Page 618 - swanns-way

of my own desire, which they seemed to shew me in its true
colours, as something purely personal, unreal, tedious and
ineffective. The most important thing was that we should
see each other, Gilberte and I, and should have an opportu-
nity of making a mutual confession of our love which, until
then, would not officially (so to speak) have begun. Doubt-
less the various reasons which made me so impatient to see
her would have appeared less urgent to a grown man. As
life goes on, we acquire such adroitness in the culture of
our pleasures, that we content ourselves with that which we
derive from thinking of a woman, as I was thinking of Gil-
berte, without troubling ourselves to ascertain whether the
image corresponds to the reality,—and with the pleasure of
loving her, without needing to be sure, also, that she loves
us; or again that we renounce the pleasure of confessing our
passion for her, so as to preserve and enhance the passion
that she has for us, like those Japanese gardeners who, to
obtain one perfect blossom, will sacrifice the rest. But at the
period when I was in love with Gilberte, I still believed that
Love did really exist, apart from ourselves; that, allowing
us, at the most, to surmount the obstacles in our way, it of-
fered us its blessings in an order in which we were not free
to make the least alteration; it seemed to me that if I had, on
my own initiative, substituted for the sweetness of a confes-
sion a pretence of indifference, I should not only have been
depriving myself of one of the joys of which I had most of-
ten dreamed, I should have been fabricating, of my own free
will, a love that was artificial and without value, that bore
no relation to the truth, whose mysterious and foreordained

618 Swann’s Way