de Guermantes. All the neighbours are talking about you. Besides, look how ill your grandmother is, you really have something more serious to think about than waylaying a woman who only laughs at you,” in a moment, like a hypnotist who brings one back from the distant country in which one imagined oneself to be, and opens one’s eyes for one, or like the doctor who, by recalling one to a sense of duty and reality, cures one of an imaginary disease in which one has been indulging one’s fancy, my mother had awakened me from an unduly protracted dream. The rest of the day had been consecrated to a last farewell to this malady which I was renouncing; I had sung, for hours on end and weeping as I sang, the sad words of Schubert’s “Adieu”:

Farewell, strange voices call thee

Away from me, dear sister of the angels.