The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (330 page)

Hence it was with the utmost 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.”

“Straight from the boat, oysters, from the boat!”

“Oh, oysters! I’ve been simply longing for some!”

Fortunately Albertine, partly from fickleness, 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 woman: “Prawns, lovely prawns, alive, alive-o … skate, nice fresh skate … whiting to fry, to fry … here comes the mackerel, freshly caught mackerel, my ladies, beautiful mackerel … who’ll buy my mussels, fine fat mussels!”

In spite of myself, the warning: “Here comes the mackerel” 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.
⁴

“Ah! mussels,” said Albertine, “I should so like some mussels.”

“My darling! They were all very well at Balbec, but 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 next costermonger announced a thing that Cottard had forbidden even more strictly:

Albertine consented, however, to forgo the cos lettuces, on the condition that I would promise to buy for her in a few days’ time from the woman who cried: “Argenteuil asparagus, lovely green asparagus.” A mysterious voice, from which one would have expected some stranger utterance, insinuated: “Barrels, barrels …” One was obliged to remain under the disappointing impression that nothing more was being offered than barrels, for the word
was almost entirely drowned by the cry: “Glazier, gla-zier, any broken panes, here comes the gla-zier,” a Gregorian division which reminded me less, however, of the liturgy than did the call of the rag-and-bone man, unwittingly reproducing one of those abrupt changes of tone in the middle of a prayer which are common enough in the ritual of the church: “
Praeceptis salutaribus moniti et divina institutione formati, audemus dicere,
” says the priest, ending briskly upon “
dicere.
” Without irreverence, as the pious of the Middle Ages used to perform farces and satires on the very threshold of the church, it was of that “
dicere
” that the rag-and-bone man reminded one when, after drawling the other words, he uttered the final syllable with a brusqueness befitting the accentuation laid down by the great seventh-century Pope: “Any old rags, any old iron, any …” (all this chanted slowly, as were the two syllables that followed, whereas the last concluded more briskly than “
dicere”
) “rabbit … skins.” The oranges (“Valencia oranges, lovely ripe oranges”), the humble leeks even (“Here’s fine leeks”), the onions (“Threepence a rope”) sounded for me as 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
.

“Oh!” exclaimed Albertine, “cabbages, carrots, oranges. Just 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 shouts we’re hearing transformed
into a good dinner. Oh, please, ask Françoise to give us instead skate
au beurre noir
. It’s so good!”

“Very well, my little darling. But don’t stay any longer, otherwise you’ll be asking for every single thing on the barrows.”

“All right, I’m off, but I never want anything again for our dinners, except what we’ve heard cried in the street. It’s such fun. And to think that we shall have to wait two whole months before we hear: ‘Green and tender beans, fresh green beans!’ How true that is: tender beans; you know I like them as soft as soft, dripping with oil and vinegar, you wouldn’t think you were eating them, they melt in the mouth like drops of dew. Oh dear, it’s the same with the cream cheese, such a long time to wait: ‘Good cream cheese, fresh cheese!’ And the dessert grapes from Fontainebleau: ‘Best
chasselas
for sale.’ ” (And I thought with dismay of all the time that I should have to spend with her before those grapes were in season.) “Wait, though. I said 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’ll 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 suspect 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 pastries.

“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 a look of mistrust.

She always maintained that she would be delighted if I went out more often, but if anything I said gave her to suppose that I would not be staying indoors, her uneasy air made me think that the joy she would evince on seeing me go out more often 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’s hawked in the streets, so why do you want one?”

And then she answered me in words which showed me what a fund of intelligence and latent taste had suddenly developed in her since Balbec, in words akin to those which, she maintained, 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 somehow forbidden by an 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 “bookish,” which seemed to me to be reserved for another, more sacred use, of which I was still in ignorance. She said to me (and I was, in spite of everything, deeply touched, for I thought to myself: True, I myself wouldn’t speak like that, and yet, all the same, but for me
she
wouldn’t be speaking like that. She has been profoundly influenced by me, and cannot therefore help but love me, since she is my creation): “What I like about these foodstuffs
that the pedlars cry is that a thing heard like a rhapsody changes its nature when it comes to the 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 eat them, temples, churches, obelisks, rocks, a sort of picturesque geography is what I see at first before converting its raspberry or vanilla monuments into coolness in my gullet.”

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 a simile 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’ll 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 self-mockery for using such carefully contrived images, or, alas, from physical pleasure at feeling inside herself something so good, so cool, which was tantamount to a sexual pleasure). “Those mountains of ice at the Ritz sometimes suggest Monte Rosa, and indeed, if it’s a lemon ice, I don’t object to its not having a monumental shape, its being irregular, abrupt, like one of Elstir’s mountains. It mustn’t be too white then, but slightly yellowish, with that look of dull,
dirty snow that Elstir’s mountains have. The ice needn’t 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 Japanese dwarf trees which one feels 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 lose their way. In the same way, at the foot of my yellowish lemon ice, I can see quite clearly postillions, 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 by pillar, those Venetian churches of a porphyry that is made with strawberries, and send what’s left over crashing down upon the worshippers. Yes, all those monuments will pass from their stony state into my inside which thrills already with their melting coolness. But, you know, even without ices, nothing is so exciting or makes one so thirsty as the advertisements for thermal 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 mineral 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, and I cut her short.

“I’m boring you, good-bye my darling,” she said.

What a change from Balbec, where I would defy Elstir
himself to have been able to divine in Albertine this wealth of poetry, though a poetry less strange, less personal than that of Celeste Albaret, for instance. Albertine would never have thought of the things that Celeste used to say to me, but love, even when it seems to be nearing its end, is partial. I preferred the picturesque geography of her ices, the somewhat facile charm of which seemed to me a reason for loving Albertine and a proof that I had some power over her, that she loved me.

As soon as Albertine had gone out, I felt how exhausting was her perpetual presence, insatiable in its restless animation, which disturbed my sleep with its movements, made me live in a perpetual chill by her habit of leaving doors open, and forced me—in order to find excuses that would justify my not accompanying her, without, however, appearing too unwell, and at the same time seeing that she was not unaccompanied—to display every day greater ingenuity than Sheherazade. Unfortunately, if by a similar ingenuity the Persian storyteller postponed her own death, I was hastening mine. There are thus in life certain situations that 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 shared life or to return to the separate existence of the past poses 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 that of the heart?

In any event, I was very glad that Andrée was to accompany Albertine to the Trocadéro, for recent and on
the whole fairly trivial incidents had persuaded me that—though I still had, of course, the same confidence in the chauffeur’s honesty—his vigilance, or at least the perspicacity of his vigilance, was not quite what it had once been. It happened that, only a short while before, I had sent Albertine alone in his charge to Versailles, and she told me that she had had lunch at the Reservoirs; as the chauffeur had mentioned Vatel’s restaurant, on discovering this contradiction I found an excuse to go downstairs and speak to him (it was still the same man, whose acquaintance we made at Balbec) while Albertine was dressing.

“You told me that you had lunch at Vatel’s, but Mlle Albertine mentioned the Reservoirs. What’s the explanation?”

The chauffeur replied: “Oh, I said I had my lunch at Vatel’s, but I’ve no idea where Mademoiselle had hers. She left me as soon as we reached Versailles to take a horse cab, which she prefers when it isn’t a long drive.”

Already I was furious at the thought that she had been alone; still, it was only during the time that it took her to have lunch.

“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 shown that she concealed her activities from me), “have had your lunch, I don’t say at her table, but in the same restaurant?”

“But she told me not to bother to meet her before six o’clock in the Place d’Armes. I wasn’t to call for her after lunch.”

“Ah!” I said, making an effort to conceal my dismay. And I returned upstairs. So it was for more than seven
hours on end that Albertine had been alone, left to her own devices. I could reassure 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 dawdling in a cab, saying that one had a better view, that the air was milder. Nevertheless, she had spent seven hours about which I should never know anything. And I dared not think of the manner in which she must have spent them. I felt that the driver had been extremely maladroit, but my confidence in him was henceforth absolute. For if he had been to the slightest extent in league with Albertine, he would never have admitted that he had left her unguarded from eleven o’clock in the morning until six in the evening. 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 show her that he was not the sort of man who could be silenced, and that if, after this first gentle warning, she did not toe the line with him, he would simply spill the beans. But this explanation was absurd; it first of all presupposed a non-existent quarrel between him and Albertine, and then meant attributing the character of a blackmailer to this handsome chauffeur who had always shown himself so affable and obliging. In fact, two days later I saw that he was more capable than in my suspicious frenzy I had for a moment supposed of exercising over Albertine a discreet and perspicacious vigilance. Having managed to take him aside and talk to him of what he had told me about Versailles, I said to him in a casual, friendly tone: “That drive to Versailles you told me about the other day was everything that it should have
been, you behaved perfectly as you always do. But if I may give you just a little hint, nothing of any great consequence, I feel such a responsibility now that Mme Bontemps has placed her niece in my charge, I’m so afraid of accidents, I feel so guilty about not accompanying her, that I’d be happier if it were you alone, you who are so safe, so wonderfully skilful, to whom no accident can possibly happen, who drove Mlle Albertine everywhere. Then I need fear nothing.”