In Search of Lost Time (65 page)

Every evening I liked to imagine this letter, I believed I was reading it, I recited each sentence of it to myself. All of a sudden I stopped in alarm. I realized that if I were to receive a letter from Gilberte, it could not be that one anyway since I was the one who had just written it. And from then on, I forced myself to turn my thoughts away from the words I would have liked her to write to me, for fear that by articulating them, I would exclude precisely those – the dearest, the most desired – from the field of all possible compositions. Even if through an improbable coincidence it had been precisely the letter that I had invented that Gilberte on her own account addressed to me, recognizing my work in it I would not have had the impression of receiving something that did not come from me, something real, new, a happiness external to my mind, independent of my will, truly given by love.

Meanwhile I reread a page which had not been written to me by
Gilberte, but which at least came to me from her, that page by Bergotte on the beauty of the old myths that inspired Racine, and which, next to the agate marble, I kept near me always. I was moved by the goodness of my friend who had had someone find it for me; and because everyone needs to discover reasons for his passion, so much so that he is happy to recognize in the person he loves qualities which literature or conversation have taught him are among those worthy of inspiring love, so much so that he assimilates them by imitation and makes them new reasons for his love, even if these qualities were the most diametrically opposed to those his love would have sought so long as it remained spontaneous – as Swann had done once upon a time, with the aesthetic nature of Odette's beauty – I, who had at first loved Gilberte, back in Combray, because of all that was unknown about her life, into which I would have liked to hurl myself, become incarnated, abandoning my own life which was no longer anything to me, I now thought, as of an inestimable advantage, that of this life of mine, too well known, disdained, Gilberte might one day become the humble servant, the companionable and comfortable collaborator who in the evening, helping me in my work, would compare and collate my pamphlets. As for Bergotte, that infinitely wise and almost divine old man because of whom I had first loved Gilberte, even before I saw her, now it was above all because of Gilberte that I loved him. With as much pleasure as the pages he had written on Racine, I looked at the paper closed with great seals of white wax and tied with a cascade of mauve ribbons in which she had brought them to me. I kissed the agate marble which was the best part of my friend's heart, the part that was not frivolous, but faithful, and which even though adorned with the mysterious charm of Gilberte's life remained close to me, lived in my bedroom, slept in my bed. But as for the beauty of that stone, and the beauty also of those pages by Bergotte, which I was so pleased to associate with the idea of my love for Gilberte, as if in the moments when that love appeared to me to be nothing at all they gave it a sort of substance, I saw that they were anterior to that love, that they did not resemble it, that their elements had been determined by talent or by the laws of mineralogy before Gilberte knew me, that nothing in the book or in the stone would have been different if Gilberte had not
loved me and that consequently nothing entitled me to read in them a message of happiness. And while my love, ceaselessly waiting for the next day to bring an avowal of Gilberte's love, cancelled and undid each evening the badly done work of the day, in the darkness inside me an unknown seamstress did not leave the pulled threads in the scrap-heap but arranged them, with no concern for pleasing me or working for my happiness, in the different order to which she gave all her work. Showing no particular interest in my love, nor beginning by deciding that I was indeed loved, she gathered up those of Gilberte's actions which had seemed inexplicable to me along with her faults, which I had excused. Then the first and the second acquired a meaning. It seemed to say, this new order, that when I saw Gilberte, instead of coming to the Champs-Élysées, go to a party, go shopping with her governess, or prepare to be away over the New Year's holidays, I was wrong to think: ‘It's because she's frivolous or docile.' For she would have ceased to be one or the other if she had loved me, and if she had been forced to obey it would have been with the same despair that I felt on the days when I did not see her. It said further, this new order, that I must after all know what it was to love since I loved Gilberte; it pointed out to me the perpetual concern I felt to show myself to advantage in her eyes, because of which I tried to persuade my mother to buy Françoise a raincoat and a hat with a blue ostrich feather, or better still not to continue sending me to the Champs-Élysées with that maid who made me blush (to which my mother answered that I was unfair to Françoise, that she was a good woman who was devoted to us), and also that unique need to see Gilberte because of which months in advance I thought only of trying to learn at what time of the year she would be leaving Paris and where she would be going, finding even the most pleasant countryside a place of exile if she was not going to be there, and wanting only to stay in Paris all the time as long as I could see her at the Champs-Élysées; and it had no difficulty showing me that I would not find that concern, or that need, behind Gilberte's actions. She on the contrary appreciated her governess, without worrying about what I thought of her. She found it natural not to come to the Champs-Élysées, if she was going to make some purchases with Mademoiselle, pleasant if she was going out with her
mother. And even supposing she would have allowed me to spend the holidays in the same place as she, at least in choosing that place she considered her parents' desires, the thousand amusements she had heard about and not in the least that this was the place where my family was intending to send me. When she assured me from time to time that she liked me less than one of her other friends, less than she had liked me the day before because I had made her lose the game through my carelessness, I would ask her to forgive me, I would ask her what I should do so that she would begin to like me again as much as, so that she would like me more than the others; I wanted her to tell me that it was already done, I begged her for it as if she could change her affection for me as she wished, as I wished, in order to please me, merely by the words that she would say, depending on my good or my bad behaviour. Did I not know, then, that what I myself felt, for her, depended neither on her actions nor on my own will?

It showed me, finally, the new order designed by the invisible seamstress, that if we may wish that the actions of a person who has hurt us until now were not sincere, there follows in their wake a clarity against which our wishes are powerless and to which, rather than to them, we must address ourselves in asking what that person's actions will be tomorrow.

These new words were heard by my love; they persuaded it that the next day would not be different from what all the other days had been; that Gilberte's feeling for me, already too old to be able to change, was indifference; that in my friendship with Gilberte, I was the only one who loved. ‘It's true, my love answered, there's nothing more to be done with this friendship, it won't change.' And so, the very next day (or waiting for a public holiday if there was one coming up soon, or an anniversary, or the New Year perhaps, one of those days which are not like the others, when time makes a fresh start by rejecting the heritage of the past, by not accepting the legacy of its sorrows) I would ask Gilberte to give up our old friendship and lay the foundations of a new one.

I always had within reach of my hand a map of Paris which, because one could distinguish on it the street where M. and Mme Swann lived,
seemed to me to contain a treasure. And for pleasure, from a sort of chivalrous loyalty also, apropos of anything or nothing, I would say the name of that street, until my father asked, not being fully informed about my love as were my mother and my grandmother:

– Now why do you talk about that street all the time, there's nothing extraordinary about it, it's a very pleasant street to live on because it's two steps from the Bois, but there are ten others of which the same thing is true.

I contrived at every turn to make my parents say the name Swann; of course I repeated it to myself in my own mind incessantly; but I also needed to hear the delicious sound of it and to have someone else play me this music the silent reading of which was not enough. The name Swann, which I had known for such a long time, was for me also, now, as can happen with the most everyday words for certain aphasics, a new name. It was always present in my mind and yet my mind could not grow accustomed to it. I took it apart, I spelled it, its orthography was a surprise to me. And at the same time that it had ceased to be familiar, it had ceased to appear innocent. The joy I felt at hearing it I believed was so guilty that it seemed to me others guessed my thoughts and changed the conversation if I tried to lead it there. I resorted to subjects that still touched upon Gilberte, I recited the same words endlessly, and although I knew they were only words – words spoken far away from her, which she could not hear, words without potency that repeated what was, but could not modify it – yet it seemed to me that by dint of thus feeling, handling everything that touched Gilberte I would perhaps make something happy emerge from it. I told my parents again that Gilberte liked her governess very much, as if that proposition articulated for the hundredth time were at last going to have the effect of suddenly producing Gilberte, who had come to live with us for ever. I resumed my praise of the old lady who read
Les Débats
(I had hinted to my parents that she was an ambassadress or perhaps a royal highness) and I continued to celebrate her beauty, her magnificence, her nobility, until the day I said that from what I had heard Gilberte call her, her name must be Mme Blatin.

– Oh, now I know who she is! exclaimed my mother while I felt myself blushing from shame. On guard! On guard! as your poor
grandfather would have said. So she's the one you find so beautiful! Why, she's horrible and always has been. She's the widow of a bailiff. You don't remember when you were little the lengths I went to to avoid her at the gymnastics class where, though she didn't know me, she would come and try to talk to me with the excuse of wanting to tell me you were “too beautiful for a boy”. She always had a mania for getting to know people and she must indeed be rather mad as I always thought, if she really knows Mme Swann. For though her background is quite common, at least there was never anything said against her so far as I know. But she always had to cultivate a new acquaintance. She's horrible, frightfully vulgar, and a trouble-maker into the bargain.'

As for Swann, in order to try to resemble him, I would spend all my time at the table pulling on my nose and rubbing my eyes. My father would say: ‘The child has no sense, he'll make himself quite hideous.' I would especially have liked to be as bald as Swann. He seemed to me a being so extraordinary that I found it amazing that people I knew actually knew him too and that the chance events of an ordinary day might bring one face to face with him. And one time, my mother, in the course of telling us, as she did every evening at dinner about the errands she had run that afternoon, merely by saying: ‘Speaking of which, guess who I met in Trois Quartiers
²⁹
at the umbrella counter: Swann,' caused the centre of her story, so very dry for me, to blossom with a mysterious flower. What a melancholy pleasure, to learn that that very afternoon, his supernatural form profiled against the crowd, Swann had gone to buy an umbrella! Among the great and tiny events, equally uninteresting, this one awoke in me those peculiar vibrations by which my love for Gilberte was perpetually moved. My father said I was not interested in anything because I did not listen when they talked about the political consequences that might follow from the visit of King Theodosius, at this moment the guest of France and, it was claimed, its ally. But how keenly, on the other hand, I wanted to know if Swann was wearing his travelling cape!

– Did you say hello to each other? I asked.

– Why, naturally, answered my mother, who always seemed to be
afraid that, were she to admit there was any coldness between them and Swann, people would have tried to bring about a reconciliation closer than she wished, because of Mme Swann, whom she did not want to know. It was he who came up and spoke to me, I didn't see him.

– So, then, you haven't quarrelled?

– Quarrelled? Now what makes you think we might have quarrelled? she answered briskly, as if I had attacked the fiction of her good relations with Swann and tried to effect a ‘rapprochement'.

– He might be cross with you for not inviting him any more.

– One isn't obliged to invite everyone; does he invite me? I don't know his wife.

– But at Combray he used to come.

– Well, yes! He came at Combray, and now in Paris he has other things to do and so have I. But I promise you we didn't look in the least like two people who had quarrelled. We stood there together for a moment because they hadn't brought him his parcel. He asked after you, he told me you played with his daughter, added my mother, stunning me with the prodigious fact that I existed in Swann's mind, even more, that I existed there in so complete a manner, that, when I trembled with love there before him in the Champs-Élysées, he knew my name, who my mother was, and could amalgamate around my qualification as playmate of his daughter certain facts about my grandparents, their family, the place where we lived, certain details of our past life which were perhaps unknown even to me. But my mother did not seem to have seen any particular charm in that counter at Trois Quartiers where she had represented for Swann, at the moment when he caught sight of her, a definite person with whom he had memories in common that had inspired the impulse to approach her, the gesture of greeting her.