In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [260]
come at once; it is good of you to have so exalted a sense of loyalty to an old friend, and my regard for you can only be increased thereby. But no, I did not ask and I shall not ask you to return; our seeing each other again—for a long time to come—might not perhaps be painful to you, a heartless girl. To me, whom at times you have thought so cold, it would be most painful. Life has driven us apart. You have made a decision which I consider very wise, and which you made at the right moment, with wonderful prescience, for you left me on the day when I had just received my mother’s consent to my asking for your hand. I would have told you this when I awoke, when I received her letter (at the same time as yours). Perhaps you would have been afraid of hurting me by leaving there and then. And we might perhaps have linked our lives together in what (who knows?) could have been unhappiness. If that was what was in store for us, then I bless you for your wisdom. We should lose all the fruit of it were we to meet again. This is not to say that I should not find it a temptation. But I claim no great credit for resisting it. You know what an inconstant person I am and how quickly I forget. Therefore I am not greatly to be pitied. As you have told me often, I am first and foremost a man of habit. The habits which I am beginning to form in your absence are not as yet very strong. Naturally, for the moment, the habits which I shared with you and which your departure has disturbed are still the stronger. They will not remain so for very long. For that reason, indeed, I had thought of taking advantage of these last few days in which our meeting would not yet be for me what it will be in a fortnight’s time, perhaps even sooner, a … (forgive my frankness) an inconvenience—I had thought of taking advantage of them, before oblivion finally comes, in order to settle certain little material questions with you, in which you might, as a kind and charming friend, have rendered a service to him who for five minutes imagined himself your future husband. Since I never doubted my mother’s approval, and since moreover I desired that we should each of us enjoy all that liberty of which you had too generously and abundantly made a sacrifice which was acceptable for a few weeks’ living together but would have become as hateful to you as to myself now that we were to spend the rest of our lives together (it almost pains me as I write to you to think that this nearly happened, that we came within a few seconds of it), I had thought of organising our existence in the most independent manner possible, and to begin with I wished you to have that yacht in which you could go cruising while I, not being well enough to accompany you, would wait for you in port (I had written to Elstir to ask for his advice, since you admire his taste); and on land I wished you to have a motor-car to yourself, for your very own, in which you could go out, could travel wherever you chose. The yacht was almost ready, it is named, after a wish that you expressed at Balbec, the Swan. And remembering that you preferred Rolls-Royces to any other cars, I had ordered one. But now that we are never to meet again, as I have no hope of persuading you to accept either the boat or the car (to me they would be quite useless), I had thought—as I had ordered them through a middleman, in your name—that you might perhaps by countermanding them yourself save me the expense of the yacht and the car which are no longer required. But this, and many other matters, would have needed to be discussed. And I find that so long as I am capable of falling in love with you again, which will not be for long, it would be madness, for the sake of a sailing boat and a Rolls-Royce, to meet again and to jeopardise your life’s happiness since you have decided that it lies in your living apart from me. No, I prefer to keep the Rolls and even the yacht. And as I shall make no use of them and they are likely to remain for ever, one in its dock, dismantled, the other in its garage, I shall have engraved on the … of the