In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (25 page)

"But Bergotte is coming, isn't he? Do you mean that you don't think it
good, what he writes? It will be better still, very soon," she went
on, "for he is more pointed, he concentrates more in newspaper
articles than in his books, where he is apt to spread out too much.
I've arranged that in future he's to do the leading articles in the
Figaro. He'll be distinctly the 'right man in the right place' there."
And, finally, "Come! He will tell you, better than anyone, what you
ought to do."

And so, just as one invites a gentleman ranker to meet his colonel, it
was in the interests of my career, and as though masterpieces of
literature arose out of "getting to know" people, that she told me not
to fail to come to dinner with her next day, to meet Bergotte.

And so there was not from the Swanns any more than from my parents,
that is to say from those who, at different times, had seemed bound to
place obstacles in my way, any further opposition to that pleasant
existence in which I might see Gilberte as often as I chose, with
enjoyment if not with peace of mind. There can be no peace of mind in
love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a
fresh starting–point for further desires. So long as I had not been
free to go to her, having my eyes fixed upon that inaccessible goal of
happiness, I could not so much as imagine the fresh grounds for
anxiety that lay in wait for me there. Once the resistance of her
parents was broken, and the problem solved at last, it began to set
itself anew, and always in different terms. Each evening, on arriving
home, I reminded myself that I had things to say to Gilberte of prime
importance, things upon which our whole friendship hung, and these
things were never the same. But at least I was happy, and no further
menace arose to threaten my happiness. One was to appear, alas, from a
quarter in which I had never detected any peril, namely from Gilberte
and myself. And yet I ought to have been tormented by what, on the
contrary, reassured me, by what I mistook for happiness. We are, when
we love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving at once to an
accident, the most simple to all appearance and one that may at any
moment occur, a serious–aspect which that accident by itself would not
bear. What makes us so happy is the presence in our heart of an
unstable element which we are perpetually arranging to keep in
position, and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is
not displaced. Actually, there is in love a permanent strain of
suffering which happiness neutralises, makes conditional only,
procrastinates, but which may at any moment become what it would long
since have been had we not obtained what we were seeking, sheer agony.

On several occasions I felt that Gilberte was anxious to put off my
visits. It is true that when I was at all anxious to see her I had
only to get myself invited by her parents who were increasingly
persuaded of my excellent influence over her. "Thanks to them," I used
to think, "my love is running no risk; the moment I have them on my
side, I can set my mind at rest; they have full authority over
Gilberte." Until, alas, I detected certain signs of impatience which
she allowed to escape her when her father made me come to the house,
almost against her will, and asked myself whether what I had regarded
as a protection for my happiness was not in fact the secret reason why
that happiness could not endure.

The last time that I called to see Gilberte, it was raining; she had
been asked to a dancing lesson in the house of some people whom she
knew too slightly to be able to take me there with her. In view of the
dampness of the air I had taken rather more caffeine than usual.
Perhaps on account of the weather, or because she had some objection
to the house in which this party was being given, Mme. Swann, as her
daughter was leaving the room, called her back in the sharpest of
tones: "Gilberte!" and pointed to me, to indicate that I had come
there to see her and that she ought to stay with me. This "Gilberte!"
had been uttered, or shouted rather, with the best of intentions
towards myself, but from the way in which Gilberte shrugged her
shoulders as she took off her outdoor clothes I divined that her
mother had unwittingly hastened the gradual evolution, which until
then it had perhaps been possible to arrest, which was gradually
drawing away from me my friend. "You don't need to go out dancing
every day," Odette told her daughter, with a sagacity acquired, no
doubt, in earlier days, from Swann. Then, becoming once more Odette,
she began speaking to her daughter in English. At once it was as
though a wall had sprung up to hide from me a part of the life of
Gilberte, as though an evil genius had spirited my friend far away. In
a language that we know, we have substituted for the opacity of
sounds, the perspicuity of ideas. But a language which we do not know
is a fortress sealed, within whose walls she whom we love is free to
play us false, while we, standing without, desperately alert in our
impotence, can see, can prevent nothing. So this conversation in
English, at which, a month earlier, I should merely have smiled,
interspersed with a few proper names in French which did not fail to
accentuate, to give a point to my uneasiness, had, when conducted
within a few feet of me by two motionless persons, the same degree of
cruelty, left me as much abandoned and alone as the forcible abduction
of my companion. At length Mme. Swann left us. That day, perhaps from
resentment against myself, the unwilling cause of her not going out to
enjoy herself, perhaps also because, guessing her to be angry with me,
I was precautionally colder than usual with her, the face of Gilberte,
divested of every sign of joy, bleak, bare, pillaged, seemed all
afternoon to be devoting a melancholy regret to the pas–de–quatre in
which my arrival had prevented her from going to take part, and to be
defying every living creature, beginning with myself, to understand
the subtle reasons that had determined in her a sentimental attachment
to the boston. She confined herself to exchanging with me, now and
again, on the weather, the increasing violence of the rain, the
fastness of the clock, a conversation punctuated with silences and
monosyllables, in which I lashed myself on, with a sort of desperate
rage, to the destruction of those moments which we might have devoted
to friendship and happiness. And on each of our remarks was stamped,
as it were, a supreme harshness, by the paroxysm of their stupefying
unimportance, which at the same time consoled me, for it prevented
Gilberte from being taken in by the banality of my observations and
the indifference of my tone. In vain was my polite: "I thought, the
other day, that the clock was slow, if anything"; she evidently
understood me to mean: "How tiresome you are being!" Obstinately as I
might protract, over the whole length of that rain–sodden afternoon,
the dull cloud of words through which no fitful ray shone, I knew that
my coldness was not so unalterably fixed as I pretended, and that
Gilberte must be fully aware that if, after already saying it to her
three times, I had hazarded a fourth repetition of the statement that
the evenings were drawing in, I should have had difficulty in
restraining myself from bursting into tears. When she was like that,
when no smile filled her eyes or unveiled her face, I cannot describe
the devastating monotony that stamped her melancholy eyes and sullen
features. Her face, grown almost livid, reminded me then of those
dreary beaches where the sea, ebbing far out, wearies one with its
faint shimmering, everywhere the same, fixed in an immutable and low
horizon. At length, as I saw no sign in Gilberte of the happy change
for which I had been waiting now for some hours, I told her that she
was not being nice. "It is you that are not being nice," was her
answer. "Oh, but surely——!" I asked myself what I could have done,
and, finding no answer, put the question to her. "Naturally, you think
yourself nice!" she said to me with a laugh, and went on laughing.
Whereupon I felt all the anguish that there was for me in not being
able to attain to that other, less perceptible, plane of her mind
which her laughter indicated. It seemed, that laughter, to mean: "No,
no, I'm not going to let myself be moved by anything that you say, I
know you're madly in love with me, but that leaves me neither hot nor
cold, for I don't care a rap for you." But I told myself that, after
all, laughter was not a language so well defined that I could be
certain of understanding what this laugh really meant. And Gilberte's
words were affectionate. "But how am I not being nice?" I asked her.
"Tell me; I will do anything you want." "No; that wouldn't be any good.
I can't explain." For a moment I was afraid that she thought that I
did not love her, and this was for me a fresh agony, no less keen, but
one that required treatment by a different conversational method. "If
you knew how much you were hurting me you would tell me." But this
pain which, had she doubted my love for her, must have rejoiced her,
seemed instead to make her more angry. Then, realising my mistake,
making up my mind to pay no more attention to what she said, letting
her (without bothering to believe her) assure me: "I do love you,
indeed I do; you will see one day," (that day on which the guilty are
convinced that their innocence will be made clear, and which, for some
mysterious reason, never happens to be the day on which their evidence
is taken), I had the courage to make a sudden resolution not to see
her again, and without telling her of it yet since she would not have
believed me.

Grief that is caused one by a person with whom one is in love can be
bitter, even when it is interpolated among preoccupations,
occupations, pleasures in which that person is not directly involved
and from which our attention is diverted only now and again to return
to it. But when such a grief has its birth—as was now happening—at a
moment when the happiness of seeing that person fills us to the
exclusion of all else, the sharp depression that then affects our
spirits, sunny hitherto, sustained and calm, lets loose in us a raging
tempest against which we know not whether we are capable of struggling
to the end. The tempest that was blowing in my heart was so violent
that I made my way home baffled, battered, feeling that I could
recover my breath only by retracing my steps, by returning, upon
whatever pretext, into Gilberte's presence. But she would have said to
herself: "Back again! Evidently I can go to any length with him; he
will come back every time, and the more wretched he is when he leaves
me the more docile he'll be." Besides, I was irresistibly drawn
towards her in thought, and those alternative orientations, that mad
careering between them of the compass–needle within me, persisted
after I had reached home, and expressed themselves in the mutually
contradictory letters to Gilberte which I began to draft.

I was about to pass through one of those difficult crises which we
generally find that we have to face at various stages in life, and
which, for all that there has been no change in our character, in our
nature (that nature which itself creates our loves, and almost creates
the women whom we love, even to their faults), we do not face in the
same way on each occasion, that is to say at every age. At such
moments our life is divided, and so to speak distributed over a pair
of scales, in two counterpoised pans which between them contain it
all. In one there is our desire not to displease, not to appear too
humble to the creature whom we love without managing to understand
her, but whom we find it more convenient at times to appear almost to
disregard, so that she shall not have that sense of her own
indispensability which may turn her from us; in the other scale there
is a feeling of pain—and one that is not localised and partial
only—which cannot be set at rest unless, abandoning every thought of
pleasing the woman and of making her believe that we can dispense with
her, we go at once to find her. When we withdraw from the pan in which
our pride lies a small quantity of the will–power which we have weakly
allowed to exhaust itself with increasing age, when we add to the pan
that holds our suffering a physical pain which we have acquired and
have let grow, then, instead of the courageous solution that would
have carried the day at one–and–twenty, it is the other, grown too
heavy and insufficiently balanced, that crushes us down at fifty. All
the more because situations, while repeating them–.selves, tend to
alter, and there is every likelihood that, in middle life or in old
age, we shall have had the grim satisfaction of complicating our love
by an intrusion of habit which adolescence, repressed by other demands
upon it, less master of itself, has never known.

I had just written Gilberte a letter in which I allowed the tempest of
my wrath to thunder, not however without throwing her the lifebuoy of
a few words disposed as though by accident on the page, by clinging to
which my friend might be brought to a reconciliation; a moment later,
the wind having changed, they were phrases full of love that I
addressed to her, chosen for the sweetness of certain forlorn
expressions, those "nevermores" so touching to those who pen them, so
wearisome to her who will have to read them, whether she believe them
to be false and translate 'nevermore' by 'this very evening, if you
want me,' or believe them to be true and so to be breaking the news to
her of one of those final separations which make so little difference
to our lives when the other person is one with whom we are not in
love. But since we are incapable, while we are in love, of acting as
fit predecessors of the next persons whom we shall presently have
become, and who will then be in love no longer, how are we to imagine
the actual state of mind of a woman whom, even when we are conscious
that we are of no account to her, we have perpetually represented in
our musings as uttering, so as to lull us into a happy dream or to
console us for a great sorrow, the same speeches that she would make
if she loved us. When we come to examine the thoughts, the actions of
a woman whom we love, we are as completely at a loss as must have
been, face to face with the phenomena of nature, the world's first
natural philosophers, before their science had been elaborated and had
cast a ray of light over the unknown. Or, worse still, we are like a
person in whose mind the law of causality barely exists, a person who
would be incapable, therefore, of establishing any connexion between
one phenomenon and another, to whose eyes the spectacle of the world
would appear unstable as a dream. Of course I made efforts to emerge
from this incoherence, to find reasons for things. I tried even to be
'objective' and, to that end, to bear well in mind the disproportion
that existed between the importance which Gilberte had in my eyes and
that, not only which I had in hers, but which she herself had in the
eyes of other people, a disproportion which, had I failed to remark
it, would have involved my mistaking mere friendliness on my friend's
part for a passionate avowal, and a grotesque and debasing display on
my own for the simple and graceful movement with which we are
attracted towards a pretty face. But I was afraid also of falling into
the contrary error, in which I should have seen in Gilberte's
unpunctuality in keeping an appointment an irremediable hostility. I
tried to discover between these two perspectives, equally distorting,
a third which would enable me to see things as they really were; the
calculations I was obliged to make with that object helped to take my
mind off my sufferings; and whether in obedience to the laws of
arithmetic or because I had made them give me the answer that I
desired, I made up my mind that next day I would go to the Swanns',
happy, but happy in the same way as people who, having long been
tormented by the thought of a journey which they have not wished to
make, go no farther than to the station and return home to unpack
their boxes. And since, while one is hesitating, the bare idea of a
possible resolution (unless one has rendered that idea sterile by
deciding that one will make no resolution) develops, like a seed in
the ground, the lineaments, every detail of the emotions that will be
born from the performance of the action, I told myself that it had
been quite absurd of me to be as much hurt by the suggestion that I
should not see Gilberte again as if I had really been about to put
that suggestion into practice, and that since, on the contrary, I was
to end by returning to her side, I might have saved myself the expense
of all those vain longings and painful acceptances. But this
resumption of friendly relations lasted only so long as it took me to
reach the Swanns'; not because their butler, who was really fond of
me, told me that Gilberte had gone out (a statement the truth of which
was confirmed, as it happened, the same evening, by people who had
seen her somewhere), but because of the manner in which he said it.
"Sir, the young lady is not at home; I can assure you, sir, that I am
speaking the truth. If you wish to make any inquiries I can fetch the
young lady's maid. You know very well, sir, that I would do
everything in my power to oblige you, and that if the young lady was
at home I would take you to her at once." These words being of the
only kind that is really important, that is to say spontaneous, the
kind that gives us a radiograph shewing the main points, at any rate,
of the unimaginable reality which would be wholly concealed beneath a
prepared speech, proved that in Gilberte's household there was an
impression that I bothered her with my visits; and so, scarcely had
the man uttered them before they had aroused in me a hatred of which I
preferred to make him rather than Gilberte the victim; he drew upon
his own head all the angry feelings that I might have had for my
friend; freed from these complications, thanks to his words, my love
subsisted alone; but his words had, at the same time, shewn me that I
must cease for the present to attempt to see Gilberte. She would be
certain to write to me, to apologise. In spite of which, I should not
return at once to see her, so as to prove to her that I was capable of
living without her. Besides, once I had received her letter,
Gilberte's society was a thing with which I should be more easily able
to dispense for a time, since I should be certain of finding her ready
to receive me whenever I chose. All that I needed in order to support
with less pain the burden of a voluntary separation was to feel that
my heart was rid of the terrible uncertainty whether we were not
irreconcilably sundered, whether she had not promised herself to
another, left Paris, been taken away by force. The days that followed
resembled the first week of that old New Year which I had had to spend
alone, without Gilberte. But when that week had dragged to its end,
then for one thing my friend would be coming again to the
Champs–Elysées, I should be seeing her as before; I had been sure of
that; for another thing, I had known with no less certainty that so
long as the New Year holidays lasted it would not be worth my while to
go to the Champs–Elysées, which meant that during that miserable week,
which was already ancient history, I had endured my wretchedness with
a quiet mind because there was blended in it neither fear nor hope.
Now, on the other hand, it was the latter of these which, almost as
much as my fear of what might happen, rendered intolerable the burden
of my grief. Not having had any letter from Gilberte that evening, I
had attributed this to her carelessness, to her other occupations, I
did not doubt that I should find something from her in the morning's
post. This I awaited, every day, with a beating heart which subsided,
leaving me utterly prostrate, when I had found in it only letters from
people who were not Gilberte, or else nothing at all, which was no
worse, the proofs of another's friendship making all the more cruel
those of her indifference. I transferred my hopes to the afternoon
post. Even between the times at which letters were delivered I dared
not leave the house, for she might be sending hers by a messenger.
Then, the time coming at last when neither the postman nor a footman
from the Swanns' could possibly appear that night, I must
procrastinate my hope of being set at rest, and thus, because I
believed that my sufferings were not destined to last, I was obliged,
so to speak, incessantly to renew them. My disappointment was perhaps
the same, but instead of just uniformly prolonging, as in the old
days, an initial emotion, it began again several times daily, starting
each time with an emotion so frequently renewed that it ended—it, so
purely physical, so instantaneous a state—by becoming stabilised, so
consistently that the strain of waiting having hardly time to relax
before a fresh reason for waiting supervened, there was no longer a
single minute in the day in which I was not in that state of anxiety
which it is so difficult to bear even for an hour. So my punishment
was infinitely more cruel than in those New Year holidays long ago,
because this time there was in me, instead of the acceptance, pure and
simple, of that punishment, the hope, at every moment, of seeing it
come to an end. And yet at this state of acceptance I ultimately
arrived; then I understood that it must be final, and I renounced
Gilberte for ever, in the interests of my love itself and because I
hoped above all that she would not retain any contemptuous memory of
me. Indeed, from that moment, so that she should not be led to suppose
any sort of lover's spite on my part, when she made appointments for
me to see her I used often to accept them and then, at the last
moment, write to her that I was prevented from coming, but with the
same protestations of my disappointment that I should have made to
anyone whom I had not wished to see. These expressions of regret,
which we keep as a rule for people who do not matter, would do more, I
imagined, to persuade Gilberte of my indifference than would the tone
of indifference which we affect only to those whom we love. When,
better than by mere words, by a course of action indefinitely
repeated, I should have proved to her that I had no appetite for
seeing her, perhaps she would discover once again an appetite for
seeing me. Alas! I was doomed to failure; to attempt, by ceasing to
see her, to reawaken in her that inclination to see me was to lose her
for ever; first of all, because, when it began to revive, if I wished
it to last I must not give way to it at once; besides, the most
agonising hours would then have passed; it was at this very moment
that she was indispensable to me, and I should have liked to be able
to warn her that what presently she would have to assuage, by the act
of seeing me again, would be a grief so far diminished as to be no
longer (what a moment ago it would still have been), nor the thought
of putting an end to it, a motive towards surrender, reconciliation,
further meetings. And then again, later on, when I should at last be
able safely to confess to Gilberte (so far would her liking for me
have regained its strength) my liking for her, the latter, not having
been able to resist the strain of so long a separation, would have
ceased to exist; Gilberte would have become immaterial to me. I knew
this, but I could not explain it to her; she would have assumed that
if I was pretending that I should cease to love her if I remained for
too long without seeing her, that was solely in order that she might
summon me back to her at once. In the meantime, what made it easier
for me to sentence myself to this separation was the fact that (in
order to make it quite clear to her that despite my protestations to
the contrary it was my own free will and not any conflicting
engagement, not the state of my health that prevented me from seeing
her), whenever I knew beforehand that Gilberte would not be in the
house, was going out somewhere with a friend and would not be home for
dinner, I went to see Mme. Swann who had once more become to me what
she had been at the time when I had such difficulty in seeing her
daughter and (on days when the latter was not coming to the
Champs–Elysées) used to repair to the Allée des Acacias. In this way I
should be hearing about Gilberte, and could be certain that she would
in due course hear about me, and in terms which would shew her that I
was not interested in her. And I found, as all those who suffer find,
that my melancholy condition might have been worse. For being free at
any time to enter the habitation in which Gilberte dwelt, I constantly
reminded myself, for all that I was firmly resolved to make no use of
that privilege, that if ever my pain grew too sharp there was a way of
making it cease. I was not unhappy, save only from day to day. And
even that is an exaggeration. How many times in an hour (but now
without that anxious expectancy which had strained every nerve of me
in the first weeks after our quarrel, before I had gone again to the
Swanns') did I not repeat to myself the words of the letter which, one
day soon, Gilberte would surely send, would perhaps even bring to me
herself. The perpetual vision of that imagined happiness helped me to
endure the desolation of my real happiness. With women who do not love
Us, as with the 'missing,' the knowledge that there is no hope left
does not prevent our continuing to wait for news. We live on
tenterhooks, starting at the slightest sound; the mother whose son has
gone to sea on some perilous voyage of discovery sees him in
imagination every moment, long after the fact of his having perished
has been established, striding into the room, saved by a miracle and
in the best of health. And this strain of waiting, according to the
strength of her memory and the resistance of her bodily organs, either
helps her on her journey through the years, at the end of which she
will be able to endure the knowledge that her son is no more, to
forget gradually and to survive his loss, or else it kills her.