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FUNDAMENTAL STATISTICS FOR THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
focuses on providing the context of statistics in behavioral research, while
emphasizing the importance of looking at data before jumping into a test.
This practical approach provides you with an understanding of the logic
behind the statistics, so you understand why and how certain methods are
used -- rather than simply carry out techniques by rote. You'll move beyond
number crunching to discover the meaning of statistical results and
appreciate how the statistical test to be employed relates to the research
questions posed by an experiment. An abundance of real data and
research studies provide a real-life perspective and help you understand
concepts as you learn about the analysis of data.

1. ES2
2. Title
3. Statement
4. Copyright
5. Dedication
6. Brief Contents
7. Contents
8. Preface
9. Ch 1: Introduction
10. Ch 1: Introduction
11. 1.1: A Changing Field
12. 1.2: The Importance of Context
13. 1.3: Basic Terminology
14. 1.4: Selection among Statistical Procedures
15. 1.5: Using Computers
16. 1.6: Summary
17. 1.7: A Quick Review
18. 1.8: Exercises
19. Ch 2: Basic Concepts
20. Ch 2: Introduction
21. 2.1: Scales of Measurement
22. 2.2: Variables
23. 2.3: Random Sampling
24. 2.4: Notation
25. 2.5: Summary
26. 2.6: A Quick Review
27. 2.7: Exercises
28. Ch 3: Displaying Data
29. Ch 3: Introduction
30. 3.1: Plotting Data
31. 3.2: Stem-and-Leaf Displays
32. 3.3: Reading Graphs
33. 3.4: Alternative Methods of Plotting Data
34. 3.5: Describing Distributions
35. 3.6: Using SPSS to Display Data
36. 3.7: Summary
37. 3.8: AQuick Review
38. 3.9: Exercises
39. Ch 4: Measures of Central Tendency
40. Ch 4: Introduction
41. 4.1: The Mode
42. 4.2: The Median
43. 4.3: The Mean
44. 4.4: Relative Advantages and Disadvantages of the Mode, the M edian, and the Mean
45. 4.5: Obtaining Measures of Central Tendency Using SPSS and
46. 4.6: ASimple Demonstration—Seeing Statistics
47. 4.7: Summary
48. 4.8: AQuick Review
49. 4.9: Exercises
50. Ch 5: Measures of Variability
51. Ch 5: Introduction
52. 5.1: Range
53. 5.2: Interquartile Range and Other Range Statistics
54. 5.3: The Average Deviation
55. 5.4: The Variance
56. 5.5: The Standard Deviation
57. 5.6: Computational Formulae for the Variance and the Standard Deviation
58. 5.7: The Mean and the Variance as Estimators
59. 5.8: Boxplots: Graphical Representations of Dispersion and E xtreme Scores
60. 5.9: AReturn to Trimming
61. 5.10: Obtaining Measures of Dispersion Using SPSS & R
62. 5.11: The Moon Illusion
63. 5.12: Seeing Statistics
64. 5.13: Summary
65. 5.14: A Quick Review
66. 5.15: Exercises
67. Ch 6: The Normal Distribution
68. Ch 6: Introduction
69. 6.1: The Normal Distribution
70. 6.2: The Standard Normal Distribution
71. 6.3: Setting Probable Limits on an Observation
72. 6.4: Measures Related to z
73. 6.5: Seeing Statistics
74. 6.6: Summary
75. 6.7: A Quick Review
76. 6.8: Exercises
77. Ch 7: Basic Concepts of Probability
78. Ch 7: Introduction
79. 7.1: Probability
80. 7.2: Basic Terminology and Rules
81. 7.3: The Application of Probability to Controversial Issues
82. 7.4: Writing Up the Results
83. 7.5: Discrete Versus Continuous Variables
84. 7.6: Probability Distributions for Discrete Variables
85. 7.7: Probability Distributions for Continuous Variables
86. 7.8: Summary
87. 7.9: A Quick Review
88. 7.10: Exercises
89. Ch 8: Sampling Distributions and Hypothesis Testing
90. Ch 8: Introduction
91. 8.1: Sampling Distributions and the Standard Error
92. 8.2: Two More Examples Involving Course Evaluations and Human Decision Making
93. 8.3: Hypothesis Testing
94. 8.4: The Null Hypothesis
95. 8.5: Test Statistics and Their Sampling Distributions
96. 8.6: Using the Normal Distribution to Test Hypotheses
97. 8.7: Type I and Type II Errors
98. 8.8: Oneand Two-Tailed Tests
99. 8.9: Seeing Statistics
100. 8.10: A Final Example
101. 8.11: Back to Course Evaluations and Sunk Costs
102. 8.12: Summary
103. 8.13: A Quick Review
104. 8.14: Exercises
105. Ch 9: Correlation
106. Ch 9: Introduction
107. 9.1: Scatter Diagrams
108. 9.2: An Example: The Relationship Between the Pace of Life and Heart
Disease
109. 9.3: The Covariance
110. 9.4: The Pearson Product-Moment Correlation Coefficient (r)
111. 9.5: Correlations with Ranked Data
112. 9.6: Factors That Affect the Correlation
113. 9.7: Beware Extreme Observations
114. 9.8: Correlation and Causation
115. 9.9: If Something Looks Too Good to Be True, Perhaps It Is
116. 9.10: Testing the Significance of a Correlation Coefficient
117. 9.11: Confidence Intervals on Correlation Coefficients
118. 9.12: Intercorrelation Matrices
119. 9.13: Other Correlation Coefficients
120. 9.14: Using SPSS to Obtain Correlation Coefficients
121. 9.15: r2 and the Magnitude of an Effect
122. 9.16: Seeing Statistics
123. 9.17: A Review: Does Rated Course Quality Relate to Expected Grade?
124. 9.18: Summary
125. 9.19: A Quick Review
126. 9.20: Exercises
127. Ch 10: Regression
128. Ch 10: Introduction
129. 10.1: The Relationship Between Stress and Health
130. 10.2: The Basic Data
131. 10.3: The Regression Line
132. 10.4: The Accuracy of Prediction
133. 10.5: The Influence of Extreme Values
134. 10.6: Hypothesis Testing in Regression
135. 10.7: Computer Solution Using SPSS
136. 10.8: Seeing Statistics
137. 10.9: A Final Example for Review
138. 10.10: Regression Versus Correlation
139. 10.11: Summary
140. 10.12: A Quick Review
141. 10.13: Exercises
142. Ch 11: Multiple Regression
143. Ch 11: Introduction
144. 11.1: Overview
145. 11.2: Funding Our Schools
146. 11.3: The Multiple Regression Equation
147. 11.4: Residuals
148. 11.5: Hypothesis Testing
149. 11.6: Refining the Regression Equation
150. 11.7: Special Section: Using R to Solve a Multiple Regression Problem
151. 11.8: A Second Example: What Makes a Confident Mother?
152. 11.9: Third Example: Psychological Symptoms in Cancer Patients
153. 11.10: Summary
154. 11.11: A Quick Review
155. 11.12: Exercises
156. Ch 12: Hypothesis Tests Applied to Means: One Sample
157. Ch 12: Introduction
158. 12.1: Sampling Distribution of the Mean
159. 12.2: Testing Hypotheses about Means when Is Known
160. 12.3: Testing a Sample Mean when Is Unknown (The One-Sample Test)
161. 12.4: Factors That Affect the Magnitude of and the Decision about
162. 12.5: A Second Example: The Moon Illusion
163. 12.6: How Large Is Our Effect?
164. 12.7: Confidence Limits on the Mean
165. 12.8: Using SPSS and to Run One-Sample Tests
166. 12.9: A Good Guess Is Better than Leaving It Blank
167. 12.10: Seeing Statistics
168. 12.11: Confidence Intervals Can Be Far More Important than a Null
Hypothesis Test
169. 12.12: Summary
170. 12.13: A Quick Review
171. 12.14: Exercises
172. Ch 13: Hypothesis Tests Applied to Means: Two Related Samples
173. Ch 13: Introduction
174. 13.1: Related Samples
175. 13.2: Student’s Applied to Difference Scores
176. 13.3: The Crowd Within Is Like the Crowd Without
177. 13.4: Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Related Samples
178. 13.5: How Large an Effect Have We Found?—Effect Size
179. 13.6: Confidence Limits on Change
180. 13.7: Using SPSS and for Tests on Related Samples
181. 13.8: Writing Up the Results
182. 13.9: Summary
183. 13.10: A Quick Review
184. 13.11: Exercises
185. Ch 14: Hypothesis Tests Applied to Means: Two Independent Samples
186. Ch 14: Introduction
187. 14.1: Distribution of Differences between Means
188. 14.2: Heterogeneity of Variance
189. 14.3: Nonnormality of Distributions
190. 14.4: A Second Example with Two Independent Samples
191. 14.5: Effect Size Again
192. 14.6: Confidence Limits on
193. 14.7: Confidence Limits on Effect Size
194. 14.8: Plotting the Results
195. 14.9: Writing Up the Results
196. 14.10: Do Lucky Charms Work?
197. 14.11: Seeing Statistics
198. 14.12: Summary
199. 14.13: A Quick Review
200. 14.14: Exercises
201. Ch 15: Power
202. Ch 15: Introduction
203. 15.1: The Basic Concept of Power
204. 15.2: Factors Affecting the Power of a Test
205. 15.3: Calculating Power the Traditional Way
206. 15.4: Power Calculations for the One-Sample t Test
207. 15.5: Power Calculations for Differences between Two Independent Means
208. 15.6: Power Calculations for the t Test for Related Samples
209. 15.7: Power Considerations in Terms of Sample Size
210. 15.8: You Don’t Have to Do It by Hand
211. 15.9: Post-hoc (Retrospective) Power
212. 15.10: Summary
213. 15.11: A Quick Review
214. 15.12: Exercises
215. Ch 16: One-Way Analysis of Variance
216. Ch 16: Introduction
217. 16.1: The General Approach
218. 16.2: The Logic of the Analysis of Variance
219. 16.3: Calculations for the Analysis of Variance
220. 16.4: Unequal Sample Sizes
221. 16.5: Multiple Comparison Procedures
222. 16.6: Violations of Assumptions
223. 16.7: The Size of the Effects
224. 16.8: Writing Up the Results
225. 16.9: A Final Worked Example
226. 16.10: Seeing Statistics
227. 16.11: Summary
228. 16.12: A Quick Review
229. 16.13: Exercises
230. Ch 17: Factorial Analysis of Variance
231. Ch 17: Introduction
232. 17.1: Factorial Designs
233. 17.2: The Eysenck Study
234. 17.3: Interactions
235. 17.4: Simple Effects
236. 17.5: Measures of Association and Effect Size
237. 17.6: Reporting the Results
238. 17.7: Unequal Sample Sizes
239. 17.8: Masculine Overcompensation Thesis: It’s a Male Thing
240. 17.9: Using SPSS for Factorial Analysis of Variance
241. 17.10: Seeing Statistics
242. 17.11: Summary
243. 17.12: A Quick Review
244. 17.13: Exercises
245. Ch 18: RepeatedMeasures Analysis of Variance
246. Ch 18: Introduction
247. 18.1: An Example: Depression as a Response to an Earthquake
248. 18.2: Multiple Comparisons
249. 18.3: Effect Size
250. 18.4: Assumptions Involved in Repeated-Measures Designs
251. 18.5: Advantages and Disadvantages of Repeated-Measures Designs
252. 18.6: Writing Up the Results
253. 18.7: A Final Worked Example
254. 18.8: Summary
255. 18.9: A Quick Review
256. 18.10: Exercises
257. Ch 19: Chi-Square
258. Ch 19: Introduction
259. 19.1: One Classification Variable: The Chi-Square Goodness-of-Fit Test
260. 19.2: Two Classification Variables: Analysis of Contingency Tables
261. 19.3: Possible Improvements on Standard Chi-Square
262. 19.4: Chi-Square for Larger Contingency Tables
263. 19.5: The Problem of Small Expected Frequencies
264. 19.6: The Use of Chi-Square as a Test on Proportions
265. 19.7: Measures of Effect Size
266. 19.8: A Final Worked Example
267. 19.9: A Second Example of Writing up Results
268. 19.10: Seeing Statistics
269. 19.11: Summary
270. 19.12: A Quick Review
271. 19.13: Exercises
272. Ch 20: Nonparametric and DistributionFree Statistical Tests
273. Ch 20: Introduction
274. 20.1: Traditional Nonparametric Tests
275. 20.2: Randomization Tests
276. 20.3: Measures of Effect Size
277. 20.4: Bootstrapping
278. 20.5: Writing Up the Results of the Study of Maternal Adaptation
279. 20.6: Summary
280. 20.7: A Quick Review
281. 20.8: Exercises
282. Ch 21: Meta-Analysis
283. Ch 21: Introduction
284. 21.1: Meta-Analysis1
285. 21.2: A Brief Review of Effect Size Measures
286. 21.3: An Example—Child and Adolescent Depression
287. 21.4: A Second Example—Nicotine Gum and Smoking Cessation
288. 21.5: A Quick Review
289. 21.6: Exercises
290. Appendix A: Arithmetic Review
291. Appendix B: Symbols and Notation
292. Appendix C: Basic Statistical Formulae
293. Appendix D: Data Set
294. Appendix E: Statistical Tables
295. Glossary
296. References
297. Answers to Exercises
298. Index
299. ES5
300. ES6
301. ES7
Other documents randomly have
different content
 That M. de Charlus should have blushed to be seen with me by M.
d’Argencourt was all very well. But that to his own sister-in-law, who
had so high an opinion of him besides, he should deny all knowledge
of me, knowledge which was perfectly natural seeing that I was a
friend of both his aunt and his nephew, was a thing that I could not
understand.
I shall end my account of this incident with the remark that from
one point of view there was in Mme. de Guermantes a true
greatness which consisted in her entirely obliterating from her
memory what other people would have only partially forgotten. Had
she never seen me waylaying her, following her, tracking her down
as she took her morning walks, had she never responded to my daily
salute with an angry impatience, had she never refused Saint-Loup
when he begged her to invite me to her house, she could not have
greeted me now in a nobler or more gracious manner. Not only did
she waste no time in retrospective explanations, in hints, allusions or
ambiguous smiles, not only was there in her present affability,
without any harking back to the past, without any reticence,
something as proudly rectilinear as her majestic stature, but the
resentment which she might have felt against anyone in the past was
so entirely reduced to ashes, the ashes were themselves cast so
utterly from her memory, or at least from her manner, that on
studying her face whenever she had occasion to treat with the most
exquisite simplification what in so many other people would have
been a pretext for reviving stale antipathies and recriminations one
had the impression of an intense purity of mind.
But if I was surprised by the modification that had occurred in her
opinion of me, how much more did it surprise me to find a similar but
ever so much greater change in my feeling for her. Had there not
been a time during which I could regain life and strength only if—
always building new castles in the air!—I had found some one who
would obtain for me an invitation to her house and, after this initial
boon, would procure many others for my increasingly exacting
heart? It was the impossibility of finding any avenue there that had
made me leave Paris for Doncières to visit Robert de Saint-Loup.
And now it was indeed by the consequence of a letter from him that I
was agitated, but on account this time of Mme. de Stermaria, not of
Mme. de Guermantes.
Let me add further, to conclude my account of this party, that there
occurred at it an incident, contradicted a few days later, which
continued to puzzle me, interrupted for some time my friendship with
Bloch, and constitutes in itself one of those curious paradoxes the
explanation of which will be found in the next part of this work. At this
party at Mme. de Villeparisis’s, Bloch kept on boasting to me about
the friendly attentions shewn him by M. de Charlus, who, when he
passed him in the street, looked him straight in the face as though he
recognised him, was anxious to know him personally, knew quite
well who he was. I smiled at first, Bloch having expressed so
vehemently at Balbec his contempt for the said M. de Charlus. And I
supposed merely that Bloch, like his father in the case of Bergotte,
knew the Baron “without actually knowing him”, and that what he
took for a friendly glance was due to absent-mindedness. But finally
Bloch became so precise and appeared so confident that on two or
three occasions M. de Charlus had wished to address him that,
remembering that I had spoken of my friend to the Baron, who had,
as we walked away together from this very house, as it happened,
asked me various questions about him, I came to the conclusion that
Bloch was not lying, that M. de Charlus had heard his name, realised
that he was my friend, and so forth. And so, a little later, at the
theatre one evening, I asked M. de Charlus if I might introduce Bloch
to him, and, on his assenting, went in search of my friend. But as
soon as M. de Charlus caught sight of him an expression of
astonishment, instantly repressed, appeared on his face, where it
gave way to a blazing fury. Not only did he not offer Bloch his hand
but whenever Bloch spoke to him he replied in the most insolent
manner, in an angry and wounding tone. So that Bloch, who,
according to his version, had received nothing until then from the
Baron but smiles, assumed that I had not indeed commended but
disparaged him in the short speech in which, knowing M. de
Charlus’s liking for formal procedure, I had told him about my friend
before bringing him up to be introduced. Bloch left us, his spirit
broken, like a man who has been trying to mount a horse which is
always ready to take the bit in its teeth, or to swim against waves
which continually dash him back on the shingle, and did not speak to
me again for six months.
The days that preceded my dinner with Mme. de Stermaria were
for me by no means delightful, in fact it was all I could do to live
through them. For as a general rule, the shorter the interval is that
separates us from our planned objective, the longer it seems to us,
because we apply to it a more minute scale of measurement, or
simply because it occurs to us to measure it at all. The Papacy, we
are told, reckons by centuries, and indeed may not think perhaps of
reckoning time at all, since its goal is in eternity. Mine was no more
than three days off; I counted by seconds, I gave myself up to those
imaginings which are the first movements of caresses, of caresses
which it maddens us not to be able to make the woman herself
reciprocate and complete—those identical caresses, to the exclusion
of all others. And, as a matter of fact, it is true that, generally
speaking, the difficulty of attaining to the object of a desire enhances
that desire (the difficulty, not the impossibility, for that suppresses it
altogether), yet in the case of a desire that is wholly physical the
certainty that it will be realised, at a fixed and not distant point in
time, is scarcely less exciting than uncertainty; almost as much as an
anxious doubt, the absence of doubt makes intolerable the period of
waiting for the pleasure that is bound to come, because it makes of
that suspense an innumerably rehearsed accomplishment and by
the frequency of our proleptic representations divides time into
sections as minute as could be carved by agony. What I required
was to possess Mme. de Stermaria, for during the last few days, with
an incessant activity, my desires had been preparing this pleasure, in
my imagination, and this pleasure alone, for any other kind
(pleasure, that is, taken with another woman) would not have been
ready, pleasure being but the realisation of a previous wish, and of
one which is not always the same, but changes according to the
endless combinations of one’s fancies, the accidents of one’s
memory, the state of one’s temperament, the variability of one’s
desires, the most recently granted of which lie dormant until the
disappointment of their satisfaction has been to some extent
forgotten; I should not have been prepared, I had already turned
from the main road of general desires and had ventured along the
bridle-path of a particular desire; I should have had—in order to wish
for a different assignation—to retrace my steps too far before
rejoining the main road and taking another path. To take possession
of Mme. de Stermaria on the island in the Bois de Boulogne where I
had asked her to dine with me, this was the pleasure that I imagined
to myself afresh every moment. It would have automatically perished
if I had dined on that island without Mme. de Stermaria; but perhaps
as greatly diminished had I dined, even with her, somewhere else.
Besides, the attitudes in which one pictures a pleasure to oneself
exist previously to the woman, to the type of woman required to give
one that pleasure. They dictate the pleasure, and the place as well,
and on that account bring to the fore alternatively, in our capricious
fancy, this or that woman, this or that scene, this or that room, which
in other weeks we should have dismissed with contempt. Child of the
attitude that produced her, one woman will not appeal to us without
the large bed in which we find peace by her side, while others, to be
caressed with a more secret intention, require leaves blown by the
wind, water rippling in the night, are as frail and fleeting as they.
No doubt in the past, long before I received Saint-Loup’s letter and
when there was as yet no question of Mme. de Stermaria, the island
in the Bois had seemed to me to be specially designed for pleasure,
because I had found myself going there to taste the bitterness of
having no pleasure to enjoy in its shelter. It is to the shores of the
lake from which one goes to that island, and along which, in the last
weeks of summer, those ladies of Paris who have not yet left for the
country take the air, that, not knowing where to look for her, or if
indeed she has not already left Paris, one wanders in the hope of
seeing the girl go by with whom one fell in love at the last ball of the
season, whom one will not have a chance of meeting again in any
drawing-room until the following spring. Feeling it to be at least the
eve, if not the morrow, of the beloved’s departure, one follows along
the brink of the shivering water those attractive paths by which
already a first red leaf is blooming like a last rose, one scans that
horizon where, by a device the opposite of that employed in those
panoramas beneath whose domed roofs the wax figures in the
foreground impart to the painted canvas beyond them the illusory
appearance of depth and mass, our eyes, passing without any
transition from the cultivated park to the natural heights of Meudon
and the Mont Valérien, do not know where to set the boundary, and
make the natural country trespass upon the handiwork of the
gardener, of which they project far beyond its own limits the artificial
charm; like those rare birds reared in the open in a botanical garden
which every day in the liberty of their winged excursions sally forth to
strike, among the surrounding woods, an exotic note. Between the
last festivity of summer and one’s winter exile, one ranges anxiously
that romantic world of chance encounters and lover’s melancholy,
and one would be no more surprised to learn that it was situated
outside the mapped universe than if, at Versailles, looking down from
the terrace, an observatory round which the clouds are massed
against a blue sky in the manner of Van der Meulen, after having
thus risen above the bounds of nature, one were informed that, there
where nature begins again at the end of the great canal, the villages
which one just could not make out, on a horizon as dazzling as the
sea, were called Fleurus or Nimègue.
And then, the last carriage having rolled by, when one feels with a
throb of pain that she will not come now, one goes to dine on the
island; above the shivering poplars which suggest endless mysteries
of evening though without response, a pink cloud paints a last touch
of life in the tranquil sky. A few drops of rain fall without noise on the
water, ancient but still in its divine infancy coloured always by the
weather and continually forgetting the reflexions of clouds and
flowers. And after the geraniums have vainly striven, by intensifying
the brilliance of their scarlet, to resist the gathering darkness, a mist
rises to envelop the now slumbering island; one walks in the moist
dimness along the water’s edge, where at the most the silent
passage of a swan startles one like, in a bed, at night, the eyes, for a
moment wide open, and the swift smile of a child whom one did not
suppose to be awake. Then one would like to have with one a loving
companion, all the more as one feels oneself to be alone and can
imagine oneself to be far away from the world.
But to this island, where even in summer there was often a mist,
how much more gladly would I have brought Mme. de Stermaria now
that the cold season, the back end of autumn had come. If the
weather that had prevailed since Sunday had not by itself rendered
grey and maritime the scenes in which my imagination was living—
as other seasons made them balmy, luminous, Italian—the hope of,
in a few days’ time, making Mme. de Stermaria mine would have
been quite enough to raise, twenty times in an hour, a curtain of mist
in my monotonously love-sick imagination. In any event the mist,
which since yesterday had risen even in Paris, not only made me
think incessantly of the native place of the young woman whom I had
invited to dine with me, but, since it was probable that, far more
thickly than in the streets of the town, it must after sunset be
invading the Bois, especially the shores of the lake, I thought that it
would make the Swans’ Island, for me, something like that Breton
island the marine and misty atmosphere of which had always
enwrapped in my mind like a garment the pale outline of Mme. de
Stermaria. Of course when we are young, at the age I had reached
at the period of my walks along the Méséglise way, our desires, our
faith bestow on a woman’s clothing an individual personality, an
ultimate quintessence. We pursue reality. But by dint of allowing it to
escape we end by noticing that, after all those vain endeavours
which have led to nothing, something solid subsists, which is what
we have been seeking. We begin to separate, to recognise what we
love, we try to procure it for ourselves, be it only by a stratagem.
Then, in the absence of our vanished faith, costume fills the gap, by
means of a deliberate illusion. I knew quite well that within half an
hour of home I should not find myself in Brittany. But in walking arm
in arm with Mme. de Stermaria in the dusk of the island, by the
water’s edge, I should be acting like other men who, unable to
penetrate the walls of a convent, do at least, before enjoying a
woman, clothe her in the habit of a nun.
I could even look forward to hearing, as I sat with the lady, the
lapping of waves, for, on the day before our dinner, a storm broke
over Paris. I was beginning to shave myself before going to the
island to engage the room (albeit at this time of year the island was
empty and the restaurant deserted) and order the food for our dinner
next day when Françoise came in to tell me that Albertine had called.
I made her come in at once, indifferent to her finding me disfigured
by a bristling chin, her for whom at Balbec I had never felt smart
enough and who had cost me then as much agitation and distress as
Mme. de Stermaria was costing me now. The latter, I was
determined, must go away with the best possible impression from
our evening together. Accordingly I asked Albertine to come with me
there and then to the island to order the food. She to whom one
gives everything is so quickly replaced by another that one is
surprised to find oneself giving all that one has, afresh, at every
moment, without any hope of future reward. At my suggestion the
smiling rosy face beneath Albertine’s flat cap, which came down very
low, to her eyebrows, seemed to hesitate. She had probably other
plans; if so she sacrificed them willingly, to my great satisfaction, for I
attached the utmost importance to my having with me a young
housewife who would know a great deal more than myself about
ordering dinner.
It is quite true that she had represented something utterly different
for me at Balbec. But our intimacy, even when we do not consider it
close enough at the time, with a woman with whom we are in love
creates between her and us, in spite of the shortcomings that pain us
while our love lasts, social ties which outlast our love and even the
memory of our love. Then, in her who is nothing more for us than a
means of approach, an avenue towards others, we are just as
astonished and amused to learn from our memory what her name
meant originally to that other creature which we then were as if, after
giving a cabman an address in the Boulevard des Capucines or the
Rue du Bac, thinking only of the person whom we are going to see
there, we remind ourself that the names were once those of,
respectively, the Capuchin nuns whose convent stood on the site
and the ferry across the Seine.
At the same time, my Balbec desires had so generously ripened
Albertine’s body, had gathered and stored in it savours so fresh and
sweet that, as we drove through the Bois, while the wind like a
careful gardener shook the trees, brought down the fruit, swept up
the fallen leaves, I said to myself that had there been any risk of
Saint-Loup’s being mistaken, or of my having misunderstood his
letter, so that my dinner with Mme. de Stermaria might lead to no
satisfactory result, I should have made an appointment for the same
evening, later on, with Albertine, so as to forget, for a purely
voluptuous hour, as I held in my arms a body of which my curiosity
had long since computed, weighed up all the possible charms in
which now it abounded, the emotions and perhaps the regrets of this
first phase of love for Mme. de Stermaria. And certainly if I could
have supposed that Mme. de Stermaria would not grant me any of
her favours at our first meeting, I should have formed a slightly
depressing picture of my evening with her. I knew too well from
experience how the two stages which occur in us in the first phase of
our love for a woman whom we have desired without knowing her,
loving in her rather the particular kind of existence in which she is
steeped than her still unfamiliar self—how distorted is the reflexion of
those two stages in the world of facts, that is to say not in ourself any
longer but in our meetings with her. We have, without ever having
talked to her, hesitated, tempted as we were by the poetic charm
which she represented for us. Shall it be this woman or another?
And lo, our dreams become fixed round about her, cease to have
any separate existence from her. The first meeting with her which will
shortly follow should reflect this dawning love. Nothing of the sort. As
if it were necessary that our material life should have its first period
also, in love with her already, we talk to her in the most trivial
fashion: “I asked you to dine on this island because I thought the
surroundings would amuse you. I’ve nothing particular to say to you,
don’t you know. But it’s rather damp, I’m afraid, and you may find it
cold——” “Oh, no, not at all!” “You just say that out of politeness.
Very well, Madame, I shall allow you to battle against the cold for
another quarter of an hour, as I don’t want to bother you, but in
fifteen minutes I shall carry you off by force. I don’t want to have you
catching a chill.” And without another word said we take her home,
remembering nothing about her, at the most a certain look in her
eyes, but thinking only of seeing her again. Well, at our second
meeting (when we do not find even that look, our sole memory of
her, but nevertheless have been thinking only of seeing her again),
the first stage is passed. Nothing has happened in the interval. And
yet, instead of talking about the comfort or want of comfort of the
restaurant, we say, without our words’ appearing to surprise the new
person, who seems to us positively plain but to whom we should like
to think that people were talking about us at every moment in her life:
“We are going to have our work cut out to overcome all the obstacles
in our way. Do you think we shall be successful? Do you suppose
that we can triumph over our enemies—live happily ever afterwards,
and all that sort of thing?” But these conversational openings, trivial
to begin with, then hinting at love, would not be required; I could trust
Saint-Loup’s letter for that. Mme. de Stermaria would yield herself to
me from the first, I should have no need therefore to engage
Albertine to come to me, as a makeshift, later in the evening. It
would be superfluous; Robert never exaggerated, and his letter was
explicit.
Albertine spoke hardly at all, conscious that my thoughts were
elsewhere. We went a little way on foot into the greenish, almost
submarine grotto of a dense mass of trees, on the domed tops of
which we heard the wind sweep and the rain pelt. I trod underfoot
dead leaves which, like shells, were trampled into the soil, and
poked with my stick at fallen chestnuts prickly as sea-urchins.
On the boughs the last clinging leaves, shaken by the wind,
followed it only as far as their stems would allow, but sometimes
these broke, and they fell to the ground, along which they coursed to
overtake it. I thought with joy how much more remote still, if this
weather lasted, the island would be on the morrow—and in any case
quite deserted. We returned to our carriage and, as the storm had
passed off, Albertine asked me to take her on to Saint-Cloud. As on
the ground the drifting leaves so up above the clouds were chasing
the wind. And a stream of migrant evenings, of which a sort of conic
section cut through the sky made visible the successive layers, pink,
blue and green, were gathered in readiness for departure to warmer
climes. To obtain a closer view of a marble goddess who had been
carved in the act of leaping from her pedestal and, alone in a great
wood which seemed to be consecrated to her, filled it with the
mythological terror, half animal, half divine, of her frenzied bounding,
Albertine climbed a grassy slope while I waited for her in the road.
She herself, seen thus from below, no longer coarse and plump as, a
few days earlier, on my bed when the grain of her throat became
apparent in the lens of my eye as it approached her person, but
chiselled and delicate, seemed a little statue on which our happy
hours together at Balbec had left their patina. When I found myself
alone again at home, and remembered that I had taken a drive that
afternoon with Albertine, that I was to dine in two days’ time with
Mme. de Guermantes and that I had to answer a letter from Gilberte,
three women each of whom I had once loved, I said to myself that
our social existence is, like an artist’s studio, filled with abandoned
sketches in which we have fancied for a moment that we could set
down in permanent form our need of a great love, but it did not occur
to me that sometimes, if the sketch be not too old, it may happen
that we return to it and make of it a work wholly different, and
possibly more important than what we had originally planned.
The next day was cold and fine; winter was in the air—indeed the
season was so far advanced that it had seemed miraculous that we
should find in the already pillaged Bois a few domes of gilded green.
When I awoke I saw, as from the window of the barracks at
Doncières, a uniform, dead white mist which hung gaily in the
sunlight, consistent and sweet as a web of spun sugar. Then the sun
withdrew, and the mist thickened still further in the afternoon. Night
fell early, I made ready for dinner, but it was still too soon to start; I
decided to send a carriage for Mme. de Stermaria. I did not like to go
for her in it myself, not wishing to force my company on her, but I
gave the driver a note for her in which I asked whether she would
mind my coming to call for her. While I waited for her answer I lay
down on my bed, shut my eyes for a moment, then opened them
again. Over the top of the curtains there was nothing now but a thin
strip of daylight which grew steadily fainter. I recognised that wasted
hour, the large ante-room of pleasure, the dark, delicious emptiness
of which I had learned at Balbec to know and to enjoy when, alone in
my room as I was now, while all the rest were at dinner, I saw without
regret the daylight fade from above my curtains, knowing that,
presently, after a night of arctic brevity, it was to be resuscitated in a
more dazzling brightness in the lighted rooms of Rivebelle. I sprang
from my bed, tied my black necktie, passed a brush over my hair,
final gestures of a belated tidying carried out at Balbec with my mind
not on myself but on the women whom I should see at Rivebelle,
while I smiled at them in anticipation in the mirror that stood across a
corner of my room, gestures which, on that account, had continued
to herald a form of entertainment in which music and lights would be
mingled. Like magic signs they summoned, nay rather presented this
entertainment already; thanks to them I had, of its intoxicating
frivolous charm, as complete an enjoyment as I had had at Combray,
in the month of July, when I heard the hammer-blows ring on the
packing cases and enjoyed, in the coolness of my darkened room, a
sense of warmth and sunshine.
Also, it was no longer exactly Mme. de Stermaria that I should
have wished most to see. Forced now to spend my evening with her,
I should have preferred, as it was almost the last before the return of
my parents, that it should remain free and myself try instead to find
some of the women from Rivebelle. I gave my hands one more final
wash and, my sense of pleasure keeping me on the move, dried
them as I walked through the shuttered dining-room. It appeared to
have a door open on to the lighted hall, but what I had taken for the
bright chink of the door, which as a matter of fact was closed, was
only the gleaming reflexion of my towel in a mirror that had been laid
against the wall in readiness to be fixed in its place before Mamma’s
return. I thought of all the other illusions of the sort which I had
discovered in different parts of the house, and which were not optical
only, for when we first came there I had supposed that our next door
neighbour kept a dog on account of the continuous, almost human
yapping which came from a certain pipe in the kitchen whenever the
tap was turned on. And the door on to the outer landing never closed
by itself, very gently, caught by a draught on the staircase, without
rendering those broken, voluptuous, whimpering passages which
sound over the chant of the pilgrims towards the end of the Overture
to Tannhäuser. I had, moreover, just as I had put my towel back on
its rail, an opportunity of hearing a fresh rendering of this brilliant
symphonic fragment, for at a peal of the bell I hurried out to open the
door to the driver who had come with Mme. de Stermaria’s answer. I
thought that his message would be: “The lady is downstairs,” or “The
lady is waiting.” But he had a letter in his hand. I hesitated for a
moment before looking to see what Mme. de Stermaria had written,
who, while she held the pen in her hand, might have been anything
but was now, detached from herself, an engine of fate, pursuing a
course alone, which she was utterly powerless to alter. I asked the
driver to wait downstairs for a moment, although he was cursing the
fog. As soon as he had gone I opened the envelope. On her card,
inscribed Vicomtesse Alix de Stermaria, my guest had written: “Am
so sorry—am unfortunately prevented from dining with you this
evening on the island in the Bois. Had been so looking forward to it.
Will write you a proper letter from Stermaria. Very sorry. Kindest
regards.” I stood motionless, stunned by the shock that I had
received. At my feet lay the card and envelope, fallen like the spent
cartridge from a gun when the shot has been fired. I picked them up,
tried to analyse her message. “She says that she cannot dine with
me on the island in the Bois. One might gather from that that she
would dine with me somewhere else. I shall not be so indiscreet as
to go and fetch her, but, after all, that is quite a reasonable
interpretation.” And from that island in the Bois, as for the last few
days my thoughts had been installed there beforehand with Mme. de
Stermaria, I could not succeed in bringing them back to where I was.
My desire responded automatically to the gravitational force which
had been pulling it now for so many hours on end, and in spite of this
message, too recent to counteract that force, I went on instinctively
getting ready to start, just as a student, although ploughed by the
examiners, tries to answer one question more. At last I decided to
tell Françoise to go down and pay the driver. I went along the
passage without finding her, I passed through the dining-room,
where suddenly my feet ceased to sound on the bare boards as they
had been doing and were hushed to a silence which, even before I
had realised the explanation of it, gave me a feeling of suffocation
and confinement. It was the carpets which, in view of my parents’
return, the servants had begun to put down again, those carpets
which look so well on bright mornings when amid their disorder the
sun stays and waits for you like a friend come to take you out to
luncheon in the country, and casts over them the dappled light and
shade of the forest, but which now on the contrary were the first
installation of the wintry prison from which, obliged as I should be to
live, to take my meals at home, I should no longer be free now to
escape when I chose.
“Take care you don’t slip, Sir; they’re not tacked yet,” Françoise
called to me. “I ought to have lighted up. Oh, dear, it’s the end of
‘Sectember’ already, the fine days are over.” In no time, winter; at the
corner of a window, as in a Gallé glass, a vein of crusted snow; and
even in the Champs-Élysées, instead of the girls one waits to see,
nothing but solitary sparrows.
What added to my distress at not seeing Mme. de Stermaria was
that her answer led me to suppose that whereas, hour by hour, since
Sunday, I had been living for this dinner alone, she had presumably
never given it a second thought. Later on I learned of an absurd love
match that she had suddenly made with a young man whom she
must already have been seeing at this time, and who had
presumably made her forget my invitation. For if she had
remembered it she would surely never have waited for the carriage
which I was not, for that matter, supposed to be sending for her, to
inform me that she was otherwise engaged. My dreams of a young
feudal maiden on a misty island had cleared the way to a still non-
existent love. Now my disappointment, my rage, my desperate
desire to recapture her who had just refused me were able, by
bringing my sensibility into play, to make definite the possible love
which until then my imagination alone had—and that more loosely—
offered me.
How many are there in our memories, how many more have we
forgotten, of these faces of girls and young women, all different, to
which we have added a certain charm and a frenzied desire to see
them again only because at the last moment they eluded us? In the
case of Mme. de Stermaria there was a good deal more than this,
and it was enough now to make me love her for me to see her again
so that I might refresh those impressions, so vivid but all too brief,
which my memory would not, without such refreshment, have the
strength to keep alive when we were apart. Circumstances decided
against me; I did not see her again. It was not she that I loved, but it
might well have been. And one of the things that made most cruel,
perhaps, the great love which was presently to come to me was that
when I thought of this evening I used to say to myself that my love
might, given a slight modification of very ordinary circumstances,
have been directed elsewhere, to Mme. de Stermaria; its application
to her who inspired it in me so soon afterwards was not therefore—
as I so longed, so needed to believe—absolutely necessary and
predestined.
 Françoise had left me by myself in the dining-room with the remark
that it was foolish of me to stay there before she had lighted the fire.
She went to get me some dinner, for even before the return of my
parents, from this very evening, my seclusion was to begin. I caught
sight of a huge bundle of carpets, still rolled up, and leaning against
one end of the sideboard, and burying my head in it, swallowing its
dust with my own tears, as the Jews used to cover their heads with
ashes in times of mourning, I began to sob. I shuddered not only
because the room was cold, but because a distinct lowering of
temperature (against the danger and—I should add, perhaps—the
by no means disagreeable sensation of which we make no attempt
to react) is brought about by a certain kind of tears which fall from
our eyes, drop by drop, like a fine, penetrating, icy rain, and seem as
though never would they cease to flow. Suddenly I heard a voice:
“May I come in? Françoise told me you would be in the dining-
room. I looked in to see whether you would care to come out and
dine somewhere, if it isn’t bad for your throat—there’s a fog outside
you could cut with a knife.”
It was—arrived in Paris that morning, when I imagined him to be
still in Morocco or on the sea—Robert de Saint-Loup.
I have already said (as a matter of fact, it was Robert himself who,
at Balbec, had helped me, quite without meaning it, to arrive at this
conclusion) what I think about friendship: to wit that it is so small a
thing that I find it hard to understand how men with some claim to
genius—Nietzsche, for instance—can have been such simpletons as
to ascribe to it a certain intellectual value, and consequently to deny
themselves friendships in which intellectual esteem would have no
part. Yes, it has always been a surprise to me to find a man who
carried sincerity towards himself to so high a pitch as to cut himself
off, by a scruple of conscience, from Wagner’s music imagining that
the truth could ever be attained by the mode of expression, naturally
vague and inadequate, which our actions in general and acts of
friendship in particular furnish, or that there could be any kind of
significance in the fact of one’s leaving one’s work to go and see a
friend and shed tears with him on hearing the false report that the
Louvre was burned. I had got so far, at Balbec, as to find that the
pleasure of playing with a troop of girls is less destructive of the
spiritual life, to which at least it remains alien, than friendship, the
whole effort of which is directed towards making us sacrifice the one
real and (save by the channel of art) incommunicable part of ourself
to a superficial self which finds—not, like the other, any joy in itself,
but rather a vague, sentimental attraction in the feeling that it is
being supported by external props, hospitably entertained by a
strange personality, through which, happy in the protection that is
afforded it there, it makes its own comfort radiate in warm approval,
and marvels at qualities which it would denounce as faults and seek
to correct in itself. Moreover the scorners of friendship can, without
illusion and not without remorse, be the finest friends in the world,
just as an artist carrying in his brain a masterpiece and feeling that
his duty is rather to live and carry on his work, nevertheless, so as
not to be thought or to run the risk of actually being selfish, gives his
life for a vain cause, and gives it all the more gallantly in that the
reasons for which he would have preferred not to give it were
disinterested. But whatever might be my opinion of friendship, to
mention only the pleasure that it procured me, of a quality so
mediocre as to be like something half-way between physical
exhaustion and mental boredom, there is no brew so deadly that it
cannot at certain moments become precious and invigorating by
giving us just the stimulus that was necessary, the warmth that we
cannot generate in ourself.
The thought of course never entered my mind now of asking Saint-
Loup to take me (as, an hour earlier, I had been longing to go) to see
some of the Rivebelle women; the scar left by my disappointment
with Mme. de Stermaria was too recent still to be so easily healed,
but at the moment when I had ceased to feel in my heart any reason
for happiness Saint-Loup’s bursting in upon me was like a sudden
apparition of kindness, mirth, life, which were external to me, no
doubt, but offered themselves to me, asked only to be made mine.
He did not himself understand my shout of gratitude, my tears of
affection. And yet is there anything more unaccountably affecting
than one of those friends, be he diplomat, explorer, airman or soldier
like Saint-Loup, who, having to start next day for the country, from
where they will go on heaven knows where, seem to form for
themselves, in the evening which they devote to us, an impression
which we are astonished both to find, so rare and fleeting is it, can
be so pleasant to them, and, since it does so delight them, not to see
them prolong farther or repeat more often. A meal with us, an event
so natural in itself, affords these travellers the same strange and
exquisite pleasure as our boulevards give to an Asiatic. We set off
together to dine, and as I went downstairs I thought of Doncières
where every evening I used to meet Robert at his restaurant, and the
little dining-rooms there that I had forgotten. I remembered one of
these to which I had never given a thought, and which was not in the
hotel where Saint-Loup dined but in another, far humbler, a cross
between an inn and a boarding-house, where the waiting was done
by the landlady and one of her servants. I had been forced to take
shelter there once from a snowstorm. Besides, Robert was not to be
dining at the hotel that evening and I had not cared to go any farther.
My food was brought to me, upstairs, in a little room with bare
wooden walls. The lamp went out during dinner and the servant
lighted a couple of candles. I, pretending that I could not see very
well as I held out my plate, while she helped me to potatoes, took
her bare fore-arm in my hand, as though to guide her. Seeing that
she did not withdraw it, I began to fondle it, then, without saying a
word, pulled her bodily to me, blew out the candles and told her to
feel in my pocket for some money. For the next few days physical
pleasure seemed to me to require, to be properly enjoyed, not only
this servant but the timbered dining-room, so remote and lonely. And
yet it was to the other, in which Saint-Loup and his friends dined, that
I returned every evening, from force of habit and in friendship for
them, until I left Doncières. But even of this hotel, where he took his
meals with his friends, I had long ceased to think; we make little use
of our experience, we leave unconsumed in the summer dusk or
precocious nights of winter the hours in which it had seemed to us
that there might nevertheless be contained some element of
tranquillity or pleasure. But those hours are not altogether wasted.
When, in their turn, come and sing to us fresh moments of pleasure,
which by themselves would pass by equally bare in outline, the
others recur, bringing them the groundwork, the solid consistency of
a rich orchestration. They are in this way prolonged into one of those
types of happiness which we recapture only now and again but
which continue to exist; in the present instance the type was that of
forsaking everything else to dine in comfortable surroundings, which
by the help of memory embody in a scene from nature suggestions
of the rewards of travel, with a friend who is going to stir our dormant
life with all his energy, his affection, to communicate to us an
emotional pleasure, very different from anything that we could derive
from our own efforts or from social distractions; we are going to exist
solely for him, to utter vows of friendship which, born within the
confines of the hour, remaining imprisoned in it, will perhaps not be
kept on the morrow but which I need have no scruple in taking
before Saint-Loup since, with a courage into which there entered a
great deal of common sense and the presentiment that friendship
cannot explore its own depths, on the morrow he would be gone.
If as I came downstairs I lived over again the evenings at
Doncières, when we reached the street, in a moment the darkness,
now almost total, in which the fog seemed to have put out the lamps,
which one could make out, glimmering very faintly, only when close
at hand, took me back to I could not say what arrival, by night, at
Combray, when the streets there were still lighted only at long
intervals and one felt one’s way through a darkness moist, warm,
consecrated, like that of a Christmas manger, just visibly starred
here and there by a wick that burned no brightlier than a candle.
Between that year—to which I could ascribe no precise date—of my
Combray life and the evenings at Rivebelle which had, an hour
earlier, been reflected above my drawn curtains, what a world of
differences! I felt on perceiving them an enthusiasm which might
have borne fruit had I been left alone and would then have saved me
the unnecessary round of many wasted years through which I was
yet to pass before there was revealed to me that invisible vocation of
which these volumes are the history. Had the revelation come to me
this evening, the carriage in which I sat would have deserved to rank
as more memorable with me than Dr. Percepied’s, on the box seat of
which I had composed that little sketch—on which, as it happened, I
had recently laid my hands, altered it and sent it in vain to the Figaro
—of the spires of Martinville. Is it because we live over our past
years not in their continuous sequence, day by day, but in a memory
that fastens upon the coolness or sun-parched heat of some morning
or afternoon, receives the shadow of some solitary place, is
enclosed, immovable, arrested, lost, remote from all others,
because, therefore, the changes gradually wrought not only in the
world outside but in our dreams and our evolving character,
(changes which have imperceptibly carried us through life from one
to another, wholly different time) are of necessity eliminated, that, if
we revive another memory taken from a different year, we find
between the two, thanks to lacunae, to vast stretches of oblivion, as
it were the gulf of a difference in altitude or the incompatibility of two
divers qualities, that of the air we breathe and the colour of the
scene before our eyes? But between one and another of the
memories that had now come to me in turn of Combray, of Doncières
and of Rivebelle, I was conscious at the moment of more than a
distance in time, of the distance that there would be between two
separate universes the material elements in which were not the
same. If I had sought to reproduce the element in which appeared
carven my most trivial memories of Rivebelle, I should have had to
streak with rosy veins, to render at once translucent, compact,
refreshing, resonant a substance hitherto analogous to the coarse
dark sandstone walls of Combray. But Robert having finished giving
his instructions to the driver joined me now in the carriage. The ideas
that had appeared before me took flight. Ideas are goddesses who
deign at times to make themselves visible to a solitary mortal, at a
turning in the road, even in his bedroom while he sleeps, when they,
standing framed in the doorway, bring him the annunciation of their
tidings. But as soon as a companion joins him they vanish, in the
society of his fellows no man has ever beheld them. And I found
myself cast back upon friendship. When he first appeared Robert
had indeed warned me that there was a good deal of fog outside, but
while we were indoors, talking, it had grown steadily thicker. It was
no longer merely the light mist which I had looked forward to seeing
rise from the island and envelop Mme. de Stermaria and myself. A
few feet away from us the street lamps were blotted out and then it
was night, as dark as in the open fields, in a forest, or rather on a
mild Breton island whither I would fain have gone; I lost myself, as
on the stark coast of some Northern sea where one risks one’s life
twenty times over before coming to the solitary inn; ceasing to be a
mirage for which one seeks, the fog became one of those dangers
against which one has to fight, so that we had, in finding our way and
reaching a safe haven, the difficulties, the anxiety and finally the joy
which safety, so little perceived by him who is not threatened with the
loss of it, gives to the perplexed and benighted traveller. One thing
only came near to destroying my pleasure during our adventurous
ride, owing to the angry astonishment into which it flung me for a
moment. “You know, I told Bloch,” Saint-Loup suddenly informed me,
“that you didn’t really think all that of him, that you found him rather
vulgar at times. I’m like that, you see, I want people to know where
they stand,” he wound up with a satisfied air and in a tone which
brooked no reply. I was astounded. Not only had I the most absolute
confidence in Saint-Loup, in the loyalty of his friendship, and he had
betrayed it by what he had said to Bloch, but it seemed to me that he
of all men ought to have been restrained from doing so, by his
defects as well as by his good qualities, by that astonishing veneer
of breeding which was capable of carrying politeness to what was
positively a want of frankness. His triumphant air, was it what we
assume to cloak a certain embarrassment in admitting a thing which
we know that we ought not to have done, or did it mean complete
unconsciousness; stupidity making a virtue out of a defect which I
had not associated with him; a passing fit of ill humour towards me,
prompting him to make an end of our friendship, or the notation in
words of a passing fit of ill humour in the company of Bloch to whom
he had felt that he must say something disagreeable, even although
I should be compromised by it? However that might be, his face was
seared, while he uttered this vulgar speech, by a frightful sinuosity
which I saw on it once or twice only in all the time I knew him, and
which, beginning by running more or less down the middle of his
face, when it came to his lips twisted them, gave them a hideous
expression of baseness, almost of bestiality, quite transitory and no
doubt inherited. There must have been at such moments, which
recurred probably not more than once every other year, a partial
eclipse of his true self by the passage across it of the personality of
some ancestor whose shadow fell on him. Fully as much as his
satisfied air, the words: “I want people to know where they stand,”
encouraged the same doubt and should have incurred a similar
condemnation. I felt inclined to say to him that if one wants people to
know where they stand one ought to confine these outbursts of
frankness to one’s own affairs and not to acquire a too easy merit at
the expense of others. But by this time the carriage had stopped
outside the restaurant, the huge front of which, glazed and streaming
with light, alone succeeded in piercing the darkness. The fog itself,
beside the comfortable brightness of the lighted interior, seemed to
be waiting outside on the pavement to shew one the way in with the
joy of servants whose faces reflect the hospitable instincts of their
master; shot with the most delicate shades of light, it pointed the way
like the pillar of fire which guided the Children of Israel. Many of
whom, as it happened, were to be found inside. For this was the
place to which Bloch and his friends had long been in the habit,
maddened by a hunger as famishing as the Ritual Fast, which at
least occurs only once a year, for coffee and the satisfaction of
political curiosity, of repairing in the evenings. Every mental
excitement creating a value that overrides others, a quality superior
to the rest of one’s habits, there is no taste at all keenly developed
that does not thus gather round it a society which it unites and in
which the esteem of his fellows is what each of its members seeks
before anything else from life. Here, in their café, be it in a little
provincial town, you will find impassioned music-lovers; the greater
part of their time, all their spare cash is spent in chamber-concerts,
in meetings for musical discussion, in cafés where one finds oneself
among musical people and rubs shoulders with the members of the
orchestra. Others, keen upon flying, seek to stand well with the old
waiter in the glazed bar perched on top of the aerodrome; sheltered
from the wind as in the glass cage of a lighthouse, they can follow in
the company of an airman who is not going up that day the
evolutions of a pilot practising loops, while another, invisible a
moment ago, comes suddenly swooping down to land with the great
winged roar of an Arabian roc. The little group which met to try to
perpetuate, to explore the fugitive emotions aroused by the Zola trial
attached a similar importance to this particular café. But they were
not viewed with favour by the young nobles who composed the rest
of its patrons and had taken possession of a second room,
separated from the other only by a flimsy parapet topped with a row
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