—the initiative in the matter. All the more so is this true in our more tender relations, in which love is endowed with so much eloquence, indifference with so little curiosity. Gilberte never having questioned or sought to learn about this misunderstanding, it became for me a real entity, to which I referred anew in every letter. And there is in these baseless situations, in the affectation of coldness, a sort of fascination which tempts one to persevere in them. By dint of writing: “Now that our hearts are sundered,” so that Gilberte might answer: “But they’re not. Do let’s talk it over,” I had gradually come to believe that they were. By constantly repeating, “Life may have changed for us, but it will never destroy the feeling that we had for one another,” in the hope of at last hearing the answer: “But there has been no change, the feeling is stronger now than it ever was,” I was living with the idea that life had indeed changed, that we should keep the memory of the feeling which no longer existed, as certain neurotics, from having at first pretended to be ill, end by becoming chronic invalids. Now, whenever I had to write to Gilberte, I brought my mind back to this imagined change, which, being now tacitly admitted by the silence which she preserved with regard to it in her replies, would in future subsist between us. Then Gilberte ceased to confine herself to preterition. She too adopted my point of view; and, as in the speeches at official banquets, when the Head of State who is being entertained adopts more or less the same expressions as have just been used by the Head of State who is entertaining him, whenever I wrote to Gilberte: “Life may have parted us, but the memory of the days when we knew one another will endure,” she never failed to respond: “Life may have parted us, but it cannot make us forget those happy hours which will always be dear to us both” (though we should have found it hard to say why or how “Life” had parted us, or what change had occurred). My sufferings were no longer excessive. And yet, one day when I was telling her in a letter that I had heard of the death of our old barley-sugar woman in the Champs-Elysées, as I wrote the words: “I felt that this would grieve you; in me it awakened a host of memories,” I could not restrain myself from bursting into tears when I saw that I was speaking in the past tense, as though it were of some dead friend, now almost forgotten, of that love of which in spite of myself I had never ceased to think as something still alive, or at least capable of reviving. Nothing could have been more tender than this correspondence between friends who did not wish to see one another any more. Gilberte’s letters to me had all the delicacy of those which I used to write to people who did not matter to me, and showed me the same apparent marks of affection, which it was so soothing for me to receive from her.
But, little by little, every refusal to see her grieved me less. And as she became less dear to me, my painful memories were no longer strong enough to destroy by their incessant return the growing pleasure which I found in thinking of Florence or of Venice. I regretted, at such moments, that I had abandoned the idea of diplomacy and had condemned myself to a sedentary existence, in order not to be separated from a girl whom I should never see again and had already almost forgotten. We construct our lives for one person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, prisoners within the walls which were intended only for her. If Venice seemed to my parents to be too far away and its climate too treacherous for me, it would be at least quite easy and not too tiring to go and settle down at Balbec. But to do that I should have had to leave Paris, to forgo those visits thanks to which, infrequent as they were, I might sometimes hear Mme Swann talk to me about her daughter. Besides, I was beginning to find in them various pleasures in which Gilberte had no part.
When spring arrived, and with it the