Swann's Way

by Proust, Marcel

  Another time, still preoccupied by the desire to hear La Berma in a classical play, I had asked her if she happened to own a little book in which Bergotte talked about Racine, and which one could no longer find. She had asked me to remind her of its exact title and that evening I had addressed an express letter to her, writing on the envelope that name, Gilberte Swann, which I had so often copied out in my notebooks. The next day she brought me a packet tied up in mauve ribbons and sealed with white wax containing the little book, which she had asked someone to find for her. “You see? It really is the one you asked for,” she said, taking from her muff the letter I had sent her. But on the address of this pneumatique20—which, only yesterday, was nothing, was merely a petit bleu which I had written, and which, now that a telegraph boy had delivered it to Gilberte’s concierge and a servant had carried it to her room, had become this priceless thing, one of the petits bleus she had received that day—it was hard for me to recognize the insignificant, solitary lines of my handwriting under the printed circles apposed to it by the post office, under the inscriptions added in pencil by one of the telegraph messengers, signs of actual realization, stamps from the outside world, violet bands symbolizing life, which for the first time came to espouse, sustain, uplift, delight my dream.

  And there was also one day when she said to me: “You know, you can call me Gilberte, I’m going to call you by your first name anyway. It’s too tiresome otherwise.” Yet for a while she went on simply calling me vous21 and when I pointed this out to her, she smiled, and composing, constructing a sentence like the ones in grammar books of foreign languages whose only aim is to make us use a new word, she ended it with my given name. And remembering later what I had felt then, I could distinguish within it the impression that I had been held for a moment in her mouth, I myself, naked, without any of the social terms and conditions that also belonged, either to her other friends, or, when she said my family name, to my parents, and of which her lips—in the effort she made, rather like her father, to articulate the words she wanted to emphasize—seemed to strip me, undress me, as one removes the skin from a fruit of which only the pulp can be eaten, while her gaze, adopting the same new degree of intimacy as her words, reached me more directly also, while at the same time showing its awareness of this, its pleasure and even its gratitude, by accompanying itself with a smile.

  But in the moment itself, I could not appreciate the value of these new pleasures. They were given, not by the little girl I loved, to me who loved her, but by the other, the one I played with, to my other self who possessed neither the memory of the true Gilberte, nor the inalienable heart which alone could have known the price of such a happiness, because it alone had desired it. Even after returning home I did not savor them, for, each day, the same need which made me hope that the next day I would be able to enjoy a clear, calm, happy contemplation of Gilberte, that she would at last confess her love for me, explaining why she had to hide it from me until now, also forced me to regard the past as nothing, to look ahead of me only, to consider the small attentions she had shown me not in themselves and as if they were enough, but as new rungs on which to set my foot, new rungs which would permit me to take another step up and at last attain the happiness I had not yet found.

  If she gave me these signs of friendliness from time to time, she also hurt me by seeming not to be pleased to see me, and this often happened on the very days I had most counted on for the realization of my hopes. I was sure that Gilberte would come to the Champs-Élysées and I felt an elation that seemed to me only the vague anticipation of a great happiness when—entering the drawing room first thing in the morning to kiss Mama, who was already dressed to go out, the tower of her black hair fully constructed, and her lovely plump white hands still smelling of soap—I learned, seeing a column of dust standing by itself above the piano and hearing a barrel organ playing “En Revenant de la Revue”22 under the window, that until nightfall winter would be receiving the unexpected and radiant visit of a day of spring. While we were eating lunch, the lady opposite, by opening her casement, had sent flying in the blink of an eye, from next to my chair—streaking the entire width of our dining room in a single bound—a beam of light that had settled there for its afternoon rest and returned to continue it a moment later. At school, during the one o’clock class,23 the sun made me languish with impatience and boredom by trailing a glimmer of gold over my desk, like an invitation to a party I would not be able to attend before three o’clock, the hour when Françoise came to pick me up at the school gate and we made our way toward the Champs-Élysées through streets decorated with light, choked with crowds, where the balconies, unsealed by the sun and vaporous, floated before the houses like clouds of gold. Alas, in the Champs-Élysées I did not see Gilberte, she had not arrived yet. Motionless on the lawn fed by the invisible sun which here and there ignited the tip of a stalk of grass, while the pigeons that had landed on it looked like ancient sculptures which the gardener’s pick had brought back up to the surface of the venerable soil, I stood with my eyes fixed on the horizon, expecting at any moment to see the image of Gilberte following her governess appear behind the statue, which seemed to hold out the child it was carrying, streaming with rays of light, to the benediction of the sun. The old lady who read Les Débats was sitting in her seat, still in the same spot; she hailed a park keeper, to whom she made a friendly gesture with her hand, calling out to him: “What fine weather!” And when the chair attendant approached to collect the price of the seat, she smirked and simpered as she put the ten-centime ticket away in the opening of her glove, as if it were a bouquet for which she was seeking, out of kindness toward the giver, the most flattering place possible. When she had found it, she performed a circular motion with her neck, straightened her boa, and fastened upon the attendant, showing her the bit of yellow paper sticking out over her wrist, the beautiful smile with which a woman, showing her bodice to a young man, says to him: “Recognize your roses?”

  I led Françoise out as far as the Arc de Triomphe hoping to meet Gilberte, we did not find her, and I was returning to the lawn convinced that now she would not be coming, when, in front of the merry-go-round, the little girl with the sharp voice flung herself at me: “Quick, quick, Gilberte’s already been here for a quarter of an hour. She’s going soon. We were waiting for you to make up a game of prisoners’ base.” While I was going up the avenue des Champs-Élysées, Gilberte had come by way of the rue Boissy-d’Anglas, Mademoiselle having taken advantage of the fine weather to do some shopping for her; and M. Swann was coming to pick up his daughter. So it was my fault; I should not have left the lawn; for one never knew for certain which way Gilberte would come, if it would be later or earlier, and in the end this waiting caused me to be more deeply moved, not only by the whole of the Champs-Élysées and the entire extent of the afternoon, a sort of immense expanse of space and time at each point and at each moment of which it was possible that Gilberte’s image would appear, but even by that image itself, because behind that image I felt there lay concealed the reason why it had been fired into my heart at four o’clock instead of two-thirty, topped by a hat for paying calls rather than a beret for playing, in front of the “Ambassadeurs”24 and not between the two puppet theaters, I could divine one of those occupations in which I could not follow Gilberte and which forced her to go out or stay at home, I touched the mystery of her unknown life. It was this mystery, too, that disturbed me when, running on orders from the little girl with the sharp voice to begin our game of prisoners’ base right away, I saw Gilberte, so brusque and lively with us, curtsying to the lady with Les Débats (who was saying to her: “What lovely sunshine, it’s like a burning fire”), talking to her with a shy smile, with a formal air which called to my mind the different young girl that Gilberte must be at home with her parents, with the friends of her parents, when paying calls, in the whole of her other existence which eluded me. But of that existence no one gave me so strong an impression as did M. Swann, who came a li
ttle later to find his daughter. For he and Mme. Swann—because their daughter lived in their home, because her studies, her games, her friendships depended on them—contained for me, like Gilberte, perhaps even more than Gilberte, as was proper for gods all-powerful with respect to her, in whom it must have had its source, an inaccessible strangeness, a painful charm. Everything that concerned them was the object of a preoccupation so constant on my part that on the days when, as on these, M. Swann (whom I had seen so often in the past without his having aroused my curiosity, when he was on friendly terms with my parents) came to pick Gilberte up in the Champs-Élysées, once the pounding of my heart that had been excited by the appearance of his gray hat and traveling cape had subsided, his appearance still impressed me like that of a historical character about whom we have just been reading a series of books and whose least peculiarities impassion us. His relations with the Comte de Paris, which, when I heard them discussed at Combray, had left me indifferent, now assumed for me something wonderful, as if no one else had ever known the Orléans; they caused him to stand out vividly against the vulgar background of people of different classes out for a walk who were crowding that path of the Champs-Élysées, and in the midst of whom I admired his consenting to appear without demanding of them any special consideration, which none of them dreamed of giving him anyway, so profound was the incognito in which he was wrapped.

  He responded politely to the greetings of Gilberte’s friends, even to mine although he had quarreled with my family, but without appearing to know me. (This reminded me that he had, however, seen me quite often in the country; a memory I had retained, but somewhere in a dim place, because ever since I had seen Gilberte again, for me Swann was preeminently her father, and no longer Swann of Combray; as the ideas with which I now linked his name were different from the ideas which had once formed the network in which it was included and which I no longer ever used when I wanted to think about him, he had become a new person; I did attach him, however, by an artificial, secondary, and transversal line to our guest of earlier times; and since nothing had any value for me anymore except to the extent that my love could profit from it, it was with a burst of shame and regret at not being able to erase them that I returned to the years when, in the eyes of this same Swann who was at this moment before me in the Champs-Élysées and to whom, happily, Gilberte had perhaps not mentioned my name, I had so often in the evenings made myself ridiculous by sending word asking Mama to come up to my room and say goodnight to me, while she was having coffee with him, my father, and my grandparents at the table in the garden.) He told Gilberte he would let her play one game, that he could wait a quarter of an hour, and sitting down like anyone else on an iron chair, paid for his ticket with the same hand which Philippe VII25 had so often held in his own, while we began playing on the lawn, putting to flight the pigeons whose beautiful heart-shaped iridescent bodies, like the lilacs of the bird kingdom, went to seek refuge as though in so many sanctuaries, one on the large stone vase to which its beak, by disappearing into it, imparted the gesture, and assigned the purpose, of offering in abundance the fruits or seeds which the bird seemed to be pecking from it, another on the forehead of the statue, which it seemed to crown with one of those enameled objects whose polychrome varies the monotony of the stone in certain ancient works of art, and with an attribute which, when the goddess carries it, earns her a particular epithet, and makes her, as does for a mortal woman a different first name, a new divinity.

  On one of those sunny days that had not fulfilled my hopes, I did not have the courage to hide my disappointment from Gilberte.

  “I had so many things to ask you,” I said to her. “I thought that today was going to mean such a lot to our friendship. And as soon as you get here, you have to leave again! Try to come early tomorrow, so I can finally talk to you.”

  Her face shone and she was jumping with joy as she answered me:

  “Tomorrow, you may depend upon it, my dear friend, I won’t be coming at all! I’ve got a big tea party; nor the day after tomorrow, either, I’m going to a friend’s house to watch the arrival of King Theodosius 26 from her windows, it will be splendid, and then the day after we’re going to Michel Strogoff27 and then after that, Christmas will be coming soon and the New Year’s holidays. Maybe they’ll take me to the Midi.28 How nice that would be! Though it will mean I won’t have a Christmas tree; anyway, if I stay in Paris, I won’t be coming here because I’ll be paying calls with Mama. Good-bye, there’s Papa, he’s calling me.”

  I returned home with Françoise through streets that were still bedecked with sunlight, as on the evening of a holiday that is over. I could scarcely drag my legs along.

  “It’s not a bit surprising,” said Françoise. “This weather is not right for the time of the year, it’s far too hot. Alas! My Lord, think of all the folk around and about that must be ill today. It makes one think that things are all awry in the heavens above, as well!”

  I repeated to myself, stifling my sobs, the words in which Gilberte had exploded with joy at the prospect of not coming back to the Champs-Élysées for such a long time. But already the charm with which, by the mere act of thinking, my mind was filled as soon as I thought about her, and the special, unique position—painful though it was—in which I was inevitably placed in relation to Gilberte by the internal constraint of a mental habit had begun to add, even to this sign of indifference, something romantic, and in the midst of my tears a smile formed that was simply the timid adumbration of a kiss. And when it was time for the mail to come, I said to myself that evening as on every evening: “I’m going to get a letter from Gilberte, she’s going to tell me at last that she has always loved me, and explain the mysterious reason why she has been forced to hide it from me until now, to pretend she could be happy without seeing me, the reason why she has disguised herself as the other Gilberte who is merely a playmate.”

  Every evening I liked to imagine this letter, I would believe I was reading it, I would recite each sentence of it to myself. All of a sudden I stopped in alarm. I realized that if I were to receive a letter from Gilberte, it could not be that one anyway since I was the one who had just written it. And from then on, I forced myself to turn my thoughts away from the words I would have liked her to write to me, for fear that by articulating them, I would exclude precisely those—the dearest, the most desired—from the field of all possible compositions. Even if through an improbable coincidence it had been precisely the letter that I had invented that Gilberte on her own account addressed to me, recognizing my work in it I would not have had the impression of receiving something that did not come from me, something real, new, a happiness external to my mind, independent of my will, truly given by love.

  Meanwhile I reread a page which had not been written to me by Gilberte, but which at least came to me from her, that page by Bergotte on the beauty of the old myths that inspired Racine, and which, next to the agate marble, I kept near me always. I was moved by the goodness of my friend who had had someone find it for me; and because everyone needs to discover reasons for his passion, so much so that he is happy to recognize in the person he loves qualities which literature or conversation have taught him are among those worthy of inspiring love, so much so that he assimilates them by imitation and makes them new reasons for his love, even if these qualities were the most diametrically opposed to those his love would have sought so long as it remained spontaneous—as Swann had done once upon a time, with the aesthetic nature of Odette’s beauty—I, who had at first loved Gilberte, back in Combray, because of all that was unknown about her life, into which I would have liked to hurl myself, become incarnated, abandoning my own life which was no longer anything to me, I now thought, as of an inestimable advantage, that of this life of mine, too well known, disdained, Gilberte might one day become the humble servant, the companionable and comfortable collaborator who in the evening, helping me in my work, would compare and collate pamphlets for me. As for Bergotte, that infinitely wise and almost
divine old man because of whom I had first loved Gilberte, even before I saw her, now it was above all because of Gilberte that I loved him. With as much pleasure as the pages he had written on Racine, I looked at the paper closed with great seals of white wax and tied with a cascade of mauve ribbons in which she had brought them to me. I kissed the agate marble which was the best part of my friend’s heart, the part that was not frivolous, but faithful, and which even though adorned with the mysterious charm of Gilberte’s life remained close to me, lived in my bedroom, slept in my bed. But as for the beauty of that stone, and the beauty also of those pages by Bergotte, which I was so pleased to associate with the idea of my love for Gilberte, as if in the moments when that love appeared to me to be nothing at all they gave it a sort of substance, I saw that they were anterior to that love, that they did not resemble it, that their elements had been determined by talent or by the laws of mineralogy before Gilberte knew me, that nothing in the book or in the stone would have been different if Gilberte had not loved me and that consequently nothing entitled me to read in them a message of happiness. And while my love, ceaselessly expecting from the next day an avowal of Gilberte’s love, annulled and undid each evening the badly done work of the day, in the darkness inside me an unknown seamstress did not leave the pulled threads in the scrap heap but arranged them, with no concern for pleasing me or working for my happiness, in the different order to which she gave all her work. Showing no particular interest in my love, nor beginning by deciding that I was indeed loved, she gathered up those of Gilberte’s actions which had seemed inexplicable to me, along with her faults, which I had excused. Then the first and the second acquired a meaning. It seemed to say, this new order, that when I saw that Gilberte, instead of coming to the Champs-Élysées, attended a party, went shopping with her governess, and prepared to be away over the New Year’s holidays, I was wrong to think: “It’s because she’s frivolous or submissive.” For she would have ceased to be either if she had loved me, and if she had been forced to obey it would have been with the same despair that I felt on the days when I did not see her. It told me further, this new order, that I must after all know what it was to love since I loved Gilberte; it pointed out to me the perpetual concern I felt to show myself to advantage in her eyes, because of which I tried to persuade my mother to buy Françoise a waterproof coat and a hat with a blue ostrich feather, or better still not to continue sending me to the Champs-Élysées with that maid who made me blush (to which my mother answered that I was unfair to Françoise, that she was a good woman and devoted to us), and also that exclusive need to see Gilberte because of which months in advance I thought only of trying to learn at what time of the year she would be leaving Paris and where she would be going, finding even the most pleasant countryside a place of exile if she was not going to be there, and wanting only to stay in Paris all the time as long as I could see her at the Champs-Élysées; and it had no difficulty showing me that I would not find that concern, or that need, behind Gilberte’s actions. She on the contrary appreciated her governess, without worrying about what I thought of her. She found it natural not to come to the Champs-Élysées, if she was going to make some purchases with Mademoiselle, pleasant if she was going out with her mother. And even supposing she would have allowed me to spend the holidays in the same place as she, at least in choosing that place she considered her parents’ desires, the thousand amusements she had heard about, and not in the least that this was the place where my family was intending to send me. When she assured me from time to time that she liked me less than one of her other friends, less than she had liked me the day before because I had made her lose the game through my carelessness, I would ask her to forgive me, I would ask her what I should do so that she would begin to like me again as much as the others, so that she would like me more than them; I wanted her to tell me that it was already done, I begged her for it as if she could change her affection for me as she wished, as I wished, in order to please me, merely by the words that she would say, depending on my good or my bad behavior. Did I not know, then, that what I myself felt, for her, depended neither on her actions nor on my own will?