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By Root 1474 0

there that evening), I ran all the way to the Champs-Elysées to give to our own special stall-keeper, with instructions to hand it over to the person who came to her several times a week from the Swanns to buy gingerbread, the letter which, on the day when my beloved had caused me so much pain, I had decided to send her at the New Year, and in which I told her that our old friendship was vanishing with the old year, that I would now forget my grievances and disappointments, and that, from this first day of January, it was a new friendship that we were going to build, so solid that nothing could destroy it, so wonderful that I hoped Gilberte would go out of her way to preserve it in all its beauty and to warn me in time, as I promised to warn her, should either of us detect the least sign of a peril that might endanger it.

On the way home Françoise made me stop at the corner of the Rue Royale, before an open-air stall from which she selected for her own stock of presents photographs of Pius IX and Raspail, while for myself I purchased one of Berma. The wholesale admiration which that artist excited gave an air of slight impoverishment to this one face that she had to respond with, immutable and precarious like the garments of people who have none “spare,” this face on which she must continually expose to view only the tiny dimple upon her upper lip, the arch of her eyebrows, and a few other physical characteristics, always the same, which, after all, were at the mercy of a burn or a blow. This face, moreover, would not in itself have seemed to me beautiful, but it gave me the idea and consequently the desire to kiss it, by reason of all the kisses that it must have sustained and for which, from its page in the album, it seemed still to be appealing with that coquettishly tender gaze, that artfully ingenuous smile. For Berma must indeed have felt for many young men those desires which she confessed under cover of the character of Phèdre, desires which everything, even the glamour of her name which enhanced her beauty and prolonged her youth, must make it so easy for her to appease. Night was falling; I stopped before a column of playbills, on which was posted the performance in which she was to appear on January 1. A moist and gentle breeze was blowing. It was a weather with which I was familiar; I suddenly had a feeling and a presentiment that New Year’s Day was not a day different from the rest, that it was not the first day of a new world in which I might, by a chance that was still intact, have made Gilberte’s acquaintance anew as at the time of the Creation, as though the past did not yet exist, as though, together with the lessons I could have drawn from them for my future guidance, the disappointments which she had sometimes brought me had been obliterated; a new world in which nothing should subsist from the old—save one thing, my desire that Gilberte should love me. I realised that if my heart hoped for such a regeneration all around it of a universe that had not satisfied it before, it was because it, my heart, had not altered, and I told myself that there was no reason to suppose that Gilberte’s had altered either; I felt that this new friendship was the same, just as there is no boundary ditch between their fore-runners and those new years which our desire, without being able to reach and so to modify them, invests, unknown to themselves, with a different name. For all that I might dedicate this new year to Gilberte, and, as one superimposes a religion on the blind laws of nature, endeavour to stamp New Year’s Day with the particular image that I had formed of it, it was in vain. I felt that it was not aware that people called it New Year’s Day, that it was passing in a wintry dusk in a manner that was not new to me: in the gentle breeze that blew around the column of playbills, I had recognised, had sensed the reappearance of, the eternal common substance, the familiar moisture, the unheeding fluidity of the old days and years.

I returned home. I had just spent the New Year’s Day of old men, who differ on that