In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV (33 page)

This avowal to Albertine of an imaginary sentiment for Andrée, and, towards herself, of an indifference which, so that it might appear altogether sincere and without exaggeration, I assured her incidentally, as though out of scrupulous politeness, must not be taken too literally, enabled me at length, without any danger that Albertine might interpret it as love, to speak to her with a tenderness which I had so long denied myself and which seemed to me exquisite. I almost caressed my confidante; as I spoke to her of her friend whom I loved, tears came to my eyes. But, coming at last to the point, I said to her that she knew what love was, its susceptibilities, its sufferings, and that perhaps, as the old friend that she now was, she might feel it in her heart to put an end to the distress she was causing me, not directly, since it was not herself that I loved, if I might venture to repeat that without offending her, but indirectly by wounding me in my love for Andrée. I broke off to admire and point out to Albertine a great, solitary, speeding bird which, far out in front of us, lashing the air with the regular beat of its wings, flew at full speed over the beach, which was stained here and there with gleaming reflexions like little torn scraps of red paper, and crossed it from end to end without slackening its pace, without diverting its attention, without deviating from its path, like an envoy carrying far afield an urgent and vital message. “It at least goes straight to the point!” said Albertine reproachfully. “You say that because you don’t know what I was going to tell you. But it’s so difficult that I prefer to leave it; I’m certain to make you angry; and then all that will have happened will be this: I shall in no way be better off with the girl I really love and I shall have lost a good friend.” “But I swear to you that I won’t be angry.” She looked so sweet, so wistfully docile, as though her whole happiness depended on me, that I could barely restrain myself from kissing—with almost the same kind of pleasure that I should have had in kissing my mother—this new face which no longer presented the lively, flushed mien of a cheeky and perverse kitten with its little pink tip-tilted nose, but seemed, in the plenitude of its prostrate sadness, to have melted, in broad, flattened and pendent planes, into pure goodness. Leaving aside my love as though it were a chronic mania that had no connexion with her, putting myself in her place, I was moved to pity at the sight of this sweet girl, accustomed to being treated in a friendly and loyal fashion, whom the good friend that she might have supposed me to be had been pursuing for weeks past with persecutions which had at last arrived at their culminating point. It was because I placed myself at a standpoint that was purely human, external to both of us, from which my jealous love had evaporated, that I felt for Albertine that profound pity, which would have been less profound if I had not loved her. However, in that rhythmical oscillation which leads from a declaration to a quarrel (the surest, the most effectively perilous way of forming by opposite and successive movements a knot which will not be loosened and which attaches us firmly to a person), in the midst of the movement of withdrawal which constitutes one of the two elements of the rhythm, of what use is it to analyse further the refluences of human pity, which, the opposite of love, though springing perhaps unconsciously from the same cause, in any case produce the same effects? When we count up afterwards the sum of all that we have done for a woman, we often discover that the actions prompted by the desire to show that we love her, to make her love us, to win her favours, bulk scarcely larger than those due to the human need to repair the wrongs that we do to the loved one, from a mere sense of moral duty, as though we did not love her. “But tell me, what on earth have I done?” Albertine asked me. There was a knock at the door; it was the lift-boy; Albertine’s aunt, who was passing the hotel in a carriage, had stopped on the chance of finding her there and taking her home. Albertine sent word that she could not come down, that they were to begin dinner without her, that she could not say at what time she would return. “But won’t your aunt be angry?” “Not at all! She’ll understand perfectly well.” In other words—at this moment at least, which perhaps would never recur—a conversation with me was in Albertine’s eyes, because of the circumstances, a thing of such self-evident importance that it must be given precedence over everything, a thing to which, referring no doubt instinctively to a family code, enumerating certain situations in which, when the career of M. Bontemps was at stake, a journey had been made without thinking twice, my friend never doubted that her aunt would think it quite natural to see her sacrifice the dinner-hour. Having relinquished for my benefit that remote hour which she spent without me, among her own people, Albertine was giving it to me; I might make what use of it I chose. I finally made bold to tell her what had been reported to me about her way of life, and said that notwithstanding the profound disgust I felt for women tainted with that vice, I had not given it a thought until I had been told the name of her accomplice, and that she could readily understand, loving Andrée as I did, the pain that this had caused me. It would have been more astute perhaps to say that other women had also been mentioned but that they were of no interest to me. But the sudden and terrible revelation that Cottard had made to me had struck home, had lacerated me, just as it was, complete in itself without any accretions. And just as, before that moment, it would never have occurred to me that Albertine was enamoured of Andrée, or at any rate could find pleasure in caressing her, if Cottard had not drawn my attention to their posture as they waltzed together, so I had been incapable of passing from that idea to the idea, so different for me, that Albertine might have, with women other than Andrée, relations which could not even be excused by affection. Albertine, even before swearing to me that it was not true, expressed, like everyone upon learning that such things are being said about them, anger, concern, and, with regard to the unknown slanderer, a fierce curiosity to know who he was and a desire to be confronted with him so as to be able to confound him. But she assured me that she bore me, at least, no resentment. “If it had been true, I would have told you. But Andrée and I both loathe that sort of thing. We haven’t reached our age without seeing women with cropped hair who behave like men and do the things you mean, and nothing revolts us more.” Albertine merely gave me her word, a categorical word unsupported by proof. But this was precisely what was best calculated to calm me, jealousy belonging to that family of morbid doubts which are eliminated by the vigour of an affirmation far more surely than by its probability. It is moreover the property of love to make us at once more distrustful and more credulous, to make us suspect the loved one, more readily than we should suspect anyone else, and be convinced more easily by her denials. We must be in love before we can care that all women are not virtuous, which is to say before we can be aware of the fact, and we must be in love too before we can hope, that is to say assure ourselves, that some are. It is human to seek out what hurts us and then at once to seek to get rid of it. Statements that are capable of so relieving us seem all too readily true: we are not inclined to cavil at a sedative that works. Besides, however multiform the person we love may be, she can in any case present to us two essential personalities according to whether she appears to us as ours, or as turning her desires elsewhere. The first of these personalities possesses the peculiar power which prevents us from believing in the reality of the second, the secret remedy to heal the sufferings that this latter has caused us. The beloved object is successively the malady and the remedy that suspends and aggravates it. Doubtless I had long been conditioned, by the powerful impression made on my imagination and my faculty for emotion by the example of Swann, to believe in the truth of what I feared rather than of what I should have wished. Hence the comfort brought me by Albertine’s affirmations came near to being jeopardised for a moment because I remembered the story of Odette. But I told myself that, if it was right to allow for the worst, not only when, in order to understand Swann’s sufferings, I had tried to put myself in his place, but now that it concerned myself, in seeking the truth as though it concerned someone else I must nevertheless not, out of cruelty to myself, like a soldier who chooses the post not where he can be of most use but where he is most exposed, end up with the mistake of regarding one supposition as more true than the rest simply because it was the most painful. Was there not a vast gulf between Albertine, a girl of good middle-class parentage, and Odette, a whore sold by her mother in her childhood? There could be no comparison of their respective credibility. Besides, Albertine had in no sense the same interest in lying to me that Odette had had in lying to Swann. And in any case to him Odette had admitted what Albertine had just denied. I should therefore be guilty of an error of reasoning as serious—though in the opposite sense—as that which would have inclined me towards a certain assumption because it caused me less pain than any other, in not taking into account these material differences in their situations, and in reconstructing the real life of my beloved solely from what I had been told about Odette’s. I had before me a new Albertine, of whom I had already, it was true, caught more than one glimpse towards the end of my previous visit to Balbec, a frank, kind Albertine who, out of affection for myself, had just forgiven me my suspicions and tried to dispel them. She made me sit down by her side on my bed. I thanked her for what she had said to me, assuring her that our reconciliation was complete, and that I would never be harsh to her again. I told her that she ought nevertheless to go home to dinner. She asked me whether I was not glad to have her with me. And drawing my head towards her for a caress which she had never given me before and which I owed perhaps to the healing of our quarrel, she drew her tongue lightly over my lips, which she attempted to force apart. At first I kept them tight shut. “What an old spoilsport you are!” she said to me.

I ought to have gone away that evening and never seen her again. I sensed there and then that in a love that is not shared—one might almost say in love, for there are people for whom there is no such thing as shared love—we can enjoy only that simulacrum of happiness which had been given to me at one of those unique moments in which a woman’s good nature, or her caprice, or mere chance, respond to our desires, in perfect coincidence, with the same words, the same actions, as if we were really loved. The wiser course would have been to consider with curiosity, to appropriate with delight, that little particle of happiness failing which I should have died without ever suspecting what it could mean to hearts less difficult or more privileged; to pretend that it formed part of a vast and enduring happiness of which this fragment only was visible to me; and—lest the next day should give the lie to this fiction—not to attempt to ask for any fresh favour after this one, which had been due only to the artifice of an exceptional moment. I ought to have left Balbec, to have shut myself up in solitude, to have remained there in harmony with the last vibrations of the voice which I had contrived to render loving for an instant, and of which I should have asked nothing more than that it might never address another word to me; for fear lest, by an additional word which henceforth could not but be different, it might shatter with a discord the sensory silence in which, as though by the pressure of a pedal, there might long have survived in me the tonality of happiness.

Calmed by my confrontation with Albertine, I began once again to live in closer intimacy with my mother. She loved to talk to me gently about the days when my grandmother had been younger. Fearing that I might reproach myself with the sorrows with which I had perhaps darkened the close of my grandmother’s life, she preferred to turn back to the years when my first studies had given my grandmother a satisfaction which until now had always been kept from me. We talked of the old days at Combray. My mother reminded me that there at least I used to read, and that at Balbec I might well do the same, if I was not going to work. I replied that, to surround myself with memories of Combray and of the pretty coloured plates, I should like to re-read the
Arabian Nights
. As, long ago at Combray, when she gave me books for my birthday, so it was in secret, as a surprise for me, that my mother now sent for both Galland’s version and that of Mardrus.
⁷
But, after casting her eye over the two translations, my mother would have preferred that I should stick to Galland’s, albeit hesitating to influence me because of her respect for intellectual liberty, her dread of interfering with my intellectual life and the feeling that, being a woman, on the one hand she lacked, or so she thought, the necessary literary equipment, and on the other hand ought not to judge a young man’s reading by what she herself found shocking. Happening upon certain of the tales, she had been revolted by the immorality of the subject and the coarseness of the expression. But above all, preserving like precious relics not only her mother’s brooch, her sunshade, her cloak, her volume of Mme de Sévigné, but also her habits of thought and speech, invoking on every occasion the opinion that she would have expressed, my mother could have no doubt of the unfavourable judgment which my grandmother would have passed on Mardrus’s version. She remembered that at Combray, while I sat reading Augustin Thierry before setting out for a walk along the Méséglise way, my grandmother, pleased with my reading and my walks, was indignant nevertheless at seeing the person whose name remained enshrined in the hemistich “Then reignèd Mérovée” called Merowig, and refused to say “Carolingians” for the “Carlovingians” to which she remained loyal. And then I told her what my grandmother had thought of the Greek names which Bloch, following Leconte de Lisle, used to give to Homer’s gods, going so far, in the simplest matters, as to make it a religious duty, in which he supposed literary talent to consist, to adopt a Greek system of spelling. Having occasion, for instance, to mention in a letter that the wine which they drank at his home was true nectar, he would write “nektar,” with a
k
, which enabled him to titter at the mention of Lamartine. Now if an
Odyssey
from which the names of Ulysses and Minerva were missing was no longer the
Odyssey
to her, what would she have said upon seeing corrupted, even on the cover, the title of her Arabian tales, upon no longer finding, exactly transcribed as she had all her life been in the habit of pronouncing them, the immortally familiar names of Scheherazade or Dinarzade, while, themselves debaptised (if one may use the expression of Muslim tales), even the charming Caliph and the powerful Genies were barely recognisable, being renamed, he the “Khalifa” and they the “Gennis.” However, my mother handed over both books to me, and I told her that I would read them on the days when I felt too tired to go out.