In Search of Lost Time, Volume V

by Marcel Proust

  “Yes,” replied Mme Bontemps, “Albertine is always ready to go to the country. Three years ago, for instance, she simply had to go every day to the Buttes-Chaumont.” At the name Buttes-Chaumont, a place where Albertine had told me that she had never been, my breath stopped for a moment. The truth is the most cunning of enemies. It delivers its attacks at the point in one’s heart where one was least expecting them and where one has prepared no defence. Had Albertine been lying, to her aunt then, when she said that she went every day to the Buttes-Chaumont, or to myself since, when she told me that she did not know the place? “Fortunately,” Mme Bontemps went on, “that poor Andrée will soon be leaving for a more bracing countryside, for the real countryside. She needs it badly, she’s not looking at all well. It’s true that she didn’t get all the fresh air she needs last summer. You see, she left Balbec at the end of July, expecting to go back there in September, and then her brother put his knee out, and she was unable to go back.”

  So Albertine was expecting her at Balbec and had concealed this from me! It is true that it was all the more kind of her to have offered to return to Paris with me. Unless …

  “Yes, I remember Albertine’s mentioning it to me” (this was untrue). “When did the accident occur, again? I’m a bit muddled about it all.”

  “Actually, in a way it happened just at the right moment, because a day later the lease of the villa would have begun, and Andrée’s grandmother would have had to pay a month’s rent for nothing. He damaged his leg on the fourteenth of September, and she had time to cable Albertine on the morning of the fifteenth that she wasn’t coming and Albertine was in time to warn the agency. A day later, and the lease would have run on to the middle of October.”

  And so, no doubt, when Albertine, changing her mind, had said to me: “Let’s go this evening,” what she saw with her mind’s eye was an apartment unknown to me, that of Andrée’s grandmother, where, as soon as we returned, she would be able to see the friend whom, without my suspecting it, she had hoped to see again shortly at Balbec. The kind words with which she had expressed her willingness to return to Paris with me, in contrast to her stubborn refusal a little earlier, I had sought to attribute to a genuine change of heart. In fact they were simply the reflexion of one of those changes in a situation of which we do not know, and which are the whole secret of the variations in the conduct of women who do not love us. They obstinately refuse to meet us the following evening, because they are tired, because their grandfather insists on their dining with him: “But come later,” we insist. “He keeps me very late. He may want to see me home.” The simple truth is that they have a rendezvous with some man whom they like. Suddenly he is no longer free. And they come to tell us how sorry they are to have hurt us, that the grandfather has been given the brush-off, and that there is nothing in the world that could keep them from remaining with us. I ought to have recognised these phrases in what Albertine had said to me on the day of my departure from Balbec. But to interpret her words I should have needed not only to recognise those phrases but to remember two traits peculiar to Albertine’s character.

  The two traits now recurred to my mind, one to console me, the other to make me wretched, for we find a little of everything in our memory; it is a sort of pharmacy, a sort of chemical laboratory, in which our groping hand may come to rest now on a sedative drug, now on a dangerous poison. The first trait, the consoling one, was that habit of making a single action serve the pleasure of several persons, that multiple utilisation of whatever she did, which was characteristic of Albertine. It was quite in keeping with her character that, returning to Paris (the fact that Andrée was not coming back might have made it inconvenient for her to remain at Balbec without this meaning that she could not do without Andrée), she should use that single journey as an opportunity for pleasing two people of whom she was genuinely fond: myself by making me believe that it was in order not to leave me on my own, in order that I should not be unhappy, out of devotion to me, and Andrée by persuading her that, since she was not coming to Balbec, she herself did not wish to remain there a moment longer, that she had prolonged her stay there only in the hope of seeing Andrée and was now hurrying back to join her. Now, Albertine’s departure with me was such an immediate sequel, on the one hand to my access of grief and my desire to return to Paris, and on the other hand to Andrée’s telegram, that it was quite natural that Andrée and I, respectively unaware, she of my grief, I of her telegram, should both have supposed that Albertine’s departure from Balbec was the effect of the one cause that each of us knew, which indeed it followed at so short an interval and so unexpectedly. And in this case, it was still possible for me to believe that the thought of keeping me company had been Albertine’s real object, though she had not wanted to neglect an opportunity of thereby establishing a claim to Andrée’s gratitude.

  But unfortunately I remembered almost at once another of Albertine’s characteristics, which was the swiftness with which she was seized by the irresistible temptation of a pleasure. And I recalled how, when she had decided to leave, she had been so impatient to get to the train, how she had pushed past the hotel manager who in trying to detain us might have made us miss the omnibus, the shrug of complicity which she had given me and by which I had been so touched when, on the twister, M. de Cambremer had asked us whether we could not “postpone it by a sennight.” Yes, what she saw in front of her eyes at that moment, what made her so feverishly anxious to leave, what she was so impatient to get to, was an uninhabited apartment I had once visited, belonging to Andrée’s grandmother, a luxurious apartment looked after by an old manservant, facing south, but so empty, so silent, that the sun appeared to spread dust-sheets over the sofa and the armchairs of the room in which Albertine and Andrée would ask the respectful caretaker, perhaps unsuspecting, perhaps conniving, to allow them to rest for a while. I saw it constantly now, empty, with a bed or a sofa, and a maid who was either a dupe or an accomplice, that apartment to which, whenever Albertine seemed serious and in a hurry, she set off to meet her friend, who had doubtless arrived there before her since her time was more her own. Until then I had never given a thought to that apartment, which now possessed for me a horrible beauty. The unknown element in the lives of other people is like that of nature, which each fresh scientific discovery merely reduces but does not abolish. A jealous lover exasperates the woman he loves by depriving her of a thousand unimportant pleasures, but those pleasures which are the keystone of her life she conceals in a place where, even at moments when he thinks that he is showing the most intelligent perspicacity and third parties are keeping him most closely informed, he never dreams of looking. However, at least Andrée was going to leave Paris. But I did not want Albertine to be in a position to despise me as having been the dupe of herself and Andrée. One of these days I would tell her. And thus I would force her perhaps to speak to me more frankly, by showing her that I was after all informed of the things that she concealed from me. But I did not wish to mention it to her for the moment, first of all because, so soon after her aunt’s visit, she would guess where my information came from, would block that source and would not be worried about other, unknown ones; and then because I did not want to run the risk, so long as I was not absolutely certain of keeping Albertine for as long as I chose, of provoking her irritation to the extent of making her decide to leave me. It is true that if I reasoned, sought the truth, prognosticated the future on the basis of her words, which always approved of all my plans, assuring me how much she loved this life, how little her seclusion deprived her of, I had no doubt that she would remain with me always. I was in fact dismayed by the thought; I felt that life and the world, whose fruits I had never really tasted, were passing me by, bartered for a woman in whom I could no longer find anything new. I could not even go to Venice, where, while I lay in bed, I should be too tormented by the fear of the advances that might be made to her by the gondolier, the people in the hotel, the Venetian women. But if on the contrary I reasoned
on the basis of the other hypothesis, that which rested not upon Albertine’s words but upon silences, looks, blushes, sulks, and even fits of anger, which I could quite easily have shown her to be unfounded and which I preferred to appear not to notice, then I told myself that she was finding this life unbearable, that she felt constantly deprived of what she loved, and that inevitably she would leave me one day. All that I wished, if she did so, was that I might choose the moment, a moment when it would not be too painful to me, and also at a time of the year when she could not go to any of the places in which I imagined her debaucheries, neither to Amsterdam, nor to Andrée’s, nor to Mlle Vinteuil’s, though she would see them again, it was true, a few months later. But in the meantime I should have become calmer and it would no longer matter to me. In any case, before even thinking of it I must wait until I was cured of the slight relapse that had been caused by my discovery of the reasons on account of which Albertine, at a few hours’ interval, had been determined not to leave, and then to leave Balbec immediately; I must allow time for the symptoms to disappear, since they could only go on diminishing if I learned nothing new, but were still too acute not to render more painful, more difficult, a process of separation now recognised as inevitable, but in no sense urgent, and one that would be better performed in “cold blood.” I could control the choice of moment, for if she decided to leave me before I had made up my mind, as soon as she informed me that she had had enough of this life, there would always be time enough for me to think up some way of countering her arguments, to offer her a larger freedom, to promise her some great pleasure in the near future which she herself would be anxious not to miss, and at worst, if I could find no other recourse but to appeal to her heart, to confess my anguish to her. My mind was therefore at rest from this point of view though I was not being very logical with myself. For, though the basis of this hypothesis was that I precisely disregarded what she said or intimated, I was assuming that, when the question of her leaving arose, she would give me her reasons beforehand, would allow me to resist and overcome them.

  I felt that my life with Albertine was on the one hand, when I was not jealous, nothing but boredom, and on the other hand, when I was jealous, nothing but pain. If there had been any happiness in it, it could not last. In the same spirit of wisdom which had inspired me at Balbec, on the evening when we had been happy together after Mme de Cambremer’s visit, I wanted to leave her, because I knew that by carrying on I should gain nothing. Only, even now, I imagined that the memory that I retained of her would be like a sort of vibration, prolonged by a pedal, of the last moment of our parting. Hence I was anxious to choose a moment of sweetness, so that it might be it that continued to vibrate in me. I must not be too particular, and wait too long, I must be sensible. And yet, having waited so long, it would be madness not to wait a few days longer, until an acceptable moment should offer itself, rather than risk seeing her depart with that same sense of revolt which I had felt in the past when Mamma left my bedside without bidding me good-night, or when she said good-bye to me at the station. To be on the safe side, I heaped more and more presents on her. As regards the Fortuny gowns, we had at length decided upon one in blue and gold lined with pink which was just ready. And I had ordered all the same the other five which she had relinquished with regret in favour of this one.

  Yet with the coming of spring, two months after her aunt’s conversation with me, I lost my temper with her one evening. It was the very evening on which Albertine had put on for the first time the indoor gown in gold and blue by Fortuny which, by reminding me of Venice, made me feel all the more strongly what I was sacrificing for her, who showed no corresponding gratitude towards me. If I had never seen Venice, I had dreamed of it incessantly since those Easter holidays which, when still a boy, I had been going to spend there, and earlier still, since the Titian prints and Giotto photographs which Swann had given me long ago at Combray. The Fortuny gown which Albertine was wearing that evening seemed to me the tempting phantom of that invisible Venice. It was overrun by Arab ornamentation, like Venice, like the Venetian palaces hidden like sultan’s wives behind a screen of perforated stone, like the bindings in the Ambrosian Library, like the columns from which the oriental birds that symbolised alternatively life and death were repeated in the shimmering fabric, of an intense blue which, as my eyes drew nearer, turned into a malleable gold by those same transmutations which, before an advancing gondola, change into gleaming metal the azure of the Grand Canal. And the sleeves were lined with a cherry pink which is so peculiarly Venetian that it is called Tiepolo pink.

  In the course of the day, Françoise had let fall in my hearing that Albertine was satisfied with nothing, that when I sent word to her that I would be going out with her, or that I would not be going out, that the car would or would not come to fetch her, she almost shrugged her shoulders and would barely give a polite answer. That evening when I felt that she was in a bad mood, and when the first heat of summer had wrought upon my nerves, I could not restrain my anger and reproached her for her ingratitude. “Yes, you can ask anybody,” I shouted at the top of my voice, quite beside myself, “you can ask Françoise, it’s common knowledge.” But immediately I remembered how Albertine had once told me how terrifying she found me when I was angry, and had applied to me the lines from Esther:

  Judge how, incensed against me, that great forehead

  Must then have cast into my troubled soul such dread.

  Alas! where is the heart audacious that defies

  Unmoved those lightnings starting from your eyes?

  I felt ashamed of my violence. And, to make amends for what I had done, without however acknowledging defeat, so that my peace might be an armed and formidable peace, while at the same time I thought it as well to show her once again that I was not afraid of a rupture so that she might not feel tempted to provoke it: “Forgive me, my little Albertine, I’m ashamed of my violence, I don’t know how to apologise. If we can’t get on together, if we’re to be obliged to part, it mustn’t be like this, it wouldn’t be worthy of us. We will part, if part we must, but first of all I wish to beg your pardon most humbly and from the bottom of my heart.” I decided that, to atone for my outburst and also to make certain of her intention to remain with me for some time to come, at any rate until Andrée should have left Paris, which would be in three weeks’ time, it would be as well, next day, to think of some pleasure greater than any that she had yet had, but fairly far ahead; and since I was going to wipe out the offence that I had given her, perhaps it would be as well to take advantage of this moment to show her that I knew more about her life than she supposed. The resentment that she would feel would be removed next day by my generosity, but the warning would remain in her mind. “Yes, my little Albertine, forgive me if I was violent. But I’m not quite as much to blame as you think. There are wicked people in the world who are trying to make us quarrel; I’ve always refrained from mentioning it, as I didn’t want to torment you. But sometimes I’m driven out of my mind by these accusations.” And wishing to make the most of the fact that I was going to be able to show her that I was in the know as regards the departure from Balbec, I went on: “For instance, you knew that Mlle Vinteuil was expected at Mme Verdurin’s that afternoon when you went to the Trocadéro.”

  She blushed: “Yes, I knew that.”

  “Can you swear to me that it was not in order to renew your relations with her that you wanted to go to the Verdurins’.”

  “Why, of course I can swear it. Why do you say renew, I never had any relations with her, I swear it.”

  I was deeply grieved to hear Albertine lie to me like this, deny the facts which her blush had made all too evident. Her mendacity appalled me. And yet, as it contained a protestation of innocence which, almost unconsciously, I was prepared to accept, it hurt me less than her sincerity when, after I had asked her: “Can you at least swear to me that the pleasure of seeing Mlle Vinteuil again had nothing to do with your anxiety to go to the Verdurins’ that
afternoon?” she replied: “No, that I cannot swear. It would have been a great pleasure to see Mlle Vinteuil again.”

  A moment earlier, I had been angry with her because she concealed her relations with Mlle Vinteuil, and now her admission of the pleasure she would have felt at seeing her again turned my bones to water. True, when Albertine had said to me, on my return from the Verdurins’: “Wasn’t Mlle Vinteuil to be there?” she had revived all my anguish by proving that she knew of her coming. But doubtless in the meantime I had reasoned thus: “She knew of her coming, which gave her no pleasure in the least, but since she must have realised, after the event, that it was the revelation that she knew someone with such a bad reputation as Mlle Vinteuil that had distressed me at Balbec to the point of thinking of suicide, she didn’t want to mention it.” And now here she was being obliged to admit that the prospect of seeing Mlle Vinteuil gave her pleasure. Besides, the mystery in which she had cloaked her intention of going to see the Verdurins ought to have been a sufficient proof. But I had not given the matter enough thought. And so, while saying to myself now: “Why does she only half confess? It’s even more stupid than wicked and sad,” I was so crushed that I did not have the heart to pursue the question, as to which I was not in a strong position, having no damning evidence to produce, and to recover my ascendancy I hurriedly turned to the subject of Andrée which would enable me to put Albertine to rout by means of the overwhelming revelation of Andrée’s telegram. “Anyhow,” I said to her, “now I’m being tormented and persecuted again with reports of your relations, this time with Andrée.”

  “With Andrée?” she cried. Her face was ablaze with fury. And astonishment or the desire to appear astonished made her open her eyes wide. “How charming! And may one know who has been telling you these pretty tales? May I be allowed to speak to these persons, to learn from them what basis they have for their slanders?”