In Search of Lost Time, Volume II

by Marcel Proust

  During those periods in which grief and bitterness of spirit, though steadily diminishing, still persist, a distinction must be drawn between the pain which comes to us from the constant thought of the beloved herself and that which is revived by certain memories, some cruel remark, some verb used in a letter that we have had from her. Pending the description, in the context of another and later love affair, of the various forms that pain can assume, suffice it to say that, of these two kinds, the former is infinitely the less cruel. That is because our conception of the person, still living within us, is there adorned with the halo with which we are bound before long to invest her, and is imprinted if not with the frequent solace of hope, at any rate with the tranquillity of a permanent sadness. (It must also be observed that the image of a person who makes us suffer counts for little in those complications which aggravate the unhappiness of love, prolong it and prevent our recovery, just as in certain maladies the cause is out of proportion to the fever which follows it and the slowness of the process of convalescence.) But if the idea of the person we love is reflected in the light of an intelligence that is on the whole optimistic, the same is not true of those particular memories, those cruel remarks, that hostile letter (I received only one that could be so described from Gilberte); it is as though the person herself dwelt in those fragments, however limited, multiplied to a power which she is far from possessing in the habitual image we form of her as a whole. Because the letter has not—as the image of the loved one has—been contemplated by us in the melancholy calm of regret; we have read it, devoured it in the fearful anguish with which we were wrung by an unforeseen misfortune. Sorrows of this sort come to us in another way—from without—and it is by way of the most cruel suffering that they have penetrated to our hearts. The picture of the beloved in our minds which we believe to be old, original, authentic, has in reality been refashioned by us many times over. The cruel memory, on the other hand, is not contemporaneous with the restored picture, it is of another age, it is one of the rare witnesses to a monstrous past. But inasmuch as this past continues to exist, save in ourselves who have been pleased to substitute for it a miraculous golden age, a paradise in which all mankind shall be reconciled, those memories, those letters carry us back to reality, and cannot but make us feel, by the sudden pang they give us, what a long way we have been borne from that reality by the baseless hopes engendered by our daily expectation. Not that the said reality is bound always to remain the same, though that does indeed happen at times. There are in our lives any number of women whom we have never sought to see again, and who have quite naturally responded to our in no way calculated silence with a silence as profound. Only in their case, since we never loved them, we have never counted the years spent apart from them, and this instance, which would invalidate our whole argument, we are inclined to forget when we consider the healing effect of isolation, just as people who believe in presentiments forget all the occasions on which their own have not come true.

  But after a time, absence may prove efficacious. The desire, the appetite for seeing us again may after all be reborn in the heart which at present contemns us. Only, we must allow time. But our demands as far as time is concerned are no less exorbitant than those which the heart requires in order to change. For one thing, time is the very thing that we are least willing to allow, for our suffering is acute and we are anxious to see it brought to an end. And then, too, the time which the other heart will need in order to change will have been spent by our own heart in changing itself too, so that when the goal we had set ourselves becomes attainable it will have ceased to be our goal. Besides, the very idea that it will be attainable, that there is no happiness that, when it has ceased to be a happiness for us, we cannot ultimately attain, contains an element, but only an element, of truth. It falls to us when we have grown indifferent to it. But the very fact of our indifference will have made us less exacting, and enabled us in retrospect to feel convinced that it would have delighted us had it come at a time when perhaps it would have seemed to us miserably inadequate. One is not very particular, nor a very good judge, about things which no longer matter to one. The friendly overtures of a person whom we no longer love, overtures which in our indifference strike us as excessive, would perhaps have fallen a long way short of satisfying our love. Those tender words, that offer to meet us, we think only of the pleasure which they would have given us, and not of all those other words and meetings by which we should have wished to see them immediately followed, and which by this greed of ours we might perhaps have prevented from ever happening. So that we can never be certain that the happiness which comes to us too late, when we can no longer enjoy it, when we are no longer in love, is altogether the same as that same happiness the lack of which made us at one time so unhappy. There is only one person who could decide this—our then self; it is no longer with us, and were it to reappear, no doubt our happiness—identical or not—would vanish.

  Pending these belated fulfilments of a dream about which I should by then have ceased to care, by dint of inventing, as in the days when I still hardly knew Gilberte, words or letters in which she implored my forgiveness, swore that she had never loved anyone but myself and besought me to marry her, a series of pleasant images incessantly renewed came by degrees to hold a larger place in my mind than the vision of Gilberte and the young man, which had nothing now to feed upon. At this point I should perhaps have resumed my visits to Mme Swann but for a dream I had in which one of my friends, who was not, however, one that I could identify, behaved with the utmost treachery towards me and appeared to believe that I had been treacherous to him. Abruptly awakened by the pain which this dream had caused me, and finding that it persisted after I was awake, I turned my thoughts back to the dream, racked my brains to remember who the friend was that I had seen in my sleep and whose name—a Spanish name—was no longer distinct. Combining Joseph’s part with Pharaoh’s, I set to work to interpret my dream. I knew that in many cases it is a mistake to pay too much attention to the appearance of the people one saw in one’s dream, who may perhaps have been disguised or have exchanged faces, like those mutilated saints in cathedrals which ignorant archaeologists have restored, fitting the head of one to the body of another and jumbling all their attributes and names. Those that people bear in a dream are apt to mislead us. The person whom we love is to be recognised only by the intensity of the pain that we suffer. From mine I learned that, transformed while I was asleep into a young man, the person whose recent betrayal still hurt me was Gilberte. I remembered then that, the last time I had seen her, on the day when her mother had forbidden her to go out to a dancing lesson, she had, whether in sincerity or in pretence, declined, laughing in a strange manner, to believe in the genuineness of my feelings for her. And by association this memory brought back to me another. Long before that, it was Swann who had not wished to believe in my sincerity, or that I was a suitable friend for Gilberte. In vain had I written to him, Gilberte had brought back my letter and had returned it to me with the same incomprehensible laugh. She had not returned it to me at once: I remembered now the whole of that scene behind the clump of laurels. One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy. Gilberte’s present antipathy for me seemed to me a punishment meted out to me by life for my conduct that afternoon. One thinks one can escape such punishments because one is careful when crossing the street, and avoids obvious dangers. But there are others that take effect within us. The accident comes from the direction one least expected, from inside, from the heart. Gilberte’s words: “If you like, we might go on wrestling,” made me shudder. I imagined her behaving like that, at home perhaps, in the linen-room, with the young man whom I had seen escorting her along the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. And so, just as much as to believe (as I had a little time back) that I was calmly established in a state of happiness, it had been foolish in me, now that I had abandoned all thought of happiness, to take it for granted that at least I had become and would be able to remain calm. For, so long as our he
art keeps enshrined with any permanence the image of another person, it is not only our happiness that may at any moment be destroyed; when that happiness has vanished, when we have suffered and then succeeded in anaesthetising our sufferings, the thing then that is as elusive, as precarious as ever our happiness was, is calm. Mine returned to me in the end, for the cloud which, affecting one’s spirits, one’s desires, has entered one’s mind under cover of a dream, will also in course of time dissolve: permanence and stability being assured to nothing in this world, not even to grief. Besides, those who suffer through love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians. Since consolation can come to them only from the person who is the cause of their grief, and since their grief is an emanation from that person, it is in their grief itself that they must in the end find a remedy: which it will disclose to them at a given moment, for as long as they turn it over in their minds, this grief will continue to show them fresh aspects of the loved, the regretted person, at one moment so intensely hateful that one has no longer the slightest desire to see her since before finding enjoyment in her company one would have to make her suffer, at another so sweet and gentle that one gives her credit for the virtue one attributes to her, and finds in it a fresh reason for hope. But even though the anguish that had re-awakened in me did at length subside, I no longer wished—except rarely—to visit Mme Swann. In the first place because, in those who love and have been forsaken, the state of incessant—even if unconfessed—expectancy in which they live undergoes a spontaneous transformation, and, while to all appearances unchanged, substitutes for its original state a second that is precisely the opposite. The first was the consequence, the reflection of the painful incidents which had upset us. Expectation of what may happen is mingled with fear, all the more since we desire at that moment, should we hear nothing new from the loved one, to act ourselves, and are none too confident of the success of a step which, once we have taken it, we may find it impossible to follow up. But presently, without our having noticed any change, expectation, which still endures, is sustained, we discover, no longer by our recollection of the painful past but by anticipation of an imaginary future. From then on, it is almost pleasant. Besides, the first state, by continuing for some time, has accustomed us to living in expectation. The pain we felt during those last meetings survives in us still, but is already lulled to sleep. We are in no hurry to arouse it, especially as we do not see very clearly what to ask for now. The possession of a little more of the woman we love would only make more necessary to us the part that we do not possess, which would inevitably remain, in spite of everything, since our requirements are begotten of our satisfactions, an irreducible quantity.

  Another, final reason came later on to reinforce this, and to make me discontinue altogether my visits to Mme Swann. This reason, slow in revealing itself, was not that I had yet forgotten Gilberte but that I must make every effort to forget her as speedily as possible. No doubt, now that the keen edge of my suffering was dulled, my visits to Mme Swann had become once again, for the residue of my sadness, the sedative and distraction which had been so precious to me at first. But the reason for the efficacy of the former was the drawback of the latter, namely that with these visits the memory of Gilberte was intimately blended. The distraction would be of no avail to me unless it set up, in opposition to a feeling no longer nourished by Gilberte’s presence, thoughts, interests, passions in which Gilberte had no part. These states of consciousness to which the person whom we love remains a stranger then occupy a place which, however small it may be at first, is always that much reconquered from the love that had been in unchallenged possession of our whole soul. We must seek to encourage these thoughts, to make them grow, while the sentiment which is no more now than a memory dwindles, so that the new elements introduced into the mind contest with that sentiment, wrest from it an ever-increasing portion of our soul, until at last the victory is complete. I realised that this was the only way in which my love could be killed, and I was still young enough and brave enough to undertake the attempt, to subject myself to that most cruel grief which springs from the certainty that, however long it may take us, we shall succeed in the end. The reason I now gave in my letters to Gilberte for refusing to see her was an allusion to some mysterious misunderstanding, wholly fictitious, which was supposed to have arisen between her and myself, and as to which I had hoped at first that Gilberte would demand an explanation. But, in fact, never, even in the most insignificant relations in life, does a request for enlightenment come from a correspondent who knows that an obscure, untruthful, incriminating sentence has been introduced on purpose, so that he shall protest against it; he is only too happy to feel thereby that he possesses—and to keep in his own hands—the initiative in the matter. All the more so is this true in our more tender relations, in which love is endowed with so much eloquence, indifference with so little curiosity. Gilberte never having questioned or sought to learn about this misunderstanding, it became for me a real entity, to which I referred anew in every letter. And there is in these baseless situations, in the affectation of coldness, a sort of fascination which tempts one to persevere in them. By dint of writing: “Now that our hearts are sundered,” so that Gilberte might answer: “But they’re not. Do let’s talk it over,” I had gradually come to believe that they were. By constantly repeating, “Life may have changed for us, but it will never destroy the feeling that we had for one another,” in the hope of at last hearing the answer: “But there has been no change, the feeling is stronger now than it ever was,” I was living with the idea that life had indeed changed, that we should keep the memory of the feeling which no longer existed, as certain neurotics, from having at first pretended to be ill, end by becoming chronic invalids. Now, whenever I had to write to Gilberte, I brought my mind back to this imagined change, which, being now tacitly admitted by the silence which she preserved with regard to it in her replies, would in future subsist between us. Then Gilberte ceased to confine herself to preterition. She too adopted my point of view; and, as in the speeches at official banquets, when the Head of State who is being entertained adopts more or less the same expressions as have just been used by the Head of State who is entertaining him, whenever I wrote to Gilberte: “Life may have parted us, but the memory of the days when we knew one another will endure,” she never failed to respond: “Life may have parted us, but it cannot make us forget those happy hours which will always be dear to us both” (though we should have found it hard to say why or how “Life” had parted us, or what change had occurred). My sufferings were no longer excessive. And yet, one day when I was telling her in a letter that I had heard of the death of our old barley-sugar woman in the Champs-Elysées, as I wrote the words: “I felt that this would grieve you; in me it awakened a host of memories,” I could not restrain myself from bursting into tears when I saw that I was speaking in the past tense, as though it were of some dead friend, now almost forgotten, of that love of which in spite of myself I had never ceased to think as something still alive, or at least capable of reviving. Nothing could have been more tender than this correspondence between friends who did not wish to see one another any more. Gilberte’s letters to me had all the delicacy of those which I used to write to people who did not matter to me, and showed me the same apparent marks of affection, which it was so soothing for me to receive from her.

  But, little by little, every refusal to see her grieved me less. And as she became less dear to me, my painful memories were no longer strong enough to destroy by their incessant return the growing pleasure which I found in thinking of Florence or of Venice. I regretted, at such moments, that I had abandoned the idea of diplomacy and had condemned myself to a sedentary existence, in order not to be separated from a girl whom I should never see again and had already almost forgotten. We construct our lives for one person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, prisoners within the walls which were intended only for
her. If Venice seemed to my parents to be too far away and its climate too treacherous for me, it would be at least quite easy and not too tiring to go and settle down at Balbec. But to do that I should have had to leave Paris, to forgo those visits thanks to which, infrequent as they were, I might sometimes hear Mme Swann talk to me about her daughter. Besides, I was beginning to find in them various pleasures in which Gilberte had no part.