In Search of Lost Time (64 page)

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, a copy of which she had asked someone to locate 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
pneumatique
²⁰
– 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, anyway I'll call you by your first name. It's too tiresome otherwise.' Yet for a while she went on simply calling me
vous
²¹
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 object 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 of having been held for a moment in her mouth, 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 not given by the little girl I loved, to the me who loved her, but by the other, the one I played with, to that other me 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 savour them, for, each day, the 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 had to hide it from me until now, that same need 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 towards 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 reader of
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 towards 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 meet her, and I was returning to the lawn convinced, now, that 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 Boissyd'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 that 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 theatres, 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 was in touch with 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, curtseying to the lady with
Les Débats
(who was saying to her: ‘What lovely sunlight, it's like 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 little 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 grey hat and travelling 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 made him stand out vividly against the vulgar background of people of different classes out for a walk who were crowding that alley of the Champs-Élysées, and among whom I admired the fact that he consented 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 quarrelled 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 that I had retained, but somewhere in the shadows, because ever since I had seen Gilberte again, for me Swann was pre-eminently her father, and no longer Swann of Combray; since 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 any more 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 VII
²⁵
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 enamelled 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 so much in our friendship. And as soon as you get here, you have to leave again! Try to come early tomorrow, so that 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 fine 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 Strogoff
²⁷
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 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.

– I'm not a bit surprised, said Françoise. It's not the weather for this time of year, it's far too hot. Alas! My Lord, imagine all the other poor people out there who must be feeling sick today. Anyone would think things were topsy-turvy up in heaven, too!

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 post 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.'