In Search of Lost Time, Volume I

by Marcel Proust

  He responded politely to the salutations of Gilberte’s playmates, even to mine, for all that he had fallen out with my family, but without appearing to know me. (This reminded me that he had seen me quite often 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; since the ideas to which I now connected his name were different from the ideas in the system of which it was formerly comprised, ideas which I no longer utilised when I had occasion to think of him, he had become a new, another person; nevertheless, I attached him by an artificial, secondary and transversal thread to our former guest; and since nothing had henceforth any value for me except so far as my love might profit by it, it was with a spasm of shame and of regret at not being able to erase them that I recalled 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 had his permission to play one game, that 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, while we began our game upon the lawn, scattering the pigeons whose beautiful, iridescent bodies (shaped like hearts and, as it were, the lilacs of the feathered kingdom) took refuge as in so many sanctuaries, one on the great stone basin, to which its beak, as it disappeared below the rim, imparted the gesture and assigned the purpose of offering 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 the monotony of the stone in certain classical works, and with an attribute which, when the goddess bears it, earns her a particular epithet and makes of her, as a different Christian name makes of a mortal, a new divinity.

  On one of these sunny days which had failed to fulfil my hopes, I could not conceal my disappointment from Gilberte.

  “I had so many things to ask you,” I said to her; “I thought that today was going to mean so much in our friendship. And no sooner have you come than you go away! Try to come early tomorrow, so that I can talk to you.”

  Her face lit up and she jumped for joy as she answered: “Tomorrow, you may depend upon it, my dear boy, I shan’t be coming. I’ve got a big tea-party. The day after tomorrow I’m going to a friend’s house to watch the arrival of King Theodosius from the window—won’t that be splendid?—and the day after that I’m going to Michel Strogoff, and then it will soon be Christmas and the New Year holidays! Perhaps they’ll take me to the Riviera—wouldn’t that be nice? though I should miss the Christmas-tree here. Anyhow, if I do stay in Paris, I shan’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 the 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. It’s like as if everything’s topsyturvy up there too.”

  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, and the special, unique position, however painful, in which I was inevitably placed in relation to Gilberte by the inner constraint of a mental habit, had begun to lend a romantic aura even to that mark of her indifference, and in the midst of my tears my lips shaped themselves into a smile which was simply the timid adumbration of a kiss. And when the time came for the postman to arrive I said to myself, that evening as on every other: “I’m going to get a letter from Gilberte; she’s going to tell me at last that she has never ceased to love me, and explain to me the mysterious reason why she has been forced to conceal it from me until now, to pretend to be able to be happy without seeing me, the reason why she has assumed the form of the other Gilberte who is simply a playmate.”

  Every evening I would beguile myself by 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 then on I would strive to divert my thoughts from the words which I should have liked her to write to me, for fear that, by voicing them, I should be excluding just those words—the dearest, the most desired—from the field of possibilities. Even if, by some improbable coincidence, it had been precisely the letter of my invention that Gilberte 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 from me, something real, something new, a happiness external to my mind, independent of my will, a true gift of love.

  Meanwhile, I re-read a page which, although it had not been written to me by Gilberte, at least came to me from her, that page of Bergotte’s on the beauty of the old myths whence Racine drew his inspiration, which (with the agate marble) I always kept close at hand. I was touched by my friend’s kindness in having procured the book for me; and as everyone needs to find reasons for his passion, to the extent of being glad to recognise in the loved one qualities which (he has learned from literature or conversation) are worthy of love, to the extent of assimilating them by imitation and making them additional reasons for his love, even though these qualities are diametrically opposed to those his love would have sought after as 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, from Combray onwards, on account of all the unknown element in her life in which I longed to be immersed, reincarnated, discarding my own as a thing of no account, I thought now, as of an inestimable privilege, that of this too familiar, despised life of mine Gilberte might one day become the humble servant, the kindly and 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 loved Gilberte, before I had even seen her, now it was above all for Gilberte’s sake that I loved him. With as much pleasure as the pages that he had written about Racine I studied the wrapper, folded under the great white seals of wax tied with festoons of mauve ribbon, in which she had brought them 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 which, for all that it was adorned with the mysterious charm of Gilberte’s life, dwelt close beside me, inhabited my room, 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 it seemed no more than a void, they gave it a kind of consistency, were, I perceived, anterior to that love and in no way resembled it; their elements had been determined by the writer’s talent or the laws of mineralogy before ever Gilberte had known me; nothing in book or stone would have been different if Gilberte had not loved me, and nothing, consequently, authorised me to read in them a message of happiness. And while my love, incessantly waiting for the morrow to bring the avowal of Gilberte’s for me, destroyed, unravelled every evening the ill-done work of the day, in some shadowed part of my being an unknown seamstress refused to abandon the discarded threads, but collected and rearranged them, without any thought of pleasing me or of toiling for my happiness,
in the different order which she gave to all her handiwork. Showing no special interest in my love, not beginning by deciding that I was loved, she gathered together those of Gilberte’s actions that had seemed to me inexplicable and her faults which I had excused. Then, one and all, they took on a meaning. It seemed to tell me, this new arrangement, that when I saw Gilberte, instead of coming to the Champs-Elysées, going to a party, or going shopping with her governess, or preparing for an absence that would extend over the New Year holidays, I was wrong in thinking: “It’s because she’s frivolous or docile.” 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 showed 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 shine in her eyes, by reason of which I tried to persuade my mother to buy Françoise a waterproof coat and a hat with a blue feather, or, better still, to stop sending me to the Champs-Elysées in the company of a servant with whom I blushed to be seen (to which my mother replied that I was unjust to Françoise, that she was an excellent woman and devoted to us all), and also that exclusive need to see Gilberte, the result of which was that, months in advance, I could think of nothing else but how to find out when she would be leaving Paris and where she was going, feeling that the most attractive country in the world would be a place of exile if she was 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, appreciated her governess, without troubling herself over what I might choose to think about her. 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 with her mother. And even supposing that she had allowed me to spend my holidays in the same place as herself, when it came to choosing that place she would consider her parents’ wishes, and the various 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 she sometimes did) 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 ask her forgiveness, would beg her to tell me what I must do in order that she should begin to like me again as much as, or more than anyone else; I wanted her to tell me that that was already the case, I besought her as though she were capable of modifying her affection for me as she or I chose, in order to please me, simply by the words she would utter, as my good or bad conduct should deserve. Did I not then know that what I felt for her depended neither upon her actions nor upon my will?

  It showed me finally, the new arrangement devised by the invisible seamstress, that, if we find ourselves hoping that the actions of a person who has hitherto caused us pain may prove not to have been sincere, they shed in their wake a light which our hopes are powerless to extinguish and to which we must address ourselves, rather than to our hopes, if we are to know what will be that person’s actions on the morrow.

  My love listened to these new counsels; 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. “It’s true,” my love answered, “there is nothing more to be made of that friendship. It will not alter now.” And so, as from the very next day (or from the next public holiday, if there was one in the offing, or an anniversary, or 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 ask Gilberte to terminate our old friendship and to join me in laying the foundations of a new one.

  I always had within reach a plan of Paris which, because I could see on it the street in which M. and Mme Swann lived, seemed to me to contain a secret treasure. And for pure pleasure, as well as from a sort of chivalrous loyalty, on no matter what pretext I would utter the name of that street until my father, not being, like my mother and grandmother, apprised of my love, would ask me: “But why are you always talking about that street? There’s nothing wonderful about it. It’s a very agreeable street to live in because it’s only a few minutes walk from the Bois, but there are a dozen other streets to which the same applies.”

  I went out of my way to find occasions for my parents to pronounce Swann’s name. In my own mind, of course, I never ceased to murmur it; but I needed also to hear its exquisite sound, to have others play to me that music the voiceless rendering of which did not suffice me. Moreover, the name Swann, with which I had for so long been familiar, had now become for me (as happens with certain aphasiacs in the case of the most ordinary words) a new name. 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 together with its familiarity it had simultaneously lost its innocence. The pleasure that I derived from the sound of it I felt to be so sinful that it seemed to me as though the others read my thoughts and changed the conversation if I tried to guide it in that direction. I fell back on subjects which still concerned Gilberte, I repeated over and over again the same words, and although I knew that they were only words—words uttered in her absence, which she could not hear, words without virtue in themselves, repeating what were facts but powerless to modify them—it seemed to me none the less that by dint of thus manipulating, stirring up everything that had reference to Gilberte, I might perhaps elicit from it something that would bring me happiness. I told my parents again that Gilberte was fond of her governess, as if that proposition, voiced 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 was an ambassadress, if not actually a Highness) and I continued to descant on her beauty, her splendour, her nobility, until the day I mentioned that, from what I had heard Gilberte call her, she appeared to be a Mme Blatin.

  “Oh, now I know who you mean,” exclaimed my mother, while I felt myself blushing with shame. “On guard! on guard!—as your poor grandfather would have said. So she’s the one you find so beautiful! Why, she’s perfectly horrible, and always has been. She’s the widow of a bailiff. Don’t you remember, when you were little, all the trouble I used to go to in order to avoid her at your gym 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 ‘too beautiful for a boy.’ She has always had a mania for getting to know people, and she really must be a sort of maniac, as I’ve always thought, if she does in fact know Mme Swann. For even if she does come from a very common background, I’ve never heard anything against her. But she must always be forcing herself upon strangers. She really is a horrible woman, frightfully vulgar, and affected as well.”

  As for Swann, in order to try to resemble him, I spent all my time at table pulling my nose and rubbing my eyes. My father would exclaim: “The child’s an idiot, he’ll make himself quite hideous.” More than anything else I should have liked to be as bald as Swann. He seemed to me a being so extraordinary that I found it miraculous that people of my acquaintance knew him too and in the course of the day might run into him. And once my mother, while she was telling us, as she did every evening at dinner, where she had been and what she had done that afternoon, merely by the words: “By the way, guess whom I saw in the Trois Quartiers—at the umbrella counter—Swann!” brought forth in the midst of her narrative (an arid desert to me) a mystic blossom. What a melancholy pleasure to learn that Swann, that very afternoon, his supernatural form silhouetted again
st the crowd, had gone to buy an umbrella. Among the events of the day, great and small, but all equally insignificant, that one alone aroused in me those peculiar vibrations by which my love for Gilberte was perpetually stirred. My father complained that I took no interest in anything because I did not listen while he was speaking of the political consequences that might follow the visit of King Theodosius, at the moment in France as the nation’s guest and (it was claimed) ally. But how I longed, on the other hand, to know whether Swann had been wearing his hooded cape!

  “Did you speak to him?” I asked.

  “Why, of course I did,” answered my mother, who always seemed afraid lest, were she to admit that we were not on the best of terms with Swann, people would seek to reconcile us more than she cared for, in view of Mme Swann, whom she did not wish to know. “It was he who came up and spoke to me. I hadn’t seen him.”

  “Then you haven’t quarrelled?”

  “Quarrelled? What on earth makes you think we’ve quarrelled?” she briskly parried, as though I had cast doubt on the fiction of her friendly relations with Swann, and tried to bring about a reconciliation.

  “He might be cross with you for never asking him here.”

  “One isn’t obliged to ask everyone to one’s house, you know. Has he ever asked me to his? I don’t know his wife.”

  “But he often used to come at Combray.”