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.
During those periods in which grief and bitterness of spirit, though steadily diminishing, still persist, a distinction must be drawn between the pain which comes to us from the constant thought of the beloved herself and that which is revived by certain memories, some cruel remark, some verb used in a letter that we have had from her. Pending the description, in the context of another and later love affair, of the various forms that pain can assume, suffice it to say that, of these two kinds, the former is infinitely the less cruel. That is because our conception of the person, still living within us, is there adorned with the halo with which we are bound before long to invest her, and is imprinted if not with the frequent solace of hope, at any rate with the tranquillity of a permanent sadness. (It must also be observed that the image of a person who makes us suffer counts for little in those complications which aggravate the unhappiness of love, prolong it and prevent our recovery, just as in certain maladies the cause is out of proportion to the fever which follows it and the slowness of the process of convalescence.) But if the idea of the person we love is reflected in the light of an intelligence that is on the whole optimistic, the same is not true of those particular memories, those cruel remarks, that hostile letter (I received only one that could be so described from Gilberte); it is as though the person herself dwelt in those fragments, however limited, multiplied to a power which she is far from possessing in the habitual image we form of her as a whole. Because the letter has not—as the image of the loved one has—been contemplated by us in the melancholy calm of regret; we have read it, devoured it in the fearful anguish with which we were wrung by an unforeseen misfortune. Sorrows of this sort come to us in another way—from without—and it is by way of the most