But I also realized that the suffering I had first known because of Gilberte, that our love does not belong to the creature who inspires it, is salutary. To a lesser extent as a means to an end (because, short as our life may be, it is only during suffering that our thoughts, in a sense shaken up by endless and shifting impulses, elevate, as in a storm, to a level at which it becomes visible, all that regulated immensity, which we, stationed at a badly placed window, do not normally see, because the calm of happiness leaves it smooth and at too low a level;
