The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (370 page)

I felt that my life with Albertine was on the one hand, when I was not jealous, nothing but boredom, and on the other hand, when I was jealous, nothing but pain. If there had been any happiness in it, it could not last. In the same spirit of wisdom which had inspired me at Balbec, on the evening when we had been happy together after Mme de Cambremer’s visit, I wanted to leave her, because I knew that by carrying on I should gain nothing. Only, even now, I imagined that the memory that I retained of her would be like a sort of vibration, prolonged by a pedal, of the last moment of our parting. Hence I was anxious to choose a moment of sweetness, so that it might be it that continued to vibrate in me. I must not be too particular, and wait too long, I must be sensible. And yet, having waited so long, it would be madness not to wait a few days longer, until an acceptable moment should offer itself, rather than risk seeing her depart with that same sense of revolt which I had felt in the past when Mamma left my bedside without bidding me good-night, or when she said good-bye to me at the station. To be on the safe side, I heaped more and more presents on
her. As regards the Fortuny gowns, we had at length decided upon one in blue and gold lined with pink which was just ready. And I had ordered all the same the other five which she had relinquished with regret in favour of this one.

Yet with the coming of spring, two months after her aunt’s conversation with me, I lost my temper with her one evening. It was the very evening on which Albertine had put on for the first time the indoor gown in gold and blue by Fortuny which, by reminding me of Venice, made me feel all the more strongly what I was sacrificing for her, who showed no corresponding gratitude towards me. If I had never seen Venice, I had dreamed of it incessantly since those Easter holidays which, when still a boy, I had been going to spend there, and earlier still, since the Titian prints and Giotto photographs which Swann had given me long ago at Combray. The Fortuny gown which Albertine was wearing that evening seemed to me the tempting phantom of that invisible Venice. It was overrun by Arab ornamentation, like Venice, like the Venetian palaces hidden like sultan’s wives behind a screen of perforated stone, like the bindings in the Ambrosian Library, like the columns from which the oriental birds that symbolised alternatively life and death were repeated in the shimmering fabric, of an intense blue which, as my eyes drew nearer, turned into a malleable gold by those same transmutations which, before an advancing gondola, change into gleaming metal the azure of the Grand Canal. And the sleeves were lined with a cherry pink which is so peculiarly Venetian that it is called Tiepolo pink.

In the course of the day, Françoise had let fall in my hearing that Albertine was satisfied with nothing, that
when I sent word to her that I would be going out with her, or that I would not be going out, that the car would or would not come to fetch her, she almost shrugged her shoulders and would barely give a polite answer. That evening when I felt that she was in a bad mood, and when the first heat of summer had wrought upon my nerves, I could not restrain my anger and reproached her for her ingratitude. “Yes, you can ask anybody,” I shouted at the top of my voice, quite beside myself, “you can ask Françoise, it’s common knowledge.” But immediately I remembered how Albertine had once told me how terrifying she found me when I was angry, and had applied to me the lines from
Esther:

I felt ashamed of my violence. And, to make amends for what I had done, without however acknowledging defeat, so that my peace might be an armed and formidable peace, while at the same time I thought it as well to show her once again that I was not afraid of a rupture so that she might not feel tempted to provoke it: “Forgive me, my little Albertine, I’m ashamed of my violence, I don’t know how to apologise. If we can’t get on together, if we’re to be obliged to part, it mustn’t be like this, it wouldn’t be worthy of us. We will part, if part we must, but first of all I wish to beg your pardon most humbly and from the bottom of my heart.” I decided that, to atone for my outburst and also to make certain of her intention to remain with me for some time to come, at any
rate until Andrée should have left Paris, which would be in three weeks’ time, it would be as well, next day, to think of some pleasure greater than any that she had yet had, but fairly far ahead; and since I was going to wipe out the offence that I had given her, perhaps it would be as well to take advantage of this moment to show her that I knew more about her life than she supposed. The resentment that she would feel would be removed next day by my generosity, but the warning would remain in her mind. “Yes, my little Albertine, forgive me if I was violent. But I’m not quite as much to blame as you think. There are wicked people in the world who are trying to make us quarrel; I’ve always refrained from mentioning it, as I didn’t want to torment you. But sometimes I’m driven out of my mind by these accusations.” And wishing to make the most of the fact that I was going to be able to show her that I was in the know as regards the departure from Balbec, I went on: “For instance, you knew that Mlle Vinteuil was expected at Mme Verdurin’s that afternoon when you went to the Trocadéro.”

She blushed: “Yes, I knew that.”

“Can you swear to me that it was not in order to renew your relations with her that you wanted to go to the Verdurins’.”

“Why, of course I can swear it. Why do you say
renew
, I never had any relations with her, I swear it.”

I was deeply grieved to hear Albertine lie to me like this, deny the facts which her blush had made all too evident. Her mendacity appalled me. And yet, as it contained a protestation of innocence which, almost unconsciously, I was prepared to accept, it hurt me less than her sincerity when, after I had asked her: “Can you at least
swear to me that the pleasure of seeing Mlle Vinteuil again had nothing to do with your anxiety to go to the Verdurins’ that afternoon?” she replied: “No, that I cannot swear. It would have been a great pleasure to see Mlle Vinteuil again.”

A moment earlier, I had been angry with her because she concealed her relations with Mlle Vinteuil, and now her admission of the pleasure she would have felt at seeing her again turned my bones to water. True, when Albertine had said to me, on my return from the Verdurins’: “Wasn’t Mlle Vinteuil to be there?” she had revived all my anguish by proving that she knew of her coming. But doubtless in the meantime I had reasoned thus: “She knew of her coming, which gave her no pleasure in the least, but since she must have realised, after the event, that it was the revelation that she knew someone with such a bad reputation as Mlle Vinteuil that had distressed me at Balbec to the point of thinking of suicide, she didn’t want to mention it.” And now here she was being obliged to admit that the prospect of seeing Mlle Vinteuil gave her pleasure. Besides, the mystery in which she had cloaked her intention of going to see the Verdurins ought to have been a sufficient proof. But I had not given the matter enough thought. And so, while saying to myself now: “Why does she only half confess? It’s even more stupid than wicked and sad,” I was so crushed that I did not have the heart to pursue the question, as to which I was not in a strong position, having no damning evidence to produce, and to recover my ascendancy I hurriedly turned to the subject of Andrée which would enable me to put Albertine to rout by means of the overwhelming revelation of Andrée’s telegram. “Anyhow,” I said to her,
“now I’m being tormented and persecuted again with reports of your relations, this time with Andrée.”

“With Andrée?” she cried. Her face was ablaze with fury. And astonishment or the desire to appear astonished made her open her eyes wide. “How charming! And may one know who has been telling you these pretty tales? May I be allowed to speak to these persons, to learn from them what basis they have for their slanders?”

“My little Albertine, I don’t know, the letters are anonymous, but from people whom you would perhaps have no difficulty in finding” (this to show her that I did not believe that she would try) “for they must know you quite well. The last one, I must admit (and I mention it because it deals with a trivial thing and there’s nothing at all unpleasant in it), made me furious all the same. It informed me that if, on the day when we left Balbec, you first of all wished to remain there and then decided to go, that was because in the meantime you had received a letter from Andrée telling you that she wasn’t coming.”

“I know quite well that Andrée wrote to tell me that she wasn’t coming, in fact she telegraphed; I can’t show you the telegram because I didn’t keep it, but it wasn’t that day. Besides, even if it had been that day, what difference do you suppose it could make to me whether Andrée came or not?”

The words “what difference do you suppose it could make to me” were a proof of anger and that it did make some difference, but were not necessarily a proof that Albertine had returned to Paris solely from a desire to see Andrée. Whenever Albertine saw one of the real or alleged motives of one of her actions discovered by a person to whom she had pleaded a different motive, she became
angry, even if the person was someone for whose sake she had really performed the action. That Albertine believed that this information about what she had been doing did not come to me from anonymous letters which I had received willy-nilly but was eagerly solicited by me could never have been deduced from the words which she next uttered, in which she appeared to accept my story of the anonymous letters, but rather from her look of fury with me, a fury which appeared to be merely the explosion of her previous ill-humour, just as the espionage in which, on this hypothesis, she must suppose that I had been indulging would have been only the culmination of a surveillance of all her actions which she had suspected for a long time past. Her anger extended even to Andrée herself, and deciding no doubt that from now on I should no longer be unworried even when she went out with Andrée, she went on: “Besides, Andrée exasperates me. She’s a deadly bore. I never want to go anywhere with her again. You can tell that to the people who informed you that I came back to Paris for her sake. Suppose I were to tell you that after all the years I’ve known Andrée I couldn’t even describe her face to you, so little have I ever looked at it!”

But at Balbec, that first year, she had said to me: “Andrée is lovely.” It is true that this did not mean that she had had amorous relations with her, and indeed I had never heard her speak at that time except with indignation of any relations of that sort. But was it not possible that she had changed, even without being aware that she had changed, not thinking that her amusements with a girlfriend were the same thing as the immoral relations, not very clearly defined in her own mind, which she condemned
in other women? Was this not possible, since this same change, and this same unawareness of change, had occurred in her relations with myself, whose kisses she had repulsed at Balbec with such indignation, kisses which afterwards she was to give me of her own accord every day, which, I hoped, she would give me for a long time to come, which she was going to give me in a moment?

“But, my darling, how do you expect me to tell them when I don’t know who they are?”

This answer was so forceful that it ought to have dissolved the objections and doubts which I saw crystallised in Albertine’s pupils. But it left them intact. I was now silent, and yet she continued to gaze at me with that persistent attention which we give to someone who has not finished speaking. I asked her forgiveness once more. She replied that she had nothing to forgive me. She had become very gentle again. But, beneath her sad and troubled features, it seemed to me that a secret plan had taken shape. I knew quite well that she could not leave me without warning me; in fact she could neither want to leave me (it was in a week’s time that she was to try on the new Fortuny gowns), nor decently do so, as my mother was returning to Paris at the end of the week and her aunt also. Why, since it was impossible for her to leave, did I repeat to her several times that we should be going out together next day to look at some Venetian glass which I wished to give her, and why was I comforted when I heard her say that that was agreed? When it was time for her to say good-night and I kissed her, she did not behave as usual, but turned her face away—it was barely a minute or two since I had been thinking how
pleasing it was that she now gave me every evening what she had refused me at Balbec—and did not return my kiss. It was as though, having quarrelled with me, she was not prepared to give me a token of affection which might later on have appeared to me an act of duplicity that belied the quarrel. It was as though she was attuning her actions to that quarrel, and yet with moderation, whether so as not to announce it, or because, while breaking off carnal relations with me, she wished nevertheless to remain my friend. I kissed her then a second time, pressing to my heart the shimmering golden azure of the Grand Canal and the mating birds, symbols of death and resurrection. But for the second time, instead of returning my kiss, she drew away with the sort of instinctive and baleful obstinacy of animals that feel the hand of death. This presentiment which she seemed to be expressing overcame me too, and filled me with such anxious dread that when she had reached the door I could not bear to let her go, and called her back.

“Albertine,” I said to her, “I’m not at all sleepy. If you don’t want to go to sleep yourself, you might stay here a little longer, if you like, but I don’t really mind, and I don’t on any account want to tire you.” I felt that if I had been able to make her undress, and to have her there in her white nightdress, in which she seemed pinker and warmer, in which she excited my senses more keenly, the reconciliation would have been more complete. But I hesitated for an instant, for the sky-blue border of her dress added to her face a beauty, a luminosity, without which she would have seemed to me harder.