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Solution Manual for Contemporary Auditing
Real Issues and Cases 8th Edition by Knapp
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knapp/
CASE 1.1
ENRON CORPORATION
Synopsis
Arthur Edward Andersen built his firm, Arthur Andersen & Company, into one of the
largest and most respected accounting firms in the world through his reputation for honesty and
integrity. “Think straight, talk straight” was his motto and he insisted that his clients adopt that
same attitude when preparing and issuing their periodic financial statements. Arthur Andersen’s
auditing philosophy was not rule-based, that is, he did not stress the importance of clients
complying with specific accounting rules because in the early days of the U.S. accounting
profession there were few formal rules and guidelines for accountants and auditors to follow.
Instead, Andersen invoked a substance-over-form approach to auditing and accounting issues. He
passionately believed that the primary role of the auditor was to ensure that clients reported fully
and honestly to the public, regardless of the consequences for those clients.
Ironically, Arthur Andersen & Co.’s dramatic fall from prominence resulted from its
association with a client known for aggressive and innovative uses of “accounting gimmicks” to
window dress its financial statements. Enron Corporation, Andersen’s second largest client, was
involved in large, complex transactions with hundreds of special purpose entities (SPEs) that it
used to obscure its true financial condition and operating results. Among other uses, these SPEs
allowed Enron to download underperforming assets from its balance sheet and to conceal large
operating losses. During 2001, a series of circumstances, including a sharp decline in the price of
Enron’s stock, forced the company to assume control and ownership of many of its troubled SPEs.
As a result, Enron was forced to report a large loss in October 2001, restate its earnings for the
previous five years, and, ultimately, file for bankruptcy in December 2001.
During the early months of 2002, Andersen became the focal point of attention among law
enforcement authorities searching for the parties responsible for Enron’s sudden collapse. The
accusations directed at Andersen centered on three key issues. The first issue had to do with the

2 Case 1.1 Enron Corporation
scope of professional services that Andersen provided to Enron. Critics charged that the enormous
consulting fees Enron paid Andersen impaired the audit firm’s independence. The second issue
stemmed from Andersen’s alleged role in Enron’s aggressive accounting and financial reporting
treatments for its SPE-related transactions. Finally, the most embarrassing issue was the massive
effort of Andersen’s Houston office to shred Enron audit documents, which eventually led to the
demise of the firm.

Case 1.1 Enron Corporation 3
Enron Corporation—Key Facts
1. Throughout Arthur E. Andersen’s life, “Think straight, talk straight” served as a guiding
principle for himself and Arthur Andersen & Co., the accounting firm that he founded.
2. Arthur Andersen’s reputation for honesty and integrity resulted in Arthur Andersen & Co.
gaining stature in the business community and growing into one of the nation’s leading accounting
firms by the time of his death in 1947.
3. Leonard Spacek succeeded Arthur Andersen as managing partner of Arthur Andersen & Co.
in 1947 and continued Andersen’s legacy of lobbying for more rigorous accounting, auditing, and
ethical standards for the public accounting profession.
4. When Spacek retired in 1973, Arthur Andersen & Co. was one of the largest and, arguably,
the most prominent accounting firm worldwide
5. The predecessor of Enron Corporation was an Omaha-based natural gas company created in
1930; steady growth in profits and sales and numerous acquisitions allowed Enron to become the
largest natural gas company in the United States by the mid-1980s.
6. During the 1990s, Kenneth Lay, Enron’s CEO, and his top subordinate, Jeffrey Skilling,
transformed the company from a conventional natural gas supplier into an energy trading
company.
7. Lay and Skilling placed a heavy emphasis on “strong earnings performance” and on increasing
Enron’s stature in the business world.
8. Enron executives used hundreds of SPEs (special purpose entities) to arrange large and
complex related party transactions that served to strengthen Enron’s reported financial condition
and operating results.
9. During 2001, Enron’s financial condition deteriorated rapidly after many of the company’s
SPE transactions unraveled; in December 2001, Enron filed for bankruptcy.
10. Following Enron’s collapse, the business press and other critics began searching for parties to
hold responsible for what, at the time, was the nation’s largest corporate bankruptcy.
11. Criticism of Andersen’s role in the Enron debacle focused on three key issues: the large
amount of consulting revenue the firm earned from Enron, the firm’s role in many of Enron’s SPE
transactions, and the efforts of Andersen personnel to destroy Enron audit documents.
12. Andersen’s felony conviction in June 2002 effectively ended the firm’s long and proud history
in the public accounting profession.
Instructional Objectives

1. To provide students with a brief overview of the history and development of the public
accounting profession in the United States.
2. To examine the “scope of services” issue, that is, the threats to auditor independence posed
by audit firms providing consulting services to their audit clients.
3. To examine the extent to which independent auditors should be involved in their clients’
decisions regarding important accounting and financial reporting issues.
4. To review recent recommendations made to strengthen the independent audit function.
5. To review auditors’ responsibilities regarding the preparation and retention of audit
workpapers.
Suggestions for Use
I typically begin an auditing course by discussing a major and widely publicized audit case.
Clearly, the Enron case satisfies those criteria. The purpose of presenting such a case early in the
semester is not only to acquaint students with the nature of auditing but also to make them aware
of why the independent audit function is so important. Many accounting students are not well
acquainted with the nature of the independent auditor’s work environment, nor are they generally
familiar with the critical role the independent audit function plays in our national economy.
Hopefully, cases such as this one provide students with a “reality jolt” that will stimulate their
interest in auditing and, possibly, make them more inclined to pursue a career in the auditing field.
The Enron case also serves as a good starting point for an auditing course since it provides
students with an overview of how the auditing profession developed and evolved in the United
States over the past century. The vehicle used to present this overview is the history of Arthur
Andersen & Co. You will find that the case attempts to contrast the “think straight, talk straight”
philosophy of Arthur E. Andersen, the founder of the Andersen firm, with the more business-
oriented approach to auditing that his predecessors adopted in the latter decades of the twentieth
century.
Consider asking one or more of your students to interview former Andersen personnel who
are graduates of your school. I have found that many former Andersen partners and employees
are more than willing to discuss their former employer and the series of events that led to the firm’s
sudden collapse. These individuals typically suggest that federal prosecutors’ efforts to “bring
down” the entire Andersen firm as a result of the document-shredding incident was not only
unnecessary but also inequitable, an argument that many members of the accounting profession—
including academics—find hard to refute.
Suggested Solutions to Case Questions
1. A large number of parties bear some degree of direct or indirect responsibility for the problems
that the Enron fiasco ultimately posed for the public accounting profession and the independent
audit function. The following bullet items identify several of these parties [see bold-facing] and
the role they played in the Enron drama.

•The leadership of the Andersen firm that allegedly focused too much attention on practice
development activities at the expense of the public service ideal embraced by Arthur E. Andersen
and other early leaders of the profession.
•Impertinent corporate executives who insisted on aggressive, if not illegal, accounting and
financial reporting treatments.
•Individual auditors who made shortsighted and/or unprofessional decisions that tainted the
perceived integrity of all auditors.
•Regulatory authorities that failed to take proactive measures to limit the ability of rogue
corporate executives, accountants, and auditors to circumvent their professional responsibilities.
•Academics who failed to goad their students into internalizing the accounting profession’s high
ethical principles.
2. One approach to answering this question is to review with your students the eight specific
types of non-audit services that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 prohibited auditors of public
companies from providing to their clients. Listed next are those eight non-audit services.
•Bookkeeping or other services related to the accounting records or financial statements of
the audit client
•Financial information systems design and implementation
•Appraisal or valuation services, fairness opinions, or contribution-in-kind reports
•Actuarial services
•Internal audit outsourcing services
•Management functions or human resources functions
•Broker or dealer, investment adviser, or investment banking services
•Legal services and expert services unrelated to the audit
Many of these services would eventually place auditors in situations in which they had to
effectively audit their own work. For example, auditors providing “financial information systems
design services” could be forced to evaluate the integrity of an accounting system they had
designed for an audit client.
Providing “human resources” functions, such as executive search services, to audit clients
could threaten auditors’ independence by causing them to evaluate the work product of high-
ranking client employees who they had recommended that a client hire.
An audit firm that provided some type of “expert service unrelated to the audit” could find
itself in a dicey situation if the given service proved to be less than expert quality. For example,
if an audit firm recommended to a client a strategy for dealing with a labor strike or other work
stoppage and that strategy proved ineffective, client executives would potentially have some
degree of leverage to extract concessions from the audit firm during subsequent audit
engagements.
3. Given the assumption that the Powers Report excerpts included in Exhibit 3 are accurate, one
could plausibly argue that Arthur Andersen violated several of the ten generally accepted auditing
standards, including the following:
•Independence (second general standard): by becoming too involved in Enron’s decisions for
important accounting and financial reporting treatments, the Arthur Andersen auditors may have
forfeited some degree of objectivity when they reviewed those decisions during the course of
subsequent audits.

•Due professional care (third general standard): any violation of one of the other nine GAAS
effectively results in a violation of the catchall due professional care standard.
•Planning and supervision (first fieldwork standard): a reliable quality control function,
including proper audit planning decisions and effective supervision/review during an audit, should
result in the identification of problematic situations in which auditors have become too involved
in client accounting and financial reporting decisions.
•Internal control evaluation (second fieldwork standard): one could argue that given the
critical and seemingly apparent defects in Enron’s internal controls, Andersen auditors failed to
gain a “sufficient understanding” of the client’s internal control system.
•Sufficient competent evidential matter (third fieldwork standard—under the current third
fieldwork standard the auditor must obtain “sufficient appropriate” audit evidence): many critics
suggest that Andersen’s deep involvement in Enron’s aggressive accounting and financial
reporting treatments may have precluded the firm from collecting sufficient competent evidence
to support the audit opinions issued on the company’s financial statements (that is, the Andersen
auditors may have been less than objective in reviewing/corroborating the client’s aggressive
accounting and financial reporting treatments).
•Reporting (fourth reporting standard): If Andersen did not maintain its independence and
objectivity while auditing Enron, the audit firm should have issued a disclaimer of opinion on the
company’s periodic financial statements.
4. Note: The PCAOB has established the documentation requirements for the audits of publicly
owned companies in PCAOB Auditing Standard No. 3, “Audit Documentation.” The
documentation requirements that pertain to audits of other organizations can be found in Statement
on Auditing Standards No. 103, “Audit Documentation,” that became effective for audits of
financial statements for periods ending on or after December 15, 2006.
SAS No. 103:
This standard has been integrated into AU Section 339. Paragraph .03 of AU 339 provides
the following general guidance to independent auditors.
“The auditor must prepare audit documentation in connection with each engagement in
sufficient detail to provide a clear understanding of the work performed (including the nature,
timing, extent, and results of audit procedures performed), the audit evidence obtained and its
source, and the conclusions reached. Audit documentation:
a. Provides the principal support for the representation in the auditor’s report that the
auditor performed the audit in accordance with generally accepted auditing
standards.
b. Provides the principal support for the opinion expressed regarding the financial
information or the assertion to the effect that an opinion cannot be expressed.”
Paragraph .32 of AU 339 notes that the “auditor should adopt reasonable procedures to retain
and access audit documentation for a period of time sufficient to meet the needs of his or her
practice and to satisfy any applicable legal or regulatory requirements for records retention.”
This paragraph goes on to note that the retention period for audit documentation “should not
be shorter than five years from the report release date.”

PCAOB No. 3:
This standard defines audit documentation as “the written record of the basis for the auditor’s
conclusions that provides the support for the auditor’s representations, whether those
representations are contained in the auditor’s report or otherwise” (para. .02). “Examples of audit
documentation include memoranda, confirmations, correspondence, schedules, audit programs,
and letters of representation. Audit documentation may be in the form of paper, electronic files,
or other media” (para. .04).
PCAOB No. 3 notes that there are three key objectives of audit documentation: “demonstrate
that the engagement complied with the standards of the PCAOB, support the basis for the auditor’s
conclusions concerning every major relevant financial statement assertion, and demonstrate that
the underlying accounting records agreed or reconciled with the financial statements” (para. .05).
This standard establishes an explicit benchmark that auditors can use to determine whether
audit documentation is “sufficient.” “Audit documentation must contain sufficient information to
enable an experienced auditor, having no previous connection with the engagement to: a)
understand the nature, timing, extent, and results of the procedures performed, evidence obtained,
and conclusions reached, and b) determine who performed the work and the date such work was
completed as well as the person who reviewed the work and the date of such review” (para. .06).
[Note: SAS No. 103 has a similar requirement—see AU 339.10.] PCAOB No. 3 generally
requires auditors to retain audit documentation for seven years from the date the auditor gave the
client permission to use the relevant audit report in connection with the issuance of a set of
financial statements.
Regardless of whether an audit client is a publicly owned company or another type of
organization, the audit workpapers are the property of the audit firm.
5. During and following the Enron debacle, wide-ranging recommendations were made by many
parties to strengthen the independent audit function. Listed next are several of these
recommendations, including certain measures that were incorporated in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act
of 2002.
•Establish an independent audit agency. Some critics have suggested that to “cure” the
paradoxical nature of the auditor-client relationship (that is, to eliminate the economic leverage
that clients have on their auditors), the independent audit function should be performed by a
government agency comparable to the Internal Revenue Service.
•Permit audit firms to provide only audit, reviews, compilations, and other “pure” attestation
services to their clients, that is, prohibit the provision of all non-audit services to audit clients. (As
mentioned in the suggested solution to Question 2, Sarbanes-Oxley prohibits audit firms from
providing eight specific consulting services to their audit clients.)
•Require that audit clients periodically rotate or change their independent audit firms.
(Sarbanes-Oxley requires that engagement and review partners be rotated every five years on audit
engagements involving public companies.)
•Establish an independent board to oversee the audits of public companies. (Sarbanes-Oxley
resulted in the creation of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board “to oversee the audit
of public companies that are subject to the securities laws . . .”)
•Require independent auditors to work more closely with their clients’ audit committees.
(Section 204 of Sarbanes-Oxley is entitled “Auditor Reports to Audit Committees” and delineates
the information that auditors should exchange with a client’s audit committee, including any
alternative accounting treatments “preferred” by the auditors.)
•Establish more explicit statutory requirements that prohibit client executives from interfering
with the work of their independent auditors. (Section 303 of Sarbanes-Oxley is entitled “Improper

Influence on Conduct of Audits.” This section of the federal law makes it unlawful for corporate
executives “to fraudulently influence, coerce, manipulate, or mislead” their company’s
independent auditors.”)
6. Many critics of our profession suggest that beginning in the latter part of the twentieth century
certain accounting firms gradually turned away from the public service ideal embraced by Arthur
E. Andersen and other early pioneers within the profession and, instead, adopted a somewhat
mercenary attitude toward the independent audit function. A key factor that certainly accelerated
this trend was the profession’s decision in the 1970s, with the goading of the Federal Trade
Commission and the courts, to drop bans on competitive bidding, client solicitation, and other
ethical rules that effectively restrained competition among audit firms. The elimination of those
rules enticed audit firms to begin competing against each other for the finite number of large
corporate audits. Practices such as “lowballing” to gain such clients allegedly resulted in audit
firms “cutting corners” on audits. Likewise, audit firms began vigorously marketing non-audit
services to supplement their suddenly low-margin audit services.
A related factor that allegedly contributed to the move away from the public service ideal was
the growing tendency for large audit firms to consider strong marketing skills, as opposed to strong
technical skills, as the key criterion in determining which individuals would be promoted to
partner. Finally, pure and simple greed is a factor that motivates most of us. The large and lucrative
market for business consulting services over the past few decades may have enticed audit firms to
focus more on becoming “strategic business advisers” to their clients rather than placing an
unrelenting emphasis on the quality of their audits of those clients’ financial statements.
7. In the spring of 2000, the SEC began requiring public companies to have their quarterly
financial reports (typically included in Form 10-Q filings) reviewed by their independent auditors.
(Note: AU Section 722, “Interim Financial Information,” provides guidance to auditors on the
“nature, timing, and extent of procedures to be applied” to a client’s interim financial information.)
Should quarterly reports be audited? In fact, many parties have advocated an even more
extreme measure, namely, that independent auditors continually monitor and report on the integrity
of their clients’ financial disclosures. In the current environment when information is distributed
so readily and widely to millions of investors and other decision makers, the validity or utility of
independent audits that focus on discrete time periods has been challenged. As recent history has
proven, by the time that auditors issue their reports on a client’s financial statements for some
discrete period, the “horse may already be out of the barn”—the “horse” in this case being the
damage to investors and other parties resulting from oversights and other misrepresentations in the
given financial statements. This problem could be cured, or, at least, mitigated to some extent, by
requiring auditors to provide real-time disclosures of potential problems in their clients’ financial
records.

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occasion as a "perfect fright" by her side—it will, on the contrary,
emphasise those very drawbacks which she seeks to hide, and which
(as for instance a feverish, that is to say a livid complexion) are all
the more tempting to him since they give his picture "character";
they are quite enough, however, to destroy all the illusions of the
ordinary man who, when he sees the picture, sees crumble into dust
the ideal which the woman herself has so proudly sustained for him,
which has placed her in her unique, her unalterable form so far
apart, so far above the rest of humanity. Fallen now, represented
otherwise than in her own type in which she sat unassailably
enthroned, she is become nothing more than just an ordinary
woman, in the legend of whose superiority we have lost all faith. In
this type we are so accustomed to regard as included not only the
beauty of an Odette but her personality, her identity, that standing
before the portrait which has thus transposed her from it we are
inclined to protest not simply "How plain he has made her!" but
"Why, it isn't the least bit like her!" We find it hard to believe that it
can be she. We do not recognise her. And yet there is a person there
on the canvas whom we are quite conscious of having seen before.
But that person is not Odette; the face of the person, her body, her
general appearance seem familiar. They recall to us not this
particular woman who never held herself like that, whose natural
pose had no suggestion of any such strange and teasing arabesque
in its outlines, but other women, all the women whom Elstir has ever
painted, women whom invariably, however they may differ from one
another, he has chosen to plant thus on his canvas facing you, with
an arched foot thrust out from under the skirt, a large round hat in
one hand, symmetrically corresponding at the level of the knee
which it hides to what also appears as a disc, higher up in the
picture, the face. And furthermore, not only does a portrait by the
hand of genius disintegrate and destroy a woman's type, as it has
been defined by her coquetry and her selfish conception of beauty,
but if it is also old, it is not content with ageing the original in the
same way as a photograph ages its sitter, by shewing her dressed in
the fashions of long ago. In a portrait, it is not only the manner the
woman then had of dressing that dates it, there is also the manner

the artist had of painting. And this, Elstir's earliest manner, was the
most damaging of birth certificates for Odette because it not only
established her, as did her photographs of the same period, as the
younger sister of various time-honoured courtesans, but made her
portrait contemporary with the countless portraits that Manet or
Whistler had painted of all those vanished models, models who
already belonged to oblivion or to history.
It was along this train of thought, meditated in silence by the side of
Elstir, as I accompanied him to his door, that I was being led by the
discovery that I had just made of the identity of his model, when
this original discovery caused me to make a second, more disturbing
still, involving the identity of the artist. He had painted the portrait of
Odette de Crécy. Could it possibly be that this man of genius, this
sage, this eremite, this philosopher with his marvellous flow of
conversation, who towered over everyone and everything, was the
foolish, corrupt little painter who had at one time been "taken up" by
the Verdurins? I asked him if he had known them, whether by any
chance it was he that they used to call M. Biche. He answered me in
the affirmative, with no trace of embarrassment, as if my question
referred to a period in his life that was ended and already somewhat
remote, with no suspicion of what a cherished illusion his words
were shattering in me, until looking up he read my disappointment
upon my face. His own assumed an expression of annoyance. And,
as we were now almost at the gate of his house, a man of less
outstanding eminence, in heart and brain, might simply have said
"good-bye" to me, a trifle dryly, and taken care to avoid seeing me
again. This however was not Elstir's way with me; like the master
that he was—and this was, perhaps, from the point of view of sheer
creative genius, his one fault, that he was a master in that sense of
the word, for an artist if he is to live the true life of the spirit in its
full extent, must be alone and not bestow himself with profusion,
even upon disciples—from every circumstance, whether involving
himself or other people, he sought to extract, for the better
edification of the young, the element of truth that it contained. He
chose therefore, rather than say anything that might have avenged

the injury to his pride, to say what he thought would prove
instructive to me. "There is no man," he began, "however wise, who
has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the
consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he
would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he
ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he
has indeed become a wise man—so far as it is possible for any of us
to be wise—unless he has passed through all the fatuous or
unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be
preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons and
grandsons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them
nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They
have, perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to
retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of
everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures,
feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and
sterile. We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for
ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else
can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom
is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.
The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are
not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at
school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order,
by reaction from the influence of everything evil or common-place
that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a
victory. I can see that the picture of what we once were, in early
youth, may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to
contemplate in later life. But we must not deny the truth of it, for it
is evidence that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the
laws of life and of the mind that we have, from the common
elements of life, of the life of studios, of artistic groups—assuming
that one is a painter—extracted something that goes beyond them."
Meanwhile we had reached his door. I was disappointed at not
having met the girls. But after all there was now the possibility of
meeting them again later on; they had ceased to do no more than
pass beyond a horizon on which I had been ready to suppose that I

should never see them reappear. Around them no longer swirled that
sort of great eddy which had separated me from them, which had
been merely the expression of the perpetually active desire, mobile,
compelling, fed ever on fresh anxieties, which was aroused in me by
their inaccessibility, their flight from me, possibly for ever. My desire
for them, I could now set it at rest, hold it in reserve, among all
those other desires the realisation of which, as soon as I knew it to
be possible, I would cheerfully postpone. I took leave of Elstir; I was
alone once again. Then all of a sudden, despite my recent
disappointment, I saw in my mind's eye all that chain of coincidence
which I had not supposed could possibly come about, that Elstir
should be a friend of those very girls, that they who only that
morning had been to me merely figures in a picture with the sea for
background had seen me, had seen me walking in friendly intimacy
with a great painter, who was now informed of my secret longing
and would no doubt do what he could to assuage it. All this had
been a source of pleasure to me, but that pleasure had remained
hidden; it was one of those visitors who wait before letting us know
that they are in the room until all the rest have gone and we are by
ourselves. Then only do we catch sight of them, and can say to
them, "I am at your service," and listen to what they have to tell us.
Sometimes between the moment at which these pleasures have
entered our consciousness and the moment at which we are free to
entertain them, so many hours have passed, we have in the interval
seen so many people that we are afraid lest they should have grown
tired of waiting. But they are patient, they do not grow tired, and as
soon as the crowd has gone we find them there ready for us.
Sometimes it is then we who are so exhausted that it seems as
though our weary mind will not have the strength left to seize and
retain those memories, those impressions for which our frail self is
the one habitable place, the sole means of realisation. And we
should regret that failure, for existence to us is hardly interesting
save on the days on which the dust of realities is shot with magic
sand, on which some trivial incident of life becomes a spring of
romance. Then a whole promontory of the inaccessible world rises
dear in the light of our dream, and enters into our life, our life in

which, like the sleeper awakened, we actually see the people of
whom we have been so ardently dreaming that we came to believe
that we should never behold them save in our dreams.
The sense of comfort that I drew from the probability of my now
being able to meet the little band whenever I chose was all the more
precious to me because I should not have been able to keep watch
for them during the next few days, which would be taken up with
preparations for Saint-Loup's departure. My grandmother was
anxious to offer my friend some proof of her gratitude for all the
kindnesses that he had shewn to her and myself. I told her that he
was a great admirer of Proudhon, and this put it into her head to
send for a collection of autograph letters by that philosopher which
she had once bought; Saint-Loup came to her room to look at them
on the day of their arrival, which was also his last day at Balbec. He
read them eagerly, fingering each page with reverence, trying to get
the sentences by heart; and then, rising from the table, was
beginning to apologise to my grandmother for having stayed so long,
when he heard her say: "No, no; take them with you; they are for
you to keep; that was why I sent for them, to give them to you."
He was overpowered by a joy which he could no more control than
we can a physical condition that arises without the intervention of
our will. He blushed scarlet as a child who has just been whipped,
and my grandmother was a great deal more touched to see all the
efforts that he was making (without success) to control the joy that
convulsed him than she would have been to hear any words of
thanks that he could have uttered. But he, fearing that he had failed
to shew his gratitude properly, begged me to make his excuses to
her again, next day, leaning from the window of the little train of the
local railway company which was to take him back to his regiment.
The distance was, as a matter of fact, nothing. He had thought of
going, as he had frequently done that summer, when he was to
return the same evening and was not encumbered with luggage, by
road. But this time he would have had, anyhow, to put all his heavy
luggage in the train. And he found it simpler to take the train himself
also, following the advice of the manager who, on being consulted,

replied that "Carriage or train, it was more or less equivocal." He
meant us to understand that they were equivalent (in fact, very
much what Françoise would have expressed as "coming to as near
as made no difference"). "Very well," Saint-Loup had decided, "I will
take the 'little crawler'." I should have taken it too, had I not been
tired, and gone with my friend to Doncières; failing this I kept on
promising, all the time that we waited in the Balbec station—the
time, that is to say, which the driver of the little train spent in
waiting for unpunctual friends, without whom he refused to start,
and also in seeking some refreshment for himself—to go over there
and see him several times a week. As Bloch had come to the station
also—much to Saint-Loup's disgust—the latter, seeing that our
companion could hear him begging me to come to luncheon, to
dinner, to stay altogether at Doncières, finally turned to him and, in
the most forbidding tone, intended to counteract the forced civility of
the invitation and to prevent Bloch from taking it seriously: "If you
ever happen to be passing through Doncières any afternoon when I
am off duty, you might ask for me at the barracks; but I hardly ever
am off duty." Perhaps, also, Robert feared lest, if left to myself, I
might not come, and, thinking that I was more intimate with Bloch
than I made out, was providing me in this way with a travelling
companion, one who would urge me on.
I was afraid that this tone, this way of inviting a person while
warning him not to come, might have wounded Bloch, and felt that
Saint-Loup would have done better, saying nothing. But I was
mistaken, for after the train had gone, while we were walking back
together as far as the cross-roads at which we should have to part,
one road going to the hotel, the other to the Blochs' villa, he never
ceased from asking me on what day we should go to Doncières, for
after "all the civilities that Saint-Loup had shewn" him, it would be
"too unmannerly" on his part not to accept the invitation. I was glad
that he had not noticed, or was so little displeased as to wish to let it
be thought that he had not noticed on how far from pressing, how
barely polite a note the invitation had been sounded. At the same
time I should have liked Bloch, for his own sake, to refrain from

making a fool of himself by going over at once to Doncières. But I
dared not offer a piece of advice which could only have offended
him by hinting that Saint-Loup had been less pressing than himself
impressed. He was a great deal too ready to respond, and even if all
his faults of this nature were atoned for by remarkable qualities
which others, with more reserve than he, would not possess, he
carried indiscretion to a pitch that was almost maddening. The week
must not, to hear him speak, pass without our going to Doncières
(he said "our" for I think that he counted to some extent on my
presence there as an excuse for his own). All the way home,
opposite the gymnasium, in its grove of trees, opposite the lawn-
tennis courts, the mayor's office, the shell-fish stall, he stopped me,
imploring me to fix a day, and, as I did not, left me in a towering
rage, saying: "As your lordship pleases. For my part, I am obliged to
go since he has invited me."
Saint-Loup was still so much afraid of not having thanked my
grandmother properly that he charged me once again to express his
gratitude to her a day or two later in a letter I received from him
from the town in which he was quartered, a town which seemed, on
the envelope where the post-mark had stamped its name, to be
hastening to me across country, to tell me that within its walls, in
the Louis XVI cavalry barracks, he was thinking of me. The paper
was embossed with the arms of Marsantes, in which I could make
out a lion, surmounted by a coronet formed by the cap of a Peer of
France.
"After a journey which," he wrote, "passed pleasantly enough, with a
book I bought at the station, by Arvède Barine (a Russian author, I
fancy; it seemed to me remarkably well written for a foreigner, but
you shall give me your critical opinion, you are bound to know all
about it, you fount of knowledge who have read everything), here I
am again in the thick of this debased existence, where, alas, I feel a
sad exile, not having here what I had to leave at Balbec; this life in
which I cannot discover one affectionate memory, any intellectual
attraction; an environment on which you would probably look with
contempt—and yet it has a certain charm. Everything seems to have

changed since I was last here, for in the interval one of the most
important periods in my life, that from which our friendship dates,
has begun. I hope that it may never come to an end. I have spoken
of our friendship, of you, to one person only, to the friend I told you
of, who has just paid me a surprise visit here. She would like
immensely to know you, and I feel that you would get on well
together, for she too is extremely literary. I, on the other hand, to go
over in my mind all our talk, to live over again those hours which I
never shall forget, have shut myself off from my comrades, excellent
fellows, but altogether incapable of understanding that sort of thing.
This remembrance of moments spent with you I should almost have
preferred, on my first day here, to call up for my own solitary
enjoyment, without writing. But I was afraid lest you, with your
subtle mind and ultra-sensitive heart, might, if you did not hear from
me, needlessly torment yourself, if, that is to say, you still
condescend to occupy your thoughts with this blunt trooper whom
you will have a hard task to polish and refine, and make a little more
subtle and worthier of your company."
On the whole this letter, in its affectionate spirit, was not at all unlike
those which, when I did not yet know Saint-Loup, I had imagined
that he would write to me, in those daydreams from which the
coldness of his first greeting had shaken me by bringing me face to
face with an icy reality which was not, however, to endure. Once I
had received this letter, whenever, at luncheon-time, the post was
brought in, I could tell at once when it was from him that a letter
came, for it had always that second face which a person assumes
when he is absent, in the features of which (the characters of his
script) there is no reason why we should not suppose that we are
tracing an individual soul just as much as in the line of a nose or the
inflexions of a voice.
I would now gladly remain at the table while it was being cleared,
and, if it was not a moment at which the girls of the little band
might be passing, it was no longer solely towards the sea that I
would turn my eyes. Since I had seen such things depicted in water-
colours by Elstir, I sought to find again in reality, I cherished, as

though for their poetic beauty, the broken gestures of the knives still
lying across one another, the swollen convexity of a discarded napkin
upon which the sun would patch a scrap of yellow velvet, the half-
empty glass which thus shewed to greater advantage the noble
sweep of its curved sides, and, in the heart of its translucent crystal,
clear as frozen daylight, a dreg of wine, dusky but sparkling with
reflected lights, the displacement of solid objects, the transmutation
of liquids by the effect of light and shade, the shifting colour of the
plums which passed from green to blue and from blue to golden
yellow in the half-plundered dish, the chairs, like a group of old
ladies, that came twice daily to take their places round the white
cloth spread on the table as on an altar at which were celebrated the
rites of the palate, where in the hollows of oyster-shells a few drops
of lustral water had gathered as in tiny holy water stoups of stone; I
tried to find beauty there where I had never imagined before that it
could exist, in the most ordinary things, in the profundities of "still
life".
When, some days after Saint-Loup's departure, I had succeeded in
persuading Elstir to give a small tea-party, at which I was to meet
Albertine, that freshness of appearance, that smartness of attire,
both (alas) fleeting, which were to be observed in me at the moment
of my starting out from the Grand Hotel, and were due respectively
to a longer rest than usual and to special pains over my toilet, I
regretted my inability to reserve them (and also the credit accruing
from Elstir's friendship) for the captivation of some other, more
interesting person; I regretted having to use them all up on the
simple pleasure of making Albertine's acquaintance. My brain
assessed this pleasure at a very low value now that it was assured
me. But, inside, my will did not for a moment share this illusion, that
will which is the persevering and unalterable servant of our
successive personalities; hiding itself in secret places, despised,
downtrodden, untiringly faithful, toiling without intermission and
with no thought for the variability of the self, its master, if only that
master may never lack what he requires. Whereas at the moment
when we are just about to start on a long-planned and eagerly

awaited holiday, our brain, our nerves begin to ask themselves
whether it is really worth all the trouble involved, the will, knowing
that those lazy masters would at once begin to consider their
journey the most wonderful experience, if it became impossible for
them to take it, the will leaves them explaining their difficulties
outside the station, multiplying their hesitations; but busies itself
with taking the tickets and putting us into the carriage before the
train starts. It is as invariable as brain and nerves are fickle, but as it
is silent, gives no account of its actions, it seems almost non-
existent; it is by its dogged determination that the other constituent
parts of our personality are led, but without seeing it, while they
distinguish clearly all their own uncertainties. My nerves and brain
then started a discussion as to the real value of the pleasure that
there would be in knowing Albertine, while I studied in the glass vain
and perishable attractions which nerves and brain would have
preserved intact for use on some other occasion. But my will would
not let the hour pass at which I must start, and it was Elstir's
address that it called out to the driver. Brain and nerves were at
liberty, now that the die was cast, to think this "a pity." If my will
had given the man a different address, they would have been finely
"sold".
When I arrived at Elstir's, a few minutes later, my first impression
was that Mlle. Simonet was not in the studio. There was certainly a
girl sitting there in a silk frock, bare-headed, but one whose
marvellous hair, her nose, meant nothing to me, in whom I did not
recognise the human entity that I had formed out of a young cyclist
strolling past, in a polo-cap, between myself and the sea. It was
Albertine, nevertheless. But even when I knew it to be her, I gave
her no thought. On entering any social gathering, when we are
young, we lose consciousness of our old self, we become a different
man, every drawing-room being a fresh universe, in which, coming
under the sway of a new moral perspective, we fasten our attention,
as if they were to matter to us for all time, on people, dances, card-
tables, all of which we shall have forgotten by the morning. Obliged
to follow, if I was to arrive at the goal of conversation with Albertine,

a road in no way of my own planning, which first brought me to a
halt at Elstir, passed by other groups of guests to whom I was
presented, then along the table, at which I was offered, and ate a
strawberry tart or two, while I listened, motionless, to the music that
was beginning in another part of the room, I found myself giving to
these various incidents the same importance as to my introduction
to Mlle. Simonet, an introduction which was now nothing more than
one among several such incidents, having entirely forgotten that it
had been, but a few minutes since, my sole object in coming there
that day. But is it not ever thus in the bustle of daily life, with every
true happiness, every great sorrow. In a room full of other people
we receive from her whom we love the answer, propitious or fatal,
which we have been awaiting for the last year. But we must go on
talking, ideas come, one after another, forming a smooth surface
which is pricked, at the very most, now and then by a dull throb
from within of the memory, deep-rooted enough but of very slender
growth, that misfortune has come upon us. If, instead of misfortune,
it is happiness, it may be that not until many years have elapsed will
we recall that the most important event in our sentimental life
occurred without our having time to give it any prolonged attention,
or even to become aware of it almost, at a social gathering, it may
have been, to which we had gone solely in expectation of that event.
When Elstir asked me to come with him so that he might introduce
me to Albertine, who was sitting a little farther down the room, I
first of all finished eating a coffee éclair and, with a show of keen
interest, asked an old gentleman whose acquaintance I had just
made (and thought that I might, perhaps, offer him the rose in my
buttonhole which he had admired) to tell me more about the old
Norman fairs. This is not to say that the introduction which followed
did not give me any pleasure, nor assume a definite importance in
my eyes. But so far as the pleasure was concerned, I was not
conscious of it, naturally, until some time later, when, once more in
the hotel, and in my room alone, I had become myself again.
Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the
presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative film; we

develop it later, when we are at home, and have once again found at
our disposal that inner dark-room, the entrance to which is barred to
us so long as we are with other people.
If my consciousness of the pleasure it had brought me was thus
retarded by a few hours, the importance of this introduction I felt
immediately. At such moments of introduction, for all that we feel
ourselves to have been suddenly enriched, to have been furnished
with a pass that will admit us henceforward to pleasures which we
have been pursuing for weeks past, but in vain, we realise only too
clearly that this acquisition puts an end for us not merely to hours of
toilsome search—a relief that could only fill us with joy—but also to
the very existence of a certain person, her whom our imagination
had wildly distorted, our anxious fear that we might never become
known to her enlarged. At the moment when our name sounds on
the lips of the person introducing us, especially if he amplifies it, as
Elstir was now doing, with a flattering account of us—in that
sacramental moment, as when in a fairy tale the magician
commands a person suddenly to become someone else, she to
whose presence we have been longing to attain vanishes; how could
she remain the same when, for one thing—owing to the attention
which the stranger is obliged to pay to the announcement of our
name and the sight of our person—in the eyes that only yesterday
were situated at an infinite distance (where we supposed that our
eyes, wandering, uncontrolled, desperate, divergent, would never
succeed in meeting them) the conscious gaze, the incommunicable
thought which we have been seeking have been miraculously and
quite simply replaced by our own image, painted in them as though
behind the glass of a smiling mirror. If this incarnation of ourself in
the person who seems to differ most from us is what does most to
modify the appearance of the person to whom we have just been
introduced, the form of that person still remains quite vague; and we
are free to ask ourself whether she will turn out to be a god, a table
or a basin. But, as nimble as the wax-modellers who will fashion a
bust before our eyes in five minutes, the few words which the
stranger is now going to say to us will substantiate her form, will

give her something positive and final that will exclude all the
hypotheses by which, a moment ago, our desire, our imagination
were being tempted. Doubtless, even before her coming to this
party, Albertine had ceased to be to me simply that sole phantom
worthy to haunt our life which is what remains of a passing stranger,
of whom we know nothing and have caught but the barest glimpse.
Her relation to Mme. Bontemps had already restricted the scope of
those marvellous hypotheses, by stopping one of the channels along
which they might have spread. As I drew closer to the girl, and
began to know her better, my knowledge of her underwent a
process of subtraction, all the factors of imagination and desire
giving place to a notion which was worth infinitely less, a notion to
which, it must be admitted, there was added presently what was
more or less the equivalent, in the domain of real life, of what joint
stock companies give one, after paying interest on one's capital, and
call a bonus. Her name, her family connexions had been the original
limit set to my suppositions. Her friendly greeting while, standing
close beside her, I saw once again the tiny mole on her cheek, below
her eye, marked another stage; last of all, I was surprised to hear
her use the adverb "perfectly" (in place of "quite") of two people
whom she mentioned, saying of one: "She is perfectly mad, but very
nice for all that," and of the other, "He is a perfectly common man, a
perfect bore." However little to be commended this use of "perfectly"
may be, it indicates a degree of civilisation and culture which I could
never have imagined as having been attained by the bacchante with
the bicycle, the frenzied muse of the golf-course. Nor did it mean
that after this first transformation Albertine was not to change again
for me, many times. The good and bad qualities which a person
presents to us, exposed to view on the surface of his or her face,
rearrange themselves in a totally different order if we approach them
from another angle—just as, in a town, buildings that appear strung
irregularly along a single line, from another aspect retire into a
graduated distance, and their relative heights are altered. To begin
with, Albertine now struck me as not implacable so much as almost
frightened; she seemed to me rather respectably than ill-bred,
judging by the description, "bad style," "a comic manner" which she

applied to each in turn of the girls of whom I spoke to her; finally,
she presented as a target for my line of sight a temple that was
distinctly flushed and hardly attractive to the eye, and no longer the
curious gaze which I had always connected with her until then. But
this was merely a second impression and there were doubtless
others through which I was successively to pass. Thus it can be only
after one has recognised, not without having had to feel one's way,
the optical illusions of one's first impression that one can arrive at an
exact knowledge of another person, supposing such knowledge to
be ever possible. But it is not; for while our original impression of
him undergoes correction, the person himself, not being an
inanimate object, changes in himself, we think that we have caught
him, he moves, and, when we imagine that at last we are seeing
him clearly, it is only the old impressions which we had already
formed of him that we have succeeded in making clearer, when they
no longer represent him.
And yet, whatever the inevitable disappointments that it must bring
in its train, this movement towards what we have only half seen,
what we have been free to dwell upon and imagine at our leisure,
this movement is the only one that is wholesome for the senses, that
whets the appetite. How dreary a monotony must pervade those
people's lives who, from indolence or timidity, drive in their carriages
straight to the doors of friends whom they have got to know without
having first dreamed of knowing them, without ever daring, on the
way, to stop and examine what arouses their desire.
I returned home, my mind full of the party, the coffee éclair which I
had finished eating before I let Elstir take me up to Albertine, the
rose which I had given the old gentleman, all the details selected
without our knowledge by the circumstances of the occasion, which
compose in a special and quite fortuitous order the picture that we
retain of a first meeting. But this picture, I had the impression that I
was seeing it from a fresh point of view, a long way remote from
myself, realising that it had not existed only for me, when some
months later, to my great surprise, on my speaking to Albertine on
the day on which I had first met her, she reminded me of the éclair,

the flower that I had given away, all those things which I had
supposed to have been—I will not say of importance only to myself
but—perceived only by myself, and which I now found thus
transcribed, in a version the existence of which I had never
suspected, in the mind of Albertine. On this first day itself, when, on
my return to the hotel, I was able to visualise the memory which I
had brought away with me, I realised the consummate adroitness
with which the sleight of hand had been performed, and how I had
talked for a moment or two with a person who, thanks to the skill of
the conjurer, without actually embodying anything of that other
person whom I had for so long been following as she paced beside
the sea, had been effectively substituted for her. I might, for that
matter, have guessed as much in advance, since the girl of the
beach was a fabrication invented by myself. In spite of which, as I
had, in my conversations with Elstir, identified her with this other
girl, I felt myself in honour bound to fulfil to the real the promises of
love made to the imagined Albertine. We betroth ourselves by proxy,
and think ourselves obliged, in the sequel, to marry the person who
has intervened. Moreover, if there had disappeared, provisionally at
any rate, from my life, an anguish that found adequate consolation
in the memory of polite manners, of that expression "perfectly
common" and of the glowing temple, that memory awakened in me
desire of another kind which, for all that it was placid and not at all
painful, resembling rather brotherly love, might in the long run
become fully as dangerous by making me feel at every moment a
compelling need to kiss this new person, whose charming ways, her
shyness, her unlooked-for accessibility, arrested the futile process of
my imagination but gave birth to a sentimental gratitude. And then,
since memory begins at once to record photographs independent of
one another, eliminates every link, any kind of sequence from
between the scenes portrayed in the collection which it exposes to
our view, the most recent does not necessarily destroy or cancel
those that came before. Confronted with the common-place though
appealing Albertine to whom I had spoken that afternoon, I still saw
the other, mysterious Albertine outlined against the sea. These were
now memories, that is to say pictures neither of which now seemed

to me any more true than the other. But, to make an end of this first
afternoon of my introduction to Albertine, when trying to recapture
that little mole on her cheek, just under the eye, I remembered that,
looking from Elstir's window, when Albertine had gone by, I had seen
the mole on her chin. In fact, whenever I saw her I noticed that she
had a mole, but my inaccurate memory made it wander about the
face of Albertine, fixing it now in one place, now in another.
Whatever my disappointment in finding in Mlle. Simonet a girl so
little different from those that I knew already, just as my rude
awakening when I saw Balbec church did not prevent me from
wishing still to go to Quimperlé, Pont-Aven and Venice, I comforted
myself with the thought that through Albertine at any rate, even if
she herself was not all that I had hoped, I might make the
acquaintance of her comrades of the little band.
I thought at first that I should fail. As she was to be staying (and I
too) for a long time still at Balbec, I had decided that the best thing
was not to make my efforts to meet her too apparent, but to wait for
an accidental encounter. But should this occur every day, even, it
was greatly to be feared that she would confine herself to
acknowledging my bow from a distance, and such meetings,
repeated day after day throughout the whole season, would benefit
me not at all.
Shortly after this, one morning when it had been raining and was
almost cold, I was accosted on the "front" by a girl wearing a close-
fitting toque and carrying a muff, so different from the girl whom I
had met at Elstir's party that to recognise in her the same person
seemed an operation beyond the power of the human mind; mine
was, nevertheless, successful in performing it, but after a
momentary surprise which did not, I think, escape Albertine's notice.
On the other hand, when I instinctively recalled the good-breeding
which had so impressed me before, she filled me with a converse
astonishment by her rude tone and manners typical of the "little
band". Apart from these, her temple had ceased to be the optical
centre, on which the eye might comfortably rest, of her face, either

because I was now on her other side, or because her toque hid it, or
else possibly because its inflammation was not a constant thing.
"What weather!" she began. "Really the perpetual summer of Balbec
is all stuff and nonsense. You don't go in for anything special here,
do you? We don't ever see you playing golf, or dancing at the
Casino. You don't ride, either. You must be bored stiff. You don't find
it too deadly, staying about on the beach all day. I see, you just bask
in the sun like a lizard; you enjoy that. You must have plenty of time
on your hands. I can see you're not like me; I simply adore all
sports. You weren't at the Sogne races! We went in the 'tram', and I
can quite believe you don't see the fun of going in an old 'tin-pot'
like that. It took us two whole hours! I could have gone there and
back three times on my bike." I, who had been lost in admiration of
Saint-Loup when he, in the most natural manner in the world, called
the little local train the "crawler", because of the ceaseless windings
of its line, was positively alarmed by the glibness with which
Albertine spoke of the "tram", and called it a "tin-pot". I could feel
her mastery of a form of speech in which I was afraid of her
detecting and scorning my inferiority. And yet the full wealth of the
synonyms that the little band possessed to denote this railway had
not yet been revealed to me. In speaking, Albertine kept her head
motionless, her nostrils closed, allowing only the corners of her lips
to move. The result of this was a drawling, nasal sound, into the
composition of which there entered perhaps a provincial descent, a
juvenile affectation of British phlegm, the teaching of a foreign
governess and a congestive hypertrophy of the mucus of the nose.
This enunciation which, as it happened, soon disappeared when she
knew people better, giving place to a natural girlish tone, might have
been thought unpleasant. But it was peculiar to herself, and
delighted me. Whenever I had gone for several days without seeing
her, I would refresh my spirit by repeating to myself: "We don't ever
see you playing golf," with the nasal intonation in which she had
uttered the words, point blank, without moving a muscle of her face.
And I thought then that there could be no one in the world so
desirable.

We formed that morning one of those couples who dotted the
"front" here and there with their conjunction, their stopping together
for time enough just to exchange a few words before breaking apart,
each to resume separately his or her divergent stroll. I seized the
opportunity, while she stood still, to look again and discover once
and for all where exactly the little mole was placed. Then, just as a
phrase of Vinteuil which had delighted me in the sonata, and which
my recollection allowed to wander from the andante to the finale,
until the day when, having the score in my hands, I was able to find
it, and to fix it in my memory in its proper place, in the scherzo, so
this mole, which I had visualised now on her cheek, now on her
chin, came to rest for ever on her upper lip, just below her nose. In
the same way, too, do we not come with amazement upon lines that
we know by heart in a poem in which we never dreamed that they
were to be found.
At that moment, as if in order that against the sea there might
multiply in freedom, in the variety of its forms, all the rich decorative
whole which was the lovely unfolding of the train of maidens, at
once golden and rosy, baked by sun and wind, Albertine's friends,
with their shapely limbs, their supple figures, but so different one
from another, came into sight in a cluster that expanded as it
approached, advancing towards us, but keeping closer to the sea,
along a parallel line. I asked Albertine's permission to walk for a little
way with her. Unfortunately, all she did was to wave her hand to
them in greeting. "But your friends will be disappointed if you don't
go with them," I hinted, hoping that we might all walk together. A
young man with regular features, carrying a bag of golf-clubs,
sauntered up to us. It was the baccarat-player, whose fast ways so
enraged the chief magistrate's wife. In a frigid, impassive tone,
which he evidently regarded as an indication of the highest
refinement, he bade Albertine good day. "Been playing golf,
Octave?" she asked. "How did the game go? Were you in form?"
"Oh, it's too sickening; I can't play for nuts," he replied. "Was
Andrée playing?" "Yes, she went round in seventy-seven." "Why,
that's a record!" "I went round in eighty-two yesterday." He was the

son of an immensely rich manufacturer who was to take an
important part in the organisation of the coming World's Fair. I was
struck by the extreme degree to which, in this young man and in the
other by no means numerous male friends of the band of girls, the
knowledge of everything that pertained to clothes and how to wear
them, cigars, English drinks, horses, a knowledge which he
possessed in its minutest details with a haughty infallibility that
approached the reticent modesty of the true expert, had been
developed in complete isolation, unaccompanied by the least trace of
any intellectual culture. He had no hesitation as to the right time and
place for dinner jacket or pyjamas, but neither had he any suspicion
of the circumstances in which one might or might not employ this or
that word, or even of the simplest rules of grammar. This disparity
between the two forms of culture must have existed also in his
father, the President of the Syndicate that "ran" Balbec, for, in an
open letter to the electors which he had recently had posted on all
the walls, he announced: "I desired to see the Mayor, to speak to
him of the matter; he would not listen to my righteous plaint."
Octave, at the Casino, took prizes in all the dancing competitions, for
bostons, tangos and what-not, an accomplishment that would entitle
him, if he chose, to make a fine marriage in that seaside society
where it is not figuratively but in sober earnest that the young
women "marry their dancing-partners". He lighted a cigar with a
"D'you mind?" to Albertine, as one who asks permission to finish,
while going on talking, an urgent piece of work. For he was one of
those people who can never be "doing nothing", although there was
nothing, for that matter, that he could ever be said to do. And as
complete inactivity has the same effect on us, in the end, as
prolonged overwork, and on the character as much as on the life of
body and muscles, the unimpaired nullity of intellect that was
enshrined behind Octave's meditative brow had ended by giving him,
despite his air of unruffled calm, ineffectual longings to think which
kept him awake at night, for all the world like an overwrought
philosopher.

Supposing that if I knew their male friends I should have more
opportunities of seeing the girls, I had been on the point of asking
for an introduction to Octave. I told Albertine this, as soon as he had
left us, still muttering, "I couldn't play for nuts!" I thought I would
thus put into her head the idea of doing it next time. "But I can't,"
she cried, "introduce you to a tame cat like that. This place simply
swarms with them. But what on earth would they have to say to
you? That one plays golf quite well, and that's all there is to it. I
know what I'm talking about; you'ld find he wasn't at all your sort."
"Your friends will be cross with you if you desert them like this," I
repeated, hoping that she would then suggest my joining the party.
"Oh, no, they don't want me." We ran into Bloch, who directed at me
a subtle, insinuating smile, and, embarrassed by the presence of
Albertine, whom he did not know, or, rather, knew "without knowing"
her, bent his head with a stiff, almost irritated jerk. "What's he
called, that Ostrogoth?" Albertine asked. "I can't think why he should
bow to me; he doesn't know me. And I didn't bow to him, either." I
had no time to explain to her, for, bearing straight down upon us,
"Excuse me," he began, "for interrupting you, but I must tell you
that I am going to Doncières to-morrow. I cannot put it off any
longer without discourtesy; indeed, I ask myself, what must de
Saint-Loup-en-Bray think of me. I just came to let you know that I
shall take the two o'clock train. At your service." But I thought now
only of seeing Albertine again, and of trying to get to know her
friends, and Doncières, since they were not going there, and my
going would bring me back too late to see them still on the beach,
seemed to me to be situated at the other end of the world. I told
Bloch that it was impossible. "Oh, very well, I shall go alone. In the
fatuous words of Master Arouet, I shall say to Saint-Loup, to beguile
his clericalism:"
'My duty stands alone, by his in no way bound;
Though he should choose to fail, yet faithful I'll be
found.'

"I admit he's not a bad looking boy," was Albertine's comment, "but
he makes me feel quite sick." I had never thought that Bloch might
be "not a bad looking boy"; and yet, when one came to think of it,
so he was. With his rather prominent brow, very aquiline nose, and
his air of extreme cleverness and of being convinced of his
cleverness, he had a pleasing face. But he could not succeed in
pleasing Albertine. This was perhaps due, to some extent, to her
own disadvantages, the harshness, the want of feeling of the little
band, its rudeness towards everything that was not itself. And later
on, when I introduced them, Albertine's antipathy for him grew no
less. Bloch belonged to a section of society in which, between the
free and easy customs of the "smart set" and the regard for good
manners which a man is supposed to shew who "does not soil his
hands", a sort of special compromise has been reached which differs
from the manners of the world and is nevertheless a peculiarly
unpleasant form of worldliness. When he was introduced to anyone
he would bow with a sceptical smile, and at the same time with an
exaggerated show of respect, and, if it was to a man, would say:
"Pleased to meet you, sir," in a voice which ridiculed the words that
it was uttering, though with a consciousness of belonging to some
one who was no fool. Having sacrificed this first moment to a
custom which he at once followed and derided (just as on the first of
January he would greet you with a "Many happy!") he would adopt
an air of infinite cunning, and would "proffer subtle words" which
were often true enough but "got on" Albertine's nerves. When I told
her on this first day that his name was Bloch, she exclaimed: "I
would have betted anything he was a Jew-boy. Trust them to put
their foot in it!" Moreover, Bloch was destined to give Albertine other
grounds for annoyance later on. Like many intellectuals, he was
incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way. He would find
some precious qualification for every statement, and would sweep
from particular to general. It vexed Albertine, who was never too
well pleased at other people's shewing an interest in what she was
doing, that when she had sprained her ankle and was keeping quiet,

Bloch said of her: "She is outstretched on her chair, but in her
ubiquity has not ceased to frequent simultaneously vague golf-
courses and dubious tennis-courts." He was simply being "literary",
of course, but this, in view of the difficulties which Albertine felt that
it might create for her with friends whose invitations she had
declined on the plea that she was unable to move, was quite enough
to disgust her with the face, the sound of the voice of the young
man who could say such things about her. We parted, Albertine and
I, after promising to take a walk together later. I had talked to her
without being any more conscious of where my words were falling,
of what became of them, than if I were dropping pebbles into a
bottomless pit. That our words are, as a general rule, filled, by the
person to whom we address them, with a meaning which that
person derives from her own substance, a meaning widely different
from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered
them, is a fact which the daily round of life is perpetually
demonstrating. But if we find ourself as well in the company of a
person whose education (as Albertine's was to me) is inconceivable,
her tastes, her reading, her principles unknown, we cannot tell
whether our words have aroused in her anything that resembles
their meaning, any more than in an animal, although there are
things that even an animal may be made to understand. So that to
attempt any closer friendship with Albertine seemed to me like
placing myself in contact with the unknown, if not the impossible, an
occupation as arduous as breaking a horse, as reposeful as keeping
bees or growing roses.
I had thought, a few hours before, that Albertine would
acknowledge my bow but would not speak to me. We had now
parted, after planning to make some excursion soon together. I
vowed that when I next met Albertine I would treat her with greater
boldness, and I had sketched out in advance a draft of all that I
would say to her, and even (being now quite convinced that she was
not strait-laced) of all the favours that I would demand of her. But
the mind is subject to external influences, as plants are, and cells
and chemical elements, and the medium in which its immersion

alters it is a change of circumstances, or new surroundings. Grown
different by the mere fact of her presence, when I found myself
once again in Albertine's company, what I said to her was not at all
what I had meant to say. Remembering her flushed temple, I asked
myself whether she might not appreciate more keenly a polite
attention which she knew to be disinterested. Besides, I was
embarrassed by certain things in her look, in her smile. They might
equally well signify a laxity of morals and the rather silly merriment
of a girl who though full of spirits was at heart thoroughly
respectable. A single expression, on a face as in speech, is
susceptible of divers interpretations, and I stood hesitating like a
schoolboy faced by the difficulties of a piece of Greek prose.
On this occasion we met almost immediately the tall one, Andrée,
the one who had jumped over the old banker, and Albertine was
obliged to introduce me. Her friend had a pair of eyes of
extraordinary brightness, like, in a dark house, a glimpse through an
open door of a room into which the sun is shining with a greenish
reflexion from the glittering sea.
A party of five were passing, men whom I had come to know very
well by sight during my stay at Balbec. I had often wondered who
they could be. "They're nothing very wonderful," said Albertine with
a sneering laugh. "The little old one with dyed hair and yellow gloves
has a fine touch; he knows how to draw all right, he's the Balbec
dentist; he's a good sort. The fat one is the Mayor, not the tiny little
fat one, you must have seen him before, he's the dancing master;
he's rather a beast, you know; he can't stand us, because we make
such a row at the Casino; we smash his chairs, and want to have the
carpet up when we dance; that's why he never gives us prizes,
though we're the only girls there who can dance a bit. The dentist is
a dear, I would have said how d'ye do to him, just to make the
dancing master swear, but I couldn't because they've got M. de
Sainte-Croix with them; he's on the General Council; he comes of a
very good family, but he's joined the Republicans, to make more
money. No nice people ever speak to him now. He knows my uncle,
because they're both in the Government, but the rest of my family

always cut him. The thin one in the waterproof is the bandmaster.
You know him, of course. You don't? Oh, he plays divinely. You
haven't been to Cavalleria Rusticana? I thought it too lovely! He's
giving a concert this evening, but we can't go because it's to be in
the town hall. In the Casino it wouldn't matter, but in the town hall,
where they've taken down the crucifix, Andrée's mother would have
a fit if we went there. You're going to say that my aunt's husband is
in the Government. But what difference does that make? My aunt is
my aunt. That's not why I'm fond of her. The only thing she has ever
wanted has been to get rid of me. No, the person who has really
been a mother to me, and all the more credit to her because she's
no relation at all, is a friend of mine whom I love just as much as if
she was my mother. I will let you see her 'photo'." We were joined
for a moment by the golf champion and baccarat plunger, Octave. I
thought that I had discovered a bond between us, for I learned in
the course of conversation that he was some sort of relative, and
even more a friend of the Verdurins. But he spoke contemptuously
of the famous Wednesdays, adding that M. Verdurin had never even
heard of a dinner jacket, which made it a horrid bore when one ran
into him in a music-hall, where one would very much rather not be
greeted with "Well, you young rascal," by an old fellow in a frock
coat and black tie, for all the world like a village lawyer. Octave left
us, and soon it was Andrée's turn, when we came to her villa, into
which she vanished without having uttered a single word to me
during the whole of our walk. I regretted her departure, all the more
in that, while I was complaining to Albertine how chilling her friend
had been with me, and was comparing in my mind this difficulty
which Albertine seemed to find in making me know her friends with
the hostility that Elstir, when he might have granted my desire,
seemed to have encountered on that first afternoon, two girls came
by to whom I lifted my hat, the young Ambresacs, whom Albertine
greeted also.
I felt that, in Albertine's eyes, my position would be improved by this
meeting. They were the daughters of a kinswoman of Mme. de
Villeparisis, who was also a friend of Mme. de Luxembourg. M. and

Mme. d'Ambresac, who had a small villa at Balbec and were
immensely rich, led the simplest of lives there, and always went
about dressed he in an unvarying frock coat, she in a dark gown.
Both of them used to make sweeping bows to my grandmother,
which never led to anything further. The daughters, who were very
pretty, were dressed more fashionably, but in a fashion suited rather
to Paris than to the seaside. With their long skirts and large hats,
they had the look of belonging to a different race from Albertine.
She, I discovered, knew all about them.
"Oh, so you know the little d'Ambresacs, do you? Dear me, you have
some swagger friends. After all, they're very simple souls," she went
on as though this might account for it. "They're very nice, but so
well brought up that they aren't allowed near the Casino, for fear of
us—we've such a bad tone. They attract you, do they? Well, it all
depends on what you like. They're just little white rabbits, really.
There may be something in that, of course. If little white rabbits are
what appeals to you, they may supply a long-felt want. It seems,
there must be some attraction, because one of them has got
engaged already to the Marquis de Saint-Loup. Which is a cruel blow
to the younger one, who is madly in love with that young man. I'm
sure, the way they speak to you with their lips shut is quite enough
for me. And then they dress in the most absurd way. Fancy going to
play golf in silk frocks! At their age, they dress more showily than
grown-up women who really know about clothes. Look at Mme.
Elstir; there's a well dressed woman if you like," I answered that she
had struck me as being dressed with the utmost simplicity. Albertine
laughed. "She does put on the simplest things, I admit, but she
dresses wonderfully, and to get what you call simplicity costs her a
fortune." Mme. Elstir's gowns passed unnoticed by any one who had
not a sober and unerring taste in matters of attire. This was lacking
in me. Elstir possessed it in a supreme degree, or so Albertine told
me. I had not suspected this, nor that the beautiful but quite simple
objects which littered his studio were treasures long desired by him
which he had followed from sale room to sale room, knowing all
their history, until he had made enough money to be able to acquire

them. But as to this Albertine, being as ignorant as myself, could not
enlighten me. Whereas when it came to clothes, prompted by a
coquettish instinct, and perhaps by the regretful longing of a
penniless girl who is able to appreciate with greater
disinterestedness, more delicacy of feeling, in other, richer people
the things that she will never be able to afford for herself, she
expressed herself admirably on the refinement of Elstir's taste, so
hard to satisfy that all women appeared to him badly dressed, while,
attaching infinite importance to right proportions and shades of
colour, he would order to be made for his wife, at fabulous prices,
the sunshades, hats and cloaks which he had learned from Albertine
to regard as charming, and which a person wanting in taste would
no more have noticed than myself. Apart from this, Albertine, who
had done a little painting, though without, she confessed, having
any "gift" for it, felt a boundless admiration for Elstir, and, thanks to
his precept and example, shewed a judgment of pictures which was
in marked contrast to her enthusiasm for Cavalleria Rusticana. The
truth was, though as yet it was hardly apparent, that she was highly
intelligent, and that in the things that she said the stupidity was not
her own but that of her environment and age. Elstir's had been a
good but only a partial influence. All the branches of her intelligence
had not reached the same stage of development. The taste for
pictures had almost caught up the taste for clothes and all forms of
smartness, but had not been followed by the taste for music, which
was still a long way behind.
Albertine might know all about the Ambresacs; but as he who can
achieve great things is not necessarily capable of small, I did not
find her, after I had bowed to those young ladies, any better
disposed to make me known to her friends. "It's too good of you to
attach any importance to them. You shouldn't take any notice of
them; they don't count. What on earth can a lot of kids like them
mean to a man like you? Now Andrée, I must say, is remarkably
clever. She is a good girl, that, though she is perfectly fantastic at
times, but the others are really dreadfully stupid." When I had left
Albertine, I felt suddenly a keen regret that Saint-Loup should have

concealed his engagement from me and that he should be doing
anything so improper as to choose a wife before breaking with his
mistress. And then, shortly afterwards, I met Andrée, and as she
went on talking to me for some time I seized the opportunity to tell
her that I would very much like to see her again next day, but she
replied that this was impossible, because her mother was not at all
well, and she would have to stay beside her. The next day but one,
when I was at Elstir's, he told me how greatly Andrée had been
attracted by me; on my protesting: "But it was I who was attracted
by her from the start; I asked her to meet me again yesterday, but
she could not." "Yes, I know; she told me all about that," was his
reply, "she was very sorry, but she had promised to go to a picnic,
somewhere miles from here. They were to drive over in a break, and
it was too late for her to get out of it." Albeit this falsehood (Andrée
knowing me so slightly) was of no real importance, I ought not to
have continued to seek the company of a person who was capable
of uttering it. For what people have once done they will do again
indefinitely, and if you go every year to see a friend who, the first
time, was not able to meet you at the appointed place, or was in
bed with a chill, you will find him in bed with another chill which he
has just caught, you will miss him again at another meeting-place at
which he has failed to appear, for a single and unalterable reason in
place of which he supposes himself to have various reasons, drawn
from the circumstances. One morning, not long after Andrée's telling
me that she would be obliged to stay beside her mother, I was
taking a short stroll with Albertine, whom I had found on the beach
tossing up and catching again on a cord an oddly shaped implement
which gave her a look of Giotto's "Idolatry"; it was called, for that
matter, "Diabolo", and is so fallen into disuse now that, when they
come upon the picture of a girl playing with one, the critics of future
generations will solemnly discuss, as it might be over one of the
allegorical figures in the Arena, what it is that she is holding. A
moment later their friend with the penurious and harsh appearance,
the same one who on that first day had sneered so malevolently: "I
do feel sorry for him, poor old man," when she saw the old
gentlemen's head brushed by the flying feet of Andrée, came up to

Albertine with "Good morning, 'm I disturbing you?" She had taken
off her hat, for comfort, and her hair, like a strange and fascinating
plant, lay over her brow, displaying all the delicate tracery of its
foliation. Albertine, perhaps because she resented seeing the other
bare-headed, made no reply, preserved a frigid silence in spite of
which the girl stayed with us, kept apart from myself by Albertine,
who arranged at one moment to be alone with her, at another to
walk with me leaving her to follow. I was obliged, to secure an
introduction, to ask for it in the girl's hearing. Then, as Albertine was
uttering my name, on the face and in the blue eyes of this girl,
whose expression I had thought so cruel when I heard her say:
"Poor old man, I do feel so sorry for him", I saw gather and gleam a
cordial, friendly smile, and she held out her hand. Her hair was
golden, and not her hair only; for if her cheeks were pink and her
eyes blue it was like the still roseate morning sky which sparkles
everywhere with dazzling points of gold.
At once kindled by her flame, I said to myself that this was a child
who when in love grew shy, that it was for my sake, from love for
me that she had remained with us, despite Albertine's rebuffs, and
that she must have rejoiced in the opportunity to confess to me at
last, by that smiling, friendly gaze, that she would be as kind to me
as she was terrible to other people. Doubtless she had noticed me
on the beach, when I still knew nothing of her, and had been
thinking of me ever since; perhaps it had been to win my admiration
that she mocked at the old gentleman, and because she had not
succeeded in getting to know me that on the following days she
appeared so morose. From the hotel I had often seen her, in the
evenings, walking by herself on the beach. Probably in the hope of
meeting me. And now, hindered as much by Albertine's presence as
she would have been by that of the whole band, she had evidently
attached herself to us, braving the increasing coldness of her friend's
attitude, only in the hope of outstaying her, of being left alone with
me, when she might make an appointment with me for some time
when she would find an excuse to slip away without either her
family's or her friends' knowing that she had gone, and would meet

me in some safe place before church or after golf. It was all the
more difficult to see her because Andrée had quarrelled with her and
now detested her. "I have put up far too long with her terrible
dishonesty," she explained to me, "her baseness; I can't tell you all
the vile insults she has heaped on me. I have stood it all because of
the others. But her latest effort was really too much!" And she told
me of some foolish thing that this girl had done, which might indeed
have injurious consequences to Andrée herself.
But those private words promised me by Gisèle's confiding eyes for
the moment when Albertine should have left us by ourselves, were
destined never to be spoken, because after Albertine, stubbornly
planted between us, had answered with increasing curtness, and
finally had ceased to respond at all to her friend's remarks, Gisèle at
length abandoned the attempt and turned back. I found fault with
Albertine for having been so disagreeable. "It will teach her to be
more careful how she behaves. She's not a bad kid, but she'ld talk
the head off a donkey. She's no business, either, to go poking her
nose into everything. Why should she fasten herself on to us without
being asked? In another minute I'ld have told her to go to blazes.
Besides I can't stand her going about with her hair like that; it's such
bad form." I gazed at Albertine's cheeks as she spoke, and asked
myself what might be the perfume, the taste of them: this time they
were not cool, but glowed with a uniform pink, violet-tinted, creamy,
like certain roses whose petals have a waxy gloss. I felt a passionate
longing for them such as one feels sometimes for a particular flower.
"I hadn't noticed it," was all that I said. "You stared at her hard
enough; anyone would have said you wanted to paint her portrait,"
she scolded, not at all softened by the fact that it was at herself that
I was now staring so fixedly. "I don't believe you would care for her,
all the same. She's not in the least a flirt. You like little girls who flirt
with you, I know. Anyhow, she won't have another chance of
fastening on to us and being sent about her business; she's going
off to-day to Paris." "Are the rest of your friends going too?" "No;
only she and 'Miss', because she's got an exam, coming; she's got to
stay at home and swot for it, poor kid. It's not much fun for her, I

don't mind telling you. Of course, you may be set a good subject,
you never know. But it's a tremendous risk. One girl I know was
asked: Describe an accident that you have witnessed. That was a
piece of luck. But I know another girl who got: State which you
would rather have as a friend, Alceste or Philinte. I'm sure I should
have dried up altogether! Apart from everything else, it's not a
question to set to girls. Girls go about with other girls; they're not
supposed to have gentlemen friends." (This announcement, which
shewed that I had but little chance of being admitted to the
companionship of the band, froze my blood.) "But in any case,
supposing it was set to boys, what on earth would you expect them
to say to a question like that? Several parents wrote to the Gaulois,
to complain of the difficult questions that were being set. The joke
of it is that in a collection of prize-winning essays they gave two
which treated the question in absolutely opposite ways. You see, it
all depends on which examiner you get. One would like you to say
that Philinte was a flatterer and a scoundrel, the other that you
couldn't help admiring Alceste, but that he was too cantankerous,
and that as a friend you ought to choose Philinte. How can you
expect a lot of unfortunate candidates to know what to say when the
professors themselves can't make up their minds. But that's nothing.
They get more difficult every year. Gisèle will want all her wits about
her if she's to get through." I returned to the hotel. My grandmother
was not there. I waited for her for some time; when at last she
appeared, I begged her to allow me, in quite unexpected
circumstances, to make an expedition which might keep me away for
a couple of days. I had luncheon with her, ordered a carriage and
drove to the station. Gisèle would shew no surprise at seeing me
there. After we had changed at Doncières, in the Paris train, there
would be a carriage with a corridor, along which, while the
governess dozed, I should be able to lead Gisèle into dark corners,
and make an appointment to meet her on my return to Paris, which
I would then try to put forward to the earliest possible date. I would
travel with her as far as Caen or Evreux, whichever she preferred,
and would take the next train back to Balbec. And yet, what would
she have thought of me had she known that I had hesitated for a

long time between her and her friends, that quite as much as with
her I had contemplated falling in love with Albertine, with the bright-
eyed girl, with Rosemonde. I felt a pang of remorse now that a bond
of mutual affection was going to unite me with Gisèle. I could,
moreover, truthfully have assured her that Albertine no longer
interested me. I had seen her that morning as she swerved aside,
almost turning her back on me, to speak to Gisèle. On her head,
which was bent sullenly over her bosom, the hair that grew at the
back, different from and darker even than the rest, shone as though
she had just been bathing. "Like a dying duck in a thunderstorm!" I
thought to myself, this view of her hair having let into Albertine's
body a soul entirely different from that implied hitherto by her
glowing complexion and mysterious gaze. That shining cataract of
hair at the back of her head had been for a moment or two all that I
was able to see of her, and continued to be all that I saw in
retrospect. Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is
exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And
as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one
to be seen. While the coachman whipped on his horse I sat there
listening to the words of gratitude and affection which Gisèle was
murmuring in my ear, born, all of them, of her friendly smile and
outstretched hand, the fact being that in those periods of my life in
which I was not actually, but desired to be in love, I carried in my
mind not only an ideal form of beauty once seen, which I recognised
at a glance in every passing stranger who kept far enough from me
for her confused features to resist any attempt at identification, but
also the moral phantom—ever ready to be incarnate—of the woman
who was going to fall in love with me, to take up her cues in the
amorous comedy which I had had written out in my mind from my
earliest boyhood, and in which every nice girl seemed to me to be
equally desirous of playing, provided that she had also some of the
physical qualifications required. In this play, whoever the new star
might be whom I invited to create or to revive the leading part, the
plot, the incidents, the lines themselves preserved an unalterable
form.

Within the next few days, in spite of the reluctance that Albertine
had shewn from introducing me to them, I knew all the little band of
that first afternoon (except Gisèle, whom, owing to a prolonged
delay at the level crossing by the station and a change in the time-
table, I had not succeeded in meeting on the train, which had been
gone some minutes before I arrived, and to whom as it happened I
never gave another thought), and two or three other girls as well to
whom at my request they introduced me. And thus, my expectation
of the pleasure which I should find in a new girl springing from
another girl through whom I had come to know her, the latest was
like one of those new varieties of rose which gardeners get by using
first a rose of another kind. And as I passed from blossom to
blossom along this flowery chain, the pleasure of knowing one that
was different would send me back to her to whom I was indebted
for it, with a gratitude in which desire was mingled fully as much as
in my new expectation. Presently I was spending all my time among
these girls.
Alas! in the freshest flower it is possible to discern those just
perceptible signs which to the instructed mind indicate already what
will be, by the desiccation or fructification of the flesh that is to-day
in bloom, the ultimate form, immutable and already predestinate, of
the autumnal seed. The eye rapturously follows a nose like a wavelet
that deliciously curls the water's face at day-break and seems not to
move, to be capturable by the pencil, because the sea is so calm
then that one does not notice its tidal flow. Human faces seem not
to change while we are looking at them, because the revolution
which they perform is too slow for us to perceive it. But we have
only to see, by the side of any of those girls, her mother or her aunt,
to realise the distance over which, obeying the gravitation of a type
that is, generally speaking, deplorable, her features will have
travelled in less than thirty years, and must continue to travel until
the sunset hour, until her face, having vanished altogether below the
horizon, catches the light no more. I knew that, as deep, as
ineluctable as is their Jewish patriotism or Christian atavism in those
who imagine themselves to be the most emancipated of their race,

there dwelt beneath the rosy inflorescence of Albertine, Rosemonde,
Andrée, unknown to themselves, held in reserve until the
circumstances should arise, a coarse nose, a protruding jaw, a bust
that would create a sensation when it appeared, but was actually in
the wings, ready to "come on", just as it might be a burst of
Dreyfusism, or clericalism, sudden, unforeseen, fatal, some patriotic,
some feudal form of heroism emerging suddenly when the
circumstances demand it from a nature anterior to that of the man
himself, by means of which he thinks, lives, evolves, gains strength
himself or dies, without ever being able to distinguish that nature
from the successive phases which in turn he takes for it. Even
mentally, we depend a great deal more than we think upon natural
laws, and our mind possesses already, like some cryptogamous
plant, every little peculiarity that we imagine ourselves to be
selecting. For we can see only the derived ideas, without detecting
the primary cause (Jewish blood, French birth or whatever it may
be) that inevitably produced them, and which at a given moment we
expose. And perhaps, while the former appear to us to be the result
of deliberate thought, the latter that of an imprudent disregard for
our own health, we take from our family, as the papilionaceae take
the form of their seed, as well the ideas by which we live as the
malady from which we shall die.
As on a plant whose flowers open at different seasons, I had seen,
expressed in the form of old ladies, on this Balbec shore, those
shrivelled seed-pods, those flabby tubers which my friends would
one day be. But what matter? For the moment it was their flowering-
time. And so when Mme. de Villeparisis asked me to drive with her I
sought an excuse to be prevented. I never went to see Elstir unless
accompanied by my new friends. I could not even spare an
afternoon to go to Doncières, to pay the visit I had promised Saint-
Loup. Social engagements, serious discussions, even a friendly
conversation, had they usurped the place allotted to my walks with
these girls, would have had the same effect on me as if, when the
luncheon bell rang, I had been taken not to a table spread with food
but to turn the pages of an album. The men, the youths, the

women, old or mature, whose society we suppose that we shall
enjoy, are borne by us only on an unsubstantial plane surface,
because we are conscious of them only by visual perception
restricted to its own limits; whereas it is as delegates from our other
senses that our eyes dart towards young girls; the senses follow,
one after another, in search of the various charms, fragrant, tactile,
savoury, which they thus enjoy even without the aid of fingers and
lips; and able, thanks to the art of transposition, the genius for
synthesis in which desire excels, to reconstruct beneath the hue of
cheeks or bosom the feel, the taste, the contact that is forbidden
them, they give to these girls the same honeyed consistency as they
create when they stand rifling the sweets of a rose-garden, or before
a vine whose clusters their eyes alone devour.
If it rained, although the weather had no power to daunt Albertine,
who was often to be seen in her waterproof spinning on her bicycle
through the driving showers, we would spend the day in the Casino,
where on such days it would have seemed to me impossible not to
go. I had the greatest contempt for the young Ambresacs, who had
never set foot in it. And I willingly joined my friends in playing tricks
on the dancing master. As a rule we had to listen to admonition from
the manager, or from some of his staff, usurping dictatorial powers,
because my friends, even Andrée herself, whom on that account I
had regarded when I first saw her as so dionysiac a creature,
whereas in reality she was delicate, intellectual, and this year far
from well, in spite of which her actions were controlled less by the
state of her health than by the spirit of that age which overcomes
every other consideration and confounds in a general gaiety the
weak with the strong, could not enter the outer hall of the rooms
without starting to run, jumping over all the chairs, sliding back
along the floor, their balance maintained by a graceful poise of their
outstretched arms, singing the while, mingling all the arts, in that
first bloom of youth, in the manner of those poets of ancient days
for whom the different "kinds" were not yet separate, so that in an
epic poem they would introduce rules of agriculture with theological
doctrine.

This Andrée who had struck me when I first saw them as the coldest
of them all, was infinitely more refined, more loving, more sensitive
than Albertine, to whom she displayed the caressing, gentle affection
of an elder sister. At the Casino she would come across the floor to
sit down by me, and knew instinctively, unlike Albertine, to refuse
my invitation to dance, or even, if I was tired, to give up the Casino
and come to me instead at the hotel. She expressed her friendship
for me, for Albertine, in terms which were evidence of the most
exquisite understanding of the things of the heart, which may have
been partly due to the state of her health. She had always a merry
smile of excuse for the childish behaviour of Albertine, who
expressed with a crude violence the irresistible temptation held out
to her by the parties and picnics to which she had not the sense, like
Andrée, resolutely to prefer staying and talking with me. When the
time came for her to go off to a luncheon party at the golf-club, if
we were all three together she would get ready to leave us, then,
coming up to Andrée: "Well, Andrée, what are you waiting for now?
You know we are lunching at the golf-club." "No; I'm going to stay
and talk to him," replied Andrée, pointing to me. "But you know,
Mme. Durieux invited you," cried Albertine, as if Andrée's intention
to remain with me could be explained only by ignorance on her part
where else and by whom she had been bidden. "Look here, my good
girl, don't be such an idiot," Andrée chid her. Albertine did not insist,
fearing a suggestion that she too should stay with me. She tossed
her head: "Just as you like," was her answer, uttered in the tone one
uses to an invalid whose self-indulgence is killing him by inches, "I
must fly; I'm sure your watch is slow," and off she went. "She is a
dear girl, but quite impossible," said Andrée, bathing her friend in a
smile at once caressing and critical. If in this craze for amusement
Albertine might be said to echo something of the old original
Gilberte, that is because a certain similarity exists, although the type
evolves, between all the women we love, a similarity that is due to
the fixity of our own temperament, which it is that chooses them,
eliminating all those who would not be at once our opposite and our
complement, fitted that is to say to gratify our senses and to wring
our heart. They are, these women, a product of our temperament,

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Solution Manual for Contemporary Auditing Real Issues and Cases 8th Edition by Knapp

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