In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [44]
Now the same mystery which often veils from our eyes the reason for a catastrophe envelops just as frequently, when love is in question, the suddenness of certain happy solutions, such as had been brought to me by Gilberte’s letter. Happy, or at least seemingly happy, for there are few that can really be happy when we are dealing with a sentiment of such a kind that any satisfaction we can give it does no more, as a rule, than dislodge some pain. And yet sometimes a respite is granted us, and we have for a little while the illusion of being healed.
As regards this letter, at the foot of which Françoise refused to recognise Gilberte’s name because the elaborate capital “G” leaning against the undotted “i” looked more like an “A,” while the final syllable was indefinitely prolonged by a waving flourish, if we persist in looking for a rational explanation of the sudden change of feeling towards me which it reflected, and which made me so radiantly happy, we may perhaps find that I was to some extent indebted for it to an incident which I should have supposed, on the contrary, to be calculated to ruin me for ever in the eyes of the Swann family. A short while back, Bloch had come to see me at a time when Professor Cottard, who, now that I was following his prescriptions, had again been called in, happened to be in my room. As his examination was over and he was sitting with me simply as a visitor because my parents had invited him to stay to dinner, Bloch was allowed to come in. While we were all talking, Bloch having mentioned that he had been told by a lady with whom he had been dining the day before, and who was a great friend of Mme Swann’s, that the latter was very fond of me, I should have liked to reply that he was most certainly mistaken, and to establish the fact (from the same scruple of conscience that had made me proclaim it to M. de Norpois, and for fear that Mme Swann might take me for a liar) that I did not know her and had never spoken to her. But I did not have the heart to correct Bloch’s mistake, because I realised that it was deliberate, and that, if he had made up something that Mme Swann could not possibly have said, it was simply to let us know (what he considered flattering to himself, and was not true either) that he had been dining with one of that lady’s friends. And thus it came about that whereas M. de Norpois, on learning that I did not know but would very much like to know Mme Swann, had taken good care to avoid speaking to her about me, Cottard, who was her doctor, having gathered from what he had heard Bloch say that she knew me quite well and thought highly of me, concluded that to remark, when next he saw her, that I was a charming young fellow and a great friend of his could not be of the smallest use to me and would be advantageous to himself, two reasons which induced him to speak of me to Odette whenever an opportunity arose.
Thus at length I came to know that house from which was wafted even on to the staircase the scent that Mme Swann used, but which was more redolent still of the peculiar, disturbing charm that emanated from the life of Gilberte. The implacable concierge, transformed into a benevolent Eumenid, adopted the habit, when I asked him if I might go upstairs, of indicating to me, by raising his cap with a propitious hand, that he granted my prayer. Those windows which, seen from outside, used to interpose between me and the treasures within, which were not destined for me, a polished, distant and superficial stare, which seemed to me the very stare of the Swanns themselves, it fell to my lot, when in the warm weather