Page 264 - swanns-way

‘to bury herself,’ to taste the bitter sweetness of feeling that
her name, and still more the name of him whose heart she
had once held, but had been unable to keep, were unknown
there, stood framed in a window from which she had no
outlook beyond the boat that was moored beside her door.
She raised her eyes with an air of distraction when she
heard, through the trees that lined the bank, the voices of
passers-by of whom, before they came in sight, she might be
certain that never had they known, nor would they know,
the faithless lover, that nothing in their past lives bore his
imprint, which nothing in their future would have occa-
sion to receive. One felt that in her renunciation of life she
had willingly abandoned those places in which she would at
least have been able to see him whom she loved, for others
where he had never trod. And I watched her, as she returned
from some walk along a road where she had known that he
would not appear, drawing from her submissive fingers long
gloves of a precious, useless charm.
Never, in the course of our walks along the ‘Guerman-
tes way,’ might we penetrate as far as the source of the
Vivonne, of which I had often thought, which had in my
mind so abstract, so ideal an existence, that I had been as
much surprised when some one told me that it was actually
to be found in the same department, and at a given num-
ber of miles from Combray, as I had been on the day when
I had learned that there was another fixed point somewhere
on the earth’s surface, where, according to the ancients,
opened the jaws of Hell. Nor could we ever reach that other
goal, to which I longed so much to attain, Guermantes itself.

264 Swann’s Way