gs in an order in
which we were not free to make the least alteration; it seemed to me
that if I had, on my own initiative, substituted for the sweetness of
a confession a pretence of indifference, I should not only have been
depriving myself of one of the joys of which I had most often dreamed,
I should have been fabricating, of my own free will, a love that was
artificial and without value, that bore no relation to the truth, whose
mysterious and foreordained ways I should thus have been declining to
follow.

But when I arrived at the Champs-Elysees,--and, as at first sight
it appeared, was in a position to confront my love, so as to make it
undergo the necessary modifications, with its living and independent
cause--as soon as I was in the presence of that Gilberte Swann on the
sight of whom I had counted to revive the images that my tired memory
had lost and could not find again, of that Gilberte Swann with whom I
had been playing the day before, and whom I had just been prompted to
greet, and then to recognise, by a blind instinct like that which, when
we are walking, sets one foot before the other, without giving us time
to think what we are doing, then at once it became as though she and the
little girl who had inspired my dreams had been two different people.
If, for instance, I had retained in my memory overnight two fiery eyes
above plump and rosy cheeks, Gilberte's face would now offer me (and
with emphasis) something that I distinctly had not remembered, a
certain sharpening and prolongation of the nose which, instantaneously
associating itself with certain others of her features, assumed the
importance of those characteristics which, in natural history, are used
to define a species, and transformed her into a little girl of the kind
that have sharpened profiles. While I was making myself ready to take
advantage of this long expected moment, and to surrender myself to the
impression of Gilberte which I had prepared beforehand but could no
longer find in my head, to an extent which would enable me, during the
long hours which I must spend alone, to be certain that it was indeed
herself whom I had in mind, that it was indeed my love for her that I
was gradually making grow, as a book grows when one is writing it, she
threw me a ball; and, like the idealist philosopher whose body takes
account of the external world in the reality of which his intellect
declines to believe, the same self which had made me salute