Chapter 5
BALBEC AND CONDORCETAN inventory of the contents and condition of the fourteen-
.t1. year-old Marcel's mind, in the period shortly before his
meeting with Marie de Benardaky, has been preserved in a leaf
of a confession-book belonging to Antoinette Faure, one of his
playmates in the Champs-Elysees. The book was an import from
Victorian England to anglomaniac Paris, and the twenty-five
questions are printed in English-perhaps Marcel had already
learned enough of the language from his mother to understand
them, or perhaps Antoinette translated for him. He writes in a
fluent, uninhibited hand, with precocious self-expression and wit;
and words such as 'intelligence', 'naturalness', 'beauty', 'the land
of the ideal' occur and recur, showing that he was accustomed to
submit all questions to these touchstones. His 'favourite occupa-
tions' are 'reading, revery, poetry, the theatre'. His 'ideal of
happiness' is 'to live near all the people I love, with the beauties
of nature, plenty of books and music, and a French theatre near
by'. His 'pet aversion' is 'people who have no feeling for good-
ness, and do not know the pleasures of affection'-perhaps he is
thinking of Dr Proust. AlI this is nothing extraordinary, and no
doubt others of MlIe Faure's young friends, those future
politicians, generals and society hostesses, made no less idealistic
entries. But Marcel's originality lay in the strength of will which
would enable him to pursue his vision of goodness and beauty,
deepened but unchanged, in later life, when others convince
themselves that the quest is unimportant, or that life has given
them what they sought. He would see that the Ideal is not to be
found in the world of space and time, and press on to seek it
elsewhere; and at this point the object of the search would become
not happiness, but salvation.
His cultural tastes, however, remain immature. His 'favourite
prose authors' are still George Sand and Augustin Thierry, for
he is faithful to the memories of the night when his mother read
Franfois Ie Champi at his bedside, and the summer of Augustin