In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [32]
On coming home from the Opéra, I had added for the following morning, to those whom for some days past I had been hoping to meet again, the image of Mme de Guermantes, tall, with her high-piled crown of silky, golden hair, with the tenderness promised by the smile which she had directed at me from her cousin’s box. I would follow the route which Françoise had told me that the Duchess generally took, and I would try at the same time, in the hope of meeting two girls whom I had seen a few days earlier, not to miss the coming out of a class or a catechism. But meanwhile, from time to time, the scintillating smile of Mme de Guermantes, and the warm feeling it had engendered, came back to me. And without exactly knowing what I was doing, I tried to find a place for them (as a woman studies the effect a certain kind of jewelled buttons that have just been given her might have on a dress) beside the romantic ideas which I had long held and which Albertine’s coldness, Gisèle’s premature departure, and before them my deliberate and too long sustained separation from Gilberte had set free (the idea for instance of being loved by a woman, of having a life in common with her); then it was the image of one or other of the two girls seen in the street that I coupled with those ideas, to which immediately afterwards I tried to adapt my memory of the Duchess. Compared with those ideas, the memory of Mme de Guermantes at the Opéra was a very insignificant thing, a tiny star twinkling beside the long tail of a blazing comet; moreover I had been quite familiar with the ideas long before I came to know Mme de Guermantes; whereas the memory of her I possessed but imperfectly; at moments it escaped me; it was during the hours when, from floating vaguely in my mind in the same way as the images of various other pretty women, it gradually developed into a unique and definitive association—exclusive of every other feminine image—with those romantic ideas of mine which were of so much longer standing than itself, it was during those few hours in which I remembered it most clearly, that I ought to have taken steps to find out exactly what it was; but I did not then know the importance it was to assume for me; I cherished it simply as a first private meeting with Mme de Guermantes inside myself; it was the first, the only accurate sketch, the only one made from life, the only one that was really Mme de Guermantes; during the few hours in which I was fortunate enough to retain it without giving it any conscious thought, it must have been charming, though, that memory, since it was always to it, freely still at that moment, without haste, without strain, without the slightest compulsion or anxiety, that my ideas of love returned; then, as gradually those ideas fixed it more permanently, it acquired from them a greater strength but itself became more vague; presently I could no longer recapture it; and in my dreams I no doubt distorted it completely, for whenever I saw Mme de Guermantes I realised the disparity—always, as it happened, different—between what I had imagined and what I saw. True, every morning now, at the moment when Mme de Guermantes emerged from her doorway at the top of the street, I saw again her tall figure, her face with its bright eyes and crown of silken hair—all the things for which I was waiting there; but, on the other hand, a minute or two later, when, having first turned my eyes away so as to appear not to be expecting this encounter which I had come to seek, I raised them to look at the Duchess at the moment in which we converged, what I saw then were red patches (as to which I did not know whether they were due to the fresh air or to a blotchy skin) on a sullen face which with the curtest of nods, a long way removed from the affability of the Phèdre evening, acknowledged the greeting which I addressed to her daily with an air of surprise and which