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 blessings 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.
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