In Search of Lost Time, Volume V

by Marcel Proust

  If I was not in love with Albertine (and of this I could not be sure) then there was nothing extraordinary in the place that she occupied in my life: we live only with what we do not love, with what we have brought to live with us only in order to kill the intolerable love, whether it be for a woman, for a place, or again for a woman embodying a place. Indeed we should be terrified of beginning to love again if a new separation were to occur. I had not yet reached this stage with Albertine. Her lies, her admissions, left me to complete the task of elucidating the truth: her innumerable lies, because she was not content with merely lying, like everyone who imagines that he or she is loved, but was by nature, quite apart from this, a liar (and so inconsistent moreover that, even if she told me the truth every time about, for instance, what she thought of other people, she would say something different every time); her admissions, because, being so rare, so quickly cut short, they left between them, in so far as they concerned the past, huge blanks over the whole expanse of which I was obliged to retrace—and for that first of all to discover—her life.

  As for the present, so far as I could interpret the sibylline utterances of Françoise, it was not only on particular points but over a whole area that Albertine lied to me, and “one fine day” I would see what Françoise pretended to know, what she refused to tell me, what I dared not ask her. It was no doubt with the same jealousy that she had shown in the past with regard to Eulalie that Françoise would speak of the most unlikely things, but so vaguely that at most one could deduce therefrom the highly improbable insinuation that the poor captive (who was a lover of women) preferred marriage with somebody who did not appear to be me. If this had been so, how, in spite of her telepathic powers, could Françoise have come to hear of it? Certainly, Albertine’s statements could give me no definite enlightenment, for they were as different day by day as the colours of a spinning-top that has almost come to a standstill. However, it seemed that it was hatred more than anything else that impelled Françoise to speak. Not a day went by without her addressing to me, and I in my mother’s absence enduring, such speeches as:

  “To be sure, you’re very nice, and I shall never forget the debt of gratitude that I owe you” (this probably so that I might establish fresh claims upon her gratitude) “but the house has become infected ever since niceness brought in deceitfulness, ever since cleverness has been protecting the stupidest person that ever was seen, ever since refinement, good manners, wit, dignity in all things, the appearance and the reality of a prince, allow themselves to be dictated to and plotted against and me to be humiliated—me who’ve been forty years in the family—by vice, by everything that’s most vulgar and base.”

  What Françoise resented most about Albertine was having to take orders from somebody who was not one of ourselves, and also the strain of the additional housework which, affecting the health of our old servant (who would not, for all that, accept any help in the house, not being a “good for nothing”), in itself would have accounted for her irritability and her furious hatred. Certainly, she would have liked to see Albertine-Esther banished from the house. This was Françoise’s dearest wish. And, by consoling her, its fulfilment would in itself have given our old servant some rest. But to my mind there was more to it than this. So violent a hatred could have originated only in an over-strained body. And, more even than of consideration, Françoise was in need of sleep.

  Albertine went to take off her things and, to lose no time in finding out what I wanted to know, I seized the telephone receiver and invoked the implacable deities, but succeeded only in arousing their fury which expressed itself in the single word “Engaged.” Andrée was in fact engaged in talking to someone else. As I waited for her to finish her conversation, I wondered why it was—now that so many of our painters are seeking to revive the feminine portraits of the eighteenth century, in which the cleverly devised setting is a pretext for portraying expressions of expectation, sulkiness, interest, reverie—why it was that none of our modern Bouchers or Fragonards had yet painted, instead of “The Letter” or “The Harpsichord,” this scene which might be entitled “At the telephone,” in which there would come spontaneously to the lips of the listener a smile that is all the more genuine because it is conscious of being unobserved.

  Finally I got through to Andrée: “Are you coming to call for Albertine tomorrow?” I asked, and as I uttered Albertine’s name, I thought of the envy Swann had aroused in me when he had said to me, on the day of the Princesse de Guermantes’s party: “Come and see Odette,” and I had thought how potent, when all was said, was a Christian name which, in the eyes of the whole world including Odette herself, had on Swann’s lips alone this entirely possessive sense. Such a monopoly—summed up in a single word—over the whole existence of another person had appeared to me, whenever I was in love, to be sweet indeed! But in fact, when we are in a position to say it, either we no longer care, or else habit, while not blunting its tenderness, has changed its sweetness to bitterness.* I knew that I alone was in a position to say “Albertine” in that tone to Andrée. And yet, to Albertine, to Andrée, and to myself, I felt that I was nothing. And I realised the impossibility which love comes up against. We imagine that it has as its object a being that can be laid down in front of us, enclosed within a body. Alas, it is the extension of that being to all the points in space and time that it has occupied and will occupy. If we do not possess its contact with this or that place, this or that hour, we do not possess that being. But we cannot touch all these points. If only they were indicated to us, we might perhaps contrive to reach out to them. But we grope for them without finding them. Hence mistrust, jealousy, persecutions. We waste precious time on absurd clues and pass by the truth without suspecting it.

  But already one of the irascible deities with the breathtakingly agile handmaidens was becoming irritated, not because I was speaking but because I was saying nothing.

  “Come along, I’ve been holding the line for you all this time; I shall cut you off.”

  However, she did nothing of the sort but, evoking Andrée’s presence, enveloped it, like the great poet that a damsel of the telephone always is, in the atmosphere peculiar to the home, the district, the very life itself of Albertine’s friend.

  “Is that you?” asked Andrée, whose voice was projected towards me with an instantaneous speed by the goddess whose privilege it is to make sound more swift than light.

  “Listen,” I replied, “go wherever you like, anywhere, except to Mme Verdurin’s. You must at all cost keep Albertine away from there tomorrow.”

  “But that’s just where she’s supposed to be going.”

  “Ah!”

  But I was obliged to break off the conversation for a moment and to make menacing gestures, for if Françoise continued—as though it were something as unpleasant as vaccination or as dangerous as the aeroplane—to refuse to learn to use the telephone, whereby she would have spared us the trouble of conversations which she might intercept without any harm, on the other hand she would at once come into the room whenever I was engaged in a conversation so private that I was particularly anxious to keep it from her ears. When she had left the room at last, not without lingering to take away various objects that had been lying there since the previous day and might perfectly well have been left there for an hour longer, and to put on to the fire a log made quite superfluous by the burning heat generated in me by the intruder’s presence and my fear of finding myself “cut off” by the operator, “I’m sorry,” I said to Andrée, “I was interrupted. Is it absolutely certain that she has to go to the Verdurins’ tomorrow?”

  “Absolutely, but I can tell her that you don’t want her to.”

  “No, not at all, but I might possibly come with you.”

  “Ah!” said Andrée, in a voice that sounded annoyed and somehow alarmed by my audacity, which was incidentally fortified as a result.

  “Well then, good-night, and please forgive me for disturbing you for nothing.”

  “Not at a
ll,” said Andrée, and (since, now that the telephone has come into general use, a decorative ritual of polite phrases has grown up round it, as round the tea-tables of the past) she added: “It’s been a great pleasure to hear your voice.”

  I might have said the same, and with greater truth than Andrée, for I had been deeply affected by the sound of her voice, having never noticed before that it was so different from the voices of other people. Then I recalled other voices still, women’s voices especially, some of them slowed down by the precision of a question and by mental concentration, others made breathless, even interrupted at moments, by the lyrical flow of what they were relating; I recalled one by one the voices of all the girls I had known at Balbec, then Gilberte’s, then my grandmother’s, then Mme de Guermantes’s; I found them all dissimilar, moulded by a speech peculiar to each of them, each playing on a different instrument, and I thought to myself how thin must be the concert performed in paradise by the three or four angel musicians of the old painters, when I saw, mounting to the throne of God by tens, by hundreds, by thousands, the harmonious and multiphonic salutation of all the Voices. I did not leave the telephone without thanking, in a few propitiatory words, the goddess who reigns over the speed of sound for having kindly exercised on behalf of my humble words a power which made them a hundred times more rapid than thunder. But my thanksgiving received no other response than that of being cut off.

  When Albertine came back to my room, she was wearing a black satin dress which had the effect of making her seem paler, of turning her into the pallid, intense Parisian woman, etiolated by lack of fresh air, by the atmosphere of crowds and perhaps by the practice of vice, whose eyes seemed the more uneasy because they were not brightened by any colour in her cheeks.

  “Guess,” I said to her, “who I’ve just been talking to on the telephone. Andrée!”

  “Andrée?” exclaimed Albertine in a loud, astonished, excited voice that so simple a piece of intelligence hardly seemed to call for. “I hope she remembered to tell you that we met Mme Verdurin the other day.”

  “Mme Verdurin? I don’t remember,” I replied as though I were thinking of something else, in order to appear indifferent to this meeting and not to betray Andrée who had told me where Albertine was going next day. But how could I tell whether Andrée was not herself betraying me, whether she would not tell Albertine tomorrow that I had asked her to prevent her at all costs from going to the Verdurins’, and whether she had not already revealed to her that I had on several occasions made similar recommendations? She had assured me that she had never repeated anything, but the value of this assertion was counterbalanced in my mind by the impression that for some time past Albertine’s face had ceased to show the trust that she had placed in me for so long.*

  Suffering, when we are in love, ceases from time to time, but only to resume in a different form. We weep to see the beloved no longer respond to us with those bursts of affection, those amorous advances of earlier days; we suffer even more when, having relinquished them with us, she resumes them with others; then, from this suffering, we are distracted by a new and still more agonising pang, the suspicion that she has lied to us about how she spent the previous evening, when she was no doubt unfaithful to us; this suspicion in turn is dispelled, and we are soothed by our mistress’s affectionate kindness; but then a forgotten word comes back to us; we had been told that she was ardent in moments of pleasure, whereas we have always found her calm; we try to picture to ourselves these passionate frenzies with others, we feel how very little we are to her, we observe an air of boredom, longing, melancholy while we are talking, we observe like a black sky the slovenly clothes she puts on when she is with us, keeping for other people the dresses with which she used to flatter us. If, on the contrary, she is affectionate, what joy for a moment! But when we see that little tongue stuck out as though in invitation, we think of those to whom that invitation was so often addressed that even perhaps with me, without her thinking of those others, it had remained for Albertine, by force of long habit, an automatic signal. Then the feeling that she is bored by us returns. But suddenly this pain is reduced to nothing when we think of the unknown evil element in her life, of the places, impossible to identify, where she has been, where she still goes perhaps during the hours when we are not with her, if indeed she is not planning to live there altogether, those places in which she is separated from us, does not belong to us, is happier than when she is with us. Such are the revolving searchlights of jealousy.

  Jealousy is moreover a demon that cannot be exorcised, but constantly reappears in new incarnations. Even if we could succeed in exterminating them all, in keeping the beloved for ever, the Spirit of Evil would then adopt another form, more pathetic still, despair at having obtained fidelity only by force, despair at not being loved.

  Tender and sweet though Albertine was on certain evenings, she no longer had any of those spontaneous impulses which I remembered from Balbec when she used to say “How very nice you are, really!” and her whole heart seemed to go out to me unrestrained by any of those grievances which she now felt and which she kept to herself because she doubtless considered them irremediable, impossible to forget, unavowable, but which nevertheless created between us a significant verbal prudence on her part or an impassable barrier of silence.

  “And may one be allowed to know why you telephoned to Andrée?”

  “To ask whether she had any objection to my joining you tomorrow and paying the Verdurins the visit I’ve been promising them since La Raspèliere.”

  “Just as you like. But I warn you, there’s an appalling fog this evening, and it’s sure to last over tomorrow. I mention it because I shouldn’t like you to make yourself ill. Personally, I need hardly say that I’d love you to come with us. However,” she added with a thoughtful air, “I’m not at all sure that I’ll go to the Verdurins’. They’ve been so kind to me that I ought, really … Next to you, they’ve been nicer to me than anybody, but there are some things about them that I don’t quite like. I simply must go to the Bon Marché or the Trois-Quartiers and get a white bodice to wear with this dress which is really too black.”

  To allow Albertine to go by herself into a big shop crowded with people perpetually brushing against one, provided with so many exits that a woman can always say that when she came out she could not find her carriage which was waiting further along the street, was something that I was quite determined never to consent to, but the thought of it made me extremely unhappy. And yet it did not occur to me that I ought long ago to have ceased to see Albertine, for she had entered, for me, upon that lamentable period in which a person, scattered in space and time, is no longer a woman but a series of events on which we can throw no light, a series of insoluble problems, a sea which, like Xerxes, we scourge with rods in an absurd attempt to punish it for what it has engulfed. Once this period has begun, we are perforce vanquished. Happy are they who understand this in time not to prolong unduly a futile, exhausting struggle, hemmed in on every side by the limits of the imagination, a struggle in which jealousy plays so sorry a part that the same man who, once upon a time, if the eyes of the woman who was always by his side rested for an instant upon another man, imagined an intrigue and suffered endless torments, now resigns himself to allowing her to go out by herself, sometimes with the man whom he knows to be her lover, preferring to the unknowable this torture which at least he knows! It is a question of the rhythm to be adopted, which afterwards one follows from force of habit. Neurotics who could never stay away from a dinner-party will eventually take rest cures which never seem to them to last long enough; women who recently were still of easy virtue live in penitence. Jealous lovers who, to keep an eye on the woman they loved, cut short their hours of sleep, deprived themselves of rest, now feeling that her desires, the world so vast and secret, and time are too much for them, allow her to go out without them, then to travel, and finally separate from her. Jealousy thus perishes for want of nourishment and has survived so long only
by clamouring incessantly for fresh food. I was still a long way from this state.

  I was now at liberty to go out with Albertine as often as I wished. As there had recently sprung up round Paris a number of aerodromes, which are to aeroplanes what harbours are to ships, and as, ever since the day when, on the way to La Raspelière, that almost mythological encounter with an airman, at whose passage overhead my horse had reared, had been to me like a symbol of liberty, I often chose to end our day’s excursion—with the ready approval of Albertine, a passionate lover of every form of sport—at one of these aerodromes. We went there, she and I, attracted by that incessant stir of departure and arrival which gives so much charm to a stroll along a jetty, or merely along a beach, to those who love the sea, and to loitering about an “aviation centre” to those who love the sky. From time to time, amid the repose of the machines that lay inert and as though at anchor, we would see one being laboriously pulled by a number of mechanics, as a boat is dragged across the sand at the bidding of a tourist who wishes to go for an outing on the sea. Then the engine was started, the machine ran along the ground, gathered speed, until finally, all of a sudden, at right angles, it rose slowly, in the braced and as it were static ecstasy of a horizontal speed suddenly transformed into a majestic, vertical ascent. Albertine could not contain her joy, and would demand explanations of the mechanics who, now that the machine was in the air, were strolling back to the sheds. The passenger, meanwhile, was covering mile after mile; the huge skiff, upon which our eyes remained fixed, was now no more than a barely visible dot in the sky, a dot which, however, would gradually recover its solidity, its size, its volume, when, as the time allowed for the excursion drew to an end, the moment came for landing. And we watched with envy, Albertine and I, as he sprang to earth, the passenger who had gone up like that to enjoy in the solitary expanses of the open sky the calm and limpidity of evening. Then, whether from the aerodrome or from some museum or church that we had been visiting, we would return home together for dinner. And yet I did not return home calmed, as I used to be at Balbec by less frequent excursions which I rejoiced to see extend over a whole afternoon and would afterwards contemplate, standing out like clustering flowers, against the rest of Albertine’s life as against an empty sky beneath which one muses pleasantly, without thinking. Albertine’s time did not belong to me then in such ample quantities as today. Yet it had seemed to me then to belong to me much more, because I then took into account—my love rejoicing in them as in the bestowal of a favour—only the hours that she spent with me, whereas now—my jealousy searching anxiously among them for the possibility of a betrayal—it was only those hours that she spent apart from me.