Atmospheric changes, provoking other changes in the inner man, awaken forgotten selves, counteract the torpor of habit, restore their old force to certain memories, to certain sufferings. How much more so with me if this change of weather recalled to me the weather in which Albertine, at Balbec, in the lashing rain, had set out, heaven knows why, on long rides, in the clinging tunic of her waterproof! If she had lived, no doubt today, in this so similar weather, she would be setting out on a comparable expedition in Touraine. Since she could do so no longer, I ought not to have suffered from the thought; but, as with people who have lost a limb, the slightest change in the weather revived the pain I felt in the limb that no longer existed.
Then a recollection that had not come back to me for a long time—for it had remained dissolved in the fluid and invisible expanse of my memory—suddenly crystallised. Many years ago, when somebody mentioned her bath-wrap, Albertine had blushed. At that time I was not jealous of her. But since then I had intended to ask her if she could remember that conversation, and why she had blushed. It had preoccupied me all the more because I had been told that the two girls who were friends of Lea’s frequented the bathing establishment of the hotel, and, it was said, not merely for the purpose of taking showers. But, for fear of annoying Albertine, or else pending some more opportune moment, I had always put off mentioning it to her and in time had ceased to think about it. And all of a sudden, some time after Albertine’s death, I recalled this memory, stamped with the character, at once tormenting and solemn, of puzzles left for ever insoluble by the death of the one person who could have explained them. Might I not at least try to find out whether Albertine had ever done anything wrong or even behaved suspiciously in that bathing establishment? By sending someone to Balbec, I might perhaps succeed in doing so. Had she been alive, I should doubtless have been unable to learn anything. But tongues become strangely loosened and will readily talk about a misdeed when the culprit’s resentment need no longer be feared. As the constitution of our imagination, which has remained rudimentary and over-simplified (not having undergone the countless transformations which improve upon the primitive models of human inventions, whether it be the barometer, the balloon, the telephone, or anything else, which become barely recognisable in their ultimate perfection), allows us to see only a very few things at one time, the memory of the bathing establishment occupied the whole field of my inner vision. It was as though nothing else had ever happened in the whole of Albertine’s life.
Sometimes I came into collision in the dark lanes of sleep with one of those bad dreams which are not very serious because for one thing the sadness they engender lasts for barely an hour after we awake, like the faintness caused by an artificial soporific, and for another we encounter them only very rarely, no more than once in two or three years. And, moreover, it remains uncertain whether we have encountered them before, whether they have not rather that aspect of not being seen for the first time which is projected on to them by an illusion, a subdivision (for duplication would not be a strong enough term). Of course, since I entertained doubts as to the life and the death of Albertine, I ought long since to have begun to make inquiries, but the same lassitude, the same cowardice which had made me give way to Albertine when she was with me prevented me from undertaking anything since I had ceased to see her. And yet, from a weakness that has dragged on for years, a flash of energy sometimes emerges. I decided to make this investigation at least, partial though it was.
I wondered who I could best send down to make inquiries on the spot, at Balbec. Aimé seemed to me to be a suitable person. Apart from his thorough knowledge of the place, he belonged to that category of working-class people who have a keen eye to their own advantage, are loyal to those they serve and indifferent to any form of morality, and of whom—because, if we pay them well, they prove themselves, in their obedience to our will, as incapable of indiscretion, lethargy or dishonesty as they are devoid of scruples—we say: “They are excellent people.” In such we can have absolute confidence. When Aimé had gone, I thought how much more to the point it would have been if I could now interrogate Albertine herself about what he was going to try to find out down there. And at once the thought of this question which I would have liked to put, which it seemed to me that I was about to put to her, having brought Albertine to my side, not by dint of a conscious effort of resuscitation but as though by one of those chance encounters which, as is the case with photographs that are not posed, with snapshots, always make the person appear more alive, at the same time as I imagined our conversation I became aware of its impossibility; I had just approached from a new angle the idea that Albertine was dead, Albertine who inspired in me that tenderness we feel for absent ones the sight of whom does not come to correct the embellished image, inspiring also sorrow at the thought that this absence was eternal and that the poor child had been deprived for ever of the joys of life. And immediately, by an abrupt transposition, from the torments of jealousy I passed to the despair of separation.
What filled my heart now, instead of odious suspicions, was the affectionate memory of hours of confiding tenderness spent with the sister that her death had really deprived me of, since my grief was related not to what Albertine had been to me, but to what my heart, anxious to participate in the most general emotions of love, had gradually persuaded me that she was; then I became aware that the life that had bored me so (or so I thought) had been on the contrary delightful; the briefest moments spent in talking to her about even the most trivial things were now augmented, blended with a pleasure which at the time—it is true—had not been perceived by me, but which was already the cause of my having sought those moments so persistently to the exclusion of any others; the most trivial incidents which I recalled, a movement she had made in the carriage by my side, or when sitting down to dinner facing me in her room, sent through my heart a surge of sweet sadness which gradually overwhelmed it altogether.
That room in which we used to dine had never seemed to me attractive; I had told Albertine that it was, merely in order that she should be content to live in it. Now, the curtains, the chairs, the books, had ceased to be a matter of indifference to me. Art is not alone in imparting charm and mystery to the most insignificant things; pain is endowed with the same power to bring them into intimate relation with ourselves. At the time I had paid no attention to the dinner which we had eaten together after our return from the Bois, before I went to the Verdurins’, and towards the beauty, the solemn sweetness of which I now turned with my eyes full of tears. An impression of love is out of proportion to the other impressions of life, but when it is lost in their midst we are incapable of appreciating it. It is not from immediately below, in the tumult of the street and amid the thronging houses nearby, but when we have moved away, that, from the slope of a neighbouring hill, at a distance from which the whole town seems to have vanished or forms only a confused heap at ground level, we can appreciate, in the calm detachment of solitude and dusk, the towering splendour of a cathedral, unique, enduring and pure. I tried to embrace the image of Albertine through my tears as I thought of all the serious and sensible things that she had said that evening.
One morning, I thought I saw the oblong shape of a hill swathed in mist, and sniffed the warm odour of a cup of chocolate, while my heart was horribly wrung by the memory of the afternoon on which Albertine had come to see me and I had kissed her for the first time: the fact was that I had heard the hiccuping of the hot-water system which had just been turned on. And I flung angrily away an invitation which Françoise brought me from Mme Verdurin. How much more forcibly the impression I had felt when I went to dine for the first time at La Raspelière, that death does not strike us all at the same age, overcame me now that Albertine had died so young, while Brichot continued to dine with Mme Verdurin who was still entertaining and would perhaps continue to entertain for many years to come! At once the name of Brichot recalled to me the close of that same evening when he had accompanied me home, when I had se
en from the street below the light of Albertine’s lamp. I had already thought of it many times, but I had not approached this memory from the same angle. For, if our memories do indeed belong to us, they do so after the fashion of those country properties which have little hidden gates of which we ourselves are often unaware, and which someone in the neighbourhood opens for us, so that from one direction at least which is new to us, we find ourselves back in our own house. Then, when I thought of the void which I should now find on returning home, when I realised that never again would I see Albertine’s window from below, that its light was extinguished for ever, I remembered how that evening, on leaving Brichot, I had felt irritated and regretful at my inability to roam the streets and make love elsewhere, and I saw how greatly I had been mistaken, that it was only because the treasure whose reflexions came down to me from above had seemed to be entirely in my possession that I had failed to appreciate its value, so that it appeared necessarily inferior to pleasures, however slight, whose value I estimated in seeking to imagine them. I understood how much this light, which seemed to me to issue from a prison, contained for me a plenitude of life and sweetness, this light which had intoxicated me for a moment, and then on the evening when Albertine had slept under the same roof as me, at Balbec, had appeared for ever impossible. I was perceiving that this life I had led in Paris, in a home of mine which was also a home of hers, was precisely the realisation of that profound peace I had dreamt of.
Remembering the conversation I had had with Albertine after our return from the Bois before that last party at the Verdurins’, I would have been inconsolable had I felt that it had never occurred, that conversation which had to some extent involved Albertine in my intellectual life and in certain respects had made us one. For no doubt, if I returned with tender emotion to her intelligence and her sweetness to me, it was not because they had been any greater than those of other persons whom I had known; had not Mme de Cambremer said to me at Balbec: “What! you could be spending your days with Elstir, who is a genius, and you spend them with your cousin!” Albertine’s intelligence pleased me because, by association, it reminded me of what I called her sweetness, as we call the sweetness of a fruit a certain sensation which exists only in our palate. And in fact, when I thought of Albertine’s intelligence, my lips instinctively protruded and savoured a memory of which I preferred that the reality should remain external to me and should consist in the objective superiority of a person. There could be no denying that I had known people whose intelligence was greater. But the infinitude of love, or its egoism, brings it about that the people whom we love are those whose intellectual and moral physiognomy is least objectively defined in our eyes; we alter them incessantly to suit our desires and fears, we do not separate them from ourselves, they are simply a vast, vague arena in which to exteriorise our emotions. We do not have as clear an outline of our own body, into which so many sensations of pain and pleasure perpetually flow, as we have of a tree or a house or a passer-by. And where I had been wrong was perhaps in not making a greater effort to know Albertine in herself. Just as, from the point of view of her charm, I had long considered only the different positions that she occupied in my memory on the plane of the years, and had been surprised to see that she had become spontaneously enriched with modifications which were not due merely to the difference of perspective, so I ought to have sought to understand her character as that of an ordinary person, and thus perhaps, grasping the reason for her persistence in keeping her secret from me, might have avoided prolonging between us, through that strange tenacity, the conflict which had led to her death. And I then felt, together with an intense pity for her, a shame at having survived her. It seemed to me indeed, in the hours when I suffered least, that I had somehow benefited from her death, for a woman is of greater utility to our life if, instead of being an element of happiness in it, she is an instrument of suffering, and there is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer. In these moments, juxtaposing the deaths of my grandmother and of Albertine, I felt that my life was defiled by a double murder from which only the cowardice of the world could absolve me. I had dreamed of being understood by Albertine, of not being misjudged by her, thinking that it was for the great happiness of being understood, of not being misjudged, when so many other people could have done it better. One wants to be understood because one wants to be loved, and one wants to be loved because one loves. The understanding of others is a matter of indifference to us and their love importunate. My joy at having possessed a little of Albertine’s intelligence and of her heart arose not from their intrinsic worth, but from the fact that this possession was a stage further towards the complete possession of Albertine, a possession which had been my goal and my chimera ever since the day when I had first set eyes on her. When we speak of the “niceness” of a woman, we are doing no more perhaps than project outside ourselves the pleasure that we feel in seeing her, like children when they say: “My dear little bed, my dear little pillow, my dear little hawthorns.” Which explains, incidentally, why men never say of a woman who is not unfaithful to them: “She is so nice,” and say it so often of a woman by whom they are betrayed.
Mme de Cambremer was right in thinking that Elstir’s intellectual charm was greater. But one cannot judge in the same way the charm of a person who is external to oneself like every other person, painted upon the horizon of one’s mind, and that of a person who, as a result of an error in localisation consequent upon certain accidents but nevertheless tenacious, has lodged herself in one’s own body to the point where wondering retrospectively whether or not she looked at a woman on a particular day in the corridor of a little seaside railway-train causes one the same pain as would a surgeon probing for a bullet in one’s heart. A simple slice of bread, but one that we eat, gives us more pleasure than all the ortolans, leverets and rock-partridges that were set before Louis XV, and the blade of grass quivering a few inches in front of our eyes as we lie on the hillside may conceal from us the vertiginous summit of a mountain if the latter is several miles away.
Moreover, our error does not lie in prizing the intelligence and amiability of a woman whom we love, however slight they may be. Our error is to remain indifferent to the amiability and intelligence of others. Falsehood begins to cause us the indignation, and kindness the gratitude, which they ought always to arouse in us, only if they come from a woman whom we love, and physical desire has the marvellous faculty of giving intelligence its true value and providing solid foundations for the moral life. Never should I find again that divine thing, a person with whom I could talk freely of everything, in whom I could confide. Confide? But did not others offer me greater confidence than Albertine? With others, did I not have more extensive conversations? The fact is that confidence and conversation are ordinary things in themselves, and what does it matter if they are less than perfect if only there enters into them love, which alone is divine. I could see Albertine now, seated at her pianola, pink-faced beneath her dark hair; I could feel against my lips, which she would try to part, her tongue, her maternal, incomestible, nutritious, hallowed tongue, whose secret dewy flame, even when she merely ran it over the surface of my neck or my stomach, gave to those caresses of hers, superficial but somehow imparted by the inside of her flesh, externalised like a piece of material reversed to show its lining, as it were the mysterious sweetness of a penetration.
I cannot even say that what I felt at the loss of all those moments of sweetness which nothing could ever restore to me was despair. To feel despair, we must still be attached to that life which can no longer be anything but unhappy. I had been in despair at Balbec when I saw the day break and realised that none of the days to come could ever be a happy one for me. I had remained just as selfish since then, but the self to which I was now attached, the self which constituted those vital reserves that bring the instinct of self-preservation into play, this self was no longer alive; when I thought
of my inner strength, of my vital force, of what was best in me, I thought of a certain treasure which I had possessed (which I had been alone in possessing since others could not know exactly the feeling, hidden within myself, that it had inspired in me) and which no one could ever again take from me since I possessed it no longer. And in fact I had only ever possessed it because I had wanted to imagine myself as possessing it. I had not merely committed the imprudence, in looking at Albertine with my lips and lodging the treasure in my heart, of making it live within me, and that other imprudence of combining a domestic love with the pleasure of the senses. I had sought also to persuade myself that our relations were love, that we were mutually practising the relations that are called love, because she obediently returned the kisses that I gave her. And through having acquired the habit of believing this, I had lost not merely a woman whom I loved but a woman who loved me, my sister, my child, my tender mistress. And on the whole I had had a happiness and a misfortune which Swann had not experienced, for, after all, during the whole of the time in which he had loved Odette and had been so jealous of her, he had barely seen her, having found it so difficult, on certain days when she put him off at the last moment, to gain admission to her. But afterwards he had had her to himself, as his wife, and until the day of his death. I, on the contrary, while I was so jealous of Albertine, more fortunate than Swann, had had her with me in my own house. I had experienced in actuality what Swann had so often dreamed of and had experienced only when he had become indifferent to it. But, after all, I had not managed to keep Albertine as he had kept Odette. She had gone, she was dead. For nothing ever repeats itself exactly, and the most analogous lives which, thanks to kinship of character and similarity of circumstances, we may select in order to represent them as symmetrical, remain in many respects opposed. By losing my life I should not have lost very much; I should have lost only an empty form, the empty frame of a work of art. Indifferent as to what I might henceforth put into it, but happy and proud to think of what it had contained, I dwelt upon the memory of those hours of sweetness, and this moral support gave me a feeling of well-being which the approach of death itself would not have disturbed.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume V Page 60
