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also the Paris of the Place du Tertre, of the earlier cafés of Montparnasse, of the Cloiserie des Lilas, of Toulouse-Lautrec, of the Goulue and of Jean le Désossé. I should have liked to interrupt Prince Eugene to ask him whether he had ever seen the Duke de Guermantes entering a box et d'un geste commander de se rassoir aux monstres marins et sacrés flottant au fond de l'antre —and with a gesture commanding those sacred marine monsters floating on the bottom of the grotto to be seated—in order to ask him to talk about the women, belles et légères comme Diane —beautiful and easy of virtue like Diana, of the smart people who used the jargon ambigu —strange lines—of Swann and Monsieur de Charlus. And I was just going to ask him the question that had been for some moments surging to my lips. I was just going to ask him with a tremor in my voice, "You have no doubt met Madame de Guermantes—" when the Prince turned, and offered his face to the tired light of sunset. He moved away from the canvas and seemed to step out of that warm and golden shadow of that côté de Guermantes in which he too appeared to conceal himself, emerging from behind the glass of an aquarium, himself like some monstre marin et sacré —sacred sea monster. Settling in an armchair at the end of the room that was farthest away from the balcony of Friherrina Celsing, he began talking about Paris, as if Paris in his painter's eyes were only a color—the memory and yearning for a color: those pinks, grays, greens, blues all faded. Perhaps for him Paris was only a mute color, a soundless color— his visual recollections, the pictures of his young Parisian years, stripped of any quality of sound, lived by themselves in his memory, moved, were lighted, flew away comme les monstres ailés de la préhistoire —like those prehistoric winged monsters. The mute pictures of that young, distant Paris of his crumbled noiselessly before his eyes, but not to a point when the destruction of that happy world of his youth would ternisse, de la vulgarité d'aucun bruit, la chasteté de silence —spoil the chastity of silence by the vulgarity of any noise.
    Meanwhile, as if to work free of the sad spell of that voice and of the pictures that were called up by it, I raised my eyes and looked across the trees in the park at the Stockholm houses, ash-colored in the tired glow of the sunset. I saw a blue sky slowly darkened by the night, similar to the Paris sky, looking down on the Royal Palace far away and on the churches of the Garnie Stade—that Proustian sky of papier gros bleu —blue wrapping paper—which I used to see from the windows of my Paris house in Place Dauphine over the roofs of the rive Gauche, over the spire of the Sainte Chapelle, over the bridges on the Seine, and over the Louvre; and those dull purples, those fiery pinks, those gray-blue hues of the clouds delicately attuned with the shaded black of the slate roofs, were sweetly gripping my heart. I thought then that perhaps Prince Eugene was also a character du côté de Guermantes. Peut-être un de ces personnages qu'évoque le nom d'Elstir.— Perhaps one of those types that remind you of Elstir. I was just going to ask him the question that had been surging to my lips for some moments. I was just going to ask him with a tremor in my voice to speak to me of her, of Madame de Guermantes, when Prince Eugene fell silent, and after a long silence during which he seemed to gather the pictures of his youth behind the screen of his lowered lids, as if to protect them, he asked whether I had ever been back to Paris during the war.
    I would have preferred not to answer. I felt a sort of painful reluctance; I should not have liked to talk to him of Paris, of my own young Paris, and I shook my head. I kept slowly shaking my head, gazing at him. Then I said, "No, I have not been back to Paris during the war. I do not wish to return to Paris while the war lasts."
    The painful and beloved pictures