In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (29 page)

In consequence of the violence of my palpitations, my doses of
caffeine were reduced; the palpitations ceased. Whereupon I asked
myself whether it was not to some extent the drug that had been
responsible for the anguish that I had felt when I came near to
quarrelling with Gilberte, an anguish which I had attributed, on every
recurrence of it, to the distressing prospect of never seeing my
friend again or of running the risk of seeing her only when she was a
prey to the same ill–humour. But if this medicine had been at the
root of the sufferings which my imagination must in that case have
interpreted wrongly (not that there would be anything extraordinary in
that, seeing that, among lovers, the most acute mental suffering
assumes often the physical identity of the woman with whom they are
living), it had been, in that sense, like the philtre which, long
after they have drunk of it, continues to bind Tristan to Isolde. For
the physical improvement which the reduction of my caffeine effected
almost at once did not arrest the evolution of that grief which my
absorption of the toxin had perhaps—if it had not created it—at any
rate contrived to render more acute.

Only, as the middle of the month of January approached, once my hopes
of a letter on New Year's Day had been disappointed, once the
additional disturbance that had come with their disappointment had
grown calm, it was my old sorrow, that of 'before the holidays,' which
began again. What was perhaps the most cruel thing about it was that I
myself was its architect, unconscious, wilful, merciless and patient.
The one thing that mattered, my relations with Gilberte, it was I who
was labouring to make them impossible by gradually creating out of
this prolonged separation from my friend, not indeed her indifference,
but what would come to the same thing in the end, my own. It was to a
slow and painful suicide of that part of me which was Gilberte's lover
that I was goading myself with untiring energy, with a clear sense not
only of what I was presently doing but of what must result from it in
the future; I knew not only that after a certain time I should cease
to love Gilberte, but also that she herself would regret it and that
the attempts which she would then make to see me would be as vain as
those that she was making now, no longer because I loved her too well
but because I should certainly be in love with some other woman whom I
should continue to desire, to wait for, through hours of which I
should not dare to divert any particle of a second to Gilberte who
would be nothing to me then. And no doubt at that very moment in which
(since I was determined not to see her again, unless after a formal
request for an explanation or a full confession of love on her part,
neither of which was in the least degree likely to come to me now) I
had already lost Gilberte, and loved her more than ever, and could
feel all that she was to me better than in the previous year when,
spending all my afternoons in her company, or as many as I chose, I
believed that no peril threatened our friendship,—no doubt at that
moment the idea that I should one day entertain identical feelings for
another was odious to me, for that idea carried me away beyond the
range of Gilberte, my love and my sufferings. My love, my sufferings
in which through my tears I attempted to discern precisely what
Gilberte was, and was obliged to recognise that they did not pertain
exclusively to her but would, sooner or later, be some other woman's
portion. So that—or such, at least, was my way of thinking then—we
are always detached from our fellow–creatures; when a man loves one of
them he feels that his love is not labelled with their two names, but
may be born again in the future, may have been born already in the
past for another and not for her. And in the time when he is not in
love, if he makes up his mind philosophically as to what it is that is
inconsistent in love, he will find that the love of which he can speak
unmoved he did not, at the moment of speaking, feel, and therefore did
not know, knowledge in these matters being intermittent and not
outlasting the actual presence of the sentiment. That future in which
I should not love Gilberte, which my sufferings helped me to divine
although my imagination was not yet able to form a clear picture of
it, certainly there would still have been time to warn Gilberte that
it was gradually taking shape, that its coming was, if not imminent,
at least inevitable, if she herself, Gilberte, did not come to my
rescue and destroy in the germ my nascent indifference. How often was
I not on the point of writing, or of going to Gilberte to tell her:
"Take care. My mind is made up. What I am doing now is my supreme
effort. I am seeing you now for the last time. Very soon I shall have
ceased to love you." But to what end? By what authority should I have
reproached Gilberte for an indifference which, not that I considered
myself guilty on that count, I too manifested towards everything that
was not herself? The last time! To me, that appeared as something of
immense significance, because I was in love with Gilberte. On her it
would doubtless have made just as much impression as those letters in
which our friends ask whether they may pay us a visit before they
finally leave the country, an offer which, like those made by tiresome
women who are in love with us, we decline because we have pleasures of
our own in prospect. The time which we have at our disposal every day
is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire
contract it; and habit fills up what remains.

Besides, what good would it have done if I had spoken to Gilberte; she
would not have understood me. We imagine always when we speak that it
is our own ears, our own mind that are listening. My words would have
come to her only in a distorted form, as though they had had to pass
through the moving curtain of a waterfall before they reached my
friend, unrecognisable, giving a foolish sound, having no longer any
kind of meaning. The truth which one puts into one's words does not
make a direct path for itself, is not supported by irresistible
evidence. A considerable time must elapse before a truth of the same
order can take shape in the words themselves. Then the political
opponent who, despite all argument, every proof that he has advanced
to damn the votary of the rival doctrine as a traitor, will himself
have come to share the hated conviction by which he who once sought in
vain to disseminate it is no longer bound. Then the masterpiece of
literature which for the admirers who read it aloud seemed to make
self–evident the proofs of its excellence, while to those who listened
it presented only a senseless or commonplace image, will by these too
be proclaimed a masterpiece, but too late for the author to learn of
their discovery. Similarly in love the barriers, do what one may,
cannot be broken down from without by him whom they maddeningly
exclude; it is when he is no longer concerned with them that suddenly,
as the result of aft effort directed from elsewhere, accomplished
within the heart of her who did not love him, those barriers which he
has charged without success will fall to no advantage. If I had come
to Gilberte to tell her of my future indifference and the means of
preventing it, she would have assumed from my action that my love for
her, the need that I had of her, were even greater than I had
supposed, and her distaste for the sight of me would thereby have been
increased. And incidentally it is quite true that it was that love for
her which helped me, by means of the incongruous states of mind which
it successively produced in me, to foresee, more clearly than she
herself could, the end of that love. And yet some such warning I might
perhaps have addressed, by letter or with my own lips, to Gilberte,
after a long enough interval, which would render her, it is true, less
indispensable to me, but would also have proved to her that she was
not so indispensable. Unfortunately certain persons—of good or evil
intent—spoke of me to her in a fashion which must have led her to
think that they were doing so at my request. Whenever I thus learned
that Cottard, my own mother, even M. de Norpois had by a few
ill–chosen words rendered useless all the sacrifice that I had just
been making, wasted all the advantage of my reserve by giving me,
wrongly, the appearance of having emerged from it, I was doubly angry.
In the first place I could no longer reckon from any date but the
present my laborious and fruitful abstention which these tiresome
people had, unknown to me, interrupted and so brought to nothing. And
not only that; I should have less pleasure in seeing Gilberte, who
would think of me now no longer as containing myself in dignified
resignation, but as plotting in the dark for an interview which she
had scorned to grant me. I cursed all the idle chatter of people who
so often, without any intention of hurting us or of doing us a
service, for no reason, for talking's sake, often because we ourselves
have not been able to refrain from talking in their presence, and
because they are indiscreet (as we ourselves are), do us, at a crucial
moment, so much harm. It is true that in the grim operation performed
for the eradication of our love they are far from playing a part equal
to that played by two persons who are in the habit, from excess of
good nature in one and of malice in the Other, of undoing everything
at the moment when everything is on the point of being settled. But
against these two persons we bear no such grudge as against the
inopportune Cottards of this world, for the latter of them is the
person whom we love and the former is ourself.

Meanwhile, since on almost every occasion of my going to see her Mme.
Swann would invite me to come to tea another day, with her daughter,
and tell me to reply directly to her, I was constantly writing to
Gilberte, and in this correspondence I did not choose the expressions
which might, I felt, have won her over, sought only to carve out the
easiest channel for the torrent of my tears. For, like desire, regret
seeks not to be analysed but to be satisfied. When one begins to love,
one spends one's time, not in getting to know what one's love really
is, but in making it possible to meet next day. When one abandons love
one seeks not to know one's grief but to offer to her who is causing
it that expression of it which seems to one the most moving. One says
the things which one feels the need of saying, and which the other
will not understand, one speaks for oneself alone. I wrote: "I had
thought that it would not be possible. Alas, I see now that it is not
so difficult." I said also: "I shall probably not see you again;" I
said it while I continued to avoid shewing a coldness which she might
think affected, and the words, as I wrote them, made me weep because I
felt that they expressed not what I should have liked to believe but
what was probably going to happen. For at the next request for a
meeting which she would convey to me I should have again, as I had
now, the courage not to yield, and, what with one refusal and another,
I should gradually come to the moment when, by virtue of not having
seen her again, I should not wish to see her. I wept, but I found
courage enough to sacrifice, I tasted the sweets of sacrificing the
happiness of being with her to the probability of seeming attractive
to her one day, a day when, alas, my seeming attractive to her would
be immaterial to me. Even the supposition, albeit so far from likely,
that at this moment, as she had pretended during the last visit that I
had paid her, she loved me, that what I took for the boredom which one
feels in the company of a person of whom one has grown tired had been
due only to a jealous susceptibility, to a feint of indifference
analogous to my own, only rendered my decision less painful. It
seemed to me that in years to come, when we had forgotten one another,
when I should be able to look back and tell her that this letter which
I was now in course of writing had not been for one moment sincere,
she would answer, "What, you really did love me, did you? If you had
only known how I waited for that letter, how I hoped that you were
coming to see me, how I cried when I read it." The thought, while I
was writing it, immediately on my return from her mother's house, that
I was perhaps helping to bring about that very misunderstanding, that
thought, by the sadness in which it plunged me, by the pleasure of
imagining that I was loved by Gilberte, gave me the impulse to
continue my letter.

If, at the moment of leaving Mme. Swann, when her tea–party ended, I
was thinking of what I was going to write to her daughter, Mme.
Cottard, as she departed, had been filled with thoughts of a wholly
different order. On her little 'tour of inspection' she had not failed
to congratulate Mme. Swann on the new 'pieces,' the recent
'acquisitions' which caught the eye in her drawing–room. She could see
among them some, though only a very few, of the things that Odette had
had in the old days in the Rue La Pérouse, for instance her animals
carved in precious stones, her fetishes.

For since Mme. Swann had picked up from a friend whose opinion she
valued the word 'dowdy'—which had opened to her a new horizon because
it denoted precisely those things which a few years earlier she had
considered 'smart'—all those things had, one after another, followed
into retirement the gilded trellis that had served as background to
her chrysanthemums, innumerable boxes of sweets from Giroux's, and the
coroneted note–paper (not to mention the coins of gilt pasteboard
littered about on the mantelpieces, which, even before she had come to
know Swann, a man of taste had advised her to sacrifice). Moreover in
the artistic disorder, the studio–like confusion of the rooms, whose
walls were still painted in sombre colours which made them as
different as possible from the white–enamelled drawing–rooms in which,
a little later, you were to find Mme. Swann installed, the Far East
recoiled more and more before the invading forces of the eighteenth
century; and the cushions which, to make me 'comfortable,' Mme. Swann
heaped up and buffeted into position behind my back were sprinkled
with Louis XV garlands and not, as of old, with Chinese dragons. In
the room in which she was usually to be found, and of which she would
say, "Yes, I like this room; I use it a great deal. I couldn't live
with a lot of horrid vulgar things swearing at me all the time; this
is where I do my work——" though she never stated precisely at what
she was working. Was it a picture? A book, perhaps, for the hobby of
writing was beginning to become common among women who liked to 'do
something,' not to be quite useless. She was surrounded by Dresden
pieces (having a fancy for that sort of porcelain, which she
would name with an English accent, saying in any connexion: "How
pretty that is; it reminds me of Dresden flowers,"), and dreaded for
them even more than in the old days for her grotesque figures and her
flower–pots the ignorant handling of her servants who must expiate,
every now and then, the anxiety that they had caused her by submitting
to outbursts of rage at which Swann, the most courteous and
considerate of masters, looked on without being shocked. Not that the
clear perception of certain weaknesses in those whom we love in any
way diminishes our affection for them; rather that affection makes us
find those weaknesses charming. Rarely nowadays was it in one of those
Japanese wrappers that Odette received her familiars, but rather in
the bright and billowing silk of a Watteau gown whose flowering foam
she made as though to caress where it covered her bosom, and in which
she immersed herself, looked solemn, splashed and sported, with such
an air of comfort, of a cool skin and long–drawn breath, that she
seemed to look on these garments not as something decorative, a mere
setting for herself, but as necessary, in the same way as her 'tub' or
her daily 'outing,' to satisfy the requirements of her style of beauty
and the niceties of hygiene. She used often to say that she would go
without bread rather than give up 'art' and 'having nice things about
her,' and that the burning of the 'Gioconda' would distress her
infinitely more than the destruction, by the same element, of
'millions' of the people she knew. Theories which seemed paradoxical
to her friends, but made her pass among them as a superior woman, and
qualified her to receive a visit once a week from the Belgian
Minister, so that in the little world whose sun she was everyone would
have been greatly astonished to learn that elsewhere—at the
Verdurins', for instance—she was reckoned a fool. It was this
vivacity of expression that made Mme. Swann prefer men's society to
women's. But when she criticised the latter it was always from the
courtesan's standpoint, singling out the blemishes that might lower
them in the esteem of men, a lumpy figure, a bad complexion, inability
to spell, hairy legs, foul breath, pencilled eyebrows. But towards a
woman who had shewn her kindness or indulgence in the past she was
more lenient, especially if this woman were now in trouble. She would
defend her warmly, saying: "People are not fair to her. I assure you,
she's quite a nice woman really."