print. She
had told me to let her know the exact title of it, and that evening
I had sent her a little telegram, writing on its envelope the name,
Gilberte Swann, which I had so often, traced in my exercise-books. Next
day she brought me in a parcel tied with pink bows and sealed with white
wax, the pamphlet, a copy of which she had managed to find. "You see, it
is what you asked me for," she said, taking from her muff the telegram
that I had sent her. But in the address on the pneumatic message--which,
only yesterday, was nothing, was merely a 'little blue' that I had
written, and, after a messenger had delivered it to Gilberte's porter
and a servant had taken it to her in her room, had become a thing
without value or distinction, one of the 'little blues' that she had
received in the course of the day--I had difficulty in recognising
the futile, straggling lines of my own handwriting beneath the circles
stamped on it at the post-office, the inscriptions added in pencil by
a postman, signs of effectual realisation, seals of the external world,
violet bands symbolical of life itself, which for the first time came to
espouse, to maintain, to raise, to rejoice my dream.

And there was another day on which she said to me: "You know, you may
call me 'Gilberte'; in any case, I'm going to call you by your first
name. It's too silly not to." Yet she continued for a while to address
me by the more formal '_vous_,' and, when I drew her attention to this,
smiled, and composing, constructing a phrase like those that are put
into the grammar-books of foreign languages with no other object than to
teach us to make use of a new word, ended it with my Christian name. And
when I recalled, later, what I had felt at the time, I could distinguish
the impression of having been held, for a moment, in her mouth, myself,
naked, without, any longer, any of the social qualifications which
belonged equally to her other companions and, when she used my surname,
to my parents, accessories of which her lips--by the effort that she
made, a little after her father's manner, to articulate the words to
which she wished to give a special value--had the air of stripping, of
divesting me, as one peels the skin from a fruit of which one is going
to put only the pulp into one's mouth, while her glance, adapting itself
to the same new degree of intimacy as her speech, fell on me also more
directly, not without testifying to the consciousness, the pleasure,