Swann's Way

by Proust, Marcel

  But would she come back to the Champs-Élysées? The next day she was not there; but I saw her there on the following days; I spent all my time circling around the spot where she played with her friends, so that once when they found they were short of players for their game of prisoners’ base, she sent to ask if I wanted to make up the number on their side, and after that I played with her each time she was there. But this was not every day; there were days when she was kept from coming by her lessons, by the catechism, a tea, that whole life separate from mine which twice, condensed in the name of Gilberte, I had felt pass so painfully close to me, on the steep path at Combray and on the lawn at the Champs-Élysées. On those days, she would announce in advance that we would not be seeing her; if it was because of her studies, she would say: “It’s an awful bore, I won’t be able to come tomorrow; you’ll all be having fun without me,” with a sorrowful air that consoled me a little; but when she was invited to a party and I, not knowing, asked her if she would be coming out to play, she would answer: “I should certainly hope not! I certainly hope Mama will let me go to my friend’s.” At least on those days, I knew I would not see her, whereas other times, it was quite unexpectedly that her mother would take her shopping, and the next day she would say: “Oh yes! I went out with Mama,” as though it were a natural thing and not, for someone else, the greatest possible misfortune. There were also the days of bad weather when her governess, who herself could not endure the rain, did not want to take her to the Champs-Élysées.

  And so if the sky was dubious, from early in the morning I would question it constantly, taking every omen into account. If I saw the lady opposite, near the window, putting on her hat, I would say to myself: “That lady is going to go out; so it’s the sort of weather one can go out in: why wouldn’t Gilberte do the same as that lady?” But the weather would darken, my mother would say it could lift again, that a ray of sunlight would be enough, but that more probably it would rain; and if it rained what was the good of going to the Champs-Élysées? And so from lunch on my anxious eyes never left the unsettled, cloudy sky. It remained dark. Before the window, the balcony was gray. Suddenly, on its gloomy stone I did not see a color that was less dull, but I felt a sort of effort toward a color less dull, the pulsation of a hesitant ray that wished to discharge its light. A moment later, the balcony was as pale and reflective as a pool at dawn, and a thousand reflections of its ironwork lattice had alighted on it. A breath of wind dispersed them, the stone had darkened again, but, as though tamed, they returned; it began imperceptibly to whiten again and, in one of those continuous crescendos like those which, in music, at the end of an overture, carry a single note to the highest fortissimo by making it pass rapidly through all the intermediary degrees, I saw it reach that fixed, unalterable gold of fine days, against which the cutout shadow of the elaborate support of the balustrade stood out in black like a whimsical vegetation, with a delicacy in the delineation of its slightest details that seemed to betray a painstaking consciousness, an artistic satisfaction, and with such sharp relief, such velvet in the restfulness of its dark and happy masses that in truth those broad and leafy reflections resting on that lake of sun seemed to know they were pledges of calm and happiness.

  Instantaneous ivy, fleeting wall flora! The least colorful, the saddest, in the opinion of many, of those that clamber over the wall or decorate the casement; for me, the dearest of them all since the day it appeared on our balcony, like the very shadow of the presence of Gilberte, who was perhaps already in the Champs-Élysées and, as soon as I arrived there, would say to me: “Let’s start playing prisoners’ base right away, you’re on my side”; fragile, carried off by a breath, but also in harmony, not with the season, but with the hour; a promise of the immediate happiness which the day will deny or fulfill, and thereby of the highest sort of immediate happiness, the happiness of love; softer, warmer on the stone even than moss; hardy, for it needs only a ray of light to come into being and blossom into joy, even in the heart of winter.

  And even on those days when all other vegetation has disappeared, when the handsome green leather that wraps the trunks of the old trees is hidden under snow, when the snow had stopped falling, but the weather was still too overcast to hope that Gilberte would go out, then suddenly, making my mother say: “Well now, it’s actually nice out, perhaps you might try going to the Champs-Élysées after all,” on the mantle of snow that covered the balcony the sun that had appeared was weaving gold threads together and embroidering black glimmers. That day we found no one, or one solitary girl about to leave, who assured me that Gilberte was not coming. The chairs, deserted by the imposing but chilly assembly of governesses, were empty. Alone, near the lawn, sat a lady of a certain age who came in all weathers, always dressed in the same clothing, magnificent and dark, to make whose acquaintance I would at that time have sacrificed, had the exchange been allowed me, all the greatest future advantages of my life. For Gilberte went up to greet her every day; she asked Gilberte for news of “her love of a mother”; and it seemed to me that, had I known her, I would have been someone quite different for Gilberte, someone who knew her parents’ friends. While her grandchildren played farther off, she always read Les Débats,16 which she called “my old Débats,” and with an aristocratic affection would say, when speaking of the policeman or the woman who rented the chairs:17 “my old friend the policeman,” “the chair warden and I who are old friends.”

  Françoise was too cold to sit still; we walked to the pont de la Concorde to see the frozen Seine, which everyone including the children approached without fear as though it were a beached whale, immense, defenseless and about to be cut up. We returned to the Champs-Élysées; I was growing sick with misery between the motionless merry-go-round and the white lawn caught in the black web of paths from which the snow had been cleared and above which the statue had in its hand an added jet of ice which seemed to explain its gesture. Even the old lady, after folding her Débats, asked a passing nanny what time it was and thanked her by saying: “How kind of you!” then begged the man tending the paths to tell her grandchildren to come back, because she was cold, adding: “You are infinitely good. I am overwhelmed!” Suddenly the air was torn apart: between the puppet theater and the circus, on the clearing horizon, against the opening sky, I had just spied, as though it were a fabulous sign, Mademoiselle’s blue feather. And already Gilberte was running as fast as possible in my direction, sparkling and red under a square fur hat, animated by the cold, the lateness, and her desire to play; a little before reaching me, she let herself slide along the ice, and either to help keep her balance, or because she thought it more graceful, or pretending to move like a skater, her arms opened wide as she came forward smiling, as if she wanted to take me into them. “Brava! Brava! That was very good. I would say, as you do, that it was champion, first-rate, if I were not from another age, if I did not belong to the Ancien Régime,” cried the old lady, speaking on behalf of the silent Champs-Élysées to thank Gilberte for having come without letting herself be intimidated by the weather. “You’re like me, faithful to our old Champs-Élysées despite everything; we’re two brave souls, you and I. I tell you I love it, even this way. This snow—you’ll laugh at me—reminds me of ermine!” And the old lady began to laugh.

  The first of these days—to which the snow, image of the forces that could stop me from seeing Gilberte, imparted the sadness of a day of separation and even the aspect of a day of departure because it changed the appearance and almost prevented the use of the customary site of our only encounters, now changed, all wrapped in dustcovers—this day, however, caused my love to progress, for it was like a first sorrow that she had shared with me. There were only the two of us out of all our gang, and to be thus the only one there with her was not only like a beginning of intimacy, but also on her part—as though she had come out only for me, in such weather—it seemed to me as touching as if on one of those days when she was invited to a party she had given it up to come to find me i
n the Champs-Élysées; I gained more confidence in the vitality and the future of our friendship, which remained hardy in the midst of the numbness, loneliness, and ruin of the things around us; and while she put snowballs down my neck, I smiled with emotion at what seemed to me both a preference she was showing me by tolerating me as her traveling companion in this new and wintry land, and also a sort of loyalty she was cherishing for me in the midst of misfortune. Soon one after the other, like hesitant sparrows, her friends arrived all black against the snow. We began to play, and since this day so sadly begun was to end in joy, when I went up, before playing prisoners’ base, to the friend with the sharp voice whom I had heard the first day shouting the name Gilberte, she said to me: “No, no, we know perfectly well you’d rather be on Gilberte’s side, besides look, she’s signaling to you.” She was indeed calling me over to join her camp on the snowy lawn, which the sun, giving it glimmers of pink, the metallic worn surface of an old brocade, was turning into a Field of the Cloth of Gold.18

  That day which I had so dreaded was, in fact, one of the only ones on which I was not too unhappy.

  For, although I no longer thought, now, of anything else but of not allowing a single day to pass without seeing Gilberte (so much so that once when my grandmother had not returned by dinnertime, I could not help saying to myself immediately that if she had been run over by a carriage, I would not be able to go to the Champs-Élysées for a long time; we no longer love anyone else when we are in love), yet those moments when I was with her and which since the day before I had been awaiting so impatiently, for which I had trembled, for which I would have sacrificed everything else, were in no way happy moments; and I knew it very well for they were the only moments in my life on which I concentrated a meticulous, fierce attention, and that attention did not discover in them one atom of pleasure.

  All the time I was away from Gilberte, I needed to see her because, constantly trying to form a picture of her for myself, in the end I could not do it, and no longer knew precisely to what my love corresponded. And then she had never yet told me she loved me. Quite the contrary, she had often claimed there were boys she liked better than me, that I was a good enough friend she was always willing to play with, though too distracted, not involved enough in the game; finally, she had often given me apparent signs of coldness that might have shaken my belief that for her I was someone different from the others, if the source of that belief had been the love Gilberte might feel for me, and not, as was the case, the love I felt for her, which rendered it far more resistant, since this made it depend entirely on the manner in which I was obliged, by an inner necessity, to think of Gilberte. But the feelings I had for her, I myself had not yet declared to her. Certainly, on every page of my notebooks I copied out her name and address endlessly, but at the sight of those indeterminate lines which I wrote without inducing her to think any more about me because of that, which made her take up so much apparent space around me without being any more involved in my life, I felt discouraged because they spoke to me not of Gilberte, who would not even see them, but of my own desire, which they seemed to show me as something purely personal, unreal, tedious, and impotent. The most urgent thing was that we should see each other, Gilberte and I, and that we should be able to make a reciprocal avowal of our love, which until then would not so to speak have begun. No doubt the various reasons that made me so impatient to see her would have been less imperious for a grown man. When we are older, more skilled in the cultivation of our pleasures, we are sometimes content with the enjoyment of thinking about a woman as I thought about Gilberte, without worrying about whether that image corresponds to the reality, and also with the pleasure of loving her without needing to be certain that she loves us; or we forgo the pleasure of confessing our warm feelings for her, in order to encourage the hardiness of hers for us, imitating those Japanese gardeners who, to obtain one lovelier flower, sacrifice several others. But during the period when I loved Gilberte, I still believed that Love really existed outside of us; that, allowing us at the very most to remove obstacles in our way, it offered its joys in an order which we were not free to alter; it seemed to me that if I had, on my own initiative, substituted for the sweetness of confession the simulation of indifference, I would not only have deprived myself of one of the joys of which I had dreamed most often but that I would have fabricated for myself in my own way a love that was artificial and without value, without any connection to the real one, whose mysterious and preexisting paths I would have had to forgo following.

  But when I reached the Champs-Élysées—and when, before anything else, I would be able to confront my love, so as to subject it to the necessary corrections, with its living cause, independent of me—as soon as I was in the presence of that Gilberte Swann on the sight of whom I had counted to refresh the images that my tired memory could no longer recapture, of that Gilberte Swann with whom I had played yesterday, and whom I had just been moved to greet and recognize by a blind instinct like that which, when we are walking, sets one of our feet in front of the other before we have had time to think, immediately it was as if she and the little girl who was the object of my dreams had been two different creatures. For example if, since the day before, I had been carrying in my memory two blazing eyes in full and shining cheeks, Gilberte’s face now presented me insistently with something that quite specifically I had not recalled, a certain sharp tapering of the nose, which, instantaneously associating itself with certain other features, assumed the importance of those characteristics which in natural history define a whole species, and transmuted her into a little girl of the type that have pointed snouts. While I was preparing to take advantage of this longed-for moment in order to devote myself to submitting the image of Gilberte which I had prepared before coming, and which I could no longer find again in my mind, to an amendment that would allow me, in the long hours when I was alone, to be sure it was truly she whom I was recalling, that it was truly my love for her that I was augmenting little by little like a book as it is being written, she would pass me a ball; and, like the idealist philosopher whose body makes allowances for the external world in the reality of which his intelligence does not believe, the same self who had made me greet her before I identified her, hastened to make me take the ball she was holding out to me (as if she were a friend with whom I had come here to play, and not a sister soul with whom I had come to be united), made me exchange with her, for the sake of decorum, until the hour when she went off, a thousand friendly and meaningless remarks and thus kept me both from preserving a silence during which I could at last have laid hands once more on the urgent truant image and from uttering the words that might have brought about the decisive progress in our love, the hope of which I was obliged each time to postpone until the following afternoon. It did, however, make some progress. One day when we had gone off with Gilberte to the booth of the vendor who was particularly nice to us—for it was to her that M. Swann sent for his spice cake,19 and for health reasons, he consumed a great deal of it, suffering from ethnic eczema and the Prophets’ constipation—Gilberte showed me with a smile two little boys who were like the little artist and the little naturalist in children’s storybooks. For one of them did not want a stick of red barley sugar because he preferred violet, and the other, tears in his eyes, was refusing the plum his nanny wanted to buy for him because, he finally said with passion: “I like the other plum better, because it has a worm!” I bought two one-sou marbles. I gazed with admiration at the agates, luminous and captive in their separate wooden bowl, precious in my eyes because they were as blond and beaming as young girls and because they cost fifty centimes apiece. Gilberte, who was given a great deal more money than I was, asked me which I thought was the most beautiful. They had the molten transparency of life itself. I did not want to make her sacrifice a single one of them. I would have liked her to be able to buy them, liberate them, all. Yet I pointed to one which was the same color as her eyes. Gilberte took it, looked for its golden ray of light, s
troked it, paid its ransom, but immediately handed her captive over to me saying: “Here, it’s for you, I’m giving it to you, keep it as a souvenir.”