In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [67]
“All men with similar ideas are alike.”
No doubt he had completely forgotten that I myself had said to him only a few days earlier what on the other hand he had remembered so well.
I did not arrive at Saint-Loup’s restaurant every evening in the same state of mind. If a memory, or a sorrow that weighs on us, are capable of leaving us, to the extent that we no longer notice them, they can also return and sometimes remain with us for a long time. There were evenings when, as I passed through the town on my way to the restaurant, I felt so keen a longing for Mme de Guermantes that I could scarcely breathe; it was as though part of my breast had been cut out by a skilled anatomist and replaced by an equal part of immaterial suffering, by its equivalent in nostalgia and love. And however neatly the wound may have been stitched together, one lives rather uncomfortably when regret for the loss of another person is substituted for one’s entrails; it seems to be occupying more room than they; one feels it perpetually; and besides, what a contradiction in terms to be obliged to think a part of one’s body. Only it seems that we are worth more, somehow. At the whisper of a breeze we sigh, with oppression but also with languor. I would look up at the sky. If it was clear, I would say to myself: “Perhaps she is in the country; she’s looking at the same stars; and, for all I know, when I arrive at the restaurant Robert may say to me: ‘Good news! I’ve just heard from my aunt. She wants to meet you, she’s coming down here.’ ” It was not the firmament alone that I associated with the thought of Mme de Guermantes. A passing breath of air, more fragrant than the rest, seemed to bring me a message from her, as, long ago, from Gilberte in the wheatfields of Méséglise. We do not change; we introduce into the feeling which we associate with a person many slumbering elements which it awakens but which are foreign to it. Besides, with these feelings for particular people, there is always something in us that strives to give them a larger truth, that is to say, to absorb them in a more general feeling, common to the whole of humanity, with which individuals and the suffering that they cause us are merely a means to enable us to communicate. What mixed a certain pleasure with my pain was that I knew it to be a tiny fragment of universal love. True, from the fact that I seemed to recognise the same sorts of sadness that I had felt on Gilberte’s account, or else when in the evenings at Combray Mamma did not stay in my room, and also the memory of certain pages of Bergotte, in the suffering which I now felt and to which Mme de Guermantes, her coldness, her absence, were not clearly linked as cause is to effect in the mind of a philosopher, I did not conclude that Mme de Guermantes was not that cause. Is there not such a thing as a diffused bodily pain, extending, radiating out into other parts, which, however, it leaves, to vanish altogether, if the practitioner lays his finger on the precise spot from which it springs? And yet, until that moment, its extension made it seem to us so vague and sinister that, powerless to explain or even to locate it, we imagined that there was no possibility of its being healed. As I made my way to the restaurant I said to myself: “A fortnight already since I last saw Mme de Guermantes” (a fortnight, which did not appear so enormous an interval except to me, who, where Mme de Guermantes was concerned, counted in minutes). For me it was no longer the stars and the breeze alone, but the arithmetical divisions of time that assumed a dolorous and poetic aspect. Each day now was like the mobile crest of an indistinct hill, down one side of which I felt that I could descend towards forgetfulness, but down the other was carried along by the need to see the Duchess again. And I was continually inclining one way or the other, having no stable equilibrium. One day I said to myself: