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By Root 1409 0

to continue it a moment later. At school, during the one o’clock lesson, the sun made me sick with impatience and boredom as it trailed a golden glow across my desk, like an invitation to festivities at which I could not myself arrive before three o’clock, until the moment when Françoise came to fetch me at the school-gate and we made our way towards the Champs-Elysées through streets bejewelled with sunlight, dense with people, over which the balconies, detached by the sun and made vaporous, seemed to float in front of the houses like clouds of gold. Alas! in the Champs-Elysées I found no Gilberte; she had not yet arrived. Motionless on the lawn nurtured by the invisible sun which, here and there, kindled to a flame the point of a blade of grass, while the pigeons that had alighted upon it had the appearance of ancient sculptures which the gardener’s pick had heaved to the surface of a hallowed soil, I stood with my eyes fixed on the horizon, expecting at every moment to see Gilberte’s form, following that of her governess, appearing from behind the statue that seemed to be holding out the glistening child it carried to receive the sun’s benediction. The old lady who read the Débats was sitting on her chair, in her invariable place, and had just accosted a park attendant with a friendly wave of her hand as she exclaimed “What a lovely day!” And when the chair-keeper came up to collect her fee, with an infinity of simperings she folded the ticket away inside her glove, as though it had been a posy of flowers for which she had sought, in gratitude to the donor, the most becoming place upon her person. When she had found it, she performed a circular movement with her neck, straightened her boa, and fastened upon the collector, as she showed her the edge of a yellow paper that stuck out over her bare wrist, the bewitching smile with which a woman says to a young man, pointing to her bosom: “You see I’m wearing your roses!”

I dragged Françoise, in the hope of meeting Gilberte halfway, as far as the Arc de Triomphe; we did not meet her, and I was returning towards the lawn convinced, now, that she was not coming, when, in front of the roundabout, the little girl with the sharp voice flung herself upon me: “Quick, quick, Gilberte’s been here a quarter of an hour. She’s going soon. We’ve been waiting for you to make up a prisoner’s base.”

While I had been going up the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, Gilberte had arrived by the Rue Boissy-d’Anglas, Mademoiselle having taken advantage of the fine weather to do some shopping for her; and M. Swann was coming to fetch his daughter. And so it was my fault; I ought not to have strayed from the lawn; for one never knew for certain from what direction Gilberte would appear, and whether she would be early or late, and this perpetual tension succeeded in making more thrilling not only the entire Champs-Elysées and the whole span of the afternoon, like a vast expanse of space and time on every point and at every moment of which it was possible that Gilberte’s form might appear, but also that form itself, since behind that form I felt that there lay concealed the reason why it had flashed into my presence at four o’clock instead of at half-past two, crowned with a formal hat instead of a playtime beret, in front of the Ambassadeurs and not between the two puppet-shows, I divined one of those occupations in which I might not follow Gilberte and which forced her to go out or stay at home, I was in contact with the mystery of her unknown life. It was this mystery, too, that troubled me when, running at the sharp-voiced girl’s bidding to begin our game without further delay, I saw Gilberte, so brusque and informal with us, making a curtsey to the old lady of the Débats (who acknowledged it with “What a lovely sun! You’d think it was a fire”) and speaking to her with a shy smile, with an air of constraint which called to my mind the other little girl that Gilberte must be when at home with her parents, or with friends of her parents or paying calls, in the whole of that other existence of hers which