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By Root 1368 0

for instance, I had retained in my memory overnight two fiery eyes above full and rosy cheeks, Gilberte’s face would now offer me with overpowering insistence something that I distinctly had not remembered, a certain sharp tapering of the nose which, instantaneously associating itself with certain other features, assumed the importance of those characteristics which in natural history define a species, and transformed her into a little girl of the kind that have pointed snouts. While I was getting ready to take advantage of this longed-for moment to effect, on the basis of the image of Gilberte which I had prepared beforehand but which had now gone from my head, the adjustment that would enable me, during the long hours I must spend alone, to be certain that it was indeed her that I had in mind, that it was indeed my love for her that I was gradually putting together as one composes a book, she passed me a ball; and, like the idealist philosopher whose body takes account of the external world in the reality of which his intellect declines to believe, the same self which had made me greet her before I had identified her now urged me to seize the ball that she handed to me (as though she were a companion with whom I had come to play, and not a sister-soul with whom I had come to be united), made me, out of decorum, address a thousand and one polite and trivial remarks to her until the time came when she had to go, and so prevented me either from keeping a silence during which I might at last have laid hands once more on the urgent truant image, or from uttering the words which might have brought about the decisive progress in the course of our love the hope of which I was always obliged to postpone until the following afternoon.

It did, however, make some progress. One day, we had gone with Gilberte to the stall of our own special vendor, who was always particularly nice to us, since it was to her that M. Swann used to send for his gingerbread, of which, for reasons of health (he suffered from ethnic eczema and from the constipation of the prophets), he consumed a great deal, and Gilberte pointed out to me with a laugh two little boys who were like the little artist and the little naturalist in the children’s story-books. For one of them would not have a red stick of barley sugar because he preferred the purple, while the other, with tears in his eyes, refused a plum which his nurse was buying for him because, as he finally explained in passionate tones: “I want the other plum; it’s got a worm in it!” I purchased two ha’penny marbles. With admiring eyes I gazed at the agate marbles, luminous and imprisoned in a bowl apart, which seemed precious to me because they were as fair and smiling as little girls, and because they cost sixpence each. Gilberte, who was given a great deal more pocket money than I ever had, asked me which I thought the prettiest. They had the transparency and mellowness of life itself. I would not have had her sacrifice a single one of them. I should have liked her to be able to buy them, to liberate them all. Still, I pointed out one that had the same colour as her eyes. Gilberte took it, turned it round until it shone with a ray of gold, fondled it, paid its ransom, but at once handed me her captive, saying: “Here, it’s for you. Keep it as a souvenir.”

Another time, being still obsessed by the desire to hear Berma in classic drama, I had asked her whether she had a copy of a booklet in which Bergotte spoke of Racine, and which was now out of print. She had asked me to let her know the exact title of it, and that evening I had sent her an express letter, writing on its envelope the name, Gilberte Swann, which I had so often traced in my exercise-book. The next day she brought me the booklet, for which she had instituted a search, in a parcel tied with mauve ribbon and sealed with white wax. “You see, it’s what you asked me for,” she said, taking from her muff the express letter that I had sent her. But in the address on the pneumatic message15—which, only yesterday, was nothing, was merely a petit bleu