Page 622 - swanns-way

to Gilberte’s porter and a servant had taken it to her in her
room, had become a thing without value or distinction, one
of the ‘little blues’ that she had received in the course of the
day—I had difficulty in recognising the futile, straggling
lines of my own handwriting beneath the circles stamped
on it at the post-office, the inscriptions added in pencil by a
postman, signs of effectual realisation, seals of the external
world, violet bands symbolical of life itself, which for the
first time came to espouse, to maintain, to raise, to rejoice
my dream.
And there was another day on which 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 con-
tinued for a while to address me by the more formal ‘vous,’
and, when I drew her attention to this, smiled, and compos-
ing, 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. And when I recalled, later, what I had
felt at the time, I could distinguish the impression of hav-
ing been held, for a moment, in her mouth, myself, naked,
without, any longer, any of the social qualifications which
belonged equally to her other companions and, when she
used my surname, to my parents, accessories of which her
lips—by the effort that she made, a little after her father’s
manner, to articulate the words to which she wished to give
a special value—had the air of stripping, of divesting me,
as one peels the skin from a fruit of which one is going to
put only the pulp into one’s mouth, while her glance, adapt-

622 Swann’s Way