who have led a life of idleness, and who seek a consolation and perhaps an excuse in the notion that their idleness offers to their intelligence objects as worthy of interest as any that might be offered by art or learning, the notion that “Life” contains situations more interesting and more romantic than all the romances ever written. So, at least, he affirmed, and had no difficulty in persuading even the most sharp-witted of his society friends, notably the Baron de Charlus, whom he liked to entertain with accounts of the intriguing adventures that had befallen him, such as when he had met a woman in a train and taken her home with him, before discovering that she was the sister of a reigning monarch in whose hands were gathered at that moment all the threads of European politics, of which Swann was thus kept informed in the most delightful fashion, or when, by the complex play of circumstances, it depended upon the choice which this conclave was about to make whether he might or might not become the lover of somebody’s cook.