become more frequent during his stay with his grandmother at the Balbec hotel. Then the sudden sight of a tiny clump of trees seen while he is driving with the Marquise de Villeparisis makes him feel that they are stretching out imploring arms towards him in a mute appeal. If he can divine what they have to tell him (they seem to say) he will touch the secret of “la vraie vie,” of life indeed. And then the writer warns us that the story of his search to make this secret his own is to come, and that this premonition of a task to be accomplished was to haunt him throughout his life. [Footnote 9: In another and rather complicated sense this is a presentiment of the future. The spires appear to have been those of Caen, the carriage a motor car, the year evidently much later. The original article will be found in _Pastiches et Mélanges_, on pp. 91 to 99.—C.K.S.M.] At this moment Marcel Proust came nearest, we may believe, to revealing to the reader the hidden soul of his own book. There is room for different interpretations, of course, and it is admitted that in any case he was frequently distracted from whatever plan he had by his delight in a pure description of the human comedy from the angle most familiar to him. Nevertheless, we are persuaded that Proust brought to the exact and intimate analysis of his own sensations something more than the self-consciousness of talent—some element, let us say, of an almost religious fervour. This modern of the moderns, this _raffiné_ of _raffinés_, had a mystical strain in his composition. These hidden messages of a moment, these glimpses and intuitions of “la vraie vie” behind a veil, were of the utmost importance to him; he had some kind of immediate certainty of their validity. He confessed as much, and we are entitled to take a man so reticent at his word.