The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle

by Marcel Proust

  At all costs I must prevent her from being alone, for some days at any rate, must keep her with me so as to be certain that she could not meet Mlle Vinteuil’s friend. In reality it would mean her living alone with me, for my mother, seizing the opportunity of a tour of inspection which my father had to make, had taken it upon herself as a duty, in obedience to my grandmother’s wishes, to go down to Combray and spend a few days there with one of my grandmother’s sisters. Mamma had no love for her aunt because she had not been to my grandmother, so loving to her, what a sister should be. Thus, when they grow up, do children remember with resentment the people who have been unkind to them. But having become my grandmother, Mamma was incapable of resentment; her mother’s life was to her like a pure and innocent childhood from which she would draw those memories whose sweetness or bitterness regulated her actions with other people. Her aunt might have been able to provide Mamma with certain priceless details, but now she would have difficulty in obtaining them, the aunt being seriously ill (they spoke of cancer). Reproaching herself for not having gone sooner, because she wanted to keep my father company, she saw this as an additional reason for doing what her mother would have done, and, just as she went on the anniversary of the death of my grandmother’s father, who had been such a bad parent, to lay upon his grave the flowers which my grandmother had been in the habit of taking there, so, to the side of the grave which was about to open, my mother wished to convey the soft words which her aunt had not come to offer to my grandmother. While she was at Combray, my mother would busy herself with certain alterations which my grandmother had always wished to have made, but only under her daughter’s supervision. And so they had not yet been begun, Mamma not wishing, by leaving Paris before my father, to make him feel too keenly the burden of a grief in which he shared but which could not afflict him as it afflicted her.

  “Ah! that wouldn’t be possible just at present,” Albertine replied. “Besides, why should you need to go back to Paris so soon, if the lady has gone?”

  “Because I shall feel calmer in a place where I knew her than at Balbec, which she has never seen and which I’ve begun to loathe.”

  Did Albertine realise later on that this other woman had never existed, and that if, that night, I had really longed for death, it was because she had thoughtlessly revealed to me that she had been on intimate terms with Mlle Vinteuil’s friend? It is possible. There are moments when it appears to me probable. At any rate, that morning, she believed in the existence of this other woman.

  “But you ought to marry this lady,” she said to me, “it would make you happy, my sweet, and I’m sure it would make her happy as well.”

  I replied that the thought that I might make this woman happy had almost made me decide to marry her; when, not long since, I had inherited a fortune which would enable me to provide my wife with ample luxury and pleasures, I had been on the point of accepting the sacrifice of the woman I loved. Intoxicated by the gratitude that I felt for Albertine’s kindness, coming so soon after the terrible blow she had dealt me, just as one would think nothing of promising a fortune to the waiter who pours one out a sixth glass of brandy, I told her that my wife would have a motor-car and a yacht, that from that point of view, since Albertine was so fond of motoring and yachting, it was unfortunate that she was not the woman I loved, that I should have been the perfect husband for her, but that we should see, we should no doubt be able to meet on friendly terms. Nevertheless, since even when we are drunk we refrain from hailing passersby for fear of blows, I was not guilty of the imprudence (if such it was) that I should have committed in Gilberte’s time, of telling her that it was she, Albertine, whom I loved.

  “You see, I came very near to marrying her. But I didn’t dare do it, after all, for I wouldn’t have wanted to make a young woman live with anyone so sickly and troublesome as myself.”

  “But you must be mad. Anybody would be delighted to live with you, just look how people run after you. They’re always talking about you at Mme Verdurin’s, and in high society too, I’m told. She can’t have been at all nice to you, that lady, to make you lose confidence in yourself like that. I can see what she is, she’s a wicked woman, I detest her. Ah, if I were in her shoes!”

  “Not at all, she is very kind, far too kind. As for the Verdurins and all the rest, I don’t care a hang. Apart from the woman I love, whom in any case I’ve given up, I care only for my little Albertine; she is the only person in the world who, by letting me see a great deal of her—that is, during the first few days,” I added, in order not to alarm her and to be able to ask anything of her during those days, “—can bring me a little consolation.”

  I made only a vague allusion to the possibility of marriage, adding that it was quite impracticable since our characters were too different. Being, in spite of myself, still pursued in my jealousy by the memory of Saint-Loup’s relations with “Rachel when from the Lord” and of Swann’s with Odette, I was too inclined to believe that, once I was in love, I could not be loved in return, and that pecuniary interest alone could attach a woman to me. No doubt it was foolish to judge Albertine by Odette and Rachel. But it was not her that I was afraid of, it was myself; it was the feelings that I was capable of inspiring that my jealousy made me underestimate. And from this judgment, possibly erroneous, sprang no doubt many of the calamities that were to befall us.

  “Then you decline my invitation to come to Paris?”

  “My aunt wouldn’t like me to leave just at present. Besides, even if I can come later on, wouldn’t it look rather odd, my descending on you like that? In Paris everybody will know that I’m not your cousin.”

  “Very well, then. We can say that we’re more or less engaged. It can’t make any difference, since you know that it isn’t true.”

  Albertine’s neck, which emerged in its entirety from her nightdress, was strongly built, bronzed, grainy in texture. I kissed it as purely as if I had been kissing my mother to calm a childish grief which I did not believe that I would ever be able to eradicate from my heart. Albertine left me in order to go and dress. Already her devotion was beginning to falter; earlier she had told me that she would not leave me for a second (and I felt sure that her resolution would not last long, since I was afraid, if we remained at Balbec, that that very evening, in my absence, she might see the Bloch girls), whereas now she had just told me that she wished to call at Maineville and that she would come back and see me in the afternoon. She had not gone home the evening before; there might be letters there for her, and besides, her aunt might be anxious about her. I had replied: “If that’s all, we can send the lift-boy to tell your aunt that you’re here and to pick up your letters.” And, anxious to appear amenable but annoyed at being tied down, she had frowned for a moment and then, at once, very sweetly, had said: “All right” and had sent the lift-boy. Albertine had not been out of the room a moment before the boy came and tapped gently on my door. I could not believe that, while I was talking to Albertine, he had had time to go to Maineville and back. He came now to tell me that Albertine had written a note to her aunt and that she could, if I wished, come to Paris that very day. It was unfortunate that she had given him this message orally, for already, despite the early hour, the manager was about, and came to me in a great state to ask me whether there was anything wrong, whether I was really leaving, whether I could not stay just a few days longer, the wind that day being rather “frightened” (frightful). I did not wish to explain to him that at all costs I wanted Albertine to be out of Balbec before the hour at which the Bloch girls took the air, especially since Andrée, who alone might have protected her, was not there, and that Balbec was like one of those places in which an invalid who can no longer bear it is determined, even if he should die on the journey, not to spend another night. Moreover I should have to struggle against similar entreaties, in the hotel first of all, where the eyes of Marie Gineste and Céleste Albaret were red. (Marie indeed was giving vent to the swift-flowing tears of a mountain stream; Céles
te, who was gentler, urged her to be calm; but, Marie having murmured the only line of poetry that she knew: “Here below the lilacs die,” Céleste could contain herself no longer, and a flood of tears spilled over her lilac-hued face; I dare say they had forgotten my existence by that evening.) Later, on the little local railway, despite all my precautions against being seen, I met M. de Cambremer who turned pale at the sight of my boxes, for he was counting upon me for the day after tomorrow; he infuriated me by trying to persuade me that my breathless fits were caused by the change in the weather, and that October would do them all the good in the world, and asked me whether I could not “postpone my departure by a sennight,” an expression the fatuity of which enraged me perhaps only because what he was suggesting to me made me feel ill. And while he talked to me in the railway carriage, at each station I was afraid of seeing, more terrible than Herimbald or Guiscard, M. de Crécy imploring me to invite him, or, more dreadful still, Mme Verdurin bent upon inviting me. But this was not to happen for some hours. I had not got there yet. I had to face only the despairing entreaties of the manager. I ushered him out of the room, for I was afraid that, although he kept his voice low, he would end by disturbing Mamma. I remained alone in my room, that room with the too lofty ceiling in which I had been so wretched on my first arrival, in which I had thought with such longing of Mlle de Stermaria, had watched for the appearance of Albertine and her friends, like migratory birds alighting upon the beach, in which I had possessed her with such indifference after I had sent the lift-boy to fetch her, in which I had experienced my grandmother’s kindness, then realised that she was dead; those shutters, beneath which shone the early morning light, I had opened the first time to look out upon the first ramparts of the sea (those shutters which Albertine made me close in case anybody should see us kissing). I became aware of my own transformations by contrasting them with the unchangingness of my surroundings. One grows accustomed to these as to people, and when, all of a sudden, one recalls the different meaning that they used to convey to one and then, after they had lost all meaning, the events, very different from those of today, which they enshrined, the diversity of the acts performed beneath the same ceiling, between the same glazed bookshelves, the change in one’s heart and in one’s life which that diversity implies, seem to be increased still further by the unalterable permanence of the setting, reinforced by the unity of the scene.

  Two or three times it occurred to me, for a moment, that the world in which this room and these bookshelves were situated, and in which Albertine counted for so little, was perhaps an intellectual world, which was the sole reality, and my grief something like what we feel when we read a novel, a thing of which only a madman would make a lasting and permanent grief that prolonged itself through his life; that a tiny flicker of my will would suffice, perhaps, to attain to this real world, to re-enter it by breaking through my grief as one breaks through a paper hoop, and to think no more about what Albertine had done than we think about the actions of the imaginary heroine of a novel after we have finished reading it. For that matter, the mistresses whom I have loved most passionately have never coincided with my love for them. That love was genuine, since I subordinated everything else to seeing them, keeping them for myself alone, and would weep aloud if, one evening, I had waited for them in vain. But it was more because they had the faculty of arousing that love, of raising it to a paroxysm, than because they were its image. When I saw them, when I heard their voices, I could find nothing in them which resembled my love and could account for it. And yet my sole joy lay in seeing them, my sole anxiety in waiting for them to come. It was as though a virtue that had no connexion with them had been artificially attached to them by nature, and that this virtue, this quasi-electric power, had the effect upon me of exciting my love, that is to say of controlling all my actions and causing all my sufferings. But from this, the beauty, or the intelligence, or the kindness of these women was entirely distinct. As by an electric current that gives us a shock, I have been shaken by my loves, I have lived them, I have felt them: never have I succeeded in seeing or thinking them. Indeed I am inclined to believe that in these relationships (I leave out of account the physical pleasure which is their habitual accompaniment but is not enough in itself to constitute them), beneath the outward appearance of the woman, it is to those invisible forces with which she is incidentally accompanied that we address ourselves as to obscure deities. It is they whose good will is necessary to us, with whom we seek to establish contact without finding any positive pleasure in it. The woman herself, during our assignation with her, does little more than put us in touch with these goddesses. We have, by way of oblation, promised jewels and travels, uttered incantations which mean that we adore and, at the same time, contrary incantations which mean that we are indifferent. We have used all our power to obtain a fresh assignation, but one that is accorded to us without constraint. Would we in fact go to so much trouble for the woman herself, if she were not complemented by these occult forces, considering that, once she has left us, we are unable to say how she was dressed and realise that we never even looked at her?