In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  What helped me to bear the thought of waiting for a whole day was a plan I had. Now that the entire thing was forgotten and we were coming back together, it was inconceivable to me that I could go to her in any capacity other than as a lover. Not a day must pass without her being sent the loveliest flowers I could find! If her mother should happen to rule against daily deliveries of flowers (not that she was entitled to severity in such things), I could think of more valuable but less frequent presents to send. My pocket-money from my parents did not allow me to buy expensive things. But I remembered a large vase in old Chinese porcelain that Aunt Léonie had left to me. My mother was for ever predicting the day when Françoise would come and report, ‘It’s gone and got broke!’ and it would be irreparable. In that case, was it not wiser to sell it, so as to lavish every pleasure on Gilberte? I thought it might fetch 1,000 francs. One good thing about getting rid of it was that it afforded me the opportunity to get to know it: as it was being wrapped up, I noticed how habit had prevented me from ever seeing it. I took it with me on my way out and told the coachman to drive to the Swanns’ via the Champs-Élysées: on a nearby corner, I knew there was a large shop dealing in Oriental articles owned by a friend of my father’s. To my amazement, he offered me on the spot not 1,000 francs but 10,000! I handled the banknotes with delight: a year’s worth of daily roses and lilacs for Gilberte! From the shop, the coach set off again for the Swanns’; and as they lived not far from the Bois de Boulogne, instead of taking the usual route, the coachman naturally headed up the avenue des Champs-Élysées itself. We had passed the corner of the rue de Berri and were very close to the Swanns’ when I thought I saw Gilberte with a young man in the twilight: they were going in the opposite direction to myself, away from her house; she was walking slowly, but with a purposeful step, and talking to this young man, whose face I could not make out. I sat up, intending to tell the driver to stop; but then I hesitated. The pair were already at quite a distance, their two faint close silhouettes fading slowly into the gathering Elysian gloom. Soon we drew up outside Gilberte’s house. ‘Oh dear! Mme Swann said. She will be sorry! I can’t imagine why she’s not here. She came home from a class complaining of being too hot and said she felt like taking a little walk in the open air with one of her girl-friends. – I think I may have just glimpsed her along the avenue des Champs-Élysées. – Oh, no, I shouldn’t think so. But whatever you do, don’t mention it to her father. He doesn’t like her to be out and about at this hour of the day.’ She added in English ‘Good evening!’ and I left. I told the cabman to go back the way we had come; but there was no sign of the pair. Where had they been? What manner of things had they been saying to each other in the gloaming, walking together in that intimate way?

  I went home in despair, clutching my windfall of 10,000 francs, which was to have enabled me to give Gilberte so many little pleasures, and realizing that I was now determined never to see her again. The visit to the shop with the Chinese vase had gladdened me with the prospect that, now and for ever, my sweetheart’s sole feelings for me would be happiness and gratitude. Yet if I had not made that detour to the shop, if the coach had not driven up the avenue des Champs-Élysées, I would never have seen Gilberte with the young man. For the stem of a single event may bear counter-balancing branches, the unhappiness it brings cancelling the happiness it caused. What had happened to me was the opposite of what is more usual: one yearns for a fulfilment which remains unattainable because one lacks the wherewithal required for it. As La Bruyère says, ‘It is sad is to be a lover without wealth.’63 One’s only resource is the relentless endeavour of stifling one’s yearning. The wherewithal was not what I lacked; but at the very moment when it materialized, an adventitious if not logical consequence of its acquisition had deprived me of the expected joy. It would appear that this is the fate of all our joys. They do of course tend to last longer than the single evening on which we have acquired what makes them possible. More usually, our fever of expectation lasts longer. Even so, happiness can never happen. Once the external circumstances are overcome, if they can be, nature then transforms the struggle into an internal one, by bringing about a gradual change in our heart, so that the gratification it desires is different from the one it is about to receive. And if the change in circumstance has come about so quickly that our heart has not had time to change with it, nature, nothing daunted, taking its own time, sets about defeating us in a way which, though more devious, is no less effective. Fulfilment is snatched from our grasp at the last moment; or rather it is fulfilment itself which nature the malicious trickster uses to destroy happiness. Having failed with everything belonging to the world of fact and external life, nature creates its ultimate impediment to happiness by making it a psychological impossibility. The phenomenon of happiness does not come to pass; or else it leads to utter bitterness.

  I locked away my 10,000 francs. They were of no use to me now; and they were to end up being spent even more quickly than if I had sent flowers to Gilberte every day, since as twilight came each evening I was so unhappy that, rather than stay at home, I went to lie weeping in the arms of other women whom I did not love. As for trying to please Gilberte with presents, I had lost all desire to do so. To step inside her house now would have been to face the certainty of suffering. Just to see her – a thing that had seemed so exhilarating the previous evening – would have been of little help to me: every moment when I could not be with her would have revived my anxiety. This explains why every new pain that a woman inflicts on us (which she often does without meaning to) increases not only her power over us, but also the demands we make on her. By every use of her power to hurt, the woman constricts us more and more, shackling us with stronger chains; but she also shows us the weakness of those which once seemed strong enough to bind her and thus to enable us to feel untroubled by her. Only the day before, had I not wanted to avoid upsetting Gilberte, I would have settled for infrequent meetings with her; but now these could no longer have satisfied me, and my conditions would have been very different. For in love, unlike war, the more one is defeated, the more one imposes harsh conditions; and one constantly tries to make them harsher, if one is actually in a position to impose any, that is. With Gilberte, I was not in this position. So to begin with, I preferred not to go back to her mother’s house. I also went on telling myself that Gilberte did not love me, that I had known this for ages, that I could see her whenever I liked and that, if I preferred not to see her, I would eventually forget her. But these thoughts, like a medication which has no effect on certain disorders, were quite ineffectual against what came intermittently to my mind: those two close silhouettes of Gilberte and that young man, stepping slowly along the avenue des Champs-Élysées. This was a new pain, but one which would eventually fade and disappear in its turn; it was an image which one day would come back to my mind with all its noxious power neutralized, like those deadly poisons which can be handled without danger, or the small piece of dynamite one can use to light a cigarette without fear of being blown up. For the time being, though, there was another force in me, fighting for all it was worth against the pernicious impulse which kept showing me, without the slightest alteration, Gilberte walking through the twilight: working against memory, trying to withstand its repeated onslaughts, there was the quiet and helpful endeavour of imagination. The force of memory went on showing the pair walking down the avenue des Champs-Élysées, along with other irksome images from the past, such as Gilberte shrugging her shoulders when her mother asked her to stay in with me. But the second force, sketching freely on the canvas of my hopes, improvised a future which was much more lovingly detailed than the meagre glimpses afforded by such a paltry past. To think that, against a single moment of the sullen Gilberte, I had a wealth of other moments, all devoted to her attempts to bring about our reconciliation – or even our engagement! This force, though directed towards the future by my imagination, did of course draw its sustenance from the past; and as my unhappiness at Gilberte’s surly
shrug of the shoulders gradually faded, so would my memory of her charm and the yearning for her that came with it. However, at the present moment, that death of the past was still remote. I still loved Gilberte, though I believed I hated her. Whenever somebody complimented me on the neatness of my hair, whenever anyone said I was looking well, I wished she could be there to hear it. Throughout that whole period, I was irritated by receiving so many invitations; and I turned them all down. On one occasion there was a great row at home, because I declined to accompany my father to an official function, at which M. and Mme Bontemps were to be present with their niece Albertine, who was then little more than a child. The different periods of our life overlap. Because you are now in love with someone who will one day mean nothing to you, you refuse out of hand to meet someone who means nothing to you now, but whom you will one day come to love, someone whom you might have loved sooner if you had agreed to an earlier meeting, who might have curtailed your present sufferings (before replacing them, of course, with others). My own sufferings were changing. I was surprised to notice certain feelings in myself, one day a particular emotion, the following day some quite different one, generally inspired by some hope or fear focussed on Gilberte. The Gilberte of my private imaginings, I mean. But I ought to have borne in mind that the other Gilberte, the real one, was perhaps utterly different from this private one, that she probably lived in ignorance of all the regrets I invented for her to feel, and thought not only much less about me than I about her, but much less than I pretended she thought about me in my moments of private communion with the fictitious Gilberte, when I longed to know her real intentions towards me and pictured her as spending her days doting on me.

  During these periods when sorrow, though already beginning to wane, still persists, there is a difference between the mode of sorrow caused by the obsessive thought of the loved one and the sorrow brought back to mind by certain memories: a nasty thing said, a verb once used in a letter. Let it be said here (all the diverse modes of sorrow will be described in connection with a later love-affair) that the first of these modes is not nearly as cruel as the second. This is because our impression of the woman, living for ever within us, is enhanced by the halo which our adoration constantly creates for her, and is tinged, if not by the glad promises of recurrent hope, at least by the peace of mind of lasting sadness. (It is noteworthy too that our image of a person who causes us pain takes up little space among the complications which exacerbate a heartbreak, which make it persist and prevent us from getting over it, just as in certain illnesses the cause is out of all proportion to the ensuing fever and the length of time required for a cure.) Though our image of the whole person we love is lit by the glow of a generally optimistic mind, this is not the case with the individual memory of the hurtful words spoken on a particular occasion or the unfriendly letter (I only ever had one like that from Gilberte): it feels as though these fragments, however minute they are, contain the whole person, amplified to a power well in excess of what she has in the usual imagined glimpses we have of her, entire though she is in them. Unlike the loved image of her, we have never gazed at the terrible letter with the untroubled eyes of melancholy and regret; the moment we spent reading it, devouring it, was fraught with the awful anguish of unexpected catastrophe. The difference in the making of these sorts of sorrows is that they come from the outside world and take the shortest and most painful route to the heart. The image of the woman we love, though we think it has a pristine authenticity, has actually been often made and remade by us. And the memory that wounds is not contemporaneous with the restored image; it dates from a very different time; it is one of the few witnesses to a monstrous past. Since this past goes on existing, though not inside us, where we have seen fit to replace it by a wondrous golden age, a paradise where we are to be reunited and reconciled, such memories and such letters are a reminder of reality; their sudden stab ought to make us realize how far we have strayed from that reality, and how foolish are the hopes with which we sustain our daily expectation. Not that this reality has to remain the same, although that can happen too. There have been many women in our lives with whom we have long since lost touch, and who have understandably matched our unpurposed silence by a similar lack of interest in ourselves. However, not being in love with them, we have never counted the years spent without them; and in our reasoning on the efficacy of separation, we disregard this counter-example, which should invalidate it, as those who believe in the possibility of foretelling the future overlook all the cases in which what they foresaw did not eventuate.

  Even so, separation can be effective: the heart which at present ignores us may be visited by the wish to see us again, or by an expectation of pleasure in our company. It just takes time. And the demands we make on time are as inordinate as the requirements of a heart if it is to change. In the first place, time is the very thing we wish not to grant; for our pain is acute and we are in haste to have it cease. As well, in the time that it takes for the other’s heart to change, our own heart will be changing too; and when the fulfilment desired comes within our reach, we will desire it no longer. Actually, the very notion that it will come within reach, that there is no fulfilment which will be for ever denied us, as long as it has ceased to be a fulfilment we desire, is one which, though true, is only partly true. By the time it comes to us, we have become indifferent to it. And our very indifference has made us less critical of it, which enables us to believe in retrospect that it would have delighted us at a time when, in fact, it might well have seemed grossly deficient. One’s standards are not high, and one is no great judge, in things one does not care about. The friendliness of a person whom we no longer care for, though it may seem too much to our indifference, might have been deemed too little by our love. The affectionate words, the suggestion of a meeting, make us think of the joy they might have led to, but not of all the other joys by which we would have wanted them to be immediately followed, and which that very eagerness of ours might well have prevented from ever coming to pass. So it is not certain that the happiness which comes too late, at a time when one can no longer enjoy it, when one is no longer in love, is exactly the same happiness for which we once pined in vain. There is only one person – our former self – who could decide the issue; and that self is no longer with us. No doubt, too, if the former self did come back, identical or not as it might be, that would be enough for the happiness in question to vanish.

  The belated coming true of these dreams, at a time when I would have ceased to long for it, was still in the future; and because I went on inventing, as in the days when I hardly knew Gilberte, words for her to say to me, letters in which she begged for forgiveness, confessed to never having loved another, asked me to marry her, this sequence of sweet and constantly regenerated images came to occupy more space in my mind than the glimpse of her with the young man, which weakened for lack of nourishment. I might well have gone back to Mme Swann’s, had it not been for a dream I had, in which a friend of mine, quite unknown to me in the waking world, behaved towards me with the most villainous duplicity, while believing I was the treacherous one. This caused me such pain that I woke with a start; and as my pain did not abate, I thought again of the dream, in an attempt to identify the friend who had visited my sleeping mind and whose name, a Spanish one, was now fading away. As both Joseph and the Pharaoh, I set about interpreting the dream.64 I knew that in many dreams one must disregard the appearance of people, who may be disguised or may have exchanged faces with one another, like those mutilated saints on the fronts of cathedrals which have been repaired by ignorant archaeologists in a jumble of mismatched heads and bodies, attributes and names. Those we give to characters in our dreams can be misleading. The one we love can be recognized only by the quality of the pain we feel. It was this that identified for me the person who as I slept had turned into a young man, and whose recent treachery still ached within me – Gilberte. I remembered then that, on the last occasion when we had been together, the day when her
mother had forbidden her to go a dancing-lesson, she had burst out with a strange laugh and refused, either sincerely or in pretence, to believe that my intentions towards her were quite proper. By association, this memory brought to mind another: long before that day, Swann himself had been the one to doubt my sincerity, to suspect that I was not a suitable friend for his daughter. I had written him my futile letter, which Gilberte had brought back and given to me with that same baffling laughter. She had not given it back immediately, of course; and I could remember the whole scene behind the clump of laurels. Unhappiness is a great promoter of morality. Gilberte’s present unpleasantness towards me now seemed a punishment meted out by life because of my behaviour that day. Because one can avoid dangers, by watching out while crossing the street, one has the impression that one can also avoid punishment. But punishments can come from within; and the unexpected danger may arise in that way, too, from the heart. The words she had spoken, ‘If you like, we can wrestle a bit more,’ now horrified me. I imagined her behaving like that with the young man I had seen with her in the avenue des Champs-Élysées, at home perhaps, up in the linen-room. So, just as, some time ago, I had been ill-advised enough to believe I had come to a state of tranquil, stable happiness, I had been rash enough, now that I had accepted that happiness was not for me, to believe I had achieved at least a haven of lasting calm. The fact is that, as long as our heart harbours the dear image of another person, it is not only our happiness which runs the constant risk of sudden destruction; for even when happiness has gone and pain has come, even when we have contrived to lull our pain, the state of calm we reach is no less illusory and precarious than happiness once was. My own state of calm did eventually come back, as whatever enters our minds in the guise of a dream, affecting our desires and our inner being, sooner or later fades away like all other things, grief being no more capable than anything else of aspiring to permanence. Besides, those who suffer the torments of love are, as is said of people suffering from certain diseases, their own doctors. As the only consolation they can find must come from the person responsible for their pain, and as the giving of that pain is an attribute of that person, the remedy they eventually find for it lies within it. One day, their pain reveals their remedy – as they mull it over, the pain shows them a new aspect of the person whom they miss so terribly: sometimes she is so hateful that they lose all desire to see her again, and any pleasure they might take in her company demands that they first wound her in their turn; sometimes she is so loving that they turn this lovingness into an objective quality of the loved one, and see in it a reason to hope. In my own case, although this new phase of my suffering did gradually come to an end, I was left with a much diminished desire to go back to see Mme Swann. In the hearts of those whose love is unrequited, the state of expectation in which they spend their days – even though it may be an unrecognized expectation – turns very gradually into a second phase which, though it seems identical with the first, is in fact its exact opposite. That first phase was the consequence, the reflection of the hurtful incidents which caused the initial sorrow. Our expectation of what might happen next is mixed with apprehension, especially since, if we hear nothing more from the beloved, we are full of the urge to do something, but are unsure of the likely outcomes of any step we might take, including the possibility that the one we do take may well rule out any further one. But soon, without our realizing it, our continuing expectation is determined, as we have seen, not by our memory of the past we have just been through, but by the imaginary future we look forward to. By then, our expectation is almost pleasant. After all, if the first phase has lasted for some time, we have already become used to living with an eye to tomorrow. The pain we felt during our final encounters with her still lives in us, albeit subdued. We are reluctant to have it revive, especially since we cannot see what further demands we could possibly make. To possess a little more of her would only increase our need for the part of her that we do not possess; and in any case, within that part, since our needs arise out of our satisfactions, something of her would still lie for ever beyond our grasp.