My Years With Proust - Day 657

Perhaps, too, she might not have remembered, or she might have lied.  In any case I was no longer interested to know, since my heart had changed even more than Gilberte's face.  This face gave me little pleasure, but above all I was no longer unhappy, and I should have been incapable of conceiving, had I thought about it again, that I could have been so unhappy of Gilberte tripping along by the side of a young man that I had said to myself: "It's all over, I shall never attempt to see her again." Of the state of mind which, in that far-off year, had been tantamount to a long-drawn-out torture for me, nothing survived.  For in this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than Beauty: namely Grief.

Marcel Proust, Times Regained, p. 713

With the death of Albertine, and the reemergence of Gilberte in his life, Marcel now gets to fret about the latter once again.  In this case, as we saw yesterday, he gets to fret about what might have been if he had acted on his earlier fascination with Gilberte - or, for that matter, simply responded to her advances.  Except, he's not actually suffering that much, especially by Proustian standards.  This might be because he's grown and has greater perspective, or maybe he's still numb from Albertine's death.  Apparently nothing survives the ravages of time: "For in this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than Beauty: namely Grief."  If beauty fades with the passing of time, then at least we have the consolation of knowing that so does grief.