In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  Now and then I had the feeling that Gilberte would have been glad to see me rather less often. The fact was that, when the desire to see her got the better of me, all I had to do was get myself invited to the house by her parents, who were more and more convinced I was an improving influence on her. Because of them, I thought, my love is in no danger: as long as they are for me, I needn’t worry about anything, since Gilberte is in their hands. Unfortunately, occasional signs of impatience from her, at times when her father had me to the house more or less without her agreement, made me wonder whether the thing I had seen as a protection for my happiness might not be the secret reason why it could not last.

  The last time I went to see her, it was raining and she had been invited to a dancing-class at the house of some people who were not close enough friends for her to be able to take me with her. Because it was wet, I had taken more caffeine than usual. As Gilberte was about to leave, Mme Swann, perhaps because of the bad weather, perhaps because of some slight ill-will she may have harboured towards the people in whose house the lesson was to take place, called out ‘Gilberte!’ in a very sharp voice, and made a gesture in my direction, meaning that I was there to see her and that she should stay at home. It was for my sake that she had snapped ‘Gilberte!’ or rather shouted the name; but from the shrugging of the shoulders with which Gilberte took off her outdoor things, I realized that, without intending to, her mother had hastened the process – which until then it might still have been possible to arrest – whereby my sweetheart was gradually being separated from me. ‘One doesn’t have to go dancing every day,’ Odette said to her daughter, possibly passing on a lesson in self-discipline once taught to her by Swann. Then, becoming Odette again, she broke into English; and it was instantly as though part of Gilberte’s life was hidden behind a wall, as though some evil genie had kidnapped her. In a language which we understand, we have replaced opacity of sound by transparency of idea. But a language we do not speak is a palace closed against us, inside which our beloved may deceive us, while we, left outside to the impotent devices of our own desperation, can see nothing and prevent nothing. A month earlier this conversation would have made me smile; but now, with the few French proper names I could hear among the English words, it increased my disquiet, gave focus to suspicion, and though conducted by two motionless people standing beside me, it left me as cruelly isolated and abandoned as if Gilberte had been abducted. At length, Mme Swann left us alone together. That day, perhaps from a sense of grievance against me for having been the unwitting cause of her being deprived of an amusement, perhaps also because, sensing and hoping to avoid her ill-humour, I myself may have been stiffer than usual, Gilberte’s face was devoid of all joy, laid waste, a blank, melancholy mask which for the rest of the afternoon seemed to grieve privately for those foursome reels being danced without her, because of my presence here, and to defy all beings, especially me, to comprehend the subtle reasons which had produced in her a sentimental inclination to do the Boston dip. She did no more than contribute occasional comments – on the weather, the fact that the rain was coming on again, or that the clock was a little fast – to a conversation of silences and monosyllables, during which I too, in a sort of rage of despair, outdid her in trying to destroy the moments in which we could have been close and happy. All the words we exchanged were stamped with a sort of stark hardness, by the crushing paradox of their crassness, an effect in which there was nevertheless something consoling, since it meant that Gilberte could not possibly be deceived by the banality of what I was saying and the indifference in my voice. Even though I said, ‘And yet the other day I had the impression the clock was actually a little slow,’ she translated this directly as, ‘How nasty you’re being!’ Even though I persisted throughout the rainy afternoon with my succession of pointless words without sunny intervals, I knew my cold manner was not as steadfast as I pretended, and that Gilberte must be well aware that, if I had dared to repeat for the fourth time what I had already said three times – that the evenings were drawing in now – I would have had difficulty in not bursting into tears. When she was like that, when a smile was not filling her eyes and revealing her face, how inexpressibly desolate and monotonous were the sadness in her eyes and the gloom of her sulky features. At such moments, her face would turn almost ugly and resembled those bare, boring stretches of beach which, when the tide has receded almost out of sight, tire the eye with their unchanging glare bounded by the fixed and inhibiting horizon. Eventually, not having seen in Gilberte the comforting change of mood I had been hoping to see for hours past, I told her she was not nice. ‘You’re the not nice one! she said. – Me? I am nice!’ I wondered what I had done and, being unable to think of anything, I asked her what I had done. ‘Naturally, you think you’re so nice!’ she replied with a long laugh. I was struck at that moment by what was so painful to me in being unable to have access to that other more elusive reach of her mind described by her laughter. The laugh seemed to mean: ‘I’m not taken in by a single thing you say, you know! I know perfectly well you’re madly in love with me, but it makes no difference, because I don’t care for you at all!’ But I reminded myself that laughter is not so determinate a form of speech that I could definitely assume I knew what Gilberte’s meant. And her words had been spoken with a tone of affection. ‘Well, how am I not nice? I asked. Tell me. I’ll do anything you ask me to. – No, that would be useless. I can’t explain …’ For a moment I was afraid she believed I did not love her; and this was a new pain, no less sharp, but requiring to be reasoned with in a different way. ‘You would tell me if you knew how unhappy you make me.’ But the unhappiness I spoke of, which if she had doubted my love for her should have overjoyed her, only irritated her. So, realizing my mistake, determined to ignore whatever she might say, and even disbelieving her when she asserted, ‘I did love you, really I did. You’ll find that out one day’ (that day when, according to the guilty, their innocence will be established, which is never, for some mysterious reason, the day when they are being asked about it), I found the courage to take the sudden resolution never to see her again, and to do this without letting her know about it yet, because she would not have believed me.

  A sadness caused by somebody one loves may be bitter, even when it happens amid a round of pastimes, joys and preoccupations which are extraneous to that person and which, except for brief moments, divert our mind from it. But when such a sadness comes right at the moment when we are basking in the full delight of being with that person, as was my case with Gilberte, the sudden depression which replaces the broad, tranquil sunlight of our inner summer sets off within us a storm so wild that we may doubt our ability to weather it. As I went home that evening, my heart was buffeted and bruised with such violence that I felt I could only get my breath back by retracing my steps, by making up some excuse to return to Gilberte. But she would only have thought: ‘Him again! Obviously I can treat him like dirt! The more unhappy I make him, the easier he’ll be to manage!’ In my mind, however, I was irresistibly drawn back to her; and these alternating urges, the crazy fluctuations of my inner compass, persisted after I reached home, where they turned into the drafts of incoherent letters which I wrote to her.

  I was on the threshold of one of those difficult junctures which most of us encounter several times in our lives; and on each of those different occasions, we do not meet them in the same way, although in the mean time, despite having grown older, we have not altered our character, our nature (which of itself creates not only the loves we experience but almost the women we love, and even their defects). At such moments, our life is divided, as though apportioned in its entirety between the two sides of a pair of scales. On one of the scales lies our wish not to give offence, by appearing too docile, to the woman whom we love, albeit without completely understanding her; but this wish we think it advisable to leave to one side, to prevent her from feeling she is indispensable to us, and thus wearying of our devotion. But on the other lies pain – though not a
localized and separate pain – which could be abated only if we were to ignore our desire to be liked, put aside our pretence of being able to live without her, and seek her out. If we lighten the scale containing our pride, by removing from it a little of the will-power which we have been remiss enough to wear away with age, and if we add to the scale containing our unhappiness an acquired physical pain which we have allowed to become worse, it is not the courageous side which outweighs the other, as would have happened at twenty; it is the craven side which, having become too ponderous and lacking a counterweight, unbalances us at fifty. Also, since situations can change as well as repeat themselves, there is the possibility that, by the middle of life or towards the end of it, one’s self-indulgence may have had the unfortunate effect of complicating love with an element of habit, which adolescence, preoccupied by too many other obligations and lacking personal freedom, has not yet acquired.

  I had just dashed off a furious letter to Gilberte, being sure to place in it the life-buoy of a few apparently casual words to which she could cling if she wanted us to make up; but then in a quite different mood, I dashed off another full of loving words, in which I savoured the touching sweetness of certain forlorn expressions such as Never again, so moving for the one who writes, yet so boring for the one who reads, either because she suspects them of being false and translates Never again as This very evening, please, or because she thinks they are true and sees in them the promise of the sort of lifelong separation which we accept with utter indifference when dealing with people we do not love. But since we are unable, while we love, to act as the worthy predecessor to the next person we are going to be, the one who will no longer be in love, how could we accurately imagine the state of mind of a woman who, even though we knew we meant nothing to her, has always figured in our sweetest day-dreams, a figment of our illusive wish to fancy a future with her, or of our need to heal the heart she has broken, whispering to us things she would have said only if she had been in love with us? Faced with the thoughts or actions of a woman we love, we are as incapacitated as the very first physicians when faced with natural phenomena (in the time before science had come into being and shed a little light into the unknown); or even worse, we are like a being for whom the principle of causality hardly exists, who is incapable of perceiving a connection between one phenomenon and another, for whom the spectacle of the world is as unreliable as a dream. Of course I tried to escape from such chaos and find causes. I even tried to be ‘objective’, to remain aware of the disparity between the importance of Gilberte to me and not only my importance to her, but hers to all people other than myself, since otherwise I might have seen what was a mere civility on her part as a declaration of ungovernable passion, and an unseemly and degrading act on my own part as the pleasing spontaneity that impels a man towards a pretty face. But I was also wary of going to the other extreme, of reading a mere moment’s unpunctuality or bad temper as meaning that Gilberte had an implacable hostility towards me. Somewhere between these two points of view, each of them making for distortion, I tried to find a way of seeing things which was more accurate; the mental efforts this required distracted me a little from my pain; and whether from trust in the answers I arrived at, or whether I had biassed these answers towards what I wanted, I decided the following day to go back to the Swanns’, a resolution which left me happy, but happy after the manner of the man who, having worried for a long time about a journey he wishes he did not have to take, goes only as far as the station, before going back home to unpack his trunk. And since, during the period one has spent in hesitations, the merest glimpse of a possible determination to end them (unless one has precluded such a thought by resolving not to make such a determination) is like a sturdy seed out of which grow first the broad lines, then all the details of the feelings one could have once the act is accomplished, I reproached myself for having been so absurd, for having allowed my own notion of never seeing Gilberte again to make me suffer as much as if I had really been going to carry it out, telling myself that since the long and the short of it was that I was going back to see her, I might as well have saved myself so many agonizing changes of heart and dispiriting resolves. This renewal of my relationship with Gilberte lasted as long as it took me to reach her house. It ended, not because the butler, who liked me, said she was out (which was true, as I learned that evening from people who had met her), but because of the way he said it: ‘Mademoiselle is out, Monsieur. I swear to Monsieur I am telling the truth. If Monsieur would like to check what I am saying, I can fetch the maid. As Monsieur well knows, I would do anything for him, and if Mademoiselle was in, I would take Monsieur straight to her.’ These words of the butler’s, as important as only spontaneous words can be, because they give us at least a summary X-ray of an inscrutable reality which a rehearsed speech would conceal, proved that the household suspected my attentions were irksome to Gilberte; and as soon as he had finished speaking them, they aroused in me a gust of hatred, which I preferred to direct against him rather than against her; they focussed on him whatever feelings of anger I had harboured against her; they cleansed my love of these feelings, and it lived on without them; but they also taught me that for some time I should not try to see Gilberte again. She would be writing to me, no doubt, to apologize. Even so, I would make a point of not going round to see her straight away, just to show her I could live without her. And of course, once I had received her letter, to see her again would be something I could more easily postpone for a time, since I would be certain of being able to be with her whenever I wanted to. To be able to bear that self-imposed separation from her without too much sorrow, all I needed was to feel that my heart had been freed from the dreadful uncertainty of not knowing whether we had fallen out for ever, whether she might not be engaged to be married, or have left Paris, or eloped with somebody. The following days were somewhat like the New Year holiday I had once had to spend without a sight of Gilberte. But in those earlier days, I had been sure that, once the week was over, she would come back to the Champs-Élysées, and that I could see her as usual; and equally sure that there was no point in going to the Champs-Élysées until the New Year holiday had ended. Which was why, for the whole of that sad week, long past, it was with an untroubled mind that I had borne my sorrow, because it had neither fear nor hope in it. But this time my pain was unbearable, because I was tormented by a hope that was almost as strong as my fear. Not having received a letter from her by the afternoon post, I reminded myself of how remiss she could be in such things, of how busy she was, and I had no doubt there would be one by the morning. I awaited the postman each morning with a beating heart, a state which turned into dejection each time I found the post to consist either of letters from people who were not Gilberte or of no letters at all, an eventuality which was not harder to bear, since a token of friendship from someone else only made the evidence of her indifference to me the more wounding. Then each day I would start looking forward again to the afternoon post. Even between the delivery times I did not dare leave the house, since she might be sending the letter round by hand. Each evening the moment eventually came when neither the postman nor the Swanns’ footman could be expected, and I had to postpone the hope of possible consolation till the following morning; in this way, because I believed my pain could not last, I was obliged to keep on renewing it, so to speak. The sorrow I felt may have been the same sorrow all the time; but unlike my earlier sadness, it was not just a uniform continuation of an initial emotion; it started up several times each day, being at first an emotion which was so often renewed that, though it was a wholly physical state and quite momentary, it ended up at a stable level; and as the disturbance provoked by expectation barely had time to settle before a new reason for expectation arose, there was no moment of the day when I was not in the grip of that form of anguish which it is so difficult to bear even for an hour. So it was that my suffering was much crueller than it had been on that previous New Year’s Day, because this time, I was full not of a simp
le acceptance of it but of the hope, recurring at every instant, that it would end. I did eventually reach that state of acceptance. I reached too the realization that it was to be definitive, and so I gave up Gilberte for ever, in the interest of my love itself, but also because I hoped more than anything that she might remember me without contempt. In the future, if she ever sent me an invitation or a suggestion that we meet, I even made a point of accepting some of these, so as to prevent her from suspecting I was acting on anything like lover’s pique, and then at the last moment I wrote to cry off, with the sort of great protestations of disappointment that you send to someone you have no real desire to see. It seemed to me that these expressions of regret, usually reserved for people to whom one is indifferent, would be more successful in convincing Gilberte of my indifference towards her than the tone of feigned indifference that one uses with somebody one loves. Once I had proved to her, not just with words, but more effectively with reiterated actions, that I could see nothing pleasing in her company, perhaps she would come to realize there was something pleasing in my mine. Sadly, this was not to be: trying to make her discover something pleasing in my company by not seeing her was the surest way to lose her for ever. For one thing, if she ever did come to this discovery, I would want its effects to last, and so I would have to be careful not to enjoy them too soon; besides, the worst of my torment would be over by then; it was now that she was necessary to me; I wished I could warn her that, before long, the only purpose of her seeing me again would be to soothe a pain that would have faded so much as to no longer be, as it still was at this moment, a reason for her to allay it by giving in, and for both of us to make up and see each other again. And in the future, when Gilberte’s liking for me had once again become so strong that I could at last safely confess mine for her, I foresaw that mine would not have survived such a long absence, and that I would have come to feel indifferent to her. All this I knew; but if I had said so, she would just have assumed that, in saying I would stop loving her if I had to live without her for too long, my real purpose was to make her ask me to come back to her at once. Meanwhile, a thing that made it easier for me to condemn myself to this separation was that (with the purpose of making Gilberte clearly aware that, for all my statements to the contrary, it really was by choice, and not because of ill-health, or some such thing beyond my control, that I was staying away from her), if I knew in advance that she was not going to be at home, was going out with a friend and would not be back for dinner, I took to visiting Mme Swann, who thus once more became the person she had been in the days when it had been so hard to see her daughter, when if Gilberte did not turn up at the Champs-Élysées I would take a walk along the avenue des Acacias. In this way not only could I hear about Gilberte, but I was sure she would hear about me too, and in a way which would make it plain I had lost interest in her. Also, like all those in pain, I had the feeling that my sorry situation could have been worse. Since I had open access to her house, I lived with the knowledge (even though I was resolved never to avail myself of the possibility) that, if ever my suffering became too much for me, I could always bring it to an end. So I was only unhappy for one day at a time. And even that is an overstatement. How many times per hour (but now free of the fever of expectation that had so anguished me in the first weeks after we had fallen out, before I started going back to the Swanns’ house) did I read to myself the letter that Gilberte would definitely send me one day – which she might even bring to me herself! The constant vision of this imaginary happiness helped me to bear the ruining of my real happiness. With a woman who does not love us, as with someone who has died, the knowledge that there is nothing left to hope for does not prevent us from going on waiting. One lives in a state of alertness, eyes and ears open; a mother whose son has gone on a dangerous sea voyage always has the feeling, even when she has long known for certain that he has perished, that he is just about to come through the door, saved by a miracle, unscathed. This waiting, depending on the strength of her memory and her bodily resistance, may enable her to last out the years which will eventually bring her to an acceptance of the death of her son, so that she gradually forgets and goes on living – or it may kill her. Also, my sorrow drew some slight comfort from the knowledge that it benefited my love. Every visit I made to Mme Swann without seeing Gilberte was hurtful to me; but I sensed that it served me by bettering Gilberte’s image of me.