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

by Marcel Proust

  It seemed to me that a part of the novel which the flames had so far spared had finally crumbled into ashes.

  My discouragement might have persisted. Albertine’s words, when I thought of them, made it give way to a furious rage. This subsided into a sort of tenderness. I too, since I had come home and declared that I wished to break with her, had been lying. And this desire to separate, which I simulated perseveringly, brought for me little by little something of the sadness I would have felt had I truly wanted to leave Albertine.

  Besides, even when I thought in fits and starts, in twinges, as we say of other bodily pains, of that orgiastic life which Albertine had led before she met me, I wondered all the more at the docility of my captive and ceased to feel any resentment. Never, in the course of our life together, had I ceased to make it clear to Albertine that that life would in all probability be merely temporary, so that she might continue to find some charm in it. But tonight I had gone further, having feared that vague threats of separation were no longer sufficient, contradicted as they would doubtless be, in Albertine’s mind, by her idea of a great and jealous love of her, which must have made me, she seemed to imply, go and investigate at the Verdurins’. That night I thought that, among the other reasons which might have made me suddenly decide to put on this comedy of rupture, without even realising what I was doing except as I went on, there was above all the fact that when, in one of those impulses to which my father was prone, I threatened another person’s safety, since unlike him I did not have the courage to put a threat into practice, in order not to give the impression that it had been nothing but empty words, I would go to considerable lengths in pretending to carry out my threat and would recoil only when my adversary, genuinely convinced of my sincerity, had begun seriously to tremble.

  Besides, we feel that in these lies there is indeed a grain of truth, that, if life does not bring about any changes in our loves, it is we ourselves who will seek to bring about or to feign them, so strongly do we feel that all love, and everything else in life, evolves rapidly towards a farewell. We want to shed the tears that it will bring long before it comes. No doubt there was, on this occasion, a practical reason for the scene that I had enacted. I had suddenly wanted to keep Albertine because I felt that she was scattered about among other people with whom I could not prevent her from mixing. But even if she had renounced them all for ever for my sake, I might perhaps have been still more firmly resolved never to leave her, for separation is made painful by jealousy but impossible by gratitude. I felt that in any case I was fighting the decisive battle in which I must conquer or succumb. I would have offered Albertine in an hour all that I possessed, because I said to myself: “Everything depends upon this battle.” But such battles are less like those of old, which lasted for a few hours, than like those of today which do not end the next day, or the day after, or the following week. We give all our strength, because we steadfastly believe that we shall never need it again. And more than a year goes by without producing a “decision.”

  Perhaps an unconscious reminiscence of lying scenes enacted by M. de Charlus, in whose company I had been when the fear of Albertine’s leaving me had seized hold of me, had contributed thereto. But later on I heard my mother tell a story, of which I then knew nothing, which leads me to believe that I had found all the elements of this scene in myself, in one of those obscure reserves of heredity which certain emotions, acting in this as drugs such as alcohol or coffee act upon the residue of our stored-up strength, place at our disposal. When my aunt Leonie learned from Eulalie that Françoise, convinced that her mistress would never again leave the house, had secretly planned an outing of which my aunt was to know nothing, she pretended, the day before, to have suddenly decided to go for a drive next day. The incredulous Françoise was ordered not only to prepare my aunt’s clothes beforehand, and to air those that had been put away for too long, but even to order the carriage and arrange all the details of the excursion down to the last quarter of an hour. It was only when Françoise, convinced or at any rate shaken, had been forced to confess to my aunt the plan that she herself had made, that my aunt publicly abandoned her own, so as not, she said, to interfere with Françoise’s arrangements. Similarly, in order that Albertine should not think that I was exaggerating and in order to make her proceed as far as possible in the idea that we were to part, myself drawing the obvious inferences from the proposal I had advanced, I had begun to anticipate the time which was to begin next day and was to last for ever, the time when we should be separated, addressing to Albertine the same requests as if we were not presently to be reconciled. Like a general who considers that if a feint is to succeed in deceiving the enemy it must be pushed to the limit, I had used up almost as much of my store of sensibility as if it had been genuine. This fictitious parting scene ended by causing me almost as much grief as if it had been real, possibly because one of the actors, Albertine, by believing it to be real, had heightened the illusion for the other. We lived a day-to-day life which, however tedious, was still endurable, held down to earth by the ballast of habit and by that certainty that the next day, even if it should prove painful, would contain the presence of the other. And here was I foolishly destroying all that heavy life. I was destroying it, it is true, only in a fictitious fashion, but this was enough to make me wretched; perhaps because the sad words which we utter, even mendaciously, carry in themselves their sorrow and inject it deeply into us; perhaps because we realise that, by feigning farewells, we anticipate an hour which must inevitably come sooner or later; then we cannot be certain that we have not triggered off the mechanism which will make it strike. In every bluff there is an element of uncertainty, however small, as to what the person whom we are deceiving is going to do. What if this make-believe parting should lead to a real parting! One cannot consider the possibility, however unlikely it may seem, without a pang of anguish. One is doubly anxious, because the parting would then occur at the moment when it would be most intolerable, when one has been made to suffer by the woman who would be leaving us before having healed, or at least soothed, one’s pain. Finally, one no longer has the solid ground of habit upon which to rest, even in one’s sorrow. One has deliberately deprived oneself of it, one has given the present day an exceptional importance, detached it from the days before and after it; it floats without roots like a day of departure; one’s imagination, ceasing to be paralysed by habit, has awakened, one has suddenly added to one’s everyday love sentimental dreams which enormously enhance it, making indispensable to one a presence upon which in fact one is no longer certain that one can rely. No doubt it is precisely in order to assure oneself of that presence for the future that one has indulged in the make-believe of being able to dispense with it. But one has oneself been taken in by the game, one has begun to suffer anew because one has created something new and unfamiliar which thus resembles those cures that are destined in time to heal the malady from which one is suffering, but the first effects of which are to aggravate it.

  I had tears in my eyes, like those people who, alone in their rooms, imagining, in the wayward course of their meditations, the death of someone they love, conjure up so precise a picture of the grief that they would feel that they end by feeling it. So, multiplying my injunctions as to how Albertine should behave towards me after we had parted, I seemed to feel almost as much distress as though we had not been on the verge of a reconciliation. Besides, was I so certain that I could bring about this reconciliation, bring Albertine back to the idea of a shared life, and, if I succeeded for the time being, that, in her, the state of mind which this scene had dispelled would not revive? I felt that I was in control of the future but I did not quite believe it because I realised that this feeling was due merely to the fact that the future did not yet exist, and that thus I was not crushed by its inevitability. And while I lied, I was perhaps putting into my words more truth than I supposed. I had just had an example of this, when I told Albertine that I would quickly forget her; this was what had ind
eed happened to me in the case of Gilberte, whom I now refrained from going to see in order to avoid, not suffering, but an irksome duty. And certainly I had suffered when I wrote to Gilberte to tell her that I would not see her any more. Yet I saw Gilberte only from time to time. Whereas the whole of Albertine’s time belonged to me. And in love, it is easier to relinquish a feeling than to give up a habit. But all these painful words about our parting, if the strength to utter them had been given me because I knew them to be untrue, were on the other hand sincere on Albertine’s lips when I heard her exclaim: “Ah! I promise I shall never see you again. Anything sooner than see you cry like that, my darling. I don’t want to cause you pain. Since it must be, we’ll never meet again.” They were sincere, as they could not have been coming from me, because, since Albertine felt nothing stronger for me than friendship, on the one hand the renunciation that they promised cost her less, and on the other hand because my tears, which would have been so small a matter in a great love, seemed to her almost extraordinary and distressed her, transposed into the domain of that state of friendship in which she dwelt, a friendship greater than mine for her, to judge by what she had just said—what she had just said, because when two people part it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches, since love does not express itself directly—what she had just said and what was perhaps not altogether untrue, for the countless kindnesses of love may end by arousing, in the person who inspires without feeling it, an affection and a gratitude less selfish than the sentiment that provoked them, which, perhaps, after years of separation, when nothing of that sentiment remains in the former lover, will still persist in the beloved.

  There was only one moment when I felt a kind of hatred for her, which merely sharpened my need to hold on to her. Since, being exclusively jealous of Mlle Vinteuil that night, I thought of the Trocadéro with the greatest indifference (not only because I had sent her there to avoid the Verdurins, but even when I thought of Lea’s presence there, on account of which I had brought her back so that she should not meet her), I mentioned Lea’s name without thinking, and Albertine, at once on her guard, supposing that I had perhaps heard something more, took the initiative and exclaimed volubly, but without looking me straight in the face: “I know her very well. Some of my friends and I went to see her act last year, and after the performance we went behind to her dressing-room. She changed in front of us. It was most interesting.” Then my mind was compelled to relinquish Mlle Vinteuil and, in a despairing effort, in that fruitless hunt through the abysses of possible reconstructions, attached itself to the actress, to that evening when Albertine had gone to see her in her dressing-room. On the one hand, after all the oaths she had sworn to me, and in so truthful a tone, after her complete sacrifice of her freedom, how could I possibly believe that there was anything wrong in it? And yet, on the other hand, were not my suspicions antennae pointing in the direction of the truth, since if she had given up the Verdurins for my sake in order to go to the Trocadéro, nevertheless at the Verdurins’ Mlle Vinteuil had been expected, and at the Trocadéro, which she had moreover given up in order to go for a drive with me, there had been this Lea, who seemed to me to be disturbing me without cause and yet whom, in a remark which I had not extracted from her, she admitted having known on a larger scale than my fears had ever envisaged, in circumstances that were indeed dubious: for what could have induced her to go behind like that to her dressing-room? If I ceased to suffer on account of Mlle Vinteuil when I suffered because of Lea, those two tormentors of my day, it was either because of the inability of my mind to picture too many scenes at one time, or because of the intrusion of my nervous emotions of which my jealousy was but the echo. I could deduce from them only that she had no more belonged to Lea than to Mlle Vinteuil and that I believed in the Lea hypothesis only because she was now uppermost in my mind. But the fact that my jealousies subsided—to revive from time to time one after another—did not mean, either, that they did not correspond each to some truth of which I had had a foreboding, that of these various women I must not say to myself none, but all. I say a foreboding, for I could not project myself to all the points of time and space which I should have had to occupy; and besides, what instinct would have given me the sequence and the co-ordinates to enable me to surprise Albertine at such and such a time with Lea, or with the Balbec girls, or with that friend of Mme Bontemps whom she had brushed against, or with the girl on the tennis-court who had nudged her with her elbow, or with Mlle Vinteuil?

  “My little Albertine,” I replied, “it is very good of you to make me this promise. Anyhow, for the first few years at least, I shall avoid the places where I might meet you. You don’t know whether you’ll be going to Balbec this summer? Because in that case I should arrange not to go there myself.” Now, if I went on in this way, anticipating the future in my lying inventions, it was less with the object of frightening Albertine than that of distressing myself. As a man who at first has had no serious reason for losing his temper becomes completely intoxicated by the sound of his own voice and lets himself be carried away by a fury engendered not by his grievance but by his anger itself as it steadily grows, so I was sliding faster and faster down the slope of my wretchedness, towards an ever more profound despair, with the inertia of a man who feels the cold grip him, makes no effort to struggle against it, and even finds a sort of pleasure in shivering. And if, presently, I had the strength at last to pull myself together, to react, to go into reverse, as I had every intention of doing, it was not so much for the pain that Albertine had caused me by greeting me with such hostility on my return, as for the pain I had felt in imagining, in order to pretend to be settling them, the formalities of an imaginary separation, in foreseeing its consequences, that Albertine’s kiss, when the time came for her to bid me good-night, would have to console me now. In any case, it was important that this leave-taking should not come of its own accord from her, for that would have made more difficult the reversal whereby I would propose to her to abandon the idea of our parting. I therefore continued to remind her that the time to say good-night had long since come and gone, and this, by leaving the initiative to me, enabled me to put it off for a moment longer. And thus I interspersed the questions which I continued to put to Albertine with allusions to our exhaustion and the lateness of the hour.

  “I don’t know where I shall be going,” she replied to the last of these questions with a preoccupied air. “Perhaps I shall go to Touraine, to my aunt’s.” And this first plan that she suggested froze me as though it were beginning actually to put our final separation into effect. She looked round the room, at the pianola, the blue satin armchairs. “I still can’t get used to the idea that I shan’t see all this again, tomorrow, or the next day, or ever. Poor little room. It seems to me quite impossible; I can’t get it into my head.”

  “It had to be; you were unhappy here.”

  “No, I wasn’t at all unhappy, it’s now that I shall be unhappy.”

  “No, I assure you, it’s better for you.”

  “For you, perhaps!”

  I began to stare into space as though, tormented by a great uncertainty, I was struggling with an idea that had just occurred to me. Then, all of a sudden: “Listen, Albertine, you say that you’re happier here, that you’re now going to be unhappy.”

  “Why, of course.”

  “That appals me. Would you like us to try to carry on for a few weeks? Who knows, week by week, we may perhaps go on for a long time. You know that there are temporary arrangements which end by becoming permanent.”

  “Oh, it would be sweet of you!”

  “Only in that case it’s ridiculous of us to have made ourselves wretched like this over nothing for hours on end. It’s like making all the preparations for a long journey and then staying at home. I’m absolutely dead beat.”

  I sat her on my knee, took Bergotte’s manuscript which she so longed to have, and wrote on the cover: “To my little Albertine, in memory of a new lease of life.”


  “Now,” I said to her, “go and sleep until tomorrow, my darling, for you must be worn out.”

  “Most of all I’m very happy.”

  “Do you love me a bit?”

  “A hundred times more than ever.”

  I should have been wrong to be pleased with this little piece of play-acting. Even if it had stopped short of the sort of full-scale production I had given it, even if we had done no more than simply discuss a separation, it would have been serious enough. In conversations of this sort, we imagine that we are speaking not just insincerely, which is true, but freely. Whereas they are generally the first faint murmur of an unsuspected storm, whispered to us without our knowing it. In reality, what we express at such times is the opposite of our desire (which is to live for ever with the one we love), but also the impossibility of living together which is the cause of our daily suffering, a suffering preferred by us to that of a separation, which will, however, end by separating us in spite of ourselves. But not, as a rule, at once. More often than not it happens—this was not, as we shall see, my case with Albertine—that, some time after the words in which we did not believe, we put into action a vague attempt at a deliberate separation, not painful, temporary. We ask the woman, so that afterwards she may be happier in our company, so that we at the same time may momentarily escape from continual bouts of gloom and exhaustion, to go away without us, or to let us go away without her, for a few days—the first that we have spent away from her for a long time past, and something that we should have thought inconceivable. Very soon she returns to take her place by our fireside. Only this separation, short but effectuated, is not so arbitrarily decided upon, not so certainly the only one that we have in mind. The same bouts of gloom begin again, the same difficulty in living together makes itself felt, only a parting is no longer so difficult as before; we have begun by talking about it, and have then put it into practice amicably. But these are only premonitory symptoms which we have failed to recognise. Presently, the temporary and benign separation will be succeeded by the terrible and final separation for which, without knowing it, we have paved the way.