No doubt the avenging eagerness with which I reintroduce her here for my conclusion is due in part to my being myself of the soulless sex. But quite apart from any such feelings, to speak of this novelist’s women without reckoning especially with his mother would be inexcusable. That he adored her in childhood he makes manifest. Further, that throughout his life this adoration effectively debarred him from profound emotion where other women were concerned becomes clear enough to the reader. It hardly appears, however, that Proust was himself wholly conscious of this. True, there is a passage in the _Combray_ section in which he speaks of “that untroubled peace which no mistress, in later years, has ever been able to give me, since one has doubts of them at the moment when one believes in them, and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in her kiss, the heart of my mother, complete, without scruple or reservation, unburdened by any liability save to myself.” But this is the only place where he seems to allow that the love he bore his mother was even comparable in kind with the love aroused by other women later in his life. Indeed, though he repeatedly speaks of the anguish with which in his childhood he longed for his mother’s good-night kiss, the ecstasy with which he received it, as if it were the Host in an act of communion, conveying to him “her real presence and with it the power to sleep”; though he tells how, for that “frail and precious kiss,” he prepared himself in advance so as to “consecrate” the whole minute of contact; though he dreaded to prolong or repeat the kiss lest a look of displeasure should cross those beautiful features with the slight, beloved blemish under one of the eyes; yet he describes himself at this time as one “into whose life Love had not yet entered,” as one whose emotion, failing love and as yet awaiting it, happened to be at the disposal of “filial piety.” No wonder if, when temporary “loves” came, he compared with them as unconsciously as unfavourably this good and gracious mother—so admiringly timid as a wife, so gentle towards strangers, so perfect socially, so full of stern solicitude as a parent (“she never allowed herself to go to any length of tenderness with me”)—and found them merely exciting to the senses. He had already, so far as woman was concerned, given his heart away. Yet, after all, perhaps he knew it well enough and merely takes his own way of saying it. He tells us little enough of his mother, though probably he tells as much as he knows. What her own real thoughts and feelings were we are left to guess. But “never again,” he says, after describing one very special visit of hers to the boy’s bedroom—“never again will such hours be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs ... which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. Actually their echo has never ceased.” CATHERINE CARSWELL. IX