Françoise had taken me for an excursion--across the frontier guarded at
regular intervals by the little bastions of the barley-sugar women--into
those neighbouring but foreign regions, where the faces of the
passers-by were strange, where the goat-carriage went past; then she had
gone away to lay down her things on a chair that stood with its back to
a shrubbery of laurels; while I waited for her I was pacing the broad
lawn, of meagre close-cropped grass already faded by the sun, dominated,
at its far end, by a statue rising from a fountain, in front of which a
little girl with reddish hair was playing with a shuttlecock; when, from
the path, another little girl, who was putting on her cloak and covering
up her battledore, called out sharply: "Good-bye, Gilberte, I'm going
home now; don't forget, we're coming to you this evening, after dinner."
The name Gilberte passed close by me, evoking all the more forcibly her
whom it labelled in that it did not merely refer to her, as one speaks
of a man in his absence, but was directly addressed to her; it passed
thus close by me, in action, so to speak, with a force that
increased with the curve of its trajectory and as it drew near to
its target;--carrying in its wake, I could feel, the knowledge, the
impression of her to whom it was addressed that belonged not to me but
to the friend who called to her, everything that, while she uttered the
words, she more or less vividly reviewed, possessed in her memory, of
their daily intimacy, of the visits that they paid to each other, of
that unknown existence which was all the more inaccessible, all the more
painful to me from being, conversely, so familiar, so tractable to this
happy girl who let her message brush past me without my being able to
penetrate its surface, who flung it on the air with a light-hearted cry:
letting float in the atmosphere the delicious attar which that message
had distilled, by touching them with precision, from certain invisible
points in Mlle. Swann's life, from the evening to come, as it would be,
after dinner, at her home,--forming, on its celestial passage through
the midst of the children and their nursemaids, a little cloud,
exquisitely coloured, like the cloud that, curling over one of Poussin's
gardens, reflects minutely, like a cloud in the opera, teeming with
chariots and horses, some apparition of the life of the gods; casting,
finally, on that ragged grass, at the spot on which she stood (at once a
scrap of withered lawn and a moment in the afternoon of the fair player,
who continued to beat up and catch her shuttlecock until a governess,
with a blue feather in her hat, had called her away) a marvellous little
band of light, of the colour of heliotrope, spread over the lawn like a
carpet on which I could not tire of treading to and fro with lingering
feet, nostalgic and profane, while Françoise shouted: "Come on, button
up your coat, look, and let's get away!" and I remarked for the first
time how common her speech was, and that she had, alas, no blue feather
in her hat.
Only, would _she_ come again to the Champs-Elysées? Next day she was
not there; but I saw her on the following days; I spent all my time
revolving round the spot where she was at play with her friends, to such
effect that once, when, they found, they were not enough to make up a
prisoner's base, she sent one of them to ask me if I cared to complete
their side, and from that day I played with her whenever she came.
But this did not happen every day; there were days when she had
been prevented from coming by her lessons, by her catechism, by a
luncheon-party, by the whole of that life, separated from my own, which
twice only, condensed into the name of Gilberte, I had felt pass so
painfully close to me, in the hawthorn lane near Combray and on the
grass of the Champs-Elysées. On such days she would have told us
beforehand that we should not see her; if it were because of her
lessons, she would say: "It is too tiresome, I sha'n't be able to come
to-morrow; you will all be enjoying yourselves here without me," with an
air of regret which to some extent consoled me; if, on the other hand,
she had been invited to a party, and I, not knowing this, asked her
whether she was coming to play with us, she would reply: "Indeed I hope
not! Indeed I hope Mamma will let me go to my friend's." But on these
days I did at least know that I should not see her, whereas on others,
without any warning, her mother would take her for a drive, or some such
thing, and next day she would say: "Oh, yes! I went out with Mamma,"
as though it had been the most natural thing in the world, and not the
greatest possible misfortune for some one else. There were also the days
of bad weather on which her governess, afraid, on her own account, of
the rain, would not bring Gilberte to the Champs-Elysées.
And so, if the heavens were doubtful, from early morning I would not
cease to interrogate them, observing all the omens. If I saw the lady
opposite, just inside her window, putting on her hat, I would say to
myself: "That lady is going out; it must, therefore, be weather in which
one can go out. Why should not Gilberte do the same as that lady?" But
the day grew dark. My mother said that it might clear again, that one
burst of sunshine would be enough, but that more probably it would rain;
and if it rained, of what use would it be to go to the Champs-Elysées?
And so, from breakfast-time, my anxious eyes never left the uncertain,
clouded sky. It remained dark. Outside the window, the balcony was grey.
Suddenly, on its sullen stone, I did not indeed see a less negative
colour, but I felt as it were an effort towards a less negative colour,
the pulsation of a hesitating ray that struggled to discharge its light.
A moment later the balcony was as pale and luminous as a standing water
at dawn, and a thousand shadows from the iron-work of its balustrade had
come to rest on it. A breath of wind dispersed them; the stone grew
dark again, but, like tamed creatures, they returned; they began,
imperceptibly, to grow lighter, and by one of those continuous
crescendos, such as, in music, at the end of an overture, carry a single
note to the extreme fortissimo, making it pass rapidly through all the
intermediate stages, I saw it attain to that fixed, unalterable gold of
fine days, on which the sharply cut shadows of the wrought iron of the
balustrade were outlined in black like a capricious vegetation, with a
fineness in the delineation of their smallest details which seemed to
indicate a deliberate application, an artist's satisfaction, and with so
much relief, so velvety a bloom in the restfulness of their sombre
and happy mass that in truth those large and leafy shadows which lay
reflected on that lake of sunshine seemed aware that they were pledges
of happiness and peace of mind.
Brief, fading ivy, climbing, fugitive flora, the most colourless, the
most depressing, to many minds, of all that creep on walls or decorate
windows; to me the dearest of them all, from the day when it appeared
upon our balcony, like the very shadow of the presence of Gilberte,
who was perhaps already in the Champs-Elysées, and as soon as I arrived
there would greet me with: "Let's begin at once. You are on my side."
Frail, swept away by a breath, but at the same time in harmony, not with
the season, with the hour; a promise of that immediate pleasure which
the day will deny or fulfil, and thereby of the one paramount immediate
pleasure, the pleasure of loving and of being loved; more soft,
more warm upon the stone than even moss is; alive, a ray of sunshine
sufficing for its birth, and for the birth of joy, even in the heart of
winter.
And on those days when all other vegetation had disappeared, when the
fine jerkins of green leather which covered the trunks of the old trees
were hidden beneath the snow; after the snow had ceased to fall, but
when the sky was still too much overcast for me to hope that Gilberte
would venture out, then suddenly--inspiring my mother to say: "Look,
it's quite fine now; I think you might perhaps try going to the
Champs-Elysées after all."--on the mantle of snow that swathed the
balcony, the sun had appeared and was stitching seams of gold, with
embroidered patches of dark shadow. That day we found no one there, or
else a solitary girl, on the point of departure, who assured me that
Gilberte was not coming. The chairs, deserted by the imposing but
uninspiring company of governesses, stood empty. Only, near the grass,
was sitting a lady of uncertain age who came in all weathers, dressed
always in an identical style, splendid and sombre, to make whose
acquaintance I would have, at that period, sacrificed, had it lain in my
power, all the greatest opportunities in my life to come. For Gilberte
went up every day to speak to her; she used to ask Gilberte for news of
her "dearest mother" and it struck me that, if I had known her, I should
have been for Gilberte some one wholly different, some one who knew
people in her parents' world. While her grandchildren played together at
a little distance, she would sit and read the Débats, which she called
"My old _Débats_!" as, with an aristocratic familiarity, she would say,
speaking of the police-sergeant or the woman who let the chairs, "My
old friend the police-sergeant," or "The chair-keeper and I, who are old
friends."
Françoise found it too cold to stand about, so we walked to the Pont
de la Concorde to see the Seine frozen over, on to which everyone, even
children, walked fearlessly, as though upon an enormous whale, stranded,
defenceless, and about to be cut up. We returned to the Champs-Elysées;
I was growing sick with misery between the motionless wooden horses and
the white lawn, caught in a net of black paths from which the snow had
been cleared, while the statue that surmounted it held in its hand a
long pendent icicle which seemed to explain its gesture. The old lady
herself, having folded up her _Débats_, asked a passing nursemaid
the time, thanking her with "How very good of you!" then begged the
road-sweeper to tell her grandchildren to come, as she felt cold, adding
"A thousand thanks. I am sorry to give you so much trouble!" Suddenly
the sky was rent in two: between the punch-and-judy and the horses,
against the opening horizon, I had just seen, like a miraculous sign,
Mademoiselle's blue feather. And now Gilberte was running at full speed
towards me, sparkling and rosy beneath a cap trimmed with fur, enlivened
by the cold, by being late, by her anxiety for a game; shortly before
she reached me, she slipped on a piece of ice and, either to regain her
balance, or because it appeared to her graceful, or else pretending
that she was on skates, it was with outstretched arms that she smilingly
advanced, as though to embrace me. "Bravo! bravo! that's splendid;
'topping,' I should say, like you--'sporting,' I suppose I ought to say,
only I'm a hundred-and-one, a woman of the old school," exclaimed the
lady, uttering, on behalf of the voiceless Champs-Elysées, their thanks
to Gilberte for having come, without letting herself be frightened
away by the weather. "You are like me, faithful at all costs to our old
Champs-Elysées; we are two brave souls! You wouldn't believe me, I dare
say, if I told you that I love them, even like this. This snow (I know,
you'll laugh at me), it makes me think of ermine!" And the old lady
began to laugh herself.
The first of these days--to which the snow, a symbol of the powers that
were able to deprive me of the sight of Gilberte, imparted the sadness
of a day of separation, almost the aspect of a day of departure, because
it changed the outward form and almost forbade the use of the customary
scene of our only encounters, now altered, covered, as it were, in
dust-sheets--that day, none the less, marked a stage in the progress of
my love, for it was, in a sense, the first sorrow that she was to share
with me. There were only our two selves of our little company, and to
be thus alone with her was not merely like a beginning of intimacy, but
also on her part--as though she had come there solely to please me, and
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
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.