Presently I would be told that she had returned; though there was a standing order that her name was not to be mentioned if I was not alone, and if, for instance, I had Bloch in the room with me, I would compel him to stay a little longer so that there should be no risk of his meeting my mistress in the hall. For I concealed the fact that she was staying in the house, and even that I ever saw her there, so afraid was I that one of my friends might become infatuated with her, and wait for her outside, or that in a momentary encounter in the passage or the hall she might make a signal and fix a rendezvous. Then I would hear the rustle of Albertine’s skirt on her way to her own room, for, out of tact and also no doubt in the spirit in which, when we used to go to dinner at La Raspelière, she went out to great lengths to ensure that I should have no cause for jealousy, she did not come to my room when she knew that I was not alone. But it was not only for this reason, as I suddenly realised. I remembered; I had known a different Albertine then all at once she had changed into another, the Albertine of today. And for this change I could hold no one responsible but myself. Everything that she would have admitted to me readily and willingly when we were simply good friends had ceased to flow from her as soon as she had suspected that I was in love with her, or, without perhaps thinking of the name of Love, had divined the existence in me of an inquisitorial sentiment that desires to know, yet suffers from knowing, and seeks to learn still more. Ever since that day, she had concealed everything from me. She kept away from my room whether she thought my visitor was male or (as was not often the case) female, she whose eyes used at one time to sparkle so brightly whenever I mentioned a girl: “You must try and get her to come here. I’d be amused to meet her.” “But she’s what you call a bad type.” “Precisely, that’ll make it all the more fun.” At that moment, I might perhaps have learned all that there was to know. And even when, in the little Casino, she had withdrawn her breasts from Andrée’s, I believe that this was due not to my presence but to that of Cottard, who was capable, she doubtless thought, of giving her a bad reputation. And yet, even then, she had already begun to “freeze,” confiding words no longer issued from her lips, her gestures became guarded. Then she had rid herself of everything that might have disturbed me. To those parts of her life of which I knew nothing she ascribed a character the inoffensiveness of which my ignorance conspired to accentuate. And now the transformation was completed; she went straight to her room if I was not alone, not merely from fear of disturbing me, but in order to show me that she was not interested in other people. There was one thing alone that she would never again do for me, that she would have done only in the days when it would have left me indifferent, that she would then have done without hesitation for that very reason, namely, confess. I should be for ever reduced, like a judge, to drawing uncertain conclusions from verbal indiscretions that were perhaps explicable without postulating guilt. And always she would feel that I was jealous, and judging her.
Our engagement was assuming the aspect of a criminal trial, and gave her the timorousness of a guilty party. Now she changed the conversation whenever it turned on people, men or women, who were not of mature years. It was when she had not yet suspected that I was jealous of her that I should have asked her to tell me what I wanted to know. One ought always to take advantage of that period. It is then that one’s mistress tells one about her pleasures and even the means by which she conceals them from other people. She would no longer have admitted to me now as she had admitted at Balbec, partly because it was true, partly by way of apology for not making her affection for me more evident, for I had already begun to weary her even then, and she had gathered from my kindness to her that she need not show as much affection to me as to others in order to obtain more from me than from them—she would no longer have admitted to me now as she had admitted then: “I think it stupid to let people see who one loves. I’m just the opposite: as soon as a person attracts me, I pretend not to take any notice. In that way, nobody knows anything about it.”
What, it was the same Albertine of today, with her pretensions to frankness and indifference to everyone, who had told me that! She would never have expressed such a rule of conduct to me now! She contented herself, when she was chatting to me, with applying it by saying of some girl or other who might cause me anxiety: “Oh, I don’t know, I didn’t even look at her, she’s too insignificant.” And from time to time, to anticipate discoveries which I might make, she would proffer the sort of confessions whose very tone, before one knows the reality which they are intended to distort, to exculpate, already betrays them as lies.
As I listened to Albertine’s footsteps with the consoling pleasure of thinking that she would not be going out again that evening, I marvelled at the thought that, for this girl whom at one time I had supposed that I could never possibly succeed in knowing, returning home every day actually meant returning to my home. The fugitive and fragmentary pleasure, compounded of mystery and sensuality, which I had felt at Balbec, on the night when she had come to sleep at the hotel, had been completed and stabilised, filling my hitherto empty dwelling with a permanent store of domestic, almost conjugal, ease that radiated even into the passages and upon which all my senses, either actively or, when I was alone, in imagination as I awaited her return, peacefully fed. When I had heard the door of Albertine’s room shut behind her, if I had a friend with me I made haste to get rid of him, not leaving him until I was quite sure that he was on the staircase, down which I might even escort him for a few steps.
Coming towards me in the passage, Albertine would greet me with: “I say, while I’m taking off my things, I shall send you Andrée. She’s looked in for a minute to say hello.” And still swathed in the big grey veil, falling from her chinchilla toque, which I had given her at Balbec, she would turn from, me and go back to her room, as though she had guessed that Andrée, whom I had entrusted with the duty of watching over her, would presently, by relating their day’s adventures in full detail, mentioning their meeting with some person of their acquaintance, impart a certain clarity of outline to the vague regions in which the day-long excursion had run its course and which I had been incapable of imagining.
Andrée’s defects had become more marked; she was no longer as pleasant a companion as when I first knew her. One noticed now, on the surface, a sort of sour uneasiness, ready to gather like a swell on the sea, merely if I happened to mention something that gave pleasure to Albertine and myself. This did not prevent Andrée from being nicer to me and liking me better—and I had frequent proof of this—than other more amiable people. But the slightest look of happiness on a person’s face, if it was not caused by herself, gave a shock to her nerves, as unpleasant as that given by a banging door. She could accept sufferings in which she had no part, but not pleasures; if she saw that I was unwell, she was distressed, was sorry for me, would have stayed to nurse me. But if I displayed a satisfaction as trifling as that of stretching myself with a blissful expression as I shut a book, saying: “Ah! I’ve just spent two delightful hours reading. What an enjoyable book!,” these words, which would have given pleasure to my mother, to Albertine, to Saint-Loup, provoked in Andrée a sort of disapprobation, perhaps simply a sort of nervous discomfort. My satisfactions caused her an irritation which she was unable to conceal. These defects were supplemented by others of a more serious nature; one day when I mentioned the young man so learned in matters of racing, gambling and golf, so uneducated in everything else, whom I had met with the little band at Balbec, Andrée said with a sneer: “You know that his father is a swindler, he only just missed being prosecuted. They’re swaggering now more than ever, but I tell everybody about it. I should love them to bring an action for slander against me. I’d have something to say in the witness-box!” Her eyes sparkled. In fact I discovered that the father had done nothing wrong, and that Andrée knew this as well as anybody. But she had felt spurned by the son, had looked around for something that would embarrass him, put him to shame, and had concocted a whole stri
ng of evidence which she imagined herself called upon to give in court, and, by dint of repeating the details to herself, was perhaps herself unsure whether they were true or not. And so, in her present state (and even without her brief, mad hatreds), I should not have wished to see her, if only because of the malevolent touchiness that surrounded with a sour and frigid carapace her warmer and better nature. But the information which she alone could give me about my mistress interested me too much for me to be able to neglect so rare an opportunity of acquiring it.
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 wh
ile 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 may 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.”
In Search of Lost Time, Volume V Page 7
