In Search of Lost Time, Volume V

by Marcel Proust

  Albertine had never told me that she suspected me of being jealous of her, preoccupied with everything that she did. The only words we had exchanged—fairly long ago, it must be said—on the subject of jealousy seemed to prove the opposite. I remembered that, on a fine moonlight evening towards the beginning of our relationship, on one of the first occasions when I had accompanied her home and would have been just as glad not to do so and to leave her in order to run after other girls, I had said to her: “You know, if I’m offering to take you home, it’s not from jealousy; if you have anything else to do, I shall slip discreetly away.” And she had replied: “Oh, I know quite well that you aren’t jealous and that you don’t care a fig, but I’ve nothing else to do except to stay with you.” Another occasion was at La Raspelière, when M. de Charlus, not without casting a covert glance at Morel, had made a display of friendly gallantry towards Albertine; I had said to her: “Well, he gave you a good hug, I hope.” And as I had added half ironically: “I suffered all the torments of jealousy,” Albertine, employing the language proper either to the vulgar background from which she sprang or to that other, more vulgar still, which she frequented, replied: “What a kidder you are! I know quite well you’re not jealous. For one thing, you told me so, and besides, it’s perfectly obvious, get along with you!” She had never told me since then that she had changed her mind; but she must have formed a number of fresh ideas on the subject, which she concealed from me but which an accident might betray willy-nilly, for that evening when, on reaching home, after going to fetch her from her own room and taking her to mine, I said to her (with a certain awkwardness which I did not myself understand, for I had indeed told Albertine that I was going to pay a call and had said that I did not know where, perhaps on Mme de Villeparisis, perhaps on Mme de Guermantes, perhaps on Mme de Cambremer; it is true that I had not actually mentioned the Verdurins): “Guess where I’ve been—at the Verdurins’,” I had barely had time to utter the words before Albertine, a look of utter consternation on her face, had answered me in words which seemed to explode of their own accord with a force which she was unable to contain: “I thought as much.”

  “I didn’t know that you’d be annoyed by my going to see the Verdurins.” (It is true that she had not told me that she was annoyed, but it was obvious. It is true also that I had not said to myself that she would be annoyed. And yet, faced with the explosion of her wrath, as with one of those events which a sort of retrospective second sight makes us imagine that we have already experienced in the past, it seemed to me that I could never have expected anything else.)

  “Annoyed? What difference does it make to me? I couldn’t care less. Wasn’t Mlle Vinteuil to be there?”

  Beside myself at these words, “You never told me you’d met her the other day,” I said to her, to show her that I was better informed than she knew.

  Believing that the person whom I reproached her for having met without telling me was Mme Verdurin and not, as I meant to imply, Mlle Vinteuil, “Did I meet her?” she inquired with a pensive air, addressing both herself, as though she were seeking to collect her fugitive memories, and me, as though it was I who could have enlightened her; and no doubt in order that I might indeed say what I knew, and perhaps also in order to gain time before making a difficult reply. But I was far less preoccupied with the thought of Mlle Vinteuil than with a fear which had already crossed my mind but which now gripped me more forcibly. Indeed I imagined that Mme Verdurin had purely and simply invented the story of having expected Mlle Vinteuil and her friend, in order to enhance her own prestige, so that I was quite calm on arriving home. Only Albertine, by saying: “Wasn’t Mlle Vinteuil to be there?” had shown me that I had not been mistaken in my original suspicion; but anyhow my mind was at rest in that quarter as far as the future was concerned, since by giving up her plan of visiting the Verdurins’ Albertine had sacrificed Mlle Vinteuil for my sake.

  “Besides,” I said to her angrily, “there are plenty of other things which you hide from me, even the most trivial things, such as for instance when you went for three days to Balbec—I mention it by the way.” I had added the words “I mention it by the way” as a complement to “even the most trivial things” so that if Albertine said to me “What was there wrong about my trip to Balbec?” I might be able to answer: “Why, I’ve quite forgotten. The things people tell me get muddled up in my mind, I attach so little importance to them.” And indeed if I referred to that three-day excursion she had made with the chauffeur to Balbec, from where her postcards had reached me after so long a delay, I did so purely at random, and regretted that I had chosen so bad an example, for in fact, as they had barely had time to go there and return, it was certainly the one excursion in which there had not even been time for the interpolation of a meeting that was at all protracted with anybody. But Albertine supposed, from what I had just said, that I knew the real truth and had merely concealed my knowledge from her. She had in any case been convinced, for some time past, that in one way or another, by having her followed, or in some such fashion, I was, as she had said the week before to Andrée, better informed about her life than she was herself. And so she interrupted me with a wholly unnecessary admission, for certainly I suspected nothing of what she now told me, and I was on the other hand shattered by it, so vast can the disparity be between the truth which a liar has travestied and the idea which, from her lies, the man who is in love with the said liar has formed of that truth. Scarcely had I uttered the words: “When you went for three days to Balbec, I mention it by the way,” than Albertine, cutting me short, declared to me as something quite natural: “You mean I never went to Balbec at all? Of course I didn’t! And I’ve always wondered why you pretended to believe that I did. All the same, there was no harm in it. The driver had some business of his own for three days. He didn’t dare to mention it to you. And so out of kindness to him (it’s typical of me, and I’m the one who always gets the blame), I invented a trip to Balbec. He simply put me down at Auteuil, at the house of a girlfriend of mine in the Rue de l’Assomption, where I spent the three days bored to tears. You see it’s not very serious, no great harm done. I did begin to think that you perhaps knew all about it, when I saw how you laughed when the postcards began to arrive, a week late. I quite see that it was absurd, and that it would have been better not to send any cards at all. But that wasn’t my fault. I’d bought them in advance and given them to the driver before he dropped me at Auteuil, and then the fathead put them in his pocket and forgot about them instead of sending them on in an envelope to a friend of his near Balbec who was to forward them to you. I kept on imagining they were about to arrive. He only remembered them after five days, and instead of telling me, the idiot sent them on at once to Balbec. When he did tell me, I really let him have it, I can tell you! To go and worry you unnecessarily, the great fool, as a reward for my shutting myself up for three whole days, so that he could go and look after his family affairs! I didn’t even venture out into Auteuil for fear of being seen. The only time I did go out, I was dressed as a man, just for a joke, really. And it was just my luck that the first person I came across was your Yid friend Bloch. But I don’t believe it was from him that you learned that my trip to Balbec never existed except in my imagination, for he seemed not to recognise me.”

  I did not know what to say, not wishing to appear surprised, and shattered by all these lies. A feeling of horror, which gave me no desire to turn Albertine out of the house, far from it, was combined with a strong inclination to burst into tears. This last was caused not by the lie itself and by the annihilation of everything that I had so firmly believed to be true that I felt as though I were in a town that had been razed to the ground, where not a house remained standing, where the bare soil was merely heaped with rubble—but by the melancholy thought that, during those three days when she had been bored to tears in her friend’s house at Auteuil, Albertine had never once felt the desire, that the idea had perhaps not even occurred to her, to come and pay me a
visit one day on the quiet, or to send a message asking me to go and see her at Auteuil. But I had no time to give myself up to these reflexions. Whatever happened, I did not wish to appear surprised. I smiled with the air of man who knows far more than he is prepared to say: “But that’s only one thing out of hundreds. For instance, only this evening, at the Verdurins’, I learned that what you had told me about Mlle Vinteuil …”

  Albertine gazed at me fixedly with a tormented air, seeking to read in my eyes how much I knew. Now, what I knew and what I was about to tell her was the truth about Mlle Vinteuil. It is true that it was not at the Verdurins’ that I had learned it, but at Montjouvain long ago. But since I had always refrained, deliberately, from mentioning it to Albertine, I could now appear to have learned it only this evening. And I had a feeling almost of joy—after having felt such anguish in the little train—at possessing this memory of Montjouvain, which I would postdate, but which would nevertheless be the unanswerable proof, a crushing blow to Albertine. This time at least, I had no need to “seem to know” and to “make Albertine talk”: I knew, I had seen through the lighted window at Montjouvain. It had been all very well for Albertine to tell me that her relations with Mlle Vinteuil and her friend had been perfectly pure, but how could she, when I swore to her (and swore without lying) that I knew the habits of these two women, how could she maintain any longer that, having lived in daily intimacy with them, calling them “my big sisters,” she had not been the object of approaches on their part which would have made her break with them, if on the contrary she had not acquiesced in them? But I had no time to tell her what I knew. Albertine, imagining, as in the case of the pretended excursion to Balbec, that I had learned the truth either from Mlle Vinteuil, if she had been at the Verdurins’, or simply from Mme Verdurin herself, who might have mentioned her to Mlle Vinteuil, did not allow me the chance to speak but made a confession, precisely contrary to what I should have imagined, which nevertheless, by showing me that she had never ceased to lie to me, caused me perhaps just as much pain (especially since I was no longer, as I said a moment ago, jealous of Mlle Vinteuil). Taking the initiative, she spoke as follows: “You mean that you found out this evening that I lied to you when I pretended that I had been more or less brought up by Mlle Vinteuil’s friend. It’s true that I did lie to you a little. But I felt so looked down on by you, and I saw that you were so keen on that man Vinteuil’s music, that as one of my schoolfriends—this is true, I swear to you—had been a friend of Mlle Vinteuil’s friend, I stupidly thought that I might make myself seem interesting to you by inventing the story that I had known the girls quite well. I felt that I bored you, that you thought me a goose; I thought that if I told you that those people used to see a lot of me, that I could easily tell you all sorts of things about Vinteuil’s work, you’d think more highly of me, that it would bring us closer together. When I lie to you, it’s always out of affection for you. And it needed this fatal Verdurin party to open your eyes to the truth, which perhaps they exaggerated a bit, incidentally. I bet Mlle Vinteuil’s friend told you that she didn’t know me. She met me at least twice at my friend’s house. But of course, I’m not smart enough for people who’ve become so famous. They prefer to say that they’ve never met me.”

  Poor Albertine, when she had thought that to tell me that she had been on such intimate terms with Mlle Vinteuil’s friend would postpone her being “ditched,” would bring her closer to me, she had, as so often happens, reached the truth by a different road from that which she had intended to take. Her showing herself better informed about music than I had supposed would never have prevented me from breaking with her that evening in the little train; and yet it was indeed that speech, which she had made with that object, that had immediately brought about far more than the impossibility of a rupture. Only she made an error of interpretation, not about the effect which that speech was to have, but about the cause by virtue of which it was to produce that effect—that cause being my discovery not of her musical culture but of her disreputable associations. What had abruptly drawn me closer to her—far more, fused indissolubly with her—was not the expectation of a pleasure—and pleasure is too strong a word, a mildly agreeable interest—but the grip of an agonising pain.

  Once again I had to be careful not to keep too long a silence which might have led her to suppose that I was surprised. And so, touched by the discovery that she was so modest and had thought herself despised in the Verdurin circle, I said to her tenderly: “But, my darling, I’d gladly give you several hundred francs to let you go and play the fashionable lady wherever you please and invite M. and Mme Verdurin to a grand dinner.”

  Alas! Albertine was several persons in one. The most mysterious, most simple, most loathsome of these revealed herself in the answer which she made me with an air of disgust, and the exact words of which, to tell the truth, I could not quite make out (even the opening words, for she did not finish her sentence). I did not succeed in reconstituting them until some time later when I had guessed what was in her mind. We hear things retrospectively when we have understood them.

  “Thank you for nothing! Spend money on them! I’d a great deal rather you left me free for once in a way to go and get myself b … (me faire casser) …”

  At once her face flushed crimson, she looked appalled, and she put her hand over her mouth as though she could have thrust back the words which she had just uttered and which I had quite failed to catch.

  “What did you say, Albertine?”

  “Nothing, I was half asleep and talking to myself.”

  “Not a bit of it, you were wide awake.”

  “I was thinking about asking the Verdurins to dinner, it’s very good of you.”

  “No, I mean what you said just now.”

  She gave me endless versions, none of which tallied in the least, not simply with her words which, having been interrupted, remained obscure to me, but with the interruption itself and the sudden flush that had accompanied it.

  “Come, my darling, that’s not what you were going to say, otherwise why did you stop short?”

  “Because I felt that my request was presumptuous.”

  “What request?”

  “To be allowed to give a dinner-party.”

  “No, no, that’s not it, there’s no need for ceremony between you and me.”

  “Indeed there is, we ought never to take advantage of the people we love. In any case, I swear to you that that was all.”

  On the one hand it was still impossible for me to doubt her sworn word; on the other hand her explanations did not satisfy my reason. I continued to press her. “Anyhow, you might at least have the courage to finish what you were saying, you stopped short at casser.”

  “No, leave me alone!”

  “But why?”

  “Because it’s dreadfully vulgar, I’d be ashamed to say such a thing in front of you. I don’t know what I was thinking of. The words—I don’t even know what they mean, I heard them used in the street one day by some very low people—just came into my head without rhyme or reason. It had nothing to do with me or anybody else, I was simply dreaming aloud.”

  I felt that I would extract nothing more from Albertine. She had lied to me when she had sworn a moment ago that what had cut her short had been a social fear of being over-presumptuous, since it had now become the shame of using a vulgar expression in front of me. Now this was certainly another lie. For when we were alone together there was no expression too perverse, no word too coarse for us to utter during our embraces. However, it was useless to insist at that moment. But my memory remained obsessed by the word casser. Albertine often used expressions such as casser du bois or casser du sucre, meaning “to run someone down,” or would say Ah! ce que je lui en ai cassé!, meaning “I fairly gave it to him!” But she would say this quite freely in my presence, and if it was this that she had meant to say, why had she suddenly stopped short, why had she blushed so deeply, placed her hands over her mouth, tried to refashion her sent
ence, and, when she saw that I had heard the word casser, offered a false explanation? Meanwhile, abandoning the pursuit of an interrogation from which I would get no response, the best thing to do was to appear to have lost interest in the matter, and, retracing my thoughts to Albertine’s reproaches to me for having gone to the Mistress’s, I said to her, somewhat clumsily, making indeed a sort of stupid excuse for my conduct: “Actually I’d been meaning to ask you to come to the Verdurins’ party this evening,” a remark that was doubly maladroit, for if I meant it, since I saw her all the time, why wouldn’t I have suggested it? Furious at my lie and emboldened by my timidity: “You could have gone on asking me for a thousand years,” she said, “and I’d never have consented. Those people have always been against me, they’ve done everything they could to mortify me. There was nothing I didn’t do for Mme Verdurin at Balbec, and look at the thanks I get. If she summoned me to her deathbed, I wouldn’t go. There are some things it’s impossible to forgive. As for you, it’s the first time you’ve behaved badly to me. When Françoise told me you’d gone out (and she enjoyed telling me all right), I’d sooner have had my skull split down the middle. I tried not to show any sign, but never in my life have I felt so grossly insulted.”

  But while she was speaking there continued within me, in that curiously alive and creative sleep of the unconscious (a sleep in which the things that have barely touched us succeed in carving an impression, in which our sleeping hands take hold of the key that turns the lock, the key for which we have sought in vain), the quest for what it was that she had meant by that interrupted sentence, the missing end of which I was so anxious to know. And all of a sudden an appalling word, of which I had never dreamed, burst upon me: le pot.22 I cannot say that it came to me in a single flash, as when, in a long passive submission to an incomplete recollection, while one tries gently and cautiously to unfold it, one remains ravelled in it, glued to it. No, in contrast to my habitual method of recall, there were, I think, two parallel lines of search: the first took into account not merely Albertine’s words, but her look of exasperation when I had offered her a sum of money with which to give a grand dinner, a look which seemed to say: “Thank you, the idea of spending money upon things that bore me, when without money I could do things that I enjoy doing!” And it was perhaps the memory of the look she had given me that made me alter my method in order to discover the end of her unfinished sentence. Until then I had been hypnotised by the last word, casser. What was it she meant by break? Casser du bois? No. Du sucre? No. Break, break, break. And all at once her look, and her shrug, when I had suggested that she should give a dinner-party sent me back to the words that had preceded. And immediately I saw that she had not simply said casser but me faire casser. Horror! It was this that she would have preferred. Twofold horror! For even the vilest of prostitutes, who consents to such a thing, or even desires it, does not use that hideous expression to the man who indulges in it. She would feel it too degrading. To a woman alone, if she loves women, she might say it, to excuse herself for giving herself presently to a man. Albertine had not been lying when she told me that she was half dreaming. Her mind elsewhere, forgetting that she was with me, impulsively she had shrugged her shoulders and begun to speak as she would have spoken to one of those women, perhaps to one of my budding girls. And abruptly recalled to reality, crimson with shame, pushing back into her mouth what she was about to say, desperately ashamed, she had refused to utter another word. I had not a moment to lose if I was not to let her see the despair I was in. But already, after my first impulse of rage, the tears were coming to my eyes. As at Balbec, on the night that followed her revelation of her friendship with the Vinteuil pair, I must immediately invent a plausible reason for my grief, and one that was at the same time capable of having so profound an effect on Albertine as to give me a few days’ respite before coming to a decision. And so, just as she was telling me that she had never felt so affronted as when she had heard that I had gone out alone, that she would sooner have died than be told this by Françoise, and just as, irritated by her absurd susceptibility, I was on the point of telling her that what I had done was trivial, that there was nothing wounding to her in my having gone out, my unconscious parallel search for what she had meant to say had come to fruition, and the despair into which my discovery plunged me could not be completely hidden, so that instead of defending, I accused myself. “My little Albertine,” I said to her in a gentle voice which was drowned in my first tears, “I could tell you that you’re mistaken, that what I did this evening was nothing, but I should be lying; it’s you who are right, you have realised the truth, my poor sweet, which is that six months ago, three months ago, when I was still so fond of you, I should never have done such a thing. It’s a mere nothing, and yet it’s enormous, because of the immense change in my heart of which it is the sign. And since you have detected this change which I hoped to conceal from you, I feel impelled to say this to you: My little Albertine” (I went on in a tone of profound gentleness and sorrow), “don’t you see that the life you’re leading here is boring for you. It is better that we should part, and as the best partings are those that are effected most swiftly, I ask you, to cut short the great sorrow that I am bound to feel, to say good-bye to me tonight and to leave in the morning without my seeing you again, while I’m asleep.”