In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (31 page)

What helped me to remain patient throughout the long day that followed
was another plan that I had made. From the moment in which everything
was forgotten, in which I was reconciled to Gilberte, I no longer
wished to visit her save as a lover. Every day she should receive from
me the finest flowers that grew. And if Mme. Swann, albeit she had no
right to be too severe a mother, should forbid my making a daily
offering of flowers, I should find other gifts, more precious and less
frequent. My parents did not give me enough money for me to be able
to buy expensive things. I thought of a big bowl of old Chinese
porcelain which had been left to me by aunt Léonie, and of which Mamma
prophesied daily that Françoise would come running to her with an "Oh,
it's all come to pieces!" and that that would be the end of it. Would
it not be wiser, in that case, to part with it, to sell it so as to be
able to give Gilberte all the pleasure I could. I felt sure that I
could easily get a thousand francs for it. I had it tied up in paper;
I had grown so used to it that I had ceased altogether to notice it;
parting with it had at least the advantage of making me realise what
it was like. I took it with me as I started for the Swanns', and,
giving the driver their address, told him to go by the Champs–Elysées,
at one end of which was the shop of a big dealer in oriental things,
who knew my father. Greatly to my surprise he offered me there and
then not one thousand but ten thousand francs for the bowl. I took the
notes with rapture. Every day, for a whole year, I could smother
Gilberte in roses and lilac. When I left the shop and got into my cab
again the driver (naturally enough, since the Swanns lived out by the
Bois) instead of taking the ordinary way began to drive me along the
Avenue des Champs–Elysées. He had just passed the end of the Rue de
Berri when, in the failing light, I thought I saw, close to the
Swanns' house but going in the other direction, going away from it,
Gilberte, who was walking slowly, though with a firm step, by the side
of a young man with whom she was conversing, but whose face I could
not distinguish. I stood up in the cab, meaning to tell the driver to
stop; then hesitated. The strolling couple were already some way away,
and the parallel lines which their leisurely progress was quietly
drawing were on the verge of disappearing in the Elysian gloom. A
moment later, I had reached Gilberte's door. I was received by Mme.
Swann. "Oh! she will be sorry!" was my greeting, "I can't think why
she isn't in. She came home just now from a lesson, complaining of the
heat, and said she was going out for a little fresh air with another
girl." "I fancy I passed her in the Avenue des Champs–Elysées." "Oh, I
don't think it can have been. Anyhow, don't mention it to her father;
he doesn't approve of her going out at this time of night. Must you
go? Good–bye." I left her, told my driver to go home the same way, but
found no trace of the two walking figures. Where had they been? What
were they saying to one another in the darkness so confidentially?

I returned home, desperately clutching my windfall of ten thousand
francs, which would have enabled me to arrange so many pleasant
surprises for that Gilberte whom now I had made up my mind never to
see again. No doubt my call at the dealer's had brought me happiness
by allowing me to expect that in future, whenever I saw my friend, she
would be pleased with me and grateful. But if I had not called there,
if my cabman had not taken the Avenue des Champs–Elysées, I should not
have seen Gilberte with that young man. Thus a single action may have
two contradictory effects, and the misfortune that it engenders cancel
the good fortune that it has already brought one. There had befallen
me the opposite of what so frequently happens. We desire some
pleasure, and the material means of obtaining it are lacking. "It is a
mistake," Labruyère tells us, "to be in love without an ample
fortune." There is nothing for it but to attempt a gradual elimination
of our desire for that pleasure. In my case, however, the material
means had been forthcoming, but at the same moment, if not by a
logical effect, at any rate as a fortuitous consequence of that
initial success, my pleasure had been snatched from me.

As, for that matter, it seems as though it must always be. As a rule,
however, not on the same evening on which we have acquired what makes
it possible. Usually, we continue to struggle and to hope for a little
longer. But the pleasure can never be realised. If we succeed in
overcoming the force of circumstances, nature at once shifts the
battle–ground, placing it within ourselves, and effects a gradual
change in our heart until it desires something other than what it is
going to obtain. And if this transposition has been so rapid that our
heart has not had time to change, nature does not, on that account,
despair of conquering us, in a manner more gradual, it is true, more
subtle, but no less efficacious. It is then, at the last moment, that
the possession of our happiness is wrested from us, or rather it is
that very possession which nature, with diabolical cleverness, uses to
destroy our happiness. After failure in every quarter of the domain of
life and action, it is a final incapacity, the mental incapacity for
happiness, that nature creates in us. The phenomenon, of happiness
either fails to appear, or at once gives way to the bitterest of
reactions.

I put my ten thousand francs in a drawer. But they were no longer of
any use to me. I ran through them, as it happened, even sooner than if
I had sent flowers every day to Gilberte, for when evening came I was
always too wretched to stay in the house and used to go and pour out
my sorrows upon the bosoms of women whom I did not love. As for
seeking to give any sort of pleasure to Gilberte, I no longer thought
of that; to visit her house again now could only have added to my
sufferings. Even the sight of Gilberte, which would have been so
exquisite a pleasure only yesterday, would no longer have sufficed me.
For I should have been miserable all the time that I was not actually
with her. That is how a woman, by every fresh torture that she
inflicts on us, increases, often quite unconsciously, her power over
us and at the same time our demands upon her. With each injury that
she does us, she encircles us more and more completely, doubles our
chains—but halves the strength of those which hitherto we had thought
adequate to bind her in order that we might retain our own peace of
mind. Only yesterday, had I not been afraid of annoying Gilberte, I
should have been content to ask for no more than occasional meetings,
which now would no longer have contented me and for which I should now
have substituted quite different terms. For in this respect love is
not like war; after the battle is ended we renew the fight with keener
ardour, which we never cease to intensify the more thoroughly we are
defeated, provided always that we are still in a position to give
battle. This was not my position with regard to Gilberte. Also I
preferred, at first, not to see her mother again. I continued, it is
true, to assure myself that Gilberte did not love me, that I had known
this for ever so long, that I could see her again if I chose, and, if
I did not choose, forget her in course of time. But these ideas, like
a remedy which has no effect upon certain complaints, had no power
whatsoever to obliterate those two parallel lines which I kept on
seeing, traced by Gilberte and the young man as they slowly
disappeared along the Avenue des Champs–Elysées. This was a fresh
misfortune, which like the rest would gradually lose its force, a
fresh image which would one day present itself to my mind's eye
completely purged of every noxious element that it now contained, like
those deadly poisons which one can handle without danger, or like a
crumb of dynamite which one can use to light one's cigarette without
fear of an explosion. Meanwhile there was in me another force which
was striving with all its might to overpower that unwholesome force
which still shewed me, without alteration, the figure of Gilberte
walking in the dusk: to meet and to break the shock of the renewed
assaults of memory, I had, toiling effectively on the other side,
imagination. The former force did indeed continue to shew me that
couple walking in the Champs–Elysées, and offered me other
disagreeable pictures drawn from the past, as for instance Gilberte
shrugging her shoulders when her mother asked her to stay and
entertain me. But the other force, working upon the canvas of my
hopes, outlined a future far more attractively developed than this
poor past which, after all, was so restricted. For one minute in which
I saw Gilberte's sullen face, how many were there in which I planned
to my own satisfaction all the steps that she was to take towards our
reconciliation, perhaps even towards our betrothal. It is true that
this force, which my imagination was concentrating upon the future, it
was drawing, for all that, from the past. I was still in love with her
whom, it is true, I believed that I detested. But whenever anyone told
me that I was looking well, or was nicely dressed, I wished that she
could have been there to see me. I was irritated by the desire that
many people shewed about this time to ask me to their houses, and
refused all their invitations. There was a scene at home because I did
not accompany my father to an official dinner at which the Bontemps
were to be present with their niece Albertine, a young girl still
hardly more than a child. So it is that the different periods of our
life overlap one another. We scornfully decline, because of one whom
we love and who will some day be of so little account, to see another
who is of no account to–day, with whom we shall be in love to–morrow,
with whom we might, perhaps, had we consented to see her now, have
fallen in love a little earlier and who would thus have put a term to
our present sufferings, bringing others, it is true, in their place.
Mine were steadily growing less. I had the surprise of discovering in
my own heart one sentiment one day, another the next, generally
inspired by some hope or some fear relative to Gilberte. To the
Gilberte whom I kept within me. I ought to have reminded myself that
the other, the real Gilberte, was perhaps entirely different from
mine, knew nothing of the regrets that I ascribed to her, was thinking
probably less about me, not merely than I was thinking about her but
that I made her be thinking about me when I was closeted alone with my
fictitious Gilberte, wondering what really were her feelings with
regard to me and so imagining her attention as constantly directed
towards myself.

During those periods in which our bitterness of spirit, though
steadily diminishing, still persists, a distinction must be drawn
between the bitterness which comes to us from our constantly thinking
of the person herself and that which is revived by certain memories,
some cutting speech, some word in a letter that we have had from her.
The various forms which that bitterness can assume we shall examine
when we come to deal with another and later love affair; for the
present it must suffice to say that, of these two kinds, the former is
infinitely the less cruel. That is because our conception of the
person, since it dwells always within ourselves, is there adorned with
the halo with which we are bound before long to invest her, and bears
the marks if not of the frequent solace of hope, at any rate of the
tranquillity of a permanent sorrow. (It must also be observed that the
image of a person who makes us suffer counts for little if anything in
those complications which aggravate the unhappiness of love, prolong
it and prevent our recovery, just as in certain maladies the cause is
insignificant beyond comparison with the fever which follows it and
the time that must elapse before our convalescence.) But if the idea
of the person whom we love catches and reflects a ray of light from a
mind which is on the whole optimistic, it is not so with those special
memories, those cutting words, that inimical letter (I received only
one that could be so described from Gilberte); you would say that
the person herself dwelt in those fragments, few and scattered as they
were, and dwelt there multiplied to a power of which she falls ever so
far short in the idea which we are accustomed to form of her as a
whole. Because the letter has not—as the image of the beloved
creature has—been contemplated by us in the melancholy calm of
regret; we have read it, devoured it in the fearful anguish with which
we were wrung by an unforeseen misfortune. Sorrows of this sort come
to us in another way; from without; and it is along the road of the
most cruel suffering that they have penetrated to our heart. The
picture of our friend in our mind, which we believe to be old,
original, authentic, has in reality been refashioned by her many times
over. The cruel memory is not itself contemporary with the restored
picture, it is of another age, it is one of the rare witnesses to a
monstrous past. But inasmuch as this past continues to exist, save in
ourselves, who have been pleased to substitute for it a miraculous age
of gold, a paradise in which all mankind shall be reconciled, those
memories, those letters carry us back to reality, and cannot but make
us feel, by the sudden pang they give us, what a long way we have been
borne from that reality by the baseless hopes engendered daily while
we waited for something to happen. Not that the said reality is bound
always to remain the same, though that does indeed happen at times.
There are in our life any number of women whom we have never wished to
see again, and who have quite naturally responded to our in no way
calculated silence with a silence as profound. Only in their case as
we never loved them, we have never counted the years spent apart from
them, and this instance, which would invalidate our whole argument, we
are inclined to forget when we are considering the healing effect of
isolation, just as people who believe in presentiments forget all the
occasions on which their own have not "come true."