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“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 no sooner have you come than you go away! Try to come early tomorrow, so that I can talk to you.”

Her face lit up and she jumped for joy as she answered: “Tomorrow, you may depend upon it, my dear boy, I shan’t be coming. I’ve got a big tea-party. The day after tomorrow I’m going to a friend’s house to watch the arrival of King Theodosius from the window—won’t that be splendid?—and the day after that I’m going to Michel Strogoff, and then it will soon be Christmas and the New Year holidays! Perhaps they’ll take me to the Riviera—wouldn’t that be nice? though I should miss the Christmas-tree here. Anyhow, if I do stay in Paris, I shan’t be coming here, because I shall be out paying calls with Mamma. Good-bye—there’s Papa calling me.”

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

“I’m not surprised,” said Françoise, “it’s not the right weather for the time of year; it’s much too warm. Oh dear, oh dear, to think of all the poor sick people there must be everywhere. It’s like as if everything’s topsyturvy up there too.”

I repeated to myself, stifling my sobs, the words in which Gilberte had given utterance to her joy at the prospect of not coming back for a long time to the Champs-Elysées. But already the charm with which, by the mere act of thinking, my mind was filled as soon as it thought of her, and the special, unique position, however painful, in which I was inevitably placed in relation to Gilberte by the inner constraint of a mental habit, had begun to lend a romantic aura even to that mark of her indifference, and in the midst of my tears my lips shaped themselves into a smile which was simply the timid adumbration of a kiss. And when the time came for the postman to arrive I said to myself, that evening as on every other: “I’m going to get a letter from Gilberte; she’s going to tell me at last that she has never ceased to love me, and explain to me the mysterious reason why she has been forced to conceal it from me until now, to pretend to be able to be happy without seeing me, the reason why she has assumed the form of the other Gilberte who is simply a playmate.”

Every evening I would beguile myself by imagining this letter, believing that I was actually reading it, reciting each of its sentences in turn. Suddenly I would stop in alarm. I had realised that if I was to receive a letter from Gilberte, it could not, in any case, be this letter, since it was I myself who had just composed it. And from then on I would strive to divert my thoughts from the words which I should have liked her to write to me, for fear that, by voicing them, I should be excluding just those words—the dearest, the most desired—from the field of possibilities. Even if, by some improbable coincidence, it had been precisely the letter of my invention that Gilberte addressed to me of her own accord, recognising my own work in it I should not have had the impression that I was receiving something that had not originated from me, something real, something new, a happiness external to my mind, independent of my will, a true gift of love.

Meanwhile, I re-read a page which, although it had not been written to me by Gilberte, at least came to me from her, that page of Bergotte’s on the beauty of the old myths whence Racine drew his inspiration, which (with the agate marble) I always kept close at hand. I was touched by my friend’s kindness in having procured the book for me; and as everyone needs to find reasons for his passion, to the extent of being glad to recognise in the loved one qualities which (he has learned from literature or conversation) are worthy of love, to the extent of assimilating them by imitation and making them additional reasons for his love, even though these qualities are diametrically opposed to those his love would