In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (32 page)

But, after a time, absence may prove efficacious. The desire, the
appetite for seeing us again may after all be reborn in the heart
which at present contemns us. Only, we must allow time. Now the
demands which we ourselves make upon time are no less exorbitant than
those of a heart in process of changing. For one thing, time is the
very thing that we are least willing to allow, for our own suffering
is keen and we are anxious to see it brought to an end. And then, too,
the interval of time which the other heart needs to effect its change
our own heart will have spent in changing itself also, so that when
the goal which we had set ourselves becomes attainable it will have
ceased to count as a goal, or to seem worth attaining. This idea,
however, that it will be attainable, that what, when it no longer
spells any good fortune to us, we shall ultimately secure is not good
fortune, this idea embodies a part, but a part only of the truth. Our
good fortune accrues to us when we have grown indifferent to it. But
the very fact of our indifference will have made us less exacting, and
allow us in retrospect to feel convinced that we should have been in
raptures over our good fortune had it come at a time when, very
probably, it would have seemed to us miserably inadequate. People are
not very hard to satisfy nor are they very good judges of matters in
which they take no interest. The friendly overtures of a person whom
we no longer love, overtures which strike us, in our indifference to
her, as excessive, would perhaps have fallen a long way short of
satisfying our love. Those tender speeches, that invitation or
acceptance, we think only of the pleasure which they would have given
us, and not of all those other speeches and meetings by which we
should have wished to see them immediately followed, which we should,
as likely as not, simply by our avidity for them, have precluded from
ever happening. So that we can never be certain that the good fortune
which comes to us too late, when we are no longer in love, is
altogether the same as that good fortune the want of which made us, at
one time, so unhappy. There is only one person who could decide that;
our ego of those days; he is no longer with us, and were he to
reappear, no doubt that would be quite enough to make our good
fortune—whether identical or not—vanish.

Pending these posthumous fulfilments of a dream in which I should not,
when the time came, be greatly interested, by dint of my having to
invent, as in the days when I still hardly knew Gilberte, speeches,
letters in which she implored my forgiveness, swore that she had never
loved anyone but myself and besought me to marry her, a series of
pleasant images incessantly renewed came by degrees to hold a larger
place in my mind than the vision of Gilberte and the young man, which
had nothing now to feed upon. At this point I should perhaps have
resumed my visits to Mme. Swann but for a dream that came to me, in
which one of my friends, who was not, however, one that I could
identify, behaved with the utmost treachery towards me and appeared to
believe that I had been treacherous to him. Abruptly awakened by the
nain which this dream had given me, and finding that it persisted
after I was awake, I turned my thoughts back to the dream, racked my
brains to discover who could have been the friend whom I had seen in
my sleep, the sound of whose name—a Spanish name—was no longer
distinct in my ears. Combining Joseph's part with Pharaoh's, I set to
work to interpret my dream. I knew that, when one is interpreting a
dream, it is often a mistake to pay too much attention to the
appearance of the people one saw in it, who may perhaps have been
disguised or have exchanged faces, like those mutilated saints on the
walls of cathedrals which ignorant archaeologists have restored,
fitting the body of one to the head of another and confusing all their
attributes and names. Those that people bear in a dream are apt to
mislead us. The person with whom we are in love is to be recognised
only by the intensity of the pain that we suffer. From mine I learned
that, though transformed while I was asleep into a young man, the
person whose recent betrayal still hurt me was Gilberte. I remembered
then that, the last time I had seen her, on the day when her mother
had forbidden her to go out to a dancing–lesson, she had, whether in
sincerity or in make–believe, declined, laughing in a strange manner,
to believe in the genuineness of my feeling for her. And by
association this memory brought back to me another. Long before that,
it had been Swann who would not believe in my sincerity, nor that I
was a suitable friend for Gilberte. In vain had I written to him,
Gilberte had brought back my letter and had returned it to me with the
same incomprehensible laugh. She had not returned it to me at once: I
remembered now the whole of that scene behind the clump of laurels. As
soon as one is unhappy one becomes moral. Gilberte's recent antipathy
for me seemed to me a judgment delivered on me by life for my conduct
that afternoon. Such judgments one imagines one can escape because one
looks out for carriages when one is crossing the street, and avoids
obvious dangers. But there are others that take effect within us. The
accident comes from the side to which one has not been looking, from
inside, from the heart. Gilberte's words: "If you like, we might go on
wrestling," made me shudder. I imagined her behaving like that, at
home perhaps, in the linen–room, with the young man whom I had seen
escorting her along the Avenue des Champs–Elysées. And so, just as
when, a little time back, I had believed myself to be calmly
established in a state of happiness, it had been fatuous in me, now
that I had abandoned all thought of happiness, to take for granted
that at least I had grown and was going to remain calm. For, so long
as our heart keeps enshrined with any permanence the image of another
person, it is not only our happiness that may at any moment be
destroyed; when that happiness has vanished, when we have suffered,
and, later, when we have succeeded in lulling our sufferings to sleep,
the thing then that is as elusive, as precarious as ever our happiness
was, is our calm. Mine returned to me in the end, for the cloud which,
lowering our resistance, tempering our desires, has penetrated, in the
train of a dream, the enclosure of our mind, is bound, in course of
time, to dissolve, permanence and stability being assured to nothing
in this world, not even to grief. Besides, those whose suffering is
due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.
As consolation can come to them only from the person who is the cause
of their grief, and as their grief is an emanation from that person,
it is there, in their grief itself, that they must in the end find a
remedy: which it will disclose to them at a given moment, for as long
as they turn it over in their minds this grief will continue to shew
them fresh aspects of the loved, the regretted creature, at one moment
so intensely hateful that one has no longer the slightest desire to
see her, since before finding enjoyment in her company one would have
first to make her suffer, at another so pleasant that the pleasantness
in which one has invested her one adds to her own stock of good
qualities and finds in it a fresh reason for hope. But even although
the anguish that had reawakened in me did at length grow calm, I no
longer wished—except just occasionally—to visit Mme. Swann. In the
first place because, among those who love and have been forsaken, the
state of incessant—even if unconfessed—expectancy in which they live
undergoes a spontaneous transformation, and, while to all appearance
unchanged, substitutes for its original elements others that are
precisely the opposite. The first were the consequences of—a reaction
from—the painful incidents which had upset us. The tension of waiting
for what is yet to come is mingled with fear, all the more since we
desire at such moments, should no message come to us from her whom we
love, to act for ourselves, and are none too confident of the success
of a step which, once we have taken it, we may find it impossible to
follow up. But presently, without our having noticed any change, this
tension, which still endures, is sustained, we discover, no longer by
our recollection of the past but by anticipation of an imaginary
future. From that moment it is almost pleasant. Besides, the first
state, by continuing for some time, has accustomed us to living in
expectation. The suffering that we felt during those last meetings
survives in us still, but is already lulled to sleep. We are in no
haste to arouse it, especially as we do not see very clearly what to
ask for now. The possession of a little more of the woman whom we love
would only make more essential to us the part that we did not yet
possess, which is bound to remain, whatever happens, since our
requirements are begotten of our satisfactions, an irreducible
quantity.

Another, final reason came later on to reinforce this, and to make me
discontinue altogether my visits to Mme. Swann. This reason, slow in
revealing itself, was not that I had now forgotten Gilberte but that I
must make every effort to forget her as speedily as possible. No
doubt, now that the keen edge of my suffering was dulled, my visits to
Mme. Swann had become once again, for what sorrow remained in me, the
sedative and distraction which had been so precious to me at first.
But what made the sedative efficacious made the distraction
impossible, namely that with these visits the memory of Gilberte was
intimately blended. The distraction would be of no avail to me unless
it was employed to combat a sentiment which the presence of Gilberte
no longer nourished, thoughts, interests, passions in which Gilberte
should have no part. These states of consciousness, to which the
person whom we love remains a stranger, then occupy a place which,
however small it may be at first, is always so much reconquered from
the love that has been in unchallenged possession of our whole soul.
We must seek to encourage these thoughts, to make them grow, while the
sentiment which is no more now than a memory dwindles, so that the new
elements introduced into our mind contest with that sentiment, wrest
from it an ever increasing part of our soul, until at last the victory
is complete. I decided that this was the only way in which my love
could be killed, and I was still young enough, still courageous enough
to undertake the attempt, to subject myself to that most cruel grief
which springs from the certainty that, whatever time one may devote to
the effort, it will prove successful in the end. The reason I now gave
in my letters to Gilberte for refusing to see her was an allusion to
some mysterious misunderstanding, wholly fictitious, which was
supposed to have arisen between her and myself, and as to which I had
hoped at first that Gilberte would insist upon my furnishing her with
an explanation. But, as a matter of fact, never, even in the most
insignificant relations in life, does a request for enlightenment come
from a correspondent who knows that an obscure, untruthful,
incriminating sentence has been written on purpose, so that he shall
protest against it, and is only too glad to feel, when he reads it,
that he possesses—and to keep in his own hands—the initiative in the
coming operations. For all the more reason is this so in our more
tender relations, in which love is endowed with so much eloquence,
indifference with so little curiosity. Gilberte having never appeared
to doubt nor sought to learn more about this misunderstanding,
it became for me a real entity, to which I referred anew in every
letter. And there is in these baseless situations, in the affectation
of coldness, a sort of fascination which tempts one to persevere in
them. By dint of writing: "Now that our hearts are sundered," so that
Gilberte might answer: "But they are not. Do explain what you mean," I
had gradually come to believe that they were. By constantly repeating,
"Life may have changed for us, it will never destroy the feeling that
we had for one another," in the hope of hearing myself, one day, say:
"But there has been no change, the feeling is stronger now than ever
it was," I was living with the idea that life had indeed changed, that
we should keep only the memory of a feeling which no longer existed,
as certain neurotics, from having at first pretended to be ill, end by
becoming chronic invalids. Now, whenever I had to write to Gilberte, I
brought my mind back to this imagined change, which, being now tacitly
admitted by the silence which she preserved with regard to it in her
replies, would in future subsist between us. Then Gilberte ceased to
make a point of ignoring it. She too adopted my point of view; and, as
in the speeches at official banquets, when the foreign Sovereign who
is being entertained adopts practically the same expressions as have
just been used by the Sovereign who is entertaining him, whenever I
wrote to Gilberte: "Life may have parted us; the memory of the days
when we knew one another will endure," she never failed to respond:
"Life may have parted us; it cannot make us forget those happy hours
which will always be dear to us both," (though we should have found it
hard to say why or how 'Life'–had parted us, or what change had
occurred). My sufferings were no longer excessive. And yet, one day
when I was telling her in a letter that I had heard of the death of
our old barley–sugar woman in the Champs–Elysées, as I wrote the
words: "I felt at once that this would distress you, in me it awakened
a host of memories," I could not restrain myself from bursting into
tears when I saw that I was speaking in the past tense, as though it
were of some dead friend, now almost forgotten, of this love of which
in spite of myself I had never ceased to think as of a thing still
alive, or one that at least might be born again. Nothing can be more
affectionate than this sort of correspondence between friends who do
not wish to see one another any more. Gilberte's letters to me had all
the delicate refinement of those which I used to write to people who
did not matter, and shewed me the same apparent marks of affection,
which it was so pleasant for me to receive from her.