In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [227]
“Take care you don’t slip, sir; they’re not tacked yet,” Françoise called to me. “I ought to have lighted up. Oh, dear, it’s the end of ‘Sectember’ already, the fine days are over.”
In no time, winter; at the corner of a window, as in a Gallé glass, a vein of crusted snow; and even in the Champs-Elysées, instead of the girls one waits to see, nothing but solitary sparrows.
What added to my despair at not seeing Mme de Stermaria was that her answer led me to suppose that whereas, hour by hour, since Sunday, I had been living for this dinner alone, she had presumably never given it a second thought. Later on I learned of an absurd love match that she made with a young man whom she must already have been seeing at this time, and who had presumably made her forget my invitation. For if she had remembered it she would surely never have waited for the carriage, which I had not in fact arranged to send for her, to inform me that she was otherwise engaged. My dreams of a young feudal maiden on a misty island had opened up a path to a still non-existent love. Now my disappointment, my rage, my desperate desire to recapture her who had just refused me, were able, by bringing my sensibility into play, to make definite the possible love which until then my imagination alone had—though more feebly—offered me.
How many they are in our memories, how many more we have forgotten—those faces of girls and young women, all different, on which we have superimposed a certain charm and a frenzied desire to see them again only because at the last moment they eluded us! In the case of Mme de Stermaria there was a good deal more than this, and it was enough now, in order to love her, for me to see her again so that I might refresh those impressions, so vivid but all too brief, which my memory would not otherwise have the strength to keep alive in her absence. Circumstances decided against me; I did not see her again. It was not she that I loved, but it might well have been. And one of the things that made most painful, perhaps, the great love which was presently to come to me was telling myself, when I thought of this evening, that given a slight modification of very simple circumstances, my love might have been transferred elsewhere, on to Mme de Stermaria; that, applied to her who inspired it in me so soon afterwards, it was not therefore—as I longed, so needed to believe—absolutely necessary and predestined.
Françoise had left me by myself in the dining-room with the remark that it was foolish of me to stay there before she had lighted the fire. She went to get me some dinner, for from this very evening, even before the return of my parents, my seclusion was beginning. I caught sight of a huge bundle of carpets, still rolled up, and propped against one end of the sideboard; and burying my head in it, swallowing its dust together with my own tears, as the Jews used to cover their heads with ashes in times of mourning, I began to sob. I shivered, not only because the room was cold, but because a distinct lowering of temperature (against the danger and, it must be said, the by no means disagreeable sensation of which we make no attempt to react) is brought about by a certain kind of tears which fall from our eyes, drop by drop, like a fine, penetrating, icy rain, and seem as though they will never cease to flow. Suddenly I heard a