his
relative or friend, he assures us that nothing could be more simple,
takes us in at the door, and promises to send her down to us in five
minutes. How much we love him--as at that moment I loved Francoise--the
good-natured intermediary who by a single word has made supportable,
human, almost propitious the inconceivable, infernal scene of gaiety in
the thick of which we had been imagining swarms of enemies, perverse and
seductive, beguiling away from us, even making laugh at us, the woman
whom we love. If we are to judge of them by him, this relative who has
accosted us and who is himself an initiate in those cruel mysteries,
then the other guests cannot be so very demoniacal. Those inaccessible
and torturing hours into which she had gone to taste of unknown
pleasures--behold, a breach in the wall, and we are through it. Behold,
one of the moments whose series will go to make up their sum, a moment
as genuine as the rest, if not actually more important to ourself
because our mistress is more intensely a part of it; we picture it to
ourselves, we possess it, we intervene upon it, almost we have created
it: namely, the moment in which he goes to tell her that we are waiting
there below. And very probably the other moments of the party will not
be essentially different, will contain nothing else so exquisite or so
well able to make us suffer, since this kind friend has assured us that
"Of course, she will be delighted to come down! It will be far more
amusing for her to talk to you than to be bored up there." Alas! Swann
had learned by experience that the good intentions of a third party are
powerless to control a woman who is annoyed to find herself pursued even
into a ball-room by a man whom she does not love. Too often, the kind
friend comes down again alone.

My mother did not appear, but with no attempt to safeguard my
self-respect (which depended upon her keeping up the fiction that she
had asked me to let her know the result of my search for something
or other) made Francoise tell me, in so many words "There is no
answer"--words I have so often, since then, heard the hall-porters in
'mansions' and the flunkeys in gambling-clubs and the like, repeat to
some poor girl, who replies in bewilderment: "What! he's said nothing?
It's not possible. You did give him my letter, didn't you? Very well,
I shall wait a little longer." And just as she invariably protests that
she does not need the extra gas which the porter off