(as now it would still be), in order to put an end to it, a motive for surrender, reconciliation and further meetings. And later on, when I should at last be able safely to confess to Gilberte (so much would her feeling for me have regained its strength) my feeling for her, the latter, not having been able to resist the strain of so long a separation, would have ceased to exist; I should have become indifferent to Gilberte. I knew this, but I could not explain it to her; she would have assumed that if I was claiming that I would cease to love her if I remained for too long without seeing her, that was solely to persuade her to summon me back to her at once. In the meantime, what made it easier for me to sentence myself to this separation was the fact that (in order to make it quite clear to her that despite my protestations to the contrary it was my own free will and not any extraneous obstacle, not the state of my health, that prevented me from seeing her), whenever I knew beforehand that Gilberte would not be in the house, was going out somewhere with a friend and would not be home for dinner, I went to see Mme Swann, who had once more become to me what she had been at the time when I had such difficulty in seeing her daughter and (on days when the latter was not coming to the Champs-Elysées) used to repair to the Allée des Acacias. In this way I should hear about Gilberte, and could be certain that she would in due course hear about me, and in terms which would show her that I was not hankering after her. And I found, as all those who suffer find, that my melancholy situation might have been worse. For, being free at any time to enter the house in which Gilberte lived, I constantly reminded myself, for all that I was firmly resolved to make no use of that privilege, that if ever my pain grew too sharp there was a way of making it cease. I was not unhappy, except one day at a time. And even that is an exaggeration. How many times an hour (but now without that anxious expectancy which had strained my every nerve in the first weeks after our quarrel, before I had gone again to the Swanns’) did I not recite to myself the words of the letter which, one day soon, Gilberte would surely send, would perhaps even bring to me herself! The perpetual vision of that imagined happiness helped me to endure the destruction of my real happiness. With women who do not love us, as with the “dear departed,” the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent us from continuing to wait. We live in expectancy, constantly on the alert; the mother whose son has gone to sea on some perilous voyage of discovery sees him in imagination every moment, long after the fact of his having perished has been established, striding into the room, saved by a miracle and in the best of health. And this expectancy, according to the strength of her memory and the resistance of her bodily organs, either helps her on her journey through the years, at the end of which she will be able to endure the knowledge that her son is no more, to forget gradually and to survive his loss—or else it kills her.
At the same time, my grief found consolation in the idea that my love must profit by it. Every visit that I paid to Mme Swann without seeing Gilberte was painful to me, but I felt that it correspondingly enhanced the idea that Gilberte had of me. Besides, if I always took care, before going to see Mme Swann, to ensure that her daughter was absent, this arose not only from my determination to break with her, but no less perhaps from the hope of reconciliation which overlay my intention to renounce her (very few of such intentions are absolute, at least in a continuous form, in this human soul of ours, one of whose laws, confirmed by the unlooked-for wealth of illustration that memory supplies, is intermittence), and hid from me something of its cruelty. I knew how chimerical was this hope. I was like a pauper who moistens his dry crust with fewer tears if he assures himself that at any moment a total stranger is perhaps going to leave him his entire fortune. We are