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By Root 1481 0

interval, which would render her, it is true, less indispensable to me, but might also have proved to her that she was not so indispensable. Unfortunately certain well or ill intentioned persons spoke of me to her in a fashion which must have led her to think that they were doing so at my request. Whenever I thus learned that Cottard, my own mother, even M. de Norpois had by a few ill-chosen words nullified the whole sacrifice that I had just been making, wasted all the advantage of my reserve by wrongly making me appear to have emerged from it, I had a double grievance. In the first place I now had to date from that day only my laborious and fruitful abstention which these tiresome people had, unknown to me, interrupted and consequently brought to nothing. But in addition I should now have less pleasure in seeing Gilberte, who would think of me no longer as containing myself in dignified resignation, but as plotting in the dark for an interview which she had scorned to grant me. I cursed all this idle chatter of people who so often, without any intention either of hurting us or of doing us a service, for no reason, for talking’s sake, sometimes because we ourselves have not been able to refrain from talking in their presence and because they are indiscreet (as we ourselves are), do us, at a crucial moment, so much harm. It is true that in the baleful task of destroying our love they are far from playing a part comparable to that played by two persons who are in the habit, one from excess of good-will and the other from excess of ill-will, of undoing everything at the moment when everything is on the point of being settled. But against these two persons we bear no such grudge as against the inopportune Cottards of this world, for one of them is the person whom we love and the other is ourself.

Meanwhile, since almost every time I went to see her Mme Swann would invite me to come to tea with her daughter and tell me to reply to the latter direct, I was constantly writing to Gilberte, and in this correspondence I did not choose the expressions which might, I felt, have won her over, but sought only to carve out the easiest channel for the flow of my tears. For regret, like desire, seeks not to analyse but to gratify itself. When one begins to love, one spends one’s time, not in getting to know what one’s love really is, but in arranging for tomorrow’s rendezvous. When one renounces love one seeks not to know one’s grief but to offer to the person who is its cause the expression of it which seems most moving. One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone. I wrote: “I had thought that it would not be possible. Alas, I see now that it is not so difficult.” I said also: “I shall probably never see you again,” and said it while continuing to avoid showing a coldness which she might think feigned, and the words, as I wrote them, made me weep because I felt that they expressed not what I should have liked to believe but what was probably going to happen. For at the next request for a meeting which she would convey to me I should have again, as I had now, the courage not to yield, and, with one refusal after another, I should gradually come to the moment when, by virtue of not having seen her again, I should no longer wish to see her. I wept, but I found courage enough to sacrifice, I savoured the melancholy pleasure of sacrificing, the happiness of being with her to the possibility of being pleasing in her eyes one day—a day, alas, when being pleasing in her eyes would be immaterial to me. Even the supposition, improbable though it was, that at this moment, as she had claimed during the last visit that I had paid her, she loved me, that what I took for the boredom which one feels in the company of a person of whom one has grown tired had been due only to a jealous susceptibility, to a feigned indifference analogous to my own, only rendered my decision less painful. It seemed to me that in years to come, when we had forgotten one another, when I should be