Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [253]
have sought after as long as it was spontaneous—as Swann, before my day, had sought to establish the aesthetic basis of Odette’s beauty—I, who had at first loved Gilberte, from Combray onwards, on account of all the unknown element in her life in which I longed to be immersed, reincarnated, discarding my own as a thing of no account, I thought now, as of an inestimable privilege, that of this too familiar, despised life of mine Gilberte might one day become the humble servant, the kindly and comforting collaborator, who in the evenings, helping me in my work, would collate for me the texts of rare pamphlets. As for Bergotte, that infinitely wise, almost divine old man, because of whom I had first loved Gilberte, before I had even seen her, now it was above all for Gilberte’s sake that I loved him. With as much pleasure as the pages that he had written about Racine I studied the wrapper, folded under the great white seals of wax tied with festoons of mauve ribbon, in which she had brought them to me. I kissed the agate marble, which was the better part of my love’s heart, the part that was not frivolous but faithful, and which, for all that it was adorned with the mysterious charm of Gilberte’s life, dwelt close beside me, inhabited my room, shared my bed. But the beauty of that stone, and the beauty also of those pages of Bergotte which I was glad to associate with the idea of my love for Gilberte, as if, in the moments when it seemed no more than a void, they gave it a kind of consistency, were, I perceived, anterior to that love and in no way resembled it; their elements had been determined by the writer’s talent or the laws of mineralogy before ever Gilberte had known me; nothing in book or stone would have been different if Gilberte had not loved me, and nothing, consequently, authorised me to read in them a message of happiness. And while my love, incessantly waiting for the morrow to bring the avowal of Gilberte’s for me, destroyed, unravelled every evening the ill-done work of the day, in some shadowed part of my being an unknown seamstress refused to abandon the discarded threads, but collected and rearranged them, without any thought of pleasing me or of toiling for my happiness, in the different order which she gave to all her handiwork. Showing no special interest in my love, not beginning by deciding that I was loved, she gathered together those of Gilberte’s actions that had seemed to me inexplicable and her faults which I had excused. Then, one and all, they took on a meaning. It seemed to tell me, this new arrangement, that when I saw Gilberte, instead of coming to the Champs-Elysées, going to a party, or going shopping with her governess, or preparing for an absence that would extend over the New Year holidays, I was wrong in thinking: “It’s because she’s frivolous or docile.” For she would have ceased to be either if she had loved me, and if she had been forced to obey, it would have been with the same despair in her heart that I felt on the days when I did not see her. It showed me further, this new arrangement, that I ought after all to know what it was to love, since I loved Gilberte; it drew my attention to the constant anxiety that I had to shine in her eyes, by reason of which I tried to persuade my mother to buy Françoise a waterproof coat and a hat with a blue feather, or, better still, to stop sending me to the Champs-Elysées in the company of a servant with whom I blushed to be seen (to which my mother replied that I was unjust to Françoise, that she was an excellent woman and devoted to us all), and also that exclusive need to see Gilberte, the result of which was that, months in advance, I could think of nothing else but how to find out when she would be leaving Paris and where she was going, feeling that the most attractive country in the world would be a place of exile if she was not to be there, and asking only to be allowed to stay for ever in Paris so long as I might see her in the Champs-Elysées; and it had little difficulty in making me see that neither my anxiety nor my need could be