Page 633 - swanns-way

te which I was glad to associate with the idea of my love
for Gilberte, as if, in the moments when my love seemed
no longer to have any existence, they gave it a kind of con-
sistency, were, I perceived, anterior to that love, which they
in no way resembled; their elements had been determined
by the writer’s talent, or by geological laws, before ever Gil-
berte had known me, nothing in book or stone would have
been different if Gilberte had not loved me, and there was
nothing, consequently, that authorised me to read in them a
message of happiness. And while my love, incessantly wait-
ing for the morrow to bring a confession of Gilberte’s love
for me, destroyed, unravelled every evening, the ill-done
work of the day, in some shadowed part of my being was
an unknown weaver who would not leave where they lay
the severed threads, but collected and rearranged them,
without any thought of pleasing me, or of toiling for my
advantage, in the different order which she gave to all her
handiwork. Without any special interest in my love, not be-
ginning by deciding that I was loved, she placed, side by
side, those of Gilberte’s actions that had seemed to me in-
explicable and her faults which I had excused. Then, one
with another, they took on a meaning. It seemed to tell me,
this new arrangement, that when I saw Gilberte, instead of
coming to me in the Champs-Elysées, going to a party, or
on errands with her governess, when I saw her prepared for
an absence that would extend over the New Year holidays, I
was wrong in thinking, in saying: ‘It is because she is frivo-
lous,’ or ‘easily lead.’ For she would have ceased to be either
if she had loved me, and if she had been forced to obey it

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