Page 632 - swanns-way

the creature whom he loves qualities which (he has learned
by reading or in conversation) are worthy to excite a man’s
love, that he assimilates them by imitation and makes out
of them fresh reasons for his love, even although these
qualities be diametrically opposed to those for which his
love would have sought, so 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,
in Combray days, on account of all the unknown element
in her life into which I would fain have plunged headlong,
have undergone reincarnation, discarding my own separate
existence as a thing that no longer mattered, I thought now,
as of an inestimable advantage, that of this, my own, my
too familiar, my contemptible existence Gilberte might one
day become the humble servant, the kindly, the comforting
collaborator, who in the evenings, helping me in my work,
would collate for me the texts of rare pamphlets. As for Ber-
gotte, that infinitely wise, almost divine old man, because of
whom I had first, before I had even seen her, loved Gilberte,
now it was for Gilberte’s sake, chiefly, that I loved him. With
as much pleasure as the pages that he had written about Ra-
cine, I studied the wrapper, folded under great seals of white
wax and tied with billows of pink ribbon, in which she had
brought those pages 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, for all that it was adorned with
the mysterious charm of Gilberte’s life, dwelt close beside
me, inhabited my chamber, shared my bed. But the beauty
of that stone, and the beauty also of those pages of Bergot-

632 Swann’s Way