t seemed to me as touching as if, on one of those days
on which she had been invited to a party, she had given it up in order
to come to me in the Champs-Elysees; I acquired more confidence in the
vitality, in the future of a friendship which could remain so much alive
amid the torpor, the solitude, the decay of our surroundings; and while
she dropped pellets of snow down my neck, I smiled lovingly at what
seemed to me at once a predilection that she shewed for me in thus
tolerating me as her travelling companion in this new, this wintry land,
and a sort of loyalty to me which she preserved through evil times.
Presently, one after another, like shyly bopping sparrows, her friends
arrived, black against the snow. We got ready to play and, since this
day which had begun so sadly was destined to end in joy, as I went up,
before the game started, to the friend with the sharp voice whom I had
heard, that first day, calling Gilberte by name, she said to me: "No,
no, I'm sure you'd much rather be in Gilberte's camp; besides, look,
she's signalling to you." She was in fact summoning me to cross the
snowy lawn to her camp, to 'take the field,' which the sun, by casting
over it a rosy gleam, the metallic lustre of old and worn brocades, had
turned into a Field of the Cloth of Gold.

This day, which I had begun with so many misgivings, was, as it
happened, one of the few on which I was not unduly wretched.

For, although I no longer thought, now, of anything save not to let a
single day pass without seeing Gilberte (so much so that once, when my
grandmother had not come home by dinner-time, I could not resist the
instinctive reflection that, if she had been run over in the street
and killed, I should not for some time be allowed to play in the
Champs-Elysees; when one is in love one has no love left for anyone),
yet those moments which I spent in her company, for which I had waited
with so much impatience all night and morning, for which I had quivered
with excitement, to which I would have sacrificed everything else in the
world, were by no means happy moments; well did I know it, for they
were the only moments in my life on which I concentrated a scrupulous,
undistracted attention, and yet I could not discover in them one atom
of pleasure. All the time that I was away from Gilberte, I wanted to see
her, because, having incessantly sought to form a mental picture of her,
I was unable, in the end, to do so, and did not know exactl