• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1699 0

what was going on, discernible at most in fleeting changes of expression, in the narrow expanse of her face and behind her privileged brow. So nice-minded in all else, he looked forward to the prospect of a brilliant marriage, solely in order to be able to continue to maintain and keep her. If one had asked oneself what was the value that he set on her, I doubt whether one could ever have imagined a figure high enough. If he did not marry her, it was because a practical instinct warned him that as soon as she had nothing more to expect from him she would leave him, or would at least live as she pleased, and that he must retain his hold on her by keeping her in expectation. For he admitted the possibility that she did not love him. No doubt the general malady called love must have forced him—as it forces all men—to believe at times that she did. But in his heart of hearts he felt that her love for him was not inconsistent with her remaining with him only on account of his money, and that as soon as she had nothing more to expect from him she would make haste (the dupe of her literary friends and their theories, and yet still loving him, he thought) to leave him.

“Today, if she’s nice,” he confided to me, “I’m going to give her a present that will make her very happy. It’s a necklace she saw at Boucheron’s. It’s rather too much for me just at present—thirty thousand francs. But, poor puss, she doesn’t have much pleasure in her life. She will be jolly pleased with it, I know. She mentioned it to me and told me she knew somebody who would perhaps give it to her. I don’t believe it’s true, but just in case, I arranged with Boucheron, who is our family jeweller, to reserve it for me. I’m so happy to think that you’re going to meet her. She’s nothing so very wonderful to look at, you know” (I could see that he thought just the opposite and had said this only to make my admiration the greater). “What she has above all is marvellous judgment: she’ll perhaps be afraid to talk much in front of you, but I rejoice in advance over what she’ll say to me about you afterwards. You know she says things one can go on thinking about for hours; there’s really something about her that’s quite Pythian.”

On our way to her house we passed a row of little gardens, and I was obliged to stop, for they were all dazzlingly aflower with pear and cherry blossom; as empty, no doubt, and lifeless only yesterday as a house that is still to let, they were suddenly peopled and adorned by these newcomers, arrived overnight, whose beautiful white garments could be seen through the railings along the garden paths.

“I’ll tell you what—I can see you’d rather stop and look at all that and be poetical,” said Robert, “so don’t budge from here, will you—my friend’s house is quite close, and I’ll go and fetch her.”

While I waited I strolled up and down the road, past these modest gardens. If I raised my head I could see now and then girls sitting at the windows, but outside, in the open air, at the height of a half-landing, dangling here and there among the foliage, light and pliant in their fresh mauve frocks, clusters of young lilacs swayed in the breeze without heeding the passer-by who raised his eyes towards their green arbour. I recognised in them the purple-clad platoons posted at the entrance to M. Swann’s park in the warm spring afternoons, like an enchanting rustic tapestry. I took a path which led me into a meadow. A cold wind swept through it, as at Combray, but in the middle of this rich, moist, rural land, which might have been on the banks of the Vivonne, there had nevertheless arisen, punctual at the trysting place like all its band of brothers, a great white pear-tree which waved smilingly in the sun’s face, like a curtain of light materialised and made palpable, its flowers shaken by the breeze but polished and glazed with silver by the sun’s rays.

Suddenly Saint-Loup appeared, accompanied by his mistress, and then, in this woman who was for him the epitome of love, of all the sweet things of life, whose personality, mysteriously enshrined as in