In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [39]
A moment later I said good-bye to the “marquise,” and went out accompanied by Françoise, whom I left to return to Gilberte. I caught sight of her at once, on a chair, behind the clump of laurels. She was there so as not to be seen by her friends: they were playing hide-and-seek. I went and sat down beside her. She had on a flat cap which came low over her eyes, giving her the same “underhand,” brooding, sly look which I had remarked in her that first time at Combray. I asked her if there was not some way for me to have it out with her father face to face. Gilberte said that she had suggested that to him, but that he had thought it pointless. “Here,” she went on, “don’t go away without your letter. I must run along to the others, as they haven’t found me.”
Had Swann appeared on the scene then before I had recovered this letter by the sincerity of which I felt that he had been so unreasonable in not letting himself be convinced, perhaps he would have seen that it was he who had been in the right. For, approaching Gilberte, who, leaning back in her chair, told me to take the letter but did not hold it out to me, I felt myself so irresistibly attracted by her body that I said to her: “I say, why don’t you try to stop me from getting it; we’ll see who’s the stronger.”
She thrust it behind her back; I put my arms round her neck, raising the plaits of hair which she wore over her shoulders, either because she was still of an age for it or because her mother chose to make her look a child for a little longer so as to make herself seem younger; and we wrestled, locked together. I tried to pull her towards me, and she resisted; her cheeks, inflamed by the effort, were as red and round as two cherries; she laughed as though I were tickling her; I held her gripped between my legs like a young tree which I was trying to climb; and, in the middle of my gymnastics, when I was already out of breath with the muscular exercise and the heat of the game, I felt, like a few drops of sweat wrung from me by the effort, my pleasure express itself in a form which I could not even pause for a moment to analyse; immediately I snatched the letter from her. Whereupon Gilberte said good-naturedly: “You know, if you like, we might go on wrestling a bit longer.”
Perhaps she was dimly conscious that my game had another object than the one I had avowed, but too dimly to have been able to see that I had attained it. And I who was afraid that she had noticed (and a slight movement of recoil and constraint as of offended modesty which she made and checked a moment later made me think that my fear had not been unfounded) agreed to go on wrestling, lest she should suppose that I had indeed had no other object in view than the one after which I wished only to sit quietly by her side.
On my way home I perceived, I suddenly recalled the impression, concealed from me until then, of which, without letting me distinguish or recognise it, the cold and almost sooty smell of the trellised pavilion had reminded me. It was that of my uncle Adolphe’s little sitting-room at Combray, which had indeed exhaled the same odour of humidity. But I could not understand, and I postponed until later the attempt to discover why the recollection of so trivial an impression had filled me with such happiness. Meanwhile it struck me that I did indeed deserve the contempt of M. de Norpois: I had preferred hitherto to all other writers one whom he styled a mere “flute-player,” and a positive rapture had been conveyed to me, not by some important idea, but by a musty smell.
For some time past, in certain households, the name of the Champs-Elysées, if a visitor mentioned it, would be greeted by the mothers with that baleful air which they reserve for a physician of established reputation whom they claim to have seen make too many