Swann's Way
belonged equally to her other companions and, when she used my surname,
to my parents, accessories of which her lips--by the effort that she
made, a little after her father's manner, to articulate the words to
which she wished to give a special value--had the air of stripping, of
divesting me, as one peels the skin from a fruit of which one is going
to put only the pulp into one's mouth, while her glance, adapting itself
to the same new degree of intimacy as her speech, fell on me also more
directly, not without testifying to the consciousness, the pleasure,
even the gratitude that it felt, accompanying itself with a smile.
But at that actual moment, I was not able to appreciate the worth of
these new pleasures. They were given, not by the little girl whom I
loved, to me who loved her, but by the other, her with whom I used to
play, to my other self, who possessed neither the memory of the true
Gilberte, nor the fixed heart which alone could have known the value
of a happiness for which it alone had longed. Even after I had returned
home I did not taste them, since, every day, the necessity which made
me hope that on the morrow I should arrive at the clear, calm, happy
contemplation of Gilberte, that she would at last confess her love
for me, explaining to me the reasons by which she had been obliged,
hitherto, to conceal it, that same necessity forced me to regard the
past as of no account, to look ahead of me only, to consider the little
advantages that she had given me not in themselves and as if they were
self-sufficient, but like fresh rungs of the ladder on which I might
set my feet, which were going to allow me to advance a step further and
finally to attain the happiness which I had not yet encountered.
If, at times, she shewed me these marks of her affection, she troubled
me also by seeming not to be pleased to see me, and this happened often
on the very days on which I had most counted for the realisation of my
hopes. I was sure that Gilberte was coming to the Champs-Elysées, and
I felt an elation which seemed merely the anticipation of a great
happiness when--going into the drawing-room in the morning to kiss
Mamma, who was already dressed to go out, the coils of her black hair
elaborately built up, and her beautiful hands, plump and white, fragrant
still with soap--I had been apprised, by seeing a column of dust
standing by itself in the air above the piano, and by hearing a
barrel-organ playing, beneath the window, _En revenant de la revue_,
that the winter had received, until nightfall, an unexpected, radiant
visit from a day of spring. While we sat at luncheon, by opening her
window, the lady opposite had sent packing, in the twinkling of an eye,
from beside my chair--to sweep in a single stride over the whole width
of our dining-room--a sunbeam which had lain down there for its midday
rest and returned to continue it there a moment later. At school, during
the one o'clock lesson, the sun made me sick with impatience and boredom
as it let fall a golden stream that crept to the edge of my desk, like
an invitation to the feast at which I could not myself arrive before
three o'clock, until the moment when Françoise came to fetch me at the
school-gate, and we made our way towards the Champs-Elysées through
streets decorated with sunlight, dense with people, over which the
balconies, detached by the sun and made vaporous, seemed to float in
front of the houses like clouds of gold. Alas! in the Champs-Elysées
I found no Gilberte; she had not yet arrived. Motionless, on the lawn
nurtured by the invisible sun which, here and there, kindled to a flame
the point of a blade of grass, while the pigeons that had alighted upon
it had the appearance of ancient sculptures which the gardener's pick
had heaved to the surface of a hallowed soil, I stood with my eyes fixed
on the horizon, expecting at every moment to see appear the form of
Gilberte following that of her governess, behind the statue that
seemed to be holding out the child, which it had in its arms, and which
glistened in the stream of light, to receive benediction from the
sun. The old lady who read the Débats was sitting on her chair, in her
invariable place, and had just accosted a park-keeper, with a friendly
wave of her hands towards him as she exclaimed "What a lovely day!" And
when the chair-woman came up to collect her penny, with an infinity of
smirks and affectations she folded the ticket away inside her glove,
as though it had been a posy of flowers, for which she had sought, in
gratitude to the donor, the most becoming place upon her person. When
she had found it, she performed a circular movement with her neck,
straightened her boa, and fastened upon the collector, as she shewed
her the end of yellow paper that stuck out over her bare wrist, the
bewitching smile with which a woman says to a young man, pointing to her
bosom: "You see, I'm wearing your roses!"
I dragged Françoise, on the way towards Gilberte, as far as the Arc
de Triomphe; we did not meet her, and I was returning towards the lawn
convinced, now, that she was not coming, when, in front of the wooden
horses, the little girl with the sharp voice flung herself upon me:
"Quick, quick, Gilberte's been here a quarter of an hour. She's just
going. We've been waiting for you, to make up a prisoner's base."
While I had been going up the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, Gilberte had
arrived by the Rue Boissy-d'Anglas, Mademoiselle having taken advantage
of the fine weather to go on some errand of her own; and M. Swann was
coming to fetch his daughter. And so it was my fault; I ought not to
have strayed from the lawn; for one never knew for certain from what
direction Gilberte would appear, whether she would be early or late, and
this perpetual tension succeeded in making more impressive not only the
Champs-Elysées in their entirety, and the whole span of the afternoon,
like a vast expanse of space and time, on every point and at every
moment of which it was possible that the form of Gilberte might appear,
but also that form itself, since behind its appearance I felt that there
lay concealed the reason for which it had shot its arrow into my heart
at four o'clock instead of at half-past two; crowned with a smart hat,
for paying calls, instead of the plain cap, for games; in front of the
Ambassadeurs and not between the two puppet-shows; I divined one of
those occupations in which I might not follow Gilberte, occupations
that forced her to go out or to stay at home, I was in contact with the
mystery of her unknown life. It was this mystery, too, which troubled
me when, running at the sharp-voiced girl's bidding, so as to begin our
game without more delay, I saw Gilberte, so quick and informal with
us, make a ceremonious bow to the old lady with the _Débats_ (who
acknowledged it with "What a lovely sun! You'd think there was a fire
burning.") speaking to her with a shy smile, with an air of constraint
which called to my mind the other little girl that Gilberte must be when
at home with her parents, or with friends of her parents, paying
visits, in all the rest, that escaped me, of her existence. But of that
existence no one gave me so strong an impression as did M. Swann, who
came a little later to fetch his daughter. That was because he and Mme.
Swann--inasmuch as their daughter lived with them, as her lessons,
her games, her friendships depended upon them--contained for me, like
Gilberte, perhaps even more than Gilberte, as befitted subjects that had
an all-powerful control over her in whom it must have had its source, an
undefined, an inaccessible quality of melancholy charm. Everything that
concerned them was on my part the object of so constant a preoccupation
that the days on which, as on this day, M. Swann (whom I had seen so
often, long ago, without his having aroused my curiosity, when he
was still on good terms with my parents) came for Gilberte to the
Champs-Elysées, once the pulsations to which my heart had been excited
by the appearance of his grey hat and hooded cape had subsided, the
sight of him still impressed me as might that of an historic personage,
upon whom one had just been studying a series of books, and the smallest
details of whose life one learned with enthusiasm. His relations with
the Comte de Paris, which, when I heard them discussed at Combray,
seemed to me unimportant, became now in my eyes something marvellous,
as if no one else had ever known the House of Orleans; they set him
in vivid detachment against the vulgar background of pedestrians
of different classes, who encumbered that particular path in the
Champs-Elysées, in the midst of whom I admired his condescending to
figure without claiming any special deference, which as it happened none
of them dreamed of paying him, so profound was the incognito in which he
was wrapped.
He responded politely to the salutations of Gilberte's companions, even
to mine, for all that he was no longer on good terms with my family,
but without appearing to know who I was. (This reminded me that he had
constantly seen me in the country; a memory which I had retained, but
kept out of sight, because, since I had seen Gilberte again, Swann had
become to me pre-eminently her father, and no longer the Combray Swann;
as the ideas which, nowadays, I made his name connote were different
from the ideas in the system of which it was formerly comprised, which
I utilised not at all now when I had occasion to think of him, he had
become a new, another person; still I attached him by an artificial
thread, secondary and transversal, to our former guest; and as nothing
had any longer any value for me save in the extent to which my love
might profit by it, it was with a spasm of shame and of regret at not
being able to erase them from my memory that I recaptured the years in
which, in the eyes of this same Swann who was at this moment before me
in the Champs-Elysées, and to whom, fortunately, Gilberte had perhaps
not mentioned my name, I had so often, in the evenings, made myself
ridiculous by sending to ask Mamma to come upstairs to my room to say
good-night to me, while she was drinking coffee with him and my father
and my grandparents at the table in the garden.) He told Gilberte that
she might play one game; he could wait for a quarter of an hour; and,
sitting down, just like anyone else, on an iron chair, paid for his
ticket with that hand which Philippe VII had so often held in his own,
while we began our game upon the lawn, scattering the pigeons, whose
beautiful, iridescent bodies (shaped like hearts and, surely, the lilacs
of the feathered kingdom) took refuge as in so many sanctuaries, one on
the great basin of stone, on which its beak, as it disappeared below the
rim, conferred the part, assigned the purpose of offering to the bird in
abundance the fruit or grain at which it appeared to be pecking, another
on the head of the statue, which it seemed to crown with one of those
enamelled objects whose polychrome varies in certain classical works
the monotony of the stone, and with an attribute which, when the goddess
bears it, entitles her to a particular epithet and makes of her, as a
different Christian name makes of a mortal, a fresh divinity.
On one of these sunny days which had not realised my hopes, I had not
the courage to conceal my disappointment from Gilberte.
"I had ever so many things to ask you," I said to her; "I thought that
to-day was going to mean so much in our friendship. And no sooner have
you come than you go away! Try to come early to-morrow, so that I can
talk to you."
Her face lighted up and she jumped for joy as she answered: "Tomorrow,
you may make up your mind, my dear friend, I sha'n't come!
"First of all I've a big luncheon-party; then in the afternoon I