“One would be cured for ever of romanticism…”

The expression “One would be cured for ever of romanticism…” presents a way of loosening love’s hold on the past: imagine the person one will be after love has ended, and the former beloved’s relics may cease to seem unique. In the narrator’s recollection, the book-cover and agate marble associated with Gilberte Swann have become ordinary things, exposing how feeling—not an inherent quality in the objects—had made them precious.

The imagined future self

The maxim proposes a change of perspective rather than a direct argument against romance. The person in love is asked to consider the future self who will no longer love; that later self can see the beloved and the objects linked to her without the inward intensity that once shaped their significance. The cure is therefore temporal: romantic attachment loses its apparent permanence when viewed from a self that has already outlived it.

The formulation is conditional, not a claim that such detachment is easy or immediate. Its promise depends on being able to imagine oneself after love, a capacity that lets the present feeling be measured against a possible future in which it no longer governs perception.

Gilberte’s keepsakes

The narrator tests this insight against two remembered objects: Gilberte’s book-cover and her agate marble. In the past, both had drawn their importance from a private inward state. Now they appear to him as a book-cover and a marble like any others. Their material identity has not changed; what has vanished is the attachment that distinguished them.

The paired objects make the expression concrete. They are not valuable because of any exceptional feature described in the passage, but because the narrator once experienced them through his love for Gilberte. Their present ordinariness reveals, in retrospect, that romantic value had been conferred by feeling rather than secured by the things themselves.

Love, memory, and altered feeling

The passage turns the maxim into an observation about how memory is revised by emotional change. The narrator can still remember the objects’ former importance, but remembering that importance is not the same as feeling it. The past survives as knowledge of what once mattered, while the present self no longer shares the inward state that made the keepsakes seem singular.

The expression’s significance lies in this contrast between the persistence of memory and the disappearance of its emotional force. Romanticism is not disproved by an abstract principle; it is diminished by the experience of becoming someone to whom a former treasure is ordinary. The imagined future self thus provides a measure of love’s transience and of the changing self who remembers it.