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By Root 1472 0

be able to carry away a very clear impression of her. Perhaps, also, that activity of all the senses at once which yet endeavours to discover with the eyes alone what lies beyond them is over-indulgent to the myriad forms, to the different savours, to the movements of the living person whom as a rule, when we are not in love, we immobilise. Whereas the beloved model does not stay still; and our mental photographs of it are always blurred. I no longer really knew how Gilberte’s features were composed, except in the heavenly moments when she unfolded them to me: I could remember nothing but her smile. And being unable to visualise that beloved face, despite every effort that I might make to recapture it, I was disgusted to find, etched on my memory with a maddening precision of detail, the meaningless, emphatic faces of the roundabout man and the barley-sugar woman; just as those who have lost a loved one whom they never see again in sleep, are enraged at meeting incessantly in their dreams any number of insupportable people whom it is quite enough to have known in the waking world. In their inability to form an image of the object of their grief they are almost led to accuse themselves of feeling no grief. And I was not far from believing that, since I could not recall Gilberte’s features, I had forgotten Gilberte herself, and no longer loved her.

At last she returned to play there almost every day, setting before me fresh pleasures to desire, to demand of her for the morrow, in this sense indeed making my love for her each day a new love. But an incident was to change once again, and abruptly, the manner in which, at about two o’clock every afternoon, the problem of my love confronted me. Had M. Swann intercepted the letter that I had written to his daughter, or was Gilberte merely confessing to me long after the event, and so that I should be more prudent in future, a state of affairs already long established? As I was telling her how greatly I admired her father and mother, she assumed that vague air, full of reticence and secrecy, which she invariably wore when one spoke to her of what she was going to do, her walks, drives, visits, then suddenly said to me: “You know, they can’t stand you!” and, slipping from me like the watersprite that she was, burst out laughing. Often her laughter, out of harmony with her words, seemed, as music seems, to be tracing an invisible surface on another plane. M. and Mme Swann did not require Gilberte to give up playing with me, but they would have been just as well pleased, she thought, if we had never begun. They did not look upon our relations with a kindly eye, believed me to be a person of low moral standard and imagined that I could only be a bad influence on their daughter. This type of unscrupulous youth whom Swann thought I resembled, I pictured to myself as detesting the parents of the girl he loves, flattering them to their faces but, when he is alone with her, making fun of them, urging her on to disobey them and, when once he has completed his conquest, preventing them even from seeing her. With these characteristics (though they are never those under which the basest of scoundrels recognises himself) how vehemently did my heart contrast the sentiments by which it was animated with regard to Swann, so passionate, on the contrary, that I had no doubt that had he had an inkling of them he would have repented of his judgment of me as of a judicial error. All that I felt towards him I made bold to express to him in a long letter which I entrusted to Gilberte with the request that she deliver it to him. She agreed to do so. Alas! he must have seen in me an even greater impostor than I had feared; he must have suspected the sentiments which I had supposed myself to be portraying, in sixteen pages, with such conviction and truth: in short, the letter that I wrote to him, as ardent and as sincere as the words that I had uttered to M. de Norpois, met with no more success. Gilberte told me next day, after taking me aside behind a clump of laurels, on a little path where we sat down