Day One Hundred Forty-One: The Prisoner, pp. 136-151

From "First, I had to be certain that Léa really was appearing..." to "...We arrived at the Bois."

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The narrator cooks up a reason to ask Albertine to leave the theater and come home, and sends Françoise on the errand. He admits that Françoise doesn't know that "Albertine's relationship to me was not of her seeking but mine (a fact that I preferred to hide from Françoise out of self-regard, and also to irritate her all the more)." Françoise succeeds in her mission, and they telephone to say Albertine will be home at three o'clock. He is jubilant, without a trace of guilt at having torn her away from the theater, even though he now knows that Albertine "had not gone to the Trocadéro to meet Léa's friends." The successful ruse reveals "that she belonged to me, even for the future, much more completely than I had realized."

I now had a woman of my own who, at one, unexpected word from me, would send a telephone message to say that she was coming straight back, was letting herself be brought back, immediately. I was more of a master than I had thought. More of a master, that is to say, more of a slave.

Which of the two, master or slave, he really is, remains to be seen.

(Incidentally, in the note Albertine sends to him via a courier, she addresses him as "Dear darling Marcel" and exclaims "Oh, Marcel, Marcel!" But I'll stick to "the narrator" for now.)

As he waits for her arrival, he plays music, starting with the sonata by Vinteuil, in which he identifies both a "sexual pleasure motif" and an "anxiety motif." The music carries him back "on the wave of sound towards the old days in Combray" and "the walks towards Guermantes" on which he decided he was going to be an artist: "Having in practice abandoned this ambition, had I given up something real? Could life make up to me for the loss of art, or was there in art a deeper reality where our true personality finds an expression that the actions of life cannot give it?" He switches to Wagner and muses on "that incompleteness which characterizes all the great works of the nineteenth century; the nineteenth century, whose greatest writers failed in their books, but, watching themselves at work as if they were both worker and judge, drew from this self-contemplation a new beauty, separate from and superior to their work, conferring on it retrospectively a unity, a grandeur which it does not have in reality."

He also notes that Wagner's phrases "soar ... freely above the earth, like ... the aeroplane I had seen at Balbec turning its energy into elevation, gliding above the waves and disappearing into the sky." He notes also that "however high one soars, one's appreciation of the silence of space is somewhat impeded by the powerful rumble of the engine!" I know that Proust bought Agostinelli an airplane, but did he ever go up on one himself?

As time draws near for Albertine's return, he goes to the courtyard and waits for her, overhearing Morel berating "the girl I imagined he was soon to marry" -- presumably a reference to Jupien's niece, although Proust curiously doesn't specify her." The scene dispels some of his happiness: "despite the blessed calm which I felt at the thought that Albertine, instead of staying at the Trocadéro, was coming home to me, my ears were still full of the sound of those constantly repeated words, 'great slut, great slut,' which had so upset me."

Albertine finally arrives and they set out by car to the Bois.

Day Ninety-Nine: The Guermantes Way, pp. 450-464

Part II, Chapter II, from "On ordinary weekdays (after dinner..." to "...the subject matter of their writings."

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The narrator goes on (and on and on) with his analysis of the Guermantes, to the frustration of those of us who are waiting to find out what Charlus is so eager to talk to him about or just generally want him to get on with the story. Still, what he has to say is witty, and we can only hope relevant to the rest of the novel. 

He observes that the manners and customs on display at events such as the Duchesse's dinner party or the receptions of the Princess of Parma are somewhat anachronistic in "an egalitarian society," but also wonders, "would not a society become secretly more hierarchical as it became ostensibly more democratic?" And in fact, the Princess is somewhat intimidated by the Duchesse: 

In short, inviting the Duchesse to her house was for the Princess of Parma a rather vexing business, so strongly was she beset by the fear that Oriane would find fault with everything. But, by contrast, and for the same reason, when the Princess of Parma came to dine with Mme de Guermantes, she could be certain in advance that everything would be perfect, delightful, and she had only one misgiving, the fear of being unable to understand, remember, engage people, of being unable to assimilate ideas and personalities. On this score, my presence aroused her attention and stimulated her cupidity, in exactly the same way that a novel style of decorating a dinner table with garlands of fruit might have done, uncertain as she was which of the two -- the table decoration or my presence -- was more distinctive as one of those charms that were the secret of Oriane's receptions.

But becoming a fixture in the Guermantes salon, it seems, could have its downside for some of the guests.

So, for instance, a doctor, a painter, and a diplomat with a fine career before him had failed to achieve the sort of success for which they were nonetheless more brilliantly equipped than most, because their friendship with the Guermantes meant that the first two were regarded as men of fashion and the third as a reactionary, and this had prevented all three from earning the recognition of their peers.

Most of all, "what the Duchesse prized above all else was not intelligence but -- intelligence in a superior form, in her view, rarer, more exquisite, elevating it to a verbal species of talent -- wit." This was what set the Guermantes apart from their kin, the Courvoisiers. 

Unfortunately, the example of the Duchesse's wit provided in this section is a rather lame pun, perhaps lost in translation, in which she referred to Charlus as "Teaser Augustus." The pun went out on the social grapevine as a choice instance of her cleverness, but when it reached the ear of a Courvoisier, "He did not quite see the point, but he half understood it, being an educated man. And the Courvoisiers went about repeating that Oriane had called Uncle Palamède 'Caesar Augustus,' which was, according to them, a good enough description of him." The Courvoisiers are so intimidated by the Duchesse, so often the butt of the Duchesse's jokes, which "make the Guermantes laugh until the tears ran down their cheeks," that they live in fear of making a gaffe that will draw her fire.

Day Ninety-Eight: The Guermantes Way, pp. 430-450

Part II, Chapter II, from "No sooner had the order to serve dinner..." to "...and make her decline further invitations."

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They go in to dinner with the Duchesse on the narrator's arm, a process like "an artfully contrived puppet theater" or a "vast, ingenious, obedient, and sumptuous human clockwork." And for all the formality and grandeur of the scene, the narrator joins in "the more readily because the Guermantes attached no more importance to it than a truly learned man does to his learning, with the result that one is less intimidated in his company than in that of an ignoramus." 

And so the narrator launches into an analysis of the Guermantes way of thinking and behaving. It is a portrait of an aristocracy long after its day had passed, of manners and comportment that were nearly wiped out a century earlier by the revolution. The Duc's "grandeur" consists in an "indifference to the splendor of his surroundings, his consideration for a guest, however insignificant, who he wished to honor." And the Duchesse "would not have admitted Mme. de Cambremer or M. de Forcheville to her society. But the moment anyone appeared eligible for admission to the Guermantes circle (as was the case with me), this courtesy disclosed a wealth of hospitable simplicity even more splendid, if such a thing is possible, than those historic rooms and their marvelous furniture." 

There is, however, a certain duality about the Guermantes, an inconsistency between the surface grace and the inner life. The Duc is "a man of touching kindness and unspeakable inflexibility, a slave to the most petty obligations yet  not to the most sacred commitments," exhibiting "the same aberration that typified court life under Louis XIV, which removes scruples of conscience from the domain of the affections and morality and transforms them into questions of pure form." 

As usual, the narrator has to overcome an initial disillusionment: "But, in the same way as Balbec or Florence, the Guermantes, after initially disappointing the imagination by having more in common with the rest of humanity than with their name, were subsequently capable, though to a lesser degree, of presenting various distinctive characteristics as food for thought." To wit, such physical traits as the men's hair, "massed in soft, golden tufts, halfway between wall lichen and cat fur." And he eventually perceives a weakness underlying their superior manner: 

Later on, I realized that the Guermantes did indeed think of me as belonging to a different breed, but one that aroused their envy, because I possessed merits of which I was unaware, and which they professed to regard as the only things that mattered. Later still, I came to feel that this profession of faith was only half sincere, and that in their responses to things admiration and envy went hand in hand with scorn and astonishment.

There is, he learns a rival branch of the family, the Courvoisiers. 

For a Guermantes (even a stupid one), to be intelligent meant to have a scathing tongue, to be capable of making tart comments, of not taking no for an answer; it also meant the ability to hold one's own in painting, music, and architecture alike, and to speak English. The Courvoisiers had a less exalted notion of intelligence, and unless one belonged to their world, being intelligent came close to meaning "having probably murdered one's parents."

Meeting a Guermantes could be a bit of an ordeal:

when the Guermantes in question, after a lightning tour of the last hiding places of your soul and your integrity, had deemed you worthy to consort with him in future, his hand, directed toward you at the end of an arm stretched out to its full length, seemed to be presenting a rapier for single combat, and the hand was in fact placed so far in front of the Guermantes himself at that moment that when he proceeded to bow his head it was difficult to distinguish whether it was yourself or his own hand he was acknowledging.

Even their movements are idiosyncratic. "But, given the sheer size of the corps de ballet involved, it is not possible to describe here the richness of this Guermantes choreography."

We are reminded in the midst of all this deftly satirical analysis of some facts we may have forgotten. For example, that the Duchesse de Guermantes is someone we met way back in Swann's Way as the Princesse des Laumes, and that she and her husband inherited the title of Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes on the death of her father-in-law. And that although the Princess of Parma outranks her socially, the Duchesse is more exclusive in her invitations than the Princess, refusing to allow entree of some people she has met at the Princess's home: "the same rule applied to a drawing room in a social as in a physical sense: it would take only a few pieces of furniture that were not particularly pleasing but had been put there to fill the room, and as a sign of the owner's wealth, to turn it into something dreadful.... Like a book, like a house, the quality of a salon, Mme de Guermantes quite rightly thought, depended essentially on what you excluded."

Day Fifty-Five: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 340-359

From "Though it was a Sunday..." to "...'her again, one of these evenings.'" 

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The narrator goes to two very different social events.

In the first, he accepts the Baron de Charlus's invitation to tea, and is puzzled by the baron's behavior, including his apparent refusal to acknowledge his arrival. Then he realizes "that his eyes, which never met those of the person with whom he was speaking, were in constant motion in all directions, like the eyes of some animals when frightened, or those of peddlers who, while they recite their patter and display their illicit wares, manage to study all the points of the compass without so much as looking around, in case the police are about." But he is more astonished when Charlus says to his grandmother, "how nice of you to think of dropping in like this!" when he has explicitly extended an invitation. When the narrator insists on asking the baron if he didn't invite them, he gets no reply -- only "the smile of the man who looks down from a great height on the characters and manners of lesser men." The narrator concludes "that it was his pride making him wish to avoid appearing to seek out people whom he despised, and that he therefore shrugged off onto them the idea that they should come to visit."

We learn a few more things about Charlus, including the fact that he wore "a faint dusting of powder" on his face, and that "he was as well disposed toward women ... as he was disgusted by men, and especially young men."

I gathered that the thing he disliked most about young men of today was their effeminacy.... But the life led by any man would have seemed effeminate compared with the kind of life he would have preferred to see men lead, ever more energetic and virile. ... He even disliked it if a man wore a ring on his finger.

And yet the narrator's grandmother "detected in M. de Charlus feminine sensitivity and intuitions." And the reader may wonder at the implications of this statement: "'But the most important thing in life is not whom one loves,' he declaimed in a voice that was authoritative, peremptory, almost cutting. 'The important thing is to love.... The limits we set to love are too restrictive and derive solely from our great ignorance of life.'" And then there's that "authoritative" voice, which

like certain contralto voices in which the middle register has been insufficiently trained and which, in song, sounds rather like an antiphonal duet between a young man and a woman, rose as he expressed these subtle insights to higher notes, took on an unexpected gentleness, and seemed to echo choirs of brids and loving sisters.... While he spoke, one could often hear their light laughter, the giggling of coquettes or schoolgirls full of pranks, mischief, and teasing talk.

When Charlus comments scornfully on the wealthy Jewish family, the Israels, who bought one of his family's estates, he "shrieked, 'Just think -- to have been the dwelling of the Guermantes and to be owned by the Israels!'" And, "noticing that his embroidered handkerchief was revealing part of its colored edging, he thrust it back into his pocket with a startled glance, like a prudish but not innocent woman concealing bodily charms that in her excessive modesty she sees as wanton."

And he thinks wearing a ring is effeminate?

Later that evening, Charlus surprises the narrator by coming to his room with a volume of Bergotte to lend him. He says, among other things, "you have youth, and youth is always irresistible," and comments about the narrator's affection for his grandmother, that it is "permissible mode of affection, I mean a requited love. There are so many other modes of affection of which one cannot say the same!" The next morning the narrator encounters Charlus on the beach where "he pinched me on the neck, with a most vulgar laugh and air of familiarity" and criticizes him for "wearing that bathing suit with anchors embroidered upon it."

The second social event is the dinner with Bloch's family, a section filled with allusions to literature and politics that are arcane to the modern reader (and heavily footnoted), but which reveals that Bloch and his father are very much alike.

So, set within my old school friend Bloch was Bloch senior, forty years behind the times of his son, who recounted stupid stories and laughs at them in the son's voice, as much as the real Bloch senior laughed at them in his own voice, since whenever he bayed with laughter and repeated the funny part several times, so that his audience would properly savor the point of each anecdote, the gales of the son's faithful guffaws would never fail to celebrate in unison with the father the latter's table talk.

Bloch père is an inveterate name-dropper and repeater of received opinions, whose "world was that of approximations, where greetings are half exchanged, where half-truths usurp the place of judgment. Inaccuracies and incompetence in no way reduce self-assurance." And yet the elder Bloch is also acutely self-conscious, especially about being Jewish, and when his uncle, Nissim Bernard, makes a reference to Peter Schlemihl, he bristles because "the mention of a word like 'Schlemihl,' though it belonged to the sort of semi-German, semi-Jewish dialect which delighted him within the family circle, he thought was vulgar and out of place when spoken in front of strangers."

As for Bernard, his nephew's insults offend him mainly because of "being treated rudely in the presence of the butler." Both Bernard and Bloch derive gratification "from their double status of 'masters' and 'Jews.'" Bernard has his manservant bring him the newspapers in the dining room "so that the other guests could see he was a man who traveled with a manservant." Bernard is a poseur, who brags about acquaintances and possessions he doesn't really have, serves "mediocre sparkling wine, poured from a carafe" as Champagne, and invites the group to the theater and claims that all the boxes were booked so that he had to book the front stalls, which "turned out to be seats in the back stalls, half the price of the others" -- and the boxes turn out to be unoccupied.

Once the dinner and the theater are over, the younger Bloch walks the narrator and Saint-Loup home. Along the way, he makes fun of Charlus, to Saint-Loup's annoyance, and asks the narrator about the "beautiful creature" he had seen with him at the Zoo. "I had of course noticed at the time that the name of Bloch was unfamiliar to Mme Swann," the narrator comments. Bloch goes on, "I was sort of hoping you could let me have her address, and then I could pop round there a few times a week and share with her the joys of Eros, favorite of the gods."

Day Twenty-Five: Swann's Way, pp. 340-356

From "Swann had walked on into the room ..." to "... so small a creature as the comma bacillus."

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Proust remains in satiric mode, giving us a portrait of those gathered at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's soiree, including the Marquise de Cambremer and the Vicomtesse de Franquetot, and the various layers of snobbery on display. We also learn that Swann is the object of some anti-Semitism:

"It's funny that he should go to old Saint-Euverte's," said Mme de Gallardon. "Oh, I know he's intelligent," she added, meaning he was a schemer, "but still and all, a Jew in the home of the sister and sister-in-law of two archbishops!"


"I confess to my shame that I'm not shocked," said the Princesse des Laumes.


"I know he's a convert, and even his parents and grandparents before him. But they do say converts remain more attached to their religion than anyone else, that it's all just a pretense."

(One thinks of the insistence that Obama is still a Muslim.)

The Princesse des Laumes reveals why Swann is so attached to her when Mme. de Gallardon persists in observing that "people claim that M. Swann is someone whom one can't have in one's house, is that true?" The Princesse replies, "Why ... you ought to know, ... since you've invited him fifty times and he hasn't come once."

The Princesse is herself no stranger to the sexual vagaries of high society, "because everyone knew that the very day after the Prince des Laumes married his ravishing cousin, he had deceived her, and he had not stopped deceiving her since." No wonder then that

Swann liked the Princesse des Laumes very much, and the sight of her also reminded him of Guermantes, the estate next to Combray, the whole countryside which he loved so much and had ceased to visit so as not to be away from Odette.

He can talk to the Princesse in ways that he is unable to do with others: "Swann, who was accustomed, when he was in the company of a woman whom he had kept up the habit of addressing in gallant language, to say things so delicately nuanced that many society people could not understand them.... Swann and the Princesse had the same way of looking at the small things of life, the effect of which -- unless it was the cause -- was a great similarity in their ways of expressing things and even in their pronunciation." So he fully understands and agrees that "life is a dreadful thing." When he hears her say this, "he felt as comforted as if she had been talking about Odette."

The Princesse, who senses Swann's unhappiness and its cause, says later to her husband,

"I do find it absurd that a man of his intelligence should suffer over a person of that sort, who isn't even interesting -- because they say she's an idiot," she added with the wisdom of people not in love who believe a man of sense should be unhappy only over a person who is worth it; which is rather like being surprised that anyone should condescend to suffer from cholera because of so small a creature as the comma bacillus.

Day Fourteen: Swann's Way, pp. 169-191

From "If it was fairly simple ..." to "... the raised finger of the dawn."

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The descriptions of the walks along the Vivonne on "the Guermantes way" are some of the most gorgeous writing so far in the novel, and could be celebrated for that alone. But one senses that Proust writes nothing without intent. One intent is to establish the centrality of the Guermantes, who have only been alluded to so far, to the history of Combray. And another is to comment on the importance of the place the narrator loves so well in his development as an artist. The two fuse together in this passage:

I dreamed that Mme. de Guermantes had summoned me there, smitten with a sudden fancy for me; all day long she would fish for trout with me. And in the evening, holding me by the hand as we walked past the little gardens of her vassals, she would show me the flowers that leaned their violet and red stems along the low walls, and would teach me their names. She would make me tell her the subjects of the poems that I intended to compose. And these dreams warned me that since I wanted to be a writer someday, it was time to find out what I meant to write.

But immediately the narrator is stricken with a kind of artistic impotence, an inability to "find a subject in which I could anchor some infinite philosophical meaning."

And then Mme. de Guermantes herself attends church in Combray, and the narrator gets his first, somewhat disillusioning glimpse of her: "a blond lady with a large nose, piercing blue eyes, a full tie of smooth, shiny new mauve silk, and a little pimple at the corner of her nose." But he overcomes the ordinariness of her appearance and imbues her with the cultural and historical significance that had informed his earlier imaginings.

And immediately I loved her, because if it may sometimes be enough for us to fall in love with a woman if she looks at us with contempt, as I had thought Mlle. Swann had done, and if we think she will never belong to us, sometimes, too, it may be enough if she looks at us with kindness, as Mme. de Guermantes was doing, and if we think she may someday belong to us.

In the meantime, his frustration at his inability to convert his sensations into something of literary import continues, to the point that he is ready to give up his vocation as a writer.

But the moral duty imposed on me by the impressions I received from form, fragrance, or color was so arduous -- to try to perceive what was concealed behind them -- that I would soon look for excuses that would allow me to save myself from this effort and spare myself this fatigue.

Fortunately, he has an epiphany on a ride back from their walk along the Guermantes way. He sees three church steeples that change position as the carriage moves along and which change colors as the sun sets. And his pleasure in the sight of them manifests itself "in the form of words that gave me pleasure." So he asks the doctor in whose carriage he is riding for a piece of paper and a pencil and writes the words down. "I felt that it had ... perfectly relieved me of those steeples and what they had been hiding behind them."

And so it was from the Guermantes way that I learned to distinguish those states of mind that follow one another in me, during certain periods, and that even go so far as to share out each day among them, on returning to drive out the other, with the punctuality of a fever; contiguous, but so exterior to one another, so lacking means of communication among them, that I can no longer comprehend, no longer even picture to myself in one, what I desired, or feared, or accomplished in the other.

And so the Méségliese way and the Guermantes way remain for me linked to many of the little events of that life which, of all the various lives we lead concurrently, is the most abundant in sudden reversals of fortune, the richest in episodes, I mean our intellectual life.

That, in a nutshell, is why the narrator goes in search of lost time. (And, incidentally, why Scott Moncrieff's Shakespeare allusion, "Remembrance of Things Past," is so misleading a title, turning the narrator's quest into a passive and nostalgic exercise.)

When on summer evenings the melodious sky growls like a wild animal and everyone grumbles at the storm, it is because of the Méségliese way that I am the only one in ecstasy inhaling, through the noise of the falling rain, the smell of invisible, enduring lilacs.

This is the quest for the incidents in the "intellectual life" that are bound up in the particularities of sensory experience.

Day Eleven: Swann's Way, pp. 129-146

From "He had in fact asked my parents ..." to "... the Champs-Élysées where she lived in Paris." 

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The narrator goes to dinner at M. Legrandin's but finds him no less enigmatic. When the narrator tries to inquire into Legrandin's acquaintance with "the ladies of Guermantes," Legrandin retreats into florid evasions: "Deep down, I care for nothing in the world now but a few churches, two or three books, scarcely more paintings, and the light of the moon when the breeze of your youth brings me the fragrance of the flower beds that my old eyes can no longer distinguish." He claims that he is still a radical, "a Jacobin in my thinking." But the narrator senses that

another Legrandin whom he kept carefully concealed deep inside himself, whom he did not exhibit because that Legrandin knew some compromising stories about our own, about his snobbishness, had already answered by the wound in his eyes, by the rictus of his mouth, by the excessive gravity in the tone of his answer, by the thousand arrows with which our own Legrandin had been instantly larded, languishing like a Saint Sebastian of snobbishness.

The narrator takes this knowledge of the second Legrandin home with him, and his parents take delight in what they have learned about their friend. "My mother was infinitely amused each time she caught Legrandin in flagrante delicto in the sin that he would not confess, that he continued to call the sin without forgiveness, snobbishness." And the father, who knows that Legrandin's sister, Mme. de Cambremer, lives near Balbec, where the grandmother plans to spend a summer vacation, delights in trying to make Legrandin confess that he knows someone in the area. But he evades the question with extravagant circumlocutions, and they conclude that

M. Legrandin, had we insisted further, would have ended by constructing a whole system of landscape ethics and a celestial geography of Lower Normandy, sooner than admit to us that his own sister lived a mile from Balbec and be obliged to offer us a letter of introduction.

This glimpse of the social mores of Combray yields to another when the family goes out on one of its walks and decides to go "Swann's way" rather than "the Guermantes way." The narrator informs us that his parents "had ceased to visit Tansonville since Swann's marriage," but believing that Swann's wife and daughter were in Paris, they decide to take a shortcut through the park. They're mistaken, however, and the narrator gets his first glimpse of Swann's daughter, Gilberte.

Her dark eyes shone, and since I did not know then, nor have I learned since, how to reduce a strong impression to its objective elements, since I did not have enough "power of observation," as they say, to isolate the notion of their color, for a long time afterward, whenever I thought of her again, the memory of their brilliance would immediately present itself to me as that of a vivid azure, since she was blonde: so that, perhaps if she had not had such dark eyes -- which struck one so the first time one saw her -- I would not have been, as I was, in love most particularly with her blue eyes.

The setup for this encounter is telling: The narrator has just been admiring a pink hawthorn.

Inserted into the hedge, but as different from it as a young girl in a party dress among people in everyday clothes who are staying at home, the shrub was all ready for Mary's month, and seemed to form a part of it already, shining there, smiling in its fresh pink outfit, catholic and delicious.

Only about twenty pages earlier, the narrator has described for us the hawthorns adorning the altar at Saint-Hilaire for the celebration of "Mary's month." Mary is, of course, the emblem of virginity -- like the "young girl in a party dress." But the narrator dwells on the pinkness of the flower, on the buds "which revealed, when they began to open, as though at the bottom of a cup of pink marble, reds of a bloody tinge." The language here is sensual, hinting at pubescence and menstruation. And Gilberte's behavior toward the narrator is hardly virginal:

she allowed her glances to stream out at full length in my direction, without any particular expression, without appearing to see me, but with a concentration and a secret smile that I could only interpret, according to the notions of good breeding instilled in me, as a sign of insulting contempt; and at the same time her hand sketched an indecent gesture for which, when it was directed in public at a person one did not know, the little dictionary of manners I carried inside me supplied only one meaning, that of intentional insolence.

(I'm trying not to venture too far into Proust commentary and criticism at this point, but I couldn't resist Googling "Proust Gilberte 'indecent gesture'," and there's plenty of discussion of this passage.)

And then Gilberte is called away by her mother, who is accompanied by Charlus. And the narrator is left to reflect on the encounter.

I thought her so beautiful that I wished I could retrace my steps and shout at her with a shrug of my shoulders: "I think you're ugly, I think you're grotesque, I loathe you!" But I went away, carrying with me forever, as the first example of a type of happiness inaccessible to children of my kind because of certain laws of nature impossible to transgress, the image of a little girl with red hair, her skin scattered with pink freckles, holding a spade and smiling as she cast at me long, cunning, and inexpressive glances.

Note that Gilberte's hair, previously described as "blonde" or "reddish-blonde," has here become simply red, and that the pinkness of her freckles is emphasized.