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

by Marcel Proust

  Andrée would come into my room, shutting the door behind her. They had met a girl they knew, whom Albertine had never mentioned to me.

  “What did they talk about?”

  “I can’t tell you; I took advantage of the fact that Albertine wasn’t alone to go and buy some wool.”

  “Buy some wool?”

  “Yes, it was Albertine who asked me to get it.”

  “All the more reason not to have gone. It was perhaps a pretext to get you out of the way.”

  “But she asked me to go for it before we met her friend.”

  “Ah!” I would reply, breathing again. At once my suspicions were revived: she might, for all I knew, have made an appointment beforehand with her friend and have provided herself with an excuse to be left alone when the time came. Besides, could I be certain that it was not my former hypothesis (according to which Andrée did not always tell me the truth) that was correct? Andrée was perhaps in league with Albertine.

  Love, I used to say to myself at Balbec, is what we feel for a person; our jealousy seems rather to be directed towards that person’s actions; we feel that if she were to tell us everything, we might perhaps easily be cured of our love. However skilfully jealousy is concealed by him who suffers from it, it is very soon detected by her who has inspired it, and who applies equal skill in her turn. She seeks to put us off the scent of what might make us unhappy, and easily succeeds, for, to the man who is not forewarned, how should a casual remark reveal the falsehoods that lie beneath it? We do not distinguish this remark from the rest; spoken apprehensively, it is received unheedingly. Later on, when we are alone, we shall return to this remark, which will seem to us not altogether consistent with the facts of the case. But do we remember it correctly? There seems to arise spontaneously in us, with regard to it and to the accuracy of our memory, a doubt of the sort which, in certain nervous conditions, prevents us from remembering whether we have bolted the door, no less after the fiftieth time than after the first; it would seem that we can repeat the action indefinitely without its ever being accompanied by a precise and liberating memory. But at least we can shut the door again for the fifty-first time. Whereas the disturbing remark exists in the past, in an imperfect hearing of it which it is not within our power to re-enact. Then we concentrate our attention upon other remarks which conceal nothing, and the sole remedy, which we do not want, is to be ignorant of everything in order not to have any desire for further knowledge.

  As soon as jealousy is discovered, it is regarded by the person who is its object as a challenge which justifies deception. Moreover, in our endeavour to learn something, it is we who have taken the initiative in lying and deceit. Andrée or Aimé may promise us that they will say nothing, but will they keep their promise? Then Bloch could promise nothing because he knew nothing. And Albertine has only to talk to any of the three in order to learn, with the help of what Saint-Loup would have called “cross-checking,” that we are lying to her when we claim to be indifferent to her actions and morally incapable of having her watched. Following thus upon my habitual boundless uncertainty as to what Albertine might be doing, an uncertainty too indeterminate not to remain painless, which was to jealousy what that incipient forgetfulness in which assuagement is born of vagueness is to grief, the little fragment of an answer which Andrée had just brought me at once began to raise fresh questions; in exploring one sector of the vast zone that extended round me, I had succeeded only in pushing back still further that unknowable thing which, when we seek to form a definite idea of it, another person’s life invariably is to us. I would continue to interrogate Andrée while Albertine, from tact and in order to leave me free (was she conscious of this?) to question her friend, prolonged her toilet in her own room.

  “I think Albertine’s uncle and aunt both like me,” I would thoughtlessly remark to Andrée, forgetting her peculiar nature.

  At once I would see her glutinous features change, like a mixture that has turned; her face would seem permanently clouded. Her mouth would become bitter. Nothing remained in Andrée of that juvenile gaiety which, like all the little band and notwithstanding her delicate health, she had displayed in the year of my first visit to Balbec and which now (it is true that Andrée was several years older) became so rapidly eclipsed in her. But I would make it reappear involuntarily before Andrée left me that evening to go home to dinner. “Somebody was singing your praises to me today in the most glowing terms,” I would say to her. Immediately a ray of joy would beam from her eyes; she looked as though she really loved me. She avoided my gaze but smiled at the empty air with a pair of eyes that had suddenly become quite round. “Who was it?” she would ask with an artless, avid interest. I would tell her, and, whoever it was, she was delighted.

  Then the time would come for her to leave me. Albertine would come back to my room; she had undressed, and was wearing one of the crepe de Chine dressing-gowns or Japanese kimonos which I had asked Mme de Guermantes to describe to me, and for some of which supplementary details had been furnished me by Mme Swann, in a letter that began: “After your long eclipse, I felt as I read your letter about my tea-gowns that I was hearing from a ghost.”

  Albertine had on her feet a pair of black shoes studded with brilliants which Françoise indignantly called clogs and which were modelled upon those which, from the drawing-room window, she had seen Mme de Guermantes wearing in the evening, just as a little later Albertine took to wearing slippers, some of gold kid, others of chinchilla, the sight of which gave me great pleasure because they were all of them signs (which other shoes would not have been) that she was living under my roof. She had also certain things which had not come to her from me, including a fine gold ring. I admired upon it the outspread wings of an eagle. “It was my aunt who gave me it,” she explained. “She can be quite nice sometimes after all. It makes me feel terribly old, because she gave it to me on my twentieth birthday.”

  Albertine took a far keener interest in all these pretty things than the Duchess, because, like every obstacle in the way of a possession (in my own case the ill health which made travel so difficult and so desirable), poverty, more generous than opulence, gives to women far more than the clothes that they cannot afford to buy: the desire for those clothes which goes hand in hand with a genuine, detailed, thorough knowledge of them. She, because she had never been able to afford these things, and I, because in ordering them for her I was seeking to give her pleasure, were both of us like students who already know all about the pictures which they are longing to go to Dresden or Vienna to see. Whereas rich women, amid the vast quantities of their hats and gowns, are like those tourists to whom a visit to a gallery, being preceded by no desire, gives merely a sensation of bewilderment, boredom and exhaustion. A particular toque, a particular sable coat, a particular Doucet dressing-gown with pink-lined sleeves, assumed for Albertine, who had observed them, coveted them and, thanks to the exclusiveness and meticulousness that characterise desire, had at once isolated them from the rest against an empty background in which the lining or the sash stood out to perfection, and studied them down to the smallest detail—and for myself who had gone to Mme de Guermantes in quest of an explanation of what constituted the peculiar merit, the superiority, the stylishness of each garment and the inimitable cut of the great designer—an importance, a charm which they certainly did not possess for the Duchess, surfeited before she had even acquired an appetite, and would not, indeed, have possessed for me had I seen them a few years earlier while accompanying some lady of fashion on one of her wearisome tours of the dressmakers’ shops.

  To be sure, a woman of fashion was what Albertine too was gradually becoming. For, while each of the things that I ordered for her was the prettiest of its kind, with all the refinements that might have been added to it by Mme de Guermantes or Mme Swann, she was beginning to possess these things in abundance. But it mattered little, since she had admired them beforehand and in isolation. When we have been smitten by one painter, then by another, we ma
y end by feeling for the whole gallery an admiration that is not frigid, for it is made up of successive enthusiasms, each one exclusive in its day, which finally have joined forces and become reconciled in one whole.

  She was not, moreover, frivolous, read a great deal when she was alone, and read aloud to me when we were together. She had become extremely intelligent. She would say, quite falsely in fact: “I’m appalled when I think that but for you I should still be quite ignorant. Don’t contradict. You have opened up a world of ideas to me which I never suspected, and whatever I may have become I owe entirely to you.”

  It will be remembered that she had spoken in similar terms of my influence over Andrée. Had either of them a real feeling for me? And, in themselves, what were Albertine and Andrée? To know the answer, I should have to immobilise you, to cease to live in that perpetual state of expectancy ending always in a different presentment of you, I should have to cease to love you in order to fix your image, cease to be conscious of your interminable and always disconcerting arrival, O girls, O successive rays in the swirling vortex wherein we throb with emotion on seeing you reappear while barely recognising you, in the dizzy velocity of light. We might perhaps remain unaware of that velocity, and everything would seem to us motionless, did not a sexual attraction set us in pursuit of you, O drops of gold, always dissimilar and always surpassing our expectation! Each time, a girl so little resembles what she was the time before (shattering, as soon as we catch sight of her, the memory that we had retained of her and the desire that we had proposed to gratify), that the stability of nature which we ascribe to her is purely fictitious and a convention of speech. We have been told that some pretty girl is tender, loving, full of the most delicate feelings. Our imagination accepts this assurance, and when we behold for the first time, beneath the woven girdle of her golden hair, the rosy disc of her face, we are almost afraid that this too virtuous sister, cooling our ardour by her very virtue, can never be to us the lover for whom we have been longing. What secrets, however, we confide to her from the first moment, on the strength of that nobility of heart, what plans we make together! But a few days later, we regret that we were so confiding, for the rosy-cheeked girl, at our second meeting, addresses us in the language of a lascivious Fury. As for the successive facets which after pulsating for some days the roseate light, now eclipsed, presents to us, it is not even certain that a momentum external to these girls has not modified their aspect, and this might well have happened with my band of girls at Balbec. People extol to us the gentleness, the purity of a virgin. But afterwards they feel that something more spicy would please us better, and recommend her to show more boldness. In herself was she one more than the other? Perhaps not, but capable of yielding to any number of different possibilities in the headlong current of life. With another, whose whole attraction lay in a certain ruthlessness (which we counted upon subduing to our own will), as, for instance, with the fearsome jumping girl at Balbec who grazed in her leaps the bald pates of startled old gentlemen, what a disappointment when, a new facet of her personality being presented to us, just as we are making tender declarations fired by the memory of her cruelty to others, we hear her telling us, by way of an opening gambit, that she is shy, that she can never say anything intelligent to anyone at a first introduction, so frightened is she, and that it is only after a fortnight or so that she will be able to talk to us at her ease. The steel has turned to cotton wool, and there is nothing left for us to attempt to break down, since of her own accord she has shed her hard integument. Of her own accord, but through our fault perhaps, for the tender words which we addressed to Harshness had perhaps, even without any deliberate calculation on her part, suggested to her that she ought to be gentle. (Distressing as the change may have been to us, it was not altogether maladroit, for our gratitude for all her gentleness may exact more from us than our delight at overcoming her cruelty.)

  I do not say that a day will not come when, even to these luminous girls, we shall assign sharply defined characters, but that will be because they will have ceased to interest us, because their entry upon the scene will no longer be, for our heart, the apparition which it expected to be different and which, each time, leaves it overwhelmed by fresh incarnations. Their immobility will come from our indifference to them, which will deliver them up to the judgment of our intelligence. The latter’s conclusions will not in fact be very much more categorical, for after deciding that some defect, predominant in the one, was happily absent from the other, it will see that this defect was offset by some precious quality. So that, from the false judgment of our intelligence, which comes into play only when we have lost interest, there will emerge well-defined, stable characters of girls, which will enlighten us no more than did the surprising faces that used to appear every day when, in the bewildering speed of our expectation, they presented themselves daily, weekly, too different to allow us, since their course was never arrested, to classify them, to award degrees of merit. As for our sentiments, we have said so too often to repeat it here, as often as not love is no more than the association of the image of a girl (whom otherwise we should soon have found intolerable) with the heartbeats inseparable from an endless wait in vain and her failure to turn up at the end of it. All this is true not only of impressionable young men in the face of changeable girls. At the stage that our narrative has now reached, it appears, as I later learned, that Jupien’s niece had altered her opinion of Morel and M. de Charlus. My chauffeur, to reinforce her love for Morel, had extolled to her, as existing in the violinist, boundless refinements of delicacy in which she was all too ready to believe. And at the same time Morel never ceased to complain to her of the despotic treatment that he received from M. de Charlus, which she ascribed to malevolence, never imagining that it could be due to love. She was moreover forced to acknowledge that M. de Charlus was a tyrannical presence at all their meetings. And in corroboration of this, she had heard society women speak of the Baron’s atrocious spitefulness. Lately, however, her judgment had been completely reversed. She had discovered in Morel (without ceasing for that reason to love him) depths of malevolence and perfidy, compensated it was true by frequent gentleness and genuine sensitivity, and in M. de Charlus an immense and unsuspected kindness mixed with incomprehensible asperities. And so she had been no more able to arrive at a definite judgment of what, each in himself, the violinist and his protector really were, than I was able to form of Andrée, whom nevertheless I saw every day, or of Albertine who was living with me.

  On the evenings when the latter did not read aloud to me, she would play me some music or begin a game of draughts, or a conversation, which I would interrupt with kisses. Our relations had a simplicity that made them soothing. The very emptiness of her life gave Albertine a sort of eagerness to comply with the few demands I made on her. Behind this girl, as behind the purple light that used to filter beneath the curtains of my room at Balbec, while outside the concert blared, there shone the blue-green undulations of the sea. Was she not, after all (she in whose being there now existed an idea of me so habitual and familiar that, next to her aunt, I was perhaps the person whom she distinguished least from herself), the girl whom I had seen the first time at Balbec, beneath her flat cap, with her insistent laughing eyes, a stranger still, slender as a silhouette projected against the waves? These effigies preserved intact in our memory astonish us, when we recall them, by their dissimilarity from the person we know, and we realise what a task of remodelling is performed every day by habit. In the charm that Albertine had in Paris, by my fireside, there still survived the desire that had been aroused in me by that insolent and blossoming cortege along the beach, and just as Rachel retained in Saint-Loup’s eyes, even after he had made her abandon it, the glamour of her stage life, so in this Albertine cloistered in my house, far from Balbec whence I had hurried her away, there persisted the excitement, the social confusion, the restless futility, the roving desires of seaside life. She was so effectively caged that on certain evenings I did no
t even ask her to leave her room for mine, she whom at one time all the world pursued, whom I had found it so hard to overtake as she sped past on her bicycle, whom the lift-boy himself was unable to bring back to me, leaving me with little hope of her coming, although I sat up waiting for her all night. Had not Albertine been—out there in front of the hotel—like a great actress of the blazing beach, arousing jealousy when she advanced upon that natural stage, speaking to no one, jostling the habitués, dominating her friends? And was not this so greatly coveted actress the same who, withdrawn by me from the stage, shut up in my house, was now here, shielded from the desires of all those who might henceforth seek for her in vain, sitting now in my room, now in her own, engaged in some work of design or engraving?

  No doubt, in the first days at Balbec, Albertine seemed to exist on a parallel plane to that on which I was living, but one that had converged on it (after my visit to Elstir) and had finally joined it, as my relations with her, at Balbec, in Paris, then at Balbec again, grew more intimate. Moreover, what a difference there was between the two pictures of Balbec, on my first visit and on my second, pictures composed of the same villas from which the same girls emerged by the same sea! In Albertine’s friends at the time of my second visit, whom I knew so well, whose good and bad qualities were so clearly engraved on their features, how could I recapture those fresh, mysterious strangers who once could not thrust open the doors of their chalets with a screech over the sand or brush past the quivering tamarisks without making my heart beat? Their huge eyes had sunk into their faces since then, doubtless because they had ceased to be children, but also because those ravishing strangers, those actresses of that first romantic year, about whom I had gone ceaselessly in quest of information, no longer held any mystery for me. They had become for me, obedient to my whims, a mere grove of budding girls, from among whom I was not a little proud of having plucked, and hidden away from the rest of the world, the fairest rose.