In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [83]
“Now then, run along and get ready; you’re keeping us waiting,” her mother reminded her.
“I’m so happy here with my little Papa; I want to stay just for a minute,” replied Gilberte, burying her head beneath the arm of her father, who passed his fingers lovingly through her fair hair.
Swann was one of those men who, having lived for a long time amid the illusions of love, have seen the blessings they have brought to a number of women increase the happiness of those women without exciting in them any gratitude, any tenderness towards their benefactors; but who believe that in their children they can feel an affection which, being incarnate in their own name, will enable them to survive after their death. When there should no longer be any Charles Swann, there would still be a Mlle Swann, or a Mme X, née Swann, who would continue to love the vanished father. Indeed, to love him too well perhaps, Swann may have been thinking, for he acknowledged Gilberte’s caress with a “You’re a good girl,” in the tone softened by uneasiness to which, when we think of the future, we are prompted by the too passionate affection of a person who is destined to survive us. To conceal his emotion, he joined in our talk about Berma. He pointed out to me, but in a detached, bored tone, as though he wished to remain somehow detached from what he was saying, with what intelligence, with what an astonishing fitness the actress said to Oenone, “You knew it!” He was right. That intonation at least had a validity that was really intelligible, and might thereby have satisfied my desire to find incontestable reasons for admiring Berma. But it was because of its very clarity that it did not in the least satisfy me. Her intonation was so ingenious, so definite in intention and meaning, that it seemed to exist by itself, so that any intelligent actress might have acquired it. It was a fine idea; but whoever else might express it as fully must possess it equally. It remained to Berma’s credit that she had discovered it, but can one use the word “discover” when the object in question is something that would not be different if one had been given it, something that does not belong essentially to one’s own nature since someone else may afterwards reproduce it?
“Upon my soul, your presence among us does raise the tone of the conversation!” Swann observed to me, as though to excuse himself to Bergotte; for he had formed the habit, in the Guermantes set, of entertaining great artists as if they were just ordinary friends whom one seeks only to provide with the opportunity to eat the dishes or play the games they like, or, in the country, indulge in whatever form of sport they please. “It seems to me that we’re talking a great deal about art,” he went on. “But it’s so nice, I do love it!” said Mme Swann, throwing me a look of gratitude, from good nature as well as because she had not abandoned her old aspirations towards intellectual conversation. After this it was to others of the party, and principally to Gilberte, that Bergotte addressed himself. I had told him everything that I felt with a freedom which had astonished me and which was due to the fact that, having acquired with him, years before (in the course of all those hours of solitary reading, in which he was to me merely the better part of myself), the habit of sincerity, of frankness, of confidence, I found him less intimidating than a person with whom I was talking for the first time. And yet, for the same reason, I was very uneasy about the impression that I must have been making on him, the contempt that I had supposed he would feel for my ideas dating not from that afternoon but from the already distant time in which I had begun to read his books in our garden at Combray. I ought perhaps to have reminded myself nevertheless that since