Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [249]
And there was another day when she said to me: “You know, you may call me ‘Gilberte.’ In any case, I’m going to call you by your first name. It’s too silly not to.” Yet she continued for a while to address me by the more formal “vous,” and when I drew her attention to this, she smiled and, composing, constructing a phrase like those that are put into the grammar-books of foreign languages with no other object than to teach us to make use of a new word, ended it with my Christian name. Recalling, some time later, what I had felt at the time, I distinguished the impression of having been held for a moment in her mouth, myself, naked, without any of the social attributes which belonged equally to her other playmates and, when she used my surname, to my parents, accessories of which her lips—by the effort she made, a little after her father’s manner, to articulate the words to which she wished to give a special emphasis—had the air of stripping, of divesting me, like the skin from a fruit of which one can swallow only the pulp, while her glance, adapting itself to the same new degree of intimacy as her speech, fell on me also more directly and testified to the consciousness, the pleasure, even the gratitude that it felt by accompanying itself with a smile.
But at the actual moment I was unable to appreciate the value of these new pleasures. They were given, not by the little girl whom I loved to the “me” who loved her, but by the other, the one with whom I used to play, to that other “me” who possessed neither the memory of the true Gilberte, nor the inalienably committed heart which alone could have known the value of a happiness which it alone had desired. Even after I had returned home I did not savour these pleasures, since every day the necessity which made me hope that on the morrow I should arrive at a clear, calm, happy contemplation of Gilberte, that she would at last confess her love for me, explaining why she had been obliged hitherto to conceal it from me, that same necessity forced me to regard the past as of no account, to look ahead of me only, to consider the small favours she had granted me not in themselves and as if they were self-sufficient, but as fresh rungs of the ladder on which I might set my feet, which would enable me to advance one step further towards the final attainment of that happiness which I had not yet encountered.
If at times she showed me these marks of affection, she pained me also by seeming not to be pleased to see me, and this happened often on the very days on which I had most counted for the realisation of my hopes. I was sure that Gilberte was coming to the Champs-Elysées, and I felt an elation which seemed merely the anticipation of a great happiness when—going into the drawing-room in the morning to kiss Mamma, who was already dressed to go out, the coils of her black hair elaborately built up, and her beautiful plump white hands fragrant still with soap—I had been apprised, on seeing a column of dust standing up by itself in the air above the piano, and on hearing a barrel-organ playing beneath the window En revenant de la revue, that the winter had received, until nightfall, an unexpected, radiant visit from a day of spring. While we sat at lunch, the lady opposite, by opening her window, had sent packing in the twinkling of an eye from beside my chair—sweeping at one bound across the whole width of our dining-room—a sunbeam which had settled down there for its midday rest and returned