In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV of 4 by Marcel Proust
Author:Marcel Proust [Proust, Marcel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Classics
ISBN: 9780679641810
Google: faQU6AVeFigC
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 7618818
Publisher: Modern Library
Published: 1921-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
You alone did seem to me that which one always seeks,
that the Lady President of the little circle, anxious to make sure of one of her âfaithfulâ even after death, had made her promise that whichever of them survived the other should be buried by her side. In front of strangersâamong whom we must always reckon the one to whom we lie the most because he is the one whose contempt would be most painful to us: ourselvesâPrincess Sherbatoff took care to represent her only three friendshipsâwith the Grand Duchess, the Verdurins, and the Baroness Putbusâas the only ones, not which cataclysms beyond her control had allowed to emerge from the destruction of all the rest, but which a free choice had made her elect in preference to any other, and to which a taste for solitude and simplicity had made her confine herself. âI see nobody else,â she would say, underlining the inflexible character of what appeared to be rather a rule that one imposes upon oneself than a necessity to which one submits. She would add: âI visit only three houses,â as a dramatist who fears that it may not run to a fourth announces that there will be only three performances of his play. Whether or not M. and Mme Verdurin gave credence to this fiction, they had helped the Princess to instil it into the minds of the faithful. And they in turn were persuaded both that the Princess, among the thousands of invitations that were available to her, had chosen the Verdurinsâ alone, and that the Verdurins, deaf to the overtures of the entire aristocracy, had consented to make but a single exception, in favour of a great lady of more intelligence than the rest of her kind, the Princess Sherbatoff.
The Princess was very rich; she engaged for every first night a large box on the ground floor, to which, with Mme Verdurinâs assent, she invited the faithful and nobody else. People would point out to one another this pale and enigmatic person who had grown old without turning white, turning red, rather, like certain tough and shrivelled hedgerow fruits. They admired both her influence and her humility, for, having always with her an Academician, Brichot, a famous scientist, Cottard, the leading pianist of the day, and at a later date M. de Charlus, yet she made a point of reserving the least prominent box in the theatre, sat at the back, paid no attention to the rest of the house, lived exclusively for the little group, who, shortly before the end of the performance, would withdraw in the wake of this strange sovereign, who was not without a certain shy, bewitching, faded beauty. But if Mme Sherbatoff did not look at the audience, if she stayed in the shadows, it was to try to forget that there existed a living world which she passionately desired and could not know; the coterie in a box was to her what is to certain animals their almost corpselike immobility in the presence of danger.
Download
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
Ancient & Classical | Arthurian Romance |
Beat Generation | Feminist |
Gothic & Romantic | LGBT |
Medieval | Modern |
Modernism | Postmodernism |
Renaissance | Shakespeare |
Surrealism | Victorian |
4 3 2 1: A Novel by Paul Auster(11074)
The handmaid's tale by Margaret Atwood(6873)
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin(5893)
Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert(4734)
Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking by M. Neil Browne & Stuart M. Keeley(4599)
On Writing A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King(4221)
Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday(4000)
Ken Follett - World without end by Ken Follett(3981)
The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson(3815)
Bluets by Maggie Nelson(3722)
Adulting by Kelly Williams Brown(3680)
Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K Hamilton(3600)
Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy(3525)
White Noise - A Novel by Don DeLillo(3443)
The Poetry of Pablo Neruda by Pablo Neruda(3371)
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read(3320)
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald(3236)
The Book of Joy by Dalai Lama(3233)
Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock(3222)