In Search of Lost Time, Volume I

by Marcel Proust

  This day which I had so dreaded was, as it happened, one of the few on which I was not unduly wretched.

  For, although I now no longer thought 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 so impatiently 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; and well did I know it, for they were the only moments in my life on which I concentrated a scrupulous, unflagging attention, and yet could not discover in them one atom of pleasure.

  All the time I was away from Gilberte, I felt the need to see her, because, constantly trying to picture her in my mind, I ended up by being unable to do so, and by no longer knowing precisely what my love represented. Besides, she had never yet told me that she loved me. Far from it: she had often boasted that she knew other 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; indeed, she had often shown signs of apparent coldness towards me which might have shaken my faith that I was for her a person different from the rest, had that faith been founded upon a love that Gilberte felt for me and not, as was the case, upon the love I felt for her, which strengthened its resistance to the assaults of doubt by making it depend entirely on the manner in which I was obliged by an internal compulsion to think of Gilberte. But I myself had not yet ventured to declare my feelings towards her. True, 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 traced without her thinking of me any the more on that account, which made her take up so much apparent space around me without her being any the more involved in my life, 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 show me in its true colours, as something purely personal, unreal, tedious and ineffectual. The important thing was that we should see each other, Gilberte and I, and should have an opportunity of making a mutual avowal 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 cultivation of our pleasures, that we content ourselves with the pleasure we derive from thinking of a woman, as I thought of Gilberte, without troubling ourselves to ascertain whether the image corresponds to the reality, and also with the pleasure of loving her without needing to be sure that she loves us too; or again that we renounce the pleasure of confessing our inclination for her, so as to preserve and enhance her inclination for us, like those Japanese gardeners who, to obtain one perfect blossom, will sacrifice several others. But at the period when I was in love with Gilberte, I still believed that Love did really exist outside ourselves; that, allowing us at the most to surmount the obstacles in our way, it offered its blessings in an order to 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 avowal a pretence of indifference, I should not only have been depriving myself of one of the joys for which I most longed, but fabricating, quite arbitrarily, a love that was artificial and valueless, that bore no relation to the true one, whose mysterious and foreordained ways I should thus have ceased to follow.

  But when I arrived in 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 cause, independent to myself—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 could no longer recapture, of that Gilberte Swann with whom I had played the day before, and whom I had just been prompted to greet and 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 was the object of my dreams had been two different people. If, for instance, I had retained in my memory overnight two fiery eyes above full and rosy cheeks, Gilberte’s face would now offer me with overpowering insistence something that I distinctly had not remembered, a certain sharp tapering of the nose which, instantaneously associating itself with certain other features, assumed the importance of those characteristics which in natural history define a species, and transformed her into a little girl of the kind that have pointed snouts. While I was getting ready to take advantage of this longed-for moment to effect, on the basis of the image of Gilberte which I had prepared beforehand but which had now gone from my head, the adjustment that would enable me, during the long hours I must spend alone, to be certain that it was indeed her that I had in mind, that it was indeed my love for her that I was gradually putting together as one composes a book, she passed 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 greet her before I had identified her now urged me to seize the ball that she handed to me (as though she were a companion with whom I had come to play, and not a sister-soul with whom I had come to be united), made me, out of decorum, address a thousand and one polite and trivial remarks to her until the time came when she had to go, and so prevented me either from keeping a silence during which I might at last have laid hands once more on the urgent truant image, or from uttering the words which might have brought about the decisive progress in the course of our love the hope of which I was always obliged to postpone until the following afternoon.

  It did, however, make some progress. 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 ethnic eczema and from the constipation of the prophets), he consumed a great deal, and 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 story-books. For one of them would not have a red stick of barley sugar 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 gazed at the agate marbles, luminous and imprisoned in a bowl apart, which seemed precious to me because they were as fair and smiling as little girls, and because they cost sixpence each. Gilberte, who was given a great deal more pocket money than I ever had, asked me which I thought the prettiest. They had the transparency and mellowness of 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 round until it shone with a ray of gold, fondled it, paid its ransom, but at once handed me her captive, saying: “Here, it’s for you. Keep it as a souvenir.”

  Another time, being still obsessed by the desire to hear Berma in classic drama, I had asked her whether she had a copy of a booklet in which Bergotte spoke of Racine, and which was now out of print. She had asked me to let her know the exact title of it, and that evening I had sent her an express letter, writing on its envelope the name, Gilberte Swann, which I had so often traced in my exercise-book. The next day she brought me the booklet, for which she had instituted a search, in a parcel tied with mauve ribbon and sealed with white wax. “You see, it’s what you asked me for,” she said, taking from her muff the express letter that I had sent he
r. But in the address on the pneumatic message15—which, only yesterday, was nothing, was merely a petit bleu that I had written, and which, after a messenger had delivered it to Gilberte’s porter and a servant had taken it up to her room, had become that priceless thing, one of the petits bleus 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 lift, to gladden my dream.

  And there was another day when 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, she 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. Recalling, some time later, what I had felt at the time, I distinguished the impression of having been held for a moment in her mouth, myself, naked, without any of the social attributes which belonged equally to her other playmates and, when she used my surname, to my parents, accessories of which her lips—by the effort she made, a little after her father’s manner, to articulate the words to which she wished to give a special emphasis—had the air of stripping, of divesting me, like the skin from a fruit of which one can swallow only the pulp, while her glance, adapting itself to the same new degree of intimacy as her speech, fell on me also more directly and testified to the consciousness, the pleasure, even the gratitude that it felt by accompanying itself with a smile.

  But at the actual moment I was unable to appreciate the value of these new pleasures. They were given, not by the little girl whom I loved to the “me” who loved her, but by the other, the one with whom I used to play, to that other “me” who possessed neither the memory of the true Gilberte, nor the inalienably committed heart which alone could have known the value of a happiness which it alone had desired. Even after I had returned home I did not savour these pleasures, since every day the necessity which made me hope that on the morrow I should arrive at a clear, calm, happy contemplation of Gilberte, that she would at last confess her love for me, explaining why she had been obliged hitherto to conceal it from me, that same necessity forced me to regard the past as of no account, to look ahead of me only, to consider the small favours she had granted me not in themselves and as if they were self-sufficient, but as fresh rungs of the ladder on which I might set my feet, which would enable me to advance one step further towards the final attainment of that happiness which I had not yet encountered.

  If at times she showed me these marks of affection, she pained 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 plump white hands fragrant still with soap—I had been apprised, on seeing a column of dust standing up by itself in the air above the piano, and on 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 lunch, the lady opposite, by opening her window, had sent packing in the twinkling of an eye from beside my chair—sweeping at one bound across the whole width of our dining-room—a sunbeam which had settled down there for its midday rest and returned to continue it a moment later. At school, during the one o’clock lesson, the sun made me sick with impatience and boredom as it trailed a golden glow across my desk, like an invitation to festivities 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 bejewelled 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 Gilberte’s form, following that of her governess, appearing from behind the statue that seemed to be holding out the glistening child it carried to receive the sun’s benediction. The old lady who read the Débats was sitting on her chair, in her invariable place, and had just accosted a park attendant with a friendly wave of her hand as she exclaimed “What a lovely day!” And when the chair-keeper came up to collect her fee, with an infinity of simperings 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 showed her the edge of a 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, in the hope of meeting Gilberte halfway, 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 roundabout, the little girl with the sharp voice flung herself upon me: “Quick, quick, Gilberte’s been here a quarter of an hour. She’s going soon. 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 do some shopping for her; 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, and whether she would be early or late, and this perpetual tension succeeded in making more thrilling not only the entire Champs-Elysées 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 Gilberte’s form might appear, but also that form itself, since behind that form I felt that there lay concealed the reason why it had flashed into my presence at four o’clock instead of at half-past two, crowned with a formal hat instead of a playtime beret, 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 and which forced her to go out or stay at home, I was in contact with the mystery of her unknown life. It was this mystery, too, that troubled me when, running at the sharp-voiced girl’s bidding to begin our game without further delay, I saw Gilberte, so brusque and informal with us, making a curtsey to the old lady of the Débats (who acknowledged it with “What a lovely sun! You’d think it was a fire”) and 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 or paying calls, in the whole of that other existence of hers which eluded me. 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. For he and Mme Swann—inasmuch as their daughter lived with them, and her lessons, her games, her friendships depended upon them—contained for me, like Gilberte, perhaps even more than Gilberte, as befitted gods with an all-powerful control over her, in whom it must have had its source, an undefined, an inaccessible quality of melancholy charm. Everything that c
oncerned them was the object of so constant a preoccupation on my part that the days on which, as on this day, M. Swann (whom I had seen so often in the past without his having aroused my curiosity, when he was still on good terms with my parents) came to fetch Gilberte from the Champs-Elysées, once the violent throbbing of my heart provoked 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 about whom one has just been reading a series of books and the minutest details of whose life and person intrigue us. His relations with the Comte de Paris, which, when I heard them discussed at Combray, had left me indifferent, became now in my eyes something to be marvelled at, as if no one else had ever known the House of Orleans; they made him stand out vividly 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.