Swann's Way
am going to a friend's house to see King Theodosius arrive from her
windows; won't that be splendid?--and then, next day, I'm going to
_Michel Strogoff_, and after that it will soon be Christmas, and the New
Year holidays! Perhaps they'll take me south, to the Riviera; won't that
be nice? Though I should miss the Christmas-tree here; anyhow, if I do
stay in Paris, I sha'n't be coming here, because I shall be out paying
calls with Mamma. Good-bye--there's Papa calling me."
I returned home with Françoise through streets that were still gay with
sunshine, as on the evening of a holiday when the merriment is over. I
could scarcely drag my legs along.
"I'm not surprised;" said Françoise, "it's not the right weather for the
time of year; it's much too warm. Oh dear, oh dear, to think of all
the poor sick people there must be everywhere; you would think that up
there, too, everything's got out of order."
I repeated to myself, stifling my sobs, the words in which Gilberte had
given utterance to her joy at the prospect of not coming back, for a
long time, to the Champs-Elysées. But already the charm with which, by
the mere act of thinking, my mind was filled as soon as it thought of
her, the privileged position, unique even if it were painful, in which
I was inevitably placed in relation to Gilberte by the contraction of a
scar in my mind, had begun to add to that very mark of her indifference
something romantic, and in the midst of my tears my lips would shape
themselves in a smile which was indeed the timid outline of a kiss. And
when the time came for the postman I said to myself, that evening as on
every other: "I am going to have a letter from Gilberte, she is going to
tell me, at last, that she has never ceased to love me, and to explain
to me the mysterious reason by which she has been forced to conceal her
love from me until now, to put on the appearance of being able to be
happy without seeing me; the reason for which she has assumed the form
of the other Gilberte, who is simply a companion."
Every evening I would beguile myself into imagining this letter,
believing that I was actually reading it, reciting each of its sentences
in turn. Suddenly I would stop, in alarm. I had realised that, if I was
to receive a letter from Gilberte, it could not, in any case, be this
letter, since it was I myself who had just composed it. And from that
moment I would strive to keep my thoughts clear of the words which I
should have liked her to write to me, from fear lest, by first selecting
them myself, I should be excluding just those identical words,--the
dearest, the most desired--from the field of possible events. Even if,
by an almost impossible coincidence, it had been precisely the letter
of my invention that Gilberte had addressed to me of her own accord,
recognising my own work in it I should not have had the impression that
I was receiving something that had not originated in myself, something
real, something new, a happiness external to my mind, independent of my
will, a gift indeed from love.
While I waited I read over again a page which, although it had not been
written to me by Gilberte, came to me, none the less, from her, that
page by Bergotte upon the beauty of the old myths from which Racine
drew his inspiration, which (with the agate marble) I always kept within
reach. I was touched by my friend's kindness in having procured the book
for me; and as everyone is obliged to find some reason for his passion,
so much so that he is glad to find in the creature whom he loves
qualities which (he has learned by reading or in conversation) are
worthy to excite a man's love, that he assimilates them by imitation
and makes out of them fresh reasons for his love, even although these
qualities be diametrically opposed to those for which his love would
have sought, so long as it was spontaneous--as Swann, before my day, had
sought to establish the aesthetic basis of Odette's beauty--I, who had
at first loved Gilberte, in Combray days, on account of all the unknown
element in her life into which I would fain have plunged headlong, have
undergone reincarnation, discarding my own separate existence as a thing
that no longer mattered, I thought now, as of an inestimable advantage,
that of this, my own, my too familiar, my contemptible existence
Gilberte might one day become the humble servant, the kindly, the
comforting collaborator, who in the evenings, helping me in my work,
would collate for me the texts of rare pamphlets. As for Bergotte, that
infinitely wise, almost divine old man, because of whom I had first,
before I had even seen her, loved Gilberte, now it was for Gilberte's
sake, chiefly, that I loved him. With as much pleasure as the pages that
he had written about Racine, I studied the wrapper, folded under great
seals of white wax and tied with billows of pink ribbon, in which she
had brought those pages to me. I kissed the agate marble, which was
the better part of my love's heart, the part that was not frivolous but
faithful, and, for all that it was adorned with the mysterious charm of
Gilberte's life, dwelt close beside me, inhabited my chamber, shared my
bed. But the beauty of that stone, and the beauty also of those pages
of Bergotte which I was glad to associate with the idea of my love for
Gilberte, as if, in the moments when my love seemed no longer to have
any existence, they gave it a kind of consistency, were, I perceived,
anterior to that love, which they in no way resembled; their elements
had been determined by the writer's talent, or by geological laws,
before ever Gilberte had known me, nothing in book or stone would have
been different if Gilberte had not loved me, and there was nothing,
consequently, that authorised me to read in them a message of happiness.
And while my love, incessantly waiting for the morrow to bring a
confession of Gilberte's love for me, destroyed, unravelled every
evening, the ill-done work of the day, in some shadowed part of my being
was an unknown weaver who would not leave where they lay the severed
threads, but collected and rearranged them, without any thought of
pleasing me, or of toiling for my advantage, in the different order
which she gave to all her handiwork. Without any special interest in my
love, not beginning by deciding that I was loved, she placed, side by
side, those of Gilberte's actions that had seemed to me inexplicable and
her faults which I had excused. Then, one with another, they took on
a meaning. It seemed to tell me, this new arrangement, that when I saw
Gilberte, instead of coming to me in the Champs-Elysées, going to a
party, or on errands with her governess, when I saw her prepared for
an absence that would extend over the New Year holidays, I was wrong in
thinking, in saying: "It is because she is frivolous," or "easily lead."
For she would have ceased to be either if she had loved me, and if she
had been forced to obey it would have been with the same despair in
her heart that I felt on the days when I did not see her. It shewed me
further, this new arrangement, that I ought, after all, to know what
it was to love, since I loved Gilberte; it drew my attention to the
constant anxiety that I had to 'shew off' before her, by reason of which
I tried to persuade my mother to get for Françoise a waterproof coat and
a hat with a blue feather, or, better still, to stop sending with me to
the Champs-Elysées an attendant with whom I blushed to be seen (to all
of which my mother replied that I was not fair to Françoise, that
she was an excellent woman and devoted to us all) and also that sole,
exclusive need to see Gilberte, the result of which was that, months in
advance, I could think of nothing but how to find out at what date she
would be leaving Paris and where she was going, feeling that the most
attractive country in the world would be but a place of exile if she
were not to be there, and asking only to be allowed to stay for ever
in Paris, so long as I might see her in the Champs-Elysées; and it had
little difficulty in making me see that neither my anxiety nor my
need could be justified by anything in Gilberte's conduct. She, on the
contrary, was genuinely fond of her governess, without troubling herself
over what I might choose to think about it. It seemed quite natural to
her not to come to the Champs-Elysées if she had to go shopping with
Mademoiselle, delightful if she had to go out somewhere with her mother.
And even supposing that she would ever have allowed me to spend my
holidays in the same place as herself, when it came to choosing
that place she considered her parents' wishes, a thousand different
amusements of which she had been told, and not at all that it should be
the place to which my family were proposing to send me. When she assured
me (as sometimes happened) that she liked me less than some other of
her friends, less than she had liked me the day before, because by my
clumsiness I had made her side lose a game, I would beg her pardon, I
would beg her to tell me what I must do in order that she should begin
again to like me as much as, or more than the rest; I hoped to hear her
say that that was already my position; I besought her; as though she had
been able to modify her affection for me as she or I chose, to give me
pleasure, merely by the words that she would utter, as my good or bad
conduct should deserve. Was I, then, not yet aware that what I felt,
myself, for her, depended neither upon her actions nor upon my desires?
It shewed me finally, the new arrangement planned by my unseen weaver,
that, if we find ourselves hoping that the actions of a person who has
hitherto caused us anxiety may prove not to have been sincere, they shed
in their wake a light which our hopes are powerless to extinguish, a
light to which, rather than to our hopes, we must put the question, what
will be that person's actions on the morrow.
These new counsels, my love listened and heard them; they persuaded it
that the morrow would not be different from all the days that had gone
before; that Gilberte's feeling for me, too long established now to
be capable of alteration, was indifference; that in my friendship with
Gilberte, it was I alone who loved. "That is true," my love responded,
"there is nothing more to be made of that friendship. It will not alter
now." And so the very next day (unless I were to wait for a public
holiday, if there was one approaching, some anniversary, the New Year,
perhaps, one of those days which are not like other days, on which time
starts afresh, casting aside the heritage of the past, declining its
legacy of sorrows) I would appeal to Gilberte to terminate our old and
to join me in laying the foundations of a new friendship.
* * *
I had always, within reach, a plan of Paris, which, because I could see
drawn on it the street in which M. and Mme. Swann lived, seemed to me to
contain a secret treasure. And to please myself, as well as by a sort
of chivalrous loyalty, in any connection or with no relevance at all, I
would repeat the name of that street until my father, not being, like
my mother and grandmother, in the secret of my love, would ask: "But
why are you always talking about that street? There's nothing wonderful
about it. It is an admirable street to live in because it's only a few
minutes' walk from the Bois, but there are a dozen other streets just
the same."
I made every effort to introduce the name of Swann into my conversation
with my parents; in my own mind, of course, I never ceased to murmur it;
but I needed also to hear its exquisite sound, and to make myself
play that chord, the voiceless rendering of which did not suffice
me. Moreover, that name of Swann, with which I had for so long been
familiar, was to me now (as happens at times to people suffering from