“Happy, or at least seemingly happy, solutions” Readings of Gilberte’s letter to the Narrator in À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs

How should we read the letter that the Narrator of the Recherche receives from Gilberte in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower? Is it a love letter? A social letter? A social letter concealing a declaration of love? Gilberte’s letter frustrates any univocal interpretation and remains unexplained; it resists any attempt to classify it in one of the precise categories outlined in the typologies developed by Proustian critics to discuss the epistolary corpus of the Recherche.