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, even the gratitude
that it felt, accompanying itself with a smile.
But at that actual moment, I was not able to appreciate the worth of these
new pleasures. They were given, not by the little girl whom I loved, to me
who loved her, but by the other, her with whom I used to play, to my other
self, who possessed neither the memory of the true Gilberte, nor the fixed
heart which alone could have known the value of a happiness for which it
alone had longed.
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