Ever so long ago, before I had even thought of breaking with her daughter, Mme. Swann had said to me: “It is all very well your coming to see Gilberte; I should like you to come sometimes for my sake, not to my ‘kettledrums,’ which would bore you because there is such a crowd, but on the other days, when you will always find me at home if you come fairly late.” So that I might be thought, when I came to see her, to be yielding only after a long resistance to a desire which she had expressed in the past. And very late in the afternoon, when it was quite dark, almost at the hour at which my parents would be sitting down to dinner, I would set out to pay Mme. Swann a visit, in the course of which I knew that I should not see Gilberte, and yet should be thinking only of her. In that quarter, then looked upon as remote, of a Paris darker than Paris is today, where even in the centre there was no electric light in the public thoroughfares and very little in private houses, the lamps of a drawing-room situated on the ground level, or but slightly raised above it, as were the rooms in which Mme.