Swann's Way
in such weather--it seemed to me as touching as if, on one of those days
on which she had been invited to a party, she had given it up in order
to come to me in the Champs-Elysées; I acquired more confidence in the
vitality, in the future of a friendship which could remain so much alive
amid the torpor, the solitude, the decay of our surroundings; and while
she dropped pellets of snow down my neck, I smiled lovingly at what
seemed to me at once a predilection that she shewed for me in thus
tolerating me as her travelling companion in this new, this wintry land,
and a sort of loyalty to me which she preserved through evil times.
Presently, one after another, like shyly hopping sparrows, her friends
arrived, black against the snow. We got ready to play and, since this
day which had begun so sadly was destined to end in joy, as I went up,
before the game started, to the friend with the sharp voice whom I had
heard, that first day, calling Gilberte by name, she said to me: "No,
no, I'm sure you'd much rather be in Gilberte's camp; besides, look,
she's signalling to you." She was in fact summoning me to cross the
snowy lawn to her camp, to 'take the field,' which the sun, by casting
over it a rosy gleam, the metallic lustre of old and worn brocades, had
turned into a Field of the Cloth of Gold.
This day, which I had begun with so many misgivings, was, as it
happened, one of the few on which I was not unduly wretched.
For, although I no longer thought, now, of anything save not to let a
single day pass without seeing Gilberte (so much so that once, when my
grandmother had not come home by dinner-time, I could not resist the
instinctive reflection that, if she had been run over in the street
and killed, I should not for some time be allowed to play in the
Champs-Elysées; when one is in love one has no love left for anyone),
yet those moments which I spent in her company, for which I had waited
with so much impatience all night and morning, for which I had quivered
with excitement, to which I would have sacrificed everything else in the
world, were by no means happy moments; well did I know it, for they
were the only moments in my life on which I concentrated a scrupulous,
undistracted attention, and yet I could not discover in them one atom
of pleasure. All the time that I was away from Gilberte, I wanted to see
her, because, having incessantly sought to form a mental picture of her,
I was unable, in the end, to do so, and did not know exactly to what my
love corresponded. Besides, she had never yet told me that she loved me.
Far from it, she had often boasted that she knew other little boys whom
she preferred to myself, that I was a good companion, with whom she was
always willing to play, although I was too absent-minded, not attentive
enough to the game. Moreover, she had often shewn signs of apparent
coldness towards me, which might have shaken my faith that I was for her
a creature different from the rest, had that faith been founded upon a
love that Gilberte had felt for me, and not, as was the case, upon
the love that I felt for her, which strengthened its resistance to the
assaults of doubt by making it depend entirely upon the manner in which
I was obliged, by an internal compulsion, to think of Gilberte. But my
feelings with regard to her I had never yet ventured to express to her
in words. Of course, on every page of my exercise-books, I wrote out,
in endless repetition, her name and address, but at the sight of those
vague lines which I might trace, without her having to think, on that
account, of me, I felt discouraged, because they spoke to me, not of
Gilberte, who would never so much as see them, but of my own desire,
which they seemed to shew me in its true colours, as something purely
personal, unreal, tedious and ineffective. The most important thing
was that we should see each other, Gilberte and I, and should have an
opportunity of making a mutual confession of our love which, until then,
would not officially (so to speak) have begun. Doubtless the various
reasons which made me so impatient to see her would have appeared less
urgent to a grown man. As life goes on, we acquire such adroitness in
the culture of our pleasures, that we content ourselves with that which
we derive from thinking of a woman, as I was thinking of Gilberte,
without troubling ourselves to ascertain whether the image corresponds
to the reality,--and with the pleasure of loving her, without needing to
be sure, also, that she loves us; or again that we renounce the pleasure
of confessing our passion for her, so as to preserve and enhance the
passion that she has for us, like those Japanese gardeners who, to
obtain one perfect blossom, will sacrifice the rest. But at the period
when I was in love with Gilberte, I still believed that Love did really
exist, apart from ourselves; that, allowing us, at the most, to surmount
the obstacles in our way, it offered us its blessings in an order in
which we were not free to make the least alteration; it seemed to me
that if I had, on my own initiative, substituted for the sweetness of
a confession a pretence of indifference, I should not only have been
depriving myself of one of the joys of which I had most often dreamed,
I should have been fabricating, of my own free will, a love that was
artificial and without value, that bore no relation to the truth, whose
mysterious and foreordained ways I should thus have been declining to
follow.
But when I arrived at the Champs-Elysées,--and, as at first sight
it appeared, was in a position to confront my love, so as to make it
undergo the necessary modifications, with its living and independent
cause--as soon as I was in the presence of that Gilberte Swann on the
sight of whom I had counted to revive the images that my tired memory
had lost and could not find again, of that Gilberte Swann with whom I
had been playing the day before, and whom I had just been prompted to
greet, and then to recognise, by a blind instinct like that which, when
we are walking, sets one foot before the other, without giving us time
to think what we are doing, then at once it became as though she and the
little girl who had inspired my dreams had been two different people.
If, for instance, I had retained in my memory overnight two fiery eyes
above plump and rosy cheeks, Gilberte's face would now offer me (and
with emphasis) something that I distinctly had not remembered, a
certain sharpening and prolongation of the nose which, instantaneously
associating itself with certain others of her features, assumed the
importance of those characteristics which, in natural history, are used
to define a species, and transformed her into a little girl of the kind
that have sharpened profiles. While I was making myself ready to take
advantage of this long expected moment, and to surrender myself to the
impression of Gilberte which I had prepared beforehand but could no
longer find in my head, to an extent which would enable me, during the
long hours which I must spend alone, to be certain that it was indeed
herself whom I had in mind, that it was indeed my love for her that I
was gradually making grow, as a book grows when one is writing it, she
threw me a ball; and, like the idealist philosopher whose body takes
account of the external world in the reality of which his intellect
declines to believe, the same self which had made me salute her before I
had identified her now urged me to catch the ball that she tossed to me
(as though she had been a companion, with whom I had come to play, and
not a sister-soul with whom my soul had come to be united), made me,
out of politeness, until the time came when she had to I go, address
a thousand polite and trivial remarks to her, and so prevented me both
from keeping a silence in which I might at last have laid my hand upon
the indispensable, escaped idea, and from uttering the words which might
have made that definite progress in the course of our love on which I
was always obliged to count only for the following afternoon. There was,
however, an occasional development. One day, we had gone with Gilberte
to the stall of our own special vendor, who was always particularly
nice to us, since it was to her that M. Swann used to send for his
gingerbread, of which, for reasons of health (he suffered from a racial
eczema, and from the constipation of the prophets), he consumed a great
quantity,--Gilberte pointed out to me with a laugh two little boys who
were like the little artist and the little naturalist in the children's
storybooks. For one of them would not have a red stick of rock because
he preferred the purple, while the other, with tears in his eyes,
refused a plum which his nurse was buying for him, because, as he
finally explained in passionate tones: "I want the other plum; it's got
a worm in it!" I purchased two ha'penny marbles. With admiring eyes I
saw, luminous and imprisoned in a bowl by themselves, the agate marbles
which seemed precious to me because they were as fair and smiling as
little girls, and because they cost five-pence each. Gilberte, who was
given a great deal more pocket money than I ever had, asked me which I
thought the prettiest. They were as transparent, as liquid-seeming as
life itself. I would not have had her sacrifice a single one of them.
I should have liked her to be able to buy them, to liberate them all.
Still, I pointed out one that had the same colour as her eyes. Gilberte
took it, turned it about until it shone with a ray of gold, fondled it,
paid its ransom, but at once handed me her captive, saying: "Take it; it
is for you, I give it to you, keep it to remind yourself of me."
Another time, being still obsessed by the desire to hear Berma in
classic drama, I had asked her whether she had not a copy of a pamphlet
in which Bergotte spoke of Racine, and which was now out of print. She
had told me to let her know the exact title of it, and that evening
I had sent her a little telegram, writing on its envelope the name,
Gilberte Swann, which I had so often traced in my exercise-books. Next
day she brought me in a parcel tied with pink bows and sealed with white
wax, the pamphlet, a copy of which she had managed to find. "You see, it
is what you asked me for," she said, taking from her muff the telegram
that I had sent her. But in the address on the pneumatic message--which,
only yesterday, was nothing, was merely a 'little blue' that I had
written, and, after a messenger had delivered it to Gilberte's porter
and a servant had taken it to her in her room, had become a thing
without value or distinction, one of the 'little blues' that she had
received in the course of the day--I had difficulty in recognising
the futile, straggling lines of my own handwriting beneath the circles
stamped on it at the post-office, the inscriptions added in pencil by
a postman, signs of effectual realisation, seals of the external world,
violet bands symbolical of life itself, which for the first time came to
espouse, to maintain, to raise, to rejoice my dream.
And there was another day on which she said to me: "You know, you may
call me 'Gilberte'; in any case, I'm going to call you by your first
name. It's too silly not to." Yet she continued for a while to address
me by the more formal '_vous_,' and, when I drew her attention to this,
smiled, and composing, constructing a phrase like those that are put
into the grammar-books of foreign languages with no other object than to
teach us to make use of a new word, ended it with my Christian name. And
when I recalled, later, what I had felt at the time, I could distinguish
the impression of having been held, for a moment, in her mouth, myself,
naked, without, any longer, any of the social qualifications which