Alas, as soon as she stood before me, the fair dairymaid with the streaky locks, stripped of all the desires and imaginings that had been aroused in me, was reduced to her mere self. The quivering cloud of my suppositions no longer enveloped her in a dizzying haze. She acquired an almost apologetic air from having (in place of the ten, the twenty that I recalled in turn without being able to fix them in my memory) but a single nose, rounder than I had thought, which gave her a hint of stupidity and had in any case lost the faculty of multiplying itself. This flyaway caught on the wing, inert, crushed, incapable of adding anything to its own paltry appearance, no longer had my imagination to collaborate with it. Fallen into the inertia of reality, I sought to spring back again; her cheeks, which I had not noticed in the shop, appeared to me so pretty that I was abashed, and to recover my composure said to the young dairymaid: “Would you be so kind as to hand me the Figaro which is lying there. I must make sure of the address to which I am going to send you.” Thereupon, as she picked up the newspaper, she disclosed as far as her elbow the red sleeve of her jersey and handed me the conservative sheet with a neat and courteous gesture which pleased me by its swift familiarity, its fluffy appearance and its scarlet hue. While I was opening the Figaro, for the sake of something to say, and without raising my eyes, I asked the girl: “What do you call that red knitted thing you’re wearing? It’s very pretty.” She replied: “It’s my sweater.” For, by a slight downward tendency common to all fashions, the garments and words which a few years earlier seemed to belong to the relatively smart world of Albertine’s friends, were now the currency of working-girls. “Are you quite sure it won’t be giving you too much trouble,” I said, while I pretended to be searching the columns of the Figaro, “if I send you rather a long way?” As soon as I myself thus appeared to consider the job I wanted her to do for me somewhat arduous, she began to feel that it would be a nuisance to her: “The only thing is, I’m supposed to be going for a ride on my bike this afternoon. You see, Sunday’s the only day we’ve got.” “But won’t you catch cold, going bare-headed like that?” “Oh, I shan’t be bare-headed, I’ll have my cap, and I could get on without it with all the hair I have.” I raised my eyes to those flavescent, frizzy locks and felt myself caught in their swirl and swept away, with a throbbing heart, amid the lightning and the blasts of a hurricane of beauty. I continued to study the newspaper, but although it was only to keep myself in countenance and to gain time, while only pretending to read I nevertheless took in the meaning of the words that were before my eyes, and my attention was caught by the following: “To the programme already announced for this afternoon in the great hall of the Trocadéro must be added the name of Mlle Lea who has consented to appear in Les Fourberies de Nérine. She will of course take the part of Nérine, which she plays with dazzling verve and bewitching gaiety.” It was as though an invisible hand had brutally torn from my heart the bandage beneath which its wound had begun to heal since my return from Balbec. The flood of my anguish came pouring out in torrents. Lea was the actress friend of the two girls at Balbec whom Albertine, without appearing to see them, had watched in the mirror, one afternoon at the Casino. It was true that at Balbec Albertine, at the name of Lea, had adopted a particular tone of solemnity in order to say to me, almost shocked that anyone could suspect such a pattern of virtue: “Oh no, she isn’t in the least that sort of woman. She’s a very nice person.” Unfortunately for me, when Albertine made an assertion of this kind, it was invariably a first stage in a series of different assertions. Shortly after the first would come this second one: “I don’t know her.” In the third phase, after Albertine had spoken to me of somebody who was “above suspicion” and whom (in the second place) she did not know, she would gradually forget first of all that she had said that she did not know the person and then, unwittingly contradicting herself, would inform me that she did. This first lapse of memory having occurred, and the new assertion been made, a second lapse of memory would begin, concerning the person’s being above suspicion. “Isn’t so and so,” I would ask, “one of those women?” “Why, of course, everybody knows that!” Immediately the note of solemnity was sounded afresh in an assertion which was a vague echo, greatly reduced, of the first assertion of all. “I’m bound to say that she has always behaved perfectly properly with me. Of course, she knows that I’d soon send her about her business if she tried it on. But that’s neither here nor there. I’m obliged to give her credit for the genuine respect she has always shown me. It’s easy to see she knew the sort of person she had to deal with.” We remember the truth because it has a name, is rooted in the past, but a makeshift lie is quickly forgotten. Albertine would forget this latest lie, her fourth, and, one day when she was anxious to gain my confidence by confiding in me, would open up to me with regard to the same person who at the outset had been so respectable and whom she did not know: “She took quite a fancy to me at one time. Three or four times she asked me to walk home with her and to come up and see her. I saw no harm in walking home with her, in front of lots of people, in broad daylight, in the open air. But when we reached her front door I always made some excuse and I never went upstairs.” Shortly after this, Albertine would make some remark about the beautiful things that this lady had in her house. By proceeding from one approximation to another one would doubtless have succeeded in getting her to tell the truth, a truth which was perhaps less serious than I was inclined to believe, for, though susceptible to women, she perhaps preferred a male lover, and, now that she had me, might not have given a thought to Lea.
Already, in the case of quite a number of women at any rate, it would have been enough for me to gather together and present to my mistress a synthesis of her contradictory statements, in order to convict her of her misdeeds (misdeeds which, like astronomical laws, it is a great deal easier to deduce by a process of reasoning than to detect and observe in reality). But then she would have preferred to say that one of her statements had been a lie, the withdrawal of which would thus bring about the collapse of my whole system of deduction, rather than acknowledge that everything she had told me from the start was simply a tissue of mendacious tales. There are similar tales in the Arabian Nights which we find charming. They pain us coming from a person whom we love, and thereby enable us to penetrate a little deeper in our knowledge of human nature instead of being content to play around on its surface. Grief enters into us and forces us, out of painful curiosity, to probe. Whence emerge truths which we feel that we have no right to keep hidden, so much so that a dying atheist who has discovered them, certain of his own extinction, indifferent to fame, will nevertheless devote his last hours on earth to an attempt to make them known.
However, I was still at the first stage of enlightenment with regard to Lea. I was not even aware whether Albertine knew her. No matter, it came to the same thing. I must at all costs prevent her from renewing this acquaintance or making the acquaintance of this stranger at the Trocadéro. I say that I did not know whether she knew Lea or not; yet I must in fact have learned this at Balbec, from Albertine herself. For amnesia obliterated from my mind as well as from Albertine’s a great many of the statements that she had made to me. Memory, instead of being a duplicate, always present before one’s eyes, of the various events of one’s life, is rather a void from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables one to resuscitate dead recollections; but even then there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into that potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain for ever unverifiable. One pays no attention to anything that one does not connect with the real life of the woman one loves; one forgets immediately what she has said to one about such and such an incident or such and such people one does not know, and her expression while she was saying it. And so when, in due course, one’s jealousy is aroused by these same people, and seeks to ascertain whether or not it is mistaken, whether it is indeed they who are responsible for one’s mistress’s impatience to go out, and her annoyance when one has prevented her
from doing so by returning earlier than usual, one’s jealousy, ransacking the past in search of a clue, can find nothing; always retrospective, it is like a historian who has to write the history of a period for which he has no documents; always belated, it dashes like an enraged bull to the spot where it will not find the dazzling, arrogant creature who is tormenting it and whom the crowd admire for his splendour and cunning. Jealousy thrashes around in the void, uncertain as we are in those dreams in which we are distressed because we cannot find in his empty house a person whom we have known well in life, but who here perhaps is another person and has merely borrowed the features of our friend, uncertain as we are even more after we awake when we seek to identify this or that detail of our dream. What was one’s mistress’s expression when she told one that? Did she not look happy, was she not actually whistling, a thing that she never does unless she has some amorous thought in her mind and finds one’s presence importunate and irritating? Did she not tell one something that is contradicted by what she now affirms, that she knows or does not know such and such a person? One does not know, and one will never know; one searches desperately among the unsubstantial fragments of a dream, and all the time one’s life with one’s mistress goes on, a life that is oblivious of what may well be of importance to one, and attentive to what is perhaps of none, a life hagridden by people who have no real connexion with one, full of lapses of memory, gaps, vain anxieties, a life as illusory as a dream.
I suddenly realised that the young dairymaid was still in the room. I told her that the place was undoubtedly a long way off, and that I did not need her. Whereupon she also decided that it would be too much trouble: “There’s a fine match this afternoon, and I don’t want to miss it.” I felt that she must already be in the habit of saying “Sport’s the thing,” and that in a few years’ time she would be talking about “living her own life.” I told her that I certainly did not need her any longer, and gave her five francs. Immediately, having little expected this largesse, and telling herself that if she got five francs for doing nothing she would get a great deal more for doing my errand, she began to find that her match was of no importance. “I could easily have taken your message. I can always find time.” But I pushed her towards the door, for I needed to be alone: I must at all costs prevent Albertine from meeting Lea’s girlfriends at the Trocadéro. It was essential that I should succeed in doing so, but I did not yet know how, and during these first few moments I opened my hands, gazed at them, cracked my knuckles, whether because the mind, when it cannot find what it is seeking, in a fit of laziness decides to halt for an instant during which it is vividly aware of the most insignificant things, like the blades of grass on a railway embankment which we see from the carriage window trembling in the wind, when the train stops in the open country—an immobility that is not always more fruitful than that of a captured animal which, paralysed by fear or mesmerised, gazes without moving a muscle—or because I was holding my body in readiness—with my mind at work inside it and, in my mind, the means of action against this or that person—as though it were simply a weapon from which would be fired the shot that would separate Albertine from Lea and her two friends. It is true that, earlier that morning, when Françoise had come in to tell me that Albertine was going to the Trocadéro, I had said to myself: “Albertine is at liberty to do as she pleases,” and had supposed that in this radiant weather her actions would remain without any perceptible importance to me until the evening. But it was not only the morning sun, as I had thought, that had made me so carefree; it was because, having obliged Albertine to abandon the plans that she might perhaps have initiated or even realised at the Verdurins’, and having reduced her to attending a matinee which I myself had chosen and with a view to which she could not have planned anything, I knew that whatever she did would of necessity be innocent. Similarly, if Albertine had said a few moments later: “I don’t really care if I kill myself,” it was because she was certain that she would not kill herself. Surrounding both myself and Albertine there had been this morning (far more than the sunny day) that environment which itself is invisible but through the translucent and changing medium of which we saw, I her actions, she the importance of her own life—that is to say those beliefs which we do not perceive but which are no more assimilable to a pure vacuum than is the air that surrounds us; composing round about us a variable atmosphere, sometimes excellent, often unbreathable, they deserve to be studied and recorded as carefully as the temperature, the barometric pressure, the season, for our days have their own singularity, physical and moral. The belief, which I had failed to notice this morning but in which nevertheless I had been joyously enveloped until the moment when I had looked a second time at the Figaro, that Albertine would do nothing that was not blameless—that belief had vanished. I was no longer living in the fine sunny day, but in another day carved out of it by my anxiety lest Albertine might renew her acquaintance with Lea, and more easily still with the two girls if, as seemed to me probable, they went to applaud the actress at the Trocadéro where it would not be difficult for them to meet Albertine during one of the intervals. I no longer gave a thought to Mlle Vinteuil; the name of Lea had brought back to my mind, to make me jealous, the image of Albertine in the Casino watching the two girls. For I possessed in my memory only a series of Albertines, separate from one another, incomplete, a collection of profiles or snapshots, and so my jealousy was restricted to a discontinuous expression, at once fugitive and fixed, and to the people who had caused that expression to appear upon Albertine’s face. I remembered her when, at Balbec, she was eyed with undue intensity by the two girls or by women of that sort; I remembered the distress that I felt when I saw her face subjected to an active scrutiny, like that of a painter preparing to make a sketch, entirely enveloped in it, and, doubtless on account of my presence, submitting to this contact without appearing to notice it, with a passivity that was perhaps clandestinely voluptuous. And before she pulled herself together and spoke to me, there was an instant during which Albertine did not move, smiled into the empty air, with the same air of feigned spontaneity and secret pleasure as if she were posing for somebody to take her photograph, or even seeking to assume before the camera a more dashing pose—the one she had adopted at Doncières when we were walking with Saint-Loup, and, laughing and passing her tongue over her lips, she pretended to be teasing a dog. Certainly at such moments she was not at all the same as when it was she who was interested in little girls who passed by. Then, on the contrary, her intense and velvety gaze fastened itself, glued itself to the passer-by, so adhesive, so corrosive, that you felt that, in withdrawing, it must tear away the skin. But that look, which did at least give her a certain gravity, almost as though she were ill, seemed to me a pleasant relief after the vacant, blissful look she had worn in the presence of the two girls, and I should have preferred the sombre expression of the desire that she may perhaps have felt at times to the beaming expression caused by the desire which she aroused. However much she tried to conceal her awareness of it, it bathed her, enveloped her, vaporous, voluptuous, made her whole face glow. But who knows whether, once my back was turned, Albertine would continue to suppress everything that at such moments she held in suspension within herself, that radiated around her and gave me such anguish, whether, now that I was no longer there, she would not respond boldly to the advances of the two girls? Certainly these memories caused me great pain; they were like a complete admission of Albertine’s proclivities, a general confession of infidelity, against which the specific pledges that she gave me and that I wanted to believe, the negative results of my incomplete inquiries, the assurances of Andrée, given perhaps with Albertine’s connivance, were powerless to prevail. Albertine might deny specific betrayals; but by words that she let fall, more potent than her declarations to the contrary, by those looks alone, she had confessed to what she would have wished to hide far more than any specific facts, to what she would have let herself be killed sooner than admit: her natural tendency. Fo
r there is no one who will willingly deliver up his soul.
In spite of the pain that these memories caused me, could I have denied that it was the programme of the matinee at the Trocadéro that had revived my need of Albertine? She was one of those women whose very failings can sometimes take the place of absent charms, and, no less than their failings, the tenderness that follows upon them and brings us that assuagement which, like an invalid who is never well for two days in succession, we are incessantly obliged to recapture in their company. Besides, even more than their faults while we are in love with them, there are their faults before we knew them, and first and foremost their nature. For what makes this sort of love painful is the fact that there pre-exists it a sort of original sin of Woman, a sin which makes us love them, so that, when we forget it, we feel less need of them, and to begin to love again we must begin to suffer again. At this moment, the thought that she must not meet the two girls again and the question whether or not she knew Lea were what was chiefly occupying my mind, in spite of the rule that one ought not to take an interest in particular facts except in relation to their general significance, and notwithstanding the childishness, as great as that of longing to travel or to make friends with women, of splintering one’s curiosity against such elements from the invisible torrent of painful realities, which will always remain unknown to one, as have fortuitously crystallised in one’s mind. Moreover, even if one succeeded in destroying those elements, they would at once be replaced by others. Yesterday I was afraid lest Albertine should go to see Mme Verdurin. Now my only thought was of Lea. Jealousy, which is blindfold, is not merely powerless to discover anything in the darkness that enshrouds it; it is also one of those tortures where the task must be incessantly repeated, like that of the Danaides, or of Ixion. Even if the two girls were not there, what impression might not Lea make on her, beautified by her stage attire, haloed with success, what thoughts might she not leave in Albertine’s mind, what desires, which, even if she repressed them in my company, would give her an aversion for a life in which she was unable to gratify them!
The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle Page 281
