In Search of Lost Time, Volume V

by Marcel Proust

  “I’m sorry, because I can see you’re not pleased,” Saint-Loup went on.

  “Well, I’m touched by your kindness, and I’m grateful to you, but it seems to me that you might have …”

  “I did my best. No one else could have done more or even as much. Try sending someone else.”

  “No, no, as a matter of fact, if I had known I wouldn’t have sent you, but the failure of your attempt prevents me from making another.”

  I heaped reproaches on him: he had tried to do me a service and had not succeeded.

  On leaving the Bontemps’ house he had met some girls arriving. I had already conjectured often enough that Albertine knew other girls in the neighbourhood; but this was the first time that I felt the pain of that conjecture. It would seem that nature has endowed the mind with the means of secreting a natural antidote which destroys the suppositions that we form unremittingly but without danger to ourselves; but nothing could immunise me against these girls whom Saint-Loup had met. But were not all these details precisely what I had sought to learn from everyone with regard to Albertine? Was it not I who, in order to learn them more fully, had begged Saint-Loup, summoned back to Paris by his colonel, to come and see me at all costs? Was it not I, therefore, who had desired them, or rather my famished grief, longing to feed and to wax fat upon them? Finally Saint-Loup told me that he had had the pleasant surprise of meeting down there—the only familiar face that had reminded him of the past—a former friend of Rachel, a pretty actress who was taking a holiday in the neighbourhood. And the name of this actress was enough to make me say to myself: “Perhaps it’s with her;” was enough to make me see, in the very arms of a woman whom I did not know, Albertine smiling and flushed with pleasure. And, after all, why should this not have been so? Had I myself refrained from thinking of other women since I had known Albertine? On the evening of my first visit to the Princesse de Guermantes, when I returned home, had I not been thinking far less of her than of the girl of whom Saint-Loup had told me, who frequented houses of assignation, and of Mme Putbus’s maid? Was it not for the latter that I had returned to Balbec? More recently, had I not longed to go to Venice? Why then might Albertine not have longed to go to Touraine? Only, when it came to the point, as I now realised, I would not have left her, I would not have gone to Venice. Indeed, in my heart of hearts, when I said to myself: “I shall leave her soon,” I knew that I would never leave her, just as I knew that I would never settle down to work, or live a healthy life, or do any of the things which, day after day, I vowed to do on the morrow. Only, whatever I might feel in my heart, I had thought it more adroit to let her live under the perpetual threat of a separation. And no doubt, thanks to my detestable adroitness, I had convinced her only too well. In any case, things could not now go on like this; I could not leave her in Touraine with those girls, with that actress; I could not endure the thought of that life which eluded me. I would await her reply to my letter: if she was doing wrong, alas! a day more or less made no difference (and perhaps I said this to myself because, being no longer in the habit of taking note of every minute of her life, a single one of which wherein she was unobserved would formerly have thrown me into a panic, my jealousy no longer observed the same time-scale). But as soon as I received her answer, if she was not coming back I would go and fetch her; willy-nilly, I would tear her away from her women friends. Besides, was it not better for me to go down in person, now that I had discovered Saint-Loup’s hitherto unsuspected duplicity? Might he not, for all I knew, have organised a plot to separate me from Albertine? Was it because I had changed, or because I had been incapable of imagining then that natural causes would bring me one day to this unprecedented pass? At all events, how I should have lied now had I written to her, as I had said to her in Paris, that I hoped that no accident might befall her! Ah! if some accident had happened to her, my life, instead of being poisoned for ever by this incessant jealousy, would at once regain, if not happiness, at least a state of calm through the suppression of suffering.

  The suppression of suffering? Can I really have believed it, have believed that death merely strikes out what exists, and leaves everything else in its place, that it removes the pain from the heart of him for whom the other’s existence has ceased to be anything but a source of pain, that it removes the pain and puts nothing in its place? The suppression of pain! As I glanced at the news items in the papers, I regretted that I had not had the courage to form the same wish as Swann. If Albertine could have been the victim of an accident, were she alive I should have had a pretext for hastening to her bedside, were she dead I should have recovered, as Swann said, my freedom to live. Did I believe this? He had believed it, that subtlest of men who thought that he knew himself well. How little do we know of what we have in our hearts! How clearly, a little later, had he been still alive, I could have proved to him that his wish was not only criminal but absurd, that the death of the woman he loved would have delivered him from nothing!

  I forsook all pride with regard to Albertine, and sent her a despairing telegram begging her to return on any terms, telling her that she could do whatever she liked, that I asked only to be allowed to take her in my arms for a minute three times a week, before she went to bed. And if she had said once a week only, I would have accepted the restriction.

  She never came back. My telegram had just gone off to her when I myself received one. It was from Mme Bontemps. The world is not created once and for all for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our lives things of which we have never had any suspicion. Alas! it was not a suppression of suffering that the first two lines of the telegram produced in me: “My poor friend, our little Albertine is no more. Forgive me for breaking this terrible news to you who were so fond of her. She was thrown by her horse against a tree while she was out riding. All our efforts to restore her to life were unavailing. If only I had died in her stead!” No, not the suppression of suffering, but a suffering until then unimagined, that of realising that she would not come back. But had I not told myself many times that she might not come back? I had indeed done so, but now I saw that I had never believed it for a moment. As I needed her presence, her kisses, to enable me to endure the pain that my suspicions caused me, I had formed, since Balbec, the habit of being always with her. Even when she had gone out, when I was alone, I was kissing her still. I had continued to do so since her departure for Touraine. I had less need of her fidelity than of her return. And if my reason might with impunity cast doubt upon it now and again, my imagination never ceased for an instant to picture it for me. Instinctively I drew my hand over my throat, over my lips, which felt themselves kissed by her lips still after she had gone away, and would never be kissed by them again; I drew my hand over them, as Mamma had caressed me at the time of my grandmother’s death, saying to me: “My poor boy, your grandmother who was so fond of you will never kiss you again.” All my life to come seemed to have been wrenched from my heart. My life to come? Had I not, then, thought at times of living it without Albertine? Of course not! Had I then for a long time past pledged her every minute of my life until my death? I had indeed! This future indissolubly blended with hers was something I had never had the vision to perceive, but now that it had just been demolished, I could feel the place that it occupied in my gaping heart. Françoise, who still knew nothing, came into my room. In a sudden fury I shouted at her: “What do you want?” Then (sometimes there are words that set a different reality in the same place as that which confronts us; they bewilder us in the same way as a fit of dizziness) she said to me: “Monsieur has no need to look cross. On the contrary he’s going to be pleased. Here are two letters from Mademoiselle Albertine.”

  I felt, afterwards, that I must have stared at her with the eyes of a man whose mind has become unhinged. I was not even glad, nor was I incredulous. I was like a person who sees the same place in his room occupied by a sofa and by a grotto: nothing seeming real to him any more, he collapses on the floor. Albertine’s two le
tters must have been written shortly before the fatal ride. The first said:

  “My dear, I must thank you for the proof of your confidence which you give me when you tell me of your intention to bring Andrée to live with you. I am sure that she will be delighted to accept, and I think that it will be a very good thing for her. Gifted as she is, she will know how to make the most of the companionship of a man like yourself, and of the admirable influence which you manage to exert over other people. I feel that you have had an idea from which as much good may spring for her as for yourself. And so, if she should make the slightest difficulty (which I do not believe she will), telegraph to me and I will undertake to bring pressure to bear upon her.”

  The second was dated the following day. (In fact she must have written them both within a few minutes of one another, perhaps at the same time, and must have predated the first. For, all the time, I had been forming absurd ideas of her intentions, which had simply been to return to me, and which anyone not directly interested in the matter, a man without imagination, the negotiator of a peace treaty, the merchant who has to examine a transaction, would have judged more accurately than myself.) It contained only these words:

  “Is it too late for me to return to you? If you have not yet written to Andrée, would you be prepared to take me back? I shall abide by your decision, but I beg you not to be long in making it known to me; you can imagine how impatiently I shall be waiting. If it is to tell me to return, I shall take the train at once. Yours with all my heart, Albertine.”

  For the death of Albertine to have been able to eliminate my suffering, the shock of the fall would have had to kill her not only in Touraine but in myself. There, she had never been more alive. In order to enter into us, another person must first have assumed the form, have adapted himself to the framework of time; appearing to us only in a succession of momentary flashes, he has never been able to reveal to us more than one aspect of himself at a time, to present us with more than a single photograph of himself. A great weakness no doubt for a person, to consist merely of a collection of moments; a great strength also: he is a product of memory, and our memory of a moment is not informed of everything that has happened since; this moment which it has recorded endures still, lives still, and with it the person whose form is outlined in it. And moreover, this disintegration does not only make the dead one live, it multiplies him or her. In order to be consoled I would have to forget, not one, but innumerable Albertines. When I had succeeded in bearing the grief of losing this Albertine, I must begin again with another, with a hundred others.

  So then my life was entirely altered. What had constituted its sweetness—not because of Albertine, but concurrently with her, when I was alone—was precisely the perpetual resurgence, at the bidding of identical moments, of moments from the past. From the sound of pattering raindrops I recaptured the scent of the lilacs at Combray; from the shifting of the sun’s rays on the balcony the pigeons in the Champs-Elysées; from the muffling of sounds in the heat of the morning hours, the cool taste of cherries; the longing for Brittany or Venice from the noise of the wind and the return of Easter. Summer was at hand, the days were long, the weather was warm. It was the season when, early in the morning, pupils and teachers repair to the public gardens to prepare for the final examinations under the trees, seeking to extract the sole drop of coolness vouchsafed by a sky less ardent than in the midday heat but already as sterilely pure. From my darkened room, with a power of evocation equal to that of former days but capable now of evoking only pain, I felt that outside, in the heaviness of the atmosphere, the setting sun was plastering the vertical fronts of houses and churches with a tawny distemper. And if Françoise, when she came in, accidentally disturbed the folds of the big curtains, I stifled a cry of pain at the rent that had just been made in my heart by that ray of long-ago sunlight which had made beautiful in my eyes the modern façade of Marcouville-l’Orgueilleuse when Albertine had said to me: “It’s restored.” Not knowing how to account to Françoise for my groan, I said to her: “Oh, I’m so thirsty.” She left the room, then returned, but I turned sharply away under the impact of the painful discharge of one of the thousand invisible memories which incessantly exploded around me in the darkness: I had noticed that she had brought me cider and cherries, things which a farm-lad had brought out to us in the carriage, at Balbec, “kinds” in which I should have made the most perfect communion, in those days, with the prismatic gleam in shuttered dining-rooms on days of scorching heat. Then I thought for the first time of the farm called Les Ecorres, and said to myself that on certain days when Albertine had told me, at Balbec, that she would not be free, that she was obliged to go somewhere with her aunt, she had perhaps been with one or another of her girlfriends at some farm to which she knew that I was not in the habit of going, and, while I waited desperately for her at Marie-Antoinette where they told me: “No, we haven’t seen her today,” had been saying to her friend the same words as she used to say to me when we went out together: “He’ll never think of looking for us here, so there’s no fear of our being disturbed.” I told Françoise to draw the curtains together, so that I would no longer see that ray of sunlight. But it continued to filter through, just as corrosively, into my memory. “It doesn’t appeal to me, it’s been restored, but tomorrow we’ll go to Saint-Mars-le-Vetu, and the day after to …” Tomorrow, the day after, it was a prospect of life together, perhaps for ever, that was opening up; my heart leapt towards it, but it was no longer there, Albertine was dead.

  I asked Françoise the time. Six o’clock. At last, thank God, that oppressive heat, of which in the past I used to complain to Albertine and which we so enjoyed, was about to die down. The day was drawing to its close. But what did that profit me? The cool evening air was rising; it was sunset; in my memory, at the end of a road which we had taken, she and I, on our way home, I saw it now, beyond the furthest village, like some distant place, inaccessible that evening, which we would spend at Balbec, still together. Together then; now I must stop short on the brink of that same abyss; she was dead. It was not enough now to draw the curtains; I tried to stop the eyes and ears of my memory in order not to see that band of orange in the western sky, in order not to hear those invisible birds responding from one tree to the next on either side of me who was then so tenderly embraced by her who was now dead. I tried to avoid those sensations that are produced by the dampness of leaves in the evening air, the rise and fall of humpback roads. But already those sensations had gripped me once more, carrying me far enough back from the present moment to give the necessary recoil, the necessary momentum to strike me anew, to the idea that Albertine was dead. Ah! never again would I enter a forest, never again would I stroll beneath the trees. But would the broad plains be less painful to me? How often had I crossed, on the way to fetch Albertine, how often had I retrodden, on the way back with her, the great plain of Cricqueville, sometimes in foggy weather when the swirling mists gave us the illusion of being surrounded by a vast lake, sometimes on limpid evenings when the moonlight, dematerialising the earth, making it appear from a few feet away as celestial as it is, in the daytime, in the distance only, enclosed the fields and the woods with the firmament to which it had assimilated them in the moss-agate of a universal blue!

  Françoise must have been pleased by Albertine’s death, and in fairness to her it should be said that by a sort of tact and decorum she made no pretence of sorrow. But the unwritten laws of her immemorial code and the tradition of the mediaeval peasant woman who weeps as in the romances of chivalry were older than her hatred of Albertine and even of Eulalie. Thus, on one of these late afternoons, as I was not quick enough in concealing my distress, she caught sight of my tears, prompted by her instinct as a former peasant girl which at one time had led her to catch and maltreat animals, to feel nothing but merriment in wringing the necks of chickens and in boiling lobsters alive, and, when I was ill, in observing, as it might be the wounds that she had inflicted on an owl, my suffering expression whi
ch she afterwards proclaimed in a sepulchral tone as a presage of coming disaster. But her Combray “unwritten law” did not permit her to treat tears and sorrow lightly—things which in her judgment were as fatal as shedding one’s flannel vest or toying with one’s food. “Oh, no, Monsieur, it doesn’t do to cry like that, it isn’t good for you.” And in trying to stem my tears she looked as anxious as if they had been torrents of blood. Unfortunately I adopted a chilly air that cut short the effusions in which she was hoping to indulge and which might well have been sincere. Her attitude towards Albertine was perhaps akin to her attitude towards Eulalie, and, now that my mistress could no longer derive any profit from me, Françoise had ceased to hate her. She felt bound, however, to let me see that she was perfectly well aware that I was crying, and that, following the deplorable example set by my family, I did not wish to “show it.” “You mustn’t cry, Monsieur,” she adjured me, in a calmer tone this time, and with the intention of proving her perspicacity rather than displaying her pity. And she added: “It was bound to happen; she was too happy, poor creature, she never knew how happy she was.”

  How slow the day is in dying on these interminable summer evenings! A pale ghost of the house opposite continued indefinitely to tinge the sky with its persistent whiteness. At last it was dark in the apartment; I stumbled against the furniture in the hall, but in the door that opened on to the staircase, in the midst of the darkness I had thought to be complete, the glazed panel was translucent and blue, with the blueness of a flower, the blueness of an insect’s wing, a blueness that would have seemed to me beautiful had I not felt it to be a last glint, sharp as a steel blade, a final blow that was being dealt me, in its indefatigable cruelty, by the day. Finally, however, complete darkness came, but then a glimpse of a star behind the tree in the courtyard was enough to remind me of the times when we used to set out in a carriage, after dinner, for the woods of Chantepie, carpeted with moonlight. And even in the streets I might chance to isolate upon the back of a bench, to glean the natural purity of a moonbeam in the midst of the artificial lights of Paris—of Paris over which, by restoring the city for a moment, in my imagination, to a state of nature, with the infinite silence of the fields thus evoked, it enthroned the heartrending memory of the walks that I had taken there with Albertine. Ah! when would the night end? But at the first coolness of dawn I shivered, for it had brought back to me the sweetness of that summer when, from Balbec to Incarville, from Incarville to Balbec, we had so many times escorted each other home until daybreak. I had now only one hope left for the future—a hope far more poignant than any fear—and that was that I might forget Albertine. I knew that I should forget her one day; I had forgotten Gilberte and Mme de Guermantes; I had forgotten my grandmother. And it is our most just and cruel punishment for that forgetfulness, as total and as tranquil as the oblivion of the graveyard, through which we have detached ourselves from those we no longer love, that we should recognise it to be inevitable in the case of those we love still. In reality, we know that it is not a painful state but a state of indifference. But not being able to think at one and the same time of what I was and of what I would be, I thought with despair of all that integument of caresses, of kisses, of friendly slumber, of which I must presently let myself be stripped for ever. The influx of these tender memories, breaking against the idea that Albertine was dead, oppressed me with such a clash of warring currents that I could not remain still; I rose, but all of a sudden I stopped, overwhelmed; the same faint daybreak that I used to see when I had just left Albertine, still radiant and warm from her kisses, had just drawn above the curtains its now sinister blade whose whiteness, cold, implacable and compact, glinted like a dagger thrust into my heart.