Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [247]
All the time I was away from Gilberte, I felt the need to see her, because, constantly trying to picture her in my mind, I ended up by being unable to do so, and by no longer knowing precisely what my love represented. Besides, she had never yet told me that she loved me. Far from it: she had often boasted that she knew other boys whom she preferred to myself, that I was a good companion, with whom she was always willing to play, although I was too absent-minded, not attentive enough to the game; indeed, she had often shown signs of apparent coldness towards me which might have shaken my faith that I was for her a person different from the rest, had that faith been founded upon a love that Gilberte felt for me and not, as was the case, upon the love I felt for her, which strengthened its resistance to the assaults of doubt by making it depend entirely on the manner in which I was obliged by an internal compulsion to think of Gilberte. But I myself had not yet ventured to declare my feelings towards her. True, on every page of my exercise-books I wrote out, in endless repetition, her name and address, but at the sight of those vague lines which I traced without her thinking of me any the more on that account, which made her take up so much apparent space around me without her being any the more involved in my life, I felt discouraged, because they spoke to me, not of Gilberte, who would never so much as see them, but of my own desire, which they seemed to show me in its true colours, as something purely personal, unreal, tedious and ineffectual. The important thing was that we should see each other, Gilberte and I, and should have an opportunity of making a mutual avowal of our love which, until then, would not officially (so to speak) have begun. Doubtless the various reasons which made me so impatient to see her would have appeared less urgent to a grown man. As life goes on, we acquire such adroitness in the cultivation of our pleasures, that we content ourselves with the pleasure we derive from thinking of a woman, as I thought of Gilberte, without troubling ourselves to ascertain whether the image corresponds to the reality, and also with the pleasure of loving her without needing to be sure that she loves us too; or again that we renounce the pleasure of confessing our inclination for her, so as to preserve and enhance her inclination for us, like those Japanese gardeners who, to obtain one perfect blossom, will sacrifice several others. But at the period when I was in love with Gilberte, I still believed that Love did really exist outside ourselves; that, allowing us at the most to surmount the obstacles in our way, it offered its blessings in an order to which we were not free to make the least alteration; it seemed to me that if I had, on my own initiative, substituted for the sweetness of avowal a pretence of indifference, I should not only have been depriving myself of one of the joys for which I most longed, but fabricating, quite arbitrarily, a love that was artificial and valueless, that bore no relation to the true one, whose mysterious and foreordained ways I should thus have ceased to follow.
But when I arrived in the Champs-Elysées—and, as at first sight it appeared, was in a position to confront my love, so as to make it undergo the necessary modifications, with its living cause, independent to myself—as soon as I was in the presence of that Gilberte Swann on the sight of whom I had counted to revive the images that my tired memory could no longer recapture, of that Gilberte Swann with whom I had played the day before, and whom I had just been prompted to greet and recognise by a blind instinct like that which, when we are walking, sets one foot before the other without giving us time to think what we are doing, then at once it became as though she and the little girl who was the object of my dreams had been two different people. If,