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Title:      The Captive
            (La Prisonnière)
            [Vol. 5 of Remembrance of Things Past--
            (À la Recherche du temps perdu)]
Author:     Marcel Proust
            Translated from the French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.:  0300501.txt
Language:   English
Date first posted:          March 2003
Date most recently updated: March 2003

Production notes: Words in italics in the book
                  are enclosed by underscores (_) in this eBook

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Title:      The Captive
            (La Prisonnière)
            [Vol. 5 of Remembrance of Things Past--
            (À la Recherche du temps perdu)]
Author:     Marcel Proust
            Translated from the French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff





TO
LUCY LUNN


CONTENTS

Part I

CHAPTER ONE Life with Albertine.

CHAPTER TWO The Verdurins quarrel with M. de Charlus.

Part II

CHAPTER TWO (continued)

CHAPTER THREE Flight of Albertine.




PART I

CHAPTER ONE
LIFE WITH ALBERTINE


At daybreak, my face still turned to the wall, and before I had seen
above the big inner curtains what tone the first streaks of light
assumed, I could already tell what sort of day it was. The first
sounds from the street had told me, according to whether they came to
my ears dulled and distorted by the moisture of the atmosphere or
quivering like arrows in the resonant and empty area of a spacious,
crisply frozen, pure morning; as soon as I heard the rumble of the
first tramcar, I could tell whether it was sodden with rain or setting
forth into the blue. And perhaps these sounds had themselves been
forestalled by some swifter and more pervasive emanation which,
stealing into my slumber, diffused in it a melancholy that seemed to
presage snow, or gave utterance (through the lips of a little person
who occasionally reappeared there) to so many hymns to the glory of
the sun that, having first of all begun to smile in my sleep, having
prepared my eyes, behind their shut lids, to be dazzled, I awoke
finally amid deafening strains of music. It was, moreover, principally
from my bedroom that I took in the life of the outer world during this
period. I know that Bloch reported that, when he called to see me in
the evenings, he could hear the sound of conversation; as my mother
was at Combray and he never found anybody in my room, he concluded
that I was talking to myself. When, much later, he learned that
Albertine had been staying with me at the time, and realised that I
had concealed her presence from all my friends, he declared that he
saw at last the reason why, during that episode in my life, I had
always refused to go out of doors. He was wrong. His mistake was,
however, quite pardonable, for the truth, even if it is inevitable, is
not always conceivable as a whole. People who learn some accurate
detail of another person's life at once deduce consequences which are
not accurate, and see in the newly discovered fact an explanation of
things that have no connexion with it whatsoever.

When I reflect now that my mistress had come, on our return from
Balbec, to live in Paris under the same roof as myself, that she had
abandoned the idea of going on a cruise, that she was installed in a
bedroom within twenty paces of my own, at the end of the corridor, in
my father's tapestried study, and that late every night, before
leaving me, she used to slide her tongue between my lips like a
portion of daily bread, a nourishing food that had the almost sacred
character of all flesh upon which the sufferings that we have endured
on its account have come in time to confer a sort of spiritual grace,
what I at once call to mind in comparison is not the night that
Captain de Borodino allowed me to spend in barracks, a favour which
cured what was after all only a passing distemper, but the night on
which my father sent Mamma to sleep in the little bed by the side of
my own. So it is that life, if it is once again to deliver us from an
anguish that has seemed inevitable, does so in conditions that are
different, so diametrically opposed at times that it is almost an open
sacrilege to assert the identity of the grace bestowed upon us.

When Albertine had heard from Françoise that, in the darkness of my
still curtained room, I was not asleep, she had no scruple about
making a noise as she took her bath, in her own dressing-room. Then,
frequently, instead of waiting until later in the day, I would repair
to a bathroom adjoining hers, which had a certain charm of its own.
Time was, when a stage manager would spend hundreds of thousands of
francs to begem with real emeralds the throne upon which a great
actress would play the part of an empress. The Russian ballet has
taught us that simple arrangements of light will create, if trained
upon the right spot, jewels as gorgeous and more varied. This
decoration, itself immaterial, is not so graceful, however, as that
which, at eight o'clock in the morning, the sun substitutes for what
we were accustomed to see when we did not arise before noon. The
windows of our respective bathrooms, so that their occupants might not
be visible from without, were not of clear glass but clouded with an
artificial and old--fashioned kind of frost. All of a sudden, the sun
would colour this drapery of glass, gild it, and discovering in myself
an earlier young man whom habit had long concealed, would intoxicate
me with memories, as though I were out in the open country gazing at a
hedge of golden leaves in which even a bird was not lacking.  For I
could hear Albertine ceaselessly humming:

  For melancholy Is but folly,
  And he who heeds it is a fool.

I loved her so well that I could spare a joyous smile for her bad
taste in music. This song had, as it happened, during the past summer,
delighted Mme. Bontemps, who presently heard people say that it was
silly, with the result that, instead of asking Albertine to sing it,
when she had a party, she would substitute:

  A song of farewell rises from troubled springs,

which in its turn became 'an old jingle of Massenet's, the child is
always dinning into our ears.'

A cloud passed, blotting out the sun; I saw extinguished and replaced
by a grey monochrome the modest, screening foliage of the glass.

The partition that divided our two dressing-rooms (Albertine's,
identical with my own, was a bathroom which Mamma, who had another at
the other end of the flat, had never used for fear of disturbing my
rest) was so slender that we could talk to each other as we washed in
double privacy, carrying on a conversation that was interrupted only
by the sound of the water, in that intimacy which, in hotels, is so.
often permitted by the smallness and proximity of the rooms, but
which, in private houses in Paris, is so rare.

On other mornings, I would remain in bed, drowsing for as long as I
chose, for orders had been given that no one was to enter my room
until I had rung the bell, an act which, owing to the awkward position
in which the electric bulb had been hung above my bed, took such a
time that often, tired of feeling for it and glad to be left alone, I
would lie back for some moments and almost fall asleep again. It was
not that I was wholly indifferent to Albertine's presence in the
house. Her separation from her girl friends had the effect of sparing
my heart any fresh anguish. She kept it in a state of repose, in a
semi-immobility which would help it to recover.  But after all, this
calm which my mistress was procuring for me was a release from
suffering rather than a positive joy. Not that it did not permit me to
taste many joys, from which too keen a grief had debarred me, but
these joys, so far from my owing them to Albertine, in whom for that
matter I could no longer see any beauty and who was beginning to bore
me, with whom I was now clearly conscious that I was not in love, I
tasted on the contrary when Albertine was not with me. And so, to
begin the morning, I did not send for her at once, especially if it
was a fine day. For some moments, knowing that he would make me
happier than Albertine, I remained closeted with the little person
inside me, hymning the rising sun, of whom I have already spoken. Of
those elements which compose our personality, it is not the most
obvious that are most essential. In myself, when ill health has
succeeded in uprooting them one after another, there will still remain
two or three, endowed with a hardier constitution than the rest,
notably a certain philosopher who is happy only when he has discovered
in two works of art, in two sensations, a common element. But the last
of all, I have sometimes asked myself whether it would not be this
little mannikin, very similar to another whom the optician at Combray
used to set up in his shop window to forecast the weather, and who,
doffing his hood when the sun shone, would put it on again if it was
going to rain. This little mannikin, I know his egoism; I may be
suffering from a choking fit which the mere threat of rain would calm;
he pays no heed, and, at the first drops so impatiently awaited,
losing his gaiety, sullenly pulls down his hood. Conversely, I dare
say that in my last agony, when all my other 'selves' are dead, if a
ray of sunshine steals into the room, while I am drawing my last
breath, the little fellow of the barometer will feel a great relief,
and will throw back his hood to sing: "Ah! Fine weather at last!"

I rang for Françoise. I opened the _Figaro_. I scanned its columns and
made sure that it did not contain an article, or so-called article,
which I had sent to the editor, and which was no more than a slightly
revised version of the page that had recently come to light, written
long ago in Dr. Percepied's carriage, as I gazed at the spires of
Martinville. Then I read Mamma's letter. She felt it to be odd, in
fact shocking, that a girl should be staying in the house alone with
me. On the first day, at the moment of leaving Balbec, when she saw
how wretched I was, and was distressed by the prospect of leaving me
by myself, my mother had perhaps been glad when she heard that
Albertine was travelling with us, and saw that, side by side with our
own boxes (those boxes among which I had passed a night in tears in
the Balbec hotel), there had been hoisted into the 'Twister'
Albertine's boxes also, narrow and black, which had seemed to me to
have the appearance of coffins, and as to which I knew not whether
they were bringing to my house life or death. But I had never even
asked myself the question, being all overjoyed, in the radiant
morning, after the fear of having to remain at Balbec, that I was
taking Albertine with me. But to this proposal, if at the start my
mother had not been hostile (speaking kindly to my friend like a
mother whose son has been seriously wounded and who is grateful to the
young mistress who is nursing him with loving care), she had acquired
hostility now that it had been too completely realised, and the girl
was prolonging her sojourn in our house, and moreover in the absence
of my parents. I cannot, however, say that my mother ever made this
hostility apparent. As in the past, when she had ceased to dare to
reproach me with my nervous instability, my laziness, now she felt a
hesitation--which I perhaps did not altogether perceive at the moment
or refused to perceive--to run the risk, by offering any criticism of
the girl to whom I had told her that I intended to make an offer of
marriage, of bringing a shadow into my life, making me in time to come
less devoted to my wife, of sowing perhaps for a season when she
herself would no longer be there, the seeds of remorse at having
grieved her by marrying Albertine. Mamma preferred to seem to be
approving a choice which she felt herself powerless to make me
reconsider. But people who came in contact with her at this time have
since told me that in addition to her grief at having lost her mother
she had an air of constant preoccupation. This mental strife, this
inward debate, had the effect of overheating my mother's brow, and she
was always opening the windows to let in the fresh air. But she did
not succeed in coming to any decision, for fear of influencing me in
the wrong direction and so spoiling what she believed to be my
happiness. She could not even bring herself to forbid me to keep
Albertine for the time being in our house. She did not wish to appear
more strict than Mme. Bontemps, who was the person principally
concerned, and who saw no harm in the arrangement, which greatly
surprised my mother. All the same, she regretted that she had been
obliged to leave us together, by departing at that very time for
Combray where she might have to remain (and did in fact remain) for
months on end, during which my great-aunt required her incessant
attention by day and night. Everything was made easy for her down
there, thanks to the kindness, the devotion of Legrandin who, gladly
undertaking any trouble that was required, kept putting off his return
to Paris from week to week, not that he knew my aunt at all well, but
simply, first of all, because she had been his mother's friend, and
also because he knew that the invalid, condemned to die, valued his
attentions and could not get on without him. Snobbishness is a serious
malady of the spirit, but one that is localised and does not taint it
as a whole. I, on the other hand, unlike Mamma, was extremely glad of
her absence at Combray, but for which I should have been afraid (being
unable to warn Albertine not to mention it) of her learning of the
girl's friendship with Mlle. Vinteuil. This would have been to my
mother an insurmountable obstacle, not merely to a marriage as to
which she had, for that matter, begged me to say nothing definite as
yet to Albertine, and the thought of which was becoming more and more
intolerable to myself, but even to the latter's being allowed to stay
for any length of time in the house.  Apart from so grave a reason,
which in this case did not apply, Mamma, under the dual influence of
my grandmother's liberating and edifying example, according to whom,
in her admiration of George Sand, virtue consisted in nobility of
heart, and of my own corruption, was now indulgent towards women whose
conduct she would have condemned in the past, or even now, had they
been any of her own middle-class friends in Paris or at Combray, but
whose lofty natures I extolled to her and to whom she pardoned much
because of their affection for myself. But when all is said, and apart
from any question of propriety, I doubt whether Albertine could have
put up with Mamma who had acquired from Combray, from my aunt Léonie,
from all her kindred, habits of punctuality and order of which my
mistress had not the remotest conception.

She would never think of shutting a door and, on the other hand, would
no more hesitate to enter a room if the door stood open than would a
dog or a cat. Her somewhat disturbing charm was, in fact, that of
taking the place in the household not so much of a girl as of a
domestic animal which comes into a room, goes out, is to be found
wherever one does not expect to find it and (in her case)
would--bringing me a profound sense of repose--come and lie down on my
bed by my side, make a place for herself from which she never stirred,
without being in my way as a person would have been. She ended,
however, by conforming to my hours of sleep, and not only never
attempted to enter my room but would take care not to make a sound
until I had rung my bell. It was Françoise who impressed these rules
of conduct upon her.

She was one of those Combray servants, conscious of their master's
place in the world, and that the least that they can do is to see that
he is treated with all the respect to which they consider him
entitled. When a stranger on leaving after a visit gave Françoise a
gratuity to be shared with the kitchenmaid, he had barely slipped his
coin into her hand before Françoise, with an equal display of speed,
discretion and energy, had passed the word to the kitchenmaid who came
forward to thank him, not in a whisper, but openly and aloud, as
Françoise had told her that she must do. The parish priest of Combray
was no genius, but he also knew what was due him. Under his
instruction, the daughter of some Protestant cousins of Mme. Sazerat
had been received into the Church, and her family had been most
grateful to him: it was a question of her marriage to a young nobleman
of Méséglise. The young man's relatives wrote to inquire about her in
a somewhat arrogant letter, in which they expressed their dislike of
her Protestant origin. The Combray priest replied in such a tone that
the Méséglise nobleman, crushed and prostrate, wrote a very different
letter in which he begged as the most precious favour the award of the
girl's hand in marriage.

Françoise deserved no special credit for making Albertine respect my
slumbers. She was imbued with tradition. From her studied silence, or
the peremptory response that she made to a proposal to enter my room,
or to send in some message to me, which Albertine had expressed in all
innocence, the latter realised with astonishment that she was now
living in an alien world, where strange customs prevailed, governed by
rules of conduct which one must never dream of infringing. She had
already had a foreboding of this at Balbec, but, in Paris, made no
attempt to resist, and would wait patiently every morning for the
sound of my bell before venturing to make any noise.

The training that Françoise gave her was of value also to our old
servant herself, for it gradually stilled the lamentations which, ever
since our return from Balbec, she had not ceased to utter. For, just
as we were boarding the tram, she remembered that she had forgotten to
say good-bye to the housekeeper of the Hotel, a whiskered dame who
looked after the bedroom floors, barely knew Françoise by sight, but
had been comparatively civil to her. Françoise positively insisted
upon getting out of the tram, going back to the Hotel, saying good-bye
properly to the housekeeper, and not leaving for Paris until the
following day. Common sense, coupled with my sudden horror of Balbec,
restrained me from granting her this concession, but my refusal had
infected her with a feverish distemper which the change of air had not
sufficed to cure and which lingered on in Paris. For, according to
Françoise's code, as it is illustrated in the carvings of
Saint-André-des-Champs, to wish for the death of an enemy, even to
inflict it is not forbidden, but it is a horrible sin not to do what
is expected of you, not to return a civility, to refrain, like a
regular churl, from saying good-bye to the housekeeper before leaving
a hotel. Throughout the journey, the continually recurring memory of
her not having taken leave of this woman had dyed Françoise's cheeks
with a scarlet flush that was quite alarming. And if she refused to
taste bite or sup until we reached Paris, it was perhaps because this
memory heaped a 'regular load' upon her stomach (every class of
society has a pathology of its own) even more than with the intention
of punishing us.

Among the reasons which led Mamma to write me a daily letter, and a
letter which never failed to include some quotation from Mme. de
Sévigné, there was the memory of my grandmother. Mamma would write to
me: "Mme. Sazerat gave us one of those little luncheons of which she
possesses the secret and which, as your poor grandmother would have
said, quoting Mme. de Sévigné, deprive us of solitude without
affording us company." In one of my own earlier letters I was so inept
as to write to Mamma: "By those quotations, your mother would
recognise you at once." Which brought me, three days later, the
reproof: "My poor boy, if it was only to speak to me of _my mother_,
your reference to Mme. de Sévigné was most inappropriate. She would
have answered you as she answered Mme. de Grignan: 'So she was nothing
to you? I had supposed that you were related.'"

By this time, I could hear my mistress leaving or returning to her
room. I rang the bell, for it was time now for Andrée to arrive with
the chauffeur, Morel's friend, lent me by the Verdurins, to take
Albertine out.  I had spoken to the last-named of the remote
possibility of our marriage; but I had never made her any formal
promise; she herself, from discretion, when I said to her: "I can't
tell, but it might perhaps be possible," had shaken her head with a
melancholy sigh, as much as to say: "Oh, no, never," in other words:
"I am too poor." And so, while I continued to say: "It is quite
indefinite," when speaking of future projects, at the moment I was
doing everything in my power to amuse her, to make life pleasant to
her, with perhaps the unconscious design of thereby making her wish to
marry me. She herself laughed at my lavish generosity.  "Andrée's
mother would be in a fine state if she saw me turn into a rich lady
like herself, what she calls a lady who has her own 'horses,
carriages, pictures.' What? Did I never tell you that she says that.
Oh, she's a character! What surprises me is that she seems to think
pictures just as important as horses and carriages." We shall see in
due course that, notwithstanding the foolish ways of speaking that she
had not outgrown, Albertine had developed to an astonishing extent,
which left me unmoved, the intellectual superiority of a woman friend
having always interested me so little that if I have ever complimented
any of my friends upon her own, it was purely out of politeness.
Alone, the curious genius of Céleste might perhaps appeal to me. In
spite of myself, I would continue to smile for some moments, when, for
instance, having discovered that Françoise was not in my room, she
accosted me with: "Heavenly deity reclining on a bed!" "But why,
Céleste," I would say, "why deity?" "Oh, if you suppose that you have
anything in common with the mortals who make their pilgrimage on our
vile earth, you are greatly mistaken!" "But why 'reclining' on a bed,
can't you see that I'm lying in bed?" "You never lie.  Who ever saw
anybody lie like that? You have just alighted there. With your white
pyjamas, and the way you twist your neck, you look for all the world
like a dove."

Albertine, even in the discussion of the most trivial matters,
expressed herself very differently from the little girl that she had
been only a few years earlier at Balbec. She went so far as to
declare, with regard to a political incident of which she disapproved:
"I consider that ominous." And I am not sure that it was not about
this time that she learned to say, when she meant that she felt a book
to be written in a bad style: "It is interesting, but really, it might
have been written _by a pig_."

The rule that she must not enter my room until I had rung amused her
greatly. As she had adopted our family habit of quotation, and in
following it drew upon the plays in which she had acted at her convent
and for which I had expressed admiration, she always compared me to
Assuérus:

  And death is the reward of whoso dares
  To venture in his presence unawares....
  None is exempt; nor is there any whom
  Or rank or sex can save from such a doom;
  Even I myself...
  Like all the rest, I by this law am bound;
  And, to address him, I must first be found
  By him, or he must call me to his side.

Physically, too, she had altered. Her blue, almond-shaped eyes, grown
longer, had not kept their form; they were indeed of the same colour,
but seemed to have passed into a liquid state. So much so that, when
she shut them it was as though a pair of curtains had been drawn to
shut out a view of the sea. It was no doubt this one of her features
that I remembered most vividly each night after we had parted. For, on
the contrary, every morning the ripple of her hair continued to give
me the same surprise, as though it were some novelty that I had never
seen before. And yet, above the smiling eyes of a girl, what could be
more beautiful than that clustering coronet of black violets? The
smile offers greater friendship; but the little gleaming tips of
blossoming hair, more akin to the flesh, of which they seem to be a
transposition into tiny waves, are more provocative of desire.

As soon as she entered my room, she sprang upon my bed and sometimes
would expatiate upon my type of intellect, would vow in a transport of
sincerity that she would sooner die than leave me: this was on
mornings when I had shaved before sending for her. She was one of
those women who can never distinguish the cause of their sensations.
The pleasure that they derive from a smooth cheek they explain to
themselves by the moral qualities of the man who seems to offer them a
possibility of future happiness, which is capable, however, of
diminishing and becoming less necessary the longer he refrains from
shaving.

I inquired where she was thinking of going.

"I believe Andrée wants to take me to the Buttes-Chaumont; I have
never been there."

Of course it was impossible for me to discern among so many other
words whether beneath these a falsehood lay concealed. Besides, I
could trust Andrée to tell me of all the places that she visited with
Albertine.

At Balbec, when I felt that I was utterly tired of Albertine, I had
made up my mind to say, untruthfully, to Andrée: "My little Andrée, if
only I had met you again sooner! It is you that I would have loved.
But now my heart is pledged in another quarter. All the same, we can
see a great deal of each other, for my love for another is causing me
great anxiety, and you will help me to find consolation." And lo,
these identical lying words had become true within the space of three
weeks. Perhaps, Andrée had believed in Paris that it was indeed a lie
and that I was in love with her, as she would doubtless have believed
at Balbec. For the truth is so variable for each of us, that other
people have difficulty in recognising themselves in it. And as I knew
that she would tell me everything that she and Albertine had done, I
had asked her, and she had agreed to come and call for Albertine
almost every day. In this way I might without anxiety remain at home.

Also, Andrée's privileged position as one of the girls of the little
band gave me confidence that she would obtain everything that I might
require from Albertine. Truly, I could have said to her now in all
sincerity that she would be capable of setting my mind at rest.

At the same time, my choice of Andrée (who happened to be staying in
Paris, having given up her plan of returning to Balbec) as guide and
companion to my mistress was prompted by what Albertine had told me of
the affection that her friend had felt for me at Balbec, at a time
when, on the contrary, I had supposed that I was boring her; indeed,
if I had known this at the time, it is perhaps with Andrée that I
would have fallen in love.

"What, you never knew," said Albertine, "but we were always joking
about it. Do you mean to say you never noticed how she used to copy
all your ways of talking and arguing? When she had just been with you,
it was too obvious. She had no need to tell us whether she had seen
you. As soon as she joined us, we could tell at once. We used to look
at one another, and laugh. She was like a coalheaver who tries to
pretend that he isn't one. He is black all over. A miller has no need
to say that he is a miller, you can see the flour all over his
clothes; and the mark of the sacks he has carried on his shoulder.
Andrée was just the same, she would knit her eyebrows the way you do,
and stretch out her long neck, and I don't know what all. When I take
up a book that has been in your room, even if I'm reading it out of
doors, I can tell at once that it belongs to you because it still
reeks of your beastly fumigations. It's only a trifle, still it's
rather a nice trifle, don't you know. Whenever anybody spoke nicely
about you, seemed to think a lot of you, Andrée was in ecstasies."

Notwithstanding all this, in case there might have been some secret
plan made behind my back, I advised her to give up the Buttes-Chaumont
for that day and to go instead to Saint-Cloud or somewhere else.

It was certainly not, as I was well aware, because I was the least bit
in love with Albertine. Love is nothing more perhaps than the
stimulation of those eddies which, in the wake of an emotion, stir the
soul. Certain such eddies had indeed stirred my soul through and
through when Albertine spoke to me at Balbec about Mlle. Vinteuil, but
these were now stilled. I was no longer in love with Albertine, for I
no longer felt anything of the suffering, now healed, which I had felt
in the tram at Balbec, upon learning how Albertine had spent her
girlhood, with visits perhaps to Montjouvain.  All this, I had too
long taken for granted, was healed. But, now and again, certain
expressions used by Albertine made me suppose--why, I cannot say--that
she must in the course of her life, short as it had been, have
received declarations of affection, and have received them with
pleasure, that is to say with sensuality. Thus, she would say, in any
connexion: "Is that true? Is it really true?" Certainly, if she had
said, like an Odette: "Is it really true, that thumping lie?" I should
not have been disturbed, for the absurdity of the formula would have
explained itself as a stupid inanity of feminine wit. But her
questioning air: "Is that true?" gave on the one hand the strange
impression of a creature incapable of judging things by herself, who
appeals to you for your testimony, as though she were not endowed with
the same faculties as yourself (if you said to her: "Why, we've been
out for a whole hour," or "It is raining," she would ask: "Is that
true?"). Unfortunately, on the other hand, this want of facility in
judging external phenomena for herself could not be the real origin of
her "Is that true? Is it really true?" It seemed rather that these
words had been, from the dawn of her precocious adolescence, replies
to: "You know, I never saw anybody as pretty as you." "You know I am
madly in love with you, I am most terribly excited."--affirmations
that were answered, with a coquettishly consenting modesty, by these
repetitions of: "Is that true? Is it really true?" which no longer
served Albertine, when in my company, save to reply by a question to
some such affirmation as: "You have been asleep for more than an
hour." "Is that true?"

Without feeling that I was the least bit in the world in love with
Albertine, without including in the list of my pleasures the moments
that we spent together, I was still preoccupied with the way in which
she disposed of her time; had I not, indeed, fled from Balbec in order
to make certain that she could no longer meet this or that person with
whom I was so afraid of her misbehaving, simply as a joke (a joke at
my expense, perhaps), that I had adroitly planned to sever, at one and
the same time, by my departure, all her dangerous entanglements? And
Albertine was so entirely passive, had so complete a faculty of
forgetting things and submitting to pressure, that these relations had
indeed been severed and I myself relieved of my haunting dread. But
that dread is capable of assuming as many forms as the undefined evil
that is its cause. So long as my jealousy was not reincarnate in fresh
people, I had enjoyed after the passing of my anguish an interval of
calm. But with a chronic malady, the slightest pretext serves to
revive it, as also with the vice of the person who is the cause of our
jealousy the slightest opportunity may serve her to practise it anew
(after a lull of chastity) with different people. I had managed to
separate Albertine from her accomplices, and, by so doing, to exorcise
my hallucinations; even if it was possible to make her forget people,
to cut short her attachments, her sensual inclination was, itself
also, chronic and was perhaps only waiting for an opportunity to
afford itself an outlet. Now Paris provided just as many opportunities
as Balbec.

In any town whatsoever, she had no need to seek, for the evil existed
not in Albertine alone, but in others to whom any opportunity for
enjoyment is good. A glance from one, understood at once by the other,
brings the two famished souls in contact. And it is easy for a clever
woman to appear not to have seen, then five minutes later to join the
person who has read her glance and is waiting for her in a side
street, and, in a few words, to make an appointment. Who will ever
know? And it was so simple for Albertine to tell me, in order that she
might continue these practices, that she was anxious to see again some
place on the outskirts of Paris that she had liked. And so it was
enough that she should return later than usual, that her expedition
should have taken an unaccountable time, although it was perfectly
easy perhaps to account for it without introducing any sensual reason,
for my malady to break out afresh, attached this time to mental
pictures which were not of Balbec, and which I would set to work, as
with their predecessors, to destroy, as though the destruction of an
ephemeral cause could put an end to a congenital malady. I did not
take into account the fact that in these acts of destruction, in which
I had as an accomplice, in Albertine, her faculty of changing, her
ability to forget, almost to hate the recent object of her love, I was
sometimes causing a profound grief to one or other of those persons
unknown with whom in turn she had taken her pleasure, and that this
grief I was causing them in vain, for they would be abandoned,
replaced, and, parallel to the path strewn with all the derelicts of
her light-hearted infidelities, there would open for me another,
pitiless path broken only by an occasional brief respite; so that my
suffering could end only with Albertine's life or with my own. Even in
the first days after our return to Paris, not satisfied by the
information that Andrée and the chauffeur had given me as to their
expeditions with my mistress, I had felt the neighbourhood of Paris to
be as tormenting as that of Balbec, and had gone off for a few days in
the country with Albertine. But everywhere my uncertainty as to what
she might be doing was the same; the possibility that it was something
wrong as abundant, vigilance even more difficult, with the result that
I returned with her to Paris. In leaving Balbec, I had imagined that I
was leaving Gomorrah, plucking Albertine from it; in reality, alas,
Gomorrah was dispersed to all the ends of the earth. And partly out of
jealousy, partly out of ignorance of such joys (a case which is rare
indeed), I had arranged unawares this game of hide and seek in which
Albertine was always to escape me.

I questioned her point-blank: "Oh, by the way, Albertine, am I
dreaming, or did you tell me that you knew Gilberte Swann?" "Yes; that
is to say, she used to talk to me at our classes, because she had a
set of the French history notes, in fact she was very nice about it,
and let me borrow them, and I gave them back the next time I saw her."
"Is she the kind of woman that I object to?" "Oh, not at all, quite
the opposite." But, rather than indulge in this sort of criminal
investigation, I would often devote to imagining Albertine's excursion
the energy that I did not employ in sharing it, and would speak to my
mistress with that ardour which remains intact in our unfulfilled
designs. I expressed so keen a longing to see once again some window
in the Sainte-Chapelle, so keen a regret that I was not able to go
there with her alone, that she said to me lovingly: "Why, my dear boy,
since you seem so keen about it, make a little effort, come with us.
We can start as late as you like, whenever you're ready.  And if you'd
rather be alone with me, I have only to send Andrée home, she can come
another time." But these very entreaties to me to go out added to the
calm which allowed me to yield to my desire to remain indoors.

It did not occur to me that the apathy that was indicated by my
delegating thus to Andrée or the chauffeur the task of soothing my
agitation by leaving them to keep watch over Albertine, was paralysing
in me, rendering inert all those imaginative impulses of the mind, all
those inspirations of the will, which enable us to guess, to
forestall, what some one else is about to do; indeed the world of
possibilities has always been more open to me than that of real
events. This helps us to understand the human heart, but we are apt to
be taken in by individuals. My jealousy was born of mental images, a
form of self torment not based upon probability. Now there may occur
in the lives of men and of nations (and there was to occur, one day,
in my own life) a moment when we need to have within us a
superintendent of police, a clear-sighted diplomat, a
master-detective, who instead of pondering over the concealed
possibilities that extend to all the points of the compass, reasons
accurately, says to himself: "If Germany announces this, it means that
she intends to do something else, not just 'something' in the abstract
but precisely this or that or the other, which she may perhaps have
begun already to do." "If So-and-So has fled, it is not in the
direction _a_ or _b_ or _d_, but to the point _c_, and the place to
which we must direct our search for him is c." Alas, this faculty
which was not highly developed in me, I allowed to grow slack, to lose
its power, to vanish, by acquiring the habit of growing calm the
moment that other people were engaged in keeping watch on my behalf.

As for the reason for my reluctance to leave the house, I should not
have liked to explain it to Albertine. I told her that the doctor had
ordered me to stay in bed. This was not true. And if it had been true,
his prescription would have been powerless to prevent me from
accompanying my mistress.  I asked her to excuse me from going out
with herself and Andrée. I shall mention only one of my reasons, which
was dictated by prudence. Whenever I went out with Albertine, if she
left my side for a moment, I became anxious, began to imagine that she
had spoken to, or simply cast a glance at somebody. If she was not in
the best of tempers, I thought that I was causing her to miss or to
postpone some appointment. Reality is never more than an allurement to
an unknown element in quest of which we can never progress very far.
It is better not to know, to think as little as possible, not to feed
our jealousy with the slightest concrete detail. Unfortunately, even
when we eliminate the outward life, incidents are created by the
inward life also; though I held aloof from Albertine's expeditions,
the random course of my solitary reflexions furnished me at times with
those tiny fragments of the truth which attract to themselves, like a
magnet, an inkling of the unknown, which, from that moment, becomes
painful. Even if we live in a hermetically sealed compartment,
associations of ideas, memories continue to act upon us. But these
internal shocks did not occur immediately; no sooner had Albertine
started on her drive than I was revivified, were it only for a few
moments, by the stimulating virtues of solitude.

I took my share of the pleasures of the new day; the arbitrary
desire--the capricious and purely spontaneous inclination to taste
them would not have sufficed to place them within my reach, had not
the peculiar state of the weather not merely reminded me of their
images in the past but affirmed their reality in the present,
immediately accessible to all men whom a contingent and consequently
negligible circumstance did not compel to remain at home. On certain
fine days the weather was so cold, one was in such full communication
with the street that it seemed as though a breach had been made in the
outer walls of the house, and, whenever a tramcar passed, the sound of
its bell throbbed like that of a silver knife striking a wall of
glass.  But it was most of all in myself that I heard, with
intoxication, a new sound rendered by the hidden violin. Its strings
are tightened or relaxed by mere changes of temperature, of light, in
the world outside. In our person, an instrument which the uniformity
of habit has rendered silent, song is born of these digressions, these
variations, the source of all music: the change of climate on certain
days makes us pass at once from one note to another.  We recapture the
forgotten air the mathematical inevitability of which we might have
deduced, and which for the first few moments we sing without
recognising it. By themselves these modifications (which, albeit
coming from without, were internal) refashioned for me the world
outside. Communicating doors, long barred, opened themselves in my
brain. The life of certain towns, the gaiety of certain expeditions
resumed their place in my consciousness. All athrob in harmony with
the vibrating string, I would have sacrificed my dull life in the
past, and all my life to come, erased with the india-rubber of habit,
for one of these special, unique moments.

If I had not gone out with Albertine on her long drive, my mind would
stray all the farther afield, and, because I had refused to savour
with my senses this particular morning, I enjoyed in imagination all
the similar mornings, past or possible, or more precisely a certain
type of morning of which all those of the same kind were but the
intermittent apparition which I had at once recognised; for the keen
air blew the book open of its own accord at the right page, and I
found clearly set out before my eyes, so that I might follow it from
my bed, the Gospel for the day. This ideal morning filled my mind full
of a permanent reality, identical with all similar mornings, and
infected me with a cheerfulness which my physical ill-health did not
diminish: for, inasmuch as our sense of well-being is caused not so
much by our sound health as by the unemployed surplus of our strength,
we can attain to it, just as much as by increasing our strength, by
diminishing our activity. The activity with which I was overflowing
and which I kept constantly charged as I lay in bed, made me spring
from side to side, with a leaping heart, like a machine which,
prevented from moving in space, rotates on its own axis.

Françoise came in to light the fire, and to make it draw, threw upon
it a handful of twigs, the scent of which, forgotten for a year past,
traced round the fireplace a magic circle within which, perceiving
myself poring over a book, now at Combray, now at Doncières, I was as
joyful, while remaining in my bedroom in Paris, as if I had been on
the point of starting for a walk along the Méséglise way, or of going
to join Saint-Loup and his friends on the training-ground. It often
happens that the pleasure which everyone takes in turning over the
keepsakes that his memory has collected is keenest in those whom the
tyranny of bodily ill-health and the daily hope of recovery prevent,
on the one hand, from going out to seek in nature scenes that resemble
those memories, and, on the other hand, leave so convinced that they
will shortly be able to do so that they can remain gazing at them in a
state of desire, of appetite, and not regard them merely as memories,
as pictures. But, even if they were never to be anything more than
memories to me, even if I, as I recalled them, saw merely pictures,
immediately they recreated in me, of me as a whole, by virtue of an
identical sensation, the boy, the youth who had first seen them. There
had been not merely a change in the weather outside, or, inside the
room, the introduction of a fresh scent, there had been in myself a
difference of age, the substitution of another person. The scent, in
the frosty air, of the twigs of brushwood, was like a fragment of the
past, an invisible floe broken off from the ice of an old winter that
stole into my room, often variegated moreover with this perfume or
that light, as though with a sequence of different years, in which I
found myself plunged, overwhelmed, even before I had identified them,
by the eagerness of hopes long since abandoned. The sun's rays fell
upon my bed and passed through the transparent shell of my attenuated
body, warmed me, made me as hot as a sheet of scorching crystal.
Whereupon, a famished convalescent who has already begun to batten
upon all the dishes that are still forbidden him, I asked myself
whether marriage with Albertine would not spoil my life, as well by
making me assume the burden, too heavy for my shoulders, of
consecrating myself to another person, as by forcing me to live in
absence from myself because of her continual presence and depriving
me, forever, of the delights of solitude.

And not of these alone. Even when we ask of the day nothing but
desires, there are some--those that are excited not by things but by
people--whose character it is to be unlike any other. If, on rising
from my bed, I went to the window and drew the curtain aside for a
moment, it was not merely, as a pianist for a moment turns back the
lid of his instrument, to ascertain whether, on the balcony and in the
street, the sunlight was tuned to exactly the same pitch as in my
memory, it was also to catch a glimpse of some laundress carrying her
linen-basket, a bread-seller in her blue apron, a dairymaid in her
tucker and sleeves of white linen, carrying the yoke from which her
jugs of milk are suspended, some haughty golden-haired miss escorted
by her governess, a composite image, in short, which the differences
of outline, numerically perhaps insignificant, were enough to make as
different from any other as, in a phrase of music, the difference
between two notes, an image but for the vision of which I should have
impoverished my day of the objects which it might have to offer to my
desires of happiness. But, if the surfeit of joy, brought me by the
spectacle of women whom it was impossible to imagine _a priori_, made
more desirable, more deserving of exploration, the street, the town,
the world, it set me longing, for that very reason, to recover my
health, to go out of doors and, without Albertine, to be a free man.
How often, at the moment when the unknown woman who was to haunt my
dreams passed beneath the window, now on foot, now at the full speed
of her motor-car, was I made wretched that my body could not follow my
gaze which kept pace with her, and falling upon her as though shot
from the embrasure of my window by an arquebus, arrest the flight of
the face that held out for me the offer of a happiness which,
cloistered thus, I should never know.

Of Albertine, on the other hand, I had nothing more to learn. Every
day, she seemed to me less attractive. Only, the desire that she
aroused in other people, when, upon hearing of it, I began to suffer
afresh and was impelled to challenge their possession of her, raised
her in my sight to a lofty pinnacle.  Pain, she was capable of causing
me; joy, never. Pain alone kept my tedious attachment alive. As soon
as my pain vanished, and with it the need to soothe it, requiring all
my attention, like some agonising distraction, I felt that she meant
absolutely nothing to me, that I must mean absolutely nothing to her.
It made me wretched that this state should persist, and, at certain
moments, I longed to hear of something terrible that she had done,
something that would be capable of keeping us at arms-length until I
was cured, so that we might then be able to be reconciled, to
refashion in a different and more flexible form the chain that bound
us.

In the meantime, I was employing a thousand circumstances, a thousand
pleasures to procure for her in my society the illusion of that
happiness which I did not feel myself capable of giving her. I should
have liked, as soon as I was cured, to set off for Venice, but how was
I to manage it, if I married Albertine, I, who was so jealous of her
that even in Paris whenever I decided to stir from my room it was to
go out with her? Even when I stayed in the house all the afternoon, my
thoughts accompanied her on her drive, traced a remote, blue horizon,
created round the centre that was myself a fluctuating zone of vague
uncertainty. "How completely," I said to myself, "would Albertine
spare me the anguish of separation if, in the course of one of these
drives, seeing that I no longer say anything to her about marriage,
she decided not to come back, and went off to her aunt's, without my
having to bid her good-bye!" My heart, now that its scar had begun to
heal, was ceasing to adhere to the heart of my mistress; I could by
imagination shift her, separate her from myself without pain. No
doubt, failing myself, some other man would be her husband, and in her
freedom she would meet perhaps with those adventures which filled me
with horror.  But the day was so fine, I was so certain that she would
return in the evening, that even if the idea of possible misbehaviour
did enter my mind, I could, by an exercise of free will, imprison it
in a part of my brain in which it had no more importance than would
have had in my real life the vices of an imaginary person; bringing
into play the supple hinges of my thought, I had, with an energy which
I felt in my head to be at once physical and mental, as it were a
muscular movement and a spiritual impulse, broken away from the state
of perpetual preoccupation in which I had until then been confined,
and was beginning to move in a free atmosphere, in which the idea of
sacrificing everything in order to prevent Albertine from marrying
some one else and to put an obstacle in the way of her fondness for
women seemed as unreasonable to my own mind as to that of a person who
had never known her.

However, jealousy is one of those intermittent maladies, the cause of
which is capricious, imperative, always identical in the same patient,
sometimes entirely different in another. There are asthmatic persons
who can soothe their crises only by opening the windows, inhaling the
full blast of the wind, the pure air of the mountains, others by
taking refuge in the heart of the city, in a room heavy with smoke.
Rare indeed is the jealous man whose jealousy does not allow certain
concessions. One will consent to infidelity, provided that he is told
of it, another provided that it is concealed from him, wherein they
appear to be equally absurd, since if the latter is more literally
deceived inasmuch as the truth is not disclosed to him, the other
demands in that truth the food, the extension, the renewal of his
sufferings.

What is more, these two parallel manias of jealousy extend often
beyond words, whether they implore or reject confidences. We see a
jealous lover who is jealous only of the women with whom his mistress
has relations in his absence, but allows her to give herself to
another man, if it is done with his authorisation, near at hand, and,
if not actually before his eyes, under his roof. This case is not at
all uncommon among elderly men who are in love with young women. Such
a man feels the difficulty of winning her favour, sometimes his
inability to satisfy her, and, rather than be betrayed, prefers to
admit to his house, to an adjoining room, some man whom he considers
incapable of giving her bad advice, but not incapable of giving her
pleasure. With another man it is just the opposite; never allowing his
mistress to go out by herself for a single minute in a town that he
knows, he keeps her in a state of bondage, but allows her to go for a
month to a place which he does not know, where he cannot form any
mental picture of what she may be doing. I had with regard to
Albertine both these sorts of sedative mania. I should not have been
jealous if she had enjoyed her pleasures in my company, with my
encouragement, pleasures over the whole of which I could have kept
watch, thus avoiding any fear of falsehood; I might perhaps not have
been jealous either if she had removed to a place so unfamiliar and
remote that I could not imagine nor find any possibility, feel any
temptation to know the manner of her life.  In either alternative, my
uncertainty would have been killed by a knowledge or an ignorance
equally complete.

The decline of day plunging me back by an act of memory in a cool
atmosphere of long ago, I breathed it with the same delight with which
Orpheus inhaled the subtle air, unknown upon this earth, of the
Elysian Fields.

But already the day was ending and I was overpowered by the desolation
of the evening. Looking mechanically at the clock to see how many
hours must elapse before Albertine's return, I saw that I had still
time to dress and go downstairs to ask my landlady, Mme. de
Guermantes, for particulars of various becoming garments which I was
anxious to procure for my mistress. Sometimes I met the Duchess in the
courtyard, going out for a walk, even if the weather was bad, in a
close-fitting hat and furs. I knew quite well that, to many people of
intelligence, she was merely a lady like any other, the name Duchesse
de Guermantes signifying nothing, now that there are no longer any
sovereign Duchies or Principalities, but I had adopted a different
point of view in my method of enjoying people and places. All the
castles of the territories of which she was Duchess, Princess,
Viscountess, this lady in furs defying the weather teemed to me to be
carrying them on her person, as a figure carved over the lintel of a
church door holds in his hand the cathedral that he has built or the
city that he has defended. But these castles, these forests, my mind's
eye alone could discern them in the left hand of the lady in furs,
whom the King called cousin. My bodily eyes distinguished in it only,
on days when the sky was threatening, an umbrella with which the
Duchess was not afraid to arm herself. "One can never be certain, it
is wiser, I may find myself miles from home, with a cabman demanding a
fare _beyond my means_." The words 'too dear' and 'beyond my means'
kept recurring all the time in the Duchess's conversation, as did
also: 'I am too poor'--without its being possible to decide whether
she spoke thus because she thought it amusing to say that she was
poor, being so rich, or because she thought it smart, being so
aristocratic, in spite of her affectation of peasant ways, not to
attach to riches the importance that people give them who are merely
rich and nothing else, and who look down upon the poor. Perhaps it
was, rather, a habit contracted at a time in her life when, already
rich, but not rich enough to satisfy her needs, considering the
expense of keeping up all those properties, she felt a certain
shortage of money which she did not wish to appear to be concealing.
The things about which we most often jest are generally, on the
contrary, the things that embarrass us, but we do not wish to appear
to be embarrassed by them, and feel perhaps a secret hope of the
further advantage that the person to whom we are talking, hearing us
treat the matter as a joke, will conclude that it is not true.

But upon most evenings, at this hour, I could count upon finding the
Duchess at home, and I was glad of this, for it was more convenient
for me to ask her in detail for the information that Albertine
required. And down I went almost without thinking how extraordinary it
was that I should be calling upon that mysterious Mme. de Guermantes
of my boyhood, simply in order to make use of her for a practical
purpose, as one makes use of the telephone, a supernatural instrument
before whose miracles we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ
without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or to order ices for
a party.

Albertine delighted in any sort of finery. I could not deny myself the
pleasure of giving her some new trifle every day. And whenever she had
spoken to me with rapture of a scarf, a stole, a sunshade which, from
the window or as they passed one another in the courtyard, her eyes
that so quickly distinguished anything smart, had seen round the
throat, over the shoulders, in the hand of Mme. de Guermantes, knowing
how the girl's naturally fastidious taste (refined still further by
the lessons in elegance of attire which Elstir's conversation had been
to her) would not be at all satisfied by any mere substitute, even of
a pretty thing, such as fills its place in the eyes of the common
herd, but differs from it entirely, I went in secret to make the
Duchess explain to me where, how, from what model the article had been
created that had taken Albertine's fancy, how I should set about to
obtain one exactly similar, in what the creator's secret, the charm
(what Albertine called the '_chic_' the 'style') of his manner, the
precise name--the beauty of the material being of importance also--and
quality of the stuffs that I was to insist upon their using.

When I mentioned to Albertine, on our return from Balbec, that the
Duchesse de Guermantes lived opposite to us, in the same mansion, she
had assumed, on hearing the proud title and great name, that air more
than indifferent, hostile, contemptuous, which is the sign of an
impotent desire in proud and passionate natures. Splendid as
Albertine's nature might be, the fine qualities which it contained
were free to develop only amid those hindrances which are our personal
tastes, or that lamentation for those of our tastes which we have been
obliged to relinquish--in Albertine's case snobbishness--which is
called antipathy. Albertine's antipathy to people in society occupied,
for that matter, but a very small part in her nature, and appealed to
me as an aspect of the revolutionary spirit--that is to say an
embittered love of the nobility--engraved upon the opposite side of
the French character to that which displays the aristocratic manner of
Mme.  de Guermantes. To this aristocratic manner Albertine, in view of
the impossibility of her acquiring it, would perhaps not have given a
thought, but remembering that Elstir had spoken to her of the Duchess
as the best dressed woman in Paris, her republican contempt for a
Duchess gave place in my mistress to a keen interest in a fashionable
woman. She was always asking me to tell her about Mme. de Guermantes,
and was glad that I should go to the Duchess to obtain advice as to
her own attire. No doubt I might have got this from Mme. Swann and
indeed I did once write to her with this intention. But Mme. de
Guermantes seemed to me to carry to an even higher pitch the art of
dressing. If, on going down for a moment to call upon her, after
making sure that she had not gone out and leaving word that I was to
be told as soon as Albertine returned, I found the Duchess swathed in
the mist of a garment of grey crêpe de chine, I accepted this aspect
of her which I felt to be due to complex causes and to be quite
inevitable, I let myself be overpowered by the atmosphere which it
exhaled, like that of certain late afternoons cushioned in pearly grey
by a vaporous fog; if, on the other hand, her indoor gown was Chinese
with red and yellow flames, I gazed at it as at a glowing sunset;
these garments were not a casual decoration alterable at her pleasure,
but a definite and poetical reality like that of the weather, or the
light peculiar to a certain hour of the day.

Of all the outdoor and indoor gowns that Mme. de Guermantes wore,
those which seemed most to respond to a definite intention, to be
endowed with a special significance, were the garments made by Fortuny
from old Venetian models. Is it their historical character, is it
rather the fact that each one of them is unique that gives them so
special a significance that the pose of the woman who is wearing one
while she waits for you to appear or while she talks to you assumes an
exceptional importance, as though the costume had been the fruit of a
long deliberation and your conversation was detached from the current
of everyday life like a scene in a novel? In the novels of Balzac, we
see his heroines purposely put on one or another dress on the day on
which they are expecting some particular visitor. The dresses of
to-day have less character, always excepting the creations of Fortuny.
There is no room for vagueness in the novelist's description, since
the gown does really exist, and the merest sketch of it is as
naturally preordained as a copy of a work of art. Before putting on
one or another of them, the woman has had to make a choice between two
garments, not more or less alike but each one profoundly individual,
and answering to its name. But the dress did not prevent me from
thinking of the woman.

Indeed, Mme. de Guermantes seemed to me at this time more attractive
than in the days when I was still in love with her. Expecting less of
her (whom I no longer went to visit for her own sake), it was almost
with the ease and comfort of a man in a room by himself, with his feet
on the fender, that I listened to her as though I were reading a book
written in the speech of long ago. My mind was sufficiently detached
to enjoy in what she said that pure charm of the French language which
we no longer find either in the speech or in the literature of the
present day. I listened to her conversation as to a folk song
deliciously and purely French, I realised that I would have allowed
her to belittle Maeterlinck (whom for that matter she now admired,
from a feminine weakness of intellect, influenced by those literary
fashions whose rays spread slowly), as I realised that Mérimée had
belittled Baudelaire, Stendhal Balzac, Paul-Louis Courier Victor Hugo,
Meilhac Mallarmé. I realised that the critic had a far more restricted
outlook than his victim, but also a purer vocabulary. That of Mme. de
Guermantes, almost as much as that of Saint-Loup's mother, was
purified to an enchanting degree. It is not in the bloodless formulas
of the writers of to-day, who say: _au fait_ (for 'in reality'),
_singulièrement_ (for 'in particular'), _étonné_ (for 'struck with
amazement'), and the like, that we recapture the old speech and the
true pronunciation of words, but in conversing with a Mme. de
Guermantes or a Françoise; I had learned from the latter, when I was
five years old, that one did not say 'the Tarn' but 'the Tar'; not
'Beam' but 'Bear.' The effect of which was that at twenty, when I
began to go into society, I had no need to be taught there that one
ought not to say, like Mme. Bontemps: 'Madame de Beam.'

It would be untrue to pretend that of this territorial and
semi-peasant quality which survived in her the Duchess was not fully
conscious, indeed she displayed a certain affectation in emphasising
it. But, on her part, this was not so much the false simplicity of a
great lady aping the countrywoman or the pride of a Duchess bent upon
snubbing the rich ladies who express contempt for the peasants whom
they do not know as the almost artistic preference of a woman who
knows the charm of what belongs to her, and is not going to spoil it
with a coat of modern varnish. In the same way, everybody will
remember at Dives a Norman innkeeper, landlord of the Guillaume le
Conquérant, who carefully refrained--which is very rare--from giving
his hostelry the modern comforts of an hotel, and, albeit a
millionaire, retained the speech, the blouse of a Norman peasant and
allowed you to enter his kitchen and watch him prepare with his own
hands, as in a farmhouse, a dinner which was nevertheless infinitely
better and even more expensive than are the dinners in the most
luxurious hotels.

All the local sap that survives in the old noble families is not
enough, there must also be born of them a person of sufficient
intelligence not to despise it, not to conceal it beneath the varnish
of society. Mme. de Guermantes, unfortunately clever and Parisian,
who, when I first knew her, retained nothing of her native soil but
its accent, had at least, when she wished to describe her life as a
girl, found for her speech one of those compromises (between what
would have seemed too spontaneously provincial on the one hand or
artificially literary on the other), one of those compromises which
form the attraction of George Sand's _La Petite Fadette_ or of certain
legends preserved by Chateaubriand in his _Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe_.
My chief pleasure was in hearing her tell some anecdote which brought
peasants into the picture with herself. The historic names, the old
customs gave to these blendings of the castle with the village a
distinctly attractive savour. Having remained in contact with the
lands over which it once ruled, a certain class of the nobility has
remained regional, with the result that the simplest remark unrolls
before our eyes a political and physical map of the whole history of
France.

If there was no affectation, no desire to fabricate a special
language, then this manner of pronouncing words was a regular museum
of French history displayed in conversation. 'My great-uncle Fitt-jam'
was not at all surprising, for we know that the Fitz-James family are
proud to boast that they are French nobles, and do not like to hear
their name pronounced in the English fashion. One must, incidentally,
admire the touching docility of the people who had previously supposed
themselves obliged to pronounce certain names phonetically, and who,
all of a sudden, after hearing the Duchesse de Guermantes pronounce
them otherwise, adopted the pronunciation which they could never have
guessed. Thus the Duchess, who had had a great-grandfather in the
suite of the Comte de Chambord, liked to tease her husband for having
turned Orleanist by proclaiming: "We old Frochedorf people...." The
visitor, who had always imagined that he was correct in saying
'Frohsdorf,' at once turned his coat, and ever afterwards might be
heard saying 'Frochedorf.'

On one occasion when I asked Mme. de Guermantes who a young blood was
whom she had introduced to me as her nephew but whose name I had
failed to catch, I was none the wiser when from the back of her throat
the Duchess uttered in a very loud but quite inarticulate voice:
"_C'est l'...  i Eon... l... b... frère à Robert_. He makes out that
he has the same shape of skull as the ancient Gauls." Then I realised
that she had said: "_C'est le petit Léon_," and that this was the
Prince de Léon, who was indeed Robert de Saint-Loup's brother-in-law.
"I know nothing about his skull," she went on, "but the way he
dresses, and I must say he does dress quite well, is not at all in the
style of those parts. Once when I was staying at Josselin, with the
Rohans, we all went over to one of the pilgrimages, where there were
peasants from every part of Brittany. A great hulking fellow from one
of the Léon villages stood gaping open-mouthed at Robert's
brother-in-law in his beige breeches! 'What are you staring at me like
that for?' said Léon. 'I bet you don't know who I am?' The peasant
admitted that he did not. 'Very well,' said Léon, 'I'm your Prince.'
'Oh!' said the peasant, taking off his cap and apologising. 'I thought
you were an _Englische_.'"

And if, taking this opportunity, I led Mme. de Guermantes on to talk
about the Rohans (with whom her own family had frequently
intermarried), her conversation would become impregnated with a hint
of the wistful charm of the Pardons, and (as that true poet Pampille
would say) with "the harsh savour of pancakes of black grain fried
over a fire of rushes."

Of the Marquis du Lau (whose tragic decline we all know, when, himself
deaf, he used to be taken to call on Mme. H... who was blind), she
would recall the less tragic years when, after the day's sport, at
Guermantes, he would change into slippers before taking tea with the
Prince of Wales, to whom he would not admit himself inferior, and with
whom, as we see, he stood upon no ceremony. She described all this so
picturesquely that she seemed to invest him with the plumed musketeer
bonnet of the somewhat vainglorious gentlemen of the Périgord.

But even in the mere classification of different people, her care to
distinguish and indicate their native provinces was in Mme. de
Guermantes, when she was her natural self, a great charm which a
Parisian-born woman could never have acquired, and those simple names
Anjou, Poitou, the Périgord, filled her conversation with pictorial
landscapes.

To revert to the pronunciation and vocabulary of Mme. de Guermantes,
it is in this aspect that the nobility shews itself truly
conservative, with everything that the word implies at once somewhat
puerile and somewhat perilous, stubborn in its resistance to evolution
but interesting also to an artist. I was anxious to know the original
spelling of the name Jean. I learned it when I received a letter from
a nephew of Mme. de Villeparisis who signs himself--as he was
christened, as he figures in Gotha--Jehan de Villeparisis, with the
same handsome, superfluous, heraldic h that we admire, illuminated in
vermilion or ultramarine in a Book of Hours or in a window.

Unfortunately, I never had time to prolong these visits indefinitely,
for I was anxious, if possible, not to return home after my mistress.
But it was only in driblets that I was able to obtain from Mme. de
Guermantes that information as to her garments which was of use in
helping me to order garments similar in style, so far as it was
possible for a young girl to wear them, for Albertine. "For instance,
Madame, that evening when you dined with Mme. de Saint-Euverte, and
then went on to the Princesse de Guermantes, you had a dress that was
all red, with red shoes, you were marvellous, you reminded me of a
sort of great blood-red blossom, a blazing ruby--now, what was that
dress? Is it the sort of thing that a girl can wear?"

The Duchess, imparting to her tired features the radiant expression
that the Princesse des Laumes used to assume when Swann, in years
past, paid her compliments, looked, with tears of merriment in her
eyes, quizzingly, questioningly and delightedly at M. de Bréauté who
was always there at that hour and who set beaming from behind his
monocle a smile that seemed to pardon this outburst of intellectual
trash for the sake of the physical excitement of youth which seemed to
him to lie beneath it. The Duchess appeared to be saying: "What is the
matter with him? He must be mad." Then turning to me with a coaxing
air: "I wasn't aware that I looked like a blazing ruby or a blood-red
blossom, but I do remember, as it happens, that I had on a red dress:
it was red satin, which was being worn that season. Yes, a girl can
wear that sort of thing at a pinch, but you told me that your friend
never went out in the evening. That is a full evening dress, not a
thing that she can put on to pay calls."

What is extraordinary is that of the evening in question, which after
all was not so very remote, Mme. de Guermantes should remember nothing
but what she had been wearing, and should have forgotten a certain
incident which nevertheless, as we shall see presently, ought to have
mattered to her greatly. It seems that among men and women of action
(and people in society are men and women of action on a minute, a
microscopic scale, but are nevertheless men and women of action), the
mind, overcharged by the need of attending to what is going to happen
in an hour's time, confides only a very few things to the memory. As
often as not, for instance, it was not with the object of putting his
questioner in the wrong and making himself appear not to have been
mistaken that M. de Norpois, when you reminded him of the prophecies
he had uttered with regard to an alliance with Germany of which
nothing had ever come, would say: "You must be mistaken, I have no
recollection of it whatever, it is not like me, for in that sort of
conversation I am always most laconic, and I would never have
predicted the success of one of those _coups d'éclat_ which are often
nothing more than _coups de tête_ and almost always degenerate into
_coups de force_.  It is beyond question that in the remote future a
Franco-German _rapprochement_ might come into being and would be
highly profitable to both countries, nor would France have the worse
of the bargain, I dare say, but I have never spoken of it because the
fruit is not yet ripe, and if you wish to know my opinion, in asking
our late enemies to join with us in solemn wedlock, I consider that we
should be setting out to meet a severe rebuff, and that the attempt
could end only in disaster." In saying this M. de Norpois was not
being untruthful, he had simply forgotten. We quickly forget what we
have not deeply considered, what has been dictated to us by the spirit
of imitation, by the passions of our neighbours. These change, and
with them our memory undergoes alteration. Even more than diplomats,
politicians are unable to remember the point of view which they
adopted at a certain moment, and some of their palinodes are due less
to a surfeit of ambition than to a shortage of memory. As for people
in society, there are very few things that they remember.

Mme. de Guermantes assured me that, at the party to which she had gone
in a red gown, she did not remember Mme. de Chaussepierre's being
present, and that I must be mistaken. And yet, heaven knows, the
Chaussepierres had been present enough in the minds of both Duke and
Duchess since then. For the following reason. M. de Guermantes had
been the senior vice-president of the Jockey, when the president died.
Certain members of the club who were not popular in society and whose
sole pleasure was to blackball the men who did not invite them to
their houses started a campaign against the Duc de Guermantes who,
certain of being elected, and relatively indifferent to the presidency
which was a small matter for a man in his social position, paid no
attention. It was urged against him that the Duchess was a Dreyfusard
(the Dreyfus case had long been concluded, but twenty years later
people were still talking about it, and so far only two years had
elapsed), and entertained the Rothschilds, that so much consideration
had been shewn of late to certain great international magnates like
the Duc de Guermantes, who was half German. The campaign found its
ground well prepared, clubs being always jealous of men who are in the
public eye, and detesting great fortunes.

Chaussepierre's own fortune was no mere pittance, but nobody could
take offence at it; he never spent a penny, the couple lived in a
modest apartment, the wife went about dressed in black serge. A
passionate music-lover, she did indeed give little afternoon parties
to which many more singers were invited than to the Guermantes. But no
one ever mentioned these parties, no refreshments were served, the
husband did not put in an appearance even, and everything went off
quite quietly in the obscurity of the Rue de la Chaise. At the Opera,
Mme. de Chaussepierre passed unnoticed, always among people whose
names recalled the most 'die-hard' element of the intimate circle of
Charles X, but people quite obsolete, who went nowhere. On the day of
the election, to the general surprise, obscurity triumphed over
renown: Chaussepierre, the second vice-president, was elected
president of the Jockey, and the Duc de Guermantes was left
sitting--that is to say, in the senior vice-president's chair. Of
course, being president of the Jockey means little or nothing to
Princes of the highest rank such as the Guermantes. But not to be it
when it is your turn, to see preferred to you a Chaussepierre to whose
wife Oriane, two years earlier, had not merely refused to bow but had
taken offence that an unknown scarecrow like that should bow to her,
this the Duke did find hard to endure.  He pretended to be superior to
this rebuff, asserting moreover that it was his long-standing
friendship with Swann that was at the root of it. Actually his anger
never cooled.

One curious thing was that nobody had ever before heard the Duc de
Guermantes make use of the quite commonplace expression 'out and out,'
but ever since the Jockey election, whenever anybody referred to the
Dreyfus case, pat would come 'out and out.'"Dreyfus case, Dreyfus
case, that's soon said, and it's a misuse of the term. It is not a
question of religion, it's _out and out_ a political matter." Five
years might go by without your hearing him say 'out and out' again, if
during that time nobody mentioned the Dreyfus case, but if, at the end
of five years, the name Dreyfus cropped up, 'out and out' would at
once follow automatically. The Duke could not, anyhow, bear to hear
any mention of the case, "which has been responsible," he would say,
"for so many disasters" albeit he was really conscious of one and one
only; his own failure to become president of the Jockey.  And so on
the afternoon in question, when I reminded Madame de Guermantes of the
red gown that she had worn at her cousin's party, M. de Bréauté was
none too well received when, determined to say something, by an
association of ideas which remained obscure and which he did not
illuminate, he began, twisting his tongue about between his pursed
lips: "Talking of the Dreyfus case--" (why in the world of the Dreyfus
case, we were talking simply of a red dress, and certainly poor
Bréauté, whose only desire was to make himself agreeable, can have had
no malicious intention).  But the mere name of Dreyfus made the Duc de
Guermantes knit his Jupiterian brows. "I was told," Bréauté went on,
"a jolly good thing, damned clever, 'pon my word, that was said by our
friend Cartier" (we must warn the reader that this Cartier, Mme. de
Villefranche's brother, was in no way related to the jeweller of that
name) "not that I'm in the least surprised, for he's got plenty of
brains to spare," "Oh!" broke in Oriane, "he can spare me his brains.
I hardly like to tell you how much your friend Cartier has always
bored me, and I have never been able to understand the boundless charm
that Charles de La Trémoïlle and his wife seem to find in the
creature, for I meet him there every time that I go to their house."
"My dear Dutt-yess," replied Bréauté, who was unable to pronounce the
soft _c_, "I think you are very hard upon Cartier. It is true that he
has perhaps made himself rather too mutt-y-at home at the La
Tré-moïlles', but after all he does provide Tyarles with a sort
of--what shall I say?--a sort of _fidus Achates_, which has become a
very rare bird indeed in these days. Anyhow, this is the story as it
was told to me. Cartier appears to have said that if M. Zola had gone
out of his way to stand his trial and to be convicted, it was in order
to enjoy the only sensation he had never yet tried, that of being in
prison." "And so he ran away before they could arrest him," Oriane
broke in. "Your story doesn't hold water.  Besides, even if it was
plausible, I think his remark absolutely idiotic. If that's what you
call being witty!" "Good grate-ious, my dear Oriane," replied Bréauté
who, finding himself contradicted, was beginning to lose confidence,
"it's not my remark, I'm telling you it as it was told to me, take it
for what's it worth. Anyhow, it earned M. Cartier a first rate blowing
up from that excellent fellow La Trémoïlle who, and quite rightly,
does not like people to discuss what one might call, so to speak,
current events, in his drawing-room, and was all the more annoyed
because Mme. Alphonse Rothschild was present. Cartier had to listen to
a positive jobation from La Trémoïlle." "I should think so," said the
Duke, in the worst of tempers, "the Alphonse Rothschilds, even if they
have the tact never to speak of that abominable affair, are
Dreyfusards at heart, like all the Jews. Indeed that is an argument
_ad hominem_" (the Duke was a trifle vague in his use of the
expression _ad hominem_) "which is not sufficiently made use of to
prove the dishonesty of the Jews. If a Frenchman robs or murders
somebody, I do not consider myself bound, because he is a Frenchman
like myself, to find him innocent. But the Jews will never admit that
one of their fellow-countrymen is a traitor, although they know it
perfectly well, and never think of the terrible repercussions" (the
Duke was thinking, naturally, of that accursed defeat by
Chaussepierre) "which the crime of one of their people can bring even
to... Come, Oriane, you're not going to pretend that it ain't damning
to the Jews that they all support a traitor. You're not going to tell
me that it ain't because they're Jews." "Of course not," retorted
Oriane (feeling, with a trace of irritation, a certain desire to hold
her own against Jupiter Tonans and also to set 'intellect' above the
Dreyfus case). "Perhaps it is just because they are Jews and know
their own race that they realise that a person can be a Jew and not
necessarily a traitor and anti-French, as M. Drumont seems to
maintain. Certainly, if he'd been a Christian, the Jews wouldn't have
taken any interest in him, but they did so because they knew quite
well that if he hadn't been a Jew people wouldn't have been so ready
to think him a traitor _a priori_, as my nephew Robert would say."
"Women never understand a thing about politics," exclaimed the Duke,
fastening his gaze upon the Duchess. "That shocking crime is not
simply a Jewish cause, but _out and out_ an affair of vast national
importance which may lead to the most appalling consequences for
France, which ought to have driven out all the Jews, whereas I am
sorry to say that the measures taken up to the present have been
directed (in an ignoble fashion, which will have to be overruled) not
against them but against the most eminent of their adversaries,
against men of the highest rank, who have been flung into the gutter,
to the ruin of our unhappy country."

I felt that the conversation had taken a wrong turning and reverted
hurriedly to the topic of clothes.

"Do you remember, Madame," I said, "the first time that you were
friendly with me?" "The first time that I was friendly with him," she
repeated, turning with a smile to M. de Bréauté, the tip of whose nose
grew more pointed, his smile more tender out of politeness to Mme. de
Guermantes, while his voice, like a knife on the grindstone, emitted
various vague and rusty sounds. "You were wearing a yellow gown with
big black flowers." "But, my dear boy, that's the same thing, those
are evening dresses." "And your hat with the cornflowers that I liked
so much! Still, those are all things of the past. I should like to
order for the girl I mentioned to you a fur cloak like the one you had
on yesterday morning.  Would it be possible for me to see it?" "Of
course; Hannibal has to be going in a moment. You shall come to my
room and my maid will shew you anything you want to look at. Only, my
dear boy, though I shall be delighted to lend you anything, I must
warn you that if you have things from Callot's or Doucet's or Paquin's
copied by some small dressmaker, the result is never the same." "But I
never dreamed of going to a small dressmaker, I know quite well it
wouldn't be the same thing, but I should be interested to hear you
explain why." "You know quite well I can never explain anything, I am
a perfect fool, I talk like a peasant. It is a question of handiwork,
of style; as far as furs go, I can at least give you a line to my
furrier, so that he shan't rob you. But you realise that even then it
will cost you eight or nine thousand francs." "And that indoor gown
that you were wearing the other evening, with such a curious smell,
dark, fluffy, speckled, streaked with gold like a butterfly's wing?"
"Ah! That is one of Fortuny's. Your young lady can quite well wear
that in the house. I have heaps of them; you shall see them presently,
in fact I can give you one or two if you like. But I should like you
to see one that my cousin Talleyrand has. I must write to her for the
loan of it." "But you had such charming shoes as well, are they
Fortuny's too?" "No, I know the ones you mean, they are made of some
gilded kid we came across in London, when I was shopping with Consuelo
Manchester. It was amazing. I could never make out how they did it, it
was just like a golden skin, simply that with a tiny diamond in front.
The poor Duchess of Manchester is dead, but if it's any help to you I
can write and ask Lady Warwick or the Duchess of Marlborough to try
and get me some more. I wonder, now, if I haven't a piece of the stuff
left. You might be able to have a pair made here. I shall look for it
this evening, and let you know."

As I endeavoured as far as possible to leave the Duchess before
Albertine had returned, it often happened that I met in the courtyard
as I came away from her door M. de Charlus and Morel on their way to
take tea at Jupien's, a supreme favour for the Baron. I did not
encounter them every day but they went there every day. Here we may
perhaps remark that the regularity of a habit is generally in
proportion to its absurdity.  The sensational things, we do as a rule
only by fits and starts. But the senseless life, in which the maniac
deprives himself of all pleasure and inflicts the greatest discomforts
upon himself, is the type that alters least.  Every ten years, if we
had the curiosity to inquire, we should find the poor wretch still
asleep at the hours when he might be living his life, going out at the
hours when there is nothing to do but let oneself be murdered in the
streets, sipping iced drinks when he is hot, still trying desperately
to cure a cold. A slight impulse of energy, for a single day, would be
sufficient to change these habits for good and all. But the fact is
that this sort of life is almost always the appanage of a person
devoid of energy.  Vices are another aspect of these monotonous
existences which the exercise of will power would suffice to render
less painful. These two aspects might be observed simultaneously when
M. de Charlus came every day with Morel to take tea at Jupien's. A
single outburst had marred this daily custom.  The tailor's niece
having said one day to Morel: "That's all right then, come to-morrow
and I'll stand you a tea," the Baron had quite justifiably considered
this expression very vulgar on the lips of a person whom he regarded
as almost a prospective daughter-in-law, but as he enjoyed being
offensive and became carried away by his own anger, instead of simply
saying to Morel that he begged him to give her a lesson in polite
manners, the whole of their homeward walk was a succession of violent
scenes. In the most insolent, the most arrogant tone: "So your 'touch'
which, I can see, is not necessarily allied to 'tact,' has hindered
the normal development of your sense of smell, since you could allow
that fetid expression 'stand a tea'--at fifteen centimes, I
suppose--to waft its stench of sewage to my regal nostrils? When you
have come to the end of a violin solo, have you ever seen yourself in
my house rewarded with a fart, instead of frenzied applause, or a
silence more eloquent still, since it is due to exhaustion from the
effort to restrain, not what your young woman lavishes upon you, but
the sob that you have brought to my lips?"

When a public official has had similar reproaches heaped upon him by
his chief, he invariably loses his post next day. Nothing, on the
contrary, could have been more painful to M. de Charlus than to
dismiss Morel, and, fearing indeed that he had gone a little too far,
he began to sing the girl's praises in detailed terms, with an
abundance of good taste mingled with impertinence. "She is charming;
as you are a musician, I suppose that she seduced you by her voice,
which is very beautiful in the high notes, where she seems to await
the accompaniment of your B sharp. Her lower register appeals to me
less, and that must bear some relation to the triple rise of her
strange and slender throat, which when it seems to have come to an end
begins again; but these are trivial details, it is her outline that I
admire. And as she is a dressmaker and must be handy with her
scissors, you must make her give me a charming silhouette of herself
cut out in paper."

Charlie had paid but little attention to this eulogy, the charms which
it extolled in his betrothed having completely escaped his notice. But
he said, in reply to M. de Charlus: "That's all right, my boy, I shall
tell her off properly, and she won't talk like that again." If Morel
addressed M.  de Charlus thus as his 'boy,' it was not that the
good-looking violinist was unaware that his own years numbered barely
a third of the Baron's. Nor did he use the expression as Jupien would
have done, but with that simplicity which in certain relations
postulates that a suppression of the difference in age has tacitly
preceded affection. A feigned affection on Morel's part. In others, a
sincere affection. Thus, about this time M. de Charlus received a
letter worded as follows: "My dear Palamède, when am I going to see
thee again? I am longing terribly for thee and always thinking of
thee. PIERRE." M. de Charlus racked his brains to discover which of
his relatives it could be that took the liberty of addressing him so
familiarly, and must consequently know him intimately, although he
failed to recognise the handwriting. All the Princes to whom the
Almanach de Gotha accords a few lines passed in procession for days on
end through his mind. And then, all of a sudden, an address written on
the back of the letter enlightened him: the writer was the page at a
gambling club to which M. de Charlus sometimes went. This page had not
felt that he was being discourteous in writing in this tone to M. de
Charlus, for whom on the contrary he felt the deepest respect. But he
thought that it would not be civil not to address in the second person
singular a gentleman who had many times kissed one, and thereby--he
imagined in his simplicity--bestowed his affection. M. de Charlus was
really delighted by this familiarity.  He even brought M. de
Vaugoubert away from an afternoon party in order to shew him the
letter. And yet, heaven knows that M. de Charlus did not care to go
about with M. de Vaugoubert. For the latter, his monocle in his eye,
kept gazing in all directions at every passing youth. What was worse,
emancipating himself when he was with M. de Charlus, he employed a
form of speech which the Baron detested. He gave feminine endings to
all the masculine words and, being intensely stupid, imagined this
pleasantry to be extremely witty, and was continually in fits of
laughter.  As at the same time he attached enormous importance to his
position in the diplomatic service, these deplorable outbursts of
merriment in the street were perpetually interrupted by the shock
caused him by the simultaneous appearance of somebody in society, or,
worse still, of a civil servant.  "That little telegraph messenger,"
he said, nudging the disgusted Baron with his elbow, "I used to know
her, but she's turned respectable, the wretch! Oh, that messenger from
the Galeries Lafayette, what a dream! Good God, there's the head of
the Commercial Department. I hope he didn't notice anything. He's
quite capable of mentioning it to the Minister, who would put me on
the retired list, all the more as, it appears, he's so himself." M. de
Charlus was speechless with rage. At length, to bring this infuriating
walk to an end, he decided to produce the letter and give it to the
Ambassador to read, but warned him to be discreet, for he liked to
pretend that Charlie was jealous, in order to be able to make people
think that he was enamoured. "And," he added with an indescribable air
of benevolence, "we ought always to try to cause as little trouble as
possible." Before we come back to Jupien's shop, the author would like
to say how deeply he would regret it should any reader be offended by
his portrayal of such unusual characters. On the one hand (and this is
the less important aspect of the matter), it may be felt that the
aristocracy is, in these pages, disproportionately accused of
degeneracy in comparison with the other classes of society. Were this
true, it would be in no way surprising.  The oldest families end by
displaying, in a red and bulbous nose, or a deformed chin,
characteristic signs in which everyone admires 'blood.' But among
these persistent and perpetually developing features, there are others
that are not visible, to wit tendencies and tastes. It would be a more
serious objection, were there any foundation for it, to say that all
this is alien to us, and that we ought to extract truth from the
poetry that is close at hand. Art extracted from the most familiar
reality does indeed exist and its domain is perhaps the largest of
any. But it is no less true that a strong interest, not to say beauty,
may be found in actions inspired by a cast of mind so remote from
anything that we feel, from anything that we believe, that we cannot
ever succeed in understanding them, that they are displayed before our
eyes like a spectacle without rhyme or reason. What eould be more
poetic than Xerxes, son of Darius, ordering the sea to be scourged
with rods for having engulfed his fleet?

We may be certain that Morel, relying on the influence which his
personal attractions give him over the girl, communicated to her, as
coming from himself, the Baron's criticism, for the expression 'stand
you a tea' disappeared as completely from the tailor's shop as
disappears from a drawing-room some intimate friend who used to call
daily, and with whom, for one reason or another, we have quarrelled,
or whom we are trying to keep out of sight and meet only outside the
house. M. de Charlus was satisfied by the cessation of 'stand you a
tea.' He saw in it a proof of his own ascendancy over Morel and the
removal of its one little blemish from the girl's perfection. In
short, like everyone of his kind, while genuinely fond of Morel and of
the girl who was all but engaged to him, an ardent advocate of their
marriage, he thoroughly enjoyed his power to create at his pleasure
more or less inoffensive little scenes, aloof from and above which he
himself remained as Olympian as his brother.

Morel had told M. de Charlus that he was in love with Jupien's niece,
and wished to marry her, and the Baron liked to accompany his young
friend upon visits in which he played the part of father-in-law to be,
indulgent and discreet. Nothing pleased him better.

My personal opinion is that 'stand you a tea' had originated with
Morel himself, and that in the blindness of her love the young
seamstress had adopted an expression from her beloved which clashed
horribly with her own pretty way of speaking. This way of speaking,
the charming manners that went with it, the patronage of M. de Charlus
brought it about that many customers for whom she had worked received
her as a friend, invited her to dinner, introduced her to their
friends, though the girl accepted their invitations only with the
Baron's permission and on the evenings that suited him. "A young
seamstress received in society?" the reader will exclaim, "how
improbable!" If you come to think of it, it was no less improbable
that at one time Albertine should have come to see me at midnight, and
that she should now be living in my house. And yet this might perhaps
have been improbable of anyone else, but not of Albertine, a
fatherless and motherless orphan, leading so uncontrolled a life that
at first I had taken her, at Balbec, for the mistress of a bicyclist,
a girl whose next of kin was Mme. Bontemps who in the old days, at
Mme. Swann's, had admired nothing about her niece but her bad manners
and who now shut her eyes, especially if by doing so she might be able
to get rid of her by securing for her a wealthy marriage from which a
little of the wealth would trickle into the aunt's pocket (in the
highest society, a mother who is very well-born and quite penniless,
when she has succeeded in finding a rich bride for her son, allows the
young couple to support her, accepts presents of furs, a motor-car,
money from a daughter-in-law whom she does not like but whom she
introduces to her friends).

The day may come when dressmakers--nor should I find it at all
shocking--will move in society. Jupien's niece being an exception
affords us no base for calculation, for one swallow does not make a
summer. In any case, if the very modest advancement of Jupien's niece
did scandalise some people, Morel was not among them, for, in certain
respects, his stupidity was so intense that not only did he label
'rather a fool' this girl a thousand times cleverer than himself, and
foolish only perhaps in her love for himself, but he actually took to
be adventuresses, dressmakers' assistants in disguise playing at being
ladies, the persons of rank and position who invited her to their
houses and whose invitations she accepted without a trace of vanity.
Naturally these were not Guermantes, nor even people who knew the
Guermantes, but rich and smart women of the middle-class, broad-minded
enough to feel that it is no disgrace to invite a dressmaker to your
house and at the same time servile enough to derive some satisfaction
from patronising a girl whom His Highness the Baron de Charlus was in
the habit--without any suggestion, of course, of impropriety--of
visiting daily.

Nothing could have pleased the Baron more than the idea of this
marriage, for he felt that in this way Morel would not be taken from
him.  It appears that Jupien's niece had been, when scarcely more than
a child, 'in trouble.' And M. de Charlus, while he sang her praises to
Morel, would have had no hesitation in revealing this secret to his
friend, who would be furious, and thus sowing the seeds of discord.
For M. de Charlus, although terribly malicious, resembled a great many
good people who sing the praises of some man or woman, as a proof of
their own generosity, but would avoid like poison the soothing words,
so rarely uttered, that would be capable of putting an end to strife.
Notwithstanding this, the Baron refrained from making any insinuation,
and for two reasons. "If I tell him," he said to himself, "that his
ladylove is not spotless, his vanity will be hurt, he will be angry
with me. Besides, how am I to know that he is not in love with her? If
I say nothing, this fire of straw will burn itself out before long, I
shall be able to control their relations as I choose, he will love her
only to the extent that I shall allow. If I tell him of his young
lady's past transgression, who knows that my Charlie is not still
sufficiently enamoured of her to become jealous. Then I shall by my
own doing be converting a harmless and easily controlled flirtation
into a serious passion, which is a difficult thing to manage." For
these reasons, M. de Charlus preserved a silence which had only the
outward appearance of discretion, but was in another respect
meritorious, since it is almost impossible for men of his sort to hold
their tongues.

Anyhow, the girl herself was charming, and M. de Charlus, who found
that she satisfied all the aesthetic interest that he was capable of
feeling in women, would have liked to have hundreds of photographs of
her. Not such a fool as Morel, he was delighted to hear the names of
the ladies who invited her to their houses, and whom his social
instinct was able to place, but he took care (as he wished to retain
his power) not to mention this to Charlie who, a regular idiot in this
respect, continued to believe that, apart from the 'violin class' and
the Verdurins, there existed only the Guermantes, and the few almost
royal houses enumerated by the Baron, all the rest being but 'dregs'
or 'scum.' Charlie interpreted these expressions of M. de Charlus
literally.

Among the reasons which made M. de Charlus look forward to the
marriage of the young couple was this, that Jupien's niece would then
be in a sense an extension of Morel's personality, and so of the
Baron's power over and knowledge of him. As for 'betraying' in the
conjugal sense the violinist's future wife, it would never for a
moment have occurred to M. de Charlus to feel the slightest scruple
about that. But to have a 'young couple' to manage, to feel himself
the redoubtable and all-powerful protector of Morel's wife, who if she
regarded the Baron as a god would thereby prove that Morel had
inculcated this idea into her, and would thus contain in herself
something of Morel, added a new variety to the form of M. de Charlus's
domination and brought to light in his 'creature,' Morel, a creature
the more, that is to say gave the Baron something different, new,
curious, to love in him. Perhaps even this domination would be
stronger now than it had ever been. For whereas Morel by himself,
naked so to speak, often resisted the Baron whom he felt certain of
reconquering, once he was married, the thought of his home, his house,
his future would alarm him more quickly, he would offer to M. de
Charlus's desires a wider surface, an easier hold. All this, and even,
failing anything else, on evenings when he was bored, the prospect of
stirring up trouble between husband and wife (the Baron had never
objected to battle-pictures) was pleasing to him. Less pleasing,
however, than the thought of the state of dependence upon himself in
which the young people would live.  M. de Charlus's love for Morel
acquired a delicious novelty when he said to himself: "His wife too
will be mine just as much as he is, they will always take care not to
annoy me, they will obey my caprices, and thus she will be a sign
(which hitherto I have failed to observe) of what I had almost
forgotten, what is so very dear to my heart, that to all the world, to
everyone who sees that I protect them, house them, to myself, Morel is
mine." This testimony in the eyes of the world and in his own pleased
M. de Charlus more than anything. For the possession of what we love
is an even greater joy than love itself. Very often those people who
conceal this possession from the world do so only from the fear that
the beloved object may be taken from them. And their happiness is
diminished by this prudent reticence.

The reader may remember that Morel had once told the Baron that his
great ambition was to seduce some young girl, and this girl in
particular, that to succeed in his enterprise he would promise to
marry her, and, the outrage accomplished, would 'cut his hook'; but
this confession, what with the declarations of love for Jupien's niece
which Morel had come and poured out to him, M. de Charlus had
forgotten. What was more, Morel had quite possibly forgotten it
himself. There was perhaps a real gap between Morel's nature--as he
had cynically admitted, perhaps even artfully exaggerated it--and the
moment at which it would regain control of him. As he became better
acquainted with the girl, she had appealed to him, he began to like
her. He knew himself so little that he doubtless imagined that he was
in love with her, perhaps indeed that he would be in love with her
always.  To be sure his initial desire, his criminal intention
remained, but glossed over by so many layers of sentiment that there
is nothing to shew that the violinist would not have been sincere in
saying that this vicious desire was not the true motive of his action.
There was, moreover, a brief period during which, without his actually
admitting it to himself, this marriage appeared to him to be
necessary. Morel was suffering at the time from violent cramp in the
hand, and found himself obliged to contemplate the possibility of his
having to give up the violin. As, in everything but his art, he was
astonishingly lazy, the question who was to maintain him loomed before
him, and he preferred that it should be Jupien's niece rather than M.
de Charlus, this arrangement offering him greater freedom and also a
wider choice of several kinds of women, ranging from the apprentices,
perpetually changing, whom he would make Jupien's niece debauch for
him, to the rich and beautiful ladies to whom he would prostitute her.
That his future wife might refuse to lend herself to these
arrangements, that she could be so perverse never entered Morel's
calculations for a moment. However, they passed into the background,
their place being taken by pure love, now that his cramp had ceased.
His violin would suffice, together with his allowance from M. de
Charlus, whose claims upon him would certainly be reduced once he,
Morel, was married to the girl. Marriage was the urgent thing, because
of his love, and in the interest of his freedom. He made a formal
offer of marriage to Jupien, who consulted his niece. This was wholly
unnecessary. The girl's passion for the violinist streamed round about
her, like her hair when she let it down, like the joy in her beaming
eyes.  In Morel, almost everything that was agreeable or advantageous
to him awakened moral emotions and words to correspond, sometimes even
melting him to tears. It was therefore sincerely--if such a word can
be applied to him--that he addressed Jupien's niece in speeches as
steeped in sentimentality (sentimental too are the speeches that so
many young noblemen who look forward to a life of complete idleness
address to some charming daughter of a middle-class millionaire) as
had been steeped in unredeemed vileness the speech he had made to M.
de Charlus about the seduction and deflowering of a virgin. Only there
was another side to this virtuous enthusiasm for a person who afforded
him pleasure and the solemn engagement that he made with her. As soon
as the person ceased to afford him pleasure, or indeed if, for
example, the obligation to fulfil the promise that he had made caused
him displeasure, she at once became the object ef an antipathy which
he justified in his own eyes and which, after some neurasthenic
disturbance, enabled him to prove to himself, as soon as the balance
of his nervous system was restored, that he was, even looking at the
matter from a purely virtuous point of view, released from any
obligation.  Thus, towards the end of his stay at Balbec, he had
managed somehow to lose all his money and, not daring to mention the
matter to M. de Charlus, looked about for some one to whom he might
appeal. He had learned from his father (who at the same time had
forbidden him ever to become a 'sponger') that in such circumstances
the correct thing is to write to the person whom you intend to ask for
a loan, "that you have to speak to him on business," to "ask him for a
business appointment." This magic formula had so enchanted Morel that
he would, I believe, have been glad to lose his money, simply to have
the pleasure of asking for an appointment 'on business.' In the course
of his life he had found that the formula had not quite the virtue
that he supposed. He had discovered that certain people, to whom
otherwise he would never have written at all, did not reply within
five minutes of receiving his letter asking to speak to them 'on
business.' If the afternoon went by without his receiving an answer,
it never occurred to him that, to put the best interpretation on the
matter, it was quite possible that the gentleman addressed had not yet
come home, or had had other letters to write, if indeed he had not
gone away from home altogether, fallen ill, or something of that sort.
If by an extraordinary stroke of fortune Morel was given an
appointment for the following morning, he would accost his intended
creditor with: "I was quite surprised not to get an answer, I was
wondering if there was anything wrong with you, I'm glad to see you're
quite well," and so forth.  Well then, at Balbec, and without telling
me that he wished to talk 'business' to him, he had asked me to
introduce him to that very Bloch to whom he had made himself so
unpleasant a week earlier in the train. Bloch had not hesitated to
lend him--or rather to secure a loan for him, from M.  Nissim Bernard,
of five thousand francs. From that moment Morel had worshipped Bloch.
He asked himself with tears in his eyes how he could shew his
indebtedness to a person who had saved his life. Finally, I undertook
to ask on his behalf for a thousand francs monthly from M. de Charlus,
a sum which he would at once forward to Bloch who would thus find
himself repaid within quite a short time. The first month, Morel,
still under the impression of Bloch's generosity, sent him the
thousand francs immediately, but after this he doubtless found that a
different application of the remaining four thousand francs might be
more satisfactory to himself, for he began to say all sorts of
unpleasant things about Bloch. The mere sight of Bloch was enough to
fill his mind with dark thoughts, and Bloch himself having forgotten
the exact amount that he had lent Morel, and having asked him for
3,500 francs instead of 4,000 which would have left the violinist 500
francs to the good, the latter took the line that, in view of so
preposterous a fraud, not only would he not pay another centime but
his creditor might think himself very fortunate if Morel did not bring
an action against him for slander. As he said this his eyes blazed. He
did not content himself with asserting that Bloch and M. Nissim
Bernard had no cause for complaint against him, but was soon saying
that they might consider themselves lucky that he made no complaint
against them. Finally, M. Nissim Bernard having apparently stated that
Thibaut played as well as Morel, the last-named decided that he ought
to take the matter into court, such a remark being calculated to
damage him in his profession, then, as there was no longer any justice
in France, especially against the Jews (anti-semitism being in Morel
the natural effect of a loan of 5,000 francs from an Israelite), took
to never going out without a loaded revolver.  A similar nervous
reaction, in the wake of keen affection, was soon to occur in Morel
with regard to the tailor's niece. It is true that M. de Charlus may
have been unconsciously responsible, to some extent, for this change,
for he was in the habit of saying, without meaning what he said for an
instant, and merely to tease them, that, once they were married, he
would never set eyes on them again but would leave them to fly upon
their own wings. This idea was, in itself, quite insufficient to
detach Morel from the girl; but, lurking in his mind, it was ready
when the time came to combine with other analogous ideas, capable,
once the compound was formed, of becoming a powerful disruptive agent.

It was not very often, however, that I was fated to meet M. de Charlus
and Morel. Often they had already passed into Jupien's shop when I
came away from the Duchess, for the pleasure that I found in her
society was such that I was led to forget not merely the anxious
expectation that preceded Albertine's return, but even the hour of
that return.

I shall set apart from the other days on which I lingered at Mme. de
Guermantes's, one that was distinguished by a trivial incident the
cruel significance of which entirely escaped me and did not enter my
mind until long afterwards. On this particular afternoon, Mme. de
Guermantes had given me, knowing that I was fond of them, some
branches of syringa which had been sent to her from the South. When I
left the Duchess and went upstairs to our flat, Albertine had already
returned, and on the staircase I ran into Andrée who seemed to be
distressed by the powerful fragrance of the flowers that I was
bringing home.

"What, are you back already?" I said. "Only this moment, but Albertine
had letters to write, so she sent me away." "You don't think she's up
to any mischief?" "Not at all, she's writing to her aunt, I think, but
you know how she dislikes strong scents, she won't be particularly
pleased to see those syringas." "How stupid of me! I shall tell
Françoise to put them out on the service stair." "Do you imagine
Albertine won't notice the scent of them on you? Next to tuberoses
they've the strongest scent of any flower, I always think; anyhow, I
believe Françoise has gone out shopping." "But in that case, as I
haven't got my latchkey, how am I to get in?" "Oh, you've only got to
ring the bell. Albertine will let you in.  Besides, Françoise may have
come back by this time."

I said good-bye to Andrée. I had no sooner pressed the bell than
Albertine came to open the door, which required some doing, as
Françoise had gone out and Albertine did not know where to turn on the
light. At length she was able to let me in, but the scent of the
syringas put her to flight. I took them to the kitchen, with the
result that my mistress, leaving her letter unfinished (why, I did not
understand), had time to go to my room, from which she called to me,
and to lay herself down on my bed.  Even then, at the actual moment, I
saw nothing in all this that was not perfectly natural, at the most a
little confused, but in any case unimportant.  She had nearly been
caught out with Andrée and had snatched a brief respite for herself by
turning out the lights, going to my room so that I should not see the
disordered state of her own bed, and pretending to be busy writing a
letter. But we shall see all this later on, a situation the truth of
which I never ascertained. In general, and apart from this isolated
incident, everything was quite normal when I returned from my visit to
the Duchess. Since Albertine never knew whether I might not wish to go
out with her before dinner, I usually found in the hall her hat, cloak
and umbrella, which she had left lying there in case they should be
needed. As soon as, on opening the door, I caught sight of them, the
atmosphere of the house became breathable once more. I felt that,
instead of a rarefied air, it was happiness that filled it. I was
rescued from my melancholy, the sight of these trifles gave me
possession of Albertine, I ran to greet her.

On the days when I did not go down to Mme. de Guermantes, to pass the
time somehow, during the hour that preceded the return of my mistress,
I would take up an album of Elstir's work, one of Bergotte's books,
Vinteuil's sonata.

Then, just as those works of art which seem to address themselves to
the eye or ear alone require that, if we are to enjoy them, our
awakened intelligence shall collaborate closely with those organs, I
would unconsciously evoke from myself the dreams that Albertine had
inspired in me long ago, before I knew her, dreams that had been
stifled by the routine of everyday life. I cast them into the
composer's phrase or the painter's image as into a crucible, or used
them to enrich the book that I was reading.  And no doubt the book
appeared all the more vivid in consequence. But Albertine herself
profited just as much by being thus transported out of one of the two
worlds to which we have access, and in which we can place alternately
the same object, by escaping thus from the crushing weight of matter
to play freely in the fluid space of mind. I found myself suddenly and
for the instant capable of feeling an ardent desire for this
irritating girl. She had at that moment the appearance of a work by
Elstir or Bergotte, I felt a momentary enthusiasm for her, seeing her
in the perspective of imagination and art.

Presently some one came to tell me that she had returned; though there
was a standing order that her name was not to be mentioned if I was
not alone, if for instance I had in the room with me Bloch, whom I
would compel to remain with me a little longer so that there should be
no risk of his meeting my mistress in the hall. For I concealed the
fact that she was staying in the house, and even that I ever saw her
there, so afraid was I that one of my friends might fall in love with
her, and wait for her outside, or that in a momentary encounter in the
passage or the hall she might make a signal and fix an appointment.
Then I heard the rustle of Albertine's petticoats on her way to her
own room, for out of discretion and also no doubt in that spirit in
which, when we used to go to dinner at la Raspelière, she took care
that I should have no cause for jealousy, she did not come to my room,
knowing that I was not alone. But it was not only for this reason, as
I suddenly realised. I remembered; I had known a different Albertine,
then all at once she had changed into another, the Albertine of
to-day. And for this change I could hold no one responsible but
myself.  The admissions that she would have made to me, easily at
first, then deliberately, when we were simply friends, had ceased to
flow from her as soon as she had suspected that I was in love with
her, or, without perhaps naming Love, had divined the existence in me
of an inquisitorial sentiment that desires to know, is pained by the
knowledge, and seeks to learn yet more. Ever since that day, she had
concealed everything from me. She kept away from my room if she
thought that my companion was (rarely as this happened) not male but
female, she whose eyes used at one time to sparkle so brightly
whenever I mentioned a girl: "You must try and get her to come here. I
should like to meet her." "But she has what you call a bad style." "Of
course, that makes it all the more fun." At that moment, I might
perhaps have learned all that there was to know. And indeed when in
the little Casino she had withdrawn her breast from Andrée's, I
believe that this was due not to my presence but to that of Cottard,
who was capable, she doubtless thought, of giving her a bad
reputation. And yet, even then, she had already begun to 'set,' the
confiding speeches no longer issued from her lips, her gestures became
reserved. After this, she had stripped herself of everything that
could stir my emotions. To those parts of her life of which I knew
nothing she ascribed a character the inoffensiveness of which my
ignorance made itself her accomplice in accentuating. And now, the
transformation was completed, she went straight to her room if I was
not alone, not merely from fear of disturbing me, but in order to shew
me that she did not care who was with me. There was one thing alone
which she would never again do for me, which she would have done only
in the days when it would have left me cold, which she would then have
done without hesitation for that very reason, namely make me a
detailed admission. I should always be obliged, like a judge, to draw
indefinite conclusions from imprudences of speech that were perhaps
not really inexplicable without postulating criminality. And always
she would feel that I was jealous, and judging her.

As I listened to Albertine's footsteps with the consoling pleasure of
thinking that she would not be going out again that evening, I thought
how wonderful it was that for this girl, whom at one time I had
supposed that I could never possibly succeed in knowing, the act of
returning home every day was nothing else than that of entering my
home. The pleasure, a blend of mystery and sensuality, which I had
felt, fugitive and fragmentary, at Balbec, on the night when she had
come to sleep at the hotel, was completed, stabilised, filled my
dwelling, hitherto void, with a permanent store of domestic, almost
conjugal bliss (radiating even into the passages) upon which all my
senses, either actively, or, when I was alone, in imagination as I
waited for her to return, quietly battened. When I had heard the door
of Albertine's room shut behind her, if I had a friend with me, I made
haste to get rid of him, not leaving him until I was quite sure that
he was on the staircase, down which I might even escort him for a few
steps. He warned me that I would catch cold, informing me that our
house was indeed icy, a cave of the winds, and that he would not live
in it if he was paid to do so. This cold weather was a source of
complaint because it had just begun, and people were not yet
accustomed to it, but for that very reason it released in me a joy
accompanied by an unconscious memory of the first evenings of winter
when, in past years, returning from the country, in order to
reestablish contact with the forgotten delights of Paris, I used to go
to a café-concert. And so it was with a song on my lips that, after
bidding my friend good-bye, I climbed the stair again and entered the
flat. Summer had flown, carrying the birds with it. But other
musicians, invisible, internal, had taken their place. And the icy
blast against which Bloch had inveighed, which was whistling
delightfully through the ill fitting doors of our apartment was (as
the fine days of summer by the woodland birds) passionately greeted
with snatches, irrepressibly hummed, from Fragson, Mayol or Paulus. In
the passage, Albertine was coming towards me. "I say, while I'm taking
off my things, I shall send you Andrée, she's looked in for a minute
to say how d'ye do." And still swathed in the big grey veil, falling
from her chinchilla toque, which I had given her at Balbec, she turned
from me and went back to her room, as though she had guessed that
Andrée, whom I had charged with the duty of watching over her, would
presently, by relating their day's adventures in full detail,
mentioning their meeting with some person of their acquaintance,
impart a certain clarity of outline to the vague regions in which that
excursion had been made which had taken the whole day and which I had
been incapable of imagining. Andrée's defects had become more evident;
she was no longer as pleasant a companion as when I first knew her.
One noticed now, on the surface, a sort of bitter uneasiness, ready to
gather like a swell on the sea, merely if I happened to mention
something that gave pleasure to Albertine and myself. This did not
prevent Andrée from being kinder to me, liking me better--and I have
had frequent proof of this--than other more sociable people. But the
slightest look of happiness on a person's face, if it was not caused
by herself, gave a shock to her nerves, as unpleasant as that given by
a banging door. She could allow the pains in which she had no part,
but not the pleasures; if she saw that I was unwell, she was
distressed, was sorry for me, would have stayed to nurse me. But if I
displayed a satisfaction as trifling as that of stretching myself with
a blissful expression as I shut a book, saying: "Ah! I have spent a
really happy afternoon with this entertaining book," these words,
which would have given pleasure to my mother, to Albertine, to
Saint-Loup, provoked in Andrée a sort of disapprobation, perhaps
simply a sort of nervous irritation. My satisfactions caused her an
annoyance which she was unable to conceal. These defects were
supplemented by others of a more serious nature; one day when I
mentioned that young man so learned in matters of racing and golf, so
uneducated in all other respects, Andrée said with a sneer: "You know
that his father is a swindler, he only just missed being prosecuted.
They're swaggering now more than ever, but I tell everybody about it.
I should love them to bring an action for slander against me. I should
be wonderful in the witness-box!" Her eyes sparkled. Well, I
discovered that the father had done nothing wrong, and that Andrée
knew this as well as anybody. But she had thought that the son looked
down upon her, had sought for something that would embarrass him, put
him to shame, had invented a long story of evidence which she imagined
herself called upon to give in court, and, by dint of repeating the
details to herself, was perhaps no longer aware that they were not
true. And so, in her present state (and even without her fleeting,
foolish hatreds), I should not have wished to see her, were it merely
on account of that malicious susceptibility which clasped with a harsh
and frigid girdle her warmer and better nature.  But the information
which she alone could give me about my mistress was of too great
interest for me to be able to neglect so rare an opportunity of
acquiring it. Andrée came into my room, shutting the door behind her;
they had met a girl they knew, whom Albertine had never mentioned to
me.  "What did they talk about?" "I can't tell you; I took the
opportunity, as Albertine wasn't alone, to go and buy some worsted."
"Buy some worsted?" "Yes, it was Albertine asked me to get it." "All
the more reason not to have gone, it was perhaps a plot to get you out
of the way." "But she asked me to go for it before we met her friend."
"Ah!" I replied, drawing breath again. At once my suspicion revived;
she might, for all I knew, have made an appointment beforehand with
her friend and have provided herself with an excuse to be left alone
when the time came. Besides, could I be certain that it was not my
former hypothesis (according to which Andrée did not always tell me
the truth) that was correct? Andrée was perhaps in the plot with
Albertine. Love, I used to say to myself, at Balbec, is what we feel
for a person whose actions seem rather to arouse our jealousy; we feel
that if she were to tell us everything, we might perhaps easily be
cured of our love for her. However skilfully jealousy is concealed by
him who suffers from it, it is at once detected by her who has
inspired it, and who when the time comes is no less skilful. She seeks
to lead us off the trail of what might make us unhappy, and succeeds,
for, to the man who is not forewarned, how should a casual utterance
reveal the falsehoods that lie beneath it? We do not distinguish this
utterance from the rest; spoken in terror, it is received without
attention. Later on, when we are by ourselves, we shall return to this
speech, it will seem to us not altogether adequate to the facts of the
case. But do we remember it correctly? It seems as though there arose
spontaneously in us, with regard to it and to the accuracy of our
memory, an uncertainty of the sort with which, in certain nervous
disorders, we can never remember whether we have bolted the door, no
better after the fiftieth time than after the first, it would seem
that we can repeat the action indefinitely without its ever being
accompanied by a precise and liberating memory. At any rate, we can
shut the door again, for the fifty-first time. Whereas the disturbing
speech exists in the past in an imperfect hearing of it which it does
not lie in our power to repeat. Then we concentrate our attention upon
other speeches which conceal nothing and the sole remedy which we do
not seek is to be ignorant of everything, so as to have no desire for
further knowledge.

As soon as jealousy is discovered, it is regarded by her who is its
object as a challenge which authorises deception. Moreover, in our
endeavour to learn something, it is we who have taken the initiative
in lying and deceit.  Andrée, Aimé may promise us that they will say
nothing, but will they keep their promise? Bloch could promise nothing
because he knew nothing, and Albertine has only to talk to any of the
three in order to learn, with the help of what Saint-Loup would have
called cross-references, that we are lying to her when we pretend to
be indifferent to her actions and morally incapable of having her
watched. And so, replacing in this way my habitual boundless
uncertainty as to what Albertine might be doing, an uncertainty too
indeterminate not to remain painless, which was to jealousy what is to
grief that beginning of forgetfulness in which relief is born of
vagueness, the little fragment of response which Andrée had brought me
at once began to raise fresh questions; the only result of my
exploration of one sector of the great zone that extended round me had
been to banish further from me that unknowable thing which, when we
seek to form a definite idea of it, another person's life invariably
is to us. I continued to question Andrée, while Albertine, from
discretion and in order to leave me free (was she conscious of this?)
to question the other, prolonged her toilet in her own room. "I think
that Albertine's uncle and aunt both like me," I stupidly said to
Andrée, forgetting her peculiar nature.

At once I saw her gelatinous features change. Like a syrup that has
turned, her face seemed permanently clouded. Her mouth became bitter.
Nothing remained in Andrée of that juvenile gaiety which, like all the
little band and notwithstanding her feeble health, she had displayed
in the year of my first visit to Balbec and which now (it is true that
Andrée was now several years older) was so speedily eclipsed in her.
But I was to make it reappear involuntarily before Andrée left me that
evening to go home to dinner. "Somebody was singing your praises to me
to-day in the most glowing language," I said to her. Immediately a ray
of joy beamed from her eyes, she looked as though she really loved me.
She avoided my gaze but smiled at the empty air with a pair of eyes
that suddenly became quite round. "Who was it?" she asked, with an
artless, avid interest. I told her, and, whoever it was, she was
delighted.

Then the time came for us to part, and she left me. Albertine came to
my room; she had undressed, and was wearing one of the charming crêpe
de chine wrappers, or one of the Japanese gowns which I had asked Mme.
de Guermantes to describe to me, and for some of which supplementary
details had been furnished me by Mme. Swann, in a letter that began:
"After your long eclipse, I felt as I read your letter about my
tea-gowns that I was receiving a message from the other world."

Albertine had on her feet a pair of black shoes studded with
brilliants which Françoise indignantly called 'pattens,' modelled upon
the shoes which, from the drawing-room window, she had seen Mme. de
Guermantes wearing in the evening, just as a little later Albertine
took to wearing slippers, some of gilded kid, others of chinchilla,
the sight of which was pleasant to me because they were all of them
signs (which other shoes would not have been) that she was living
under my roof. She had also certain things which had not come to her
from me, including a fine gold ring. I admired upon it the outspread
wings of an eagle. "It was my aunt gave me it," she explained. "She
can be quite nice sometimes after all. It makes me feel terribly old,
because she gave it to me on my twentieth birthday."

Albertine took a far keener interest in all these pretty things than
the Duchess, because, like every obstacle in the way of possession (in
my own case the ill health which made travel so difficult and so
desirable), poverty, more generous than opulence, gives to women what
is better than the garments that they cannot afford to buy, the desire
for those garments which is the genuine, detailed, profound knowledge
of them. She, because she had never been able to afford these things,
I, because in ordering them for her I was seeking to give her
pleasure, we were both of us like students who already know all about
the pictures which they are longing to go to Dresden or Vienna to see.
Whereas rich women, amid the multitude of their hats and gowns, are
like those tourists to whom the visit to a gallery, being preceded by
no desire, gives merely a sensation of bewilderment, boredom and
exhaustion.

A particular toque, a particular sable cloak, a particular Doucet
wrapper, its sleeves lined with pink, assumed for Albertine, who had
observed them, coveted them and, thanks to the exclusiveness and
minute nicety that are elements of desire, had at once isolated them
from everything else in a void against which the lining or the scarf
stood out to perfection, and learned them by heart in every
detail--and for myself who had gone to Mme. de Guermantes in quest of
an explanation of what constituted the peculiar merit, the
superiority, the smartness of the garment and the inimitable style of
the great designer--an importance, a charm which they certainly did
not possess for the Duchess, surfeited before she had even acquired an
appetite and would not, indeed, have possessed for myself had I beheld
them a few years earlier while accompanying some lady of fashion on
one of her wearisome tours of the dressmakers' shops.

To be sure, a lady of fashion was what Albertine was gradually
becoming.  For, even if each of the things that I ordered for her was
the prettiest of its kind, with all the refinements that had been
added to it by Mme. de Guermantes or Mme. Swann, she was beginning to
possess these things in abundance.  But no matter, so long as she
admired them from the first, and each of them separately.

When we have been smitten by one painter, then by another, we may end
by feeling for the whole gallery an admiration that is not frigid, for
it is made up of successive enthusiasms, each one exclusive in its
day, which finally have joined forces and become reconciled in one
whole.

She was not, for that matter, frivolous, read a great deal when she
was by herself, and used to read aloud when she was with me. She had
become extremely intelligent. She would say, though she was quite
wrong in saying: "I am appalled when I think that but for you I should
still be quite ignorant. Don't contradict. You have opened up a world
of ideas to me which I never suspected, and whatever I may have become
I owe entirely to you."

It will be remembered that she had spoken in similar terms of my
influence over Andrée. Had either of them a sentimental regard for me?
And, in themselves, what were Albertine and Andrée? To learn the
answer, I should have to immobilise you, to cease to live in that
perpetual expectation, ending always in a different presentment of
you, I should have to cease to love you, in order to fix you, to cease
to know your interminable and ever disconcerting arrival, oh girls, oh
recurrent ray in the swirl wherein we throb with emotion upon seeing
you reappear while barely recognising you, in the dizzy velocity of
light. That velocity, we should perhaps remain unaware of it and
everything would seem to us motionless, did not a sexual attraction
set us in pursuit of you, drops of gold always different, and always
passing our expectation! On each occasion a girl so little resembles
what she was the time before (shattering in fragments as soon as we
catch sight of her the memory that we had retained of her and the
desire that we were proposing to gratify), that the stability of
nature which we ascribe to her is purely fictitious and a convenience
of speech. We have been told that some pretty girl is tender, loving,
full of the most delicate sentiments.  Our imagination accepts this
assurance, and when we behold for the first time, within the woven
girdle of her golden hair, the rosy disc of her face, we are almost
afraid that this too virtuous sister may chill our ardour by her very
virtue, that she can never be to us the lover for whom we have been
longing. What secrets, at least, we confide in her from the first
moment, on the strength of that nobility of heart, what plans we
discuss together.  But a few days later, we regret that we were so
confiding, for the rose-leaf girl, at our second meeting, addresses us
in the language of a lascivious Fury. As for the successive portraits
which after a pulsation lasting for some days the renewal of the rosy
light presents to us, it is not even certain that a momentum external
to these girls has not modified their aspect, and this might well have
happened with my band of girls at Balbec.

People extol to us the gentleness, the purity of a virgin. But
afterwards they feel that something more seasoned would please us
better, and recommend her to shew more boldness. In herself was she
one more than the other? Perhaps not, but capable of yielding to any
number of different possibilities in the headlong current of life.
With another girl, whose whole attraction lay in something implacable
(which we counted upon subduing to our own will), as, for instance,
with the terrible jumping girl at Balbec who grazed in her spring the
bald pates of startled old gentlemen, what a disappointment when, in
the fresh aspect of her, just as we were addressing her in
affectionate speeches stimulated by our memory of all her cruelty to
other people, we heard her, as her first move in the game, tell us
that she was shy, that she could never say anything intelligent to
anyone at a first introduction, so frightened was she, and that it was
only after a fortnight or so that she would be able to talk to us at
her ease. The steel had turned to cotton, there was nothing left for
us to attempt to break, since she herself had lost all her
consistency. Of her own accord, but by our fault perhaps, for the
tender words which we had addressed to Severity had perhaps, even
without any deliberate calculation on her part, suggested to her that
she ought to be gentle.

Distressing as the change may have been to us, it was not altogether
maladroit, for our gratitude for all her gentleness would exact more
from us perhaps than our delight at overcoming her cruelty. I do not
say that a day will not come when, even to these luminous maidens, we
shall not assign sharply differentiated characters, but that will be
because they have ceased to interest us, because their entry upon the
scene will no longer be to our heart the apparition which it expected
in a different form and which leaves it overwhelmed every time by
fresh incarnations. Their immobility will spring from our indifference
to them, which will hand them over to the judgment of our mind. This
will not, for that matter, be expressed in any more categorical terms,
for after it has decided that some defect which was prominent in one
is fortunately absent from the other, it will see that this defect had
as its counterpart some priceless merit. So that the false judgment of
our intellect, which comes into play only when we have ceased to take
any interest, will define permanent characters of girls, which will
enlighten us no more than the surprising faces that used to appear
every day when, in the dizzy speed of our expectation, our friends
presented themselves daily, weekly, too different to allow us, as they
never halted in their passage, to classify them, to award degrees of
merit. As for our sentiments, we have spoken of them too often to
repeat again now that as often as not love is nothing more than the
association of the face of a girl (whom otherwise we should soon have
found intolerable) with the heartbeats inseparable from an endless,
vain expectation, and from some trick that she has played upon us. All
this is true not merely of imaginative young men brought into contact
with changeable girls. At the stage that our narrative has now
reached, it appears, as I have since heard, that Jupien's niece had
altered her opinion of Morel and M. de Charlus. My motorist,
reinforcing the love that she felt for Morel, had extolled to her, as
existing in the violinist, boundless refinements of delicacy in which
she was all too ready to believe. And at the same time Morel never
ceased to complain to her of the despotic treatment that he received
from M. de Charlus, which she ascribed to malevolence, never imagining
that it could be due to love. She was moreover bound to acknowledge
that M. de Charlus was tyrannically present at all their meetings. In
corroboration of all this, she had heard women in society speak of the
Baron's terrible spite. Now, quite recently, her judgment had been
completely reversed. She had discovered in Morel (without ceasing for
that reason to love him) depths of malevolence and perfidy,
compensated it was true by frequent kindness and genuine feeling, and
in M. de Charlus an unimaginable and immense generosity blended with
asperities of which she knew nothing. And so she had been unable to
arrive at any more definite judgment of what, each in himself, the
violinist and his protector really were, than I was able to form of
Andrée, whom nevertheless I saw every day, or of Albertine who was
living with me. On the evenings when the latter did not read aloud to
me, she would play to me or begin a game of draughts, or a
conversation, either of which I would interrupt with kisses. The
simplicity of our relations made them soothing. The very emptiness of
her life gave Albertine a sort of eagerness to comply with the only
requests that I made of her. Behind this girl, as behind the purple
light that used to filter beneath the curtains of my room at Balbec,
while outside the concert blared, were shining the blue-green
undulations of the sea. Was she not, after all (she in whose heart of
hearts there was now regularly installed an idea of myself so familiar
that, next to her aunt, I was perhaps the person whom she
distinguished least from herself), the girl whom I had seen the first
time at Balbec, in her flat polo-cap, with her insistent laughing
eyes, a stranger still, exiguous as a silhouette projected against the
waves? These effigies preserved intact in our memory, when we
recapture them, we are astonished at their unlikeness to the person
whom we know, and we begin to realise what a task of remodelling is
performed every day by habit. In the charm that Albertine had in
Paris, by my fireside, there still survived the desire that had been
aroused in me by that insolent and blossoming parade along the beach,
and just as Rachel retained in Saint-Loup's eyes, even after he had
made her abandon it, the prestige of her life on the stage, so in this
Albertine cloistered in my house, far from Balbec, from which I had
hurried her away, there persisted the emotion, the social confusion,
the uneasy vanity, the roving desires of life by the seaside. She was
so effectively caged that on certain evenings I did not even ask her
to leave her room for mine, her to whom at one time all the world gave
chase, whom I had found it so hard to overtake as she sped past on her
bicycle, whom the lift-boy himself was unable to capture for me,
leaving me with scarcely a hope of her coming, although I sat up
waiting for her all the night. Had not Albertine been--out there in
front of the Hotel--like a great actress of the blazing beach,
arousing jealousy when she advanced upon that natural stage, not
speaking to anyone, thrusting past its regular frequenters, dominating
the girls, her friends, and was not this so greatly coveted actress
the same who, withdrawn by me from the stage, shut up in my house, was
out of reach now of the desires of all the rest, who might hereafter
seek for her in vain, sitting now in my room, now in her own, and
engaged in tracing or cutting out some pattern?

No doubt, in the first days at Balbec, Albertine seemed to be on a
parallel plane to that upon which I was living, but one that had drawn
closer (after my visit to Elstir) and had finally become merged in it,
as my relations with her, at Balbec, in Paris, then at Balbec again,
grew more intimate.  Besides, between the two pictures of Balbec, at
my first visit and at my second, pictures composed of the same villas
from which the same girls walked down to the same sea, what a
difference! In Albertine's friends at the time of my second visit,
whom I knew so well, whose good and bad qualities were so clearly
engraved on their features, how was I to recapture those fresh,
mysterious strangers who at first could not, without making my heart
throb, thrust open the door of their bungalow over the grinding sand
and set the tamarisks shivering as they came down the path! Their huge
eyes had, in the interval, been absorbed into their faces, doubtless
because they had ceased to be children, but also because those
ravishing strangers, those ravishing actresses of the romantic first
year, as to whom I had gone ceaselessly in quest of information, no
longer held any mystery for me. They had become obedient to my
caprices, a mere grove of budding girls, from among whom I was quite
distinctly proud of having plucked, and carried off from them all,
their fairest rose.

Between the two Balbec scenes, so different one from the other, there
was the interval of several years in Paris, the long expanse of which
was dotted with all the visits that Albertine had paid me. I saw her
in successive years of my life occupying, with regard to myself,
different positions, which made me feel the beauty of the interposed
gaps, that long extent of time in which I never set eyes on her and
against the diaphanous background of which the rosy person that I saw
before me was modelled with mysterious shadows and in bold relief.
This was due also to the superimposition not merely of the successive
images which Albertine had been for me, but also of the great
qualities of brain and heart, the defects of character, all alike
unsuspected by me, which Albertine, in a germination, a multiplication
of herself, a carnal efflorescence in sombre colours, had added to a
nature that formerly could scarcely have been said to exist, but was
now deep beyond plumbing. For other people, even those of whom we have
so often dreamed that they have become nothing more than a picture, a
figure by Benozzo Gozzoli standing out upon a background of verdure,
as to whom we were prepared to believe that the only variations
depended upon the point of view from which we looked at them, their
distance from us, the effect of light and shade, these people, while
they change in relation to ourselves, change also in themselves, and
there had been an enrichment, a solidification and an increase of
volume in the figure once so simply outlined against the sea.
Moreover, it was not only the sea at the close of day that came to
life for me in Albertine, but sometimes the drowsy murmur of the sea
upon the shore on moonlit nights.

Sometimes, indeed, when I rose to fetch a book from my father's study,
and had given my mistress permission to lie down while I was out of
the room, she was so tired after her long outing in the morning and
afternoon in the open air that, even if I had been away for a moment
only, when I returned I found Albertine asleep and did not rouse her.

Stretched out at full length upon my bed, in an attitude so natural
that no art could have designed it, she reminded me of a long
blossoming stem that had been laid there, and so indeed she was: the
faculty of dreaming which I possessed only in her absence I recovered
at such moments in her presence, as though by falling asleep she had
become a plant. In this way her sleep did to a certain extent make
love possible. When she was present, I spoke to her, but I was too far
absent from myself to be able to think.  When she was asleep, I no
longer needed to talk to her, I knew that she was no longer looking at
me, I had no longer any need to live upon my own outer surface.

By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped
off, one after another, the different human characters with which she
had deceived me ever since the day when I had first made her
acquaintance. She was animated now only by the unconscious life of
vegetation, of trees, a life more different from my own, more alien,
and yet one that belonged more to me. Her personality did not escape
at every moment, as when we were talking, by the channels of her
unacknowledged thoughts and of her gaze. She had called back into
herself everything of her that lay outside, had taken refuge,
enclosed, reabsorbed, in her body. In keeping her before my eyes, in
my hands, I had that impression of possessing her altogether, which I
never had when she was awake. Her life was submitted to me, exhaled
towards me its gentle breath.

I listened to this murmuring, mysterious emanation, soft as a breeze
from the sea, fairylike as that moonlight which was her sleep. So long
as it lasted, I was free to think about her and at the same time to
look at her, and, when her sleep grew deeper, to touch, to kiss her.
What I felt then was love in the presence of something as pure, as
immaterial in its feelings, as mysterious, as if I had been in the
presence of those inanimate creatures which are the beauties of
nature. And indeed, as soon as her sleep became at all heavy, she
ceased to be merely the plant that she had been; her sleep, on the
margin of which I remained musing, with a fresh delight of which I
never tired, but could have gone on enjoying indefinitely, was to me
an undiscovered country. Her sleep brought within my reach something
as calm, as sensually delicious as those nights of full moon on the
bay of Balbec, turned quiet as a lake over which the branches barely
stir, where stretched out upon the sand one could listen for hours on
end to the waves breaking and receding.

When I entered the room, I remained standing in the doorway, not
venturing to make a sound, and hearing none but that of her breath
rising to expire upon her lips at regular intervals, like the reflux
of the sea, but drowsier and more gentle. And at the moment when my
ear absorbed that divine sound, I felt that there was, condensed in
it, the whole person, the whole life of the charming captive,
outstretched there before my eyes.  Carriages went rattling past in
the street, her features remained as motionless, as pure, her breath
as light, reduced to the simplest expulsion of the necessary quantity
of air. Then, seeing that her sleep would not be disturbed, I advanced
cautiously, sat down upon the chair that stood by the bedside, then
upon the bed itself.

I have spent charming evenings talking, playing games with Albertine.
but never any so pleasant as when I was watching her sleep. Granted
that she might have, as she chatted with me, or played cards, that
spontaneity which no actress could have imitated, it was a spontaneity
carried to the second degree that was offered me by her sleep. Her
hair, falling all along her rosy face, was spread out beside her on
the bed, and here and there a separate straight tress gave the same
effect of perspective as those moonlit trees, lank and pale, which one
sees standing erect and stiff in the backgrounds of Elstir's
Raphaelesque pictures. If Albertine's lips were closed, her eyelids,
on the other hand, seen from the point at which I was standing, seemed
so loosely joined that I might almost have questioned whether she
really was asleep. At the same time those drooping lids introduced
into her face that perfect continuity, unbroken by any intrusion of
eyes. There are people whose faces assume a quite unusual beauty and
majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.

I measured with my own Albertine outstretched at my feet. Now and then
a slight, unaccountable tremor ran through her body, as the leaves of
a tree are shaken for a few moments by a sudden breath of wind. She
would touch her hair, then, not having arranged it to her liking,
would raise her hand to it again with motions so consecutive, so
deliberate, that I was convinced that she was about to wake. Not at
all, she grew calm again in the sleep from which she had not emerged.
After this she lay without moving.  She had laid her hand on her bosom
with a sinking of the arm so artlessly childlike that I was obliged,
as I gazed at her, to suppress the smile that is provoked in us by the
solemnity, the innocence and the charm of little children.

I, who was acquainted with many Albertines in one person, seemed now
to see many more again, reposing by my side. Her eyebrows, arched as I
had never seen them, enclosed the globes of her eyelids like a
halcyon's downy nest. Races, atavisms, vices reposed upon her face.
Whenever she moved her head, she created a fresh woman, often one
whose existence I had never suspected. I seemed to possess not one,
but innumerable girls.  Her breathing, as it became gradually deeper,
was now regularly stirring her bosom and, through it, her folded
hands, her pearls, displaced in a different way by the same movement,
like the boats, the anchor chains that are set swaying by the movement
of the tide. Then, feeling that the tide of her sleep was full, that I
should not ground upon reefs of consciousness covered now by the high
water of profound slumber, deliberately, I crept without a sound upon
the bed, lay down by her side, clasped her waist in one arm, placed my
lips upon her cheek and heart, then upon every part of her body in
turn laid my free hand, which also was raised, like the pearls, by
Albertine's breathing; I myself was gently rocked by its regular
motion: I had embarked upon the tide of Albertine's sleep.  Sometimes
it made me taste a pleasure that was less pure. For this I had no need
to make any movement, I allowed my leg to dangle against hers, like an
oar which one allows to trail in the water, imparting to it now and
again a gentle oscillation like the intermittent flap given to its
wing by a bird asleep in the air. I chose, in gazing at her, this
aspect of her face which no one ever saw and which was so pleasing.

It is I suppose comprehensible that the letters which we receive from
a person are more or less similar and combine to trace an image of the
writer so different from the person whom we know as to constitute a
second personality. But how much stranger is it that a woman should be
conjoined, like Rosita and Doodica, with another woman whose different
beauty makes us infer another character, and that in order to behold
one we must look at her in profile, the other in full face. The sound
of her breathing as it grew louder might give the illusion of the
breathless ecstasy of pleasure and, when mine was at its climax, I
could kiss her without having interrupted her sleep. I felt at such
moments that I had been possessing her more completely, like an
unconscious and unresisting object of dumb nature. I was not affected
by the words that she muttered occasionally in her sleep, their
meaning escaped me, and besides, whoever the unknown person to whom
they referred, it was upon my hand, upon my cheek that her hand, as an
occasional tremor recalled it to life, stiffened for an instant.  I
relished her sleep with a disinterested, soothing love, just as I
would remain for hours listening to the unfurling of the waves.

Perhaps it is laid down that people must be capable of making us
suffer intensely before, in the hours of respite, they can procure for
us the same soothing calm as Nature. I had not to answer her as when
we were engaged in conversation, and even if I could have remained
silent, as for that matter I did when it was she that was talking,
still while listening to her voice I did not penetrate so far into
herself. As I continued to hear, to gather from moment to moment the
murmur, soothing as a barely perceptible breeze, of her breath, it was
a whole physiological existence that was spread out before me, for me;
as I used to remain for hours lying on the beach, in the moonlight, so
long could I have remained there gazing at her, listening to her.

Sometimes one would have said that the sea was becoming rough, that
the storm was making itself felt even inside the bay, and like the bay
I lay listening to the gathering roar of her breath. Sometimes, when
she was too warm, she would take off, already half asleep, her kimono
which she flung over my armchair. While she was asleep I would tell
myself that all her correspondence was in the inner pocket of this
kimono, into which she always thrust her letters. A signature, a
written appointment would have sufficed to prove a lie or to dispel a
suspicion. When I could see that Albertine was sound asleep, leaving
the foot of the bed where I had been standing motionless in
contemplation of her, I took a step forward, seized by a burning
curiosity, feeling that the secret of this other life lay offering
itself to me, flaccid and defenceless, in that armchair. Perhaps I
took this step forward also because to stand perfectly still and watch
her sleeping became tiring after a while. And so, on tiptoe,
constantly turning round to make sure that Albertine was not waking, I
made my way to the armchair.  There I stopped short, stood for a long
time gazing at the kimono, as I had stood for a long time gazing at
Albertine. But (and here perhaps I was wrong) never once did I touch
the kimono, put my hand in the pocket, examine the letters. In the
end, realising that I would never make up my mind, I started back, on
tiptoe, returned to Albertine's bedside and began again to watch her
sleeping, her who would tell me nothing, whereas I could see lying
across an arm of the chair that kimono which would have told me much.
And just as people pay a hundred francs a day for a room at the Hotel
at Balbec in order to breathe the sea air, I felt it to be quite
natural that I should spend more than that upon her since I had her
breath upon my cheek, between her lips which I parted with my own,
through which her life flowed against my tongue.

But this pleasure of seeing her sleep, which was as precious as that
of feeling her live, was cut short by another pleasure, that of seeing
her wake.  It was, carried to a more profound and more mysterious
degree, the same pleasure that I felt in having her under my roof. It
was gratifying, of course, in the afternoon, when she alighted from
the carriage, that it should be to my address that she was returning.
It was even more so to me that when from the underworld of sleep she
climbed the last steps of the stair of dreams, it was in my room that
she was reborn to consciousness and life, that she asked herself for
an instant: "Where am I?" and, seeing all the things in the room round
about her, the lamp whose light scarcely made her blink her eyes, was
able to assure herself that she was at home, as soon as she realised
that she was waking in my home. In that first delicious moment of
uncertainty, it seemed to me that once again I took a more complete
possession of her since, whereas after an outing it was to her own
room that she returned, it was now my room that, as soon as Albertine
should have recognised it, was about to enclose, to contain her,
without any sign of misgiving in the eyes of my mistress, which
remained as calm as if she had never slept at all.

The uncertainty of awakening revealed by her silence was not at all
revealed in her eyes. As soon as she was able to speak she said:
"My-----" or "My dearest----" followed by my Christian name, which, if
we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would
be 'My Marcel,' or 'My dearest Marcel.' After this I would never allow
my relatives, by calling me 'dearest,' to rob of their priceless
uniqueness the delicious words that Albertine uttered to me. As she
uttered them, she pursed her lips in a little pout which she herself
transformed into a kiss. As quickly as, earlier in the evening, she
had fallen asleep, so quickly had she awoken.  No more than my own
progression in time, no more than the act of gazing at a. girl seated
opposite to me beneath the lamp, which shed upon her a different light
from that of the sun when I used to behold her striding along the
seashore, was this material enrichment, this autonomous progress of
Albertine the determining cause of the difference between my present
view of her and my original impression of her at Balbec. A longer term
of years might have separated the two images without effecting so
complete a change; it had come to pass, essential and sudden, when I
learned that my mistress had been virtually brought up by Mlle.
Vinteuil's friend.  If at one time I had been carried away by
excitement when I thought that I saw a trace of mystery in Albertine's
eyes, now I was happy only at the moments when from those eyes, from
her cheeks even, as mirroring as her eyes, so gentle now but quickly
turning sullen, I succeeded in expelling every trace of mystery.

The image for which I sought, upon which I reposed, against which I
would have liked to lean and die, was no longer that of Albertine
leading a hidden life, it was that of an Albertine as familiar to me
as possible (and for this reason my love could not be lasting unless
it was unhappy, for in its nature it did not satisfy my need of
mystery), an Albertine who did not reflect a distant world, but
desired nothing else--there were moments when this did indeed appear
to be the case--than to be with me, a person like myself, an Albertine
the embodiment of what belonged to me and not of the unknown. When it
is in this way, from an hour of anguish caused by another person, when
it is from uncertainty whether we shall be able to keep her or she
will escape, that love is born, such love bears the mark of the
revolution that has created it, it recalls very little of what we had
previously seen when we thought of the person in question. And my
first impressions at the sight of Albertine, against a background of
sea, might to some small extent persist in my love of her: actually,
these earlier impressions occupy but a tiny place in a love of this
sort; in its strength, in its agony, in its need of comfort and its
return to a calm and soothing memory with which we would prefer to
abide and to learn nothing more of her whom we love, even if there be
something horrible that we ought to know--would prefer still more to
consult only these earlier memories--such a love is composed of very
different material!

Sometimes I put out the light before she came in. It was in the
darkness, barely guided by the glow of a smouldering log, that she lay
down by my side. My hands, my cheeks alone identified her without my
eyes beholding her, my eyes that often were afraid of finding her
altered. With the result that by virtue of this unseeing love she may
have felt herself bathed in a warmer affection than usual. On other
evenings, I undressed, I lay down, and, with Albertine perched on the
side of my bed, we resumed our game or our conversation interrupted by
kisses; and, in the desire that alone makes us take an interest in the
existence and character of another person, we remain so true to our
own nature (even if, at the same time, we abandon successively the
different people whom we have loved in turn), that on one occasion,
catching sight of myself in the glass at the moment when I was kissing
Albertine and calling her my little girl, the sorrowful, passionate
expression on my own face, similar to the expression it had assumed
long ago with Gilberte whom I no longer remembered, and would perhaps
assume one day with another girl, if I was fated ever to forget
Albertine, made me think that over and above any personal
considerations (instinct requiring that we consider the person of the
moment as the only true person) I was performing the duties of an
ardent and painful devotion dedicated as an oblation to the youth and
beauty of Woman. And yet with this desire, honouring youth with an _ex
voto_, with my memories also of Balbec, there was blended, in the need
that I felt of keeping Albertine in this way every evening by my side,
something that had hitherto been unknown, at least in my amorous
existence, if it was not entirely novel in my life.

It was a soothing power the like of which I had not known since the
evenings at Combray long ago when my mother, stooping over my bed,
brought me repose in a kiss. To be sure, I should have been greatly
astonished at that time, had anyone told me that I was not wholly
virtuous, and more astonished still to be told that I would ever seek
to deprive some one else of a pleasure. I must have known myself very
slightly, for my pleasure in having Albertine to live with me was much
less a positive pleasure than that of having withdrawn from the world,
where everyone was free to enjoy her in turn, the blossoming damsel
who, if she did not bring me any great joy, was at least withholding
joy from others. Ambition, fame would have left me unmoved. Even more
was I incapable of feeling hatred. And yet to me to love in a carnal
sense was at any rate to enjoy a triumph over countless rivals. I can
never repeat it often enough; it was first and foremost a sedative.

For all that I might, before Albertine returned, have doubted her
loyalty, have imagined her in the room at Montjouvain, once she was in
her dressing-gown and seated facing my chair, or (if, as was more
frequent, I had remained in bed) at the foot of my bed, I would
deposit my doubts in her, hand them over for her to relieve me of
them, with the abnegation of a worshipper uttering his prayer. All the
evening she might have been there, huddled in a provoking ball upon my
bed, playing with me, like a great cat; her little pink nose, the tip
of which she made even tinier with a coquettish glance which gave it
that sharpness which we see in certain people who are inclined to be
stout, might have given her a fiery and rebellious air; she might have
allowed a tress of her long, dark hair to fall over a cheek of rosy
wax and, half shutting her eyes, unfolding her arms, have seemed to be
saying to me: "Do with me what you please!"; when, as the time came
for her to leave me, she drew nearer to say good night, it was a
meekness that had become almost a part of my family life that I kissed
on either side of her firm throat which now never seemed to me brown
or freckled enough, as though these solid qualities had been in
keeping with some loyal generosity in Albertine.

When it was Albertine's turn to bid me good night, kissing me on
either side of my throat, her hair caressed me like a wing of softly
bristling feathers. Incomparable as were those two kisses of peace,
Albertine slipped into my mouth, making me the gift of her tongue,
like a gift of the Holy Spirit, conveyed to me a viaticum, left me
with a provision of tranquillity almost as precious as when my mother
in the evening at Combray used to lay her lips upon my brow.

"Are you coming with us to-morrow, you naughty man?" she asked before
leaving me. "Where are you going?" "That will depend on the weather
and on yourself. But have you written anything to-day, my little
darling?  No? Then it was hardly worth your while, not coming with us.
Tell me, by the way, when I came in, you knew my step, you guessed at
once who it was?" "Of course. Could I possibly be mistaken, couldn't I
tell my little sparrow's hop among a thousand? She must let me take
her shoes off, before she goes to bed, it will be such a pleasure to
me. You are so nice and pink in all that white lace."

Such was my answer; among the sensual expressions, we may recognise
others that were peculiar to my grandmother and mother for, little by
little, I was beginning to resemble all my relatives, my father
who--in a very different fashion from myself, no doubt, for if things
do repeat themselves, it is with great variations--took so keen an
interest in the weather; and not my father only, I was becoming more
and more like my aunt Léonie. Otherwise, Albertine could not but have
been a reason for my going out of doors, so as not to leave her by
herself, beyond my control.  My aunt Léonie, wrapped up in her
religious observances, with whom I could have sworn that I had not a
single point in common, I so passionately keen on pleasure, apparently
worlds apart from that maniac who had never known any pleasure in her
life and lay mumbling her rosary all day long, I who suffered from my
inability to embark upon a literary career whereas she had been the
one person in the family who could never understand that reading was
anything more than an amusing pastime, which made reading, even at the
paschal season, lawful upon Sunday, when every serious occupation is
forbidden, in order that the day may be hallowed by prayer alone. Now,
albeit every day I found an excuse in some particular indisposition
which made me so often remain in bed, a person (not Albertine, not any
person that I loved, but a person with more power over me than any
beloved) had migrated into me, despotic to the extent of silencing at
times my jealous suspicions or at least of preventing me from going to
find out whether they had any foundation, and this was my aunt Léonie.
It was quite enough that I should bear an exaggerated resemblance to
my father, to the extent of not being satisfied like him with
consulting the barometer, but becoming an animated barometer myself;
it was quite enough that I should allow myself to be ordered by my
aunt Léonie to stay at home and watch the weather, from my bedroom
window or even from my bed; yet here I was talking now to Albertine,
at one moment as the child that I had been at Combray used to talk to
my mother, at another as my grandmother used to talk to me.

When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were
and the souls of the dead from whom we spring come and bestow upon us
in handfuls their treasures and their calamities, asking to be allowed
to cooperate in the new sentiments which we are feeling and in which,
obliterating their former image, we recast them in an original
creation. Thus my whole past from my earliest years, and earlier still
the past of my parents and relatives, blended with my impure love for
Albertine the charm of an affection at once filial and maternal. We
have to give hospitality, at a certain stage in our life, to all our
relatives who have journeyed so far and gathered round us.

Before Albertine obeyed and allowed me to take off her shoes, I opened
her chemise. Her two little upstanding breasts were so round that they
seemed not so much to be an integral part of her body as to have
ripened there like fruit; and her belly (concealing the place where a
man's is marred as though by an iron clamp left sticking in a statue
that has been taken down from its niche) was closed, at the junction
of her thighs, by two valves of a curve as hushed, as reposeful, as
cloistral as that of the horizon after the sun has set. She took off
her shoes, and lay down by my side.

O mighty attitudes of Man and Woman, in which there seeks to be
reunited, in the innocence of the world's first age and with the
humility of clay, what creation has cloven apart, in which Eve is
astonished and submissive before the Man by whose side she has awoken,
as he himself, alone still, before God Who has fashioned him.
Albertine folded her arms behind her dark hair, her swelling hip, her
leg falling with the inflexion of a swan's neck that stretches upwards
and then curves over towards its starting point. It was only when she
was lying right on her side that one saw a certain aspect of her face
(so good and handsome when one looked at it from in front) which I
could not endure, hook-nosed as in some of Leonardo's caricatures,
seeming to indicate the shiftiness, the greed for profit, the cunning
of a spy whose presence in my house would have filled me with horror
and whom that profile seemed to unmask. At once I took Albertine's
face in my hands and altered its position.

"Be a good boy, promise me that if you don't come out to-morrow you
will work," said my mistress as she slipped into her chemise. "Yes,
but don't put on your dressing-gown yet." Sometimes I ended by falling
asleep by her side. The room had grown cold, more wood was wanted. I
tried to find the bell above my head, but failed to do so, after
fingering all the copper rods in turn save those between which it
hung, and said to Albertine who had sprung from the bed so that
Françoise should not find us lying side by side: "No, come back for a
moment, I can't find the bell."

Comforting moments, gay, innocent to all appearance, and yet moments
in which there accumulates in us the never suspected possibility of
disaster, which makes the amorous life the most precarious of all,
that in which the incalculable rain of sulphur and brimstone falls
after the most radiant moments, after which, without having the
courage to derive its lesson from our mishap, we set to work
immediately to rebuild upon the slopes of the crater from which
nothing but catastrophe can emerge. I was as careless as everyone who
imagines that his happiness will endure.

It is precisely because this comfort has been necessary to bring grief
to birth--and will return moreover at intervals to calm it--that men
can be sincere with each other, and even with themselves, when they
pride themselves upon a woman's kindness to them, although, taking
things all in all, at the heart of their intimacy there lurks
continually in a secret fashion, unavowed to the rest of the world, or
revealed unintentionally by questions, inquiries, a painful
uncertainty. But as this could not have come to birth without the
preliminary comfort, as even afterwards the intermittent comfort is
necessary to make suffering endurable and to prevent ruptures, their
concealment of the secret hell that life can be when shared with the
woman in question, carried to the pitch of an ostentatious display of
an intimacy which, they pretend, is precious, expresses a genuine
point of view, a universal process of cause and effect, one of the
modes in which the production of grief is rendered possible.

It no longer surprised me that Albertine should be in the house, and
would not be going out to-morrow save with myself or in the custody of
Andrée. These habits of a life shared in common, this broad outline
which defined my existence and within which nobody might penetrate but
Albertine, also (in the future plan, of which I was still unaware, of
my life to come, like the plan traced by an architect for monumental
structures which will not be erected until long afterwards) the
remoter lines, parallel to the others but vaster, that sketched in me,
like a lonely hermitage, the somewhat rigid and monotonous formula of
my future loves, had in reality been traced that night at Balbec when,
in the little tram, after Albertine had revealed to me who it was that
had brought her up, I had decided at any cost to remove her from
certain influences and to prevent her from straying out of my sight
for some days to come. Day after day had gone by, these habits had
become mechanical, but, like those primitive rites the meaning of
which historians seek to discover, I might (but would not) have said
to anybody who asked me what I meant by this life of seclusion which I
carried so far as not to go any more to the theatre, that its origin
was the anxiety of a certain evening, and my need to prove to myself,
during the days that followed, that the girl whose unfortunate
childhood I had learned should not find it possible, if she wished, to
expose herself to similar temptations. I no longer thought, save very
rarely, of these possibilities, but they were nevertheless to remain
vaguely present in my consciousness. The fact that I was
destroying--or trying to destroy--them day by day was doubtless the
reason why it comforted me to kiss those cheeks which were no more
beautiful than many others; beneath any carnal attraction which is at
all profound, there is the permanent possibility of danger.



I had promised Albertine that, if I did not go out with her, I would
settle down to work, but in the morning, just as if, taking advantage
of our being asleep, the house had miraculously flown, I awoke in
different weather beneath another clime. We do not begin to work at
the moment of landing in a strange country to the conditions of which
we have to adapt ourself. But each day was for me a different country.
Even my laziness itself, beneath the novel forms that it had assumed,
how was I to recognise it?

Sometimes, on days when the weather was, according to everyone, past
praying for, the mere act of staying in the house, situated in the
midst of a steady and continuous rain, had all the gliding charm, the
soothing silence, the interest of a sea voyage; at another time, on a
bright day, to lie still in bed was to let the lights and shadows play
around me as round a tree-trunk.

Or yet again, in the first strokes of the bell of a neighbouring
convent, rare as the early morning worshippers, barely whitening the
dark sky with their fluttering snowfall, melted and scattered by the
warm breeze, I had discerned one of those tempestuous, disordered,
delightful days, when the roofs soaked by an occasional shower and
dried by a breath of wind or a ray of sunshine let fall a cooing
eavesdrop, and, as they wait for the wind to resume its turn, preen in
the momentary sunlight that has burnished them their pigeon's-breast
of slates, one of those days filled with so many changes of weather,
atmospheric incidents, storms, that the idle man does not feel that he
has wasted them, because he has been taking an interest in the
activity which, in default of himself, the atmosphere, acting in a
sense in his stead, has displayed; days similar to those times of
revolution or war which do not seem empty to the schoolboy who has
played truant from his classroom, because by loitering outside the Law
Courts or by reading the newspapers, he has the illusion of finding,
in the events that have occurred, failing the lesson which he has not
learned, an intellectual profit and an excuse for his idleness; days
to which we may compare those on which there occurs in our life some
exceptional crisis from which the man who has never done anything
imagines that he is going to acquire, if it comes to a happy issue,
laborious habits; for instance, the morning on which he sets out for a
duel which is to be fought under particularly dangerous conditions;
then he is suddenly made aware, at the moment when it is perhaps about
to be taken from him, of the value of a life of which he might have
made use to begin some important work, or merely to enjoy pleasures,
and of which he has failed to make any use at all. "If I can only not
be killed," he says to himself, "how I shall settle down to work this
very minute, and how I shall enjoy myself too."

Life has in fact suddenly acquired, in his eyes, a higher value,
because he puts into life everything that it seems to him capable of
giving, instead of the little that he normally makes it give. He sees
it in the light of his desire, not as his experience has taught him
that he was apt to make it, that is to say so tawdry! It has, at that
moment, become filled with work, travel, mountain-climbing, all the
pleasant things which, he tells himself, the fatal issue of the duel
may render impossible, whereas they were already impossible before
there was any question of a duel, owing to the bad habits which, even
had there been no duel, would have persisted. He returns home without
even a scratch, but he continues to find the same obstacles to
pleasures, excursions, travel, to everything of which he had feared
for a moment to be for ever deprived by death; to deprive him of them
life has been sufficient. As for work--exceptional circumstances
having the effect of intensifying what previously existed in the man,
labour in the laborious, laziness in the lazy--he takes a holiday.

I followed his example, and did as I had always done since my first
resolution to become a writer, which I had made long ago, but which
seemed to me to date from yesterday, because I had regarded each
intervening day as non-existent. I treated this day in a similar
fashion, allowing its showers of rain and bursts of sunshine to pass
without doing anything, and vowing that I would begin to work on the
morrow. But then I was no longer the same man beneath a cloudless sky;
the golden note of the bells did not contain merely (as honey
contains) light, but the sensation of light and also the sickly savour
of preserved fruits (because at Combray it had often loitered like a
wasp over our cleared dinner-table). On this day of dazzling sunshine,
to remain until nightfall with my eyes shut was a thing permitted,
customary, healthgiving, pleasant, seasonable, like keeping the
outside shutters closed against the heat.

It was in such weather as this that at the beginning of my second
visit to Balbec I used to hear the violins of the orchestra amid the
bluish flow of the rising tide. How much more fully did I possess
Albertine to-day.  There were days when the sound of a bell striking
the hour bore upon the sphere of its resonance a plate so cool, so
richly loaded with moisture or with light that it was like a
transcription for the blind, or if you prefer a musical interpretation
of the charm of rain or of the charm of the sun.  So much so that, at
that moment, as I lay in bed, with my eyes shut, I said to myself that
everything is capable of transposition and that a universe which was
merely audible might be as full of variety as the other. Travelling
lazily upstream from day to day, as in a boat, and seeing appear
before my eyes an endlessly changing succession of enchanted memories,
which I did not select, which a moment earlier had been invisible, and
which my mind presented to me one after another, without my being free
to choose them, I pursued idly over that continuous expanse my stroll
in the sunshine.

Those morning concerts at Balbec were not remote in time. And yet, at
that comparatively recent moment, I had given but little thought to
Albertine.  Indeed, on the very first mornings after my arrival, I had
not known that she was at Balbec. From whom then had I learned it? Oh,
yes, from Aimé. It was a fine sunny day like this. He was glad to see
me again.  But he does not like Albertine. Not everybody can be in
love with her.  Yes, it was he who told me that she was at Balbec. But
how did he know?  Ah! he had met her, had thought that she had a bad
style. At that moment, as I regarded Aimé's story from another aspect
than that in which he had told me it, my thoughts, which hitherto had
been sailing blissfully over these untroubled waters, exploded
suddenly, as though they had struck an invisible and perilous mine,
treacherously moored at this point in my memory. He had told me that
he had met her, that he had thought her style bad. What had he meant
by a bad style? I had understood him to mean a vulgar manner, because,
to contradict him in advance, I had declared that she was most
refined. But no, perhaps he had meant the style of Gomorrah. She was
with another girl, perhaps their arms were round one another's waist,
they were staring at other women, they were indeed displaying a
'style' which I had never seen Albertine adopt in my presence.  Who
was the other girl, where had Aimé met her, this odious Albertine?

I tried to recall exactly what Aimé had said to me, in order to see
whether it could be made to refer to what I imagined, or he had meant
nothing more than common manners. But in vain might I ask the
question, the person who put it and the person who might supply the
recollection were, alas, one and the same person, myself, who was
momentarily duplicated but without adding anything to my stature.
Question as I might, it was myself who answered, I learned nothing
fresh. I no longer gave a thought to Mlle.  Vinteuil. Born of a novel
suspicion, the fit of jealousy from which I was suffering was novel
also, or rather it was only the prolongation, the extension of that
suspicion, it had the same theatre, which was no longer Montjouvain,
but the road upon which Aimé had met Albertine, and for its object the
various friends one or other of whom might be she who had been with
Albertine that day. It was perhaps a certain Elisabeth, or else
perhaps those two girls whom Albertine had watched in the mirror at
the Casino, while appearing not to notice them. She had doubtless been
having relations with them, and also with Esther, Bloch's cousin. Such
relations, had they been revealed to me by a third person, would have
been enough almost to kill me, but as it was myself that was imagining
them, I took care to add sufficient uncertainty to deaden the pain.

We succeed in absorbing daily, under the guise of suspicions, in
enormous doses, this same idea that we are being betrayed, a quite
minute quantity of which might prove fatal, if injected by the needle
of a stabbing word. It is no doubt for that reason, and by a survival
of the instinct of self-preservation, that the same jealous man does
not hesitate to form the most terrible suspicions upon a basis of
innocuous details, provided that, whenever any proof is brought to
him, he may decline to accept its evidence. Anyhow, love is an
incurable malady, like those diathetic states in which rheumatism
affords the sufferer a brief respite only to be replaced by
epileptiform headaches. Was my jealous suspicion calmed, I then felt a
grudge against Albertine for not having been gentle with me, perhaps
for having made fun of me to Andrée. I thought with alarm of the idea
that she must have formed if Andrée had repeated all our
conversations; the future loomed black and menacing. This mood of
depression left me only if a fresh jealous suspicion drove me upon
another quest or if, on the other hand, Albertine's display of
affection made the actual state of my fortunes seem to me immaterial.
Whoever this girl might be, I should have to write to Aimé, to try to
see him, and then I should check his statement by talking to
Albertine, hearing her confession. In the meantime, convinced that it
must be Bloch's cousin, I asked Bloch himself, who had not the
remotest idea of my purpose, simply to let me see her photograph, or,
better still, to arrange if possible for me to meet her.

How many persons, cities, roads does not jealousy make us eager thus
to know? It is a thirst for knowledge thanks to which, with regard to
various isolated points, we end by acquiring every possible notion in
turn except those that we require. We can never tell whether a
suspicion will not arise, for, all of a sudden, we recall a sentence
that was not clear, an alibi that cannot have been given us without a
purpose. And yet, we have not seen the person again, but there is such
a thing as a posthumous jealousy, that is born only after we have left
her, a jealousy of the doorstep.  Perhaps the habit that I had formed
of nursing in my bosom several simultaneous desires, a desire for a
young girl of good family such as I used to see pass beneath my window
escorted by her governess, and especially of the girl whom Saint-Loup
had mentioned to me, the one who frequented houses of ill fame, a
desire for handsome lady's-maids, and especially for the maid of Mme.
Putbus, a desire to go to the country in early spring, to see once
again hawthorns, apple trees in blossom, storms at sea, a desire for
Venice, a desire to settle down to work, a desire to live like other
people--perhaps the habit of storing up, without assuaging any of
them, all these desires, contenting myself with the promise, made to
myself, that I would not forget to satisfy them one day, perhaps this
habit, so many years old already, of perpetual postponement, of what
M. de Charlus used to castigate under the name of procrastination, had
become so prevalent in me that it assumed control of my jealous
suspicions also and, while it made me take a mental note that I would
not fail, some day, to have an explanation from Albertine with regard
to the girl, possibly the girls (this part of the story was confused,
rubbed out, that is to say obliterated, in my memory) with whom Aimé
had met her, made me also postpone this explanation.  In any case, I
would not mention it this evening to my mistress for fear of making
her think me jealous and so offending her.

And yet when, on the following day, Bloch had sent me the photograph
of his cousin Esther, I made haste to forward it to Aimé. And at the
same moment I remembered that Albertine had that morning refused me a
pleasure which might indeed have tired her. Was that in order to
reserve it for some one else? This afternoon, perhaps? For whom?

Thus it is that jealousy is endless, for even if the beloved object,
by dying for instance, can no longer provoke it by her actions, it so
happens that posthumous memories, of later origin than any event, take
shape suddenly in our minds as though they were events also, memories
which hitherto we have never properly explored, which had seemed to us
unimportant, and to which our own meditation upon them has been
sufficient, without any external action, to give a new and terrible
meaning. We have no need of her company, it is enough to be alone in
our room, thinking, for fresh betrayals of us by our mistress to come
to light, even though she be dead. And so we ought not to fear in
love, as in everyday life, the future alone, but even the past which
often we do not succeed in realising until the future has come and
gone; and we are not speaking only of the past which we discover long
afterwards, but of the past which we have long kept stored up in
ourselves and learn suddenly how to interpret.

No matter, I was very glad, now that afternoon was turning to evening,
that the hour was not far off when I should be able to appeal to
Albertine's company for the consolation of which I stood in need.
Unfortunately, the evening that followed was one of those on which
this consolation was not afforded me, on which the kiss that Albertine
would give me when she left me for the night, very different from her
ordinary kiss, would no more soothe me than my mother's kiss had
soothed me long ago, on days when she was vexed with me and I dared
not send for her, but at the same time knew that I should not be able
to sleep. Such evenings were now those on which Albertine had formed
for the morrow some plan of which she did not wish me to know. Had she
confided in me, I would have employed, to assure its successful
execution, an ardour which none but Albertine could have inspired in
me. But she told me nothing, nor had she any need to tell me anything;
as soon as she came in, before she had even crossed the threshold of
my room, as she was still wearing her hat or toque, I had already
detected the unknown, restive, desperate, indomitable desire. Now,
these were often the evenings when I had awaited her return with the
most loving thoughts, and looked forward to throwing my arms round her
neck with the warmest affection.

Alas, those misunderstandings that I had often had with my parents,
whom I found cold or cross at the moment when I was running to embrace
them, overflowing with love, are nothing in comparison with these that
occur between lovers! The anguish then is far less superficial, far
harder to endure, it has its abode in a deeper stratum of the heart.
This evening, however, Albertine was obliged to mention the plan that
she had in her mind; I gathered at once that she wished to go next day
to pay a call on Mme. Verdurin, a call to which in itself I would have
had no objection. But evidently her object was to meet some one there,
to prepare some future pleasure. Otherwise she would not have attached
so much importance to this call. That is to say, she would not have
kept on assuring me that it was of no importance. I had in the course
of my life developed in the opposite direction to those races which
make use of phonetic writing only after regarding the letters of the
alphabet as a set of symbols; I, who for so many years had sought for
the real life and thought of other people only in the direct
statements with which they furnished me of their own free will,
failing these had come to attach importance, on the contrary, only to
the evidence that is not a rational and analytical expression of the
truth; the words themselves did not enlighten me unless they could be
interpreted in the same way as a sudden rush of blood to the cheeks of
a person who is embarrassed, or, what is even more telling, a sudden
silence.

Some subsidiary word (such as that used by M. de Cambremer when he
understood that I was 'literary,' and, not having spoken to me before,
as he was describing a visit that he had paid to the Verdurins, turned
to me with: "_Why_, Boreli was there!") bursting into flames at the
unintended, sometimes perilous contact of two ideas which the speaker
has not expressed, but which, by applying the appropriate methods of
analysis or electrolysis I was able to extract from it, told me more
than a long speech.

Albertine sometimes allowed to appear in her conversation one or other
of these precious amalgams which I made haste to 'treat' so as to
transform them into lucid ideas. It is by the way one of the most
terrible calamities for the lover that if particular details--which
only experiment, espionage, of all the possible realisations, would
ever make him know--are so difficult to discover, the truth on the
other hand is easy to penetrate or merely to feel by instinct.

Often I had seen her, at Balbec, fasten upon some girls who came past
us a sharp and lingering stare, like a physical contact, after which,
if I knew the girls, she would say to me: "Suppose we asked them to
join us? I should so love to be rude to them." And now, for some time
past, doubtless since she had succeeded in reading my character, no
request to me to invite anyone, not a word, never even a sidelong
glance from her eyes, which had become objectless and mute, and as
revealing, with the vague and vacant expression of the rest of her
face, as had been their magnetic swerve before. Now it was impossible
for me to reproach her, or to ply her with questions about things
which she would have declared to be so petty, so trivial, things that
I had stored up in my mind simply for the pleasure of making mountains
out of molehills. It is hard enough to say: "Why did you stare at that
girl who went past?" but a great deal harder to say: "Why did you not
stare at her?" And yet I knew quite well, or at least I should have
known, if I had not chosen to believe Albertine's assertions rather
than all the trivialities contained in a glance, proved by it and by
some contradiction or other in her speech, a contradiction which often
I did not perceive until long after I had left her, which kept me on
tenterhooks all the night long, which I never dared mention to her
again, but which nevertheless continued to honour my memory from time
to time with its periodical visits.

Often, in the case of these furtive or sidelong glances on the beach
at Balbec or in the streets of Paris, I might ask myself whether the
person who provoked them was not merely at the moment when she passed
an object of desire but was an old acquaintance, or else some girl who
had simply been mentioned to her, and of whom, when I heard about it,
I was astonished that anybody could have spoken to her, so utterly
unlike was she to anyone that Albertine could possibly wish to know.
But the Gomorrah of to-day is a dissected puzzle made up of fragments
which are picked up in the places where we least expected to find
them. Thus I once saw at Rivebelle a big dinner-party of ten women,
all of whom I happened to know--at least by name--women as unlike one
another as possible, perfectly united nevertheless, so much so that I
never saw a party so homogeneous, albeit so composite.

To return to the girls whom we passed in the street, never did
Albertine gaze at an old person, man or woman, with such fixity, or on
the other hand with such reserve, and as though she saw nothing. The
cuckolded husbands who know nothing know everything all the same. But
it requires more accurate and abundant evidence to create a scene of
jealousy. Besides, if jealousy helps us to discover a certain tendency
to falsehood in the woman whom we love, it multiplies this tendency an
hundredfold when the woman has discovered that we are jealous. She
lies (to an extent to which she has never lied to us before), whether
from pity, or from fear, or because she instinctively withdraws by a
methodical flight from our investigations. Certainly there are love
affairs in which from the start a light woman has posed as virtue
incarnate in the eyes of the man who is in love with her. But how many
others consist of two diametrically opposite periods? In the first,
the woman speaks almost spontaneously, with slight modifications, of
her zest for sensual pleasure, of the gay life which it has made her
lead, things all of which she will deny later on, with the last breath
in her body, to the same man--when she has felt that he is jealous of
and spying upon her. He begins to think with regret of the days of
those first confidences, the memory of which torments him
nevertheless. If the woman continued to make them, she would furnish
him almost unaided with the secret of her conduct which he has been
vainly pursuing day after day. And besides, what a surrender that
would mean, what trust, what friendship. If she cannot live without
betraying him, at least she would be betraying him as a friend,
telling him of her pleasures, associating him with them. And he thinks
with regret of the sort of life which the early stages of their love
seemed to promise, which the sequel has rendered impossible, making of
that love a thing exquisitely painful, which will render a final
parting, according to circumstances, either inevitable or impossible.

Sometimes the script from which I deciphered Albertine's falsehoods,
without being ideographic needed simply to be read backwards; so this
evening she had flung at me in a careless tone the message, intended
to pass almost unheeded: "It is possible that I may go to-morrow to
the Verdurins', I don't in the least know whether I shall go, I don't
really want to." A childish anagram of the admission: "I shall go
to-morrow to the Verdurins', it is absolutely certain, for I attach
the utmost importance to the visit." This apparent hesitation
indicated a resolute decision and was intended to diminish the
importance of the visit while warning me of it. Albertine always
adopted a tone of uncertainty in speaking of her irrevocable
decisions. Mine was no less irrevocable. I took steps to arrange that
this visit to Mme. Verdurin should not take place. Jealousy is often
only an uneasy need to be tyrannical, applied to matters of love.  I
had doubtless inherited from my father this abrupt, arbitrary desire
to threaten the people whom I loved best in the hopes with which they
were lulling themselves with a security that I determined to expose to
them as false; when I saw that Albertine had planned without my
knowledge, behind my back, an expedition which I would have done
everything in the world to make easier and more pleasant for her, had
she taken me into her confidence, I said carelessly, so as to make her
tremble, that I intended to go out the next day myself.

I set to work to suggest to Albertine other expeditions in directions
which would have made this visit to the Verdurins impossible, in words
stamped with a feigned indifference beneath which I strove to conceal
my excitement. But she had detected it. It encountered in her the
electric shock of a contrary will which violently repulsed it; I could
see the sparks flash from her eyes. Of what use, though, was it to pay
attention to what her eyes were saying at that moment? How had I
failed to observe long ago that Albertine's eyes belonged to the class
which even in a quite ordinary person seem to be composed of a number
of fragments, because of all the places which the person wishes to
visit--and to conceal her desire to visit--that day. Those eyes which
their falsehood keeps ever immobile and passive, but dynamic,
measurable in the yards or miles to be traversed before they reach the
determined, the implacably determined meeting-place, eyes that are not
so much smiling at the pleasure which tempts them as they are shadowed
with melancholy and discouragement because there may be a difficulty
in their getting to the meeting-place.  Even when you hold them in
your hands, these people are fugitives.  To understand the emotions
which they arouse, and which other people, even better looking, do not
arouse, we must take into account that they are not immobile but in
motion, and add to their person a sign corresponding to what in
physics is the sign that indicates velocity.  If you upset their plans
for the day, they confess to you the pleasure that they had hidden
from you: "I did so want to go to tea at five o'clock with So-and-So,
my dearest friend." Very well, if, six months later, you come to know
the person in question, you will learn that the girl whose plans you
upset, who, caught in the trap, in order that you might set her free,
confessed to you that she was in the habit of taking tea like this
with a dear friend, every day at the hour at which you did not see
her,--has never once been inside this person's house, that they have
never taken tea together, and that the girl used to explain that her
whole time was take up by none other than yourself. And so the person
with whom she confessed that she had gone to tea, with whom she begged
you to allow her to go to tea, that person, the excuse that necessity
made her plead, was not the real person, there was somebody, something
else! Something else, what? Some one, who?

Alas, the kaleidoscopic eyes starting off into the distance and
shadowed with melancholy might enable us perhaps to measure distance,
but do not indicate direction. The boundless field of possibilities
extends before us, and if by any chance the reality presented itself
to our gaze, it would be so far beyond the bounds of possibility that,
dashing suddenly against the boundary wall, we should fall over
backwards. It is not even essential that we should have proof of her
movement and flight, it is enough that we should guess them. She had
promised us a letter, we were calm, we were no longer in love. The
letter has not come; no messenger appears with it; what can have
happened? anxiety is born afresh, and love. It is such people more
than any others who inspire love in us, for our destruction.  For
every fresh anxiety that we feel on their account strips them in our
eyes of some of their personality. We were resigned to suffering,
thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our
love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow,
and that its object is, to a very small extent only, the girl with the
raven tresses. But, when all is said, it is these people more than any
others who inspire love.

Generally speaking, love has not as its object a human body, except
when an emotion, the fear of losing it, the uncertainty of finding it
again have been infused into it. This sort of anxiety has a great
affinity for bodies. It adds to them a quality which surpasses beauty
even; which is one of the reasons why we see men who are indifferent
to the most beautiful women fall passionately in love with others who
appear to us ugly.  To these people, these fugitives, their own
nature, our anxiety fastens wings. And even when they are in our
company the look in their eyes seems to warn us that they are about to
take flight. The proof of this beauty, surpassing the beauty added by
the wings, is that very often the same person is, in our eyes,
alternately wingless and winged. Afraid of losing her, we forget all
the others. Sure of keeping her, we compare her with those others whom
at once we prefer to her. And as these emotions and these certainties
may vary from week to week, a person may one week see sacrificed to
her everything that gave us pleasure, in the following week be
sacrificed herself, and so for weeks and months on end. All of which
would be incomprehensible did we not know from the experience, which
every man shares, of having at least once in a lifetime ceased to
love, forgotten a woman, for how very little a person counts in
herself when she is no longer--or is not yet--permeable by our
emotions. And, be it understood, what we say of fugitives is equally
true of those in prison, the captive women, we suppose that we are
never to possess them. And so men detest procuresses, for these
facilitate the flight, enhance the temptation, but if on the other
hand they are in love with a cloistered woman, they willingly have
recourse to a procuress to make her emerge from her prison and bring
her to them. In so far as relations with women whom we abduct are less
permanent than others, the reason is that the fear of not succeeding
in procuring them or the dread of seeing them escape is the whole of
our love for them and that once they have been carried off from their
husbands, torn from their footlights, cured of the temptation to leave
us, dissociated in short from our emotion whatever it may be, they are
only themselves, that is to say almost nothing, and, so long desired,
are soon forsaken by the very man who was so afraid of their forsaking
him.

How, I have asked, did I not guess this? But had I not guessed it from
the first day at Balbec? Had I not detected in Albertine one of those
girls beneath whose envelope of flesh more hidden persons are
stirring, than in... I do not say a pack of cards still in its box, a
cathedral or a theatre before we enter it, but the whole, vast, ever
changing crowd? Not only all these persons, but the desire, the
voluptuous memory, the desperate quest of all these persons. At Balbec
I had not been troubled because I had never even supposed that one day
I should be following a trail, even a false trail. No matter! This had
given Albertine, in my eyes, the plenitude of a person filled to the
brim by the superimposition of all these persons, and desires and
voluptuous memories of persons. And now that she had one day let fall
the words 'Mlle. Vinteuil,' I would have wished not to tear off her
garments so as to see her body but through her body to see and read
that memorandum block of her memories and her future, passionate
engagements.

How suddenly do the things that are probably the most insignificant
assume an extraordinary value when a person whom we love (or who has
lacked only this duplicity to make us love her) conceals them from us!
In itself, suffering does not of necessity inspire in us sentiments of
love or hatred towards the person who causes it: a surgeon can hurt
our body without arousing any personal emotion. But a woman who has
continued for some time to assure us that we are everything in the
world to her, without being herself everything in the world to us, a
woman whom we enjoy seeing, kissing, taking upon our knee, we are
astonished if we merely feel from a sudden resistance that we are not
free to dispose of her life. Disappointment may then revive in us the
forgotten memory of an old anguish, which we know, all the same, to
have been provoked not by this woman but by others whose betrayals are
milestones in our past life; if it comes to that, how have we the
courage to wish to live, how can we move a finger to preserve
ourselves from death, in a world in which love is provoked only by
falsehood, and consists merely in our need to see our sufferings
appeased by the person who has made us suffer?  To restore us from the
collapse which follows our discovery of her falsehood and her
resistance, there is the drastic remedy of endeavouring to act against
her will, with the help of people whom we feel to be more closely
involved than we are in her life, upon her who is resisting us and
lying to us, to play the cheat in turn, to make ourselves loathed. But
the suffering caused by such a love is of the sort which must
inevitably lead the sufferer to seek in a change of posture an
illusory comfort.

These means of action are not wanting, alas! And the horror of the
kind of love which uneasiness alone has engendered lies in the fact
that we turn over and over incessantly in our cage the most trivial
utterances; not to mention that rarely do the people for whom we feel
this love appeal to us physically in a complex fashion, since it is
not our deliberate preference, but the chance of a minute of anguish,
a minute indefinitely prolonged by our weakness of character, which
repeats its experiments every evening until it yields to sedatives,
that chooses for us.

No doubt my love for Albertine was not the most barren of those to
which, through feebleness of will, a man may descend, for it was not
entirely platonic; she did give me carnal satisfaction and, besides,
she was intelligent. But all this was a superfluity. What occupied my
mind was not the intelligent remark that she might have made, but some
chance utterance that had aroused in me a doubt as to her actions; I
tried to remember whether she had said this or that, in what tone, at
what moment, in response to what speech of mine, to reconstruct the
whole scene of her dialogue with me, to recall at what moment she had
expressed a desire to call upon the Verdurins, what words of mine had
brought that look of vexation to her face. The most important matter
might have been in question, without my giving myself so much trouble
to establish the truth, to restore the proper atmosphere and colour.
No doubt, after these anxieties have intensified to a degree which we
find insupportable, we do sometimes manage to soothe them altogether
for an evening. The party to which the mistress whom we love is
engaged to go, the true nature of which our mind has been toiling for
days to discover, we are invited to it also, our mistress has neither
looks nor words for anyone but ourselves, we take her home and then we
enjoy, all our anxieties dispelled, a repose as complete, as healing,
as that which we enjoy at times in the profound sleep that comes after
a long walk. And no doubt such repose deserves that we should pay a
high price for it. But would it not have been more simple not to
purchase for ourselves, deliberately, the preceding anxiety, and at a
higher price still? Besides, we know all too well that however
profound these momentary relaxations may be, anxiety will still be the
stronger. Sometimes indeed it is revived by the words that were
intended to bring us repose. But as a rule, all that we do is to
change our anxiety. One of the words of the sentence that was meant to
calm us sets our suspicions running upon another trail. The demands of
our jealousy and the blindness of our credulity are greater than the
woman whom we love could ever suppose.

When, of her own accord, she swears to us that some man is nothing
more to her than a friend, she appalls us by informing us--a thing we
never suspected--that he has been her friend. While she is telling us,
in proof of her sincerity, how they took tea together, that very
afternoon, at each word that she utters the invisible, the unsuspected
takes shape before our eyes. She admits that he has asked her to be
his mistress, and we suffer agonies at the thought that she can have
listened to his overtures.  She refused them, she says. But presently,
when we recall what she told us, we shall ask ourselves whether her
story is really true, for there is wanting, between the different
things that she said to us, that logical and necessary connexion
which, more than the facts related, is a sign of the truth. Besides,
there was that terrible note of scorn in her: "I said to him no,
absolutely," which is to be found in every class of society, when a
woman is lying. We must nevertheless thank her for having refused,
encourage her by our kindness to repeat these cruel confidences in the
future. At the most, we may remark: "But if he had already made
advances to you, why did you accept his invitation to tea?" "So that
he should not be angry with me and say that I hadn't been nice to
him." And we dare not reply that by refusing she would perhaps have
been nicer to us.

Albertine alarmed me further when she said that I was quite right to
say, out of regard for her reputation, that I was not her lover, since
"for that matter," she went on, "it's perfectly true that you aren't."
I was not her lover perhaps in the full sense of the word, but then,
was I to suppose that all the things that we did together she did also
with all the other men whose mistress she swore to me that she had
never been? The desire to know at all costs what Albertine was
thinking, whom she was seeing, with whom she was in love, how strange
it was that I should be sacrificing everything to this need, since I
had felt the same need to know, in the case of Gilberte, names, facts,
which now left me quite indifferent. I was perfectly well aware that
in themselves Albertine's actions were of no greater interest. It is
curious that a first love, if by the frail state in which it leaves
our heart it opens the way to our subsequent loves, does not at least
provide us, in view of the identity of symptoms and sufferings, with
the means of curing them.

After all, is there any need to know a fact? Are we not aware
beforehand, in a general fashion, of the mendacity and even the
discretion of those women who have something to conceal? Is there any
possibility of error? They make a virtue of their silence, when we
would give anything to make them speak. And we feel certain that they
have assured their accomplice: "I never tell anything. It won't be
through me that anybody will hear about it, I never tell anything." A
man may give his fortune, his life for a person, and yet know quite
well that in ten years' time, more or less, he would refuse her the
fortune, prefer to keep his life.  For then the person would be
detached from him, alone, that is to say null and void. What attaches
us to people are those thousand roots, those innumerable threads which
are our memories of last night, our hopes for to-morrow morning, those
continuous trammels of habit from which we can never free ourselves.
Just as there are misers who hoard money from generosity, so we are
spendthrifts who spend from avarice, and it is not so much to a person
that we sacrifice our life as to all that the person has been able to
attach to herself of our hours, our days, of the things compared with
which the life not yet lived, the relatively future life, seems to us
more remote, more detached, less practical, less our own. What we
require is to disentangle ourselves from those trammels which are so
much more important than the person, but they have the effect of
creating in us temporary obligations towards her, obligations which
mean that we dare not leave her for fear of being misjudged by her,
whereas later on we would so dare for, detached from us, she would no
longer be ourselves, and because in reality we create for ourselves
obligations (even if, by an apparent contradiction, they should lead
to suicide) towards ourselves alone.

If I was not in love with Albertine (and of this I could not be sure)
then there was nothing extraordinary in the place that she occupied in
my life: we live only with what we do not love, with what we have
brought to live with us only to kill the intolerable love, whether it
be of a woman, of a place, or again of a woman embodying a place.
Indeed we should be sorely afraid to begin to love again if a further
separation were to occur.  I had not yet reached this stage with
Albertine. Her falsehoods, her admissions, left me to complete the
task of elucidating the truth: her innumerable falsehoods because she
was not content with merely lying, like everyone who imagines that he
or she is loved, but was by nature, quite apart from this, a liar, and
so inconsistent moreover that, even if she told me the truth every
time, told me what, for instance, she thought of other people, she
would say each time something different; her admissions, because,
being so rare, so quickly cut short, they left between them, in so far
as they concerned the past, huge intervals quite blank over the whole
expanse of which I was obliged to retrace--and for that first of all
to learn--her life.

As for the present, so far as I could interpret the sibylline
utterances of Françoise, it was not only in particular details, it was
as a whole that Albertine was lying to me, and 'one fine day' I would
see what Françoise made a pretence of knowing, what she refused to
tell me, what I dared not ask her. It was no doubt with the same
jealousy that she had felt in the past with regard to Eulalie that
Françoise would speak of the most improbable things, so vague that one
could at the most suppose them to convey the highly improbable
insinuation that the poor captive (who was a lover of women) preferred
marriage with somebody who did not appear altogether to be myself. If
this were so, how, notwithstanding her power of radiotelepathy, could
Françoise have come to hear of it? Certainly, Albertine's statements
could give me no definite enlightenment, for they were as different
day by day as the colours of a spinning-top that has almost come to a
standstill. However, it seemed that it was hatred, more than anything
else, that impelled Françoise to speak. Not a day went by but she said
to me, and I in my mother's absence endured such speeches as:

"To be sure, you yourself are kind, and I shall never forget the debt
of gratitude that I owe to you" (this probably so that I might
establish fresh claims upon her gratitude) "but the house has become a
plague-spot now that kindness has set up knavery in it, now that
cleverness is protecting the stupidest person that ever was seen, now
that refinement, good manners, wit, dignity in everything allow to lay
down the law and rule the roost and put me to shame, who have been
forty years in the family,--vice, everything that is most vulgar and
abject."

What Françoise resented most about Albertine was having to take orders
from somebody who was not one of ourselves, and also the strain of the
additional housework which was affecting the health of our old
servant, who would not, for all that, accept any help in the house,
not being a 'good for nothing.' This in itself would have accounted
for her nervous exhaustion, for her furious hatred. Certainly, she
would have liked to see Albertine-Esther banished from the house. This
was Françoise's dearest wish. And, by consoling her, its fulfilment
alone would have given our old servant some repose. But to my mind
there was more in it than this. So violent a hatred could have
originated only in an overstrained body. And, more even than of
consideration, Françoise was in need of sleep.

Albertine went to take off her things and, so as to lose no time in
finding out what I wanted to know, I attempted to telephone to Andrée;
I took hold of the receiver, invoked the implacable deities, but
succeeded only in arousing their fury which expressed itself in the
single word 'Engaged!' Andrée was indeed engaged in talking to some
one else. As I waited for her to finish her conversation, I asked
myself how it was--now that so many of our painters are seeking to
revive the feminine portraits of the eighteenth century, in which the
cleverly devised setting is a pretext for portraying expressions of
expectation, spleen, interest, distraction--how it was that none of
our modern Bouchers or Fragonards had yet painted, instead of 'The
Letter' or 'The Harpsichord,' this scene which might be entitled 'At
the Telephone,' in which there would come spontaneously to the lips of
the listener a smile all the more genuine in that it is conscious of
being unobserved. At length, Andrée was at the other end: "You are
coming to call for Albertine to-morrow?" I asked, and as I uttered
Albertine's name, thought of the envy I had felt for Swann when he
said to me on the day of the Princesse de Guermantes's party: "Come
and see Odette," and I had thought how, when all was said, there must
be something in a Christian name which, in the eyes of the whole world
including Odette herself, had on Swann's lips alone this entirely
possessive sense.

Must not such an act of possession--summed up in a single word--over
the whole existence of another person (I had felt whenever I was in
love) be pleasant indeed! But, as a matter of fact, when we are in a
position to utter it, either we no longer care, or else habit has not
dulled the force of affection, but has changed its pleasure into pain.
Falsehood is a very small matter, we live in the midst of it without
doing anything but smile at it, we practise it without meaning to do
any harm to anyone, but our jealousy is wounded by it, and sees more
than the falsehood conceals (often our mistress refuses to spend the
evening with us and goes to the theatre simply so that we shall not
notice that she is not looking well). How blind it often remains to
what the truth is concealing!  But it can extract nothing, for those
women who swear that they are not lying would refuse, on the scaffold,
to confess their true char--acter.  I knew that I alone was in a
position to say 'Albertine' in that tone to Andrée. And yet, to
Albertine, to Andrée, and to myself, I felt that I was nothing. And I
realised the impossibility against which love is powerless.

We imagine that love has as its object a person whom we can see lying
down before our eyes, enclosed in a human body. Alas, it is the
extension of that person to all the points in space and time which the
person has occupied and will occupy. If we do not possess its contact
with this or that place, this or that hour, we do not possess it. But
we cannot touch all these points. If only they were indicated to us,
we might perhaps contrive to reach out to them. But we grope for them
without finding them.  Hence mistrust, jealousy, persecutions. We
waste precious time upon absurd clues and pass by the truth without
suspecting it.

But already one of the irascible deities, whose servants speed with
the agility of lightning, was annoyed, not because I was speaking, but
because I was saying nothing. "Come along, I've been holding the line
for you all this time; I shall cut you off." However, she did nothing
of the sort but, as she evoked Andrée's presence, enveloped it, like
the great poet that a telephone girl always is, in the atmosphere
peculiar to the home, the district, the very life itself of
Albertine's friend. "Is that you?" asked Andrée, whose voice was
projected towards me with an instantaneous speed by the goddess whose
privilege it is to make sound more swift than light. "Listen," I
replied; "go wherever you like, anywhere, except to Mme. Verdurin's.
Whatever happens, you simply must keep Albertine away from there
to-morrow." "Why, that's where she promised to go to-morrow." "Ah!"

But I was obliged to break off the conversation for a moment and to
make menacing gestures, for if Françoise continued--as though it had
been something as unpleasant as vaccination or as dangerous as the
aeroplane--to refuse to learn to telephone, whereby she would have
spared us the trouble of conversations which she might intercept
without any harm, on the other hand she would at once come into the
room whenever I was engaged in a conversation so private that I was
particularly anxious to keep it from her ears. When she had left the
room, not without lingering to take away various things that had been
lying there since the previous day and might perfectly well have been
left there for an hour longer, and to place in the grate a log that
was quite unnecessary in view of my burning fever at the intruder's
presence and my fear of finding myself 'cut off' by the operator: "I
beg your pardon," I said to Andrée, "I was interrupted.  Is it
absolutely certain that she has to go to the Verdurins' tomorrow?"
"Absolutely, but I can tell her that you don't like it." "No, not at
all, but it is possible that I may come with you." "Ah!" said Andrée,
in a tone of extreme annoyance and as though alarmed by my audacity,
which was all the more encouraged by her opposition. "Then I shall say
good night, and please forgive me for disturbing you for nothing."
"Not at all," said Andrée, and (since nowadays, the telephone having
come into general use, a decorative ritual of polite speeches has
grown up round it, as round the tea-tables of the past) added: "It has
been a great pleasure to hear your voice."

I might have said the same, and with greater truth than Andrée, for I
had been deeply touched by the sound of her voice, having never before
noticed that it was so different from the voices of other people.
Then I recalled other voices still, women's voices especially, some of
them rendered slow by the precision of a question and by mental
concentration, others made breathless, even silenced at moments, by
the lyrical flow of what the speakers were relating; I recalled one by
one the voices of all the girls whom I had known at Balbec, then
Gilberte's voice, then my grandmother's, then that of Mme. de
Guermantes, I found them all unlike, moulded in a language peculiar to
each of the speakers, each playing upon a different instrument, and I
said to myself how meagre must be the concert performed in paradise by
the three or four angel musicians of the old painters, when I saw
mount to the Throne of God, by tens, by hundreds, by thousands, the
harmonious and multisonant salutation of all the Voices. I did not
leave the telephone without thanking, in a few propitiatory words, her
who reigns over the swiftness of sounds for having kindly employed on
behalf of my humble words a power which made them a hundred times more
rapid than thunder, by my thanksgiving received no other response than
that of being cut off.

When Albertine returned to my room, she was wearing a garment of black
satin which had the effect of making her seem paler, of turning her
into the pallid, ardent Parisian, etiolated by want of fresh air, by
the atmosphere of crowds and perhaps by vicious habits, whose eyes
seemed more restless because they were not brightened by any colour in
her cheeks.

"Guess," I said to her, "to whom I've just been talking on the
telephone.  Andrée!" "Andrée?" exclaimed Albertine in a harsh tone of
astonishment and emotion, which so simple a piece of intelligence
seemed hardly to require. "I hope she remembered to tell you that we
met Mme. Verdurin the other day." "Mme. Verdurin? I don't remember," I
replied, as though I were thinking of something else, so as to appear
indifferent to this meeting and not to betray Andrée who had told me
where Albertine was going on the morrow.

But how could I tell that Andrée was not herself betraying me, and
would not tell Albertine to-morrow that I had asked her to prevent her
at all costs from going to the Verdurins', and had not already
revealed to her that I had many times made similar appeals. She had
assured me that she had never repeated anything, but the value of this
assertion was counterbalanced in my mind by the impression that for
some time past Albertine's face had ceased to shew that confidence
which she had for so long reposed in me.

What is remarkable is that, a few days before this dispute with
Albertine, I had already had a dispute with her, but in Andrée's
presence.  Now Andrée, while she gave Albertine good advice, had
always appeared to be insinuating bad. "Come, don't talk like that,
hold your tongue," she said, as though she were at the acme of
happiness. Her face assumed the dry raspberry hue of those pious
housekeepers who made us dismiss each of our servants in turn. While I
was heaping reproaches upon Albertine which I ought never to have
uttered, Andrée looked as though she were sucking a lump of barley
sugar with keen enjoyment. At length she was unable to restrain an
affectionate laugh. "Come, Titine, with me.  You know, I'm your dear
little sister." I was not merely exasperated by this rather sickly
exhibition, I asked myself whether Andrée really felt the affection
for Albertine that she pretended to feel. Seeing that Albertine, who
knew Andrée far better than I did, had always shrugged her shoulders
when I asked her whether she was quite certain of Andrée's affection,
and had always answered that nobody in the world cared for her more, I
was still convinced that Andrée's affection was sincere. Possibly, in
her wealthy but provincial family, one might find an equivalent of
some of the shops in the Cathedral square, where certain sweetmeats
are declared to be 'the best quality.' But I do know that, for my own
part, even if I had invariably come to the opposite conclusion, I had
so strong an impression that Andrée was trying to rap Albertine's
knuckles that my mistress at once regained my affection and my anger
subsided.

Suffering, when we are in love, ceases now and then for a moment, but
only to recur in a different form. We weep to see her whom we love no
longer respond to us with those outbursts of sympathy, the amorous
advances of former days, we suffer more keenly still when, having lost
them with us, she recovers them for the benefit of others; then, from
this suffering, we are distracted by a new and still more piercing
grief, the suspicion that she was lying to us about how she spent the
previous evening, when she doubtless played us false; this suspicion
in turn is dispelled, the kindness that our mistress is shewing us
soothes us, but then a word that we had forgotten comes back to our
mind; some one has told us that she was ardent in moments of pleasure,
whereas we have always found her calm; we try to picture to ourselves
what can have been these frenzies with other people, we feel how very
little we are to her, we observe an air of boredom, longing,
melancholy, while we are talking, we observe like a black sky the
unpretentious clothes which she puts on when she is with us, keeping
for other people the garments with which she used to flatter us at
first. If on the contrary she is affectionate, what joy for a moment;
but when we see that little tongue outstretched as though in
invitation, we think of those people to whom that invitation has so
often been addressed, and that perhaps even here at home, even
although Albertine was not thinking of them, it has remained, by force
of long habit, an automatic signal. Then the feeling that we are bored
with each other returns. But suddenly this pain is reduced to nothing
when we think of the unknown evil element in her life, of the places
impossible to identify where she has been, where she still goes
perhaps at the hours when we are not with her, if indeed she is not
planning to live there altogether, those places in which she is parted
from us, does not belong to us, is happier than when she is with us.
Such are the revolving searchlights of jealousy.

Jealousy is moreover a demon that cannot be exorcised, but always
returns to assume a fresh incarnation. Even if we could succeed in
exterminating them all, in keeping for ever her whom we love, the
Spirit of Evil would then adopt another form, more pathetic still,
despair at having obtained fidelity only by force, despair at not
being loved.

Between Albertine and myself there was often the obstacle of a silence
based no doubt upon grievances which she kept to herself, because she
supposed them to be irremediable. Charming as Albertine was on some
evenings, she no longer shewed those spontaneous impulses which I
remembered at Balbec when she used to say: "How good you are to me all
the same!" and her whole heart seemed to spring towards me without the
reservation of any of those grievances which she now felt and kept to
herself because she supposed them no doubt to be irremediable,
impossible to forget, unconfessed, but which set up nevertheless
between her and myself the significant prudence of her speech or the
interval of an impassable silence.

"And may one be allowed to know why you telephoned to Andrée?" "To ask
whether she had any objection to my joining you to-morrow, so that I
may pay the Verdurins the call I promised them at la Raspelière."
"Just as you like. But I warn you, there is an appalling mist this
evening, and it's sure to last over to-morrow. I mention it, because I
shouldn't like you to make yourself ill. Personally, you can imagine I
would far rather you came with us. However," she added with a
thoughtful air: "I'm not at all sure that I shall go to the
Verdurins'. They've been so kind to me that I ought, really.... Next
to yourself, they have been nicer to me than anybody, but there are
some things about them that I don't quite like. I simply must go to
the Bon Marché and the Trois-Quartiers and get a white scarf to wear
with this dress which is really too black."

Allow Albertine to go by herself into a big shop crowded with people
perpetually rubbing against one, furnished with so many doors that a
woman can always say that when she came out she could not find the
carriage which was waiting farther along the street; I was quite
determined never to consent to such a thing, but the thought of it
made me extremely unhappy. And yet I did not take into account that I
ought long ago to have ceased to see Albertine, for she had entered,
in my life, upon that lamentable period in which a person disseminated
over space and time is no longer a woman, but a series of events upon
which we can throw no light, a series of insoluble problems, a sea
which we absurdly attempt, Xerxes-like, to scourge, in order to punish
it for what it has engulfed. Once this period has begun, we are
perforce vanquished.  Happy are they who understand this in time not
to prolong unduly a futile, exhausting struggle, hemmed in on every
side by the limits of the imagination, a struggle in which jealousy
plays so sorry a part that the same man who once upon a time, if the
eyes of the woman who was always by his side rested for an instant
upon another man, imagined an intrigue, suffered endless torments,
resigns himself in time to allowing her to go out by herself,
sometimes with the man whom he knows to be her lover, preferring to
the unknown this torture which at least he does know! It is a question
of the rhythm to be adopted, which afterwards one follows from force
of habit. Neurotics who could never stay away from a dinner-party will
afterwards take rest cures which never seem to them to last long
enough; women who recently were still of easy virtue live for and by
acts of penitence. Jealous lovers who, in order to keep a watch upon
her whom they loved, cut short their own hours of sleep, deprived
themselves of rest, feeling that her own personal desires, the world,
so vast and so secret, time, are stronger than they, allow her to go
out without them, then to travel, and finally separate from her.
Jealousy thus perishes for want of nourishment and has survived so
long only by clamouring incessantly for fresh food. I was still a long
way from this state.

I was now at liberty to go out with Albertine as often as I chose. As
there had recently sprung up all round Paris a number of aerodromes,
which are to aeroplanes what harbours are to ships, and as ever since
the day when, on the way to la Raspelière, that almost mythological
encounter with an airman, at whose passage overhead my horse had
shied, had been to me like a symbol of liberty, I often chose to end
our day's excursion--with the ready approval of Albertine, a
passionate lover of every form of sport--at one of these aerodromes.
We went there, she and I, attracted by that incessant stir of
departure and arrival which gives so much charm to a stroll along the
pier, or merely upon the beach, to those who love the sea, and to
loitering about an 'aviation centre' to those who love the sky. At any
moment, amid the repose of the machines that lay inert and as though
at anchor, we would see one, laboriously pushed by a number of
mechanics, as a boat is pushed down over the sand at the bidding of a
tourist who wishes to go for an hour upon the sea. Then the engine was
started, the machine ran along the ground, gathered speed, until
finally, all of a sudden, at right angles, it rose slowly, in the
awkward, as it were paralysed ecstasy of a horizontal speed suddenly
transformed into a majestic, vertical ascent. Albertine could not
contain her joy, and demanded explanations of the mechanics who, now
that the machine was in the air, were strolling back to the sheds. The
passenger, meanwhile, was covering mile after mile; the huge skiff,
upon which our eyes remained fixed, was nothing more now in the azure
than a barely visible spot, which, however, would gradually recover
its solidity, size, volume, when, as the time allowed for the
excursion drew to an end, the moment came for landing. And we watched
with envy, Albertine and I, as he sprang to earth, the passenger who
had gone up like that to enjoy at large in those solitary expanses the
calm and limpidity of evening. Then, whether from the aerodrome or
from some museum, some church that we had been visiting, we would
return home together for dinner. And yet, I did not return home
calmed, as I used to be at Balbec by less frequent excursions which I
rejoiced to see extend over a whole afternoon, used afterwards to
contemplate standing out like clustering flowers from the rest of
Albertine's life, as against an empty sky, before which we muse
pleasantly, without thinking. Albertine's time did not belong to me
then in such ample quantities as to-day. And yet, it had seemed to me
then to be much more my own, because I took into account only--my love
rejoicing in them as in the bestowal of a favour--the hours that she
spent with me; now--my jealousy searching anxiously among them for the
possibility of a betrayal--only those hours that she spent apart from
me.

Well, on the morrow she was looking forward to some such hours. I must
choose, either to cease from suffering, or to cease from loving. For,
just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is
kept in existence only by painful anxiety. I felt that part of
Albertine's life was escaping me. Love, in the painful anxiety as in
the blissful desire, is the insistence upon a whole. It is born, it
survives only if some part remains for it to conquer. We love only
what we do not wholly possess. Albertine was lying when she told me
that she probably would not go to the Verdurins', as I was lying when
I said that I wished to go there. She was seeking merely to dissuade
me from accompanying her, and I, by my abrupt announcement of this
plan, which I had no intention of putting into practice, to touch what
I felt to be her most sensitive spot, to track down the desire that
she was concealing and to force her to admit that my company on the
morrow would prevent her from gratifying it. She had virtually made
this admission by ceasing at once to wish to go to see the Verdurins.

"If you don't want to go to the Verdurins'," I told her, "there is a
splendid charity show at the Trocadéro." She listened to my urging her
to attend it with a sorrowful air. I began to be harsh with her as at
Balbec, at the time of my first jealousy. Her face reflected a
disappointment, and I employed, to reproach my mistress, the same
arguments that had been so often advanced against myself by my parents
when I was little, and had appeared unintelligent and cruel to my
misunderstood childhood. "No, for all your melancholy air," I said to
Albertine, "I cannot feel any pity for you; I should feel sorry for
you if you were ill, if you were in trouble, if you had suffered some
bereavement; not that you would mind that in the least, I dare say,
since you pour out false sentiment over every trifle.  Anyhow, I have
no opinion of the feelings of people who pretend to be so fond of us
and are quite incapable of doing us the slightest service, and whose
minds wander so that they forget to deliver the letter we have
entrusted to them, on which our whole future depends."

These words--a great part of what we say being no more than a
recitation from memory--I had heard spoken, all of them, by my mother,
who was ever ready to explain to me that we ought not to confuse true
feeling, what (she said) the Germans, whose language she greatly
admired notwithstanding my father's horror of their nation, called
_Empfindung_, and affectation or _Empfindelei_. She had gone so far,
once when I was in tears, as to tell me that Nero probably suffered
from his nerves and was none the better for that. Indeed, like those
plants which bifurcate as they grow, side by side with the sensitive
boy which was all that I had been, there was now a man of the opposite
sort, full of common sense, of severity towards the morbid sensibility
of others, a man resembling what my parents had been to me. No doubt,
as each of us is obliged to continue in himself the life of his
forebears, the balanced, cynical man who did not exist in me at the
start had joined forces with the sensitive one, and it was natural
that I should become in my turn what my parents had been to me.

What is more, at the moment when this new personality took shape in
me, he found his language ready made in the memory of the speeches,
ironical and scolding, that had been addressed to me, that I must now
address to other people, and which came so naturally to my lips,
whether I evoked them by mimicry and association of memories, or
because the delicate and mysterious enchantments of the reproductive
power had traced in me unawares, as upon the leaf of a plant, the same
intonations, the same gestures, the same attitudes as had been adopted
by the people from whom I sprang. For sometimes, as I was playing the
wise counsellor in conversation with Albertine, I seemed to be
listening to my grandmother; had it not, moreover, occurred to my
mother (so many obscure unconscious currents inflected everything in
me down to the tiniest movements of my fingers even, to follow the
same cycles as those of my parents) to imagine that it was my father
at the door, so similar was my knock to his.

On the other hand the coupling of contrary elements is the law of
life, the principle of fertilisation, and, as we shall see, the cause
of many disasters.  As a general rule, we detest what resembles
ourself, and our own faults when observed in another person infuriate
us. How much the more does a man who has passed the age at which we
instinctively display them, a man who, for instance, has gone through
the most burning moments with an icy countenance, execrate those same
faults, if it is another man, younger or simpler or stupider, that is
displaying them. There are sensitive people to whom merely to see in
other people's eyes the tears which they themselves have repressed is
infuriating. It is because the similarity is too great that, in spite
of family affection, and sometimes all the more the greater the
affection is, families are divided.

Possibly in myself, and in many others, the second man that I had
become was simply another aspect of the former man, excitable and
sensitive in his own affairs, a sage mentor to other people. Perhaps
it was so also with my parents according to whether they were regarded
in relation to myself or in themselves. In the case of my grandmother
and mother it was as clear as daylight that their severity towards
myself was deliberate on their part and indeed cost them a serious
effort, but perhaps in my father himself his coldness was but an
external aspect of his sensibility. For it was perhaps the human truth
of this twofold aspect: the side of private life, the side of social
relations, that was expressed in a sentence which seemed to me at the
time as false in its matter as it was commonplace in form, when some
one remarked, speaking of my father: "Beneath his icy chill, he
conceals an extraordinary sensibility; what is really wrong with him
is that he is ashamed of his own feelings."

Did it not, after all, conceal incessant secret storms, that calm
(interspersed if need be with sententious reflexions, irony at the
maladroit exhibitions of sensibility) which was his, but which now I
too was affecting in my relations with everybody and never laid aside
in certain circumstances of my relations with Albertine?

I really believe that I came near that day to making up my mind to
break with her and to start for Venice. What bound me afresh in my
chains had to do with Normandy, not that she shewed any inclination to
go to that region where I had been jealous of her (for it was my good
fortune that her plans never impinged upon the painful spots in my
memory), but because when I had said to her: "It is just as though I
were to speak to you of your aunt's friend who lived at Infreville,"
she replied angrily, delighted--like everyone in a discussion, who is
anxious to muster as many arguments as possible on his side--to shew
me that I was in the wrong and herself in the right: "But my aunt
never knew anybody at Infreville, and I have never been near the
place."

She had forgotten the lie that she had told me one afternoon about the
susceptible lady with whom she simply must take tea, even if by going
to visit this lady she were to forfeit my friendship and shorten her
own life.  I did not remind her of her lie. But it appalled me. And
once again I postponed our rupture to another day. A person has no
need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. I
here give the name of love to a mutual torment. I saw nothing
reprehensible this evening in speaking to her as my grandmother--that
mirror of perfection--used to speak to me, nor, when I told her that I
would escort her to the Verdurins', in having adopted my father's
abrupt manner, who would never inform us of any decision except in the
manner calculated to cause us the maximum of agitation, out of all
proportion to the decision itself. So that it was easy for him to call
us absurd for appearing so distressed by so small a matter, our
distress corresponding in reality to the emotion that he had aroused
in us. Since--like the inflexible wisdom of my grandmother--these
arbitrary moods of my father had been passed on to myself to complete
the sensitive nature to which they had so long remained alien, and,
throughout my whole childhood, had caused so much suffering, that
sensitive nature informed them very exactly as to the points at which
they must take careful aim: there is no better informer than a
reformed thief, or a subject of the nation we are fighting. In certain
untruthful families, a brother who has come to call upon his brother
without any apparent reason and asks him, quite casually, on the
doorstep, as he is going away, for some information to which he does
not even appear to listen, indicates thereby to his brother that this
information was the main object of his visit, for the brother is quite
familiar with that air of detachment, those words uttered as though in
parentheses and at the last moment, having frequently had recourse to
them himself. Well, there are also pathological families, kindred
sensibilities, fraternal temperaments, initiated into that mute
language which enables people in the family circle to make themselves
understood without speaking. And who can be more nerve-wracking than a
neurotic? Besides, my conduct, in these cases, may have had a more
general, a more profound cause. I mean that in those brief but
inevitable moments, when we detest some one whom we love--moments
which last sometimes for a whole lifetime in the case of people whom
we do not love--we do not wish to appear good, so as not to be pitied,
but at once as wicked and as happy as possible so that our happiness
may be truly hateful and may ulcerate the soul of the occasional or
permanent enemy. To how many people have I not untruthfully slandered
myself, simply in order that my 'successes' might seem to them immoral
and make them all the more angry! The proper thing to do would be to
take the opposite course, to shew without arrogance that we have
generous feelings, instead of taking such pains to hide them. And it
would be easy if we were able never to hate, to love all the time. For
then we should be so glad to say only the things that can make other
people happy, melt their hearts, make them love us.

To be sure, I felt some remorse at being so irritating to Albertine,
and said to myself: "If I did not love her, she would be more grateful
to me, for I should not be nasty to her; but no, it would be the same
in the end, for I should also be less nice." And I might, in order to
justify myself, have told her that I loved her. But the confession of
that love, apart from the fact that it could not have told Albertine
anything new, would perhaps have made her colder to myself than the
harshness and deceit for which love was the sole excuse. To be harsh
and deceitful to the person whom we love is so natural! If the
interest that we shew in other people does not prevent us from being
kind to them and complying with their wishes, then our interest is not
sincere. A stranger leaves us indifferent, and indifference does not
prompt us to unkind actions.

The evening passed. Before Albertine went to bed, there was no time to
lose if we wished to make peace, to renew our embraces. Neither of us
had yet taken the initiative. Feeling that, anyhow, she was angry with
me already, I took advantage of her anger to mention Esther Levy.
"Bloch tells me" (this was untrue) "that you are a great friend of his
cousin Esther." "I shouldn't know her if I saw her," said Albertine
with a vague air. "I have seen her photograph," I continued angrily. I
did not look at Albertine as I said this, so that I did not see her
expression, which would have been her sole reply, for she said
nothing.

It was no longer the peace of my mother's kiss at Combray that I felt
when I was with Albertine on these evenings, but, on the contrary, the
anguish of those on which my mother scarcely bade me good night, or
even did not come up at all to my room, whether because she was vexed
with me or was kept downstairs by guests. This anguish--not merely its
transposition in terms of love--no, this anguish itself which had at
one time been specialised in love, which had been allocated to love
alone when the division, the distribution of the passions took effect,
seemed now to be extending again to them all, become indivisible again
as in my childhood, as though all my sentiments which trembled at the
thought of my not being able to keep Albertine by my bedside, at once
as a mistress, a sister, a daughter; as a mother too, of whose regular
good-night kiss I was beginning again to feel the childish need, had
begun to coalesce, to unify in the premature evening of my life which
seemed fated to be as short as a day in winter. But if I felt the
anguish of my childhood, the change of person that made me feel it,
the difference of the sentiment that it inspired in me, the very
transformation in my character, made it impossible for me to demand
the soothing of that anguish from Albertine as in the old days from my
mother.

I could no longer say: "I am unhappy." I confined myself, with death
at my heart, to speaking of unimportant things which afforded me no
progress towards a happy solution. I waded knee-deep in painful
platitudes.  And with that intellectual egoism which, if only some
insignificant fact has a bearing upon our love, makes us pay great
respect to the person who has discovered it, as fortuitously perhaps
as the fortune-teller who has foretold some trivial event which has
afterwards come to pass, I came near to regarding Françoise as more
inspired than Bergotte and Elstir because she had said to me at
Balbec: "That girl will only land you in trouble."

Every minute brought me nearer to Albertine's good night, which at
length she said. But this evening her kiss, from which she herself was
absent, and which did not encounter myself, left me so anxious that,
with a throbbing heart, I watched her make her way to the door,
thinking: "If I am to find a pretext for calling her back, keeping her
here, making peace with her, I must make haste; only a few steps and
she will be out of the room, only two, now one, she is turning the
handle; she is opening the door, it is too late, she has shut it
behind her!" Perhaps it was not too late, all the same. As in the old
days at Combray when my mother had left me without soothing me with
her kiss, I wanted to dart in pursuit of Albertine, I felt that there
would be no peace for me until I had seen her again, that this next
meeting was to be something immense which no such meeting had ever yet
been, and that--if I did not succeed by my own efforts in ridding
myself of this melancholy--I might perhaps acquire the shameful habit
of going to beg from Albertine. I sprang out of bed when she was
already in her room, I paced up and down the corridor, hoping that she
would come out of her room and call me; I stood without breathing
outside her door for fear of failing to hear some faint summons, I
returned for a moment to my own room to see whether my mistress had
not by some lucky chance forgotten her handkerchief, her bag,
something which I might have appeared to be afraid of her wanting
during the night, and which would have given me an excuse for going to
her room. No, there was nothing. I returned to my station outside her
door, but the crack beneath it no longer shewed any light. Albertine
had put out the light, she was in bed, I remained there motionless,
hoping for some lucky accident but none occurred; and long afterwards,
frozen, I returned to bestow myself between my own sheets and cried
all night long.

But there were certain evenings also when I had recourse to a ruse
which won me Albertine's kiss. Knowing how quickly sleep came to her
as soon as she lay down (she knew it also, for, instinctively, before
lying down, she would take off her slippers, which I had given her,
and her ring which she placed by the bedside, as she did in her own
room when she went to bed), knowing how heavy her sleep was, how
affectionate her awakening, I would plead the excuse of going to look
for something and make her lie down upon my bed. When I returned to
the room she was asleep and I saw before me the other woman that she
became whenever one saw her full face. But she very soon changed her
identity, for I lay down by her side and recaptured her profile. I
could place my hand in her hand, on her shoulder, on her cheek.
Albertine continued to sleep.

I might take her head, turn it round, press it to my lips, encircle my
neck in her arms, she continued to sleep like a watch that does not
stop, like an animal that goes on living whatever position you assign
to it, like a climbing plant, a convulvulus which continues to thrust
out its tendrils whatever support you give it. Only her breathing was
altered by every touch of my fingers, as though she had been an
instrument on which I was playing and from which I extracted
modulations by drawing from first one, then another of its strings
different notes. My jealousy grew calm, for I felt that Albertine had
become a creature that breathes, that is nothing else besides, as was
indicated by that regular breathing in which is expressed that pure
physiological function which, wholly fluid, has not the solidity
either of speech or of silence; and, in its ignorance of all evil, her
breath, drawn (it seemed) rather from a hollowed reed than from a
human being, was truly paradisal, was the pure song of the angels to
me who, at these moments, felt Albertine to be withdrawn from
everything, not only materially but morally. And yet in that
breathing, I said to myself of a sudden that perhaps many names of
people borne on the stream of memory must be playing. Sometimes indeed
to that music the human voice was added. Albertine uttered a few
words. How I longed to catch their meaning! It happened that the name
of a person of whom we had been speaking and who had aroused my
jealousy came to her lips, but without making me unhappy, for the
memory that it brought with it seemed to be only that of the
conversations that she had had with me upon the subject. This evening,
however, when with her eyes still shut she was half awake, she said,
addressing myself: "Andrée." I concealed my emotion.  "You are
dreaming, I am not Andrée," I said to her, smiling. She smiled also.
"Of course not, I wanted to ask you what Andrée was saying to you." "I
should have supposed that you were used to lying like this by her
side." "Oh no, never," she said. Only, before making this reply, she
had hidden her face for a moment in her hands. So her silences were
merely screens, her surface affection merely kept beneath the surface
a thousand memories which would have rent my heart, her life was full
of those incidents the derisive account, the comic history of which
form our daily gossip at the expense of other people, people who do
not matter, but which, so long as a person remains lost in the dark
forest of our heart, seem to us so precious a revelation of her life
that, for the privilege of exploring that subterranean world, we would
gladly sacrifice our own. Then her sleep appeared to me a marvellous
and magic world in which at certain moments there rises from the
depths of the barely translucent element the confession of a secret
which we shall not understand. But as a rule, when Albertine was
asleep, she seemed to have recovered her innocence. In the attitude
which I had imposed upon her, but which in her sleep she had speedily
made her own, she looked as though she were trusting herself to me!
Her face had lost any expression of cunning or vulgarity, and between
herself and me, towards whom she was raising her arm, upon whom her
hand was resting, there seemed to be an absolute surrender, an
indissoluble attachment. Her sleep moreover did not separate her from
me and allowed her to rétain her consciousness of our affection; its
effect was rather to abolish everything else; I embraced her, told her
that I was going to take a turn outside, she half-opened her eyes,
said to me with an air of astonishment--indeed the hour was late: "But
where are you off to, my darling-----" calling me by my Christian
name, and at once fell asleep again. Her sleep was only a sort of
obliteration of the rest of her life, a continuous silence over which
from time to time would pass in their flight words of intimate
affection. By putting these words together, you would have arrived at
the unalloyed conversation, the secret intimacy of a pure love. This
calm slumber delighted me, as a mother is delighted, reckoning it
among his virtues, by the sound sleep of her child. And her sleep was
indeed that of a child. Her waking also, and so natural, so loving,
before she even knew where she was, that I sometimes asked myself with
terror whether she had been in the habit, before coming to live with
me, of not sleeping by herself but of finding, when she opened her
eyes, some one lying by her side. But her childish charm was more
striking. Like a mother again, I marvelled that she should always
awake in so good a humour. After a few moments she recovered
consciousness, uttered charming words, unconnected with one another,
mere bird-pipings. By a sort of 'general post' her throat, which as a
rule passed unnoticed, now almost startlingly beautiful, had acquired
the immense importance which her eyes, by being closed in sleep, had
forfeited, her eyes, my regular informants to which I could no longer
address myself after the lids had closed over them. Just as the closed
lids impart an innocent, grave beauty to the face by suppressing all
that the eyes express only too plainly, there was in the words, not
devoid of meaning, but interrupted by moments of silence, which
Albertine uttered as she awoke, a pure beauty that is not at every
moment polluted, as is conversation, by habits of speech,
commonplaces, traces of blemish. Anyhow, when I had decided to wake
Albertine, I had been able to do so without fear, I knew that her
awakening would bear no relation to the evening that we had passed
together, but would emerge from her sleep as morning emerges from
night. As soon as she had begun to open her eyes with a smile, she had
offered me her lips, and before she had even uttered a word, I had
tasted their fresh savour, as soothing as that of a garden still
silent before the break of day.

On the morrow of that evening when Albertine had told me that she
would perhaps be going, then that she would not be going to see the
Verdurins, I awoke early, and, while I was still half asleep, my joy
informed me that there was, interpolated in the winter, a day of
spring. Outside, popular themes skilfully transposed for various
instruments, from the horn of the mender of porcelain, or the trumpet
of the chair weaver, to the flute of the goat driver who seemed, on a
fine morning, to be a Sicilian goatherd, were lightly orchestrating
the matutinal air, with an 'Overture for a Public Holiday.' Our
hearing, that delicious sense, brings us the company of the street,
every line of which it traces for us, sketches all the figures that
pass along it, shewing us their colours. The iron shutters of the
baker's shop, of the dairy, which had been lowered last night over
every possibility of feminine bliss, were rising now like the canvas
of a ship which is setting sail and about to proceed, crossing the
transparent sea, over a vision of young female assistants. This sound
of the iron curtain being raised would perhaps have been my sole
pleasure in a different part of the town. In this quarter a hundred
other sounds contributed to my joy, of which I would not have lost a
single one by remaining too long asleep. It is the magic charm of the
old aristocratic quarters that they are at the same time plebeian.
Just as, sometimes, cathedrals used to have them within a stone's
throw of their porches (which have even preserved the name, like the
porch of Rouen styled the Booksellers', because these latter used to
expose their merchandise in the open air against its walls), so
various minor trades, but peripatetic, used to pass in front of the
noble Hôtel de Guermantes, and made one think at times of the
ecclesiastical France of long ago. For the appeal which they launched
at the little houses on either side had, with rare exceptions, nothing
of a song. It differed from song as much as the declamation--barely
coloured by imperceptible modulations--of _Boris Godounov_ and
_Pelléas_; but on the other hand recalled the psalmody of a priest
chanting his office of which these street scenes are but the
good-humoured, secular, and yet half liturgical counterpart.  Never
had I so delighted in them as since Albertine had come to live with
me; they seemed to me a joyous signal of her awakening, and by
interesting me in the life of the world outside made me all the more
conscious of the soothing virtue of a beloved presence, as constant as
I could wish. Several of the foodstuffs cried in the street, which
personally I detested, were greatly to Albertine's liking, so much so
that Françoise used to send her young footman out to buy them,
slightly humiliated perhaps at finding himself mingled with the
plebeian crowd. Very distinct in this peaceful quarter (where the
noise was no longer a cause of lamentation to Françoise and had become
a source of pleasure to myself), there came to me, each with its
different modulation, recitatives declaimed by those humble folk as
they would be in the music--so entirely popular--of _Boris_, where an
initial intonation is barely altered by the inflexion of one note
which rests upon another, the music of the crowd which is more a
language than a music. It was "_ah! le bigorneau, deux sous le
bigorneau," which brought people running to the cornets in which were
sold those horrid little shellfish, which, if Albertine had not been
there, would have disgusted me, just as the snails disgusted me which
I heard cried for sale at the same hour. Here again it was of the
barely lyrical declamation of Moussorgsky that the vendor reminded me,
but not of it alone. For after having almost 'spoken': "_Les
escargots, ils sont frais, ils sont beaux_," il was with the vague
melancholy of Maeterlinck, transposed into music by Debussy, that the
snail vendor, in one of those pathetic finales in which the composer
of Pelléas shews his kinship with Rameau: "If vanquished I must be, is
it for thee to be my vanquisher?" added with a singsong melancholy:
"_On les vend six sous la douzaine_...."

I have always found it difficult to understand why these perfectly
simple words were sighed in a tone so far from appropriate,
mysterious, like the secret which makes everyone look sad in the old
palace to which Mélisande has not succeeded in bringing joy, and
profound as one of the thoughts of the aged Arkel who seeks to utter,
in the simplest words, the whole lore of wisdom and destiny. The very
notes upon which rises with an increasing sweetness the voice of the
old King of Allemonde or that of Goland, to say: "We know not what is
happening here, it may seem strange, maybe nought that happens is in
vain," or else: "No cause here for alarm, 'twas a poor little
mysterious creature, like all the world," were those which served the
snail vendor to resume, in an endless cadenza: "_On les vend six sous
la douzaine_...." But this metaphysical lamentation had not time to
expire upon the shore of the infinite, it was interrupted by a shrill
trumpet. This time, it was no question of victuals, the words of the
libretto were: "_Tond les chiens, coupe les chats, les queues et les
oreilles_."

It was true that the fantasy, the spirit of each vendor or vendress
frequently introduced variations into the words of all these chants
that I used to hear from my bed. And yet a ritual suspension
interposing a silence in the middle of a word, especially when it was
repeated a second time, constantly reminded me of some old church. In
his little cart drawn by a she-ass which he stopped in front of each
house before entering the courtyard, the old-clothes man, brandishing
a whip, intoned: "_Habits, marchand d'habits, ha... bits_" with the
same pause between the final syllables as if he had been intoning in
plain chant: "_Per omnia saecula saeculo...  rum_" or "_requiescat in
pa... ce_" albeit he had no reason to believe in the immortality of
his clothes, nor did he offer them as cerements for the supreme repose
in peace. And similarly, as the motives were beginning, even at this
early hour, to become confused, a vegetable woman, pushing her little
hand-cart, was using for her litany the Gregorian division:

  _A la tendresse, à la verduresse,
  Artichauts tendres et beaux,
  Arti... chauts_.

although she had probably never heard of the antiphonal, or of the
seven tones that symbolise four the sciences of the quadrivium and
three those of the trivium.

Drawing from a penny whistle, from a bagpipe, airs of his own southern
country whose sunlight harmonised well with these fine days, a man in
a blouse, wielding a bull's pizzle in his hand and wearing a basque
béret on his head, stopped before each house in turn. It was the
goatherd with two dogs driving before him his string of goats. As he
came from a distance, he arrived fairly late in our quarter; and the
women came running out with bowls to receive the milk that was to give
strength to their little ones.  But with the Pyrenean airs of this
good shepherd was now blended the bell of the grinder, who cried:
"_Couteaux, ciseaux, rasoirs_." With him the saw-setter was unable to
compete, for, lacking an instrument, he had to be content with
calling: "_Avez-vous des scies à repasser, v'ià le repasseur_," while
in a gayer mood the tinker, after enumerating the pots, pans and
everything else that he repaired, intoned the refrain:

  _Tam, tam, tam,
  C'est moi qui rétame
  Même le macadam,
  C'est moi qui mets des fonds partout,
  Qui bouche tous les trous, trou, trou_;

and young Italians carrying big iron boxes painted red, upon which the
numbers--winning and losing--were marked, and springing their rattles,
gave the invitation: "_Amusez-vous, mesdames, v'là le plaisir_."

Françoise brought in the _Figaro_. A glance was sufficient to shew me
that my article had not yet appeared. She told me that Albertine had
asked whether she might come to my room and sent word that she had
quite given up the idea of calling upon the Verdurins, and had decided
to go, as I had advised her, to the 'special' matinée at the
Trocadéro--what nowadays would be called, though with considerably
less significance, a 'gala' matinée--after a short ride which she had
promised to take with Andrée. Now that I knew that she had renounced
her desire, possibly evil, to go and see Mme. Verdurin, I said with a
laugh: "Tell her to come in," and told myself that she might go where
she chose and that it was all the same to me. I knew that by the end
of the afternoon, when dusk began to fall, I should probably be a
different man, moping, attaching to every one of Albertine's movements
an importance that they did not possess at this morning hour when the
weather was so fine. For my indifference was accompanied by a clear
notion of its cause, but was in no way modified by it. "Françoise
assured me that you were awake and that I should not be disturbing
you," said Albertine as she entered the room. And since next to making
me catch cold by opening the window at the wrong moment, what
Albertine most dreaded was to come into my room when I was asleep: "I
hope I have not done anything wrong," she went on. "I was afraid you
would say to me: What insolent mortal comes here to meet his doom?"
and she laughed that laugh which I always found so disturbing. I
replied in the same vein of pleasantry: "Was it for you this stern
decree was made?"--and, lest she should ever venture to break it,
added: "Although I should be furious if you did wake me." "I know, I
know, don't be frightened," said Albertine.  And, to relieve the
situation, I went on, still enacting the scene from Esther with her,
while in the street below the cries continued, drowned by our
conversation: "I find in you alone a certain grace That charms me and
of which I never tire" (and to myself I thought: "yes, she does tire
me very often"). And remembering what she had said to me overnight, as
I thanked her extravagantly for having given up the Verdurins, so that
another time she would obey me similarly with regard to something
else, I said: "Albertine, you distrust me who love you and you place
your trust in other people who do not love you" (as though it were not
natural to distrust the people who love us and who alone have an
interest in lying to us in order to find out things, to hinder us),
and added these lying words: "You don't really believe that I love
you, which is amusing. As a matter of fact, I don't adore you." She
lied in her turn when she told me that she trusted nobody but myself
and then became sincere when she assured me that she knew very well
that I loved her. But this affirmation did not seem to imply that she
did not believe me to be a liar and a spy. And she seemed to pardon me
as though she had seen these defects to be the agonising consequence
of a strong passion or as though she herself had felt herself to be
less good. "I beg of you, my dearest girl, no more of that haute
voltige you were practising the other day. Just think, Albertine, if
you were to meet with an accident!" Of course I did not wish her any
harm. But what a pleasure it would be if, with her horses, she should
take it into her head to ride off somewhere, wherever she chose, and
never to return again to my house. How it would simplify everything,
that she should go and live happily somewhere else, I did not even
wish to know where. "Ohl I know you wouldn't survive me for more than
a day; you would commit suicide."

So we exchanged lying speeches. But a truth more profound than that
which we would utter were we sincere may sometimes be expressed and
announced by another channel than that of sincerity. "You don't mind
all that noise outside," she asked me; "I love it. But you're such a
light sleeper anyhow." I was on the contrary an extremely heavy
sleeper (as I have already said, but I am obliged to repeat it in view
of what follows), especially when I did not begin to sleep until the
morning. As this kind of sleep is--on an average--four times as
refreshing, it seems to the awakened sleeper to have lasted four times
as long, when it has really been four times as short. A splendid,
sixteenfold error in multiplication which gives so much beauty to our
awakening and makes life begin again on a different scale, like those
great changes of rhythm which, in music, mean that in an andante a
quaver has the same duration as a minim in a prestissimo, and which
are unknown in our waking state. There life is almost always the same,
whence the disappointments of travel. It may seem indeed that our
dreams are composed of the coarsest stuff of life, but that stuff is
treated, kneaded so thoroughly, with a protraction due to the fact
that none of the temporal limitations of the waking state is there to
prevent it from spinning itself out to heights so vast that we fail to
recognise it. On the mornings after this good fortune had befallen me,
after the sponge of sleep had obliterated from my brain the signs of
everyday occupations that are traced upon it as upon a blackboard, I
was obliged to bring my memory back to life; by the exercise of our
will we can recapture what the amnesia of sleep or of a stroke has
made us forget, what gradually returns to us as our eyes open or our
paralysis disappears. I had lived through so many hours in a few
minutes that, wishing to address Françoise, for whom I had rung, in
language that corresponded to the facts of real life and was regulated
by the clock, I was obliged to exert all my power of internal
repression in order not to say: "Well, Françoise, here we are at five
o'clock in the evening and I haven't set eyes on you since yesterday
afternoon." And seeking to dispel my dreams, giving them the lie and
lying to myself as well, I said boldly, compelling myself with all my
might to silence, the direct opposite: "Françoise, it must be at least
ten!" I did not even say ten o'clock in the morning, but simply ten,
so that this incredible hour might appear to be uttered in a more
natural tone. And yet to say these words, instead of those that
continued to run in the mind of the half-awakened sleeper that I still
was, demanded the same effort of equilibrium that a man requires when
he jumps out of a moving train and runs for some yards along the
platform, if he is to avoid falling. He runs for a moment because the
environment that he has just left was one animated by great velocity,
and utterly unlike the inert soil upon which his feet find it
difficult to keep their balance.

Because the dream world is not the waking world, it does not follow
that the waking world is less genuine, far from it. In the world of
sleep, our perceptions are so overcharged, each of them increased by a
counterpart which doubles its bulk and blinds it to no purpose, that
we are not able even to distinguish what is happening in the
bewilderment of awakening; was it Françoise that had come to me, or I
that, tired of waiting, went to her? Silence at that moment was the
only way not to reveal anything, as at the moment when we are brought
before a magistrate cognisant of all the charges against us, when we
have not been informed of them ourselves. Was it Françoise that had
come, was it I that had summoned her? Was it not, indeed, Françoise
that had been asleep and I that had just awoken her; nay more, was not
Françoise enclosed in my breast, for the distinction between persons
and their reaction upon one another barely exists in that murky
obscurity in which reality is as little translucent as in the body of
a porcupine, and our all but non-existent perception may perhaps
furnish an idea of the perception of certain animals.  Besides, in the
limpid state of unreason that precedes these heavy slumbers, if
fragments of wisdom float there luminously, if the names of Taine and
George Eliot are not unknown, the waking life does still retain the
superiority, inasmuch as it is possible to continue it every morning,
whereas it is not possible to continue the dream life every night. But
are there perhaps other worlds more real than the waking world? Even
if we have seen transformed by every revolution in the arts, and still
more, at the same time, by the degree of proficiency and culture that
distinguishes an artist from an ignorant fool.

And often an extra hour of sleep is a paralytic stroke after which we
must recover the use of our limbs, learn to speak. Our will would not
be adequate for this task. We have slept too long, we no longer exist.
Our waking is barely felt, mechanically and without consciousness, as
a water pipe might feel the turning off of a tap. A life more
inanimate than that of the jellyfish follows, in which we could
equally well believe that we had been drawn up from the depths of the
sea or released from prison, were we but capable of thinking anything
at all. But then from the highest heaven the goddess Mnemotechnia
bends down and holds out to us in the formula 'the habit of ringing
for our coffee' the hope of resurrection. However, the instantaneous
gift of memory is not always so simple. Often we have before us, in
those first minutes in which we allow ourself to slip into the waking
state, a truth composed of different realities among which we imagine
that we can choose, as among a pack of cards.

It is Friday morning and we have just returned from our walk, or else
it is teatime by the sea. The idea of sleep and that we are lying in
bed and in our nightshirt is often the last that occurs to us.

Our resurrection is not effected at once; we think that we have rung
the bell, we have not done so, we utter senseless remarks. Movement
alone restores our thought, and when we have actually pressed the
electric button we are able to say slowly but distinctly: "It must be
at least ten o'clock, Françoise, bring me my coffee." Oh, the miracle!
Françoise could have had no suspicion of the sea of unreality in which
I was still wholly immersed and through which I had had the energy to
make my strange question pass.  Her answer was: "It is ten past ten."
Which made my remark appear quite reasonable, and enabled me not to
let her perceive the fantastic conversations by which I had been
interminably beguiled, on days when it was not a mountain of
non-existence that had crushed all life out of me. By strength of
will, I had reinstated myself in life. I was still enjoying the last
shreds of sleep, that is to say of the only inventiveness, the only
novelty that exists in story-telling, since none of our narrations in
the waking state, even though they be adorned with literary graces,
admit those mysterious differences from which beauty derives. It is
easy to speak of the beauty created by opium. But to a man who is
accustomed to sleeping only with the aid of drugs, an unexpected hour
of natural sleep will reveal the vast, matutinal expanse of a country
as mysterious and more refreshing. By varying the hour, the place at
which we go to sleep, by wooing sleep in an artificial manner, or on
the contrary by returning for once to natural sleep--the strangest
kind of all to whoever is in the habit of putting himself to sleep
with soporifics--we succeed in producing a thousand times as many
varieties of sleep as a gardener could produce of carnations or roses.
Gardeners produce flowers that are delicious dreams, and others too
that are like nightmares. When I fell asleep in a certain way I used
to wake up shivering, thinking that I had caught the measles, or, what
was far more painful, that my grandmother (to whom I never gave a
thought now) was hurt because I had laughed at her that day when, at
Balbec, in the belief that she was about to die, she had wished me to
have a photograph of herself.  At once, albeit I was awake, I felt
that I must go and explain to her that she had misunderstood me. But,
already, my bodily warmth was returning. The diagnosis of measles was
set aside, and my grandmother became so remote that she no longer made
my heart throb. Sometimes over these different kinds of sleep there
fell a sudden darkness. Ï was afraid to continue my walk along an
entirely unlighted avenue, where I could hear prowling footsteps.
Suddenly a dispute broke out between a policeman and one of those
women whom one often saw driving hackney carriages, and mistook at a
distance for young men. Upon her box among the shadows I could not see
her, but she spoke, and in her voice I could read the perfections of
her face and the youthfulness of her body. I strode towards her, in
the darkness, to get into her carriage before she drove off.  It was a
long way. Fortunately, her dispute with the policeman continued.  I
overtook the carriage which was still drawn up. This part of the
avenue was lighted by street lamps. The driver became visible. She was
indeed a woman, but old and corpulent, with white hair tumbling
beneath her hat, and a red birthmark on her face. I walked past her,
thinking: Is this what happens to the youth of women? Those whom we
have met in the past, if suddenly we desire to see them again, have
they become old? Is the young woman whom we desire like a character on
the stage, when, unable to secure the actress who created the part,
the management is obliged to entrust it to a new star? But then it is
no longer the same.

With this a feeling of melancholy invaded me. We have thus in our
sleep a number of Pities, like the 'Pietà' of the Renaissance, but
not, like them, wrought in marble, being, rather, unsubstantial. They
have their purpose, however, which is to make us remember a certain
outlook upon things, more tender, more human, which we are too apt to
forget in the common sense, frigid, sometimes full of hostility, of
the waking state.  Thus I was reminded of the vow that I had made at
Balbec that I would always treat Françoise with compassion. And for
the whole of that morning at least I would manage to compel myself not
to be irritated by Fran-çoise's quarrels with the butler, to be gentle
with Françoise to whom the others shewed so little kindness. For that
morning only, and I would have to try to frame a code that was a
little more permanent; for, just as nations are not governed for any
length of time by a policy of pure sentiment, so men are not governed
by the memory of their dreams. Already this dream was beginning to
fade away. In attempting to recall it in order to portray it I made it
fade all the faster. My eyelids were no longer so firmly sealed over
my eyes. If I tried to reconstruct my dream, they opened completely.
At every moment we must choose between health and sanity on the one
hand, and spiritual pleasures on the other. I have always taken the
cowardly part of choosing the former. Moreover, the perilous power
that I was renouncing was even more perilous than we suppose. Pities,
dreams, do not fly away unaccompanied. When we alter thus the
conditions in which we go to sleep, it is not our dreams alone that
fade, but, for days on end, for years it may be, the faculty not
merely of dreaming but of going to sleep. Sleep is divine but by no
means stable; the slightest shock makes it volatile. A lover of
habits, they retain it every night, being more fixed than itself, in
the place set apart for it, they preserve it from all injury, but if
we displace it, if it is no longer subordinated, it melts away like a
vapour. It is like youth and love, never to be recaptured.

In these various forms of sleep, as likewise in music, it was the
lengthening or shortening of the interval that created beauty. I
enjoyed this beauty, but, on the other hand, I had lost in my sleep,
however brief, a good number of the cries which render perceptible to
us the peripatetic life of the tradesmen, the victuallers of Paris.
And so, as a habit (without, alas, foreseeing the drama in which these
late awakenings and the Draconian, Medo-Persian laws of a Racinian
Assuérus were presently to involve me) I made an effort to awaken
early so as to lose none of these cries.

And, more than the pleasure of knowing how fond Albertine was of them
and of being out of doors myself without leaving my bed, I heard in
them as it were the symbol of the atmosphere of the world outside, of
the dangerous stirring life through the veins of which I did not allow
her to move save under my tutelage, from which I withdrew her at the
hour of my choosing to make her return home to my side. And so it was
with the most perfect sincerity that I was able to say in answer to
Albertine: "On the contrary, they give me pleasure because I know that
you like them." "_A la barque, les huîtres, à la barque_." "Oh,
oysters! I've been simply longing for some!" Fortunately Albertine,
partly from inconsistency, partly from docility, quickly forgot the
things for which she had been longing, and before I had time to tell
her that she would find better oysters at Prunier's, she wanted in
succession all the things that she heard cried by the fish hawker: "_A
la crevette, à la bonne crevette, j'ai de la raie toute en vie, toute
en vie." "Merlans à frire, à frire." "Il arrive le maquereau,
maquereau frais, maquereau nouveau." "Voilà le maquereau, mesdames, il
est beau le maquereau." "A la moule fraîche et bonne, à la moule_!" In
spite of myself, the warning: "_Il arrive le maquereau_" made me
shudder. But as this warning could not, I felt, apply to our
chauffeur, I thought only of the fish of that name, which I detested,
and my uneasiness did not last.  "Ah! Mussels," said Albertine, "I
should so like some mussels." "My darling!  They were all very well at
Balbec, here they're not worth eating; besides, I implore you,
remember what Cottard told you about mussels." But my remark was all
the more ill-chosen in that the vegetable woman who came next
announced a thing that Cottard had forbidden even more strictly:

  _A la romaine, à la romaine!
  On ne le vend pas, on la promène_.

Albertine consented, however, to sacrifice her lettuces, on the
condition that I would promise to buy for her in a few days' time from
the woman who cried: "_J'ai de la belle asperge d'Argenteuil, j'ai de
la belle asperge_." A mysterious voice, from which one would have
expected some stranger utterance, insinuated: "Tonneaux, tonneaux!" We
were obliged to remain under the disappointment that nothing more was
being offered us than barrels, for the word was almost entirely
drowned by the appeal: "_Vitri, vitri-er, carreaux cassés, voilà le
vitrier, vitri-er_," a Gregorian division which reminded me less,
however, of the liturgy than did the appeal of the rag vendor,
reproducing unconsciously one of those abrupt interruptions of sound,
in the middle of a prayer, which are common enough in the ritual of
the church: "_Praeceptis salutaribus moniti et divina institutione
formait audemus dicere_," says the priest, ending sharply upon
'_dicere_.' Without irreverence, as the populace of the middle ages
used to perform plays and farces within the consecrated ground of the
church, it is of that '_dicere_' that this rag vendor makes one think
when, after drawling the other words, he utters the final syllable
with a sharpness befitting the accentuation laid down by the great
Pope of the seventh century: "_Chiffons, ferrailles à vendre_" (all
this chanted slowly, as are the two syllables that follow, whereas the
last concludes more briskly than '_dicere_') "_peaux d'la-pins_." "_La
Valence, la belle Valence, la fraîche orange_." The humble leeks even:
"_Voilà d'beaux poireaux_," the onions: "_Huit sous mon oignon_,"
sounded for me as if it were an echo of the rolling waves in which,
left to herself, Albertine might have perished, and thus assumed the
sweetness of a "_Suave mari magno." "Voilà des carrottes à deux ronds
la botte_." "Oh!" exclaimed Albertine, "cabbages, carrots, oranges.
All the things I want to eat. Do make Françoise go out and buy some.
She shall cook us a dish of creamed carrots.  Besides, it will be so
nice to eat all these things together. It will be all the sounds that
we hear, transformed into a good dinner.... Oh, please, ask Françoise
to give us instead a ray with black butter. It is so good!" "My dear
child, of course I will, but don't wait; if you do, you'll be asking
for all the things on the vegetable-barrows." "Very well, I'm off, but
I never want anything again for our dinners except what we've heard
cried in the street. It is such fun. And to think that we shall have
to wait two whole months before we hear: '_Haricots verts et tendres,
haricots, v'la l'haricot vert_.' How true that is: tender haricots;
you know I like them as soft as soft, dripping with vinegar sauce, you
wouldn't think you were eating, they melt in the mouth like drops of
dew. Oh dear, it's the same with the little hearts of cream cheese,
such a long time to wait: '_Bon fromage à la cré, à la cré, bon
fromage_.' And the water-grapes from Fontainebleau: '_J'ai du bon
chasselas_.'" And I thought with dismay of all the time that I should
have to spend with her before the water-grapes were in season.
"Listen, I said that I wanted only the things that we had heard cried,
but of course I make exceptions. And so it's by no means impossible
that I may look in at Rebattet's and order an ice for the two of us.
You will tell me that it's not the season for them, but I do so want
one!" I was disturbed by this plan of going to Rebattet's, rendered
more certain and more suspicious in my eyes by the words 'it's by no
means impossible.' It was the day on which the Verdurins were at home,
and, ever since Swann had informed them that Rebattet's was the best
place, it was there that they ordered their ices and pastry. "I have
no objection to an ice, my darling Albertine, but let me order it for
you, I don't know myself whether it will be from Poiré-Blanche's, or
Rebattet's, or the Ritz, anyhow I shall see." "Then you're going out?"
she said with an air of distrust. She always maintained that she would
be delighted if I went out more often, but if anything that I said
could make her suppose that I would not be staying indoors, her uneasy
air made me think that the joy that she would feel in seeing me go out
every day was perhaps not altogether sincere. "I may perhaps go out,
perhaps not, you know quite well that I never make plans beforehand.
In any case ices are not a thing that is cried, that people hawk in
the streets, why do you want one?" And then she replied in words which
shewed me what a fund of intelligence and latent taste had developed
in her since Balbec, in words akin to those which, she pretended, were
due entirely to my influence, to living continually in my company,
words which, however, I should never have uttered, as though I had
been in some way forbidden by some unknown authority ever to decorate
my conversation with literary forms. Perhaps the future was not
destined to be the same for Albertine as for myself. I had almost a
presentiment of this when I saw her eagerness to employ in speech
images so 'written,' which seemed to me to be reserved for another,
more sacred use, of which I was still ignorant. She said to me (and I
was, in spite of everything, deeply touched, for I thought to myself:
Certainly I would not speak as she does, and yet, all the same, but
for me she would not be speaking like this, she has come profoundly
under my influence, she cannot therefore help loving me, she is my
handiwork): "What I like about these foodstuffs that are cried is that
a thing which we hear like a rhapsody changes its nature when it comes
to our table and addresses itself to my palate. As for ices (for I
hope that you won't order me one that isn't cast in one of those
old-fashioned moulds which have every architectural shape imaginable),
whenever I take one, temples, churches, obelisks, rocks, it is like an
illustrated geography-book which I look at first of all and then
convert its raspberry or vanilla monuments into coolness in my
throat." I thought that this was a little too well expressed, but she
felt that I thought that it was well expressed, and went on, pausing
for a moment when she had brought off her comparison to laugh that
beautiful laugh of hers which was so painful to me because it was so
voluptuous. "Oh dear, at the Ritz I'm afraid you'll find Vendôme
Columns of ice, chocolate ice or raspberry, and then you will need a
lot of them so that they may look like votive pillars or pylons
erected along an avenue to the glory of Coolness. They make raspberry
obelisks too, which will rise up here and there in the burning desert
of my thirst, and I shall make their pink granite crumble and melt
deep down in my throat which they will refresh better than any oasis"
(and here the deep laugh broke out, whether from satisfaction at
talking so well, or in derision of herself for using such hackneyed
images, or, alas, from a physical pleasure at feeling inside herself
something so good, so cool, which was tantamount to a sensual
satisfaction). "Those mountains of ice at the Ritz sometimes suggest
Monte Rosa, and indeed, if it is a lemon ice, I do not object to its
not having a monumental shape, its being irregular, abrupt, like one
of Elstir's mountains. It ought not to be too white then, but slightly
yellowish, with that look of dull, dirty snow that Elstir's mountains
have.  The ice need not be at all big, only half an ice if you like,
those lemon ices are still mountains, reduced to a tiny scale, but our
imagination restores their dimensions, like those little Japanese
dwarf trees which, one knows quite well, are still cedars, oaks,
manchineels; so much so that if I arranged a few of them beside a
little trickle of water in my room I should have a vast forest
stretching down to a river, in which children would be lost. In the
same way, at the foot of my yellowish lemon ice, I can see quite
clearly postilions, travellers, post chaises over which my tongue sets
to work to roll down freezing avalanches that will swallow them up"
(the cruel delight with which she said this excited my jealousy);
"just as," she went on, "I set my lips to work to destroy, pillar
after pillar, those Venetian churches of a porphyry that is made with
strawberries, and send what I spare of them crashing down upon the
worshippers. Yes, all those monuments will pass from their stony state
into my inside which throbs already with their melting coolness. But,
you know, even without ices, nothing is so exciting or makes one so
thirsty as the advertisements of mineral springs. At Montjouvain, at
Mlle. Vinteuil's, there was no good confectioner who made ices in the
neighbourhood, but we used to make our own tour of France in the
garden by drinking a different sparkling water every day, like Vichy
water which, as soon as you pour it out, sends up from the bottom of
the glass a white cloud which fades and dissolves if you don't drink
it at once." But to hear her speak of Montjouvain was too painful, I
cut her short. "I am boring you, good-bye, my dear boy." What a change
from Balbec, where I would defy Elstir himself to have been able to
divine in Albertine this wealth of poetry, a poetry less strange, less
personal than that of Céleste Albaret, for instance. Albertine would
never have thought of the things that Céleste used to say to me, but
love, even when it seems to be nearing its end, is partial. I
preferred the illustrated geography-book of her ices, the somewhat
facile charm of which seemed to me a reason for loving Albertine and a
proof that I had an influence over her, that she was in love with me.

As soon as Albertine had gone out, I felt how tiring it was to me,
this perpetual presence, insatiable of movement and life, which
disturbed my sleep with its movements, made me live in a perpetual
chill by that habit of leaving doors open, forced me--in order to find
pretexts that would justify me in not accompanying her, without,
however, appearing too unwell, and at the same time to see that she
was not unaccompanied--to display every day greater ingenuity than
Scheherezade. Unfortunately, if by a similar ingenuity the Persian
story-teller postponed her own death, I was hastening mine. There are
thus in life certain situations which are not all created, as was
this, by amorous jealousy and a precarious state of health which does
not permit us to share the life of a young and active person,
situations in which nevertheless the problem of whether to continue a
life shared with that person or to return to the separate existence of
the past sets itself almost in medical terms; to which of the two
sorts of repose ought we to sacrifice ourselves (by continuing the
daily strain, or by returning to the agonies of separation) to that of
the head or of the heart?

In any event, I was very glad that Andrée was to accompany Albertine
to the Trocadéro, for certain recent and for that matter entirely
trivial incidents had brought it about that while I had still, of
course, the same confidence in the chauffeur's honesty, his vigilance,
or at least the perspicacity of his vigilance did not seem to be quite
what it had once been. It so happened that, only a short while since,
I had sent Albertine alone in his charge to Versailles, and she told
me that she had taken her luncheon at the Réservoirs; as the chauffeur
had mentioned the restaurant Vatel, the day on which I noticed this
contradiction, I found an excuse to go downstairs and speak to him (it
was still the same man, whose acquaintance we had made at Balbec)
while Albertine was dressing. "You told me that you had had your
luncheon at the Vatel. Mlle. Albertine mentions the Réservoirs. What
is the meaning of that?" The driver replied: "Oh, I said that I had
had my luncheon at the Vatel, but I cannot tell where Mademoiselle
took hers. She left me as soon as we reached Versailles to take a
horse cab, which she prefers when it is not a question of time."
Already I was furious at the thought that she had been alone; still,
it was only during the time that she spent at her luncheon. "You might
surely," I suggested mildly (for I did not wish to appear to be
keeping Albertine actually under surveillance, which would have been
humiliating to myself, and doubly so, for it would have shewn that she
concealed her activities from me), "have had your luncheon, I do not
say at her table, but in the same restaurant?" "But all she told me
was to meet her at six o'clock at the Place d'Armes. I had no orders
to call for her after luncheon." "Ah!" I said, making an effort to
conceal my dismay. And I returned upstairs. And so it was for more
than seven hours on end that Albertine had been alone, left to her own
devices. I might assure myself, it is true, that the cab had not been
merely an expedient whereby to escape from the chauffeur's
supervision. In town, Albertine preferred driving in a cab, saying
that one had a better view, that the air was more pleasant.
Nevertheless, she had spent seven hours, as to which I should never
know anything. And I dared not think of the manner in which she must
have employed them.  I felt that the driver had been extremely clumsy,
but my confidence in him was now absolute. For if he had been to the
slightest extent in league with Albertine, he would never have
acknowledged that he had left her unguarded from eleven o'clock in the
morning to six in the afternoon.  There could be but one other
explanation, and it was absurd, of the chauffeur's admission. This was
that some quarrel between Albertine and himself had prompted him, by
making a minor disclosure to me, to shew my mistress that he was not
the sort of man who could be hushed, and that if, after this first
gentle warning, she did not do exactly as he told her, he would take
the law into his own hands. But this explanation was absurd; I should
have had first of all to assume a non-existent quarrel between him and
Albertine, and then to label as a consummate blackmailer this
good-looking motorist who had always shewn himself so affable and
obliging.  Only two days later, as it happened, I saw that he was more
capable than I had for a moment supposed in my frenzy of suspicion of
exercising over Albertine a discreet and far-seeing vigilance. For,
having managed to take him aside and talk to him of what he had told
me about Versailles, I said to him in a careless, friendly tone: "That
drive to Versailles that you told me about the other day was
everything that it should be, you behaved perfectly as you always do.
But, if I may give you just a little hint, I have so much
responsibility now that Mme. Bontemps has placed her niece under my
charge, I am so afraid of accidents, I reproach myself so for not
going with her, that I prefer that it should be yourself, you who are
so safe, so wonderfully skilful, to whom no accident can ever happen,
that shall take Mlle. Albertine everywhere. Then I need fear nothing."
The charming apostolic motorist smiled a subtle smile, his hand
resting upon the consecration-cross of his wheel. Then he uttered
these words which (banishing all the anxiety from my heart where its
place was at once filled by joy) made me want to fling my arms round
his neck: "Don't be afraid," he said to me. "Nothing can happen to
her, for, when my wheel is not guiding her, my eye follows her
everywhere. At Versailles, I went quietly along and visited the town
with her, as you might say. From the Réservoirs she went to the
Château, from the Château to the Trianons, and I following her all the
time without appearing to see her, and the astonishing thing is that
she never saw me. Oh, if she had seen me, the fat would have been in
the fire. It was only natural, as I had the whole day before me with
nothing to do that I should visit the castle too. All the more as
Mademoiselle certainly hasn't failed to notice that I've read a bit
myself and take an interest in all those old curiosities" (this was
true, indeed I should have been surprised if I had learned that he was
a friend of Morel, so far more refined was his taste than the
violinist's). "Anyhow, she didn't see me." "She must have met some of
her own friends, of course, for she knows a great many ladies at
Versailles." "No, she was alone all the time." "Then people must have
stared at her, a girl of such striking appearance, all by herself."
"Why, of course they stared at her, but she knew nothing about it; she
went all the time with her eyes glued to her guide-book, or gazing up
at the pictures." The chauffeur's story seemed to me all the more
accurate in that it was indeed a 'card' with a picture of the Château,
and another of the Trianons, that Albertine had sent me on the day of
her visit.  The care with which the obliging chauffeur had followed
every step of her course touched me deeply. How was I to suppose that
this correction--in the form of a generous amplification--of his
account given two days earlier was due to the fact that in those two
days Albertine, alarmed that the chauffeur should have spoken to me,
had surrendered, and made her peace with him. This suspicion never
even occurred to me. It is beyond question that this version of the
driver's story, as it rid me of all fear that Albertine might have
deceived me, quite naturally cooled me towards my mistress and made me
take less interest in the day that she had spent at Versailles. I
think, however, that the chauffeur's explanations, which, by absolving
Albertine, made her even more tedious than before, would not perhaps
have been sufficient to calm me so quickly. Two little pimples which
for some days past my mistress had had upon her brow were perhaps even
more effective in modifying the sentiments of my heart. Finally these
were diverted farther still from her (so far that I was conscious of
her existence only when I set eyes upon her) by the strange confidence
volunteered me by Gilberte's maid, whom I happened to meet. I learned
that, when I used to go every day to see Gilberte, she was in love
with a young man of whom she saw a great deal more than of myself. I
had had an inkling of this for a moment at the time, indeed I had
questioned this very maid.  But, as she knew that I was in love with
Gilberte, she had denied, sworn that never had Mlle. Swann set eyes on
the young man. Now, however, knowing that my love had long since died,
that for years past I had left all her letters unanswered--and also
perhaps because she was no longer in Gilberte's service--of her own
accord she gave me a full account of the amorous episode of which I
had known nothing. This seemed to her quite natural. I supposed,
remembering her oaths at the time, that she had not been aware of what
was going on. Far from it, it was she herself who used to go, at Mme.
Swann's orders, to inform the young man whenever the object of my love
was alone. The object then of my love.... But I asked myself whether
my love of those days was as dead as I thought, for this story pained
me. As I do not believe that jealousy can revive a dead love, I
supposed that my painful impression was due, in part at least, to the
injury to my self-esteem, for a number of people whom I did not like
and who at that time and even a little later--their attitude has since
altered--affected a contemptuous attitude towards myself, knew
perfectly well, while I was in love with Gilberte, that I was her
dupe. And this made me ask myself retrospectively whether in my love
for Gilberte there had not been an element of self-love, since it so
pained me now to discover that all the hours of affectionate
intercourse, which had made me so happy, were known to be nothing more
than a deliberate hoodwinking of me by my mistress, by people whom I
did not like. In any case, love or self-love, Gilberte was almost dead
in me but not entirely, and the result of this annoyance was to
prevent me from worrying myself beyond measure about Albertine, who
occupied so small a place in my heart. Nevertheless, to return to her
(after so long a parenthesis) and to her expedition to Versailles, the
postcards of Versailles (is it possible, then, to have one's heart
caught in a noose like this by two simultaneous and interwoven
jealousies, each inspired by a different person?) gave me a slightly
disagreeable impression whenever, as I tidied my papers, my eye fell
upon them. And I thought that if the driver had not been such a worthy
fellow, the harmony of his second narrative with Albertine's 'cards'
would not have amounted to much, for what are the first things that
people send you from Versailles but the Château and the Trianons,
unless that is to say the card has been chosen by some person of
refined taste who adores a certain statue, or by some idiot who
selects as a 'view' of Versailles the station of the horse tramway or
the goods depot. Even then I am wrong in saying an idiot, such
postcards not having always been bought by a person of that sort at
random, for their interest as coming from Versailles. For two whole
years men of intelligence, artists, used to find Siena, Venice,
Granada a 'bore,' and would say of the humblest omnibus, of every
railway-carriage: "There you have true beauty." Then this fancy passed
like the rest. Indeed, I cannot be certain that people did not revert
to the 'sacrilege of destroying the noble relics of the past.' Anyhow,
a first class railway carriage ceased to be regarded as _a priori_
more beautiful than St. Mark's at Venice. People continued to say:
"Here you have real life, the return to the past is artificial," but
without drawing any definite conclusion. To make quite certain,
without forfeiting any of my confidence in the chauffeur, in order
that Albertine might not be able to send him away without his
venturing to refuse for fear of her taking him for a spy, I never
allowed her to go out after this without the reinforcement of Andrée,
whereas for some time past I had found the chauffeur sufficient. I had
even allowed her then (a thing I would never dare do now) to stay away
for three whole days by herself with the chauffeur and to go almost as
far as Balbec, so great was her longing to travel at high speed in an
open car. Three days during which my mind had been quite at rest,
although the rain of postcards that she had showered upon me did not
reach me, owing to the appalling state of the Breton postal system
(good in summer, but disorganised, no doubt, in winter), until a week
after the return of Albertine and the chauffeur, in such health and
vigour that on the very morning of their return they resumed, as
though nothing had happened, their daily outings. I was delighted that
Albertine should be going this afternoon to the Trocadéro, to this
'special' matinée, but still more reassured that she would have a
companion there in the shape of Andrée.

Dismissing these reflexions, now that Albertine had gone out, I went
and took my stand for a moment at the window. There was at first a
silence, amid which the whistle of the tripe vendor and the horn of
the tramcar made the air ring in different octaves, like a blind
piano-tuner. Thea gradually the interwoven motives became distinct,
and others were combined with them. There was also a new whistle, the
call of a vendor the nature of whose wares I have never discovered, a
whistle that was itself exactly like the scream of the tramway, and,
as it was not carried out of earshot by its own velocity, one thought
of a single car, not endowed with motion, or broken down, immobilised,
screaming at short intervals like a dying animal. And I felt that,
should I ever have to leave this aristocratic quarter--unless it were
to move to one that was entirely plebeian--the streets and boulevards
of central Paris (where the fruit, fish and other trades, stabilised
in huge stores, rendered superfluous the cries of the street hawkers,
who for that matter would not have been able to make themselves heard)
would seem to me very dreary, quite uninhabitable, stripped, drained
of all these litanies of the small trades and peripatetic victuals,
deprived of the orchestra that returned every morning to charm me. On
the pavement a woman with no pretence to fashion (or else obedient to
an ugly fashion) came past, too brightly dressed in a sack overcoat of
goatskin; but no, it was not a woman, it was a chauffeur who,
enveloped in his ponyskin, was proceeding on foot to his garage.
Escaped from the big hotels, their winged messengers, of variegated
hue, were speeding towards the termini, bent over their handlebars, to
meet the arrivals by the morning trains. The throb of a violin was due
at one time to the passing of a motor-car, at another to my not having
put enough water in my electric kettle. In the middle of the symphony
there rang out an old-fashioned 'air'; replacing the sweet seller, who
generally accompanied her song with a rattle, the toy seller, to whose
pipe was attached a jumping jack which he sent flying in all
directions, paraded similar puppets for sale, and without heeding the
ritual declamation of Gregory the Great, the reformed declamation of
Palestrina or the lyrical declamation of the modern composers, entoned
at the top of his voice, a belated adherent of pure melody: "_Allons
les papas, allons les mamans, contentez vos petits enfants, c'est moi
qui les jais, c'est moi qui les vends, et c'est moi qui boulotte
l'argent.  Tra la la la. Tra la la la laire, tra la la la la la la.
Allons les petits_!" Some Italian boys in felt bérets made no attempt
to compete with this lively aria, and it was without a word that they
offered their little statuettes. Soon, however, a young fifer
compelled the toy merchant to move on and to chant more inaudibly,
though in brisk time: "_Allons les papas, allons les mamans_." This
young fifer, was he one of the dragoons whom I used to hear in the
mornings at Doncières? No, for what followed was: "_Voilà le
réparateur de faïence et de porcelaine. Je répare le verre, le marbre,
le cristal, l'os, l'ivoire et objets d'antiquité. Voilà le
réparateur_." In a butcher's shop, between an aureole of sunshine on
the left and a whole ox suspended from a hook on the right, an
assistant, very tall and slender, with fair hair and a throat that
escaped above his sky-blue collar, was displaying a lightning speed
and a religious conscientiousness in putting on one side the most
exquisite fillets of beef, on the other the coarsest parts of the
rump, placed them upon glittering scales surmounted by a cross, from
which hung down a number of beautiful chains, and--albeit he did
nothing afterwards but arrange in the window a display of kidneys,
steaks, ribs--was really far more suggestive of a handsome angel who,
on the day of the Last Judgment, will prepare for God, according to
their quality, the separation of the good and the evil and the
weighing of souls. And once again the thin crawling music of the fife
rose in the air, herald no longer of the destruction that Françoise
used to dread whenever a regiment of cavalry filed past, but of
'repairs' promised by an 'antiquary,' simpleton or rogue, who, in
either case highly eclectic, instead of specialising, applied his art
to the most diverse materials. The young bread carriers hastened to
stuff into their baskets the long rolls ordered for some luncheon
party, while the milk girls attached the bottles of milk to their
yokes. The sense of longing with which my eyes followed these young
damsels, ought I to consider it quite justified? Would it not have
been different if I had been able to detain for a few moments at close
quarters one of those whom from the height of my window I saw only
inside her shop or in motion. To estimate the loss that I suffered by
my seclusion, that is to say the wealth that the day held in store for
me, I should have had to intercept in the long unrolling of the
animated frieze some girl carrying her linen or her milk, make her
pass for a moment, like a silhouette from some mobile scheme of
decoration, from the wings to the stage, within the proscenium of my
bedroom door, and keep her there under my eye, not without eliciting
some information about her which would enable me to find her again
some day, like the inscribed ring which ornithologists or
ichthyologists attach before setting them free to the legs or bellies
of the birds or fishes whose migrations they are anxious to trace.

And so I asked Françoise, since I had a message that I wished taken,
to be good enough to send up to my room, should any of them call, one
or other of those girls who were always coming to take away the dirty
or bring back the clean linen, or with bread, or bottles of milk, and
whom she herself used often to send on errands. In doing so I was like
Elstir, who, obliged to remain closeted in his studio, on certain days
in spring when the knowledge that the woods were full of violets gave
him a hunger to gaze at them, used to send his porter's wife out to
buy him a bunch; then it was not the table upon which he had posed the
little vegetable model, but the whole carpet of the underwoods where
he had seen in other years, in their thousands, the serpentine stems,
bowed beneath the weight of their blue beaks, that Elstir would fancy
that he had before his eyes, like an imaginary zone defined in his
studio by the limpid odour of the sweet, familiar flower.

Of a laundry girl, on a Sunday, there was not the slightest prospect.
As for the girl who brought the bread, as ill luck would have it, she
had rung the bell when Françoise was not about, had left her rolls in
their basket on the landing, and had made off. The fruit girl would
not call until much later. Once I had gone to order a cheese at the
dairy, and, among the various young assistants, had remarked one girl,
extravagantly fair, tall in stature though still little more than a
child, who, among the other errand girls, seemed to be dreaming, in a
distinctly haughty attitude. I had seen her in the distance only, and
for so brief an instant that I could not have described her
appearance, except to say that she must have grown too fast and that
her head supported a fleece that gave the impression far less of
capillary details than of a sculptor's conventional rendering of the
separate channels of parallel drifts of snow upon a glacier. This was
all that I had been able to make out, apart from a nose sharply
outlined (a rare thing in a child) upon a thin face which recalled the
beaks of baby vultures. Besides, this clustering of her comrades round
about her had not been the only thing that prevented me from seeing
her distinctly, there was also my uncertainty whether the sentiments
which I might, at first sight and subsequently, inspire in her would
be those of injured pride, or of irony, or of a scorn which she would
express later on to her friends. These alternative suppositions which
I had formed, in an instant, with regard to her, had condensed round
about her the troubled atmosphere in which she disappeared, like a
goddess in the cloud that is shaken by thunder. For moral uncertainty
is a greater obstacle to an exact visual perception than any defect of
vision would be. In this too skinny young person, who moreover
attracted undue attention, the excess of what another person would
perhaps have called her charms was precisely what was calculated to
repel me, but had nevertheless had the effect of preventing me from
perceiving even, far more from remembering anything about the other
young dairymaids, whom the hooked nose of this one and her gaze--how
unattractive it was!--pensive, personal, with an air of passing
judgment, had plunged in perpetual night, as a white streak of
lightning darkens the landscape on either side of it. And so, of my
call to order a cheese, at the dairy, I had remembered (if we can say
'remember' in speaking of a face so carelessly observed that we adapt
to the nullity of the face ten different noses in succession), I had
remembered only this girl who had not attracted me. This is sufficient
to engender love. And yet I should have forgotten the extravagantly
fair girl and should never have wished to see her again, had not
Françoise told me that, child as she was, she had all her wits about
her and would shortly be leaving her employer, since she had been
going too fast and owed money among the neighbours. It has been said
that beauty is a promise of happiness. Inversely, the possibility of
pleasure may be a beginning of beauty.

I began to read Mamma's letter. Beneath her quotations from Madame de
Sévigné: "If my thoughts are not entirely black at Combray, they are
at least dark grey, I think of you at every moment; I long for you;
your health, your affairs, your absence, what sort of cloud do you
suppose they make in my sky?" I felt that my mother was vexed to find
Albertine's stay in the house prolonged, and my intention of marriage,
although not yet announced to my mistress, confirmed. She did not
express her annoyance more directly because she was afraid that I
might leave her letters lying about. Even then, veiled as her letters
were, she reproached me with not informing her immediately, after each
of them, that I had received it: "You remember how Mme. de Sévigné
said: 'When we are far apart, we no longer laugh at letters which
begin with _I have received yours_.'" Without referring to what
distressed her most, she said that she was annoyed by my lavish
expenditure: "Where on earth does all your money go? It is distressing
enough that, like Charles de Sévigné, you do not know what you want
and are 'two or three people at once,' but do try at least not to be
like him in spending money so that I may never have to say of you: 'he
has discovered how to spend and have nothing to shew, how to lose
without staking and how to pay without clearing himself of debt.'" I
had just finished Mamma's letter when Françoise returned to tell me
that she had in the house that very same slightly overbold young
dairymaid of whom she had spoken to me. "She can quite well take
Monsieur's note and bring back the answer, if it's not too far.
Monsieur shall see her, she's just like a Little Red Ridinghood."
Françoise withdrew to fetch the girl, and I could hear her leading the
way and saying: "Come along now, you're frightened because there's a
passage, stuff and nonsense, I never thought you would be such a
goose. Have I got to lead you by the hand?" And Françoise, like a good
and honest servant who means to see that her master is respected as
she respects him herself, had draped herself in that majesty with
ennobles the matchmaker in a picture by an old master where, in
comparison with her, the lover and his mistress fade into
insignificance.  But Elstir when he gazed at them had no need to
bother about what the violets were doing. The entry of the young
dairymaid at once robbed me of my contemplative calm; I could think
only of how to give plausibility to the fable of the letter that she
was to deliver and I began to write quickly without venturing to cast
more than a furtive glance at her, so that I might not seem to have
brought her into my room to be scrutinised. She was invested for me
with that charm of the unknown which I should not discover in a pretty
girl whom I had found in one of those houses where they come to meet
one. She was neither naked nor in disguise, but a genuine dairymaid,
one of those whom we imagine to be so pretty, when we have not time to
approach them; she possessed something of what constitutes the eternal
desire, the eternal regret of life, the twofold current of which is at
length diverted, directed towards us. Twofold, for if it is a question
of the unknown, of a person who must, we guess, be divine, from her
stature, her proportions, her indifferent glance, her haughty calm, on
the other hand we wish this woman to be thoroughly specialised in her
profession, allowing us to escape from ourselves into that world which
a peculiar costume makes us romantically believe different. If for
that matter we seek to comprise in a formula the law of our amorous
curiosities, we should have to seek it in the maximum of difference
between a woman of whom we have caught sight and one whom we have
approached and caressed. If the women of what used at one time to be
called the closed houses, if prostitutes themselves (provided that we
know them to be prostitutes) attract us so little, it is not because
they are less beautiful than other women, it is because they are ready
and waiting; the very object that we are seeking to attain they offer
us already; it is because they are not conquests. The difference there
is at a minimum. A harlot smiles at us already in the street as she
will smile when she is in our room. We are sculptors. We are anxious
to obtain of a woman a statue entirely different from that which she
has presented to us. We have seen a girl strolling, indifferent,
insolent, along the seashore, we have seen a shop-assistant, serious
and active, behind her counter, who will answer us stiffly, if only so
as to escape the sarcasm of her comrades, a fruit seller who barely
answers us at all. Well, we know no rest until we can discover by
experiment whether the proud girl on the seashore, the shop-assistant
on her high horse of 'What will people say?', the preoccupied fruit
seller cannot be made, by skilful handling on our part, to relax their
rectangular attitude, to throw about our neck their fruit-laden arms,
to direct towards our lips, with a smile of consent, eyes hitherto
frozen or absent--oh, the beauty of stern eyes--in working hours when
the worker was so afraid of the gossip of her companions, eyes that
avoided our beleaguering stare and, now that we have seen her alone
and face to face, make their pupils yield beneath the sunlit burden of
laughter when we speak of making love. Between the shopgirl, the
laundress busy with her iron, the fruit seller, the dairymaid on the
one hand, and the same girl when she is about to become our mistress,
the maximum of difference is attained, stretched indeed to its extreme
limits, and varied by those habitual gestures of her profession which
make a pair of arms, during the hours of toil, something as different
as possible (regarded as an arabesque pattern) from those supple bonds
that already every evening are fastened about our throat while the
mouth shapes itself for a kiss. And so we pass our whole life in
uneasy advances, incessantly renewed, to respectable girls whom their
calling seems to separate from us. Once they are in our arms, they are
no longer anything more than they originally were, the gulf that we
dreamed of crossing has been bridged.  But we begin afresh with other
women, we devote to these enterprises all our time, all our money, all
our strength, our blood boils at the too cautious driver who is
perhaps going to make us miss our first assignation, we work ourself
into a fever. That first meeting, we know all the same that it will
mean the vanishing of an illusion. It does not so much matter that the
illusion still persists; we wish to see whether we can convert it into
reality, and then we think of the laundress whose coldness we
remarked.  Amorous curiosity is like that which is aroused in us by
the names of places; perpetually disappointed, it revives and remains
for ever insatiable.

Alas! As soon as she stood before me, the fair dairymaid with the
ribbed tresses, stripped of all that I had imagined and of the desire
that had been aroused in me, was reduced to her own proportions. The
throbbing cloud of my suppositions no longer enveloped her in a
shimmering haze. She acquired an almost beggarly air from having (in
place of the ten, the score that I recalled in turn without being able
to fix any of them in my memory) but a single nose, rounder than I had
thought, which made her appear rather a fool and had in any case lost
the faculty of multiplying itself. This flyaway caught on the wing,
inert, crushed, incapable of adding anything to its own paltry
appearance, had no longer my imagination to collaborate with it.
Fallen into the inertia of reality, I sought to rebound; her cheeks,
which I had not seen in the shop, appeared to me so pretty that I
became alarmed, and, to put myself in countenance, said to the young
dairymaid: "Would you be so kind as to pass me the _Figaro_ which is
lying there, I must make sure of the address to which I am going to
send you." Thereupon, as she picked up the newspaper, she disclosed as
far as her elbow the red sleeve of her jersey and handed me the
conservative sheet with a neat and courteous gesture which pleased me
by its intimate rapidity, its pliable contour and its scarlet hue.
While I was opening the _Figaro_, in order to say something and
without raising my eyes, I asked the girl: "What do you call that red
knitted thing you're wearing? It is very becoming." She replied: "It's
my golf." For, by a slight downward tendency common to all fashions,
the garments and styles which, a few years earlier, seemed to belong
to the relatively smart world of Albertine's friends, were now the
portion of working girls. "Are you quite sure it won't be giving you
too much trouble," I said, while I pretended to be searching the
columns of the _Figaro_, "if I send you rather a long way?" As soon as
I myself appeared to find the service at all arduous that she would be
performing by taking a message for me, she began to feel that it would
be a trouble to her. "The only thing is, I have to be going out
presently on my bike. Good lord, you know, Sunday's the only day we've
got." "But won't you catch cold, going bare-headed like that?" "Oh, I
shan't be bare-headed, I shall have my polo, and I could get on
without it with all the hair I have." I raised my eyes to the blaze of
curling tresses and felt myself caught in their swirl and swept away,
with a throbbing heart, amid the lightning and the blasts of a
hurricane of beauty. I continued to study the newspaper, but albeit
this was only to keep myself in countenance and to gain time, while I
merely pretended to read, I took in nevertheless the meaning of the
words that were before my eyes, and my attention was caught by the
following: "To the programme already announced for this afternoon in
the great hall of the Trocadéro must be added the name of Mlle. Lea
who has consented to appear in _Les Fourberies de Nérine_. She will of
course sustain the part of Nérine, in which she is astounding in her
display of spirit and bewitching gaiety." It was as though a hand had
brutally torn from my heart the bandage beneath which its wound had
begun since my return from Balbec to heal. The flood of my anguish
escaped in torrents, Lea, that was the actress friend of the two girls
at Balbec whom Albertine, without appearing to see them, had, one
afternoon at the Casino, watched in the mirror. It was true that at
Balbec Albertine, at the name of Lea, had adopted a special tone of
compunction in order to say to me, almost shocked that anyone could
suspect such a pattern of virtue: "Oh no, she is not in the least that
sort of woman, she is a very respectable person." Unfortunately for
me, when Albertine made a statement of this sort, it was never
anything but the first stage towards other, divergent statements.
Shortly after the first, came this second: "I don't know her." In the
third phase, after Albertine had spoken to me of somebody who was
'above suspicion' and whom (in the second place) she did not know, she
first of all forgot that she had said that she did not know her and
then, in a speech in which she contradicted herself unawares, informed
me that she did know her. This first act of oblivion completed, and
the fresh, statement made, a second oblivion began, to wit that the
person was above suspicion.  "Isn't So-and-So," I would ask, "one of
those women?" "Why, of course, everybody knows that!" Immediately the
note of compunction was sounded afresh to utter a statement which was
a vague echo, greatly reduced, of the first statement of all. "I'm
bound to say that she has always behaved perfectly properly with me.
Of course, she knows that I would send her about her business if she
tried it on. Still, that makes no difference. I am obliged to give her
credit for the genuine respect she has always shewn for me. It is easy
to see she knew the sort of person she had to deal with." We remember
the truth because it has a name, is rooted in the past, but a
makeshift lie is quickly forgotten. Albertine forgot this latest lie,
her fourth, and, one day when she was anxious to gain my confidence by
confiding in me, went so far as to tell me, with regard to the same
person who at the outset had been so respectable and whom she did not
know. "She took quite a fancy to me at one time. She asked me, three
or four times, to go home with her and to come upstairs to her room. I
saw no harm in going home with her, where everybody could see us, in
broad daylight, in the open air. But when we reached her front door I
always made some excuse and I never went upstairs." Shortly after
this, Albertine made an allusion to the beautiful things that this
lady had in her room. By proceeding from one approximation to another,
I should no doubt have arrived at making her tell me the truth which
was perhaps less serious than I had been led to believe, for, although
perhaps easy going with women, she preferred a male lover, and now
that she had myself would not have given a thought to Léa. In any
case, with regard to this person, I was still at the first stage of
revelation and was not aware whether Albertine knew her. Already, in
the case of many women at any rate, it would have been enough for me
to collect and present to my mistress, in a synthesis, her
contradictory statements, in order to convict her of her misdeeds
(misdeeds which, like astronomical laws, it is a great deal easier to
deduce by a process of reasoning than to observe, to surprise in the
act). But then she would have preferred to say that one of her
statements had been a lie, the withdrawal of which would thus bring
about the collapse of my whole system of evidence, rather than admit
that everything which she had told me from the start was simply a
tissue of falsehood. There are similar tissues in the _Thousand and
One Nights_, which we find charming. They pain us, coming from a
person whom we love, and thereby enable us to penetrate a little
deeper in our knowledge of human nature instead of being content to
play upon the surface. Grief penetrates into us and forces us out of
painful curiosity to penetrate other people. Whence emerge truths
which we feel that we have no right to keep hidden, so much so that a
dying atheist who has discovered them, certain of his own extinction,
indifferent to fame, will nevertheless devote his last hours on earth
to an attempt to make them known.

Of course, I was still at the first stage of enlightenment with regard
to Léa. I was not even aware whether Albertine knew her. No matter, it
all came to the same thing. I must at all costs prevent her from--at
the Troca-déro--renewing this acquaintance or making the acquaintance
of this stranger. I have said that I did not know whether she knew
Léa; I ought, however, to have learned it at Balbec, from Albertine
herself. For defective memory obliterated from my mind as well as from
Albertine's a great many of the statements that she had made to me.
Memory, instead of being a duplicate always present before our eyes of
the various events of our life, is rather an abyss from which at odd
moments a chance resemblance enables us to draw up, restored to life,
dead impressions; but even then there are innumerable little details
which have not fallen into that potential reservoir of memory, and
which will remain for ever beyond our control. To anything that we do
not know to be related to the real life of the person whom we love we
pay but scant attention, we forget immediately what she has said to us
about some incident or people that we do not know, and her expression
while she was saying it. And so when, in due course, our jealousy is
aroused by these same people, and seeks to make sure that it is not
mistaken, that it is they who are responsible for the haste which our
mistress shews in leaving the house, her annoyance when we have
prevented her from going out by returning earlier than usual; our
jealousy ransacking the past in search of a clue can find nothing;
always retrospective, it is like a historian who has to write the
history of a period for which he has no documents; always belated, it
dashes like a mad bull to the spot where it will not find the proud
and brilliant creature who is infuriating it with his darts and whom
the crowd admire for his splendour and his cunning. Jealousy fights
the empty air, uncertain as we are in those dreams in which we are
distressed because we cannot find in his empty house a person whom we
have known well in life, but who here perhaps is really another person
and has merely borrowed the features of our friend, uncertain as we
are even more after we awake when we seek to identify this or that
detail of our dream. What was our mistress's expression when she told
us this; did she not look happy, was she not actually whistling, a
thing that she never does unless there is some amorous thought in her
mind? In the time of our love, if our presence teased her and
irritated her a little, has she not told us something that is
contradicted by what she now affirms, that she knows or does not know
such and such a person?  We do not know, we shall never find out; we
strain after the unsubstantial fragments of a dream, and all the time
our life with our mistress continues, our life indifferent to what we
do not know to be important to us, attentive to what is perhaps of no
importance, hagridden by people who have no real connexion with us,
full of lapses of memory, gaps, vain anxieties, our life as fantastic
as a dream.

I realised that the young dairymaid was still in the room. I told her
that the place was certainly a long way off, that I did not need her.
Whereupon she also decided that it would be too much trouble: "There's
a fine match coming off, I don't want to miss it." I felt that she
must already be devoted to sport and that in a few years' time she
would be talking about 'living her own life.' I told her that I
certainly did not need her any longer, and gave her five francs.
Immediately, having little expected this largesse, and telling herself
that if she earned five francs for doing nothing she would have a
great deal more for taking my message, she began to find that her
match was of no importance. "I could easily have taken your message. I
can always find time." But I thrust her from the room, I needed to be
alone, I must at all costs prevent Albertine from any risk of meeting
Lea's girl friends at the Trocadéro. I must try, and I must succeed;
to tell the truth I did not yet see how, and during these first
moments I opened my hands, gazed at them, cracked my knuckles, whether
because the mind which cannot find what it is seeking, in a fit of
laziness allows itself to halt for an instant at a spot where the most
unimportant things are distinctly visible to it, like the blades of
grass on the embankment which we see from the carriage window
trembling in the wind, when the train halts in the open country--an
immobility that is not always more fertile than that of the captured
animal which, paralysed by fear or fascinated, gazes without moving a
muscle--or that I might hold my body in readiness--with my mind at
work inside it and, in my mind, the means of action against this or
that person--as though it were no more than a weapon from which would
be fired the shot that was to separate Albertine from Léa and her two
friends. It is true that earlier in the morning, when Françoise had
come in to tell me that Albertine was going to the Trocadéro, I had
said to myself: "Albertine is at liberty to do as she pleases" and had
supposed that until evening came, in this radiant weather, her actions
would remain without any perceptible importance to myself; but it was
not only the morning sun, as I had thought, that had made me so
careless; it was because, having obliged Albertine to abandon the
plans that she might perhaps have initiated or even completed at the
Verdurins', and having restricted her to attending a performance which
I myself had chosen, so that she could not have made any preparations,
I knew that whatever she did would of necessity be innocent. Just as,
if Albertine had said a few moments later: "If I kill myself, it's all
the same to me," it would have been because she was certain that she
would not kill herself.  Surrounding myself and Albertine there had
been this morning (far more than the sunlight in the air) that
atmosphere which we do not see, but by the translucent and changing
medium of which we do see, I her actions, she the importance of her
own life, that is to say those beliefs which we do not perceive but
which are no more assimilable to a pure vacuum than is the air that
surrounds us; composing round about us a variable atmosphere,
sometimes excellent, often unbreathable, they deserve to be studied
and recorded as carefully as the temperature, the barometric pressure,
the weather, for our days have their own singularity, physical and
moral. My belief, which I had failed to remark this morning, and yet
in which I had been joyously enveloped until the moment when I had
looked a second time at the _Figaro_, that Albertine would do nothing
that was not harmless, this belief had vanished. I was living no
longer in the fine sunny day, but in a day carved out of the other by
my anxiety lest Albertine might renew her acquaintance with Léa and
more easily still with the two girls, should they go, as seemed to me
probable, to applaud the actress at the Trocadéro where it would not
be difficult for them, in one of the intervals, to come upon
Albertine. I no longer thought of Mlle. Vinteuil, the name of Léa had
brought back to my mind, to make me jealous, the image of Albertine in
the Casino watching the two girls. For I possessed in my memory only
series of Albertines, separate from one another, incomplete, outlines,
snapshots; and so my jealousy was restricted to an intermittent
expression, at once fugitive and fixed, and to the people who had
caused that expression to appear upon Albertine's face. I remembered
her when, at Balbec, she received undue attention from the two girls
or from women of that sort; I remembered the distress that I used to
feel when I saw her face subjected to an active scrutiny, like that of
a painter preparing to make a sketch, entirely covered by them, and,
doubtless on account of my presence, submitting to this contact
without appearing to notice it, with a passivity that was perhaps
clandestinely voluptuous. And before she recovered herself and spoke
to me there was an instant during which Albertine did not move, smiled
into the empty air, with the same air of feigned spontaneity and
concealed pleasure as if she were posing for somebody to take her
photograph; or even seeking to assume before the camera a more dashing
pose--that which she had adopted at Doncières when we were walking
with Saint-Loup, and, laughing and passing her tongue over her lips,
she pretended to be teasing a dog. Certainly at such moments she was
not at all the same as when it was she that was interested in little
girls who passed us. Then, on the contrary, her narrow velvety gaze
fastened itself upon, glued itself to the passer-by, so adherent, so
corrosive, that you felt that when she removed it it must tear away
the skin. But at that moment this other expression, which did at least
give her a serious air, almost as though she were in pain, had seemed
to me a pleasant relief after the toneless blissful expression she had
worn in the presence of the two girls, and I should have preferred the
sombre expression of the desire that she did perhaps feel at times to
the laughing expression caused by the desire which she aroused.
However she might attempt to conceal her consciousness of it, it
bathed her, enveloped her, vaporous, voluptuous, made her whole face
appear rosy. But everything that Albertine held at such moments
suspended in herself, that radiated round her and hurt me so acutely,
how could I tell whether, once my back was turned, she would continue
to keep it to herself, whether to the advances of the two girls, now
that I was no longer with her, she would not make some audacious
response. Indeed, these memories caused me intense grief, they were
like a complete admission of Albertine's failings, a general
confession of her infidelity against which were powerless the various
oaths that she swore to me and I wished to believe, the negative
results of my incomplete researches, the assurances, made perhaps in
connivance with her, of Andrée. Albertine might deny specified
betrayals; by words that she let fall, more emphatic than her
declarations to the contrary, by that searching gaze alone, she had
made confession of what she would fain have concealed, far more than
any specified incident, what she would have let herself be killed
sooner than admit: her natural tendency. For there is no one who will
willingly deliver up his soul. Notwithstanding the grief that these
memories were causing me, could I have denied that it was the
programme of the matinée at the Trocadéro that had revived my need of
Albertine? She was one of those women in whom their misdeeds may at a
pinch take the place of absent charms, and no less than their misdeeds
the kindness that follows them and restores to us that sense of
comfort which in their company, like an invalid who is never well for
two days in succession, we are incessantly obliged to recapture. And
then, even more than their misdeeds while we are in love with them,
there are their misdeeds before we made their acquaintance, and first
and foremost: their nature. What makes this sort of love painful is,
in fact, that there preexists a sort of original sin of Woman, a sin
which makes us love them, so that, when we forget it, we feel less
need of them, and to begin to love afresh we must begin to suffer
afresh. At this moment, the thought that she must not meet the two
girls again and the question whether or not she knew Léa were what was
chiefly occupying my mind, in spite of the rule that we ought not to
take an interest in particular facts except in relation to their
general significance, and notwithstanding the childishness, as great
as that of longing to travel or to make friends with women, of
shattering our curiosity against such elements of the invisible
torrent of painful realities which will always remain unknown to us as
have happened to crystallise in our mind. But, even if we should
succeed in destroying that crystallisation, it would at once be
replaced by another.  Yesterday I was afraid lest Albertine should go
to see Mme. Verdurin.  Now my only thought was of Léa. Jealousy, which
wears a bandage over its eyes, is not merely powerless to discover
anything in the darkness that enshrouds it, it is also one of those
torments where the task must be incessantly repeated, like that of the
Danaids, or of Ixion. Even if her friends were not there, what
impression might she not form of Léa, beautified by her stage attire,
haloed with success, what thoughts would she leave in Albertine's
mind, what desires which, even if she repressed them, would in my
house disgust her with a life in which she was unable to gratify them.

Besides, how could I tell that she was not acquainted with Léa, and
would not pay her a visit in her dressing-room; and, even if Léa did
not know her, who could assure me that, having certainly seen her at
Balbec, she would not recognise her and make a signal to her from the
stage that would entitle Albertine to seek admission behind the
scenes? A danger seems easy to avoid after it has been conjured away.
This one was not yet conjured, I was afraid that it might never be,
and it seemed to me all the more terrible. And yet this love for
Albertine which I felt almost vanish when I attempted to realise it,
seemed in a measure to acquire a proof of its existence from the
intensity of my grief at this moment. I no longer cared about anything
else, I thought only of how I was to prevent her from remaining at the
Trocadéro, I would have offered any sum in the world to Léa to
persuade her not to go there. If then we prove our choice by the
action that we perform rather than by the idea that we form, I must
have been in love with Albertine. But this renewal of my suffering
gave no further consistency to the image that I beheld of Albertine.
She caused my calamities, like a deity that remains invisible. Making
endless conjectures, I sought to shield myself from suffering without
thereby realising my love. First of all, I must make certain that Léa
was really going to perform at the Trocadéro. After dismissing the
dairymaid, I telephoned to Bloch, whom I knew to be on friendly terms
with Léa, in order to ask him. He knew nothing about it and seemed
surprised that the matter could be of any importance to me. I decided
that I must set to work immediately, remembered that Françoise was
ready to go out and that I was not, and as I rose and dressed made her
take a motor-car; she was to go to the Trocadéro, engage a seat, look
high and low for Albertine and give her a note from myself. In this
note I told her that I was greatly upset by a letter which I had just
received from that same lady on whose account she would remember that
I had been so wretched one night at Balbec.  I reminded her that, on
the following day, she had reproached me for not having sent for her.
And so I was taking the liberty, I informed her, of asking her to
sacrifice her matinée and to join me at home so that we might take a
little fresh air together, which might help me to recover from the
shock. But as I should be a long time in getting ready, she would
oblige me, seeing that she had Françoise as an escort, by calling at
the Trois-Quartiers (this shop, being smaller, seemed to me less
dangerous than the Bon Marché) to buy the scarf of white tulle that
she required. My note was probably not superfluous. To tell the truth,
I knew nothing that Albertine had done since I had come to know her,
or even before. But in her conversation (she might, had I mentioned it
to her, have replied that I had misunderstood her) there were certain
contradictions, certain embellishments which seemed to me as decisive
as catching her red-handed, but less serviceable against Albertine
who, often caught out in wrongdoing like a child, had invariably, by
dint of sudden, strategic changes of front, stultified my cruel
onslaught and reestablished her own position. Cruel, most of all, to
myself. She employed, not from any refinement of style, but in order
to correct her imprudences, abrupt breaches of syntax not unlike that
figure which the grammarians call anacoluthon or some such name.
Having allowed herself, while discussing women, to say: "I remember,
the other day, I...," she would at once catch her breath, after which
'I' became 'she': it was something that she had witnessed as an
innocent spectator, not a thing that she herself had done. It was not
herself that was the heroine of the anecdote. I should have liked to
recall how, exactly, the sentence began, so as to conclude for myself,
since she had broken off in the middle, how it would have ended. But
as I had heard the end, I found it hard to remember the beginning,
from which perhaps my air of interest had made her deviate, and was
left still anxious to know what she was really thinking, what she
really remembered. The first stages of falsehood on the part of our
mistress are like the first stages of our own love, or of a religious
vocation. They take shape, accumulate, pass, without our paying them
any attention. When we wish to remember in what manner we began to
love a woman, we are already in love with her; when we dreamed about
her before falling in love, we did not say to ourself: This is the
prelude to a love affair, we must pay attention!--and our dreams took
us by surprise, and we barely noticed them. So also, except in cases
that are comparatively rare, it is only for the convenience of my
narrative that I have frequently in these pages confronted one of
Albertine's false statements with her previous assertion upon the same
subject. This previous assertion, as often as not, since I could not
read the future and did not at the time guess what contradictory
affirmation was to form a pendant to it, had slipped past unperceived,
heard it is true by my ears, but without my isolating it from the
continuous flow of Albertine's speech. Later on, faced with the
self-evident lie, or seized by an anxious doubt, I would fain have
recalled it; but in vain; my memory had not been warned in time, and
had thought it unnecessary to preserve a copy.

I urged Françoise, when she had got Albertine out of the hall, to let
me know by telephone, and to bring her home, whether she was willing
or not. "That would be the last straw, that she should not be willing
to come and see Monsieur," replied Françoise. "But I don't know that
she's as fond as all that of seeing me." "Then she must be an
ungrateful wretch," went on Françoise, in whom Albertine was renewing
after all these years the same torment of envy that Eulalie used at
one time to cause her in my aunt's sickroom. Unaware that Albertine's
position in my household was not of her own seeking but had been
decided by myself (a fact which, from motives of self-esteem and to
make Françoise angry, I preferred to conceal from her), she admired
and execrated the girl's dexterity, called her when she spoke of her
to the other servants a 'play-actress,' a wheedler who could twist me
round her little finger. She dared not yet declare open war against
her, shewed her a smiling countenance and sought to acquire merit in
my sight by the services which she performed for her in her relations
with myself, deciding that it was useless to say anything to me and
that she would gain nothing by doing so; but if the opportunity ever
arose, if ever she discovered a crack in Albertine's armour, she was
fully determined to enlarge it, and to part us for good and all.
"Ungrateful? No, Françoise, I think it is I that am ungrateful, you
don't know how good she is to me." (It was so soothing to give the
impression that I was loved.) "Be as quick as you can." "All right,
I'll get a move on." Her daughter's influence was beginning to
contaminate Françoise's vocabulary. So it is that all languages lose
their purity by the admission of new words. For this decadence of
Françoise's speech, which I had known in its golden period, I was
myself indirectly responsible. Françoise's daughter would not have
made her mother's classic language degenerate into the vilest slang,
had she been content to converse with her in dialect. She had never
given up the use of it, and when they were both in my room at once, if
they had anything private to say, instead of shutting themselves up in
the kitchen, they armed themselves, right in the middle of my room,
with a screen more impenetrable than the most carefully shut door, by
conversing in dialect. I supposed merely that the mother and daughter
were not always on the best of terms, if I was to judge by the
frequency with which they employed the only word that I could make
out: _m'esasperate_ (unless it was that the object of their
exasperation was myself). Unfortunately the most unfamiliar tongue
becomes intelligible in time when we are always hearing it spoken. I
was sorry that this should be dialect, for I succeeded in picking it
up, and should have been no less successful had Françoise been in the
habit of expressing herself in Persian. In vain might Françoise, when
she became aware of my progress, accelerate the speed of her
utterance, and her daughter likewise, it was no good. The mother was
greatly put out that I understood their dialect, then delighted to
hear me speak it. I am bound to admit that her delight was a mocking
delight, for albeit I came in time to pronounce the words more or less
as she herself did, she found between our two ways of pronunciation an
abyss of difference which gave her infinite joy, and she began to
regret that she no longer saw people to whom she had not given a
thought for years but who, it appeared, would have rocked with a
laughter which it would have done her good to hear, if they could have
heard me speaking their dialect so badly. In any case, no joy came to
mitigate her sorrow that, however badly I might pronounce it, I
understood well. Keys become useless when the person whom we seek to
prevent from entering can avail himself of a skeleton key or a jemmy.
Dialect having become useless as a means of defence, she took to
conversing with her daughter in a French which rapidly became that of
the most debased epochs.

I was now ready, but Françoise had not yet telephoned; I ought perhaps
to go out without waiting for a message. But how could I tell that she
would find Albertine, that the latter would not have gone behind the
scenes, that even if Françoise did find her, she would allow herself
to be taken away? Half an hour later the telephone bell began to
tinkle and my heart throbbed tumultuously with hope and fear. There
came, at the bidding of an operator, a flying squadron of sounds which
with an instantaneous speed brought me the words of the telephonist,
not those of Françoise whom an inherited timidity and melancholy, when
she was brought face to face with any object unknown to her fathers,
prevented from approaching a telephone receiver, although she would
readily visit a person suffering from a contagious disease. She had
found Albertine in the lobby by herself, and Albertine had simply gone
to warn Andrée that she was not staying any longer and then had
hurried back to Françoise. "She wasn't angry? Oh, I beg your pardon;
will you please ask the person whether the young lady was angry?" "The
lady asks me to say that she wasn't at all angry, quite the contrary,
in fact; anyhow, if she wasn't pleased, she didn't shew it. They are
starting now for the Trois-Quartiers, and will be home by two
o'clock." I gathered that two o'clock meant three, for it was past two
o'clock already. But Françoise suffered from one of those peculiar,
permanent, incurable defects, which we call maladies; she was never
able either to read or to announce the time correctly. I have never
been able to understand what went on in her head. When Françoise,
after consulting her watch, if it was two o'clock, said: "It is one"
or "it is three o'clock," I have never been able to understand whether
the phenomenon that occurred was situated in her vision or in her
thought or in her speech; the one thing certain is that the phenomenon
never failed to occur. Humanity is a very old institution. Heredity,
cross-breeding have given an irresistible force to bad habits, to
vicious reflexes. One person sneezes and gasps because he is passing a
rosebush, another breaks out in an eruption at the smell of wet paint,
has frequent attacks of colic if he has to start on a journey, and
grandchildren of thieves who are themselves millionaires and generous
cannot resist the temptation to rob you of fifty francs. As for
knowing in what consisted Francoise's incapacity to tell the time
correctly, she herself never threw any light upon the problem.  For,
notwithstanding the anger that I generally displayed at her inaccurate
replies, Françoise never attempted either to apologise for her mistake
or to explain it. She remained silent, pretending not to hear, and
thereby making me lose my temper altogether. I should have liked to
hear a few words of justification, were it only that I might smite her
hip and thigh; but not a word, an indifferent silence. In any case,
about the timetable for to-day there could be no doubt; Albertine was
coming home with Françoise at three o'clock, Albertine would not be
meeting Léa or her friends. Whereupon the danger of her renewing
relations with them, having been averted, at once began to lose its
importance in my eyes and I was amazed, seeing with what ease it had
been averted, that I should have supposed that I would not succeed in
averting it. I felt a keen impulse of gratitude to Albertine, who, I
could see, had not gone to the Trocadéro to meet Léa's friends, and
shewed me, by leaving the performance and coming home at a word from
myself, that she belonged to me more than I had imagined. My gratitude
was even greater when a bicyclist brought me a line from her bidding
me be patient, and full of the charming expressions that she was in
the habit of using. "My darling, dear Marcel, I return less quickly
than this cyclist, whose machine I would like to borrow in order to be
with you sooner. How could you imagine that I might be angry or that I
could enjoy anything better than to be with you? It will be nice to go
out, just the two of us together; it would be nicer still if we never
went out except together. The ideas you get into your head! What a
Marcel!  What a Marcel! Always and ever your Albertine."

The frocks that I bought for her, the yacht of which I had spoken to
her, the wrappers from Fortuny's, all these things having in this
obedience on Albertine's part not their recompense but their
complement, appeared to me now as so many privileges that I was
enjoying; for the duties and expenditure of a master are part of his
dominion, and define it, prove it, fully as much as his rights. And
these rights which she recognised in me were precisely what gave my
expenditure its true character: I had a woman of my own, who, at the
first word that I sent to her unexpectedly, made my messenger
telephone humbly that she was coming, that she was allowing herself to
be brought home immediately. I was more of a master than I had
supposed. More of a master, in other words more of a slave. I no
longer felt the slightest impatience to see Albertine. The certainty
that she was at this moment engaged in shopping with Françoise, or
that she would return with her at an approaching moment which I would
willingly have postponed, illuminated like a calm and radiant star a
period of time which I would now have been far better pleased to spend
alone. My love for Albertine had made me rise and get ready to go out,
but it would prevent me from enjoying my outing. I reflected that on a
Sunday afternoon like this little shopgirls, midinettes, prostitutes
must be strolling in the Bois. And with the words _midinettes, little
shopgirls_ (as had often happened to me with a proper name, the name
of a girl read in the account of a ball), with the image of a white
bodice, a short skirt, since beneath them I placed a stranger who
might perhaps come to love me, I created out of nothing desirable
women, and said to myself: "How charming they must be!" But of what
use would it be to me that they were charming, seeing that I was not
going out alone. Taking advantage of the fact that I still was alone,
and drawing the curtains together so that the sun should not prevent
me from reading the notes, I sat down at the piano, turned over the
pages of Vinteuil's sonata which happened to be lying there, and began
to play; seeing that Albertine's arrival was still a matter of some
time but was on the other hand certain, I had at once time to spare
and tranquillity of mind. Floating in the expectation, big with
security, of her return escorted by Françoise and in my confidence in
her docility as in the blessedness of an inward light as warming as
the light of the sun, I might dispose of my thoughts, detach them for
a moment from Albertine, apply them to the sonata. In the latter,
indeed, I did not take pains to remark how the combinations of the
voluptuous and anxious motives corresponded even more closely now to
my love for Albertine, from which jealousy had been absent for so long
that I had been able to confess to Swann my ignorance of that
sentiment. No, taking the sonata from another point of view, regarding
it in itself as the work of a great artist, I was carried back upon
the tide of sound to the days at Combray--I do not mean at Montjouvain
and along the Méséglise way, but to walks along the Guermantes
way--when I had myself longed to become an artist. In definitely
abandoning that ambition, had I forfeited something real?  Could life
console me for the loss of art, was there in art a more profound
reality, in which our true personality finds an expression that is not
afforded it by the activities of life? Every great artist seems indeed
so different from all the rest, and gives us so strongly that
sensation of individuality for which we seek in vain in our everyday
existence. Just as I was thinking thus, I was struck by a passage in
the sonata, a passage with which I was quite familiar, but sometimes
our attention throws a different light upon things which we have long
known, and we remark in them what we have never seen before. As I
played the passage, and for all that in it Vinteuil had been trying to
express a fancy which would have been wholly foreign to Wagner, I
could not help murmuring '_Tristan_,' with the smile of an old friend
of the family discovering a trace of the grandfather in an intonation,
a gesture of the grandson who never set eyes on him. And as the friend
then examines a photograph which enables him to estimate the likeness,
so, in front of Vinteuil's sonata, I set up on the music-rest the
score of _Tristan_, a selection from which was being given that
afternoon, as it happened, at the Lamoureux concert. I had not, in
admiring the Bayreuth master, any of the scruples of those people
whom, like Nietzsche, their sense of duty bids to shun in art as in
life the beauty that tempts them, and who, tearing themselves from
_Tristan_ as they renounce _Parsifal_, and, in their spiritual
asceticism, progressing from one mortification to another, arrive, by
following the most bloody of _viae Cruets_, at exalting themselves to
the pure cognition and perfect adoration of _Le Postillon de
Longjumeau_. I began to perceive how much reality there is in the work
of Wagner, when I saw in my mind's eye those insistent, fleeting
themes which visit an act, withdraw only to return, and, sometimes
distant, drowsy, almost detached, are at other moments, while
remaining vague, so pressing and so near, so internal, so organic, so
visceral, that one would call them the resumption not so much of a
musical motive as of an attack of neuralgia.

Music, very different in this respect from Albertine's society, helped
me to descend into myself, to make there a fresh discovery: that of
the difference that I had sought in vain in life, in travel, a longing
for which was given me, however, by this sonorous tide which sent its
sunlit waves rolling to expire at my feet. A twofold difference. As
the spectrum makes visible to us the composition of light, so the
harmony of a Wagner, the colour of an Elstir enable us to know that
essential quality of another person's sensations into which love for
another person does not allow us to penetrate.  Then there is
diversity inside the work itself, by the sole means that it has of
being effectively diverse, to wit combining diverse individualities.
Where a minor composer would pretend that he was portraying a squire,
or a knight, whereas he would make them both sing the same music,
Wagner on the contrary allots to each denomination a different
reality, and whenever a squire appears, it is an individual figure, at
once complicated and simplified, that, with a joyous, feudal clash of
warring sounds, inscribes itself in the vast, sonorous mass. Whence
the completeness of a music that is indeed filled with so many
different musics, each of which is a person. A person or the
impression that is given us by a momentary aspect of nature. Even what
is most independent of the sentiment that it makes us feel preserves
its outward and entirely definite reality; the song of a bird, the
ring of a hunter's horn, the air that a shepherd plays upon his pipe,
cut out against the horizon their silhouette of sound. It is true that
Wagner had still to bring these together, to make use of them, to
introduce them into an orchestral whole, to make them subservient to
the highest musical ideals, but always respecting their original
nature, as a carpenter respects the grain, the peculiar essence of the
wood that he is carving.

But notwithstanding the richness of these works in which the
contemplation of nature has its place by the side of action, by the
side of persons who are something more than proper names, I thought
how markedly, all the same, these works participate in that quality of
being--albeit marvellously--always incomplete, which is the
peculiarity of all the great works of the nineteenth century, with
which the greatest writers of that century have stamped their books,
but, watching themselves at work as though they were at once author
and critic, have derived from this self-contemplation a novel beauty,
exterior and superior to the work itself, imposing upon it
retrospectively a unity, a greatness which it does not possess.
Without pausing to consider him who saw in his novels, after they had
appeared, a _Human Comedy_, nor those who entitled heterogeneous poems
or essays _The Legend of the Ages_ or _The Bible of Humanity_, can we
not say all the same of the last of these that he is so perfect an
incarnation of the nineteenth century that the greatest beauties in
Michelet are to be sought not so much in his work itself as in the
attitudes that he adopts when he is considering his work, not in his
_History of France_ nor in his _History of the Revolution_, but in his
prefaces to his books? _Prefaces_, that is to say pages written after
the books themselves, in which he considers the books, and with which
we must include here and there certain phrases beginning as a rule
with a: "Shall I say?" which is not a scholar's precaution but a
musician's cadence. The other musician, he who was delighting me at
this moment, Wagner, retrieving some exquisite scrap from a drawer of
his writing-table to make it appear as a theme, retrospectively
necessary, in a work of which he had not been thinking at the moment
when he composed it, then having composed a first mythological opera,
and a second, and afterwards others still, and perceiving all of a
sudden that he had written a tetralogy, must have felt something of
the same exhilaration as Balzac, when, casting over his works the eye
at once of a stranger and of a father, finding in one the purity of
Raphael, in another the simplicity of the Gospel, he suddenly decided,
as he shed a retrospective illumination upon them, that they would be
better brought together in a cycle in which the same characters would
reappear, and added to his work, in this act of joining it together, a
stroke of the brush, the last and the most sublime. A unity that was
ulterior, not artificial, otherwise it would have crumbled into dust
like all the other systématisations of mediocre writers who with the
elaborate assistance of titles and sub-titles give themselves the
appearance of having pursued a single and transcendent design. Not
fictitious, perhaps indeed all the more real for being ulterior, for
being born of a moment of enthusiasm when it is discovered to exist
among fragments which need only to be joined together. A unity that
has been unaware of itself, therefore vital and not logical, that has
not banned variety, chilled execution. It emerges (only applying
itself this time to the work as a whole) like a fragment composed
separately, born of an inspiration, not required by the artificial
development of a theme, which comes in to form an integral part of the
rest. Before the great orchestral movement that precedes the return of
Yseult, it is the work itself that has attracted to it the
half-forgotten air of a shepherd's pipe. And, no doubt, just as the
swelling of the orchestra at the approach of the ship, when it takes
hold of these notes on the pipe, transforms them, infects them with
its own intoxication, breaks their rhythm, clarifies their tone,
accelerates their movement, multiplies their instrumentation, so no
doubt Wagner himself was filled with joy when he discovered in his
memory a shepherd's air, incorporated it in his work, gave it its full
wealth of meaning. This joy moreover never forsakes him. In him,
however great the melancholy of the poet, it is consoled,
surpassed--that is to say destroyed, alas, too soon--by the delight of
the craftsman. But then, no less than by the similarity I had remarked
just now between Vinteuil's phrase and Wagner's, I was troubled by the
thought of this Vulcan-like craftsmanship. Could it be this that gave
to great artists the illusory appearance of a fundamental originality,
incommensurable with any other, the reflexion of a more than human
reality, actually the result of industrious toil? If art be no more
than that, it is not more real than life and I had less cause for
regret. I went on playing Tristan. Separated from Wagner by the wall
of sound, I could hear him exult, invite me to share his joy, I could
hear ring out all the louder the immortally youthful laugh and the
hammer-blows of Siegfried, in which, moreover, more marvellously
struck were those phrases, the technical skill of the craftsman
serving merely to make it easier for them to leave the earth, birds
akin not to Lohengrin's swan but to that aeroplane which I had seen at
Balbec convert its energy into vertical motion, float over the sea and
lose itself in the sky. Perhaps, as the birds that soar highest and
fly most swiftly have a stronger wing, one required one of these
frankly material vehicles to explore the infinite, one of these 120
horsepower machines, marked Mystery, in which nevertheless, however
high one flies, one is prevented to some extent from enjoying the
silence of space by the overpowering roar of the engine!

For some reason or other the course of my musings, which hitherto had
wandered among musical memories, turned now to those men who have been
the best performers of music in our day, among whom, slightly
exaggerating his merit, I included Morel. At once my thoughts took a
sharp turn, and it was Morel's character, certain eccentricities of
his nature that I began to consider. As it happened--and this might be
connected though it should not be confused with the neurasthenia to
which he was a prey--Morel was in the habit of talking about his life,
but always presented so shadowy a picture of it that it was difficult
to make anything out. For instance, he placed himself entirely at M.
de Charlus's disposal on the understanding that he must keep his
evenings free, as he wished to be able after dinner to attend a course
of lectures on algebra. M. de Charlus conceded this, but insisted upon
seeing him after the lectures. "Impossible, it's an old Italian
painting" (this witticism means nothing when written down like this;
but M. de Charlus having made Morel read _l'Éducation sentimentale_,
in the penultimate chapter of which Frédéric Moreau uses this
expression, it was Morel's idea of a joke never to say the word
'impossible' without following it up with "it's an old Italian
painting") "the lectures go on very late, and I've already given a lot
of trouble to the lecturer, who naturally would be annoyed if I came
away in the middle." "But there's no need to attend lectures, algebra
is not a thing like swimming, or even English, you can learn it
equally well from a book," replied M. de Charlus, who had guessed from
the first that these algebra lectures were one of those images of
which it was impossible to make out anything.  It was perhaps some
affair with a woman, or, if Morel was seeking to earn money in shady
ways and had attached himself to the secret police, a nocturnal
expedition with detectives, or possibly, what was even worse, an
engagement as one of the young men whose services may be required in a
brothel. "A great deal easier, from a book," Morel assured M. de
Charlus, "for it's impossible to make head or tail of the lectures."
"Then why don't you study it in my house, where you would be far more
comfortable?" M. de Charlus might have answered, but took care not to
do so, knowing that at once, preserving only the same essential
element that the evening hours must be set apart, the imaginary
algebra course would change to a compulsory lesson in dancing or in
drawing. In which M. de Charlus might have seen that he was mistaken,
partially at least, for Morel did often spend his time at the Baron's
in solving equations. M. de Charlus did raise the objection that
algebra could be of little use to a violinist. Morel replied that it
was a distraction which helped him to pass the time and to conquer his
neurasthenia. No doubt M. de Charlus might have made inquiries, have
tried to find out what actually were these mysterious and ineluctable
lectures on algebra that were delivered only at night. But M. de
Charlus was not qualified to unravel the tangled skein of Morel's
occupations, being himself too much caught in the toils of social
life. The visits he received or paid, the time he spent at his club,
dinner-parties, evenings at the theatre prevented him from thinking
about the problem, or for that matter about the violent and vindictive
animosity which Morel had (it was reported) indulged and at the same
time sought to conceal in the various environments, the different
towns in which his life had been spent, and where people still spoke
of him with a shudder, with bated breath, never venturing to say
anything definite about him.

It was unfortunately one of the outbursts of this neurotic
irritability that I was privileged to hear that day when, rising from
the piano, I went down to the courtyard to meet Albertine, who still
did not appear. As I passed by Jupien's shop, in which Morel and the
girl who, I supposed, was shortly to become his wife were by
themselves, Morel was screaming at the top of his voice, thereby
revealing an accent that I had never heard in his speech, a rustic
tone, suppressed as a rule, and very strange indeed.  His words were
no less strange, faulty from the point of view of the French language,
but his knowledge of everything was imperfect. "Will you get out of
here, _grand pied de grue, grand pied de grue, grand pied de grue_,"
he repeated to the poor girl who at first had certainly not understood
what he meant, and now, trembling and indignant, stood motionless
before him. "Didn't I tell you to get out of here, _grand pied de
grue, grand pied de grue_; go and fetch your uncle till I tell him
what you are, you whore." Just at that moment the voice of Jupien who
was coming home talking to one of his friends was heard in the
courtyard, and as I knew that Morel was an utter coward, I decided
that it was unnecessary to join my forces with those of Jupien and his
friend, who in another moment would have entered the shop, and I
retired upstairs again to escape Morel, who, for all his having
pretended to be so anxious that Jupien should be fetched (probably in
order to frighten and subjugate the girl, an act of blackmail which
rested probably upon no foundation), made haste to depart as soon as
he heard his voice in the courtyard. The words I have set down here
are nothing, they would not explain why my heart throbbed so as I went
upstairs. These scenes of which we are witnesses in real life find an
incalculable element of strength in what soldiers call, in speaking of
a military offensive, the advantage of surprise, and however agreeably
I might be soothed by the knowledge that Albertine, instead of
remaining at the Trocadéro, was coming home to me, I still heard
ringing in my ears the accent of those words ten times repeated:
"_Grand pied de grue, grand pied de grue_," which had so appalled me.

Gradually my agitation subsided. Albertine was on her way home. I
should hear her ring the bell in a moment. I felt that my life was no
longer what it might have become, and that to have a woman in the
house like this with whom quite naturally, when she returned home, I
should have to go out, to the adornment of whose person the strength
and activity of my nature were to be ever more and more diverted, made
me as it were a bough that has blossomed, but is weighed down by the
abundant fruit into which all its reserves of strength have passed. In
contrast to the anxiety that I had been feeling only an hour earlier,
the calm that I now felt at the prospect of Albertine's return was
more ample than that which I had felt in the morning before she left
the house. Anticipating the future, of which my mistress's docility
made me practically master, more resistant, as though it were filled
and stabilised by the imminent, importunate, inevitable, gentle
presence, it was the calm (dispensing us from the obligation to seek
our happiness in ourselves) that is born of family feeling and
domestic bliss. Family and domestic: such was again, no less than the
sentiment that had brought me such great peace while I was waiting for
Albertine, that which I felt later on when I drove out with her. She
took off her glove for a moment, whether to touch my hand, or to
dazzle me by letting me see on her little finger, next to the ring
that Mme. Bontemps had given her, another upon which was displayed the
large and liquid surface of a clear sheet of ruby. "What! Another
ring, Albertine. Your aunt is generous!" "No, I didn't get this from
my aunt," she said with a laugh. "It was I who bought it, now that,
thanks to you, I can save up ever so much money.  I don't even know
whose it was before. A visitor who was short of money left it with the
landlord of an hotel where I stayed at Le Mans. He didn't know what to
do with it, and would have let it go for much less than it was worth.
But it was still far too dear for me. Now that, thanks to you, I'm
becoming a smart lady, I wrote to ask him if he still had it. And here
it is." "That makes a great many rings, Albertine. Where will you put
the one that I am going to give you? Anyhow, it is a beautiful ring, I
can't quite make out what that is carved round the ruby, it looks like
a man's head grinning. But my eyes aren't strong enough." "They might
be as strong as you like, you would be no better off. I can't make it
out either." In the past it had often happened, as I read somebody's
memoirs, or a novel, in which a man always goes out driving with a
woman, takes tea with her, that I longed to be able to do likewise. I
had thought sometimes that I was successful, as for instance when I
took Saint-Loup's mistress out with me, or went to dinner with her.
But in vain might I summon to my assistance the idea that I was at
that moment actually impersonating the character that I had envied in
the novel, that idea assured me that I ought to find pleasure in
Rachel's society, and afforded me none. For, whenever we attempt to
imitate something that has really existed, we forget that this
something was brought about not by the desire to imitate but by an
unconscious force which itself also is real; but this particular
impression which I had been unable to derive from all my desire to
taste a delicate pleasure in going out with Rachel, behold I was now
tasting it without having made the slightest effort to procure it, but
for quite different reasons, sincere, profound; to take a single
instance, for the reason that my jealousy prevented me from letting
Albertine go out of my sight, and, the moment that I was able to leave
the house, from letting her go anywhere without me. I tasted it only
now, because our knowledge is not of the external objects which we try
to observe, but of involuntary sensations, because in the past a woman
might be sitting in the same carriage as myself, she was not _really_
by my side, so long as she was not created afresh there at every
moment by a need of her such as I felt of Albertine, so long as the
constant caress of my gaze did not incessantly restore to her those
tints that need to be perpetually refreshed, so long as my senses,
appeased it might be but still endowed with memory, did not place
beneath those colours savour and substance, so long as, combined with
the senses and with the imagination that exalts them, jealousy was not
maintaining the woman in equilibrium by my side by a compensated
attraction as powerful as the law of gravity. Our motor-car passed
swiftly along the boulevards, the avenues whose lines of houses, a
rosy congelation of sunshine and cold, reminded me of calling upon
Mme. Swann in the soft light of her chrysanthemums, before it was time
to ring for the lamps.

I had barely time to make out, being divided from them by the glass of
the motor-car as effectively as I should have been by that of my
bedroom window, a young fruit seller, a dairymaid, standing in the
doorway of her shop, illuminated by the sunshine like a heroine whom
my desire was sufficient to launch upon exquisite adventures, on the
threshold of a romance which I might never know. For I could not ask
Albertine to let me stop, and already the young women were no longer
visible whose features my eyes had barely distinguished, barely
caressed their fresh complexions in the golden vapour in which they
were bathed. The emotion that I felt grip me when I caught sight of a
wine-merchant's girl at her desk or a laundress chatting in the street
was the emotion that we feel on recognising a goddess. Now that
Olympus no longer exists, its inhabitants dwell upon the earth. And
when, in composing a mythological scene, painters have engaged to pose
as Venus or Ceres young women of humble birth, who follow the most
sordid callings, so far from committing sacrilege, they have merely
added, restored to them the quality, the various attributes which they
had forfeited. "What did you think of the Trocadéro, you little
gadabout?" "I'm jolly glad I came away from it to go out with you. As
architecture, it's pretty measly, isn't it? It's by Davioud, I fancy."
"But how learned my little Albertine is becoming! Of course it was
Davioud who built it, but I couldn't have told you offhand." "While
you are asleep, I read your books, you old lazybones." "Listen, child,
you are changing so fast and becoming so intelligent" (this was true,
but even had it not been true I was not sorry that she should have the
satisfaction, failing any other, of saying to herself that at least
the time which she spent in my house was not being entirely wasted)
"that I don't mind telling you things that would generally be regarded
as false and which are all on the way to a truth that I am seeking.
You know what is meant by impressionism?" "Of course!" "Very well
then, this is what I mean: you remember the church at Marcouville
l'Orgueilleuse which Elstir disliked because it was new. Isn't it
rather a denial of his own impressionism when he subtracts such
buildings from the general impression in which they are contained to
bring them out of the light in which they are dissolved and scrutinise
like an archaeologist their intrinsic merit? When he begins to paint,
have not a hospital, a school, a poster upon a hoarding the same value
as a priceless cathedral which stands by their side in a single
indivisible image? Remember how the façade was baked by the sun, how
that carved frieze of saints swam upon the sea of light. What does it
matter that a building is new, if it appears to be old, or even if it
does not. All the poetry that the old quarters contain has been
squeezed out to the last drop, but if you look at some of the houses
that have been built lately for rich tradesmen, in the new districts,
where the stone is all freshly cut and still quite white, don't they
seem to rend the torrid air of noon in July, at the hour when the
shopkeepers go home to luncheon in the suburbs, with a cry as harsh as
the odour of the cherries waiting for the meal to begin in the
darkened dining-room, where the prismatic glass knife-rests project a
multicoloured fire as beautiful as the windows of Chartres?" "How
wonderful you are! If I ever do become clever, it will be entirely
owing to you." "Why on a fine day tear your eyes away from the
Trocadéro, whose giraffe-neck towers remind one of the Charterhouse of
Pavia?" "It reminded me also, standing up like that on its hill, of a
Mantegna that you have, I think it's of Saint Sebastian, where in the
background there's a city like an amphitheatre, and you would swear
you saw the Trocadéro." "There, you see! But how did you come across
my Mantegna? You are amazing!" We had now reached a more plebeian
quarter, and the installation of an ancillary Venus behind each
counter made it as it were a suburban altar at the foot of which I
would gladly have spent the rest of my life.

As one does on the eve of a premature death, I drew up a mental list
of the pleasures of which I was deprived by Albertine's setting a full
stop to my freedom. At Passy it was in the open street, so crowded
were the footways, that a group of girls, their arms encircling one
another's waist, left me marvelling at their smile. I had not time to
see it clearly, but it is hardly probable that I exaggerated it; in
any crowd after all, in any crowd of young people, it is not unusual
to come upon the effigy of a noble profile.  So that these assembled
masses on public holidays are to the voluptuary as precious as is to
the archaeologist the congested state of a piece of ground in which
digging will bring to light ancient medals. We arrived at the Bois. I
reflected that, if Albertine had not come out with me, I might at this
moment, in the enclosure of the Champs-Elysées, have been hearing the
Wagnerian tempest set all the rigging of the orchestra ascream, draw
to itself, like a light spindrift, the tune of the shepherd's pipe
which I had just been playing to myself, set it flying, mould it,
deform it, divide it, sweep it away in an ever-increasing whirlwind. I
was determined, at any rate, that our drive should be short, and that
we should return home early, for, without having mentioned it to
Albertine, I had decided to go that evening to the Verdurins'. They
had recently sent me an invitation which I had flung into the
waste-paper basket with all the rest. But I changed my mind for this
evening, for I meant to try to find out who the people were that
Albertine might have been hoping to meet there in the afternoon.  To
tell the truth, I had reached that stage in my relations with
Albertine when, if everything remains the same, if things go on
normally, a woman ceases to serve us except as a starting point
towards another woman. She still retains a corner in our heart, but a
very small corner; we hasten out every evening in search of unknown
women, especially unknown women who are known to her and can tell us
about her life. Herself, after all, we have possessed, have exhausted
everything that she has consented to yield to us of herself. Her life
is still herself, but that part of herself which we do not know, the
things as to which we have questioned her in vain and which we shall
be able to gather from fresh lips.

If my life with Albertine was to prevent me from going to Venice, from
travelling, at least I might in the meantime, had I been alone, have
made the acquaintance of the young midinettes scattered about in the
sunlight of this fine Sunday, in the sum total of whose beauty I gave
a considerable place to the unknown life that animated them. The eyes
that we see, are they not shot through by a gaze as to which we do not
know what images, memories, expectations, disdains it carries, a gaze
from which we cannot separate them? The life that the person who
passes by is living, will it not impart, according to what it is, a
different value to the knitting of those brows, to the dilatation of
those nostrils? Albertine's presence debarred me from going to join
them and perhaps also from ceasing to desire them. The man who would
maintain in himself the desire to go on living, and his belief in
something more delicious than the things of daily life, must go out
driving; for the streets, the avenues are full of goddesses. But the
goddesses do not allow us to approach them. Here and there, among the
trees, at the entrance to some café, a waitress was watching like a
nymph on the edge of a sacred grove, while beyond her three girls were
seated by the sweeping arc of their bicycles that were stacked beside
them, like three immortals leaning against the clouds or the fabulous
coursers upon which they perform their mythological journeys. I
remarked that, whenever Albertine looked for a moment at these girls,
with a profound attention, she at once turned to gaze at myself. But I
was not unduly troubled, either by the intensity of this
contemplation, or by its brevity for which its intensity compensated;
as for the latter, it often happened that Albertine, whether from
exhaustion, or because it was an intense person's way of looking at
other people, used to gaze thus in a sort of brown study at my father,
it might be, or at Françoise; and as for the rapidity with which she
turned to look at myself, it might be due to the fact that Albertine,
knowing my suspicions, might prefer, even if they were not justified,
to avoid giving them any foothold. This attention, moreover, which
would have seemed to me criminal on Albertine's part (and quite as
much so if it had been directed at young men), I fastened, without
thinking myself reprehensible for an instant, almost deciding indeed
that Albertine was reprehensible for preventing me, by her presence,
from stopping the car and going to join them, upon all the midinettes.
We consider it innocent to desire a thing and atrocious that the other
person should desire it. And this contrast between what concerns
ourselves on the one hand, and on the other the person with whom we
are in love, is not confined only to desire, but extends also to
falsehood. What is more usual than a lie, whether it is a question of
masking the daily weakness of a constitution which we wish to be
thought strong, of concealing a vice, or of going off, without
offending the other person, to the thing that we prefer? It is the
most necessary instrument of conversation, and the one that is most
widely used. But it is this which we actually propose to banish from
the life of her whom we love; we watch for it, scent it, detest it
everywhere. It appalls us, it is sufficient to bring about a rupture,
it seems to us to be concealing the most serious faults, except when
it does so effectively conceal them that we do not suspect their
existence. A strange state this in which we are so inordinately
sensitive to a pathogenic agent which its universal swarming makes
inoffensive to other people and so serious to the wretch who finds
that he is no longer immune to it.

The life of these pretty girls (because of my long periods of
seclusion, I so rarely met any) appeared to me as to everyone in whom
facility of realisation has not destroyed the faculty of imagination,
a thing as different from anything that I knew, as desirable as the
most marvellous cities that travel holds in store for us.

The disappointment that I had felt with the women whom I had known, in
the cities which I had visited, did not prevent me from letting myself
be caught by the attraction of others or from believing in their
reality; thus, just as seeing Venice--that Venice for which the spring
weather too filled me with longing, and which marriage with Albertine
would prevent me from knowing--seeing Venice in a panorama which Ski
would perhaps have declared to be more beautiful in tone than the
place itself, would to me have been no substitute for the journey to
Venice the length of which, determined without any reference to
myself, seemed to me an indispensable preliminary; similarly, however
pretty she might be, the midinette whom a procuress had artificially
provided for me could not possibly be a substitute for her who with
her awkward figure was strolling at this moment under the trees,
laughing with a friend. The girl that I might find in a house of
assignation, were she even better-looking than this one, could not be
the same thing, because we do not look at the eyes of a girl whom we
do not know as we should look at a pair of little discs of opal or
agate. We know that the little ray which colours them or the diamond
dust that makes them sparkle is all that we can see of a mind, a will,
a memory in which is contained the home life that we do not know, the
intimate friends whom we envy. The enterprise of taking possession of
all this, which is so difficult, so stubborn, is what gives its value
to the gaze far more than its merely physical beauty (which may serve
to explain why the same young man can awaken a whole romance in the
imagination of a woman who has heard somebody say that he is the
Prince of Wales, whereas she pays no more attention to him after
learning that she is mistaken); to find the midinette in the house of
assignation is to find her emptied of that unknown life which
permeates her and which we aspire to possess with her, it is to
approach a pair of eyes that have indeed become mere precious stones,
a nose whose quivering is as devoid of meaning as that of a flower.
No, that unknown midinette who was passing at that moment, it seemed
to me as indispensable, if I wished to continue to believe in her
reality, to test her resistance by adapting my behaviour to it,
challenging a rebuff, returning to the charge, obtaining an
assignation, waiting for her as she came away from her work, getting
to know, episode by episode, all that composed the girl's life,
traversing the space that, for her, enveloped the pleasure which I was
seeking, and the distance which her different habits, her special mode
of life, set between me and the attention, the favour which I wished
to attain and capture, as making a long journey in the train if I
wished to believe in the reality of Venice which I should see and
which would not be merely a panoramic show in a World Exhibition. But
this very parallel between desire and travel made me vow to myself
that one day I would grasp a little more closely the nature of this
force, invisible but as powerful as any faith, or as, in the world of
physics, atmospheric pressure, which exalted to such a height cities
and women so long as I did not know them, and slipped away from
beneath them as soon as I had approached them, made them at once
collapse and fall flat upon the dead level of the most commonplace
reality.

Farther along another girl was kneeling beside her bicycle, which she
was putting to rights. The repair finished, the young racer mounted
her machine, but without straddling it as a man would have done. For a
moment the bicycle swerved, and the young body seemed to have added to
itself a sail, a huge wing; and presently we saw dart away at full
speed the young creature half-human, half-winged, angel or peri,
pursuing her course.

This was what a life with Albertine prevented me from enjoying.
Prevented me, did I say? Should I not have thought rather: what it
provided for my enjoyment. If Albertine had not been living with me,
had been free, I should have imagined, and with reason, every woman to
be a possible, a probable object of her desire, of her pleasure. They
would have appeared to me like those dancers who, in a diabolical
ballet, representing the Temptations to one person, plunge their darts
in the heart of another.  Midinettes, schoolgirls, actresses, how I
should have hated them all! Objects of horror, I should have excepted
them from the beauty of the universe.  My bondage to Albertine, by
permitting me not to suffer any longer on their account, restored them
to the beauty of the world. Inoffensive, having lost the needle that
stabs the heart with jealousy, I was able to admire them, to caress
them with my eyes, another day more intimately perhaps.  By secluding
Albertine, I had at the same time restored to the universe all those
rainbow wings which sweep past us in public gardens, ballrooms,
theatres, and which became tempting once more to me because she could
no longer succumb to their temptation. They composed the beauty of the
world. They had at one time composed that of Albertine. It was because
I had beheld her as a mysterious bird, then as a great actress of the
beach, desired, perhaps won, that I had thought her wonderful. As soon
as she was a captive in my house, the bird that I had seen one
afternoon advancing with measured step along the front, surrounded by
the congregation of the other girls like seagulls alighted from who
knows whence, Albertine had lost all her colours, with all the chances
that other people had of securing her for themselves. Gradually she
had lost her beauty. It required excursions like this, in which I
imagined her, but for my presence, accosted by some woman, or by some
young man, to make me see her again amid the splendour of the beach,
albeit my jealousy was on a different plane from the decline of the
pleasures of my imagination. But notwithstanding these abrupt
reversions in which, desired by other people, she once more became
beautiful in my eyes, I might very well divide her visit to me in two
periods, an earlier in which she was still, although less so every
day, the glittering actress of the beach, and a later period in which,
become the grey captive, reduced to her dreary self, I required those
flashes in which I remembered the past to make me see her again in
colour.

Sometimes, in the hours in which I felt most indifferent towards her,
there came back to me the memory of a far-off moment when upon the
beach, before I had made her acquaintance, a lady being near her with
whom I was on bad terms and with whom I was almost certain now that
she had had relations, she burst out laughing, staring me in the face
in an insolent fashion. All round her hissed the blue and polished
sea. In the sunshine of the beach, Albertine, in the midst of her
friends, was the most beautiful of them all. She was a splendid girl,
who in her familiar setting of boundless waters, had--precious in the
eyes of the lady who admired her--inflicted upon me this unpardonable
insult. It was unpardonable, for the lady would perhaps return to
Balbec, would notice perhaps, on the luminous and echoing beach, that
Albertine was absent. But she would not know that the girl was living
with me, was wholly mine. The vast expanse of blue water, her
forgetfulness of the fondness that she had felt for this particular
girl and would divert to others, had closed over the outrage that
Albertine had done me, enshrining it in a glittering and unbreakable
casket.  Then hatred of that woman gnawed my heart; of Albertine also,
but a hatred mingled with admiration of the beautiful, courted girl,
with her marvellous hair, whose laughter upon the beach had been an
insult.  Shame, jealousy, the memory of my earliest desires and of the
brilliant setting had restored to Albertine the beauty, the intrinsic
merit of other days. And thus there alternated with the somewhat
oppressive boredom that I felt in her company a throbbing desire, full
of splendid storms and of regrets; according to whether she was by my
side in my bedroom or I set her at liberty in my memory upon the
front, in her gay seaside frocks, to the sound of the musical
instruments of the sea,--Albertine, now extracted from that
environment, possessed and of no great value, now plunged back into
it, escaping from me into a past which I should never be able to know,
hurting me, in her friend's presence, as much as the splash of the
wave or the heat of the sun,--Albertine restored to the beach or
brought back again to my room, in a sort of amphibious love.

Farther on, a numerous band were playing ball. All these girls had
come out to make the most of the sunshine, for these days in February,
even when they are brilliant, do not last long and the splendour of
their light does not postpone the hour of its decline. Before that
hour drew near, we passed some time in twilight, because after we had
driven as far as the Seine, where Albertine admired, and by her
presence prevented me from admiring the reflexions of red sails upon
the wintry blue of the water, a solitary house in the distance like a
single red poppy against the clear horizon, of which Saint-Cloud
seemed, farther off again, to be the fragmentary, crumbling, rugged
pétrification, we left our motor-car and walked a long way together;
indeed for some moments I gave her my arm, and it seemed to me that
the ring which her arm formed round it united our two persons in a
single self and linked our separate destinies together.

At our feet, our parallel shadows, where they approached and joined,
traced an exquisite pattern. No doubt it already seemed to me a
marvellous thing at home that Albertine should be living with me, that
it should be she that came and lay down on my bed. But it was so to
speak the transportation of that marvel out of doors, into the heart
of nature, that by the shore of that lake in the Bois, of which I was
so fond, beneath the trees, it should be her and none but her shadow,
the pure and simplified shadow of her leg, of her bust, that the sun
had to depict in monochrome by the side of mine upon the gravel of the
path. And I found a charm that was more immaterial doubtless, but no
less intimate, than in the drawing together, the fusion of our bodies,
in that of our shadows. Then we returned to our car. And it chose, for
our homeward journey, a succession of little winding lanes along which
the wintry trees, clothed, like ruins, in ivy and brambles, seemed to
be pointing the way to the dwelling of some magician. No sooner had we
emerged from their dusky cover than we found, upon leaving the Bois,
the daylight still so bright that I imagined that I should still have
time to do everything that I wanted to do before dinner, when, only a
few minutes later, at the moment when our car approached the Arc de
Triomphe, it was with a sudden start of surprise and dismay that I
perceived, over Paris, the moon prematurely full, like the face of a
clock that has stopped and makes us think that we are late for an
engagement. We had told the driver to take us home. To Albertine, this
meant also coming to my home. The company of those women, however dear
to us, who are obliged to leave us and return home, does not bestow
that peace which I found in the company of Albertine seated in the car
by my side, a company that was conveying us not to the void in which
lovers have to part but to an even more stable and more sheltered
union in my home, which was also hers, the material symbol of my
possession of her. To be sure, in order to possess, one must first
have desired. We do not possess a line, a surface, a mass unless it is
occupied by our love. But Albertine had not been for me during our
drive, as Rachel had been in the past, a futile dust of flesh and
clothing. The imagination of my eyes, my lips, my hands had at Balbec
so solidly built, so tenderly polished her body that now in this car,
to touch that body, to contain it, I had no need to press my own body
against Albertine, nor even to see her; it was enough to hear her, and
if she was silent to know that she was by my side; my interwoven
senses enveloped her altogether and when, as we arrived at the front
door, she quite naturally alighted, I stopped for a moment to tell the
chauffeur to call for me later on, but my gaze enveloped her still
while she passed ahead of me under the arch, and it was still the same
inert, domestic calm that I felt as I saw her thus, solid, flushed,
opulent and captive, returning home quite naturally with myself, as a
woman who was my own property, and, protected by its walls,
disappearing into our house. Unfortunately, she seemed to feel herself
a prisoner there, and to share the opinion of that Mme. de La
Rochefoucauld who, when somebody asked her whether she was not glad to
live in so beautiful a home as Liancourt, replied: "There is no such
thing as a beautiful prison"; if I was to judge by her miserable,
weary expression that evening as we dined together in my room. I did
not notice it at first; and it was I that was made wretched by the
thought that, if it had not been for Albertine (for with her I should
have suffered too acutely from jealousy in an hotel where all day long
she would have been exposed to contact with a crowd of strangers), I
might at that moment be dining in Venice in one of those little
restaurants, barrel-vaulted like the hold of a ship, from which one
looks out on the Grand Canal through arched windows framed in Moorish
mouldings.

I ought to add that Albertine greatly admired in my room a big bronze
by Barbedienne which with ample justification Bloch considered
extremely ugly. He had perhaps less reason to be surprised at my
having kept it. I had never sought, like him, to furnish for artistic
effect, to compose my surroundings, I was too lazy, too indifferent to
the things that I was in the habit of seeing every day. Since my taste
was not involved, I had a right not to harmonise my interior. I might
perhaps, even without that, have discarded the bronze. But ugly and
expensive things are of great use, for they enjoy, among people who do
not understand us, who have not our taste and with whom we cannot fall
in love, a prestige that would not be shared by some proud object that
does not reveal its beauty. Now the people who do not understand us
are precisely the people with regard to whom alone it may be useful to
us to employ a prestige which our intellect is enough, to assure us
among superior people. Albertine might indeed be beginning to shew
taste, she still felt a certain respect for the bronze, and this
respect was reflected upon myself in a consideration which, coming
from Albertine, mattered infinitely more to me than the question of
keeping a bronze which was a trifle degrading, since I was in love
with Albertine.

But the thought of my bondage ceased of a sudden to weigh upon me and
I looked forward to prolonging it still further, because I seemed to
perceive that Albertine was painfully conscious of her own. True that
whenever I had asked her whether she was not bored in my house, she
had always replied that she did not know where it would be possible to
have a happier time. But often these words were contradicted by an air
of nervous exhaustion, of longing to escape.

Certainly if she had the tastes with which I had credited her, this
inhibition from ever satisfying them must have been as provoking to
her as it was calming to myself, calming to such an extent that I
should have decided that the hypothesis of my having accused her
unjustly was the most probable, had it not been so difficult to fit
into this hypothesis the extraordinary pains that Albertine was taking
never to be alone, never to be disengaged, never to stop for a moment
outside the front door when she came in, to insist upon being
accompanied, whenever she went to the telephone, by some one who would
be able to repeat to me what she had said, by Françoise or Andrée,
always to leave me alone (without appearing to be doing so on purpose)
with the latter, after they had been out together, so that I might
obtain a detailed report of their outing. With this marvellous
docility were contrasted certain quickly repressed starts of
impatience, which made me ask myself whether Albertine was not
planning to cast off her chain. Certain subordinate incidents seemed
to corroborate my supposition. Thus, one day when I had gone out by
myself, in the Passy direction, and had met Gisèle, we began to talk
about one thing and another. Presently, not without pride at being
able to do so, I informed her that I was constantly seeing Albertine.
Gisèle asked me where she could find her, since there was something
that she simply _must_ tell her.  "Why, what is it?" "Something to do
with some young friends of hers." "What friends? I may perhaps be able
to tell you, though that need not prevent you from seeing her." "Oh,
girls she knew years ago, I don't remember their names," Gisèle
replied vaguely, and beat a retreat. She left me, supposing herself to
have spoken with such prudence that the whole story must seem to me
perfectly straightforward. But falsehood is so unexacting, needs so
little help to make itself manifest! If it had been a question of
friends of long ago, whose very names she no longer remembered, why
_must_ she speak about them to Albertine? This '_must_,' akin to an
expression dear to Mme. Cottard: 'in the nick of time,' could be
applicable only to something particular, opportune, perhaps urgent,
relating to definite persons.  Besides, something about her way of
opening her mouth, as though she were going to yawn, with a vague
expression, as she said to me (almost drawing back her body, as though
she began to reverse her engine at this point in our conversation):
"Oh, I don't know, I don't remember their names," made her face, and
in harmony with it her voice, as clear a picture of falsehood as the
wholly different air, tense, excited, of her previous '_must_' was of
truth. I did not question Gisèle. Of what use would it have been to
me? Certainly, she was not lying in the same fashion as Albertine.
And certainly Albertine's lies pained me more. But they had obviously
a point in common: the fact of the lie itself, which in certain cases
is self-evident.  Not evidence of the truth that the lie conceals. We
know that each murderer in turn imagines that he has arranged
everything so cleverly that he will not be caught, and so it is with
liars, particularly the woman with whom we are in love. We do not know
where she has been, what she has been doing. But at the very moment
when she speaks, when she speaks of something else beneath which lies
hidden the thing that she does not mention, the lie is immediately
perceived, and our jealousy increased, since we are conscious of the
lie, and cannot succeed in discovering the truth.  With Albertine, the
impression that she was lying was conveyed by many of the
peculiarities which we have already observed in the course of this
narrative, but especially by this, that, when she was lying, her story
broke down either from inadequacy, omission, improbability, or on the
contrary from a surfeit of petty details intended to make it seem
probable. Probability, notwithstanding the idea that the liar has
formed of it, is by no means the same as truth. Whenever, while
listening to something that is true, we hear something that is only
probable, which is perhaps more so than the truth, which is perhaps
too probable, the ear that is at all sensitive feels that it is not
correct, as with a line that does not scan or a word read aloud in
mistake for another. Our ear feels this, and if we are in love our
heart takes alarm. Why do we not reflect at the time, when we change
the whole course of our life because we do not know whether a woman
went along the Rue de Berri or the Rue Washington, why do we not
reflect that these few hundred yards of difference, and the woman
herself, will be reduced to the hundred millionth part of themselves
(that is to say to dimensions far beneath our perception), if we only
have the wisdom to remain for a few years without seeing the woman,
and that she who has out-Gullivered Gulliver in our eyes will shrink
to a Lilliputian whom no microscope--of the heart, at least, for that
of the disinterested memory is more powerful and less fragile--can
ever again perceive! However it may be, if there was a point in
common--the lie itself--between Albertine's lies and Gisèle's, still
Gisèle did not lie in the same fashion as Albertine, nor indeed in the
same fashion as Andrée, but their respective lies dovetailed so neatly
into one another, while presenting a great variety, that the little
band had the impenetrable solidity of certain commercial houses,
booksellers' for example or printing presses, where the wretched
author will never succeed, notwithstanding the diversity of the
persons employed in them, in discovering whether he is being swindled
or not. The editor of the newspaper or review lies with an attitude of
sincerity all the more solemn in that he is frequently obliged to
conceal the fact that he himself does exactly the same things and
indulges in the same commercial practices that he denounced in other
editors or theatrical managers, in other publishers, when he chose as
his battle-cry, when he raised against them the standard of Sincerity.
The fact of a man's having proclaimed (as leader of a political party,
or in any other capacity) that it is wicked to lie, obliges him as a
rule to lie more than other people, without on that account abandoning
the solemn mask, doffing the august tiara of sincerity.  The 'sincere'
gentleman's partner lies in a different and more ingenuous fashion. He
deceives his author as he deceives his wife, with tricks from the
vaudeville stage. The secretary of the firm, a blunt and honest man,
lies quite simply, like an architect who promises that your house will
be ready at a date when it will not have been begun. The head reader,
an angelic soul, flutters from one to another of the three, and
without knowing what the matter is, gives them, by a brotherly scruple
and out of affectionate solidarity, the precious support of a word
that is above suspicion.  These four persons live in a state of
perpetual dissension to which the arrival of the author puts a stop.
Over and above their private quarrels, each of them remembers the
paramount military duty of rallying to the support of the threatened
'corps.' Without realising it, I had long been playing the part of
this author among the little band. If Gisèle had been thinking, when
she used the word 'must,' of some one of Albertine's friends who was
proposing to go abroad with her as soon as my mistress should have
found some pretext or other for leaving me, and had meant to warn
Albertine that the hour had now come or would shortly strike, she,
Gisèle, would have let herself be torn to pieces rather than tell me
so; it was quite useless therefore to ply her with questions. Meetings
such as this with Gisèle were not alone in accentuating my doubts. For
instance, I admired Albertine's sketches. Albertine's sketches, the
touching distractions of the captive, moved me so that I congratulated
her upon them. "No, they're dreadfully bad, but I've never had a
drawing lesson in my life." "But one evening at Balbec you sent word
to me that you had stayed at home to have a drawing lesson." I
reminded her of the day and told her that I had realised at the time
that people did not have drawing lessons at that hour in the evening.
Albertine blushed. "It is true," she said, "I was not having drawing
lessons, I told you a great many lies at first, that I admit. But I
never lie to you now." I would so much have liked to know what were
the many lies that she had told me at first, but I knew beforehand
that her answers would be fresh lies. And so I contented myself with
kissing her.  I asked her to tell me one only of those lies. She
replied: "Oh, well; for instance when I said that the sea air was bad
for me." I ceased to insist in the face of this unwillingness to
reveal.

To make her chain appear lighter, the best thing was no doubt to make
her believe that I was myself about to break it. In any case, I could
not at that moment confide this mendacious plan to her, she had been
too kind in returning from the Trocadéro that afternoon; what I could
do, far from distressing her with the threat of a rupture, was at the
most to keep to myself those dreams of a perpetual life together which
my grateful heart kept forming. As I looked at her, I found it hard to
restrain myself from pouring them out to her, and she may perhaps have
noticed this. Unfortunately the expression of such dreams is not
contagious. The case of an affected old woman like M. de Charlus who,
by dint of never seeing in his imagination anything but a stalwart
young man, thinks that he has himself become a stalwart young man, all
the more so the more affected and ridiculous he becomes, this case is
more general, and it is the tragedy of an impassioned lover that he
does not take into account the fact that while he sees in front of him
a beautiful face, his mistress is seeing his face which is not made
any more beautiful, far from it, when it is distorted by the pleasure
that is aroused in it by the sight of beauty. Nor indeed does love
exhaust the whole of this case; we do not see our own body, which
other people see, and we 'follow' our own thought, the object
invisible to other people which is before our eyes. This object the
artist does sometimes enable us to see in his work. Whence it arises
that the admirers of his work are disappointed in its author, upon
whose face that internal beauty is imperfectly reflected.

Every person whom we love, indeed to a certain extent every person is
to us like Janus, presenting to us the face that we like if that
person leaves us, the repellent face if we know him or her to be
perpetually at our disposal.  In the case of Albertine, the prospect
of her continued society was painful to me in another fashion which I
cannot explain in this narrative.  It is terrible to have the life of
another person attached to our own like a bomb which we hold in our
hands, unable to get rid of it without committing a crime. But let us
take as a parallel the ups and downs, the dangers, the anxieties, the
fear of seeing believed in time to come false and probable things
which one will not be able then to explain, feelings that one
experiences if one lives in the intimate society of a madman. For
instance, I pitied M. de Charlus for living with Morel (immediately
the memory of the scene that afternoon made me feel the left side of
my breast heavier than the other); leaving out of account the
relations that may or may not have existed between them, M. de Charlus
must have been unaware at the outset that Morel was mad. Morel's
beauty, his stupidity, his pride must have deterred the Baron from
exploring so deeply, until the days of melancholy when Morel accused
M. de Charlus of responsibility for his sorrows, without being able to
furnish any explanation, abused him for his want of confidence, by the
aid of false but extremely subtle reasoning, threatened him with
desperate resolutions, while throughout all this there persisted the
most cunning regard for his own most immediate interests But all this
is only a comparison. Albertine was not mad.



I learned that a death had occurred during the day which distressed me
greatly, that of Bergotte. It was known that he had been ill for a
long time past. Not, of course, with the illness from which he had
suffered originally and which was natural. Nature hardly seems capable
of giving us any but quite short illnesses. But medicine has annexed
to itself the art of prolonging them. Remedies, the respite that they
procure, the relapses that a temporary cessation of them provokes,
compose a sham illness to which the patient grows so accustomed that
he ends by making it permanent, just as children continue to give way
to fits of coughing long after they have been cured of the whooping
cough. Then remedies begin to have less effect, the doses are
increased, they cease to do any good, but they have begun to do harm
thanks to that lasting indisposition. Nature would not have offered
them so long a tenure. It is a great miracle that medicine can almost
equal nature in forcing a man to remain in bed, to continue on pain of
death the use of some drug. From that moment the illness artificially
grafted has taken root, has become a secondary but a genuine illness,
with this difference only that natural illnesses are cured, but never
those which medicine creates, for it knows not the secret of their
cure.

For years past Bergotte had ceased to go out of doors. Anyhow, he had
never cared for society, or had cared for it for a day only, to
despise it as he despised everything else and in the same fashion,
which was his own, namely to despise a thing not because it was beyond
his reach but as soon as he had reached it. He lived so simply that
nobody suspected how rich he was, and anyone who had known would still
have been mistaken, for he would have thought him a miser, whereas no
one was ever more generous.  He was generous above all towards
women,--girls, one ought rather to say--who were ashamed to receive so
much in return for so little. He excused himself in his own eyes
because he knew that he could never produce such good work as in an
atmosphere of amorous feelings. Love is too strong a word, pleasure
that is at all deeply rooted in the flesh is helpful to literary work
because it cancels all other pleasures, for instance the pleasures of
society, those which are the same for everyone. And even if this love
leads to disillusionment, it does at least stir, even by so doing, the
surface of the soul which otherwise would be in danger of becoming
stagnant. Desire is therefore not without its value to the writer in
detaching him first of all from his fellow men and from conforming to
their standards, and afterwards in restoring some degree of movement
to a spiritual machine which, after a certain age, tends to become
paralysed.  We do not succeed in being happy but we make observation
of the reasons which prevent us from being happy and which would have
remained invisible to us but for these loopholes opened by
disappointment. Dreams are not to be converted into reality, that we
know; we would not form any, perhaps, were it not for desire, and it
is useful to us to form them in order to see them fail and to be
instructed by their failure. And so Bergotte said to himself: "I am
spending more than a multimillionaire would spend upon girls, but the
pleasures or disappointments that they give me make me write a book
which brings me money." Economically, this argument was absurd, but no
doubt he found some charm in thus transmuting gold into caresses and
caresses into gold. We saw, at the time of my grandmother's death, how
a weary old age loves repose. Now in society, there is nothing but
conversation. It may be stupid, but it has the faculty of suppressing
women who are nothing more than questions and answers. Removed from
society, women become once more what is so reposeful to a weary old
man, an object of contemplation. In any case, it was no longer a
question of anything of this sort. I have said that Bergotte never
went out of doors, and when he got out of bed for an hour in his room,
he would be smothered in shawls, plaids, all the things with which a
person covers himself before exposing himself to intense cold or
getting into a railway train. He would apologise to the few friends
whom he allowed to penetrate to his sanctuary, and, pointing to his
tartan plaids, his travelling-rugs, would say merrily: "After all, my
dear fellow, life, as Anaxagoras has said, is a journey." Thus he went
on growing steadily colder, a tiny planet that offered a prophetic
image of the greater, when gradually heat will withdraw from the
earth, then life itself. Then the resurrection will have come to an
end, for if, among future generations, the works of men are to shine,
there must first of all be men. If certain kinds of animals hold out
longer against the invading chill, when there are no longer any men,
and if we suppose Bergotte's fame to have lasted so long, suddenly it
will be extinguished for all time. It will not be the last animals
that will read him, for it is scarcely probable that, like the
Apostles on the Day of Pentecost, they will be able to understand the
speech of the various races of mankind without having learned it.

In the months that preceded his death, Bergotte suffered from
insomnia, and what was worse, whenever he did fall asleep, from
nightmares which, if he awoke, made him reluctant to go to sleep
again. He had long been a lover of dreams, even of bad dreams, because
thanks to them and to the contradiction they present to the reality
which we have before us in our waking state, they give us, at the
moment of waking if not before, the profound sensation of having
slept. But Bergotte's nightmares were not like that. When he spoke of
nightmares, he used in the past to mean unpleasant things that passed
through his brain. Latterly, it was as though proceeding from
somewhere outside himself that he would see a hand armed with a damp
cloth which, passed over his face by an evil woman, kept scrubbing him
awake, an intolerable itching in his thighs, the rage--because
Bergotte had murmured in his sleep that he was driving badly--of a
raving lunatic of a cabman who flung himself upon the writer, biting
and gnawing his fingers. Finally, as soon as in his sleep it had grown
sufficiently dark, nature arranged a sort of undress rehearsal of the
apoplectic stroke that was to carry him off: Bergotte arrived in a
carriage beneath the porch of Swann's new house, and tried to alight.
A stunning giddiness glued him to his seat, the porter came forward to
help him out of the carriage, he remained seated, unable to rise,--to
straighten his legs. He tried to pull himself up with the help of the
stone pillar that was by his side, but did not find sufficient support
in it to enable him to stand.

He consulted doctors who, flattered at being called in by him, saw in
his virtue as an incessant worker (it was twenty years since he had
written anything), in his overstrain, the cause of his ailments. They
advised him not to read thrilling stories (he never read anything), to
benefit more by the sunshine, which was 'indispensable to life' (he
had owed a few years of comparative health only to his rigorous
seclusion indoors), to take nourishment (which made him thinner, and
nourished nothing but his nightmares).  One of his doctors was blessed
with the spirit of contradiction, and whenever Bergotte consulted him
in the absence of the others, and, in order not to offend him,
suggested to him as his own ideas what the others had advised, this
doctor, thinking that Bergotte was seeking to have prescribed for him
something that he himself liked, at once forbade it, and often for
reasons invented so hurriedly to meet the case that in face of the
material objections which Bergotte raised, this argumentative doctor
was obliged in the same sentence to contradict himself, but, for fresh
reasons, repeated the original prohibition. Bergotte returned to one
of the first of these doctors, a man who prided himself on his
cleverness, especially in the presence of one of the leading men of
letters, and who, if Bergotte insinuated: "I seem to remember, though,
that Dr. X-----told me--long ago, of course--that that might congest
my kidneys and brain..." would smile sardonically, raise his finger
and enounce: "I said use, I did not say abuse. Naturally every remedy,
if one takes it in excess, becomes a two-edged sword." There is in the
human body a certain instinct for what is beneficial to us, as there
is in the heart for what is our moral duty, an instinct which no
authorisation by a Doctor of Medicine or Divinity can replace. We know
that cold baths are bad for us, we like them, we can always find a
doctor to recommend them, not to prevent them from doing us harm. From
each of these doctors Bergotte took something which, in his own
wisdom, he had forbidden himself for years past. After a few weeks,
his old troubles had reappeared, the new had become worse. Maddened by
an unintermittent pain, to which was added insomnia broken only by
brief spells of nightmare, Bergotte called in no more doctors and
tried with success, but to excess, different narcotics, hopefully
reading the prospectus that accompanied each of them, a prospectus
which proclaimed the necessity of sleep but hinted that all the
preparations which induce it (except that contained in the bottle
round which the prospectus was wrapped, which never produced any toxic
effect) were toxic, and therefore made the remedy worse than the
disease. Bergotte tried them all.  Some were of a different family
from those to which we are accustomed, preparations for instance of
amyl and ethyl. When we absorb a new drug, entirely different in
composition, it is always with a delicious expectancy of the unknown.
Our heart beats as at a first assignation. To what unknown forms of
sleep, of dreams, is the newcomer going to lead us? He is inside us
now, he has the control of our thoughts. In what fashion are we going
to fall asleep? And, once we are asleep, by what strange paths, up to
what peaks, into what unfathomed gulfs is he going to lead us? With
what new grouping of sensations are we to become acquainted on this
journey? Will it bring us in the end to illness? To blissful
happiness? To death? Bergotte's death had come to him overnight, when
he had thus entrusted himself to one of these friends (a friend? or an
enemy, rather?) who proved too strong for him. The circumstances of
his death were as follows. An attack of uraemia, by no means serious,
had led to his being ordered to rest. But one of the critics having
written somewhere that in Vermeer's _Street in Delft_ (lent by the
Gallery at The Hague for an Exhibition of Dutch painting), a picture
which he adored and imagined that he knew by heart, a little patch of
yellow wall (which he could not remember) was so well painted that it
was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of
Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself, Bergotte ate a
few potatoes, left the house, and went to the exhibition. At the first
few steps that he had to climb he was overcome by giddiness. He passed
in front of several pictures and was struck by the stiffness and
futility of so artificial a school, nothing of which equalled the
fresh air and sunshine of a Venetian palazzo, or of an ordinary house
by the sea.  At last he came to the Vermeer which he remembered as
more striking, more different from anything else that he knew, but in
which, thanks to the critic's article, he remarked for the first time
some small figures in blue, that the ground was pink, and finally the
precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His giddiness
increased; he fixed his eyes, like a child upon a yellow butterfly
which it is trying to catch, upon the precious little patch of wall.
"That is how I ought to have written," he said. "My last books are too
dry, I ought to have gone over them with several coats of paint, made
my language exquisite in itself, like this little patch of yellow
wall." Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his
condition.  In a celestial balance there appeared to him, upon one of
its scales, his own life, while the other contained the little patch
of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly
surrendered the former for the latter.  "All the same," he said to
himself, "I have no wish to provide the 'feature' of this exhibition
for the evening papers."

He repeated to himself: "Little patch of yellow wall, with a sloping
roof, little patch of yellow wall." While doing so he sank down upon a
circular divan; and then at once he ceased to think that his life was
in jeopardy and, reverting to his natural optimism, told himself: "It
is just an ordinary indigestion from those potatoes; they weren't
properly cooked; it is nothing." A fresh attack beat him down; he
rolled from the divan to the floor, as visitors and attendants came
hurrying to his assistance. He was dead.  Permanently dead? Who shall
say? Certainly our experiments in spiritualism prove no more than the
dogmas of religion that the soul survives death.  All that we can say
is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it
carrying the burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there
is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can
make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be fastidious, to be
polite even, nor make the talented artist consider himself obliged to
begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration
aroused by which will matter little to his body devoured by worms,
like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much knowledge and skill
by an artist who must for ever remain unknown and is barely identified
under the name Vermeer. All these obligations which have not their
sanction in our present life seem to belong to a different world,
founded upon kindness, scrupulosity, self-sacrifice, a world entirely
different from this, which we leave in order to be born into this
world, before perhaps returning to the other to live once again
beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we have obeyed because we
bore their precepts in our hearts, knowing not whose hand had traced
them there--those laws to which every profound work of the intellect
brings us nearer and which are invisible only--and still!--to fools.
So that the idea that Bergotte was not wholly and permanently dead is
by no means improbable.

They buried him, but all through the night of mourning, in the lighted
windows, his books arranged three by three kept watch like angels with
outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his
resurrection.




I learned, I have said, that day that Bergotte was dead. And I
marvelled at the carelessness of the newspapers which--each of them
reproducing the same paragraph--stated that he had died the day
before. For, the day before, Albertine had met him, as she informed me
that very evening, and indeed she had been a little late in coming
home, for she had stopped for some time talking to him. She was
doubtless the last person to whom he had spoken. She knew him through
myself who had long ceased to see him, but, as she had been anxious to
make his acquaintance, I had, a year earlier, written to ask the old
master whether I might bring her to see him.  He had granted my
request, a trifle hurt, I fancy, that I should be visiting him only to
give pleasure to another person, which was a proof of my indifference
to himself. These cases are frequent: sometimes the man or woman whom
we implore to receive us not for the pleasure of conversing with them
again, but on behalf of a third person, refuses so obstinately that
our protégée concludes that we have boasted of an influence which we
do not possess; more often the man of genius or the famous beauty
consents, but, humiliated in their glory, wounded in their affection,
feel for us afterwards only a diminished, sorrowful, almost
contemptuous attachment.  I discovered long after this that I had
falsely accused the newspapers of inaccuracy, since on the day in
question Albertine had not met Bergotte, but at the time I had never
suspected this for a single instant, so naturally had she told me of
the incident, and it was not until much later that I discovered her
charming skill in lying with simplicity. The things that she said, the
things that she confessed were so stamped with the character of formal
evidence--what we see, what we learn from an unquestionable
source--that she sowed thus in the empty spaces of her life episodes
of another life the falsity of which I did not then suspect and began
to perceive only at a much later date. I have used the word
'confessed,' for the following reason. Sometimes a casual meeting gave
me a jealous suspicion in which by her side there figured in the past,
or alas in the future, another person. In order to appear certain of
my facts, I mentioned the person's name, and Albertine said: "Yes, I
met her, a week ago, just outside the house. I had to be polite and
answer her when she spoke to me. I walked a little way with her. But
there never has been anything between us. There never will be." Now
Albertine had not even met this person, for the simple reason that the
person had not been in Paris for the last ten months. But my mistress
felt that a complete denial would sound hardly probable. Whence this
imaginary brief encounter, related so simply that I could see the lady
stop, bid her good day, walk a little way with her. The evidence of my
senses, if I had been in the street at that moment, would perhaps have
informed me that the lady had not been with Albertine. But if I had
knowledge of the fact, it was by one of those chains of reasoning in
which the words of people in whom we have confidence insert strong
links, and not by the evidence of my senses. To invoke this evidence
of the senses I should have had to be in the street at that particular
moment, and I had not been. We may imagine, however, that such an
hypothesis is not improbable: I might have gone out, and have been
passing along the street at the time at which Albertine was to tell me
in the evening (not having seen me there) that she had gone a little
way with the lady, and I should then have known that Albertine was
lying. But is that quite certain even then? A religious obscurity
would have clouded my mind, I should have begun to doubt whether I had
seen her by herself, I should barely have sought to understand by what
optical illusion I had failed to perceive the lady, and should not
have been greatly surprised to find myself mistaken, for the stellar
universe is not so difficult of comprehension as the real actions of
other people, especially of the people with whom we are in love,
strengthened as they are against our doubts by fables devised for
their protection. For how many years on end can they not allow our
apathetic love to believe that they have in some foreign country a
sister, a brother, a sister-in-law who have never existed!

The evidence of the senses is also an operation of the mind in which
conviction creates the evidence. We have often seen her sense of
hearing convey to Françoise not the word that was uttered but what she
thought to be its correct form, which was enough to prevent her from
hearing the correction implied in a superior pronunciation. Our butler
was cast in a similar mould. M. de Charlus was in the habit of wearing
at this time--for he was constantly changing--very light trousers
which were recognisable a mile off. Now our butler, who thought that
the word _pissotière_ (the word denoting what M. de Rambuteau had been
so annoyed to hear the Duc de Guermantes call a Rambuteau stall) was
really _pistière_, never once in the whole of his life heard a single
person say _pissotière_, albeit the word was frequently pronounced
thus in his hearing. But error is more obstinate than faith and does
not examine the grounds of its belief. Constantly the butler would
say: "I'm sure M. le Baron de Charlus must have caught a disease to
stand about as long as he does in a _pistière_. That's what comes of
running after the girls at his age. You can tell what he is by his
trousers. This morning, Madame sent me with a message to Neuilly. As I
passed the _pistière_ in the Rue de Bourgogne I saw M. le Baron de
Charlus go in. When I came back from Neuilly, quite an hour later, I
saw his yellow trousers in the same _pistière_, in the same place, in
the middle stall where he always goes so that people shan't see him."
I can think of no one more beautiful, more noble or more youthful than
a certain niece of Mme. de Guermantes. But I have heard the porter of
a restaurant where I used sometimes to dine say as she went by: "Just
look at that old trollop, what a style! And she must be eighty, if
she's a day." As far as age went, I find it difficult to believe that
he meant what he said. But the pages clustered round him, who tittered
whenever she went past the hotel on her way to visit, at their house
in the neighbourhood, her charming great-aunts, Mmes.  de Fezensac and
de Bellery, saw upon the face of the young beauty the four-score years
with which, seriously or in jest, the porter had endowed the 'old
trollop.' You would have made them shriek with laughter had you told
them that she was more distinguished than one of the two cashiers of
the hotel, who, devoured by eczema, ridiculously stout, seemed to them
a fine-looking woman. Perhaps sexual desire alone would have been
capable of preventing their error from taking form, if it had been
brought to bear upon the passage of the alleged old trollop, and if
the pages had suddenly begun to covet the young goddess. But for
reasons unknown, which were most probably of a social nature, this
desire had not come into play. There is moreover ample room for
discussion. The universe is true for us all and dissimilar to each of
us. If we were not obliged, to preserve the continuity of our story,
to confine ourselves to frivolous reasons, how many more serious
reasons would permit us to demonstrate the falsehood and flimsiness of
the opening pages of this volume in which, from my bed, I hear the
world awake, now to one sort of weather, now to another. Yes, I have
been forced to whittle down the facts, and to be a liar, but it is not
one universe, there are millions, almost as many as the number of
human eyes and brains in existence, that awake every morning.

To return to Albertine, I have never known any woman more amply
endowed than herself with the happy aptitude for a lie that is
animated, coloured with the selfsame tints of life, unless it be one
of her friends--one of my blossoming girls also, rose-pink as
Albertine, but one whose irregular profile, concave in one place, then
convex again, was exactly like certain clusters of pink flowers the
name of which I have forgotten, but which have long and sinuous
concavities. This girl was, from the point of view of story-telling,
superior to Albertine, for she never introduced any of those painful
moments, those furious innuendoes, which were frequent with my
mistress. I have said, however, that she was charming when she
invented a story which left no room for doubt, for one saw then in
front of her the thing--albeit imaginary--which she was saying, using
it as an illustration of her speech. Probability alone inspired
Albertine, never the desire to make me jealous. For Albertine, without
perhaps any material interest, liked people to be polite to her. And
if in the course of this work I have had and shall have many occasions
to shew how jealousy intensifies love, it is the lover's point of view
that I have adopted. But if that lover be only the least bit proud,
and though he were to die of a separation, he will not respond to a
supposed betrayal with a courteous speech, he will turn away, or
without going will order himself to assume a mask of coldness.  And so
it is entirely to her own disadvantage that his mistress makes him
suffer so acutely. If, on the contrary, she dispels with a tactful
word, with loving caresses, the suspicions that have been torturing
him for all his show of indifference, no doubt the lover does not feel
that despairing increase of love to which jealousy drives him, but
ceasing in an instant to suffer, happy, affectionate, relieved from
strain as one is after a storm when the rain has ceased and one barely
hears still splash at long intervals from the tall horse-chestnut
trees the clinging drops which already the reappearing sun has dyed
with colour, he does not know how to express his gratitude to her who
has cured him. Albertine knew that I liked to reward her for her
kindnesses, and this perhaps explained why she used to invent, to
exculpate herself, confessions as natural as these stories the truth
of which I never doubted, one of them being that of her meeting with
Bergotte when he was already dead. Previously I had never known any of
Albertine's lies save those that, at Balbec for instance, Françoise
used to report to me, which I have omitted from these pages albeit
they hurt me so sorely: "As she didn't want to come, she said to me:
'Couldn't you say to Monsieur that you didn't find me, that I had gone
out?'" But our 'inferiors,' who love us as Françoise loved me, take
pleasure in wounding us in our self-esteem.




CHAPTER TWO

THE VERDURINS QUARREL WITH M. DE CHARLUS


After dinner, I told Albertine that, since I was out of bed, I might
as well take the opportunity to go and see some of my friends, Mme. de
Villeparisis, Mme. de Guermantes, the Cambremers, anyone in short whom
I might find at home. I omitted to mention only the people whom I did
intend to see, the Verdurins. I asked her if she would not come with
me. She pleaded that she had no suitable clothes. "Besides, my hair is
so awful.  Do you really wish me to go on doing it like this?" And by
way of farewell she held out her hand to me in that abrupt fashion,
the arm outstretched, the shoulders thrust back, which she used to
adopt on the beach at Balbec and had since then entirely abandoned.
This forgotten gesture retransformed the body which it animated into
that of the Albertine who as yet scarcely knew me. It restored to
Albertine, ceremonious beneath an air of rudeness, her first novelty,
her strangeness, even her setting. I saw the sea behind this girl whom
I had never seen shake hands with me in this fashion since I was at
the seaside. "My aunt thinks it makes me older," she added with a
sullen air. "Oh that her aunt may be right!" thought I.  "That
Albertine by looking like a child should make Mme. Bontemps appear
younger than she is, is all that her aunt would ask, and also that
Albertine shall cost her nothing between now and the day when, by
marrying me, she will repay what has been spent on her." But that
Albertine should appear less young, less pretty, should turn fewer
heads in the street, that is what I, on the contrary, hoped. For the
age of a duenna is less reassuring to a jealous lover than the age of
the woman's face whom he loves. I regretted only that the style in
which I had asked her to do her hair should appear to Albertine an
additional bolt on the door of her prison. And it was henceforward
this new domestic sentiment that never ceased, even when I was parted
from Albertine, to form a bond attaching me to her.

I said to Albertine, who was not dressed, or so she told me, to
accompany me to the Guermantes' or the Cambremers', that I could not
be certain where I should go, and set off for the Verdurins'. At the
moment when the thought of the concert that I was going to hear
brought back to my mind the scene that afternoon: "_Grand pied de
grue, grand pied de grue_,"--a scene of disappointed love, of jealous
love perhaps, but if so as bestial as the scene to which a woman might
be subjected by, so to speak, an orang-outang that was, if one may use
the expression, in love with her--at the moment when, having reached
the street, I was just going to hail a cab, I heard the sound of sobs
which a man who was sitting upon a curbstone was endeavouring to
stifle. I came nearer; the man, who had buried his face in his hands,
appeared to be quite young, and I was surprised to see, from the gleam
of white in the opening of his cloak, that he was wearing evening
clothes and a white tie. As he heard my step he uncovered a face
bathed in tears, but at once, having recognised me, turned away. It
was Morel. He guessed that I had recognised him and, checking his
tears with an effort, told me that he had stopped to rest for a
moment, he was in such pain. "I have grossly insulted, only to-day,"
he said, "a person for whom I had the very highest regard. It was a
cowardly thing to do, for she loves me." "She will forget perhaps, as
time goes on," I replied, without realising that by speaking thus I
made it apparent that I had overheard the scene that afternoon. But he
was so much absorbed in his own grief that it never even occurred to
him that I might know something about the affair. "She may forget,
perhaps," he said. "But I myself can never forget. I am too conscious
of my degradation, I am disgusted with myself! However, what I have
said I have said, and nothing can unsay it.  When people make me lose
my temper, I don't know what I am doing.  And it is so bad for me, my
nerves are all on edge," for, like all neurasthenics, he was keenly
interested in his own health. If, during the afternoon, I had
witnessed the amorous rage of an infuriated animal, this evening,
within a few hours, centuries had elapsed and a fresh sentiment, a
sentiment of shame, regret, grief, shewed that a great stage had been
passed in the evolution of the beast destined to be transformed into a
human being.  Nevertheless, I still heard ringing in my ears his
'_grand pied de grue_' and dreaded an imminent return to the savage
state. I had only a very vague impression, however, of what had been
happening, and this was but natural, for M. de Charlus himself was
totally unaware that for some days past, and especially that day, even
before the shameful episode which was not a direct consequence of the
violinist's condition, Morel had been suffering from a recurrence of
his neurasthenia. As a matter of fact, he had, in the previous month,
proceeded as rapidly as he had been able, a great deal less rapidly
than he would have liked, towards the seduction of Jupien's niece with
whom he was at liberty, now that they were engaged, to go out whenever
he chose. But whenever he had gone a trifle far in his attempts at
violation, and especially when he suggested to his betrothed that she
might make friends with other girls whom she would then procure for
himself, he had met with a resistance that made him furious. All at
once (whether she would have proved too chaste, or on the contrary
would have surrendered herself) his desire had subsided. He had
decided to break with her, but feeling that the Baron, vicious as he
might be, was far more moral than himself, he was afraid lest, in the
event of a rupture, M. de Charlus might turn him out of the house. And
so he had decided, a fortnight ago, that he would not see the girl
again, would leave M. de Charlus and Jupien to clean up the mess (he
employed a more realistic term) by themselves, and, before announcing
the rupture, to 'b-----off' to an unknown destination.

For all that his conduct towards Jupien's niece coincided exactly, in
its minutest details, with the plan of conduct which he had outlined
to the Baron as they were dining together at Saint-Mars le Vêtu, it is
probable that his intention was entirely different, and that
sentiments of a less atrocious nature, which he had not foreseen in
his theory of conduct, had improved, had tinged it with sentiment in
practice. The sole point in which, on the contrary, the practice was
worse than the theory is this, that in theory it had not appeared to
him possible that he could remain in Paris after such an act of
betrayal. Now, on the contrary, actually to 'b------off' for so small
a matter seemed to him quite unnecessary. It meant leaving the Baron
who would probably be furious, and forfeiting his own position.  He
would lose all the money that the Baron was now giving him. The
thought that this was inevitable made his nerves give away altogether,
he cried for hours on end, and in order not to think about it any more
dosed himself cautiously with morphine. Then suddenly he hit upon an
idea which no doubt had gradually been taking shape in his mind and
gaining strength there for some time, and this was that a rupture with
the girl would not inevitably mean a complete break with M. de
Charlus. To lose all the Baron's money was a serious thing in itself.
Morel in his uncertainty remained for some days a prey to dark
thoughts, such as came to him at the sight of Bloch. Then he decided
that Jupien and his niece had been trying to set a trap for him, that
they might consider themselves lucky to be rid of him so cheaply. He
found in short that the girl had been in the wrong in being so clumsy,
in not having managed to keep him attached to her by a sensual
attraction. Not only did the sacrifice of his position with M.  de
Charlus seem to him absurd, he even regretted the expensive dinners he
had given the girl since they became engaged, the exact cost of which
he knew by heart, being a true son of the valet who used to bring his
'book' every month for my uncle's inspection. For the word book, in
the singular, which means a printed volume to humanity in general,
loses that meaning among Royal Princes and servants. To the latter it
means their housekeeping book, to the former the register in which we
inscribe our names.  (At Balbec one day when the Princesse de
Luxembourg told me that she had not brought a book with her, I was
about to offer her _Le Pêcheur d'Islande_ and _Tartarîn de Tarascon_,
when I realised that she had meant not that she would pass the time
less agreeably, but that I should find it more difficult to pay a call
upon her.)

Notwithstanding the change in Morel's point of view with regard to the
consequences of his behaviour, albeit that behaviour would have seemed
to him abominable two months earlier, when he was passionately in love
with Jupien's niece, whereas during the last fortnight he had never
ceased to assure himself that the same behaviour was natural,
praiseworthy, it continued to intensify the state of nervous unrest in
which, finally, he had announced the rupture that afternoon. And he
was quite prepared to vent his anger, if not (save in a momentary
outburst) upon the girl, for whom he still felt that lingering fear,
the last trace of love, at any rate upon the Baron. He took care,
however, not to say anything to him before dinner, for, valuing his
own professional skill above everything, whenever he had any difficult
music to play (as this evening at the Verdurins') he avoided (as far
as possible, and the scene that afternoon was already more than ample)
anything that might impair the flexibility of his wrists. Similarly a
surgeon who is an enthusiastic motorist, does not drive when he has an
operation to perform. This accounts to me for the fact that, while he
was speaking to me, he kept bending his fingers gently one after
another to see whether they had regained their suppleness. A slight
frown seemed to indicate that there was still a trace of nervous
stiffness. But, so as not to increase it, he relaxed his features, as
we forbid ourself to grow irritated at not being able to sleep or to
prevail upon a woman, for fear lest our rage itself may retard the
moment of sleep or of satisfaction. And so, anxious to regain his
serenity so that he might, as was his habit, absorb himself entirely
in what he was going to play at the Verdurins', and anxious, so long
as I was watching him, to let me see how unhappy he was, he decided
that the simplest course was to beg me to leave him immediately.  His
request was superfluous, and it was a relief to me to get away from
him.  I had trembled lest, as we were due at the same house, within a
few minutes, he might ask me to take him with me, my memory of the
scene that afternoon being too vivid not to give me a certain distaste
for the idea of having Morel by my side during the drive. It is quite
possible that the love, and afterwards the indifference or hatred felt
by Morel for Jupien's niece had been sincere. Unfortunately, it was
not the first time that he had behaved thus, that he had suddenly
'dropped' a girl to whom he had sworn undying love, going so far as to
produce a loaded revolver, telling her that he would blow out his
brains if ever he was mean enough to desert her. He did nevertheless
desert her in time, and felt instead of remorse, a sort of rancour
against her. It was not the first time that he had behaved thus, it
was not to be the last, with the result that the heads of many
girls--girls less forgetful of him than he was of them--suffered--as
Jupien's niece's head continued long afterwards to suffer, still in
love with Morel although she despised him--suffered, ready to burst
with the shooting of an internal pain because in each of them--like a
fragment of a Greek carving--an aspect of Morel's face, hard as marble
and beautiful as an antique sculpture, was embedded in her brain, with
his blossoming hair, his fine eyes, his straight nose, forming a
protuberance in a cranium not shaped to receive it, upon which no
operation was possible.  But in the fulness of time these stony
fragments end by slipping into a place where they cause no undue
discomfort, from which they never stir again; we are no longer
conscious of their presence: I mean forgetfulness, or an indifferent
memory.

Meanwhile I had gained two things in the course of the day. On the one
hand, thanks to the calm that was produced in me by Albertine's
docility, I found it possible, and therefore made up my mind, to break
with her. There was on the other hand, the fruit of my reflexions
during the interval that I had spent waiting for her, at the piano,
the idea that Art, to which I would try to devote my reconquered
liberty, was not a thing that justified one in making a sacrifice, a
thing above and beyond life, that did not share in its fatuity and
futility; the appearance of real individuality obtained in works of
art being due merely to the illusion created by the artist's technical
skill. If my afternoon had left behind it other deposits, possibly
more profound, they were not to come to my knowledge until much later.
As for the two which I was able thus to weigh, they were not to be
permanent; for, from this very evening my ideas about art were to rise
above the depression to which they had been subjected in the
afternoon, while on the other hand my calm, and consequently the
freedom that would enable me to devote myself to it, was once again to
be withdrawn from me.

As my cab, following the line of the embankment, was coming near the
Verdurins' house, I made the driver pull up. I had just seen Brichot
alighting from the tram at the foot of the Rue Bonaparte, after which
he dusted his shoes with an old newspaper and put on a pair of pearl
grey gloves.  I went up to him on foot. For some time past, his sight
having grown steadily weaker, he had been endowed--as richly as an
observatory--with new spectacles of a powerful and complicated kind,
which, like astronomical instruments, seemed to be screwed into his
eyes; he focussed their exaggerated blaze upon myself and recognised
me. They--the spectacles--were in marvellous condition. But behind
them I could see, minute, pallid, convulsive, expiring, a remote gaze
placed under this powerful apparatus, as, in a laboratory equipped out
of all proportion to the work that is done in it, you may watch the
last throes of some insignificant animalcule through the latest and
most perfect type of microscope. I offered him my arm to guide him on
his way. "This time it is not by great Cherbourg that we meet," he
said to me, "but by little Dunkerque," a remark which I found
extremely tiresome, as I failed to understand what he meant; and yet I
dared not ask Brichot, dreading not so much his scorn as his
explanations. I replied that I was longing to see the room in which
Swann used to meet Odette every evening. "What, so you know that old
story, do you?" he said. "And yet from those days to the death of
Swann is what the poet rightly calls: '_Grande spatium mortalis
aevi_.'"

The death of Swann had been a crushing blow to me at the time. The
death of Swann! Swann, in this phrase, is something more than a noun
in the possessive case. I mean by it his own particular death, the
death allotted by destiny to the service of Swann. For we talk of
'death' for convenience, but there are almost as many different deaths
as there are people. We are not equipped with a sense that would
enable us to see, moving at every speed in every direction, these
deaths, the active deaths aimed by destiny at this person or that.
Often there are deaths that will not be entirely relieved of their
duties until two or even three years later.  They come in haste to
plant a tumour in the side of a Swann, then depart to attend to their
other duties, returning only when, the surgeons having performed their
operation, it is necessary to plant the tumour there afresh.  Then
comes the moment when we read in the _Gaulois_ that Swann's health has
been causing anxiety but that he is now making an excellent recovery.
Then, a few minutes before the breath leaves our body, death, like a
sister of charity who has come to nurse, rather than to destroy us,
enters to preside over our last moments, crowns with a supreme halo
the cold and stiffening creature whose heart has ceased to beat. And
it is this diversity among deaths, the mystery of their circuits, the
colour of their fatal badge, that makes so impressive a paragraph in
the newspapers such as this:

"We regret to learn that M. Charles Swann passed away yesterday at his
residence in Paris, after a long and painful illness. A Parisian whose
intellectual gifts were widely appreciated, a discriminating but
steadfastly loyal friend, he will be universally regretted, in those
literary and artistic circles where the soundness and refinement of
his taste made him a willing and a welcome guest, as well as at the
Jockey Club of which he was one of the oldest and most respected
members. He belonged also to the Union and Agricole. He had recently
resigned his membership of the Rue Royale.  His personal appearance
and eminently distinguished bearing never failed to arouse public
interest at all the great events of the musical and artistic seasons,
especially at private views, at which he was a regular attendant
until, during the last years of his life, he became almost entirely
confined to the house. The funeral will take place, etc."

>From this point of view, if one is not 'somebody,' the absence of a
well known title makes the process of decomposition even more rapid.
No doubt it is more or less anonymously, without any personal
identity, that a man still remains Duc d'Uzès. But the ducal coronet
does for some time hold the elements together, as their moulds keep
together those artistically designed ices which Albertine admired,
whereas the names of ultra-fashionable commoners, as soon as they are
dead, dissolve and lose their shape. We have seen M. de Bréauté speak
of Cartier as the most intimate friend of the Duc de La Trémoïlle, as
a man greatly in demand in aristocratic circles. To a later
generation, Cartier has become something so formless that it would
almost be adding to his importance to make him out as related to the
jeweller Cartier, with whom he would have smiled to think that anybody
could be so ignorant as to confuse him! Swann on the contrary was a
remarkable personality, in both the intellectual and the artistic
worlds; and even although he had 'produced' nothing, still he had a
chance of surviving a little longer. And yet, my dear Charles-----,
whom I used to know when I was still so young and you were nearing
your grave, it is because he whom you must have regarded as a little
fool has made you the hero of one of his volumes that people are
beginning to speak of you again and that your name will perhaps live.
If in Tissot's picture representing the balcony of the Rue Royale
club, where you figure with Galliffet, Edmond Polignac and
Saint-Maurice, people are always drawing attention to yourself, it is
because they know that there are some traces of you in the character
of Swann.

To return to more general realities, it was of this foretold and yet
unforeseen death of Swann that I had heard him speak himself to the
Duchesse de Guermantes, on the evening of her cousin's party. It was
the same death whose striking and specific strangeness had recurred to
me one evening when, as I ran my eye over the newspaper, my attention
was suddenly arrested by the announcement of it, as though traced in
mysterious lines interpolated there out of place. They had sufficed to
make of a living man some one who can never again respond to what you
say to him, to reduce him to a mere name, a written name, that has
passed in a moment from the real world to the realm of silence. It was
they that even now made me anxious to make myself familiar with the
house in which the Verdurins had lived, and where Swann, who at that
time was not merely a row of five letters printed in a newspaper, had
dined so often with Odette. I must add also (and this is what for a
long time made Swann's death more painful than any other, albeit these
reasons bore no relation to the individual strangeness of his death)
that I had never gone to see Gilberte, as I promised him at the
Princesse de Guermantes's, that he had never told me what the 'other
reason' was, to which he alluded that evening, for his selecting me as
the recipient of his conversation with the Prince, that a thousand
questions occurred to me (as bubbles rise from the bottom of a pond)
which I longed to ask him about the most different subjects: Vermeer,
M.  de Mouchy, Swann himself, a Boucher tapestry, Combray, questions
that doubtless were not very vital since I had put off asking them
from day to day, but which seemed to me of capital importance now
that, his lips being sealed, no answer would ever come.

"No," Brichot went on, "it was not here that Swann met his future
wife, or rather it was here only in the very latest period, after the
disaster that partially destroyed Mme. Verdurin's former home."

Unfortunately, in my fear of displaying before the eyes of Brichot an
extravagance which seemed to me out of place, since the professor had
no share in its enjoyment, I had alighted too hastily from the
carriage and the driver had not understood the words I had flung at
him over my shoulder in order that I might be well clear of the
carriage before Brichot caught sight of me. The consequence was that
the driver followed us and asked me whether he was to call for me
later; I answered hurriedly in the affirmative, and was regarded with
a vastly increased respect by the professor who had come by omnibus.

"Ah! So you were in a carriage," he said in solemn tones. "Only by the
purest accident. I never take one as a rule. I always travel by
omnibus or on foot. However, it may perhaps entitle me to the great
honour of taking you home to-night if you will oblige me by consenting
to enter that rattletrap; we shall be packed rather tight. But you are
always so considerate to me." Alas, in making him this offer, I am
depriving myself of nothing (I reflected) since in any case I shall be
obliged to go home for Albertine's sake. Her presence in my house, at
an hour when nobody could possibly call to see her, allowed me to
dispose as freely of my time as I had that afternoon, when, seated at
the piano, I knew that she was on her way back from the Trocadéro and
that I was in no hurry to see her again. But furthermore, as also in
the afternoon, I felt that I had a woman in the house and that on
returning home I should not taste the fortifying thrill of solitude.
"I accept with great good will," replied Brichot. "At the period to
which you allude, our friends occupied in the Rue Montalivet a
magnificent ground floor apartment with an upper landing, and a garden
behind, less sumptuous of course, and yet to my mind preferable to the
old Venetian Embassy." Brichot informed me that this evening there was
to be at 'Quai Conti' (thus it was that the faithful spoke of the
Verdurin drawing-room since it had been transferred to that address) a
great musical 'tow-row-row' got up by M. de Charlus. He went on to say
that in the old days to which I had referred, the little nucleus had
been different, and its tone not at all the same, not only because the
faithful had then been younger. He told me of elaborate jokes played
by Elstir (what he called 'pure buffooneries'), as for instance one
day when the painter, having pretended to fail at the last moment, had
come disguised as an extra waiter and, as he handed round the dishes,
whispered gallant speeches in the ear of the extremely proper Baroness
Putbus, crimson with anger and alarm; then disappearing before the end
of dinner he had had a hip-bath carried into the drawing-room, out of
which, when the party left the table, he had emerged stark naked
uttering fearful oaths; and also of supper parties to which the guests
came in paper costumes, designed, cut out and coloured by Elstir,
which were masterpieces in themselves, Brichot having worn on one
occasion that of a great nobleman of the court of Charles VII, with
long turned-up points to his shoes, and another time that of Napoleon
I, for which Elstir had fashioned a Grand Cordon of the Legion of
Honour out of sealing-wax. In short Brichot, seeing again with the
eyes of memory the drawing-room of those days with its high windows,
its low sofas devoured by the midday sun which had had to be replaced,
declared that he preferred it to the drawing-room of to-day. Of
course, I quite understood that by 'drawing-room' Brichot meant--as
the word church implies not merely the religious edifice but the
congregation of worshippers--not merely the apartment, but the people
who visited it, the special pleasures that they came to enjoy there,
to which, in his memory, those sofas had imparted their form upon
which, when you called to see Mme.  Verdurin in the afternoon, you
waited until she was ready, while the blossom on the horse chestnuts
outside, and on the mantelpiece carnations in vases seemed, with a
charming and kindly thought for the visitor expressed in the smiling
welcome of their rosy hues, to be watching anxiously for the tardy
appearance of the lady of the house. But if the drawing-room seemed to
him superior to what it was now, it was perhaps because our mind is
the old Proteus who cannot remain the slave of any one shape and, even
in the social world, suddenly abandons a house which has slowly and
with difficulty risen to the pitch of perfection to prefer another
which is less brilliant, just as the 'touched-up' photographs which
Odette had had taken at Otto's, in which she queened it in a
'princess' gown, her hair waved by Lenthéric, did not appeal to Swann
so much as a little 'cabinet picture' taken at Nice, in which, in a
cloth cape, her loosely dressed hair protruding beneath a straw hat
trimmed with pansies and a bow of black ribbon, instead of being
twenty years younger (for women as a rule look all the older in a
photograph, the earlier it is), she looked like a little servant girl
twenty years older than she now was. Perhaps too he derived some
pleasure from praising to me what I myself had never known, from
shewing me that he had tasted delights that I could never enjoy. If
so, he was successful, for merely by mentioning the names of two or
three people who were no longer alive and to each of whom he imparted
something mysterious by his way of referring to them, to that
delicious intimacy, he made me ask myself what it could have been
like; I felt that everything that had been told me about the Verdurins
was far too coarse; and indeed, in the case of Swann whom I had known,
I reproached myself with not having paid him sufficient attention,
with not having paid attention to him in a sufficiently disinterested
spirit, with not having listened to him properly when he used to
entertain me while we waited for his wife to come home for luncheon
and he shewed me his treasures, now that I knew that he was to be
classed with the most brilliant talkers of the past. Just as we were
coming to Mme. Verdurin's doorstep, I caught sight of M. de Charlus,
steering towards us the bulk of his huge body, drawing unwillingly in
his wake one of those blackmailers or mendicants who nowadays,
whenever he appeared, sprang up without fail even in what were to all
appearance the most deserted corners, by whom this powerful monster
was, evidently against his will, invariably escorted, although at a
certain distance, as is the shark by its pilot, in short contrasting
so markedly with the haughty stranger of my first visit to Balbec,
with his stern aspect, his affectation of virility, that I seemed to
be discovering, accompanied by its satellite, a planet at a wholly
different period of its revolution, when one begins to see it full, or
a sick man now devoured by the malady which a few years ago was but a
tiny spot which was easily concealed and the gravity of which was
never suspected. Although the operation that Brichot had undergone had
restored a tiny portion of the sight which he had thought to be lost
for ever, I do not think he had observed the ruffian following in the
Baron's steps. Not that this mattered, for, ever since la Raspelière,
and notwithstanding the professor's friendly regard for M. de Charlus,
the sight of the latter always made him feel ill at ease. No doubt to
every man the life of every other extends along shadowy paths which he
does not suspect.  Falsehood, however, so often treacherous, upon
which all conversation is based, conceals less perfectly a feeling of
hostility, or of sordid interest, or a visit which we wish to look as
though we had not paid, or an escapade with the mistress of a day
which we are anxious to keep from our wife, than a good reputation
covers up--so as not to let their existence be guessed--evil habits.
They may remain unknown to us for a lifetime; an accidental encounter
upon a pier, at night, will disclose them; even then this accidental
discovery is frequently misunderstood and we require a third person,
who is in the secret, to supply the unimaginable clue of which
everyone is unaware. But, once we know about them, they alarm us
because we feel that that way madness lies, far more than by their
immorality.  Mme. de Surgis did not possess the slightest trace of any
moral feeling, and would have admitted anything of her sons that could
be degraded and explained by material interest, which is
comprehensible to all mankind!  But she forbade them to go on visiting
M. de Charlus when she learned that, by a sort of internal clockwork,
he was inevitably drawn upon each of their visits, to pinch their
chins and to make each of them pinch his brother's. She felt that
uneasy sense of a physical mystery which makes us ask ourself whether
the neighbour with whom we have been on friendly terms is not tainted
with cannibalism, and to the Baron's repeated inquiry: "When am I
going to see your sons again?" she would reply, conscious of the
thunderbolts that she was attracting to her defenceless head, that
they were very busy working for examinations, preparing to go abroad,
and so forth. Irresponsibility aggravates faults, and even crimes,
whatever anyone may say. Landru (assuming that he really did kill his
wives) if he did so from a financial motive, which it is possible to
resist, may be pardoned, but not if his crime was due to an
irresistible Sadism.




CHAPTER TWO (continued)

THE VERDURINS QUARREL WITH M. DE CHARLUS


Brichot's coarse pleasantries, in the early days of his friendship
with the Baron, had given place, as soon as it was a question, not of
uttering commonplaces, but of understanding, to an awkward feeling
which concealed a certain merriment. He reassured himself by recalling
pages of Plato, lines of Virgil, because, being mentally as well as
physically blind, he did not understand that in those days to fall in
love with a young man was like, in our day (Socrates's jokes reveal
this more clearly than Plato's theories), keeping a dancing girl
before one marries and settles down. M.  de Charlus himself would not
have understood, he who confused his mania with friendship, which does
not resemble it in the least, and the athletes of Praxiteles with
obliging boxers. He refused to see that for the last nineteen hundred
years ("a pious courtier under a pious prince would have been an
atheist under an atheist prince," as Labruyère reminds us) all
conventional homosexuality--that of Plato's young friends as well as
that of Virgil's shepherds--has disappeared, that what survives and
increases is only the involuntary, the neurotic kind, which we conceal
from other people and disguise to ourselves. And M. de Charlus would
have been wrong in not denying frankly the pagan genealogy. In
exchange for a little plastic beauty, how vast the moral superiority!
The shepherd in Theocritus who sighs for love of a boy, later on will
have no reason to be less hard of heart, less dull of wit than the
other shepherd whose flute sounds for Amaryllis.  For the former is
not suffering from a malady, he is conforming to the customs of his
time. It is the homosexuality that survives in spite of obstacles, a
thing of scorn and loathing, that is the only true form, the only form
that can be found conjoined in a person with an enhancement of his
moral qualities. We are appalled at the apparently close relation
between these and our bodily attributes, when we think of the slight
dislocation of a purely physical taste, the slight blemish in one of
the senses, which explain why the world of poets and musicians, so
firmly barred against the Duc de Guermantes, opens its portals to M.
de Charlus. That the latter should shew taste in the furnishing of his
home, which is that of an eclectic housewife, need not surprise us;
but the narrow loophole that opens upon Beethoven and Veronese! This
does not exempt the sane from a feeling of alarm when a madman who has
composed a sublime poem, after explaining to them in the most logical
fashion that he has been shut up by mistake, through his wife's
machinations, imploring them to intercede for him with the governor of
the asylum, complaining of the promiscuous company that is forced upon
him, concludes as follows: "You see that man who is waiting to speak
to me on the lawn, whom I am obliged to put up with; he thinks that he
is Jesus Christ. That alone will shew you the sort of lunatics that I
have to live among; he cannot be Christ, for I am Christ myself!" A
moment earlier, you were on the point of going to assure the governor
that a mistake had been made. At this final speech, even if you bear
in mind the admirable poem at which this same man is working every
day, you shrink from him, as Mme. de Surgis's sons shrank from M. de
Charlus, not that he would have done them any harm, but because of his
ceaseless invitations, the ultimate purpose of which was to pinch
their chins. The poet is to be pitied, who must, with no Virgil to
guide him, pass through the circles of an inferno of sulphur and
brimstone, to cast himself into the fire that falls from heaven, in
order to rescue a few of the inhabitants of Sodom! No charm in his
work; the same severity in his life as in those of the unfrocked
priests who follow the strictest rule of celibacy so that no one may
be able to ascribe to anything but loss of faith their discarding of
the cassock.

Making a pretence of not seeing the seedy individual who was following
in his wake (whenever the Baron ventured into the Boulevards or
crossed the waiting-room in Saint-Lazarre station, these followers
might be counted by the dozen who, in the hope of 'touching him for a
dollar,' never let him out of their sight), and afraid at the same
time that the other might have the audacity to accost him, the Baron
had devoutly lowered his darkened eyelids which, in contrast to his
rice-powdered cheeks, gave him the appearance of a Grand Inquisitor
painted by El Greco. But this priestly expression caused alarm, and he
looked like an unfrocked priest, various compromises to which he had
been driven by the need to apologise for his taste and to keep it
secret having had the effect of bringing to the surface of his face
precisely what the Baron sought to conceal, a debauched life indicated
by moral decay. This last, indeed, whatever be its cause, is easily
detected, for it is never slow in taking bodily form and proliferates
upon a face, especially on the cheeks and round the eyes, as
physically as the ochreous yellows accumulate there in a case of
jaundice or repulsive reds in a case of skin disease. Nor was it
merely in the cheeks, or rather the chaps of this painted face, in the
mammiferous chest, the aggressive rump of this body allowed to
deteriorate and invaded by obesity, upon which there now floated
iridescent as a film of oil, the vice at one time so jealously
confined by M. de Charlus in the most secret chamber of his heart. Now
it overflowed in all his speech.

"So this is how you prowl the streets at night, Brichot, with a
good-looking young man," he said as he joined us, while the
disappointed ruffian made off. "A fine example. We must tell your
young pupils at the Sorbonne that this is how you behave. But, I must
say, the society of youth seems to be good for you, Monsieur le
Professeur, you are as fresh as a rosebud. I have interrupted you, you
looked as though you were enjoying yourselves like a pair of giddy
girls, and had no need of an old Granny Killjoy like myself. I shan't
take it to the confessional, since you are almost at your
destination." The Baron's mood was all the more blithe since he knew
nothing whatever about the scene that afternoon, Jupien having decided
that it was better to protect his niece against a repetition of the
onslaught than to inform M. de Charlus. And so the Baron was still
looking forward to the marriage, and delighting in the thought of it.
One would suppose that it is a consolation to these great solitaries
to give their tragic celibacy the relief of a fictitious fatherhood.
"But, upon my word, Brichot," he went on, turning with a laugh to gaze
at us, "I feel quite awkward when I see you in such gallant company.
You were like a pair of lovers. Going along arm in arm, I say,
Brichot, you do go the pace!" Ought one to ascribe this speech to the
senility of a particular state of mind, less capable than in the past
of controlling its reflexes, which in moments of automatism lets out a
secret that has been so carefully hidden for forty years? Or rather to
that contempt for plebeian opinion which all the Guermantes felt in
their hearts, and of which M. de Charlus's brother, the Duke, was
displaying a variant form when, regardless of the fact that my mother
could see him, he used to shave standing by his bedroom window in his
unbuttoned nightshirt. Had M. de Charlus contracted, during the
roasting journeys between Doncières and Douville, the dangerous habit
of making himself at ease, and, just as he would push back his straw
hat in order to cool his huge forehead, of unfastening--at first, for
a few moments only--the mask that for too long had been rigorously
imposed upon his true face? His conjugal attitude towards Morel might
well have astonished anyone who had observed it in its full extent.
But M. de Charlus had reached the stage when the monotony of the
pleasures that his vice has to offer became wearying. He had sought
instinctively for novel displays, and, growing tired of the strangers
whom he picked up, had passed to the opposite pole, to what he used to
imagine that he would always loathe, the imitation of family life, or
of fatherhood. Sometimes even this did not suffice him, he required
novelty, and would go and spend the night with a woman, just as a
normal man may, once in his life, have wished to go to bed with a boy,
from a curiosity similar though inverse, and in either case equally
unhealthy. The Baron's existence as one of the 'faithful,' living, for
Charlie's sake, entirely among the little clan, had had, in
stultifying the efforts that he had been making for years to keep up
lying appearances, the same influence that a voyage of exploration or
residence in the colonies has upon certain Europeans who discard the
ruling principles by which they were guided at home. And yet, the
internal revolution of a mind, ignorant at first of the anomaly
contained in its body, then appalled at it after the discovery, and
finally growing so used to it as to fail to perceive that it is not
safe to confess to other people what the sinner has come in time to
confess without shame to himself, had been even more effective in
liberating M. de Charlus from the last vestiges of social constraint
than the time that he spent at the Verdurins'.  No banishment, indeed,
to the South Pole, or to the summit of Mont Blanc, can separate us so
entirely from our fellow creatures as a prolonged residence in the
seclusion of a secret vice, that is to say of a state of mind that is
different from theirs. A vice (so M. de Charlus used at one time to
style it) to which the Baron now gave the genial aspect of a mere
failing, extremely common, attractive on the whole and almost amusing,
like laziness, absent-mindedness or greed. Conscious of the curiosity
that his own striking personality aroused, M. de Charlus derived a
certain pleasure from satisfying, whetting, sustaining it. Just as a
Jewish journalist will come forward day after day as the champion of
Catholicism, not, probably, with any hope of being taken seriously,
but simply in order not to disappoint the good-natured amusement of
his readers, M. de Charlus would genially denounce evil habits among
the little clan, as he would have mimicked a person speaking English
or imitated Mounet-Sully, without waiting to be asked, so as to pay
his scot with a good grace, by displaying an amateur talent in
society; so that M. de Charlus now threatened Brichot that he would
report to the Sorbonne that he was in the habit of walking about with
young men, exactly as the circumcised scribe keeps referring in and
out of season to the 'Eldest Daughter of the Church' and the 'Sacred
Heart of Jesus,' that is to say without the least trace of hypocrisy,
but with a distinctly histrionic effect.  It was not only the change
in the words themselves, so different from those that he allowed
himself to use in the past, that seemed to require some explanation,
there was also the change that had occurred in his intonations, his
gestures, all of which now singularly resembled the type M. de Charlus
used most fiercely to castigate; he would now utter unconsciously
almost the same little cries (unconscious in him, and all the more
deep-rooted) as are uttered consciously by the inverts who refer to
one another as 'she'; as though this deliberate 'camping,' against
which M. de Charlus had for so long set his face, were after all
merely a brilliant and faithful imitation of the manner that men of
the Charlus type, whatever they may say, are compelled to adopt when
they have reached a certain stage in their malady, just as sufferers
from general paralysis or locomotor ataxia inevitably end by
displaying certain symptoms. As a matter of fact--and this is what
this purely unconscious 'camping' revealed--the difference between the
stern Charlus, dressed all in black, with his stiffly brushed hair,
whom I had known, and the painted young men, loaded with rings, was no
more than the purely imaginary difference that exists between an
excited person who talks fast, keeps moving all the time, and a
neurotic who talks slowly, preserves a perpetual phlegm, but is
tainted with the same neurasthenia in the eyes of the physician who
knows that each of the two is devoured by the same anguish and marred
by the same defects. At the same time one could tell that M. de
Charlus had aged from wholly different signs, such as the
extraordinary frequency in his conversation of certain expressions
that had taken root in it and used now to crop up at every moment (for
instance: 'the chain of circumstances') upon which the Baron's speech
leaned in sentence after sentence as upon a necessary prop. "Is
Charlie here yet?" Brichot asked M. de Charlus as we came in sight of
the door. "Oh, I don't know," said the Baron, raising his arms and
half-shutting his eyes with the air of a person who does not wish
anyone to accuse him of being indiscreet, all the more so as he had
probably been reproached by Morel for things which he had said and
which the other, as timorous as he was vain, and as ready to deny M.
de Charlus as he was to boast of his friendship, had considered
serious albeit they were quite unimportant. "You know, he never tells
me what he's going to do." If the conversations of two people bound by
a tie of intimacy are full of falsehood, this occurs no less
spontaneously in the conversations that a third person holds with a
lover on the subject of the person with whom the latter is in love,
whatever be the sex of that person.

"Have you seen him lately?" I asked M. de Charlus, with the object of
seeming at once not to be afraid of mentioning Morel to him and not to
believe that they were actually living together. "He came in, as it
happened, for five minutes this morning while I was still half asleep,
and sat down on the side of my bed, as though he wanted to ravish me."
I guessed at once that M. de Charlus had seen Charlie within the last
hour, for if we ask a woman when she last saw the man whom we know to
be--and whom she may perhaps suppose that we suspect of being--her
lover, if she has just taken tea with him, she replies: "I saw him for
an instant before luncheon." Between these two incidents the only
difference is that one is false and the other true, but both are
equally innocent, or, if you prefer it, equally culpable. And so we
should be unable to understand why the mistress (in this case, M. de
Charlus) always chooses the false version, did we not know that such
replies are determined, unknown to the person who utters them, by a
number of factors which appear so out of proportion to the triviality
of the incident that we do not take the trouble to consider them. But
to a physicist the space occupied by the tiniest ball of pith is
explained by the harmony of action, the conflict or equilibrium, of
laws of attraction or repulsion which govern far greater worlds. Just
as many different laws acting in opposite directions dictate the more
general responses with regard to the innocence, the 'platonism,' or on
the contrary the carnal reality of the relations that one has with the
person whom one says one saw in the morning when one has seen him or
her in the evening.  Here we need merely record, without pausing to
consider them, the desire to appear natural and fearless, the
instinctive impulse to conceal a secret assignation, a blend of
modesty and ostentation, the need to confess what one finds so
delightful and to shew that one is loved, a divination of what the
other person knows or guesses--but does not say--a divination which,
exceeding or falling short of the other person's, makes one now
exaggerate, now under-estimate it, the spontaneous longing to play
with fire and the determination to rescue something from the blaze. At
the same time, speaking generally, let us say that M. de Charlus,
notwithstanding the aggravation of his malady which perpetually urged
him to reveal, to insinuate, sometimes boldly to invent compromising
details, did intend, during this period in his life, to make it known
that Charlie was not a man of the same sort as himself and that they
were friends and nothing more.  This did not prevent him (even though
it may quite possibly have been true) from contradicting himself at
times (as with regard to the hour at which they had last met), whether
he forgot himself at such moments and told the truth, or invented a
lie, boastingly or from a sentimental affectation or because he
thought it amusing to baffle his questioner. "You know that he is to
me," the Baron went on, "the best of comrades, for whom I have the
greatest affection, as I am certain" (was he uncertain of it, then,
that he felt the need to say that he was certain?) "he has for me, but
there is nothing at all between us, nothing of that sort, you
understand, nothing of that sort," said the Baron, as naturally as
though he had been speaking of a woman. "Yes, he came in this morning
to pull me out of bed. Though he knows that I hate anybody to see me
in bed. You don't mind? Oh, it's horrible, it's so disturbing, one
looks so perfectly hideous, of course I'm no longer five-and-twenty,
they won't choose me to be Queen of the May, still one does like to
feel that one is looking one's best."

It is possible that the Baron was in earnest when he spoke of Morel as
a good comrade, and that he was being even more truthful than he
supposed when he said: "I never know what he's doing; he tells me
nothing about his life."

Indeed we may mention (interrupting for a few moments our narrative,
which shall be resumed immediately after the closure of this
parenthesis which opens at the moment when M. de Charlus, Brichot and
myself are arriving at Mme. Verdurin's front door), we may mention
that shortly before this evening the Baron had been plunged in grief
and stupefaction by a letter which he had opened by mistake and which
was addressed to Morel. This letter, which by a repercussion was to
cause intense misery to myself also, was written by the actress Léa,
notorious for her exclusive interest in women. And yet her letter to
Morel (whom M. de Charlus had never suspected of knowing her, even)
was written in the most impassioned tone. Its indelicacy prevents us
from reproducing it here, but we may mention that Léa addressed him
throughout in the feminine gender, with such expressions as: "Go on,
you bad woman!" or "Of course you are so, my pretty, you know you
are." And in this letter reference was made to various other women who
seemed to be no less Morel's friends than Léa's. On the other hand,
Morel's sarcasm at the Baron's expense and Léa's at that of an officer
who was keeping her, and of whom she said: "He keeps writing me
letters begging me to be careful! What do you say to that, my little
white puss," revealed to M. de Charlus a state of things no less
unsuspected by him than were Morel's peculiar and intimate relations
with Léa. What most disturbed the Baron was the word 'so.' Ignorant at
first of its application, he had eventually, at a time already remote
in the past, learned that he himself was 'so.' And now the notion that
he had acquired of this word was again put to the challenge. When he
had discovered that he was 'so,' he had supposed this to mean that his
tastes, as Saint-Simon says, did not lie in the direction of women.
And here was this word 'so' applied to Morel with an extension of
meaning of which M.  de Charlus was unaware, so much so that Morel
gave proof, according to this letter, of his being 'so' by having the
same taste as certain women for other women. From that moment the
Baron's jealousy had no longer any reason to confine itself to the men
of Morel's acquaintance, but began to extend to the women also. So
that the people who were 'so' were not merely those that he had
supposed to be 'so,' but a whole and vast section of the inhabitants
of the planet, consisting of women as well as of men, loving not
merely men but women also, and the Baron, in the face of this novel
meaning of a word that was so familiar to him, felt himself tormented
by an anxiety of the mind as well as of the heart, born of this
twofold mystery which combined an extension of the field of his
jealousy with the sudden inadequacy of a definition.

M. de Charlus had never in his life been anything but an amateur. That
is to say, incidents of this sort could never be of any use to him. He
worked off the painful impression that they might make upon him in
violent scenes in which he was a past-master of eloquence, or in
crafty intrigues. But to a person endowed with the qualities of a
Bergotte, for instance, they might have been of inestimable value.
This may indeed explain, to a certain extent (since we have to grope
blindfold, but choose, like the lower animals, the herb that is good
for us), why men like Bergotte have generally lived in the company of
persons who were ordinary, false and malicious. Their beauty is
sufficient for the writer's imagination, enhances his generosity, but
does not in any way alter the nature of his companion, whose life,
situated thousands of feet below the level of his own, her incredible
stories, her lies carried farther, and, what is more, in another
direction than what might have been expected, appear in occasional
flashes. The lie, the perfect lie, about people whom we know, about
the relations that we have had with them, about our motive for some
action, a motive which we express in totally different terms, the lie
as to what we are, whom we love, what we feel with regard to the
person who loves us and believes that she has fashioned us in her own
image because she keeps on kissing us morning, noon and night, that
lie is one of the only things in the world that can open a window for
us upon what is novel, unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses
to the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have
known. We are bound to say, in so far as M. de Charlus is concerned,
that, if he was stupefied to learn with regard to Morel a certain
number of things which the latter had carefully concealed from him, he
was not justified in concluding from this that it was a mistake to
associate too closely with the lower orders. We shall indeed see, in
the concluding section of this work, M. de Charlus himself engaged in
doing things which would have stupefied the members of his family and
his friends far more than he could possibly have been stupefied by the
revelations of Léa.  (The revelation that he had found most painful
had been that of a tour which Morel had made with Léa, whereas at the
time he had assured M.  de Charlus that he was studying music in
Germany. He had found support for this falsehood in obliging friends
in Germany to whom he had sent his letters, to be forwarded from there
to M. de Charlus, who, as it happened, was so positive that Morel was
there that he had not even looked at the postmark.) But it is time to
rejoin the Baron as he advances with Brichot and myself towards the
Verdurins' door.

"And what," he went on, turning to myself, "has become of your young
Hebrew friend, whom we met at Douville? It occurred to me that, if you
liked, one might perhaps invite him to the house one evening." For M.
de Charlus, who did not shrink from employing a private detective to
spy upon every word and action of Morel, for all the world like a
husband or a lover, had not ceased to pay attention to other young
men. The vigilance which he made one of his old servants maintain,
through an agency, upon Morel, was so indiscreet that his footmen
thought they were being watched, and one of the housemaids could not
endure the suspense, never ventured into the street, always expecting
to find a policeman at her heels. "She can do whatever she likes! It
would be a waste of time and money to follow her! As if her goings on
mattered to us!" the old servant ironically exclaimed, for he was so
passionately devoted to his master that, albeit he in no way shared
the Baron's tastes, he had come in time, with such ardour did he
employ himself in their service, to speak of them as though they were
his own. "He is the very best of good fellows," M. de Charlus would
say of this old servant, for we never appreciate anyone so much as
those who combine with other great virtues that of placing themselves
unconditionally at the disposal of our vices. It was moreover of men
alone that M. de Charlus was capable of feeling any jealousy so far as
Morel was concerned. Women inspired in him no jealousy whatever. This
is indeed an almost universal rule with the Charlus type. The love of
the man with whom they are in love for women is something different,
which occurs in another animal species (a lion does not interfere with
tigers); does not distress them; if anything, reassures them.
Sometimes, it is true, in the case of those who exalt their inversion
to the level of a priesthood, this love creates disgust. These men
resent their friends' having succumbed to it, not as a betrayal but as
a lapse from virtue. A Charlus, of a different variety from the Baron,
would have been as indignant at the discovery of Morel's relations
with a woman as upon reading in a newspaper that he, the interpreter
of Bach and Handel, was going to play Puccini. It is, by the way, for
this reason that the young men who, with an eye to their own personal
advantage, condescend to the love of men like Charlus, assure them
that women inspire them only with disgust, just as they would tell a
doctor that they never touch alcohol, and care only for spring water.
But M. de Charlus, in this respect, departed to some extent from the
general rule. Since he admired everything about Morel, the latter's
successes with women caused him no annoyance, gave him the same joy as
his successes on the platform, or at écarté. "But do you know, my dear
fellow, he has women," he would say, with an air of disclosure, of
scandal, possibly of envy, above all of admiration. "He is
extraordinary," he would continue. "Everywhere, the most famous whores
can look at nobody but him. They stare at him everywhere, whether,
it's on the underground or in the theatre. It's becoming a nuisance! I
can't go out with him to a restaurant without the waiter bringing him
notes from at least three women.  And always pretty women too. Not
that there's anything surprising in that. I was watching him
yesterday, I can quite understand it, he has become so beautiful, he
looks just like a Bronzino, he is really marvellous." But M. de
Charlus liked to shew that he was in love with Morel, to persuade
other people, possibly to persuade himself, that Morel was in love
with him. He applied to the purpose of having Morel always with him
(notwithstanding the harm that the young fellow might do to the
Baron's social position) a sort of self-esteem. For (and this is
frequent among men of good position, who are snobs, and, in their
vanity, sever all their social ties in order to be seen everywhere
with a mistress, a person of doubtful or a lady of tarnished
reputation, whom nobody will invite, and with whom nevertheless it
seems to them flattering to be associated) he had arrived at that
stage at which self-esteem devotes all its energy to destroying the
goals to which it has attained, whether because, under the influence
of love, a man finds a prestige which he is alone in perceiving in
ostentatious relations with the beloved object, or because, by the
waning of social ambitions that have been gratified, and the rising of
a tide of subsidiary curiosities all the more absorbing the more
platonic they are, the latter have not only reached but have passed
the level at which the former found it difficult to remain.

As for young men in general, M. de Charlus found that to his fondness
for them Morel's existence was not an obstacle, and that indeed his
brilliant reputation as a violinist or his growing fame as a composer
and journalist might in certain instances prove an attraction. Did
anyone introduce to the Baron a young composer of an agreeable type,
it was in Morel's talents that he sought an opportunity of doing the
stranger a favour. "You must," he would tell him, "bring me some of
your work so that Morel can play it at a concert or on tour. There is
hardly any decent music written, now, for the violin. It is a godsend
to find anything new. And abroad they appreciate that sort of thing
enormously. Even in the provinces there are little musical societies
where they love music with a fervour and intelligence that are quite
admirable." Without any greater sincerity (for all this could serve
only as a bait and it was seldom that Morel condescended to fulfil
these promises), Bloch having confessed that he was something of a
poet (when he was 'in the mood,' he had added with the sarcastic laugh
with which he would accompany a platitude, when he could think of
nothing original), M. de Charlus said to me: "You must tell your young
Israelite, since he writes verses, that he must really bring me some
for Morel.  For a composer, that is always the stumbling block, to
find something decent to set to music. One might even consider a
libretto. It would not be without interest, and would acquire a
certain value from the distinction of the poet, from my patronage,
from a whole chain of auxiliary circumstances, among which Morel's
talent would take the chief place, for he is composing a lot just now,
and writing too, and very pleasantly, I must talk to you about it. As
for his talent as a performer (there, as you know, he is already a
past-master), you shall see this evening how well the lad plays
Vinteuil's music; he overwhelms me; at his age, to have such an
understanding while he is still such a boy, such a kid! Oh, this
evening is only to be a little rehearsal. The big affair is to come
off in two or three days. But it will be much more distinguished this
evening. And so we are delighted that you have come," he went on,
employing the plural pronoun doubtless because a King says: "It is our
wish." "The programme is so magnificent that I have advised Mme.
Verdurin to give two parties. One in a few days' time, at which she
will have all her own friends, the other to-night at which the hostess
is, to use a legal expression, 'disseized.' It is I who have issued
the invitations, and I have collected a few people from another
sphere, who may be useful to Charlie, and whom it will be nice for the
Verdurins to meet. Don't you agree, it is all very well to have the
finest music played by the greatest artists, the effect of the
performance remains muffled in cotton-wool, if the audience is
composed of the milliner from across the way and the grocer from round
the corner. You know what I think of the intellectual level of people
in society, still they can play certain quite important parts, among
others that which in public events devolves upon the press, and which
is that of being an organ of publicity.  You know what I mean; I have
for instance invited my sister-in-law Oriane; it is not certain that
she will come, but it is on the other hand certain that, if she does
come, she will understand absolutely nothing. But one does not ask her
to understand, which is beyond her capacity, but to talk, a task which
is admirably suited to her, and which she never fails to perform. What
is the result? To-morrow as ever is, instead of the silence of the
milliner and the grocer, an animated conversation at the Mortemarts'
with Oriane telling everyone that she has heard the most marvellous
music, that a certain Morel, and so forth; unspeakable rage of the
people not invited, who will say: 'Palamède thought, no doubt, that we
were unworthy; anyhow, who are these people who were giving the
party?' a counterblast quite as useful as Oriane's praises, because
Morel's name keeps cropping up all the time and is finally engraved in
the memory like a lesson that one has read over a dozen times. All
this forms a chain of circumstances which may be of value to the
artist, to the hostess, may serve as a sort of megaphone for a
performance which will thus be made audible to a remote public.
Really, it is worth the trouble; you shall see what progress Charlie
has made. And what is more, we have discovered a new talent in him, my
dear fellow, he writes like an angel. Like an angel, I tell you." M.
de Charlus omitted to say that for some time past he had been
employing Morel, like those great noblemen of the seventeenth century
who scorned to sign and even to write their own slanderous attacks, to
compose certain vilely calumnious little paragraphs at the expense of
Comtesse Mole. Their insolence apparent even to those who merely
glanced at them, how much more cruel were they to the young woman
herself, who found in them, so skilfully introduced that nobody but
herself saw the point, certain passages from her own correspondence,
textually quoted, but interpreted in a sense which made them as deadly
as the cruellest revenge. They killed the lady. But there is edited
every day in Paris, Balzac would tell us, a sort of spoken newspaper,
more terrible than its printed rivals. We shall see later on that this
verbal press reduced to nothing the power of a Charlus who had fallen
out of fashion, and exalted far above him a Morel who was not worth
the millionth part of his former patron.  Is this intellectual fashion
really so simple, and does it sincerely believe in the nullity of a
Charlus of genius, in the incontestable authority of a crass Morel?
The Baron was not so innocent in his implacable vengeance.  Whence, no
doubt, that bitter venom on his tongue, the spreading of which seemed
to dye his cheeks with jaundice when he was in a rage. "You who knew
Bergotte," M. de Charlus went on, "I thought at one time that you
might, perhaps, by refreshing his memory with regard to the
youngster's writings, collaborate in short with myself, help me to
assist a twofold talent, that of a musician and a writer, which may
one day acquire the prestige of that of Berlioz. As you know, the
Illustrious have often other things to think about, they are smothered
in flattery, they take little interest except in themselves. But
Bergotte, who was genuinely unpretentious and obliging, promised me
that he would get into the _Gaulois_, or some such paper, those little
articles, a blend of the humourist and the musician, which he really
does quite charmingly now, and I am really very glad that Charlie
should combine with his violin this little stroke of Ingres's pen. I
know that I am prone to exaggeration, when he is concerned, like all
the old fairy godmothers of the Conservatoire. What, my dear fellow,
didn't you know that? You have never observed my little weakness. I
pace up and down for hours on end outside the examination hall. I'm as
happy as a queen. As for Charlie's prose, Bergotte assured me that it
was really very good indeed."

M. de Charlus, who had long been acquainted with Bergotte through
Swann, had indeed gone to see him a few days before his death, to ask
him to find an opening for Morel in some newspaper for a sort of
commentary, half humorous, upon the music of the day. In doing so, M.
de Charlus had felt some remorse, for, himself a great admirer of
Bergotte, he was conscious that he never went to see him for his own
sake, but in order, thanks to the respect, partly intellectual, partly
social, that Bergotte felt for him, to be able to do a great service
to Morel, or to some other of his friends. That he no longer made use
of people in society for any other purpose did not shock M. de
Charlus, but to treat Bergotte thus had appeared to him more
offensive, for he felt that Bergotte had not the calculating nature of
people in society, and deserved better treatment. Only, his was a busy
life, and he could never find time for anything except when he was
greatly interested in something, when, for instance, it affected
Morel. What was more, as he was himself extremely intelligent, the
conversation of an intelligent man left him comparatively cold,
especially that of Bergotte who was too much the man of letters for
his liking and belonged to another clan, did not share his point of
view. As for Bergotte, he had observed the calculated motive of M. de
Charlus's visits, but had felt no resentment, for he had been
incapable, throughout his life, of any consecutive generosity, but
anxious to give pleasure, broadminded, insensitive to the pleasure of
administering a rebuke. As for M. de Charlus's vice, he had never
partaken of it to the smallest extent, but had found in it rather an
element of colour in the person affected, _fas et nefas_, for an
artist, consisting not in moral examples but in memories of Plato or
of Sodom. "But you, fair youth, we never see you at Quai Conti. You
don't abuse their hospitality!" I explained that I went out as a rule
with my cousin. "Do you hear that! He goes out with his cousin! What a
most particularly pure young man!" said M. de Charlus to Brichot.
Then, turning again to myself: "But we are not asking you to give an
account of your life, my boy.  You are free to do anything that amuses
you. We merely regret that we have no share in it. Besides, you shew
very good taste, your cousin is charming, ask Brichot, she quite
turned his head at Douville. We shall regret her absence this evening.
But you did just as well, perhaps, not to bring her with you.
Vinteuil's music is delightful. But I have heard that we are to meet
the composer's daughter and her friend, who have a terrible
reputation. That sort of thing is always awkward for a girl. They are
sure to be there, unless the ladies have been detained in the country,
for they were to have been present without fail all afternoon at a
rehearsal which Mme. Verdurin was giving to-day, to which she had
invited only the bores, her family, the people whom she could not very
well have this evening.  But a moment ago, before dinner, Charlie told
us that the sisters Vinteuil.  as we call them, for whom they were all
waiting, never came." Notwithstanding the intense pain that I had felt
at the sudden association with its effect, of which alone I had been
aware, of the cause, at lengt