In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (29 page)

In the confusion of her drawing-room, on her way from showing out one visitor, or with a plateful of cakes to tempt another, Mme Swann as she passed by me would take me aside for a moment: “I’ve been specially charged by Gilberte to invite you to luncheon the day after tomorrow. As I wasn’t sure of seeing you here, I was going to write to you if you hadn’t come.” I continued to resist. And this resistance was costing me gradually less and less, because, however much we may love the poison that is destroying us, when necessity has deprived us of it for some time past, we cannot help attaching a certain value to the peace of mind which we had ceased to know, to the absence of emotion and suffering. If we are not altogether sincere in telling ourselves that we never wish to see the one we love again, we would not be a whit more sincere in saying that we do. For no doubt we can endure her absence only by promising ourselves that it will not be for long, and thinking of the day when we shall see her again, but at the same time we feel how much less painful are those daily recurring dreams of an imminent and constantly postponed meeting than would be an interview which might be followed by a spasm of jealousy, with the result that the news that we are shortly to see her would create a disagreeable turmoil in our mind. What we now put off from day to day is no longer the end of the intolerable anxiety caused by separation, it is the dreaded renewal of emotions which can lead to nothing. How infinitely we prefer to any such interview the docile memory which we can supplement at will with dreams in which she who in reality does not love us seems, on the contrary, to be making protestations of her love, when we are all alone! How infinitely we prefer that memory which, by blending gradually with it a great deal of what we desire, we can contrive to make as sweet as we choose, to the deferred interview in which we would have to deal with a person to whom we could no longer dictate at will the words that we want to hear on her lips, but from whom we can expect to meet with new coldness, unforeseen aggressions! We know, all of us, when we no longer love, that forgetfulness, or even a vague memory, does not cause us so much suffering as an ill-starred love. It was the reposeful tranquillity of such forgetfulness that in anticipation I preferred, without acknowledging it to myself.

Moreover, however painful such a course of psychical detachment and isolation may be, it grows steadily less so for another reason, namely that it weakens while it is in process of healing that fixed obsession which is a state of love. Mine was still strong enough for me to wish to recapture my old position in Gilberte’s estimation, which in view of my voluntary abstention must, it seemed to me, be steadily increasing, so that each of those calm and melancholy days on which I did not see her, coming one after the other without interruption, continuing too without prescription (unless some busy-body were to meddle in my affairs), was a day not lost but gained. Gained to no purpose, perhaps, for presently I might be pronounced cured. Resignation, modulating our habits, allows certain elements of our strength to be indefinitely increased. Those—so wretchedly inadequate—that I had had to support my grief, on the first evening of my rupture with Gilberte, had since multiplied to an incalculable power. Only, the tendency of everything that exists to prolong its own existence is sometimes interrupted by sudden impulses to which we allow ourselves to surrender with all the fewer qualms because we know for how many days, for how many months even, we have been able, and might still be able to abstain. And often it is when the purse in which we hoard our savings is nearly full that we suddenly empty it, it is without waiting for the result of our treatment and when we have succeeded in growing accustomed to it that we abandon it. And so, one day, when Mme Swann repeated her familiar words about the pleasure it would be to Gilberte to see me, thus putting the happiness of which I had now for so long been depriving myself as it were within arm’s reach, I was stupefied by the realisation that it was still possible for me to enjoy it; and I could hardly wait until next day; for I had made up my mind to pay a surprise visit to Gilberte before her dinner.

What helped me to remain patient throughout the long day that followed was a little plan that I made. As soon as everything was forgotten, as soon as I was reconciled with Gilberte, I no longer wished to visit her except as a lover. Every day she would receive from me the finest flowers that grew. And if Mme Swann, although she had no right to be too severe a mother, should forbid my making a daily offering of flowers, I should find other gifts, more precious and less frequent. My parents did not give me enough money for me to be able to buy expensive things. I thought of a big vase of old Chinese porcelain which had been left to me by aunt Léonie, and of which Mamma prophesied daily that Françoise would come to her and say “Oh, it’s all come to pieces!” and that would be the end of it. Would it not be wiser, in that case, to part with it, to sell it so as to be able to give Gilberte all the pleasure I could. I felt sure that I could easily get a thousand francs for it. I had it wrapped up; I had grown so used to it that I had ceased altogether to notice it: parting with it had at least the advantage of making me realise what it was like. I took it with me on my way to the Swanns’, and, giving the driver their address, told him to go by the Champs-Elysées, at one end of which was the shop of a big dealer in oriental objects whom my father knew. Greatly to my surprise he offered me there and then not one thousand but ten thousand francs for the vase. I took the notes with rapture: every day, for a whole year, I could smother Gilberte in roses and lilac. When I left the shop and got back into the carriage the driver (naturally enough, since the Swanns lived out by the Bois) instead of taking the ordinary way began to drive along the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. He had just passed the corner of the Rue de Berri when, in the failing light, I thought I saw, close to the Swanns’ house but going in the other direction, away from it, Gilberte, who was walking slowly, though with a firm step, by the side of a young man with whom she was conversing and whose face I could not distinguish. I stood up in the cab, meaning to tell the driver to stop; then hesitated. The strolling couple were already some way away, and the two parallel lines which their leisurely progress was quietly drawing were on the verge of disappearing in the Elysian gloom. A moment later, I had reached Gilberte’s door. I was received by Mme Swann. “Oh! she will be sorry!” was my greeting, “I can’t think why she isn’t in. But she was complaining of the heat just now after a lesson, and said she might go out for a breath of fresh air with one of her girl friends.” “I thought I saw her in the Avenue des Champs-Elysées.” “Oh, I don’t think it can have been her. Anyhow, don’t mention it to her father; he doesn’t approve of her going out at this time of night. Must you go?
Good-bye
.” I left her, told my driver to go back the same way, but found no trace of the two walkers. Where had they been? What were they saying to one another in the darkness with that confidential air?

I returned home, despairingly clutching my windfall of ten thousand francs, which would have enabled me to arrange so many pleasant surprises for that Gilberte whom now I had made up my mind never to see again. No doubt my call at the dealer’s had brought me happiness by allowing me to hope that in future, whenever I saw my beloved, she would be pleased with me and grateful. But if I had not called there, if the carriage had not taken the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, I should not have seen Gilberte with that young man. Thus a single action may have two contradictory effects, and the misfortune that it engenders cancel the good fortune it had brought one. What had happened to me was the opposite of what so frequently occurs. We desire some pleasure, and the material means of obtaining it are lacking. “It is sad,” La Bruyère tells us, “to love without an ample fortune.” There is nothing for it but to try to eradicate little by little our desire for that pleasure. In my case, however, the material means had been forthcoming, but at the same moment, if not by a logical effect, at any rate as a fortuitous consequence of that initial success, my pleasure had been snatched from me. As, for that matter, it seems as though it must always be. As a rule, however, not on the same evening as we have acquired what makes it possible. Usually, we continue to struggle and hope for a little longer. But happiness can never be achieved. If we succeed in overcoming the force of circumstances, nature at once shifts the battle-ground, placing it within ourselves, and effects a gradual change in our hearts until they desire something other than what they are about to possess. And if the change of fortune has been so rapid that our hearts have not had time to change, nature does not on that account despair of conquering us, in a manner more gradual, it is true, more subtle, but no less efficacious. It is then at the last moment that the possession of our happiness is wrested from us, or rather it is that very possession which nature, with diabolical cunning, uses to destroy our happiness. Having failed in everything related to the sphere of life and action, it is a final impossibility, the psychological impossibility of happiness, that nature creates. The phenomenon of happiness either fails to appear, or at once gives rise to the bitterest reactions.

I put my ten thousand francs in a drawer. But they were no longer of any use to me. I ran through them, as it happened, even more rapidly than if I had sent flowers every day to Gilberte, for when evening came I was always too wretched to stay at home and went to drown my sorrows in the arms of women whom I did not love. As for seeking to give any sort of pleasure to Gilberte, I no longer thought of that; to visit her house again now could only give me pain. Even the sight of Gilberte, which would have been so exquisite a pleasure only yesterday, would no longer have sufficed me. For I should have been anxious all the time that I was not actually with her. That is how a woman, by every fresh torture that she inflicts on us, often quite unwillingly, increases her power over us and at the same time our demands upon her. With each injury that she does us, she encircles us more and more completely, redoubles our chains, but also those which hitherto we had thought adequate to bind her in order to keep our minds at rest. Only yesterday, had I not been afraid of annoying Gilberte, I should have been content to ask for no more than occasional meetings, which now would no longer have sufficed me and for which I should now have substituted quite different terms. For in this respect love is not like war; after each battle we renew the fight with keener ardour, which we never cease to intensify the more thoroughly we are defeated, provided always that we are still in a position to give battle. This was not my case with regard to Gilberte. Hence I preferred at first not to return to her mother’s house. I continued, it is true, to assure myself that Gilberte did not love me, that I had known this for some time, that I could see her again if I chose, and, if I did not choose, forget her in the long run. But these ideas, like a remedy which has no effect upon certain complaints, had no power whatsoever to obliterate those two parallel lines which I kept on seeing, traced by Gilberte and the young man as they slowly disappeared along the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. This was a new malady, which like the rest would gradually lose its force, a fresh image which would one day present itself to my mind’s eye completely purged of every noxious element that it now contained, like those deadly poisons which one can handle without danger, or like a crumb of dynamite which one can use to light one’s cigarette without fear of an explosion. Meanwhile there was in me another force which strove with all its might to overpower that unwholesome force which still showed me, without alteration, the figure of Gilberte walking in the dusk: to meet and to break the shock of the renewed assaults of memory, I had, toiling effectively in the opposite direction, imagination. The first of these two forces did indeed continue to show me that couple walking in the Champs-Elysées, and offered me other disagreeable pictures drawn from the past, as for instance Gilberte shrugging her shoulders when her mother asked her to stay and entertain me. But the second force, working upon the canvas of my hopes, outlined a future far more attractively developed than this meagre past which was on the whole so restricted. For one minute in which I saw Gilberte’s sullen face, how many were there in which I devised steps she might take with a view to our reconciliation, perhaps even to our engagement! It is true that this force, which my imagination was focusing upon the future, it drew, after all, from the past. As my vexation at Gilberte’s having shrugged her shoulders gradually faded, the memory of her charm, a memory that made me wish for her to return to me, would diminish too. But I was still a long way from such a death of the past. I was still in love with her, even though I believed that I detested her. Whenever anyone told me that I was looking well, or was nicely dressed, I wished that she could have been there to see me. I was irritated by the desire that many people showed about this time to ask me to their houses, and refused all their invitations. There was a scene at home because I did not accompany my father to an official dinner at which the Bontemps were to be present with their niece Albertine, a young girl still hardly more than a child. So it is that the different periods of our lives overlap one another. We scornfully decline, because of one whom we love and who will some day be of so little account, to see another who is of no account today, whom we shall love tomorrow, whom we might perhaps, had we consented to see her now, have loved a little sooner and who would thus have put an end to our present sufferings, bringing others, it is true, in their place. Mine were steadily growing less. I was amazed to observe deep down inside me, one sentiment one day, another the next, generally inspired by some hope or some fear relative to Gilberte. To the Gilberte whom I carried within me. I ought to have reminded myself that the other, the real Gilberte, was perhaps entirely different from mine, knew nothing of the regrets that I ascribed to her, thought probably much less about me, not merely than I thought about her but than I made her think about me when I was closeted alone with my fictitious Gilberte, wondering what really were her feelings towards me, and imagining her thus, her attention as constantly directed towards myself.