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By Root 1418 0

justified by anything in Gilberte’s conduct. She, on the contrary, appreciated her governess, without troubling herself over what I might choose to think about her. It seemed quite natural to her not to come to the Champs-Elysées if she had to go shopping with Mademoiselle, delightful if she had to go out with her mother. And even supposing that she had allowed me to spend my holidays in the same place as herself, when it came to choosing that place she would consider her parents’ wishes, and the various amusements of which she had been told, and not at all that it should be the place to which my family were proposing to send me. When she assured me (as she sometimes did) that she liked me less than some other of her friends, less than she had liked me the day before, because by my clumsiness I had made her side lose a game, I would ask her forgiveness, would beg her to tell me what I must do in order that she should begin to like me again as much as, or more than anyone else; I wanted her to tell me that that was already the case, I besought her as though she were capable of modifying her affection for me as she or I chose, in order to please me, simply by the words she would utter, as my good or bad conduct should deserve. Did I not then know that what I felt for her depended neither upon her actions nor upon my will?

It showed me finally, the new arrangement devised by the invisible seamstress, that, if we find ourselves hoping that the actions of a person who has hitherto caused us pain may prove not to have been sincere, they shed in their wake a light which our hopes are powerless to extinguish and to which we must address ourselves, rather than to our hopes, if we are to know what will be that person’s actions on the morrow.

My love listened to these new counsels; they persuaded it that the morrow would not be different from all the days that had gone before; that Gilberte’s feeling for me, too long established now to be capable of alteration, was indifference; that in my friendship with Gilberte, it was I alone who loved. “It’s true,” my love answered, “there is nothing more to be made of that friendship. It will not alter now.” And so, as from the very next day (or from the next public holiday, if there was one in the offing, or an anniversary, or the New Year, perhaps—one of those days which are not like other days, on which time starts afresh, casting aside the heritage of the past, declining its legacy of sorrows) I would ask Gilberte to terminate our old friendship and to join me in laying the foundations of a new one.

I always had within reach a plan of Paris which, because I could see on it the street in which M. and Mme Swann lived, seemed to me to contain a secret treasure. And for pure pleasure, as well as from a sort of chivalrous loyalty, on no matter what pretext I would utter the name of that street until my father, not being, like my mother and grandmother, apprised of my love, would ask me: “But why are you always talking about that street? There’s nothing wonderful about it. It’s a very agreeable street to live in because it’s only a few minutes walk from the Bois, but there are a dozen other streets to which the same applies.”

I went out of my way to find occasions for my parents to pronounce Swann’s name. In my own mind, of course, I never ceased to murmur it; but I needed also to hear its exquisite sound, to have others play to me that music the voiceless rendering of which did not suffice me. Moreover, the name Swann, with which I had for so long been familiar, had now become for me (as happens with certain aphasiacs in the case of the most ordinary words) a new name. It was for ever present in my mind, which could not, however, grow accustomed to it. I analysed it, I spelt it; its orthography came to me as a surprise. And together with its familiarity it had simultaneously lost its innocence. The pleasure that I derived from the sound of it I felt to be so sinful that it seemed to me as though the others read my thoughts and changed the conversation if I tried to guide it in that direction.