In Search of Lost Time, Volume V

by Marcel Proust

  Aimé took lodgings close to Mme Bontemps’s villa; he made the acquaintance of a maidservant, and of a livery-stable keeper from whom Albertine had often hired a carriage by the day. These people had noticed nothing. In a second letter, Aimé informed me that he had learned from a young laundry-girl in the town that Albertine had a peculiar way of gripping her arm when she brought back the washing. “But,” she said, “the young lady never did anything more.” I sent Aimé the money to pay for his journey, to pay for the pain he had caused me by his letter, and meanwhile I was doing my best to heal it by telling myself that what he had described was a familiarity which gave no proof of any vicious desire, when I received a telegram from him: “Have learned most interesting things. Have heaps of news for Monsieur. Letter follows.” On the following day came a letter the envelope of which was enough to make me tremble; I had recognised that it was from Aimé, for every person, even the humblest, has under his control those little familiar creatures, at once alive and reclining in a sort of torpor upon the paper: the characters of his handwriting which he alone possesses.

  “At first the young laundry-girl refused to tell me anything, she assured me that Mlle Albertine had never done anything more than pinch her arm. But to get her to talk, I took her out to dinner and gave her plenty to drink. Then she told me that Mlle Albertine often used to meet her on the bank of the Loire, when she went to bathe, that Mlle Albertine, who was in the habit of getting up very early to go and bathe, was in the habit of meeting her by the water’s edge, at a spot where the trees are so thick that nobody can see you, and besides there is nobody who can see you at that hour in the morning. Then the laundry-girl brought her girlfriends and they bathed and afterwards, as it is already very hot down there and the sun beats down on you even through the trees, they used to lie about on the grass drying themselves and playing and stroking and tickling one another. The young laundry-girl confessed to me that she enjoyed playing around with her girlfriends and that seeing that Mlle Albertine was always rubbing up against her in her bathing-wrap she made her take it off and used to caress her with her tongue along the throat and arms, even on the soles of her feet which Mlle Albertine held out to her. The laundry-girl undressed too, and they played at pushing each other into the water. After that she told me nothing more, but being always at your service and ready to do anything to oblige you, I took the young laundry-girl to bed with me. She asked me if I would like her to do to me what she used to do to Mlle Albertine when she took off her bathing-dress. And she said to me: (If you could have seen how she used to wriggle, that young lady, she said to me (oh, it’s too heavenly) and she got so excited that she could not keep from biting me.) I could still see the marks on the laundry-girl’s arms. And I can understand Mlle Albertine’s pleasure, for that young wench is really a very good performer.”

  I had suffered indeed at Balbec when Albertine told me of her friendship with Mlle Vinteuil. But Albertine was there to console me. Then, when by my excessive curiosity as to her actions I had succeeded in making Albertine leave me, when Françoise informed me that she was no longer in the house and I found myself alone, I had suffered even more. But at least the Albertine whom I had loved remained in my heart. Now, in her place—to punish me for having pushed even further a curiosity to which, contrary to what I had supposed, death had not put an end—what I found was a different girl, heaping up lies and deceit there where the other had so sweetly reassured me by swearing that she had never tasted those pleasures, which in the intoxication of her recaptured liberty she had set out to enjoy to the point of fainting, to the point of biting that young laundress whom she used to meet at sunrise, on the bank of the Loire, and to whom she used to say “Oh, it’s too heavenly.” A different Albertine, not only in the sense in which we understand the word different when we apply it to other people. If people are different from what we have supposed, as this difference does not affect us deeply, and the pendulum of intuition cannot swing outward with a greater oscillation than that of its inward swing, it is only in superficial areas of their being that we situate these differences. Formerly, when I learned that a woman loved other women, she did not seem to me on that account to be a quintessentially different woman. But in the case of a woman one loves, in order to rid oneself of the pain one feels at the thought that such a thing is possible, one wants to know not only what she has done, but what she felt while she was doing it, what she thought of what she was doing; then, probing ever more deeply, through the intensity of one’s pain one arrives at the mystery, the quintessence. I suffered to the very depths of my being, in my body and in my heart, far more than the pain of losing my life would have made me suffer, from this curiosity to which all the force of my intelligence and my unconscious contributed; and thus it was into the core of Albertine’s own being that I now projected everything that I learned about her. And the pain that the revelation of her vice had thus driven into me to such a depth was to render me, much later, a final service. Like the harm that I had done my grandmother, the harm that Albertine had done me was a last bond between her and myself which outlived memory even, for with the conservation of energy which belongs to everything that is physical, suffering has no need of the lessons of memory. Thus a man who has forgotten the glorious nights spent by moonlight in the woods, suffers still from the rheumatism which he then contracted.

  Those tastes which she had denied but which were hers, those tastes the discovery of which had come to me not by a cold process of reasoning but in the burning anguish I had felt on reading the words “Oh, it’s too heavenly,” an anguish that gave them a qualitative distinction, those tastes were not merely added to the image of Albertine as the new shell which it drags after it is affixed to the hermit crab, but rather as a salt which, coming in contact with another salt, alters not only its colour but its nature. When the laundry-girl must have said to her friends, “Just fancy, I’d never have believed it, but the young lady is one too,” to me it was not merely a vice hitherto unsuspected by them that they added to Albertine’s person, but the discovery that she was another person, a person like themselves, speaking the same language, and this, by making her the compatriot of others, made her even more alien to myself, proved that what I had possessed of her, what I carried in my heart, was only quite a small part of her, and that the rest, which was made so extensive by not being merely that thing which is already mysteriously important enough, an individual desire, but being shared with others, she had always concealed from me, had kept me away from, as a woman might conceal from me that she was a native of an enemy country and a spy, and far more treacherously even than a spy, for the latter deceives us only as to her nationality, whereas Albertine had deceived me as to her profoundest humanity, the fact that she did not belong to ordinary humankind, but to an alien race which moves among it, hides itself among it and never merges with it. I had as it happened seen two paintings by Elstir showing naked women in a thickly wooded landscape. In one of them, a girl is raising her foot as Albertine must have raised hers when she offered it to the laundress. With her other foot she is pushing into the water another girl who gaily resists, her thigh raised, her foot barely dipping into the blue water. I remembered now that the raised thigh made the same swan’s-neck curve with the angle of the knee as was made by the line of Albertine’s thigh when she was lying by my side on the bed, and I had often meant to tell her that she reminded me of those paintings. But I had refrained from doing so, for fear of awakening in her mind the image of naked female bodies. Now I saw her, side by side with the laundry-girl and her friends, recomposing the group which I had so loved when I was sitting among Albertine’s friends at Balbec. And if I had been an art-lover responsive to beauty alone, I should have recognised that Albertine recomposed it a thousand times more ravishingly, now that its elements were the nude statues of goddesses like those which the great sculptors scattered among the groves of Versailles or arrayed round the fountains to be washed and polished by the caresses of their waters. Now, beside
the laundry-girl, I saw her, a girl at the water’s edge, in their twofold nudity of marble statues in the midst of a grove of vegetation and dipping into the water like aquatic bas-reliefs. Remembering Albertine as she lay on my bed, I seemed to see the curve of her thigh, I saw it as a swan’s neck, seeking the other girl’s mouth. Then I no longer even saw a thigh, but simply the bold neck of a swan, like the one in a stirring sketch seeking the mouth of a Leda who is seen in all the specific palpitation of feminine pleasure, because there is no one else with her but a swan, and she seems more alone, just as one discovers on the telephone the inflexions of a voice which one fails to perceive so long as it is not dissociated from a face in which one objectivises its expression. In this sketch, the pleasure, instead of reaching out to the woman who inspires it and who is absent, replaced by an inert swan, is concentrated in her who feels it. At moments the contact between my heart and my memory was interrupted. What Albertine had done with the laundry-girl was indicated to me now only by quasi-algebraic abbreviations which no longer meant anything to me; but a hundred times an hour the interrupted current was restored, and my heart was pitilessly scorched by a fire from hell, while I saw Albertine, resurrected by my jealousy, really alive, stiffen beneath the caresses of the young laundry-girl to whom she was saying: “Oh, it’s too heavenly.”

  As she was alive at the moment when she committed her misdeed, that is to say at the moment at which I myself found myself placed, it was not enough for me to know of the misdeed, I wanted her to know that I knew. Hence, if at those moments I thought with regret that I should never see her again, this regret bore the stamp of my jealousy, and, very different from the lacerating regret of the moments when I loved her, was only regret at not being able to say to her: “You thought I’d never know what you did after you left me. Well, I know everything—the laundry-girl on the bank of the Loire, and your saying to her ‘Oh, it’s too heavenly,’ and I’ve seen the bite.” Of course I said to myself: “Why torment yourself? She who took her pleasure with the laundry-girl no longer exists, and consequently was not a person whose actions retain any importance. She isn’t telling herself that you know. But neither is she telling herself that you don’t know, since she isn’t telling herself anything.” But this line of reasoning convinced me less than the visual image of her pleasure which brought me back to the moment in which she had experienced it. What we feel is the only thing that exists for us, and we project it into the past, or into the future, without letting ourselves be stopped by the fictitious barriers of death. If my regret that she was dead was subjected at such moments to the influence of my jealousy and assumed such a peculiar form, that influence naturally extended to my thoughts about occultism and immortality, which were no more than an effort to realise what I desired. Hence, at those moments, if I could have succeeded in evoking her by table-turning as Bergotte had at one time thought possible, or in meeting her in the other life as the abbé X thought, I would have wished to do so only in order to say to her: “I know about the laundry-girl. You said to her: ‘Oh, it’s too heavenly,’ and I’ve seen the bite.”

  What came to my rescue against this image of the laundry-girl—certainly when it had lasted for some time—was that image itself, because we only truly know what is new, what suddenly introduces into our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, what habit has not yet replaced with its colourless facsimiles. But it was above all that fragmentation of Albertine into many parts, into many Albertines, that was her sole mode of existence in me. Moments recurred in which she had simply been kind, or intelligent, or serious, or even loving sport above all else. And was it not right, after all, that this fragmentation should soothe me? For if it was not in itself something real, if it arose from the continuously changing shape of the hours in which she had appeared to me, a shape which remained that of my memory as the curve of the projections of my magic lantern depended on the curve of the coloured slides, did it not in its own way represent a truly objective truth, this one, namely that none of us is single, that each of us contains many persons who do not all have the same moral value, and that if a vicious Albertine had existed, it did not mean that there had not been others, the Albertine who enjoyed talking to me about Saint-Simon in her room, the Albertine who on the night when I had told her that we must part had said so sadly: “This pianola, this room, to think that I shall never see any of these things again” and, when she saw the distress which I had finally communicated to myself by my lie, had exclaimed with sincere pity: “Oh, no, anything rather than make you unhappy, I promise that I shall never try to see you again.” Then I was no longer alone; I felt the barrier that separated us vanish. As soon as this good Albertine had returned, I had found once more the only person who could provide me with the antidote to the sufferings which Albertine was causing me. True, I still wanted to speak to her about the story of the laundry-girl, but no longer in order to score a cruel triumph and to show her maliciously how much I knew. I asked her tenderly, as I should have asked her had she been alive, whether the story about the laundry-girl was true. She swore to me that it was not, that Aimé was not very truthful and that, wishing to appear to have earned the money I had given him, he had not liked to return empty-handed, and had made the girl tell him what he wished to hear. No doubt Albertine had never ceased to lie to me. And yet, in the ebb and flow of her contradictions, I felt that there had been a certain progression due to myself. That she had not, indeed, confided some of her secrets to me at the beginning (perhaps, it is true, involuntarily, in a remark that escaped her lips) I would not have sworn. I no longer remembered. And besides, she had such odd ways of naming certain things that they could be interpreted one way or the other. But the impression she had received of my jealousy had led her afterwards to retract with horror what at first she had complacently admitted. In any case, Albertine had no need to tell me this. To be convinced of her innocence it was enough for me to embrace her, and I could do so now that the barrier that separated us was down, that impalpable but hermetic barrier which rises between two lovers after a quarrel and against which kisses would be shattered. No, she had no need to tell me anything. Whatever she might have done, whatever she might have wished to do, the poor child, there were sentiments in which, over the barrier that divided us, we could be united. If the story was true, and if Albertine had concealed her tastes from me, it was in order not to make me unhappy. I had the comfort of hearing this Albertine say so. Besides, had I ever known any other? The two chief causes of error in one’s relations with another person are, having oneself a kind heart, or else being in love with that other person. We fall in love for a smile, a look, a shoulder. That is enough; then, in the long hours of hope or sorrow, we fabricate a person, we compose a character. And when later on we see much of the beloved being, we can no more, whatever the cruel reality that confronts us, divest the woman with that look, that shoulder, of the sweet nature and loving character with which we have endowed her than we can, when she has grown old, eliminate her youthful face from a person whom we have known since her girlhood. I recalled the kind and compassionate look in the eyes of that Albertine, her plump cheeks, the grainy texture of her neck. It was the image of a dead woman, but, as this dead woman was alive, it was easy for me to do immediately what I should inevitably have done if she had been by my side in her living body (what I should do were I ever to meet her again in another life), I forgave her.

  The moments which I had lived through with this Albertine were so precious to me that I did not want to let any of them escape me. And occasionally, as one recovers the remnants of a squandered fortune, I recaptured some of them which I had thought to be lost: for instance, tying a scarf behind my neck instead of in front, I remembered a drive which I had never thought of since, during which, in order that the cold air might not reach my throat, Albertine had arranged my scarf for me in this way after first kissing me. That simple drive, restored to my memory by so humble a gesture, gave me the same pleasure as the intimate objects belonging
to a dead woman who was dear to us which are brought to us by her old servant and which we find so precious; my grief was enriched by it, all the more so as I had never given another thought to the scarf in question. As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savours the past.