very odd little house with a lot of Chinese stuff.
I remember, we were bothered all the time by the newsboys, shouting
outside; in the end she made me get up and go."

Without listening to these memories, I could feel all about her the
indistinct murmur of fame. My heart leaped with impatience when I
thought that a few seconds must still elapse before all these people,
among whom I was dismayed not to find a certain mulatto banker who (or
so I felt) had a contempt for me, were to see the unknown youth, to
whom they had not, so far, been paying the slightest attention, salute
(without knowing her, it was true, but I thought that I had sufficient
authority since my parents knew her husband and I was her daughter's
playmate) this woman whose reputation for beauty, for misconduct, and
for elegance was universal. But I was now close to Mme. Swann; I pulled
off my hat with so lavish, so prolonged a gesture that she could not
repress a smile. People laughed. As for her, she had never seen me with
Gilberte, she did not know my name, but I was for her--like one of the
keepers in the Bois, like the boatman, or the ducks on the lake, to
which she threw scraps of bread--one of the minor personages, familiar,
nameless, as devoid of individual character as a stage-hand in a
theatre, of her daily walks abroad.

On certain days when I had missed her in the Allee des Acacias I would
be so fortunate as to meet her in the Allee de la Reine Marguerite,
where women went who wished to be alone, or to appear to be wishing to
be alone; she would not be alone for long, being soon overtaken by some
man or other, often in a grey 'tile' hat, whom I did not know, and
who would talk to her for some time, while their two carriages crawled
behind.

* * *

That sense of the complexity of the Bois de Boulogne which made it an
artificial place and, in the zoological or mythological sense of the
word, a Garden, I captured again, this year, as I crossed it on my way
to Trianon, on one of those mornings, early in November, when in Paris,
if we stay indoors, being so near and yet prevented from witnessing the
transformation scene of autumn, which is drawing so rapidly to a close
without our assistance, we feel a regret for the fallen leaves that
becomes a fever, and may even keep us awake at night. Into my closed
room they had been drifting already for a month, summoned there by
my desire to see them, slipping between my thoughts and the object,