In Search of Lost Time, Volume II

by Marcel Proust

  Had I been less firmly resolved upon settling down definitively to work, I should perhaps have made an effort to begin at once. But since my resolution was explicit, since within twenty-four hours, in the empty frame of the following day where everything was so well arranged because I myself was not yet in it, my good intentions would be realised without difficulty, it was better not to start on an evening when I felt ill-prepared. The following days were not, alas, to prove more propitious. But I was reasonable. It would have been puerile, on the part of one who had waited now for years, not to put up with a postponement of two or three days. Confident that by the day after tomorrow I should have written several pages, I said not a word more to my parents of my decision; I preferred to remain patient for a few hours and then to bring to a convinced and comforted grandmother a sample of work that was already under way. Unfortunately the next day was not that vast, extraneous expanse of time to which I had feverishly looked forward. When it drew to a close, my laziness and my painful struggle to overcome certain internal obstacles had simply lasted twenty-four hours longer. And at the end of several days, my plans not having matured, I had no longer the same hope that they would be realised at once, and hence no longer the heart to subordinate everything else to their realisation: I began again to stay up late, having no longer, to oblige me to go to bed early one evening, the certain hope of seeing my work begun next morning. I needed, before I could recover my creative energy, a few days of relaxation, and the only time my grandmother ventured, in a gentle and disillusioned tone, to frame the reproach: “Well, this famous work, don’t we even speak about it any more?”, I resented her intrusion, convinced that in her inability to see that my decision was irrevocably made, she had further and perhaps for a long time postponed its execution by the shock which her denial of justice had administered to my nerves and under the impact of which I should be disinclined to begin my work. She felt that her scepticism had stumbled blindly against a genuine intention. She apologised, kissing me: “I’m sorry, I shan’t say another word,” and, so that I should not be discouraged, assured me that as soon as I was quite well again, the work would come of its own accord to boot.

  Besides, I said to myself, in spending all my time with the Swanns, am I not doing exactly what Bergotte does? To my parents it seemed almost as though, idle as I was, I was leading, since it was spent in the same salon as a great writer, the life most favourable to the growth of talent. And yet the assumption that anyone can be dispensed from having to create that talent for himself, from within himself, and can acquire it from someone else, is as erroneous as to suppose that a man can keep himself in good health (in spite of neglecting all the rules of hygiene and of indulging in the worst excesses) merely by dining out often in the company of a physician. The person, incidentally, who was most completely taken in by this illusion which misled me as well as my parents, was Mme Swann. When I explained to her that I was unable to come, that I must stay at home and work, she looked as though she felt that I was making a great fuss about nothing, that I was being rather stupidly pretentious:

  “After all, Bergotte’s coming. Do you mean you don’t think what he writes is any good? It will be even better very soon,” she went on, “because he’s sharper and pithier in newspaper articles than in his books, where he’s apt to pad a bit. I’ve arranged that in future he’s to do the leaders in the Figaro. He’ll be distinctly the right man in the right place there.” And finally she added: “Do come! He’ll tell you better than anyone what you ought to do.”

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

  Thus, no more from the Swanns than from my parents, that is to say from those who, at different times, had seemed bound to resist it, was there any further opposition to that delectable existence in which I might see Gilberte as often as I chose, with enchantment if not with peace of mind. There can be no peace of mind in love, since what one has obtained is never anything but a new starting-point for further desires. So long as I had been unable to go to her house, with my eyes fixed upon that inaccessible happiness, I could not even 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, each time in different terms. In this sense it was indeed a new friendship that began each day. 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 threat arose to endanger 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 should 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 the most apparently simple accident, an accident which may at any moment occur, a seriousness which in itself it would not entail. What makes us so happy is the presence in our hearts of an unstable element which we contrive perpetually to maintain and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced. In reality, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralises, makes potential only, postpones, but which may at any moment become, what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted, excruciating.

  On several occasions I sensed 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 thought, “my love is in no danger; seeing that I have them on my side, I can set my mind at rest since they have complete authority over Gilberte.” Until, alas, detecting certain signs of impatience which she betrayed when her father asked me to the house almost against her will, I wondered whether what I had regarded as a protection for my happiness was not in fact the secret reason why that happiness could not last.

  The last time I came 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, perhaps because she had some objection to the house in which this party was being given, Mme Swann, as her daughter was about to leave, 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 unwillingly hastened a process, which until then it might perhaps have been possible to arrest, which was gradually drawing my beloved away from me. “One doesn’t have 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 to speak to her daughter in English. At once it was as though a wall had sprung up to hide from me a part of Gilberte’s life, as though an evil genius had spirited her far away. In a language that we know, we have substituted for the opacity of sounds the transparency of ideas. But a language which we do not know is a fortress sealed, within whose walls the one we love is free to play us false, while we, standing outside, desperately keyed up 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 served only to intensify and pinpoint my anxieties, and conducted within a few feet of me by two motionless persons, was as painful to me, left me as much abandoned and alone, as the forcible abduction of my companion. At length Mme Swann left us. That day, perhaps from resentmen
t against me, the involuntary cause of her not going out to enjoy herself, perhaps also because, guessing her to be angry with me, I was pre-emptively colder than usual with her, Gilberte’s face, divested of every sign of joy, bleak, bare, ravaged, seemed all afternoon to be harbouring a melancholy regret for the pas-de-quatre which my arrival had prevented her from going to dance, and to be defying every living creature, beginning with myself, to understand the subtle reasons that had induced 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 myself persisted, with a sort of desperate rage, in destroying those moments which we might have devoted to friendship and happiness. And on each of our remarks a sort of transcendent harshness was conferred by the paroxysm of their stupefying insignificance, 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 did I say: “I thought the other day that the clock was slow, if anything,” she clearly understood me to mean: “How nasty you are!” 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 this, when no smile filled her eyes or opened up her face, I cannot describe the devastating monotony that stamped her melancholy eyes and sullen features. Her face, grown almost ugly, reminded me then of those dreary beaches where the sea, ebbing far out, wearies one with its faint shimmering, everywhere the same, encircled by an immutable low horizon. At length, seeing 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’s you who are not being nice,” was her answer. “Yes I am!” I wondered 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 how agonising it was for me not to be able to attain to that other, more elusive plane of her mind which her laughter reflected. It seemed, that laughter, to mean: “No, no, I’m not going to be taken in by anything that you say, I know you’re mad about 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’ll 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 acute, but one that required a different dialectic. “If you knew how much you were hurting me you would tell me.” But this pain which, had she doubted my love, must have rejoiced her, seemed instead to irritate her the more. Then, realising my mistake, making up my mind to pay no more attention to what she had said, letting her (without believing her) assure me: “I really did love you; you’ll 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 suddenly had the courage to resolve never to see her again, and without telling her yet since she would not have believed me.

  Grief that is caused by a person one loves can be bitter, even when it is interspersed with preoccupations, occupations, pleasures in which that person is not involved and from which our attention is diverted only now and again to return to the beloved. But when such a grief has its birth—as was the case with mine—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, hitherto sunny, sustained and calm, lets loose in us a raging storm against which we feel we may not be capable of struggling to the end. The storm that was blowing in my heart was so violent that I made my way home battered and bruised, 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 do what I like with him: he’ll 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 by my thoughts, and those alternative orientations, that wild spinning of my inner compass, 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 we love, down to their very 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 person whom we love without being able to understand, but whom we find it more astute 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 assuaged unless, abandoning every thought of pleasing the woman and of making her believe that we can do without her, we go to her at once. If we withdraw from the pan that holds our pride a small quantity of the will-power which we have weakly allowed to wither with age, if we add to the pan that holds our suffering a physical pain which we have acquired and have allowed to get worse, then, instead of the brave solution that would have carried the day at twenty, it is the other, grown too heavy and insufficiently counter-balanced, that pulls us down at fifty. All the more because situations, while repeating themselves, tend to alter, and there is every likelihood that, in middle life or in old age, we shall have had the fatal self-indulgence of complicating our love by an intrusion of habit which adolescence, detained by too many other duties, less free to choose, knows nothing of.

  I had just written Gilberte a letter in which I allowed my fury 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 beloved 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 believes them to be false and translates “nevermore” by “this very evening, if you want me,” or believes them to be true and so to be breaking the news to her of one of those final separations to which we are so utterly indifferent when the person concerned 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 person whom we shall presently have become and who will 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, in order to lull us into a happy dream or to console us for a great sorrow, the same words that she would use if she loved us. Faced with the thoughts, the actions of a woman whom we love, we are as completely at a loss as the world’s first natural philosophers must have been, face to face with the phenomena of nature, 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 w
ho would be incapable, therefore, of establishing a connexion between one phenomenon and another and to whose eyes the spectacle of the world would appear as 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 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, might have caused me to mistake mere friendliness on her part for a passionate avowal, and a grotesque and debasing display on mine for the simple and amiable impulse that directs us towards a pretty face. But I was afraid also of falling into the opposite excess, whereby I should have seen in Gilberte’s unpunctuality in keeping an appointment, merely on a bad-tempered impulse, 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 to go round to the Swanns’ next day, 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 further than the station and then return home to unpack their boxes. And since, while one is hesitating, the mere idea of a possible decision (unless one has rendered that idea sterile by deciding that one will make no decision) develops, like a seed in the ground, the lineaments, the minutiae, of the emotions that would spring from the performance of the action, I told myself that it had been quite absurd of me to go to as much trouble, in planning never to see Gilberte again, as if I had really had to put this plan into effect and that since, on the contrary, I was to end by returning to her side, I might have spared myself all those painful velleities and acceptances.