In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  Although the wittiness of any salon and its degree of fashionableness usually stand in inverse rather than direct relation to each other, it must be assumed, given that Swann thought Mme Bontemps was a pleasant person, that any acceptance of one’s lowered status has its corollary in a relaxing of the standards one applies to the people whose company one is resigned to enjoy, whose wit one is prepared to find amusing. If that is so, then once the independence of individuals is threatened, their culture and even their language, like those of nations, must also stand in jeopardy. Beyond a certain age, one of the effects of this indulgence is to exacerbate our tendency to take pleasure in hearing praise of our own ways of thinking and preferences, which we see as an invitation to air them again; it is the age at which a great painter may find that the company of his creative peers begins to pall, when he prefers to mix with his pupils, whose only common point with him is their respect for the letter of his tenets, but who listen to him, who extol him; it is the age when, at a party, an outstanding man or woman, living only for some beloved, will be convinced, on hearing some possibly mediocre individual say something which, by suggesting a sympathetic understanding of the life devoted to amorous things, flatters their fond obsession, that they are listening to the only real mind among those present; it was the age at which Swann, in his capacity as husband of Odette, liked both to hear Mme Bontemps say how stupid it is to frequent only duchesses (from which he concluded she was a sensible woman, full of wit and without a touch of snobbery, the opposite of what he would have thought in earlier times at the Verdurins’) and to share jokes with her which ‘tickled her fancy’, because, though she had never heard any of them, she always ‘got’ them, being eager to please and ever ready to enjoy a good laugh. ‘So, Mme Swann said to Mme Cottard, you tell me the Doctor isn’t a great flower-fancier like yourself? – Well, as you know, my husband is the soul of good sense – moderation in all things. Still, I must say, he does have one great passion. – And what’s that, dear lady?’ implored Mme Bontemps, her eyes gleaming with spite, glee and inquisitiveness. ‘Reading, Mme Cottard replied in her artless way. – Oh well! That’s a reassuring passion for a husband to have! Mme Bontemps exclaimed, stifling fiendish mirth. – Yes, just give him a good book! – Well, dear lady, there’s nothing much to be alarmed about in that. – Oh, but there is! His eyesight! Which reminds me, Odette, I really must be off now. But I’ll be back, knocking on your door, at the earliest opportunity. Speaking of eyesight, have you heard the house that Mme Verdurin has just bought is going to have the electric light in it? It wasn’t my little private police who told me, you know. It was Mildé the electrician himself! I like quoting my sources, as you can see. And even the bedrooms will have electric lamps, with shades on, to soften the light. Very nice, very luxurious! We belong to a generation of ladies for whom everything must be up to the minute, the very latest thing. The sister-in-law of a friend of mine has actually got a telephone installed in her house! She can order something from a shopkeeper without stepping out of her own front door! I must admit I’ve been shamelessly currying favour, so that I’ll be allowed to go and speak into the machine one day. The idea fascinates me – but only in someone else’s house, not in my own. I don’t think I’d like having a telephone about the house. Once the novelty of it wears off, it must be a definite nuisance. Now, Odette, I’m off! And you must also release Mme Bontemps, since she’s looking after me. I really must go! You’ll get me into hot water – Dr Cottard will be home before me!’

  I had to go home too, though I had not savoured those promised winter pleasures that had seemed to lie concealed within the brilliant surface of the chrysanthemums. The pleasures had not materialized; yet Mme Swann seemed to be expecting nothing further. She let the servants carry away the tea things, as she might have announced, ‘Time, please!’ She even said to me, ‘Really, must you go?’ Then she added in English, ‘Well, good-bye!’ I sensed that, even if I were to stay on, I would never find those secret pleasures, and that it was not only my sorrow that had withheld them from me. Was it possible they did not lie somewhere along the well-frequented path of those hours which always lead so soon to going-home time, but by some side-path, branching off somewhere else unknown to me, which I should have taken? At least I had achieved the aim of my visit: Gilberte would know I had been to her house during her absence, where, as Mme Cottard kept saying, I had ‘Straight off, from the word go, completely won over Mme Verdurin!’, whom she had never seen ‘go to so much trouble’. She had added, ‘I expect it’s a case of like attracting like.’ Gilberte would be told I had spoken about her affectionately, as I could not help doing; and she would know I did not suffer from the inability to live without her which I felt was the source of her recent discontents with me. I had told Mme Swann I could no longer see Gilberte. I had made it sound as though my decision to sever contact with her was irrevocable. The letter I was going to send Gilberte would also be couched in those terms. But to keep my courage up, I told myself I would make the heroic but brief effort of staying away from her for only a few days longer: ‘This will be the very last invitation of hers that I decline! I’ll accept the next one!’ So as to make my separation from her easier to achieve, I tried to see it as not being definitive. I sensed, however, that it was going to be.

  That New Year’s Day was especially painful. When one is unhappy, anything that serves as a reminder or an anniversary can cause this pain. If it is a reminder, say, of the death of a loved one, the grief comes from the sharpened contrast between present and past. In my position, however, it was aggravated by the unacknowledged hope that Gilberte might have been expecting me to make the first step towards a reconciliation, and that, now it was clear I had not made it, she might have decided to take the opportunity of the New Year, with its exchanges of greetings, to send me a note: ‘Look, what’s the matter? I’m madly in love with you, I can’t live without you, let’s meet and sort it all out.’ By the last days of December, it had come to seem likely that I would receive such a letter. Whether it was really likely or not, our desire for such a letter, our need for it, is enough to make us believe it will probably come. The soldier is convinced that an indefinitely extendable period must elapse before he will be killed, the thief before he will be arrested, all of us before we must die. This is the amulet which protects individuals, and sometimes nations, not from danger, but from the fear of danger, or rather from belief in danger, which can lead to the braving of real dangers by those who are not brave. Such unfounded confidence sustains the lover who looks forward to a reconciliation or a letter. For me to stop expecting one from Gilberte, I would have had to stop wishing for it. Despite knowing one is an object of indifference to a woman one still loves, one fills her mind with imaginary thoughts (though they may amount only to indifference) and an urge to express them, one sees oneself as the focus of her complicated emotional life, albeit possibly only as a source of dislike, but by the same token as an object of her permanent attention. For me to have an inkling of what was in Gilberte’s real mind on that New Year’s Day, I would have had to be able to feel in advance what I would feel on some future New Year’s Day, by which time I would have ignored entirely any notice or lack of notice Gilberte might take of me, any affection or lack of it that she might feel for me, just as I would have become incapable of having the slightest urge to seek solutions to such problems, for they would have long since ceased to be mine. When we are in love, our love is too vast to be wholly contained within ourselves; it radiates outwards, reaches the resistant surface of the loved one, which reflects it back to its starting-point; and this return of our own tenderness is what we see as the other’s feelings, working their new, enhanced charm on us, because we do not recognize them as having originated in ourselves. New Year’s Day chimed its hours one after the other without Gilberte’s letter being delivered. By the 3rd of January, then the 4th, having just received some well-wishers’ cards and letters which had been posted late, or held up in the great rush of New Y
ear mail, I had not given up my hope, although it had begun to fade. On the following days I was often in tears. This meant, of course, that I had held on to the hope of having a New Year letter from Gilberte because, in giving her up, I had not been as sincere as I had thought. That hope having now died, before I had been able to fortify myself with a replacement, I was as distressed as an invalid who has finished his phial of morphine without having another one available. But it may also have meant – the two explanations need not rule each other out; and a single feeling may be made of opposites – that my hope of at last receiving a letter had brought the image of Gilberte closer, recreating in me the feelings which I had once had from looking forward to being with her, from the sight of her and her ways with me. The immediate possibility of being reconciled with her had abolished in me the thing of which we never realize the full enormity: resignation. Neurotics never believe people who assure them that, if they just stay in bed, read no letters and open no newspapers, they will gradually calm down. They foresee that such a regimen can only worsen the state of their nerves. Those in love see renunciation in the same light: they imagine it while living in a state which is its opposite; and never having so much as begun to try it, they cannot believe in its power of healing.

  My heart palpitations had become so violent that I was ordered to reduce my consumption of caffeine. This having put a stop to them, I began to wonder whether the caffeine might not be partly responsible for the anguish I had felt when I more or less chose to fall out with Gilberte, and which I had attributed, each time it recurred, to the grief of separation from her, or the likelihood of being with her only when she was still in the same bad mood. But if this medication was really the source of a suffering that had then been misinterpreted by my imagination (which would not be unheard-of, as the most acute emotional pain suffered by a lover often comes from his sheer physical habituation to the woman he loves), then its action was like that of the love-potion which, long after Tristan and Yseult have drunk it, continues to bind them. For the physical improvement brought about almost at once by the reduction in caffeine did not inhibit the evolution of the sorrow which the toxic dose had possibly created, or which it had at least contrived to make more acute.

  Then, about the middle of January, once my frustrated hopes for a New Year letter had faded, and the extra pain caused by their unfulfilment had settled too, I was assailed once more by the sorrow which had beset me before the holiday period. The cruellest thing in it was still that it was my own handiwork: that actively and consciously, patiently and ruthlessly, I had brought it upon myself. The only thing I cared for, my relationship with Gilberte, was the very thing I was trying to sabotage, through my prolonging of our separation, through my gradual fostering not of her indifference towards me, but – which would come to the same thing in the end – of mine towards her. My unremitting effort was directed to bringing about the slow, agonizing suicide of the self which loved Gilberte; and this I did with a clear awareness both of my actions in the present and of the consequences of them for the future: I could tell not only that within a certain time I would have stopped loving her, but that she herself would be unhappy about this, that her attempts to see me then would be as pointless as any she might make today, not because I would love her, as now, too much, but because without a doubt I would be in love with some other woman, and all my hours would be spent in the desire for her, in the expectation of a moment with her, and not even a second would I dare subtract from them to spend with a girl I no longer cared for. In this present moment, when Gilberte was already lost to me (since I was determined not to see her again, unless she made an unambiguous request for us to clarify our relationship, accompanied by a full declaration of her love for me, both of which I knew were impossible) and when I loved her more than ever (I knew she meant more to me now than she had the previous year, when I could spend as many afternoons with her as I wished, when I believed nothing could come between us), I detested the thought that one day I might have these same feelings for someone else, as this deprived me not only of Gilberte, but also of my love and my pain, the very love and pain through which, as I wept, I tried to grasp the real Gilberte, though I was obliged to admit they did not belong to her in particular, but would sooner or later devolve to some other woman. For we are always (or so I thought then) detached from the other person: while we love, we are aware that our love does not bear her name, that we may feel it again in the future – or might even have felt it in the past – for someone other than her; and at times when we are not in love, it is precisely because our feelings are unaffected by it that we find it easy to be philosophical towards the contradictoriness of love, that we can speak such untroubled words about it, because we have no consciousness of it at that moment, knowledge in this being intermittent and not outliving the effective presence of the emotion. There would of course have been time to warn Gilberte that the future in which I would no longer love her, a future my pain could foresee, but which my imagination could not distinguish in detail, was bound to take shape piece by piece, that its arrival was, if not imminent, at least inexorable, unless she came to my assistance and nipped my coming indifference in the bud. How often I came close to writing to her or going to say to her: ‘I warn you, my mind is made up! This is my very last offer! I’m seeing you for the last time! Soon I’ll have stopped loving you!’ But what good would it have done? What right had I to reproach her for treating me with the same indifference which, without thinking it blameworthy, I showed for everything except her? The last time! The words appalled me, because I loved her. But they would have made no more impression on her than the sort of letter a friend who is going abroad sends us to suggest a meeting, and which we ignore, as we ignore, say, the importunities of a woman who loves us, because we are looking forward to some enjoyment or other. The time we have to spend each day is elastic: it is stretched by the passions we feel; it is shrunk by those we inspire; and all of it is filled by habit.

  Even if I had spoken to Gilberte, she would not have heard me. We always fancy, when we speak, that it is our ears and our minds which listen. If any words of mine had reached Gilberte, they would have been distorted, as though by passing through the mobile curtain of a waterfall, and would have been unintelligible to her, full of ludicrous sounds and devoid of meaning. Whatever truth one puts into words does not make its way unaided; it is not endowed with irresistible self-evidence. In order for a truth of the same order to take form within them, a certain time must elapse. When it has elapsed, the proponent of a political idea who, in the teeth of all counter-arguments and proofs, once said the proponent of the opposite idea was a blackguard, comes at length to share the abhorrent belief, which has been abandoned in the meantime by the man who once wasted his breath on spreading it. The masterpiece which, to the ears of the admirers who read it aloud, sounded pregnant with the proofs of inherent excellence, while to those of listeners it was inept or nondescript, comes eventually to be pronounced a masterpiece indeed by the latter, but too late for its creator to know of it. So it is with the barriers of love, which the efforts, however despairing, of the one who is excluded by them can do nothing to force; then a day comes when, as a result of quite extraneous influences at work inside the feelings of the once unloving woman, and though he no longer cares about them, the barriers give way suddenly, but to no purpose. So even if I had gone to warn Gilberte about my future indifference to her, if I had told her how she might obviate it, she would just have deduced from this that my love for her, my need for her, were even greater than she had thought; and she would have been more irked than ever by the sight of me. It is a fact, too, that it was this love for her which, because of the sequence of discordant states of mind it created in me, helped me to foresee better than she how it would end. Nevertheless, I might still have sent or spoken such a warning to her after enough time had passed, which, though it would of course have meant she was by then not quite as necessary to me, would also have enabled me to demonstrate to her h
ow unnecessary she was. But then unfortunately some well-meaning or ill-intentioned people would speak to her about me in ways which could only give her the impression that I had asked them to do so. Whenever I heard that Dr Cottard, my own mother, even M. de Norpois, had with a few ill-advised words undone the sacrifice which I had so laboriously achieved, spoiling the whole effect of my silence towards Gilberte, by making it appear as though I had decided to end it, I was faced with a double difficulty. For one thing, my painful and profitable self-denial, which these meddlers had, unknown to me, just interrupted, and thus nullified, would have to be seen now as counting only from the day when they had spoken to her. What was worse was that I myself would have taken less pleasure in seeing her again, since she would have believed, not that I was living in a state of dignified resignation, but that I was intriguing behind her back to bring about a meeting which she had declined. I cursed the idle talk of people who for no particular reason, not even trying to hurt or please, often just for the sake of something to say, or because we have actually indulged in similar idle talk with them, turn out to be as indiscreet as we were, and harm us with a word out of place. However, in the sorry work done to cause the downfall of our love, the contribution of these people is not nearly as important as that of two others, who are in the habit of spoiling it at the very moment when its course promised to run smooth, one of them by being too kind, the other too unkind. Even so, we do not resent this pair as we do the meddling Cottards, as the second of them is the person we love and the first is ourself.