y to what my
love corresponded. Besides, she had never yet told me that she loved me.
Far from it, she had often boasted that she knew other little boys whom
she preferred to myself, that I was a good companion, with whom she was
always willing to play, although I was too absent-minded, not attentive
enough to the game. Moreover, she had often shewn signs of apparent
coldness towards me, which might have shaken my faith that I was for her
a creature different from the rest, had that faith been founded upon a
love that Gilberte had felt for me, and not, as was the case, upon
the love that I felt for her, which strengthened its resistance to the
assaults of doubt by making it depend entirely upon the manner in which
I was obliged, by an internal compulsion, to think of Gilberte. But my
feelings with regard to her I had never yet ventured to express to her
in words. Of course, on every page of my exercise-books, I wrote out,
in endless repetition, her name and address, but at the sight of those
vague lines which I might trace, without her having to think, on that
account, of me, I felt discouraged, because they spoke to me, not of
Gilberte, who would never so much as see them, but 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
opportunity of making a mutual confession of our love which, until then,
would not officially (so to speak) have begun. Doubtless 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 Gilberte,
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 offered us its blessin