In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower by Marcel Proust Page B

which I
might have preserved for my future guidance, the disappointments which
she had sometimes brought me; a new world in which nothing should
subsist from the old—save one thing, my desire that Gilberte should
love me. I realised that if my heart hoped for such a reconstruction,
round about it, of a universe that had not satisfied it before, it was
because my heart had not altered, and I told myself that there was no
reason why Gilberte's should have altered either; I felt that this new
friendship was the same, just as there is no boundary ditch between
their forerunners and those new years which our desire for them,
without being able to reach and so to modify them, invests, unknown to
themselves, with distinctive names. I might dedicate this new year, if
I chose, to Gilberte, and as one bases a religious system upon the
blind laws of nature, endeavour to stamp New Year's Day with the
particular image that I had formed of it; but in vain, I felt that it
was not aware that people called it New Year's Day, that it was
passing in a wintry dusk in a manner that was not novel to me; in the
gentle breeze that floated about the column of playbills I had
recognised, I had felt reappear the eternal, the universal substance,
the familiar moisture, the unheeding fluidity of the old days and
years.
    I returned to the house. I had spent the New Year's Day of old men,
who differ on that day from their juniors, not because people have
ceased to give them presents but because they themselves have ceased
to believe in the New Year. Presents I had indeed received, but not
that present which alone could bring me pleasure, namely a line from
Gilberte. I was young still, none the less, since I had been able to
write her one, by means of which I hoped, in telling her of my
solitary dreams of love and longing, to arouse similar dreams in her.
The sadness of men who have grown old lies in their no longer even
thinking of writing such letters, the futility of which their
experience has shewn.
    After I was in bed, the noises of the street, unduly prolonged upon
this festive evening, kept me awake. I thought of all the people who
were ending the night in pleasure, of the lover, the troop, it might
be, of debauchees who would be going to meet Berma at the stage–door
after the play that I had seen announced for this evening. I was not
even able, so as to calm the agitation which that idea engendered in
me during my sleepless night, to assure myself that Berma was not,
perhaps, thinking about love, since the lines that she was reciting,
which she had long and carefully rehearsed, reminded her at every
moment that love is an exquisite thing, as of course she already knew,
and knew so well that she displayed its familiar pangs—only enriched
with a new violence and an unsuspected sweetness—to her astonished
audience; and yet each of them had felt those pangs himself. I lighted
my candle again, to look once more upon her face. At the thought that
it was, no doubt, at that very moment being caressed by those men whom
I could not prevent from giving to Berma and receiving from her joys
superhuman but vague, I felt an emotion more cruel than voluptuous, a
longing that was aggravated presently by the sound of a horn, as one
hears it on the nights of the Lenten carnival and often of other
public holidays, which, because it then lacks all poetry, is more
saddening, coming from a toy squeaker, than "at evening, in the depth
of the woods." At that moment, a message from Gilberte would perhaps
not have been what I wanted. Our desires cut across one another's
paths, and in this confused existence it is but rarely that a piece of
good fortune coincides with the desire that clamoured for it.
    I continued to go to the Champs–Elysées on fine days, along streets
whose stylish pink houses seemed to be washed (because exhibitions of
water–colours were then at the height of fashion) in a lightly
floating atmosphere. It would be untrue to say that in those