But very soon that love surged up
again in me like a reaction by which my humiliated heart was endeavouring
to rise to Gilberte's level, or to draw her down to its own. I loved her;
I was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to
do her some injury, to force her to keep some memory of me. I knew her to
be so beautiful that I should have liked to be able to retrace my steps so
as to shake my fist at her and shout, "I think you are hideous, grotesque;
you are utterly disgusting!" However, I walked away, carrying with me,
then and for ever afterwards, as the first illustration of a type of
happiness rendered inaccessible to a little boy of my kind by certain laws
of nature which it was impossible to transgress, the picture of a little
girl with reddish hair, and a skin freckled with tiny pink marks, who held
a trowel in her hand, and smiled as she directed towards me a long and
subtle and inexpressive stare. And already the charm with which her name,
like a cloud of incense, had filled that archway in the pink hawthorn
through which she and I had, together, heard its sound, was beginning to
conquer, to cover, to embalm, to beautify everything with which it had any
association: her grandparents, whom my own had been so unspeakably
fortunate as to know, the glorious profession of a stockholder, even the
melancholy neighbourhood of the Champs-Elysees, where she lived in Paris.
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