In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  When this reason was later reinforced by another one, I completely gave up my visits to Mme Swann’s. This belated reason was not that I had already forgotten Gilberte: it was that I hoped in that way to forget her sooner. Of course, since the end of my acute unhappiness, my residual sorrow had once again drawn from my visits to Mme Swann the sedative and the diversion which I had found so comforting at an earlier stage. But the reason why the sedative was effective was also the reason why the diversion was a drawback: that the memory of Gilberte was inseparable from such visits. The diversion could have been beneficial only if it could have pitted thoughts, interests or passions unrelated to Gilberte against a feeling which was no longer reinforced by her presence. Such states of mind, from which the loved one is entirely absent, serve to take up a space which, though minimal to begin with, leaves a little less room in the heart for the love which once occupied it entirely. They must be fostered, they must be fortified, in time with the waning of the emotion which is no more than a memory, so that the new elements provided to the mind can encroach on a larger and larger area of the self and finally take it over completely. I realized it was the only way to kill a feeling of love; and I was young enough and brave enough to undertake to do this, to inflict this wound on myself, the cruellest of all wounds, since it comes from one’s knowledge that, however long it may take, one is bound to succeed. When I wrote to Gilberte now, the reason I alleged for my reluctance to see her was some mysterious misunderstanding, utterly untrue of course, which had come between us, and on which I had at first been hoping she would invite me to explain myself. But in fact no clarification, even in the most trivial relationships, is ever required by any correspondent who knows that a designedly obscure, untrue or incriminating statement is included in a letter for the express purpose of provoking a protest, and who is satisfied to see in it a proof that he (or she) not only enjoys a commanding position and retains the initiative, but will continue to do so. In love relationships this is even more true, for love has so much eloquence, and indifference so little curiosity. As Gilberte had never expressed a doubt on this supposed misunderstanding, or tried to find out what it was, it had become a reality for me, and I alluded to it in each letter. There is, in such readiness to misinterpret, in the pretence of standoffishness, a dire charm which leads you further and further on. Having so often used the phrase ‘since we fell out’, so as to make Gilberte reply ‘But we haven’t, let’s talk about it,’ I had managed to persuade myself that we had. By so often writing statements like ‘Life may have parted us, but it can never alter the feeling we shared,’ in the hope of being told, ‘Nothing has parted us, our feeling is as strong as ever,’ I had become used to the idea that life had parted us, that our erstwhile feeling would live in our memories, as certain neurotics start by simulating an illness and end by really being ill. Whenever I had occasion to write to Gilberte now, I made a point of mentioning life’s imagined parting of us. And this role of life having been tacitly accepted by the fact that Gilberte never referred to it in her replies, it would go on parting us. But then, eschewing mere reticence, she overtly adopted my point of view; and thenceforward, as a visiting Head of State will incorporate into his speech of reply to an official welcome some of the words used by his host, each time I wrote, ‘Life may have come between us, but the memory of our time together will live on,’ she took to saying, ‘Life may have come between us, but it can never make us forget the dear days we shared’ (why ‘life’ should be said to have come between us or to have changed anything, we would have been hard put to say). By now my pain had much abated. But then one day when I was telling her in a letter that I had just heard of the death of our old barley-sugar woman from the Champs-Élysées, as I wrote these words, ‘I’m sure you must have been sad to hear of it; it certainly brought back many memories to me,’ I collapsed in helpless tears, as I realized that, though I had gone on hoping against hope that our love was still a living emotion, or at least one which could revive, I was now speaking of it in the past, as though it too had died and was all but forgotten. How affectionate this correspondence was, between friends trying not to meet! Her letters were fully as considerate as any I wrote to people who meant nothing to me; and I was greatly comforted to receive from her the very same tokens of apparent affection which I sent to them.

  Gradually, the more often I declined her suggestion that we meet, the less pain it caused me. As she became slowly less dear to me, my hurtful and incessantly recurring memories of her lost the power to prevent the thought of a visit to Florence or Venice from giving me pleasure. At such moments, I regretted the fact that I had turned down the diplomatic career and tied myself to a life without travel, so as not to absent myself from a girl whom I would not now be seeing again, whom I had already more or less forgotten. We design our life for the sake of an individual who, by the time we are able to welcome her into it, has turned into a total stranger, and never comes to share that life with us; and so we live on imprisoned in an arrangement made for someone else. Though my parents judged Venice to be too distant and fever-ridden for me, at least it was easy and untiring to go for a time to Balbec. But that would have entailed leaving Paris and giving up my visits, infrequent though they were, to Mme Swann’s, where I could hear her speak about her daughter, and where I was even beginning to discover other pleasures, which had nothing to do with Gilberte.

  As spring advanced, as the Ice Saints65 and Easter-time with its squalls of hail brought back the cold, Mme Swann was convinced that the house was freezing, and I often had occasion to see my hostess wearing furs: her shivery hands and shoulders disappeared under the dazzling white of a great flat muff and tippet, both of ermine, which she had been wearing outside and which looked like winter’s last and most persistent patches of snow, unthawed by the warmth of her fireside or the change of season. The composite truth of those icy but already flowering weeks was brought into that drawing-room, which I was soon to cease visiting, by whiteness of a more affecting sort, such as the snowballs of the Guelder roses, each of their tall stems, as bare as the Pre-Raphaelites’ linear flora, topped by its single clustered globe, as white as a herald angel and surrounded by the scent of lemon. For Odette, as befitted the lady of Tansonville, knew that even the iciest April is never without its flowers, and that winter, springtime and summer are not as hermetically partitioned from one another as may be supposed by the man-about-town who, until the first warm weather arrives, cannot imagine the world containing anything other than bare housefronts dripping rain. No doubt Mme Swann did not rely solely on what her gardener regularly sent up from Combray, and she did not decline to palliate, with the assistance of her ‘florist by appointment’, the insufficiencies of her artificial springtime by drawing on the resources afforded by Mediterranean precocity. Not that this mattered to me. Apart from the snows of Mme Swann’s muff, all that was required to set me yearning for the countryside was that the snowballs of the Guelder roses (which may have had no other purpose than to join with my hostess’s furniture and her own outfit in making the ‘Symphony in White major’ that Bergotte liked to talk of) should remind me that the Good Friday Spell66 represents a natural miracle, which we could witness every year, had we but the good sense to do so, and that these white flowers, along with the heady acid perfume of blooms of other species, the names of which were unknown to me, but which had often made me pause on my walks about Combray, should give to Mme Swann’s drawing-room an air that was as virginal, as candid, as blossomy without leaves, as thick with genuine smells, as the steep little path leading up to Tansonville.

  But even the memory of the little path was almost too much. The danger of it was that it might keep alive in me the remaining vestige of my love for Gilberte. So, despite the fact that my visits to Mme Swann now caused me no grief at all, I made them even more infrequent, trying to see her as little as possible. I did allow myself, since I persisted in not leaving Paris, to walk with her a few times. Fine warm weather had at last arrived. Knowing t
hat Mme Swann went out each day before lunch and took a short walk in the avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne, not far from the Arc de Triomphe, quite close to the spot which was known in those days, in honour of the citizenry who went there to see all the rich people they had heard of, as the ‘Hard-up Club’, I had asked my parents’ permission to go out for a walk late on Sunday mornings (not being free on weekdays at that time) and not to come back to lunch till a quarter-past one, which was much later than their own lunch-time. During that month of May, I did not miss a single Sunday, Gilberte having gone off to spend some time in the country with friends. I would arrive at the Arc de Triomphe about midday and stand at the end of the avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne, from where I could watch the corner of the side-street from which Mme Swann would emerge, coming from her house, which was only a few steps away. It was the hour at which many of those who had been out for a walk were going home to lunch; of the few remaining, most belonged to fashionable society. Then it was, stepping on to the fine gravel of the avenue, that Mme Swann would make her entrance, as late, languid and luxuriant as the most beautiful flower that never opens until noon, in outfits which gave her a bloom of radiance, and which, though they were always different, I remember as mainly mauve. The bright moment of her flowering was complete when, on an elongated stretch of stem, she unfurled the silky vexillum of a broad sunshade blending with the full-blown shimmer of her frock. She was accompanied by a whole retinue: Swann was there, as were four or five other club-men who had either dropped in to see her that morning or whom she had just encountered. And as the blacks and greys of this disciplined formation executed their almost mechanical movements, lending an inert frame to Odette, they made the woman, the only one with any intensity in her gaze, appear to be staring past them all, looking straight ahead as though leaning out of a window, and made her stand out, fragile and fearless, in the nudity of her gentle colours, as though she was a creature of a different species or of some mysterious descent, with a suggestion of something warlike about her, all of which enabled her single person to counter-balance her numerous escort. Beaming with smiles, contented with the lovely day and the sunshine, which was not yet too warm, with all the poise and confidence of a creator who beholds every thing that he has made and sees it is very good, and knowing (though vulgar passers-by might not appreciate this) that her outfit was more elegant than anyone else’s, she wore it for herself but also for her friends, naturally, without show but also without complete indifference, not objecting if the light bows on her bodice and skirt drifted slightly in front of her, like pets whose presence she was aware of but whose caprices she indulged, leaving them to their own devices as long as they stayed close to her; and as though her purple parasol, often furled when she first emerged into the avenue, was a posy of Parma violets, it too at times received from her happy eyes a glance which, though directed not at her friends but at an inanimate object, brimmed with so much gentle good-will that it still seemed to be a smile. A margin of elegance, which Mme Swann’s choice of outfit made all her own, was accepted as her essential and exclusive prerogative by the gentlemen whom she addressed most familiarly; and in this they deferred to her with the air of ignorant outsiders who do not mind recognizing themselves as such, conceding the aptness of her authority, as they might with an invalid on the matter of the special care he must take, or with a mother on how best to bring up her children. It was not just this suite of retainers, surrounding her and seeming not to notice passers-by, that suggested Mme Swann’s indoor life: by reason of the lateness of her advent in the avenue, she brought to mind the house in which she had spent long morning hours, where she would soon have to return for lunch; the proximity of it was in the calm and leisured simplicity of her manner, as though she was strolling down her own garden path; the cool subdued light of its interior seemed to hang about her as she passed. But this vision of her only gave me a heightened sense of the fresh air and the warmth of the day, especially since (in my conviction that, in accordance with her pious expertise in the rites and liturgy of such things, Mme Swann’s ways of dressing were linked to the season and the time of day by a bond that was necessary and unique) the flowers on her soft straw hat and the little bows on her frock seemed a more natural product of May than any flowers cultivated in beds or growing wild in the woods; and to witness the thrilling onset of the new season, I needed to lift my eyes no higher than Mme Swann’s sunshade, opened now and stretched above me like a nearer, more temperate sky, full of its constantly changing blue. Though subordinate to none, these rites were honour-bound, as was consequently Mme Swann herself, to defer to the morning, the springtime and the sunshine, none of which I ever thought seemed flattered enough that such an elegant woman should make a point of respecting them, of choosing for their pleasure a frock in a brighter or lighter material, its lower neckline and looser sleeves suggesting the moist warmth of the throat and the wrists, that she should treat them as a great lady treats the common people whose invitation to visit them in the country she has cheerfully condescended to accept, and for whose special occasion, though they are nobodies, she makes a point of giving her dress a bucolic touch. As soon as she appeared, I made my bow to Mme Swann; she paused with me and gave me her smiling English ‘Good morning!’ As we strolled, I realized that it was for her own sake that she observed these standards in dress, as though they were the tenets of a superior form of worship, which she merely served as a high priestess; for if she felt too warm, if she unbuttoned or even took off and asked me to carry the jacket that she had originally meant to keep buttoned, I discovered in the blouse she wore under it a host of details of handiwork which might well never have been noticed, after the manner of those orchestral parts which the composer has worked with exquisite care, although no ears among the audience will ever hear them; or else in the sleeves folded over my arm I picked out and studied, for the pleasure of looking at them or for the pleasure of being pleasant, this or that tiny detail, a strip of cloth of a delightful shade, or a mauve satinet normally unseen by any eye, but just as delicately finished as any of the outer parts of the garment, like the fine Gothic stonework hidden eighty feet up a cathedral, on the inner face of a balustrade, just as perfectly executed as the low-relief statues in the main doorway, but which no one had ever set eyes on until an artist on a chance visit to the city asked to be allowed to climb up there, walk about at sky-level and survey a whole townscape from between the twin steeples.