In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust Page A

place well enough, down there
to the right along the main boulevards, a little way back." The
restaurant of which she spoke with this blend of pride and
good–humoured tolerance was, it turned out, the Café Anglais.
    When New Year's Day came, I first of all paid a round of family visits
with Mamma who, so as not to tire me, had planned them beforehand
(with the aid of an itinerary drawn up by my father) according to
districts rather than to degrees of kinship. But no sooner had we
entered the drawing–room of the distant cousin whose claim to being
visited first was that her house was at no distance from ours, than my
mother was horrified to see standing there, his present of marrons
glacés or déguisés in his hand, the bosom friend of the most
sensitive of all my uncles, to whom he would at once go and report
that we had not begun our round with him. And this uncle would
certainly be hurt; he would have thought it quite natural that we
should go from the Madeleine to the Jardin des Plantes, where he
lived, before stopping at Saint–Augustin, on our way to the Rue de
l'Ecole de Médecine.
    Our visits ended (my grandmother had dispensed us from the duty of
calling on her, since we were to dine there that evening), I ran all
the way to the Champs–Elysées to give to our own special stall–keeper,
with instructions to hand it over to the person who came to her
several times a week from the Swanns to buy gingerbread, the letter
which, on the day when my friend had caused me so much anxiety, I had
decided to send her at the New Year, and in which I told her that our
old friendship was vanishing with the old year, that I would forget,
now, my old sorrows and disappointments, and that, from this first day
of January, it was a new friendship that we were going to cement, one
so solid that nothing could destroy it, so wonderful that I hoped that
Gilberte would go out of her way to preserve it in all its beauty, and
to warn me in time, as I promised to warn her, should either of us
detect the least sign of a peril that might endanger it. On our way
home Françoise made me stop at the corner of the Rue Royale, before an
open–air stall from which she selected for her own stock of presents
photographs of Pius IX and Raspail, while for myself I purchased one
of Berma. The innumerable admiration which that artist excited gave an
air almost of poverty to this one face that she had to respond with,
unalterable and precarious as are the garments of people who have not
a 'change,' this face on which she must continually expose to view
only the tiny dimple upon her upper lip, the arch of her eyebrows, a
few other physical peculiarities always the same, which, when it came
to that, were at the mercy of a burn or a blow. This face, moreover,
could not in itself have seemed to me beautiful, but it gave me the
idea, and consequently the desire to kiss it by reason of all the
kisses that it must have received, for which, from its page in the
album, it seemed still to be appealing with that coquettishly tender
gaze, that artificially ingenuous smile. For our Berma must indeed
have felt for many young men those longings which she confessed under
cover of the personality of Phaedra, longings of which everything,
even the glamour of her name which enhanced her beauty and prolonged
her youth, must render the gratification so easy to her. Night was
falling; I stopped before a column of playbills, on which was posted
that of the piece in which she was to appear on January 1. A moist
and gentle breeze was blowing. It was a time of day and year that I
knew; I suddenly felt a presentiment that New Year's Day was not a day
different from, the rest, that it was not the first day of a new
world, in which, I might, by a chance that had never yet occurred,
that was still intact, make Gilberte's acquaintance afresh, as at the
Creation of the World, as though the past had no longer any existence,
as though there had been obliterated, with the indications