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
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
aphasia, in the case of the most ordinary words) the name of something
new. It was for ever present in my mind, which could not, however, grow
accustomed to it. I analysed it, I spelt it; its orthography came to me
as a surprise. And with its familiarity it had simultaneously lost its
innocence. The pleasure that I derived from the sound of it I felt to
be so guilty, that it seemed to me as though the others must read my
thoughts, and would change the conversation if I endeavoured to guide it
in that direction. I fell back upon subjects which still brought me into
touch with Gilberte, I eternally repeated the same words, and it was no
use my knowing that they were but words--words uttered in her absence,
which she could not hear, words without virtue in themselves, repeating
what were, indeed, facts, but powerless to modify them--for still
it seemed to me that by dint of handling, of stirring in this way
everything that had reference to Gilberte, I might perhaps make emerge
from it something that would bring me happiness. I told my parents again
that Gilberte was very fond of her governess, as if the statement, when
repeated for the hundredth time, would at last have the effect of making
Gilberte suddenly burst into the room, come to live with us for ever.
I had already sung the praises of the old lady who read the _Débats_
(I had hinted to my parents that she must at least be an Ambassador's
widow, if not actually a Highness) and I continued to descant on her
beauty, her splendour, her nobility, until the day on which I mentioned
that, by what I had heard Gilberte call her, she appeared to be a Mme.
Blatin.
"Oh, now I know whom you mean," cried my mother, while I felt myself
grow red all over with shame. "On guard! on guard!--as your grandfather
says. And so it's she that you think so wonderful? Why, she's perfectly
horrible, and always has been. She's the widow of a bailiff. You can't
remember, when you were little, all the trouble I used to have to avoid
her at your gymnastic lessons, where she was always trying to get hold
of me--I didn't know the woman, of course--to tell me that you were
'much too nice-looking for a boy.' She has always had an insane desire
to get to know people, and she must be quite insane, as I have always
thought, if she really does know Mme. Swann. For even if she does come
of very common people, I have never heard anything said against her
character. But she must always be forcing herself upon strangers. She
is, really, a horrible woman, frightfully vulgar, and besides, she is
always creating awkward situations."