In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [94]
I was about to pass through one of those difficult crises which we generally find that we have to face at various stages in life, and which, for all that there has been no change in our character, in our nature (that nature which itself creates our loves, and almost creates the women we love, down to their very faults), we do not face in the same way on each occasion, that is to say at every age. At such moments our life is divided, and so to speak distributed over a pair of scales, in two counterpoised pans which between them contain it all. In one there is our desire not to displease, not to appear too humble to the person whom we love without being able to understand, but whom we find it more astute at times to appear almost to disregard, so that she shall not have that sense of her own indispensability which may turn her from us; in the other scale there is a feeling of pain—and one that is not localised and partial only—which cannot be assuaged unless, abandoning every thought of pleasing the woman and of making her believe that we can do without her, we go to her at once. If we withdraw from the pan that holds our pride a small quantity of the will-power which we have weakly allowed to wither with age, if we add to the pan that holds our suffering a physical pain which we have acquired and have allowed to get worse, then, instead of the brave solution that would have carried the day at twenty, it is the other, grown too heavy and insufficiently counter-balanced, that pulls us down at fifty. All the more because situations, while repeating themselves, tend to alter, and there is every likelihood that, in middle life or in old age, we shall have had the fatal self-indulgence of complicating our love by an intrusion of habit which adolescence, detained by too many other duties, less free to choose, knows nothing of.
I had just written Gilberte a letter in which I allowed my fury to thunder, not however without throwing her the lifebuoy of a few words disposed as though by accident on the page, by clinging to which my beloved might be brought to a reconciliation. A moment later, the wind having changed, they were phrases full of love that I addressed to her, chosen for the sweetness of certain forlorn expressions, those “nevermores” so touching to those who pen them, so wearisome to her who will have to read them, whether she believes them to be false and translates “nevermore” by “this very evening, if you want me,” or believes them to be true and so to be breaking the news to her of one of those final separations to which we are so utterly indifferent when the person concerned is one with whom we are not in love. But since we are incapable, while we are in love, of acting as fit predecessors of the person whom we shall presently have become and who will be in love no longer, how are we to imagine the actual state of mind of a woman whom, even when we are conscious that we are of no account to her, we have perpetually represented in our musings as uttering, in order to lull us into a happy dream or to console us for a great sorrow, the same words that she would use if she loved us. Faced with the thoughts, the actions of a woman whom we love, we are as completely at a loss as the world’s first natural philosophers must have been, face to face with the phenomena of nature, before their science had been elaborated and had cast a ray of light over the unknown. Or, worse still, we are like a person in whose mind the law of causality barely exists, a person who would be incapable, therefore, of establishing a connexion between one phenomenon and another and to whose eyes the