alities which (he has learned by reading or in conversation) are
worthy to excite a man's love, that he assimilates them by imitation
and makes out of them fresh reasons for his love, even although these
qualities be diametrically opposed to those for which his love would
have sought, so long as it was spontaneous--as Swann, before my day, had
sought to establish the aesthetic basis of Odette's beauty--I, who had
at first loved Gilberte, in Combray days, on account of all the unknown
element in her life into which I would fain have plunged headlong, have
undergone reincarnation, discarding my own separate existence as a thing
that no longer mattered, I thought now, as of an inestimable advantage,
that of this, my own, my too familiar, my contemptible existence
Gilberte might one day become the humble servant, the kindly, the
comforting collaborator, who in the evenings, helping me in my work,
would collate for me the texts of rare pamphlets. As for Bergotte, that
infinitely wise, almost divine old man, because of whom I had first,
before I had even seen her, loved Gilberte, now it was for Gilberte's
sake, chiefly, that I loved him. With as much pleasure as the pages that
he had written about Racine, I studied the wrapper, folded under great
seals of white wax and tied with billows of pink ribbon, in which she
had brought those pages to me. I kissed the agate marble, which was
the better part of my love's heart, the part that was not frivolous but
faithful, and, for all that it was adorned with the mysterious charm of
Gilberte's life, dwelt close beside me, inhabited my chamber, shared my
bed. But the beauty of that stone, and the beauty also of those pages
of Bergotte 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 consistency, 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 Gilberte 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 waiting 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 w