In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (74 page)

If Andrée had not believed me when I told her that Albertine’s family left me indifferent, it was because she thought that I was in love with Albertine. And probably she was none too happy in the thought.

She was generally present as a third party at my meetings with her friend. There were however days when I was to see Albertine by herself, days to which I looked forward with feverish impatience, which passed without bringing me any decisive result, without any of them having been that cardinal day whose role I immediately entrusted to the following day, which would prove no more apt to play it; thus there rose and toppled one after another, like waves, those peaks at once replaced by others.

About a month after the day on which we had played “ferret” together, I learned that Albertine was going away next morning to spend a couple of days with Mme Bontemps, and, since she would have to take an early train, was coming to spend the night at the Grand Hotel, from which, by taking the omnibus, she would be able, without disturbing the friends with whom she was staying, to catch the first train in the morning. I mentioned this to Andrée. “I don’t believe a word of it,” she replied with a look of annoyance. “Anyhow it won’t help you at all, for I’m quite sure Albertine won’t want to see you if she goes to the hotel by herself. It would be against ‘protocol,’ ” she added, employing an expression which had recently come into favour with her, in the sense of “what is done.” “I tell you this because I understand Albertine. What difference do you suppose it makes to me whether you see her or not? Not the slightest, I can assure you!”

We were joined by Octave who had no hesitation in telling Andrée the number of strokes he had gone round in, the day before, at golf, then by Albertine, who came along swinging her diabolo like a nun her rosary. Thanks to this pastime she could remain alone for hours on end without getting bored. As soon as she joined us I became conscious of the impish tip of her nose, which I had omitted from my mental picture of her during the last few days; beneath her dark hair the vertical line of her forehead controverted—and not for the first time—the blurred image that I had preserved of her, while its whiteness made a vivid splash in my field of vision; emerging from the dust of memory, Albertine was built up afresh before my eyes.

Golf gives one a taste for solitary pleasures. The pleasure to be derived from diabolo is undoubtedly one of these. And yet, after she had joined us, Albertine continued to play with it, just as a lady on whom friends have come to call does not on their account stop working at her crochet. “I gather that Mme de Villeparisis,” she remarked to Octave, “has been complaining to your father.” (I could hear, underlying the “I gather,” one of those notes that were peculiar to Albertine; every time I realised that I had forgotten them, I would remember having already caught a glimpse behind them of Albertine’s determined and Gallic mien. I could have been blind and yet have detected certain of her qualities, alert and slightly provincial, in those notes just as plainly as in the tip of her nose. They were equivalent and might have been substituted for one another, and her voice was like what we are promised in the photo-telephone of the future: the visual image was clearly outlined in the sound.) “She hasn’t written only to your father, either, she wrote to the Mayor of Balbec at the same time, to say that we must stop playing diabolo on the front as somebody hit her in the face with a ball.”

“Yes, I was hearing about that,” said Octave. “It’s ridiculous. There’s little enough to do here as it is.”

Andrée did not join in the conversation; she was not acquainted, any more than was Albertine or Octave, with Mme de Villeparisis. She did, however, remark: “I can’t think why this lady should make such a song about it. Old Mme de Cambremer got hit in the face, and she never complained.”

“I’ll explain the difference,” replied Octave gravely, striking a match as he spoke. “It’s my belief that Mme de Cambremer is a society lady, and Mme de Villeparisis is just an upstart. Are you playing golf this afternoon?” And he left us, followed by Andrée. I was alone now with Albertine. “You see,” she began, “I’m wearing my hair now the way you like—look at my ringlet. They all laugh at it and nobody knows who I’m doing it for. My aunt will laugh at me too. But I shan’t tell her why, either.” I had a sidelong view of Albertine’s cheeks, which often appeared pale, but, seen thus, were flushed with unclouded blood which lighted them up, gave them that brightness of certain winter mornings when the stones catching the sun seem blocks of pink granite and radiate joy. The joy I felt at this moment at the sight of Albertine’s cheeks was as keen, but led to another desire which was not the desire for a walk but for a kiss. I asked her if the report of her plans which I had heard was correct. “Yes,” she told me, “I shall be sleeping at your hotel tonight, and in fact as I’ve got a bit of a cold I shall be going to bed before dinner. You can come and sit by my bed and watch me eat, if you like, and afterwards we’ll play at anything that you choose. I should have liked you to come to the station tomorrow morning, but I’m afraid it might look rather odd, I don’t say to Andrée who is a sensible person, but to the others who will be there; if my aunt got to know, I should never hear the last of it. But we can spend the evening together, at any rate. My aunt will know nothing about that. I must go and say good-bye to Andrée. Till we meet again then. Come early, so that we can have a nice long time together,” she added, smiling.

At these words I was swept back past the days when I loved Gilberte to those when love seemed to me not simply an external entity but one that could be realised. Whereas the Gilberte whom I used to see in the Champs-Elysées was a different Gilberte from the one I found within me when I was alone again, suddenly in the real Albertine, the one I saw every day, whom I supposed to be stuffed with middle-class prejudices and entirely frank with her aunt, the imaginary Albertine had just been embodied, she whom, when I did not yet know her, I had suspected of casting furtive glances at me on the front, she who had worn an air of being reluctant to go home when she saw me making off in the other direction.

I went into dinner with my grandmother. I felt within me a secret which she could never guess. Similarly with Albertine; tomorrow her friends would be with her, not knowing what new experience she and I had in common; and when she kissed her niece on the forehead Mme Bontemps would never imagine that I stood between them, in the shape of that hair arrangement which had for its object, concealed from all the world, to give pleasure to me, to me who had until then so greatly envied Mme Bontemps because, being related to the same people as her niece, she had the same occasions to put on mourning, the same family visits to pay; and now I found myself being more to Albertine than was the aunt herself. When she was with her aunt, it was of me that she would be thinking. What was going to happen that evening, I scarcely knew. In any event, the Grand Hotel and the evening no longer seemed empty to me; they contained my happiness. I rang for the lift-boy to take me up to the room which Albertine had engaged, a room that looked over the valley. The slightest movements, such as that of sitting down on the bench in the lift, were sweet to me, because they were in direct relation to my heart; I saw in the ropes that drew the cage upwards, in the few stairs that I had still to climb, only the machinery, the materialised stages of my joy. I now had only two or three steps to take along the corridor before coming to that room in which was enshrined the precious substance of that rosy form—that room which, even if there were to be done in it delicious things, would keep that air of changelessness, of being, to a chance visitor who knew nothing of its history, just like any other room, which makes of inanimate things the obstinately mute witnesses, the scrupulous confidants, the inviolable depositaries of our pleasure. Those few steps from the landing to Albertine’s door, those few steps which no one could stop, I took with rapture but with prudence, as though plunged in a new and strange element, as if in going forward I had been gently displacing a liquid stream of happiness, and at the same time with a strange feeling of omnipotence, and of entering at last into an inheritance which had belonged to me from time immemorial. Then suddenly I reflected that I was wrong to be in any doubt; she had told me to come when she was in bed. It was as clear as daylight; I pranced for joy, I nearly knocked over Françoise who was standing in my way, and I ran, with sparkling eyes, towards my beloved’s room.

I found Albertine in bed. Leaving her throat bare, her white nightdress altered the proportions of her face, which, flushed by being in bed or by her cold or by dinner, seemed pinker; I thought of the colours I had had beside me a few hours earlier on the front, the savour of which I was now at last to taste; her cheek was traversed by one of those long, dark, curling tresses which, to please me, she had undone altogether. She looked at me and smiled. Beyond her, through the window, the valley lay bright beneath the moon. The sight of Albertine’s bare throat, of those flushed cheeks, had so intoxicated me (that is to say had so shifted the reality of the world for me away from nature into the torrent of my sensations which I could scarcely contain), that it had destroyed the equilibrium between the immense and indestructible life which circulated in my being and the life of the universe, so puny in comparison. The sea, which was visible through the window as well as the valley, the swelling breasts of the first of the Maineville cliffs, the sky in which the moon had not yet climbed to the zenith—all this seemed less than a featherweight on my eyeballs, which between their lids I could feel dilated, resistant, ready to bear far greater burdens, all the mountains of the world, upon their fragile surface. Their orb no longer found even the sphere of the horizon adequate to fill it. And all the life-giving energy that nature could have brought me would have seemed to me all too meagre, the breathing of the sea all too short to express the immense aspiration that was swelling my breast. I bent over Albertine to kiss her. Death might have struck me down in that moment and it would have seemed to me a trivial, or rather an impossible thing, for life was not outside me but in me; I should have smiled pityingly had a philosopher then expressed the idea that some day, even some distant day, I should have to die, that the eternal forces of nature would survive me, the forces of that nature beneath whose godlike feet I was no more than a grain of dust; that, after me, there would still remain those rounded, swelling cliffs, that sea, that moonlight and that sky! How could it have been possible; how could the world have lasted longer than myself, since I was not lost in its vastness, since it was the world that was enclosed in me, in me whom it fell far short of filling, in me who, feeling that there was room to store so many other treasures, flung sky and sea and cliffs contemptuously into a corner. “Stop it or I’ll ring the bell!” cried Albertine, seeing that I was flinging myself upon her to kiss her. But I told myself that not for nothing does a girl invite a young man to her room in secret, arranging that her aunt should not know, and that boldness, moreover, rewards those who know how to seize their opportunities; in the state of exaltation in which I was, Albertine’s round face, lit by an inner flame as by a night-light, stood out in such relief that, imitating the rotation of a glowing sphere, it seemed to me to be turning, like those Michelangelo figures which are being swept away in a stationary and vertiginous whirlwind. I was about to discover the fragrance, the flavour which this strange pink fruit concealed. I heard a sound, abrupt, prolonged and shrill. Albertine had pulled the bell with all her might.

I had supposed that my love for Albertine was not based on the hope of carnal possession. And yet, when the lesson to be drawn from my experience that evening was, apparently, that such possession was impossible; when, after having had no doubt, that first day on the beach, that Albertine was licentious, and having passed through various intermediate assumptions, it seemed to me to be established that she was absolutely virtuous; when on her return from her aunt’s a week later, she greeted me coldly with: “I forgive you; in fact I’m sorry to have upset you, but you must never do it again”—then in contrast to what I had felt on learning from Bloch that one could have all the women one wanted, and as if, instead of a real girl, I had known a wax doll, my desire to penetrate into her life, to follow her through the places in which she had spent her childhood, to be initiated by her into the sporting life, gradually detached itself from her; my intellectual curiosity as to thoughts on this subject or that did not survive my belief that I might kiss her if I chose. My dreams abandoned her as soon as they ceased to be nourished by the hope of a possession of which I had supposed them to be independent. Thenceforward they found themselves once more at liberty to transfer themselves—according to the attraction that I had found in her on any particular day, above all according to the chances I seemed to detect of my being possibly loved by her—to one or other of Albertine’s friends, and to Andrée first of all. And yet, if Albertine had not existed, perhaps I should not have had the pleasure which I began to feel more and more strongly during the days that followed in the kindness that was shown me by Andrée. Albertine told no one of the rebuff which I had received at her hands. She was one of those pretty girls who, from their earliest youth, on account of their beauty, but especially of an attraction, a charm which remains somewhat mysterious and has its source perhaps in reserves of vitality to which others less favoured by nature come to quench their thirst, have always—in their home circle, among their friends, in society—been more sought after than other more beautiful and richer girls; she was one of those people from whom, before the age of love and much more still after it is reached, more is asked than they themselves ask, more even than they are able to give. From her childhood Albertine had always had round her in an adoring circle four or five little girl friends, among them Andrée who was so far her superior and knew it (and perhaps this attraction which Albertine exerted quite involuntarily had been the origin, had laid the foundations of the little band). This attraction was still potent even at a great social distance, in circles quite brilliant by comparison, where, if there was a pavane to be danced, Albertine would be sent for rather than another girl of better family. The consequence was that, not having a penny to her name, living, not very well, at the expense of M. Bontemps who was said to be a shady individual and was anyhow anxious to be rid of her, she was nevertheless invited, not only to dine but to stay, by people who in Saint-Loup’s eyes might not have had much distinction, but to Rosemonde’s mother or Andrée’s, women who though very rich themselves did not know these people, represented something quite extraordinary. Thus Albertine spent a few weeks every year with the family of one of the Governors of the Bank of France, who was also Chairman of the Board of Directors of a railway company. The wife of this financier entertained prominent people, and had never mentioned her “day” to Andrée’s mother, who thought her wanting in politeness, but was nevertheless prodigiously interested in everything that went on in her house. Accordingly she encouraged Andrée every year to invite Albertine down to their villa, because, she said, it was a charitable act to offer a holiday by the sea to a girl who had not herself the means to travel and whose aunt did so little for her. Andrée’s mother was probably not prompted by the thought that the banker and his wife, learning that Albertine was made much of by her and her daughter, would form a high opinion of them both; still less did she hope that Albertine, kind and clever as she was, would manage to get her invited, or at least to get Andrée invited, to the financier’s garden-parties. But every evening at the dinner-table, while assuming an air of indifference and disdain, she was fascinated by Albertine’s accounts of everything that had happened at the big house while she was staying there, and the names of the other guests, almost all of them people whom she knew by sight or by name. Even the thought that she knew them only in this indirect fashion, that is to say did not know them at all (she called this kind of acquaintance knowing people “all my life”), gave Andrée’s mother a touch of melancholy while she plied Albertine with questions about them in a lofty and distant tone, with pursed lips, and might have left her doubtful and uneasy as to the importance of her own social position had she not been able to reassure herself, to return safely to the “realities of life,” by saying to the butler: “Please tell the chef that his peas aren’t soft enough.” She then recovered her serenity. And she was quite determined that Andrée was to marry nobody but a man, of the best family of course, rich enough for her too to be able to keep a chef and a couple of coachmen. That was the reality, the practical proof of “position.” But the fact that Albertine had dined at the banker’s country house with this or that great lady, and that the said great lady
had invited her to stay with her next winter, invested the girl, in the eyes of Andrée’s mother, with a peculiar esteem which went very well with the pity and even contempt aroused by her lack of fortune, a contempt increased by the fact that M. Bontemps had betrayed his flag and—being even vaguely Panamist, it was said—had rallied to the Government. Not that this deterred Andrée’s mother, in her passion for abstract truth, from withering with her scorn the people who appeared to believe that Albertine was of humble origin. “What’s that you say? Why, they’re one of the best families in the country. Simonet with a single ‘n,’ you know!” Certainly, in view of the class of society in which all this went on, in which money plays so important a part, and mere charm makes people ask you out but not marry you, an “acceptable” marriage did not appear to be for Albertine a practical outcome of the so distinguished patronage which she enjoyed but which would not have been held to compensate for her poverty. But even in themselves, and with no prospect of any matrimonial consequence, Albertine’s “successes” excited the envy of certain spiteful mothers, furious at seeing her received “like one of the family” by the banker’s wife, even by Andrée’s mother, whom they scarcely knew. They therefore went about telling mutual friends of theirs and of those two ladies that the latter would be very angry if they knew the truth, which was that Albertine repeated to each of them everything that the intimacy to which she was rashly admitted enabled her to spy out in the household of the other, countless little secrets which it must be infinitely unpleasant to the interested party to have made public. These envious women said this so that it might be repeated and might get Albertine into trouble with her patrons. But, as often happens, their machinations met with no success. The spite that prompted them was too apparent, and their only result was to make the women who had perpetrated them appear rather more contemptible than before. Andrée’s mother was too firm in her opinion of Albertine to change her mind about her now. She looked upon her as “unfortunate,” but the best-natured girl living, and one who was incapable of making anything up except to give pleasure.