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By Root 1500 0

—we are always detached from our fellow-creatures: when we love, we sense that our love does not bear a name, that it may spring up again in the future, could have sprung up already in the past, for another person rather than this one; and during the time when we are not in love, if we resign ourselves philosophically to love’s inconsistencies and contradictions, it is because we do not at that moment feel the love which we speak about so freely, and hence do not know it, knowledge in these matters being intermittent and not outlasting the actual presence of the sentiment. Of course there would still have been time to warn Gilberte that that future in which I should no longer love her, which my suffering helped me to divine although my imagination was not yet able to form a clear picture of it, would gradually take shape, that its coming was, if not imminent, at least inevitable, if she herself did not come to my rescue and nip my future indifference in the bud. How often was I not on the point of writing, or of going to Gilberte to tell her: “Take care. My mind is made up. This is my final attempt. I am seeing you now for the last time. Soon I shall love you no longer!” But to what end? By what right could I reproach her for an indifference which, without considering myself guilty on that account, I myself manifested towards everything that was not Gilberte? The last time! To me, that appeared as something of immense significance, because I loved Gilberte. On her it would doubtless have made just as much impression as those letters in which our friends ask whether they may pay us a visit before they finally leave the country, requests which, like those made by tiresome women who are in love with us, we decline because we have pleasures of our own in prospect. The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.

Besides, what good would it have done if I had spoken to Gilberte? She would not have heard me. We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening. My words would have come to her only in a distorted form, as though they had had to pass through the moving curtain of a waterfall before they reached my beloved, unrecognisable, sounding false and absurd, having no longer any kind of meaning. The truth which one puts into one’s words does not carve out a direct path for itself, is not irresistibly self-evident. A considerable time must elapse before a truth of the same order can take shape in them. Then the political opponent who, despite every argument, every proof, condemns the votary of the rival doctrine as a traitor, himself comes to share the hated conviction, in which he who once sought in vain to disseminate it no longer believes. Then the masterpiece of literature whose excellence seemed self-evident to the admirers who read it aloud, while to those who listened it presented only a senseless or commonplace image, will by those too be proclaimed a masterpiece, but too late for the author to learn of their conversion. Similarly, in love, the barriers, do what he may, cannot be broken down from without by the despairing lover; it is when he no longer cares about them that suddenly, as the result of an effort directed from elsewhere, accomplished within the heart of the one who did not love, those barriers which he has charged in vain will fall to no avail. If I had come to Gilberte to tell her of my future indifference and the means of preventing it, she would have assumed that my love for her, the need that I had of her, were even greater than she had supposed, and her reluctance to see me would thereby have been increased. And it is all too true, moreover, that it was that love for her which helped me, by the disparate states of mind which it successively produced in me, to foresee, more clearly than she herself could, the end of that love. And yet some such warning I might perhaps have addressed, by letter or by word of mouth, to Gilberte, after a long enough