David Cerruti’s Reviews > Time Regained > Status Update

,,, although the war had been over a long time. … rich and noble ladies who wore rags out of conventional sentimentality and fear of taxes, while men on the Stock Exchange ceaselessly bought diamonds, not for their wives but because, having no confidence in the credit of any country, they sought safety in tangible wealth,

And like an aviator who rolls painfully along the ground until, abruptly, he breaks away from it, I felt myself being slowly lifted towards the silent peaks of memory. Those particular streets of Paris, will, for me, always be composed of a different substance from others.

** Reader’s lament: I wish I could quote more of the beautiful passages in this book, but they just don’t fit in this tiny quote box. I curse the 420 character limit. **

"Oh, don't let us talk about my life, I am doomed in advance." Was he then alluding to the vice which he had until then succeeded in hiding from the world, the gravity of which he perhaps exaggerated as young people do who make love for the first time or who even earlier seek solitary gratification and imagine themselves like plants which cannot disseminate their pollen without dying?

“Haven’t you read in the papers that Sarah Bernhardt said France would go on till the end. The French will let themselves be killed to the last man.” “I don’t doubt for a single instant that the French will bravely be killed to the last man,” M. de Charlus answered as though it were the most natural thing in the world, in spite of his having no intention of doing anything whatever …

Thus Napoleon invaded Russia and magnanimously invited the authorities to present themselves to him. But no one came.

M. de Charlus put the same sort of arrogance into his tone in pronouncing the word boches as he did formerly in the train to Balbec when he alluded to men whose taste is not for women.

In fact one became giddy looking at the lazy, beautiful sky which deigned not to change its time–table and prolonged in its blue tones the lengthened day above the lighted city; it was no longer a spreading sea, but a vertical gradation of blue glaciers.

Ah! if Albertine had lived, how sweet it would have been, on the evenings when I dined out, to make an appointment with her under the arcades. At first I should have seen nobody, I should have had the emotion of believing she would not come, when all at once I should have seen one of her dear grey dresses in relief against the black wall, her smiling eyes would have perceived me ...

Once I left Gilberte early and in the middle of the night, while still half–asleep, I called Albertine. I had not been thinking or dreaming of her, nor had I mistaken her for Gilberte. My memory had lost its love for Albertine but it seems there must be an involuntary memory of the limbs, pale and sterile imitation of the other, which lives longer as certain mindless animals or plants live longer than man.