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By Root 1529 0

else to their realisation: I began again to stay up late, having no longer, to oblige me to go to bed early one evening, the certain hope of seeing my work begun next morning. I needed, before I could recover my creative energy, a few days of relaxation, and the only time my grandmother ventured, in a gentle and disillusioned tone, to frame the reproach: “Well, this famous work, don’t we even speak about it any more?”, I resented her intrusion, convinced that in her inability to see that my decision was irrevocably made, she had further and perhaps for a long time postponed its execution by the shock which her denial of justice had administered to my nerves and under the impact of which I should be disinclined to begin my work. She felt that her scepticism had stumbled blindly against a genuine intention. She apologised, kissing me: “I’m sorry, I shan’t say another word,” and, so that I should not be discouraged, assured me that as soon as I was quite well again, the work would come of its own accord to boot.

Besides, I said to myself, in spending all my time with the Swanns, am I not doing exactly what Bergotte does? To my parents it seemed almost as though, idle as I was, I was leading, since it was spent in the same salon as a great writer, the life most favourable to the growth of talent. And yet the assumption that anyone can be dispensed from having to create that talent for himself, from within himself, and can acquire it from someone else, is as erroneous as to suppose that a man can keep himself in good health (in spite of neglecting all the rules of hygiene and of indulging in the worst excesses) merely by dining out often in the company of a physician. The person, incidentally, who was most completely taken in by this illusion which misled me as well as my parents, was Mme Swann. When I explained to her that I was unable to come, that I must stay at home and work, she looked as though she felt that I was making a great fuss about nothing, that I was being rather stupidly pretentious:

“After all, Bergotte’s coming. Do you mean you don’t think what he writes is any good? It will be even better very soon,” she went on, “because he’s sharper and pithier in newspaper articles than in his books, where he’s apt to pad a bit. I’ve arranged that in future he’s to do the leaders in the Figaro. He’ll be distinctly the right man in the right place there.” And finally she added: “Do come! He’ll tell you better than anyone what you ought to do.”

And so, just as one invites a gentleman ranker with his colonel, it was in the interests of my career, and as though masterpieces arose out of “getting to know” people, that she told me not to fail to come to dinner next day with Bergotte.

Thus, no more from the Swanns than from my parents, that is to say from those who, at different times, had seemed bound to resist it, was there any further opposition to that delectable existence in which I might see Gilberte as often as I chose, with enchantment if not with peace of mind. There can be no peace of mind in love, since what one has obtained is never anything but a new starting-point for further desires. So long as I had been unable to go to her house, with my eyes fixed upon that inaccessible happiness, I could not even imagine the fresh grounds for anxiety that lay in wait for me there. Once the resistance of her parents was broken, and the problem solved at last, it began to set itself anew, each time in different terms. In this sense it was indeed a new friendship that began each day. Each evening, on arriving home, I reminded myself that I had things to say to Gilberte of prime importance, things upon which our whole friendship hung, and these things were never the same. But at least I was happy, and no further threat arose to endanger my happiness. One was to appear, alas, from a quarter in which I had never detected any peril, namely from Gilberte and myself. And yet I should have been tormented by what, on the contrary, reassured me, by what I mistook for happiness. We are, when we love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving