which indeed we had said thinking that we were play-acting and yet the falseness of which was very slight, very uninteresting, wholly confined within our pitiable insincerity, compared with what they contained unbeknown to us—lies and errors falling short of the profound reality which neither of us perceived, truth extending beyond it, the truth of our natures, the essential laws of which escape us and require Time before they reveal themselves, the truth of our destinies also. I had believed myself to be lying when I said to her at Balbec: “The more I see you, the more I shall love you” (and yet it was that constant intimacy which, through the medium of jealousy, had attached me so strongly to her), “I feel that I could be of use to you intellectually;” and in Paris: “Do be careful. Remember that if you met with an accident, it would break my heart” (and she: “But I may meet with an accident”); in Paris too, on the evening when I had pretended that I wished to leave her: “Let me look at you once again since presently I shall not be seeing you again, and it will be for ever!” and she, when that same evening she had looked round the room: “To think that I shall never see this room again, those books, that pianola, the whole house, I cannot believe it and yet it’s true.” In her last letters again, when she had written (probably saying to herself that it was eyewash): “I leave you the best of myself” (and was it not now indeed to the fidelity, to the strength—also too frail, alas—of my memory that her intelligence, her kindness, her beauty were entrusted?) and: “That moment of double twilight, since night was falling and we were about to part, will be effaced from my thoughts only when the darkness is complete” (that sentence written on the eve of the day when her mind had indeed been plunged into complete darkness, and when, in those last brief glimmers which the anguish of the moment subdivides ad infinitum, she had indeed perhaps recalled our last drive together and in that instant when everything forsakes us and we create a faith for ourselves, as atheists turn Christian on the battlefield, she had perhaps summoned to her aid the friend whom she had so often cursed but had so deeply respected, who himself—for all religions are alike—was cruel enough to hope that she had also had time to see herself as she was, to give her last thought to him, to confess her sins at length to him, to die in him).
But to what purpose, since even if, at that moment, she had had time to see herself as she was, we had both of us understood where our happiness lay, what we ought to do, only when, only because, that happiness was no longer possible, when and because we could no longer do it—whether it is that, so long as things are possible, we postpone them, or that they cannot assume that force of attraction, that apparent ease of realisation except when, projected on to the ideal void of the imagination, they are removed from their deadening and degrading submersion in physical being. The idea that one will die is more painful than dying, but less painful than the idea that another person is dead, that, becoming once more a still, plane surface after having engulfed a person, a reality extends, without even a ripple at the point of disappearance, from which that person is excluded, in which there no longer exists any will, any knowledge, and from which it is as difficult to reascend to the idea that that person has lived as, from the still recent memory of his life, it is to think that he is comparable with the insubstantial images, the memories, left us by the characters in a novel we have been reading.
At any rate I was glad that before she died she had written me that letter, and above all had sent me that final message which proved to me that she would have returned had she lived. It seemed to me that it was not merely more soothing, but more beautiful also, that the event would have been incomplete without that message, would not have had so markedly the form of art and destiny. In reality it would have been just as markedly so had it