The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (401 page)

“Certainly not, it wasn’t that at all.”

“Then because I was too disagreeable?”

“No, I don’t think so. I think she was forced to leave you by her aunt who had designs for her future upon that guttersnipe, you know, the young man you used to call ‘I’m a wash-out,’ the young man who was in love with Albertine and had asked for her hand. Seeing that you weren’t marrying her, they were afraid that the shocking length of her stay in your house might prevent the young man from doing so. And so Mme Bontemps, on whom the young man was constantly bringing pressure to bear, summoned Albertine home. Albertine after all needed her
uncle and aunt, and when she realised that they were forcing her hand she left you.”

I had never in my jealousy thought of this explanation, but only of Albertine’s desire for women and of my own surveillance of her; I had forgotten that there was also Mme Bontemps who might eventually regard as strange what had shocked my mother from the first. At least Mme Bontemps was afraid that it might shock this possible husband whom she was keeping in reserve for Albertine in case I failed to marry her.

So that it was possible that a long debate had gone on in Albertine’s mind between staying with me and leaving me, but that her decision to leave me had been made on account of her aunt, or of that young man, and not on account of women to whom perhaps she had never given a thought. The most disturbing thing to my mind was that Andrée, who after all no longer had anything to conceal from me as to Albertine’s morals, swore to me that nothing of the sort had ever occurred between Albertine on the one hand and Mlle Vinteuil or her friend on the other (Albertine herself was unconscious of her own proclivities when she first met them, and they, from the fear of being mistaken in the object of one’s desire which breeds as many errors as desire itself, regarded her as extremely hostile to that sort of thing. Perhaps later on they had learned that her tastes were similar to their own, but by that time they knew Albertine and Albertine knew them too well for there to be any question of their doing those things together).

“But, my dear Andrée, you’re lying again. Remember—you admitted it to me yourself when I telephoned to you the evening before, don’t you remember?—that
Albertine had been so anxious, and kept it from me as though it was something that I mustn’t know about, to go to the afternoon party at the Verdurins’ at which Mlle Vinteuil was expected.”

“Yes, but Albertine hadn’t the slightest idea that Mlle Vinteuil was to be there.”

“What? You yourself told me that she’d met Mme Verdurin a few days earlier. Besides, Andrée, there’s no point in our trying to deceive one another. I found a note one morning in Albertine’s room, a note from Mme Verdurin urging her to come that afternoon.”

And I showed her this note which, as a matter of fact, Françoise had taken care to bring to my notice by placing it on top of Albertine’s belongings a few days before her departure, and, I regret to say, leaving it there to make Albertine suppose that I had been rummaging among her things, to let her know in any case that I had seen it. And I had often wondered whether Françoise’s ruse had not been largely responsible for the departure of Albertine, who saw that she could no longer conceal anything from me, and felt disheartened, defeated. I showed Andrée the note: I
feel no compunction, on the strength of this genuine family feeling
… “You know very well, Andrée, that Albertine used always to say that Mlle Vinteuil’s friend was indeed a mother, an elder sister to her.”

“But you’ve misinterpreted this note. The person Mme Verdurin wished Albertine to meet that afternoon wasn’t Mlle Vinteuil’s friend at all, it was the young man you call ‘I’m a wash-out,’ and the family feeling is what Mme Verdurin felt for the brute, who is after all her nephew. However, I think Albertine did hear afterwards that Mlle Vinteuil was to be there—Mme Verdurin may
have let her know incidentally. And of course the thought of seeing her friend again gave her pleasure, reminded her of happy times in the past, just as you’d be glad, if you were going somewhere, to know that Elstir would be there, but no more than that, not even as much. No, if Albertine was unwilling to say why she wanted to go to Mme Verdurin’s, it was because it was a rehearsal to which Mme Verdurin had invited a very small party, including that nephew of hers whom you met at Balbec, to whom Mme Bontemps was hoping to marry Albertine off and to whom Albertine wanted to talk. He was a real blackguard …”

And so Albertine, contrary to what Andrée’s mother used to think, had had after all the prospect of a wealthy marriage. And when she had wanted to visit Mme Verdurin, when she had spoken to her in secret, when she had been so annoyed that I should have gone there that evening without warning her, the intrigue between her and Mme Verdurin had had as its object her meeting not Mlle Vinteuil but the nephew who loved Albertine and for whom Mme Verdurin, with that satisfaction of working towards the realisation of one of those marriages which surprise one in some families into whose state of mind one does not enter completely, did not desire a rich bride. Now I had never given another thought to this nephew who had perhaps been the initiator thanks to whom I had received Albertine’s first kiss. And for the whole structure of Albertine’s anxieties which I had built up, I must now substitute another, or rather superimpose it, for perhaps it did not exclude the other, a taste for women not being incompatible with marriage. Was this marriage really the reason for Albertine’s departure, and
had she, out of self-respect, so as not to appear to be dependent on her aunt, or to force me to marry her, preferred not to mention it? I was beginning to realise that the system of multiple motives for a single action, of which Albertine showed her mastery in her relations with her friends when she allowed each of them to suppose that it was for her sake that she had come, was only a sort of symbol, artificial and premeditated, of the different aspects that an action assumes according to the point of view from which we look at it. It was not the first time I had felt astonishment and a sort of shame at never once having told myself that Albertine was in a false position in my house, a position that might give offence to her aunt; it was not the first, nor was it the last. How often has it happened to me, after having sought to understand the relations between two people and the crises that they entail, to hear all of a sudden a third person speak to me of them from his own point of view, for he has even closer relations with one of the two, a point of view which has perhaps been the cause of the crisis! And if people’s actions remain so unpredictable, how should not the people themselves be equally so? Listening to the people who maintained that Albertine was a schemer who had tried to get one man after another to marry her, it was not difficult to imagine how they would have defined her life with me. And yet to my mind she had been a victim, a victim who perhaps was not altogether pure, but in that case guilty for other reasons, on account of vices which people did not mention.

But above all we must remember this: on the one hand, lying is often a trait of character; on the other hand, in women who would not otherwise be liars, it is a natural
defence, improvised at first, then more and more organised, against that sudden danger which would be capable of destroying all life: love. Furthermore, it is not by mere chance that sensitive, intellectual men invariably give themselves to insensitive and inferior women, and moreover remain attached to them, and that the proof that they are not loved does not in the least cure them of the urge to sacrifice everything to keep such women with them. If I say that such men need to suffer, I am saying something that is accurate while suppressing the preliminary truths which make that need—involuntary in a sense—to suffer a perfectly understandable consequence of those truths. Not to mention the fact that, all-round natures being rare, a man who is highly sensitive and highly intellectual will generally have little will-power, will be the plaything of habit and of that fear of suffering in the immediate present which condemns to perpetual suffering—and that in these conditions he will never be prepared to repudiate the woman who does not love him. One may be surprised that he should be content with so little love, but one ought rather to picture to oneself the anguish that may be caused him by the love which he himself feels. An anguish which one ought not to pity unduly, for those terrible commotions that are caused by an unrequited love, by the departure or the death of a mistress, are like those attacks of paralysis which at first leave us helpless, but after which the muscles tend gradually to recover their vital elasticity and energy. What is more, this anguish does not lack compensation. These sensitive and intellectual persons are as a rule little inclined to falsehood. It takes them all the more unawares in that, however intelligent they may be, they live in the world of the possible, live in the
anguish which a woman has just inflicted on them rather than in the clear perception of what she wanted, what she did, what she loved, a perception granted chiefly to self-willed natures which need it in order to prepare against the future instead of lamenting the past. And so these persons feel that they are betrayed without quite knowing how. Wherefore the mediocre woman whom we are astonished to see them loving enriches the universe for them far more than an intelligent woman would have done. Behind each of her words, they feel that a lie is lurking, behind each house to which she says that she has gone, another house, behind each action, each person, another action, another person. Of course they do not know what or whom, they do not have the energy, would not perhaps find it possible, to discover. A lying woman, by an extremely simple trick, can beguile, without taking the trouble to change her method, any number of people, and, what is more, the very person who ought to have discovered the trick. All this confronts the sensitive intellectual with a universe full of depths which his jealousy longs to plumb and which are not without interest to his intelligence.

Without being precisely a man of that category, I was going perhaps to learn, now that Albertine was dead, the secret of her life. Here again, do not these indiscretions which come to light only after a person’s life on earth is ended prove that nobody really believes in a future life? If these indiscretions are true, one ought to fear the resentment of a woman whose actions one reveals fully as much in anticipation of meeting her in heaven as one feared it while she was alive and one felt bound to keep her secret. And if these indiscretions are false, invented because she
is no longer present to contradict them, one ought to be even more afraid of the dead woman’s wrath if one believed in heaven. But no one does believe in it.

On the whole, I did not understand any better than before why Albertine had left me. If the face of a woman can with difficulty be grasped by the eyes, which cannot take in the whole of its mobile surface, or by the lips, or still less by the memory, if it is shrouded in obscurity according to her social position, according to the level at which we are situated, how much thicker is the veil drawn between those of her actions which we see and her motives! Motives are situated at a deeper level, which we do not perceive, and moreover engender actions other than those of which we are aware and often in absolute contradiction to them. When has there not been some man in public life, regarded as a saint by his friends, who is discovered to have forged documents, robbed the State, betrayed his country? How often is a great nobleman robbed by a steward whom he has brought up from childhood, ready to swear that he was an excellent man, as possibly he was! And how much more impenetrable does it become, this curtain that screens another’s motives, if we are in love with that person, for it clouds our judgment and also obscures the actions of one who, feeling that she is loved, ceases suddenly to set any store by what otherwise would have seemed to her important, such as wealth for example. Perhaps also it induces her to feign to some extent this scorn for wealth in the hope of obtaining more by making us suffer. The bargaining instinct may also enter into everything else; and even actual incidents in her life, an intrigue which she has confided to no one for fear of its being revealed to us, which many people might for
all that have discovered had they felt the same passionate desire to know it as we ourselves while preserving a greater equanimity of mind and arousing fewer suspicions in the guilty party, an intrigue of which certain people have in fact not been unaware—but people whom we do not know and would not know how to find. And among all these reasons for her adopting an inexplicable attitude towards us, we must include those idiosyncrasies of character which impel people, whether from indifference to their own interests, or from hatred, or from love of freedom, or under the impulse of anger, or from fear of what certain people will think, to do the opposite of what we expected. And then there are the differences of environment, of upbringing, in which we refuse to believe because, when we are talking together, they are effaced by our words, but which return when we are apart to direct the actions of each of us from so opposite a point of view that no true meeting of minds is possible.

“Anyhow there’s no need to seek out all these explanations,” Andrée went on. “Heaven knows I was fond of Albertine, and she was a really nice creature, but, especially after she had typhoid (a year before you first met us all), she was an absolute madcap. All of a sudden she would get sick of what she was doing, all her plans would have to be changed that very minute, and she herself probably couldn’t say why. You remember the year when you first came to Balbec, the year when you met us all? One fine day she got somebody to send her a telegram calling her back to Paris; she barely had time to pack her trunks. But there was absolutely no reason for her to go. All the pretexts she gave were false. Paris would be a deadly bore at that moment. We were all of us still at
Balbec. The golf club wasn’t closed, indeed the heats for the cup which she was so keen on winning weren’t finished. She’d certainly have won it. It only meant staying on for another week. Well, off she went at a gallop. I often spoke to her about it later. She said herself that she didn’t know why she had left, that she felt homesick (the home being Paris, you can imagine how likely that was), that she didn’t feel happy at Balbec, that she thought there were people there who sneered at her.”