In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [121]
perhaps have resumed my visits to Mme Swann but for a dream I had in which one of my friends, who was not, however, one that I could identify, behaved with the utmost treachery towards me and appeared to believe that I had been treacherous to him. Abruptly awakened by the pain which this dream had caused me, and finding that it persisted after I was awake, I turned my thoughts back to the dream, racked my brains to remember who the friend was that I had seen in my sleep and whose name—a Spanish name—was no longer distinct. Combining Joseph’s part with Pharaoh’s, I set to work to interpret my dream. I knew that in many cases it is a mistake to pay too much attention to the appearance of the people one saw in one’s dream, who may perhaps have been disguised or have exchanged faces, like those mutilated saints in cathedrals which ignorant archaeologists have restored, fitting the head of one to the body of another and jumbling all their attributes and names. Those that people bear in a dream are apt to mislead us. The person whom we love is to be recognised only by the intensity of the pain that we suffer. From mine I learned that, transformed while I was asleep into a young man, the person whose recent betrayal still hurt me was Gilberte. I remembered then that, the last time I had seen her, on the day when her mother had forbidden her to go out to a dancing lesson, she had, whether in sincerity or in pretence, declined, laughing in a strange manner, to believe in the genuineness of my feelings for her. And by association this memory brought back to me another. Long before that, it was Swann who had not wished to believe in my sincerity, or that I was a suitable friend for Gilberte. In vain had I written to him, Gilberte had brought back my letter and had returned it to me with the same incomprehensible laugh. She had not returned it to me at once: I remembered now the whole of that scene behind the clump of laurels. One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy. Gilberte’s present antipathy for me seemed to me a punishment meted out to me by life for my conduct that afternoon. One thinks one can escape such punishments because one is careful when crossing the street, and avoids obvious dangers. But there are others that take effect within us. The accident comes from the direction one least expected, from inside, from the heart. Gilberte’s words: “If you like, we might go on wrestling,” made me shudder. I imagined her behaving like that, at home perhaps, in the linen-room, with the young man whom I had seen escorting her along the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. And so, just as much as to believe (as I had a little time back) that I was calmly established in a state of happiness, it had been foolish in me, now that I had abandoned all thought of happiness, to take it for granted that at least I had become and would be able to remain calm. For, so long as our heart keeps enshrined with any permanence the image of another person, it is not only our happiness that may at any moment be destroyed; when that happiness has vanished, when we have suffered and then succeeded in anaesthetising our sufferings, the thing then that is as elusive, as precarious as ever our happiness was, is calm. Mine returned to me in the end, for the cloud which, affecting one’s spirits, one’s desires, has entered one’s mind under cover of a dream, will also in course of time dissolve: permanence and stability being assured to nothing in this world, not even to grief. Besides, those who suffer through love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians. Since consolation can come to them only from the person who is the cause of their grief, and since their grief is an emanation from that person, it is in their grief itself that they must in the end find a remedy: which it will disclose to them at a given moment, for as long as they turn it over in their minds, this grief will continue to show them fresh aspects of the loved, the regretted person, at one moment so intensely hateful that one has no longer the slightest desire to see her since before