CHAPTER I
GRIEF AND OBLIVION
"Mademoiselle Albertine has gone!" How much farther does anguish
penetrate in psychology than psychology itself! A moment ago, as I
lay analysing my feelings, I had supposed that this separation
without a final meeting was precisely what I wished, and, as I
compared the mediocrity of the pleasures that Albertine afforded me
with the richness of the desires which she prevented me from
realising, had felt that I was being subtle, had concluded that I
did not wish to see her again, that I no longer loved her. But now
these words: "Mademoiselle Albertine has gone!" had expressed
themselves in my heart in the form of an anguish so keen that I
would not be able to endure it for any length of time. And so what
I had supposed to mean nothing to me was the only thing in my whole
life. How ignorant we are of ourselves. The first thing to be done
was to make my anguish cease at once. Tender towards myself as my
mother had been towards my dying grandmother, I said to myself with
that anxiety which we feel to prevent a person whom we love from
suffering: "Be patient for just a moment, we shall find something
to take the pain away, don't fret, we are not going to allow you to
suffer like this." It was among ideas of this sort that my instinct
of self-preservation sought for the first sedatives to lay upon my
open wound: "All this is not of the slightest importance, for I am
going to make her return here at once. I must think first how I am
to do it, but in any case she will be here this evening. Therefore,
it is useless to worry myself." "All this is not of the slightest
importance," I had not been content with giving myself this
assurance, I had tried to convey the same impression to Françoise
by not allowing her to see what I was suffering, because, even at
the moment when I was feeling so keen an anguish, my love did not
forget how important it was that it should appear a happy love, a
mutual love, especially in the eyes of Françoise, who, as she
disliked Albertine, had always doubted her sincerity. Yes, a moment
ago, before Françoise came into the room, I had supposed that I was
no longer in love with Albertine, I had supposed that I was leaving
nothing out of account; a careful analyst, I had supposed that I
knew the state of my own heart. But our intelligence, however great
it may be, cannot perceive the elements that compose it and remain
unsuspected so long as, from the volatile state in which they
generally exist, a phenomenon capable of isolating them has not
subjected them to the first stages of solidification. I had been
mistaken in thinking that I could see clearly into my own heart.
But this knowledge which had not been given me by the finest mental
perceptions had now been brought to me, hard, glittering, strange,
like a crystallised salt, by the abrupt reaction of grief. I was so
much in the habit of seeing Albertine in the room, and I saw, all
of a sudden, a fresh aspect of Habit. Hitherto I had regarded it
chiefly as an annihilating force which suppresses the originality
and even our consciousness of our perceptions; now I beheld it as a
dread deity, so riveted to ourselves, its meaningless aspect so
incrusted in our heart, that if it detaches itself, if it turns
away from us, this deity which we can barely distinguish inflicts
upon us sufferings more terrible than any other and is then as
cruel as death itself.The first thing to be done was to read Albertine's letter,
since I was anxious to think of some way of making her return. I
felt that this lay in my power, because, as the future is what
exists only in our mind, it seems to us to be still alterable by
the intervention, in extremis, of our will. But, at the
same time, I remembered that I had seen act upon it forces other
than my own, against which, however long an interval had been
allowed me, I could never have prevailed. Of what use is it that
the hour has not yet struck if we can do nothing to influence what
is bound to happen. When Albertine was living in the house I had
been quite determined to retain the initiative in our parting. And
now she had gone. I opened her letter. It ran as
follows:"My dear
friend,"Forgive me for not having dared to say to you in so many
words what I am now writing, but I am such a coward, I have always
been so afraid in your presence that I have never been able to
force myself to speak. This is what I should have said to you. Our
life together has become impossible; you must, for that matter,
have seen, when you turned upon me the other evening, that there
had been a change in our relations. What we were able to straighten
out that night would become irreparable in a few days' time. It is
better for us, therefore, since we have had the good fortune to be
reconciled, to part as friends. That is why, my darling, I am
sending you this line, and beg you to be so kind as to forgive me
if I am causing you a little grief when you think of the immensity
of mine. My dear old boy, I do not wish to become your enemy, it
will be bad enough to become by degrees, and very soon, a stranger
to you; and so, as I have absolutely made up my mind, before
sending you this letter by Françoise, I shall have asked her to let
me have my boxes. Good-bye: I leave with you the best part of
myself."Albertine.""All this means nothing," I told myself, "It is even better
than I thought, for as she doesn't mean a word of what she says she
has obviously written her letter only to give me a severe shock, so
that I shall take fright, and not be horrid to her again. I must
make some arrangement at once: Albertine must be brought back this
evening. It is sad to think that the Bontemps are no better than
blackmailers who make use of their niece to extort money from me.
But what does that matter? Even if, to bring Albertine back here
this evening, I have to give half my fortune to Mme. Bontemps, we
shall still have enough left, Albertine and I, to live in comfort."
And, at the same time, I calculated whether I had time to go out
that morning and order the yacht and the Rolls-Royce which she
coveted, quite forgetting, now that all my hesitation had vanished,
that I had decided that it would be unwise to give her them. "Even
if Mme. Bontemps' support is not sufficient, if Albertine refuses
to obey her aunt and makes it a condition of her returning to me
that she shall enjoy complete independence, well, however much it
may distress me, I shall leave her to herself; she shall go out by
herself, whenever she chooses. One must be prepared to make
sacrifices, however painful they may be, for the thing to which one
attaches most importance, which is, in spite of everything that I
decided this morning, on the strength of my scrupulous and absurd
arguments, that Albertine shall continue to live here." Can I say
for that matter that to leave her free to go where she chose would
have been altogether painful to me? I should be lying. Often
already I had felt that the anguish of leaving her free to behave
improperly out of my sight was perhaps even less than that sort of
misery which I used to feel when I guessed that she was bored in my
company, under my roof. No doubt at the actual moment of her asking
me to let her go somewhere, the act of allowing her to go, with the
idea of an organised orgy, would have been an appalling torment.
But to say to her: "Take our yacht, or the train, go away for a
month, to some place which I have never seen, where I shall know
nothing of what you are doing,"—this had often appealed to me,
owing to the thought that, by force of contrast, when she was away
from me, she would prefer my society, and would be glad to return.
"This return is certainly what she herself desires; she does not in
the least insist upon that freedom upon which, moreover, by
offering her every day some fresh pleasure, I should easily succeed
in imposing, day by day, a further restriction. No, what Albertine
has wanted is that I shall no longer make myself unpleasant to her,
and most of all—like Odette with Swann—that I shall make up my mind
to marry her. Once she is married, her independence will cease to
matter; we shall stay here together, in perfect happiness." No
doubt this meant giving up any thought of Venice. But the places
for which we have most longed, such as Venice (all the more so, the
most agreeable hostesses, such as the Duchesse de Guermantes,
amusements such as the theatre), how pale, insignificant, dead they
become when we are tied to the heart of another person by a bond so
painful that it prevents us from tearing ourselves away. "Albertine
is perfectly right, for that matter, about our marriage. Mamma
herself was saying that all these postponements were ridiculous.
Marrying her is what I ought to have done long ago, it is what I
shall have to do, it is what has made her write her letter without
meaning a word of it; it is only to bring about our marriage that
she has postponed for a few hours what she must desire as keenly as
I desire it: her return to this house. Yes, that is what she meant,
that is the purpose of her action," my compassionate judgment
assured me; but I felt that, in telling me this, my judgment was
still maintaining the same hypothesis which it had adopted from the
start. Whereas I felt that it was the other hypothesis which had
invariably proved correct. No doubt this second hypothesis would
never have been so bold as to formulate in so many words that
Albertine could have had intimate relations with Mile. Vinteuil and
her friend. And yet, when I was overwhelmed by the invasion of
those terrible tidings, as the train slowed down before stopping at
Parville station, it was the second hypothesis that had already
been proved correct. This hypothesis had never, in the interval,
conceived the idea that Albertine might leave me of her own accord,
in this fashion, and without warning me and giving me time to
prevent her departure. But all the same if, after the immense leap
forwards which life had just made me take, the reality that
confronted me was as novel as that which is presented by the
discovery of a scientist, the inquiries of an examining magistrate
or the researches of a historian into the mystery of a crime or a
revolution, this reality while exceeding the meagre previsions of
my second hypothesis nevertheless fulfilled them. This second
hypothesis was not an intellectual feat, and the panic fear that I
had felt on the evening when Albertine had refused to kiss me, the
night when I had heard the sound of her window being opened, that
fear was not based upon reason. But—and the sequel will shew this
more clearly, as several episodes must have indicated it
already—the fact that our intellect is not the most subtle, the
most powerful, the most appropriate instrument for grasping the
truth, is only a reason the more for beginning with the intellect,
and not with a subconscious intuition, a ready-made faith in
presentiments. It is life that, little by little, case by case,
enables us to observe that what is most important to our heart, or
to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but by other powers. And
then it is the intellect itself which, taking note of their
superiority, abdicates its sway to them upon reasoned grounds and
consents to become their collaborator and their servant. It is
faith confirmed by experiment. The unforeseen calamity with which I
found myself engaged, it seemed to me that I had already known it
also (as I had known of Albertine's friendship with a pair of
Lesbians), from having read it in so many signs in which
(notwithstanding the contrary affirmations of my reason, based upon
Albertine's own statements) I had discerned the weariness, the
horror that she felt at having to live in that state of slavery,
signs traced as though in invisible ink behind her sad, submissive
eyes, upon her cheeks suddenly inflamed with an unaccountable
blush, in the sound of the window that had suddenly been flung
open. No doubt I had not ventured to interpret them in their full
significance or to form a definite idea of her immediate departure.
I had thought, with a mind kept in equilibrium by Albertine's
presence, only of a departure arranged by myself at an undetermined
date, that is to say a date situated in a non-existent time;
consequently I had had merely the illusion of thinking of a
departure, just as people imagine that they are not afraid of death
when they think of it while they are in good health and actually do
no more than introduce a purely negative idea into a healthy state
which the approach of death would automatically destroy. Besides,
the idea of Albertine's departure on her own initiative might have
occurred to my mind a thousand times over, in the clearest, the
most sharply defined form, and I should no more have suspected
what, in relation to myself, that is to say in reality, that
departure would be, what an unprecedented, appalling, unknown
thing, how entirely novel a calamity. Of her departure, had I
foreseen it, I might have gone on thinking incessantly for years on
end, and yet all my thoughts of it, placed end to end, would not
have been comparable for an instant, not merely in intensity but in
kind, with the unimaginable hell the curtain of which Françoise had
raised for me when she said: "Mademoiselle Albertine has gone." In
order to form an idea of an unknown situation our imagination
borrows elements that are already familiar and for that reason does
not form any idea of it. But our sensibility, even in its most
physical form, receives, as it were the brand of the lightning, the
original and for long indelible imprint of the novel event. And I
scarcely ventured to say to myself that, if I had foreseen this
departure, I would perhaps have been incapable of picturing it to
myself in all its horror, or indeed, with Albertine informing me of
it, and myself threatening, imploring her, of preventing it! How
far was any longing for Venice removed from me now! As far as, in
the old days at Combray, was the longing to know Mme. de Guermantes
when the time came at which I longed for one thing only, to have
Mamma in my room. And it was indeed all these anxieties that I had
felt ever since my childhood, which, at the bidding of this new
anguish, had come hastening to reinforce it, to amalgamate
themselves with it in a homogeneous mass that was stifling me. To
be sure, the physical blow which such a parting strikes at the
heart, and which, because of that terrible capacity for registering
things with which the body is endowed, makes our suffering somehow
contemporaneous with all the epochs in our life in which we have
suffered; to be sure, this blow at the heart upon which the woman
speculates a little perhaps—so little compunction do we shew for
the sufferings of other people—who is anxious to give the maximum
intensity to regret, whether it be that, merely hinting at an
imaginary departure, she is seeking only to demand better terms, or
that, leaving us for ever—for ever!—she desires to wound us, or, in
order to avenge herself, or to continue to be loved, or to enhance
the memory that she will leave behind her, to rend asunder the net
of weariness, of indifference which she has felt being woven about
her—to be sure, this blow at our heart, we had vowed that we would
avoid it, had assured ourselves that we would make a good finish.
But it is rarely indeed that we do finish well, for, if all was
well, we would never finish! And besides, the woman to whom we shew
the utmost indifference feels nevertheless in an obscure fashion
that while we have been growing tired of her, by virtue of an
identical force of habit, we have grown more and more attached to
her, and she reflects that one of the essential elements in a good
finish is to warn the other person before one goes. But she is
afraid, if she warns us, of preventing her own departure. Every
woman feels that, if her power over a man is great, the only way to
leave him is sudden flight. A fugitive because a queen, precisely.
To be sure, there is an unspeakable interval between the boredom
which she inspired a moment ago and, because she has gone, this
furious desire to have her back again. But for this, apart from
those which have been furnished in the course of this work and
others which will be furnished later on, there are reasons. For one
thing, her departure occurs as often as not at the moment when our
indifference—real or imagined—is greatest, at the extreme point of
the oscillation of the pendulum. The woman says to herself: "No,
this sort of thing cannot go on any longer," simply because the man
speaks of nothing but leaving her, or thinks of nothing else; and
it is she who leaves him. Then, the pendulum swinging back to its
other extreme, the interval is all the greater. In an instant it
returns to this point; once more, apart from all the reasons that
have been given, it is so natural. Our heart still beats; and
besides, the woman who has gone is no longer the same as the woman
who was with us. Her life under our roof, all too well known, is
suddenly enlarged by the addition of the lives with which she is
inevitably to be associated, and it is perhaps to associate herself
with them that she has left us. So that this novel richness of the
life of the woman who has gone reacts upon the woman who was with
us and was perhaps planning her departure. To the series of
psychological facts which we are able to deduce and which form part
of her life with us, our too evident boredom in her company, our
jealousy also (the effect of which is that the men who have been
left by a number of women have been left almost always in the same
manner because of their character and of certain always identical
reactions which can be calculated: each man has his own way of
being betrayed, as he has his own way of catching cold), to this
series not too mysterious for us, there corresponds doubtless a
series of facts of which we were unaware. She must for some tune
past have been keeping up relations, written, or verbal or through
messengers, with some man, or some woman, have been awaiting some
signal which we may perhaps have given her ourselves,
unconsciously, when we said: "X. called yesterday to see me," if
she had arranged with X. that on the eve of the day when she was to
join him he was to call upon me. How many possible hypotheses!
Possible only. I constructed the truth so well, but in the realm of
possibility only, that, having one day opened, and then by mistake,
a letter addressed to my mistress, from this letter which was
written in a code, and said: "Go on waiting for a signal to go to
the Marquis de Saint-Loup; let me know to-morrow by telephone," I
reconstructed a sort of projected flight; the name of the Marquis
de Saint-Loup was there only as a substitute for some other name,
for my mistress did not know Saint-Loup well enough, but had heard
me speak of him, and moreover the signature was some sort of
nickname, without any intelligible form. As it happened, the letter
was addressed not to my mistress but to another person in the
building who bore a different name which had been misread. The
letter was written not in code, but in bad French, because it was
written by an American woman, who was indeed a friend of Saint-Loup
as he himself told me. And the odd way in which this American woman
wrote certain letters had given the appearance of a nickname to a
name which was quite genuine, only foreign. And so I had on that
occasion been entirely at fault in my suspicions. But the
intellectual structure which had in my mind combined these facts,
all of them false, was itself so accurate, so inflexible form of
the truth that when three months later my mistress, who had at that
time been meaning to spend the rest of her life with me, left me,
it was in a fashion absolutely identical with that which I had
imagined on the former occasion. A letter arrived, containing the
same peculiarities which I had wrongly attributed to the former
letter, but this time it was indeed meant as a signal.This calamity was the greatest that I had experienced in my
life. And, when all was said, the suffering that it caused me was
perhaps even exceeded by my curiosity to learn the causes of this
calamity which Albertine had deliberately brought about. But the
sources of great events are like those of rivers, in vain do we
explore the earth's surface, we can never find them. So Albertine
had for a long time past been planning her flight; I have said (and
at the time it had seemed to me simply a sign of affectation and
ill humour, what Françoise called 'lifting her head') that, from
the day upon which she had ceased to kiss me, she had gone about as
though tormented by a devil, stiffly erect, unbending, saying the
simplest things in a sorrowful tone, slow in her movements, never
once smiling. I cannot say that there was any concrete proof of
conspiracy with the outer world. Françoise told me long afterwards
that, having gone into Albertine's room two days before her
departure, she had found it empty, the curtains drawn, but had
detected from the atmosphere of the room and the sounds that came
in that the window was open. And indeed she had found Albertine on
the balcony. But it is hard to say with whom she could have been
communicating from there, and moreover the drawn curtains screening
the open window could doubtless be explained by her knowing that I
was afraid of draughts, and by the fact that, even if the curtains
afforded me little protection, they would prevent Françoise from
seeing from the passage that the shutters had been opened so early.
No, I can see nothing save one trifling incident which proves
merely that on the day before her departure she knew that she was
going. For during the day she took from my room without my noticing
it a large quantity of wrapping paper and cloth which I kept there,
and in which she spent the whole night packing her innumerable
wrappers and dressing-gowns so that she might leave the house in
the morning; this was the only incident, it was more than enough. I
cannot attach any importance to her having almost forced upon me
that evening a thousand francs which she owed me, there is nothing
peculiar in that, for she was extremely scrupulous about money.
Yes, she took the wrapping paper overnight, but it was not only
then that she knew that she was going to leave me! For it was not
resentment that made her leave me, but her determination, already
formed, to leave me, to abandon the life of which she had dreamed,
that gave her that air of resentment. A resentful air, almost
solemnly cold toward myself, except on the last evening when, after
staying in my room longer than she had intended, she said—a remark
which surprised me, coming from her who had always sought to
postpone the moment of parting—she said to me from the door:
"Good-bye, my dear; good-bye, my dear." But I did not take any
notice of this, at the moment. Françoise told me that next morning
when Albertine informed her that she was going (but this, for that
matter, may be explained also by exhaustion for she had spent the
whole night in packing all her clothes, except the things for which
she had to ask Françoise as they were not in her bedroom or her
dressing-room), she was still so sad, so much more erect, so much
stiffer than during the previous days that Françoise, when
Albertine said to her: "Good-bye, Françoise," almost expected to
see her fall to the ground. When we are told anything like this, we
realise that the woman who appealed to us so much less than any of
the women whom we meet so easily in the course of the briefest
outing, the woman who makes us resent our having to sacrifice them
to herself, is on the contrary she whom now we would a thousand
times rather possess. For the choice lies no longer between a
certain pleasure—which has become by force of habit, and perhaps by
the insignificance of its object, almost nothing—and other
pleasures, which tempt and thrill us, but between these latter
pleasures and something that is far stronger than they, compassion
for suffering.When I vowed to myself that Albertine would be back in the
house before night, I had proceeded in hot haste to cover with a
fresh belief the open wound from which I had torn the belief that
had been my mainstay until then. But however rapidly my instinct of
self-preservation might have acted, I had, when Françoise spoke to
me, been left for an instant without relief, and it was useless my
knowing now that Albertine would return that same evening, the pain
that I had felt in the instant in which I had not yet assured
myself of her return (the instant that had followed the words:
"Mademoiselle Albertine has asked for her boxes, Mademoiselle
Albertine has gone"), this revived in me of its own accord as keen
as it had been before, that is to say as if I had still been
unaware of Albertine's immediate return. However, it was essential
that she should return, but of her own accord. Upon every
hypothesis, to appear to be taking the first step, to be begging
her to return would be to defeat my own object. To be sure, I had
not the strength to give her up as I had given up Gilberte. Even
more than to see Albertine again, what I wished was to put an end
to the physical anguish which my heart, less stout than of old,
could endure no longer. Then, by dint of accustoming myself to not
wishing anything, whether it was a question of work or of anything
else, I had become more cowardly. But above all, this anguish was
incomparably keener for several reasons, the most important of
which was perhaps not that I had never tasted any sensual pleasure
with Mme. de Guermantes or with Gilberte, but that, not seeing them
every day, and at every hour of the day, having no opportunity and
consequently no need to see them, there had been less prominent, in
my love for them, the immense force of Habit. Perhaps, now that my
heart, incapable of wishing and of enduring of its own free will
what I was suffering, found only one possible solution, that
Albertine should return at all costs, perhaps the opposite solution
(a deliberate renunciation, gradual resignation) would have seemed
to me a novelist's solution, improbable in real life, had I not
myself decided upon it in the past when Gilberte was concerned. I
knew therefore that this other solution might be accepted also and
by the same man, for I had remained more or less the same. Only
time had played its part, time which had made me older, time which
moreover had kept Albertine perpetually in my company while we were
living together. But I must add that, without my giving up the idea
of that life, there survived in me of all that I had felt about
Gilberte the pride which made me refuse to be to Albertine a
repellent plaything by insisting upon her return; I wished her to
come back without my appearing to attach any importance to her
return. I got out of bed, so as to lose no more time, but was
arrested by my anguish; this was the first time that I had got out
of bed since Albertine had left me. Yet I must dress myself at once
in order to go and make inquiries of her porter.Suffering, the prolongation of a spiritual shock that has
come from without, keeps on endeavouring to change its form; we
hope to be able to dispel it by making plans, by seeking
information; we wish it to pass through its countless
metamorphoses, this requires less courage than retaining our
suffering intact; the bed appears so narrow, hard and cold on which
we lie down with our grief. I put my feet to the ground; I stepped
across the room with endless precautions, took up a position from
which I could not see Albertine's chair, the pianola upon the
pedals of which she used to press her golden slippers, nor a single
one of the things which she had used and all of which, in the
secret language that my memory had imparted to them, seemed to be
seeking to give me a fresh translation, a different version, to
announce to me for the second time the news of her departure. But
even without looking at them I could see them, my strength left me,
I sank down upon one of those blue satin armchairs, the glossy
surface of which an hour earlier, in the dimness of my bedroom
anaesthetised by a ray of morning light, had made me dream dreams
which then I had passionately caressed, which were so far from me
now. Alas, I had never sat down upon any of them until this minute
save when Albertine was still with me. And so I could not remain
sitting there, I rose; and thus, at every moment there was one more
of those innumerable and humble 'selves' that compose our
personality which was still unaware of Albertine's departure and
must be informed of it; I was obliged—and this was more cruel than
if they had been strangers and had not borrowed my sensibility to
pain—to describe to all these 'selves' who did not yet know of it,
the calamity that had just occurred, it was necessary that each of
them in turn should hear for the first time the words: "Albertine
has asked for her boxes"—those coffin-shaped boxes which I had seen
put on the train at Balbec with my mother's—"Albertine has gone."
To each of them I had to relate my grief, the grief which is in no
way a pessimistic conclusion freely drawn from a number of
lamentable circumstances, but is the intermittent and involuntary
revival of a specific impression, come to us from without and not
chosen by us. There were some of these 'selves' which I had not
encountered for a long time past. For instance (I had not
remembered that it was the day on which the barber called) the
'self that I was when I was having my hair cut. I had forgotten
this 'self,' the barber's arrival made me burst into tears, as, at
a funeral, does the appearance of an old pensioned servant who has
not forgotten the deceased. Then all of a sudden I recalled that,
during the last week, I had from time to time been seized by panic
fears which I had not confessed to myself. At such moments,
however, I had debated the question, saying to myself: "Useless, of
course, to consider the hypothesis of her suddenly leaving me. It
is absurd. If I were to confess it to a sober, intelligent man"
(and I should have done so to secure peace of mind, had not
jealousy prevented me from making confidences) "he would be sure to
say to me: 'Why, you are mad. It is impossible.' And, as a matter
of fact, during these last days we have not quarrelled once. People
separate for a reason. They tell you their reason. They give you a
chance to reply. They do not run away like that. No, it is
perfectly childish. It is the only hypothesis that is absurd." And
yet, every day, when I found that she was still there in the
morning when I fang my bell, I had heaved a vast sigh of relief.
And when Françoise handed me Albertine's letter, I had at once been
certain that it referred to the one thing that could not happen, to
this departure which I had in a sense perceived many days in
advance, in spite of the logical reasons for my feeling reassured.
I had said this to myself almost with satisfaction at my own
perspicacity in my despair, like a murderer who knows that his
guilt cannot be detected, but is nevertheless afraid and all of a
sudden sees his victim's name written at the head of a document on
the table of the police official who has sent for him. My only hope
was that Albertine had gone to Touraine, to her aunt's house where,
after all, she would be fairly well guarded and could not do
anything very serious in the interval before I brought her back. My
worst fear was that she might be remaining in Paris, or have gone
to Amsterdam or to Montjouvain, in other words that she had escaped
in order to involve herself in some intrigue the preliminaries of
which I had failed to observe. But in reality when I said to myself
Paris, Amsterdam, Montjouvain, that is to say various names of
places, I was thinking of places which were merely potential. And
so, when Albertine's hall porter informed me that she had gone to
Touraine, this place of residence which I supposed myself to desire
seemed to me the most terrible of them all, because it was real,
and because, tormented for the first time by the certainty of the
present and the uncertainty of the future, I pictured to myself
Albertine starting upon a life which she had deliberately chosen to
lead apart from myself, perhaps for a long time, perhaps for ever,
and in which she would realise that unknown element which in the
past had so often distressed me when, nevertheless, I had enjoyed
the happiness of possessing, of caressing what was its outer shell,
that charming face impenetrable and captive. It was this unknown
element that formed the core of my love. Outside the door of
Albertine's house I found a poor little girl who gazed at me
open-eyed and looked so honest that I asked her whether she would
care to come home with me, as I might have taken home a dog with
faithful eyes. She seemed pleased by my suggestion. When I got
home, I held her for some time on my knee, but very soon her
presence, by making me feel too keenly Albertine's absence, became
intolerable. And I asked her to go away, giving her first a
five-hundred franc note. And yet, a moment later, the thought of
having some other little girl in the house with me, of never being
alone, without the comfort of an innocent presence, was the only
thing that enabled me to endure the idea that Albertine might
perhaps remain away for some time before returning. As for
Albertine herself, she barely existed in me save under the form of
her name, which, but for certain rare moments of respite when I
awoke, came and engraved itself upon my brain and continued
incessantly to do so. If I had thought aloud, I should have kept on
repeating it, and my speech would have been as monotonous, as
limited as if I had been transformed into a bird, a bird like that
in the fable whose song repeated incessantly the name of her whom,
when a man, it had loved. We say the name to ourselves, and as we
remain silent it seems as though we inscribed it on ourselves, as
though it left its trace on our brain which must end by being, like
a wall upon which somebody has amused himself by scribbling,
entirely covered with the name, written a thousand times over, of
her whom we love. We repeat it all the time in our mind, even when
we are happy, all the more when we are unhappy. And to repeat this
name, which gives us nothing in addition to what we already know,
we feel an incessantly renewed desire, but, in the course of time,
it wearies us. To carnal pleasure I did not even give a thought at
this moment; I did not even see, with my mind's eye, the image of
that Albertine, albeit she had been the cause of such an upheaval
of my existence, I did not perceive her body and if I had wished to
isolate the idea that was bound up—for there is always some idea
bound up—with my suffering, it would have been alternately, on the
one hand my doubt as to the intention with which she had left me,
with or without any thought of returning, and on the other hand the
means of bringing her back. Perhaps there is something symbolical
and true in the minute place occupied in our anxiety by the person
who is its cause. The fact is that the person counts for little or
nothing; what is almost everything is the series of emotions, of
agonies which similar mishaps have made us feel in the past in
connexion with her and which habit has attached to her. What proves
this clearly is, even more than the boredom which we feel in
moments of happiness, that the fact of seeing or not seeing the
person in question, of being or not being admired by her, of having
or not having her at our disposal will seem to us utterly trivial
when we shall no longer have to set ourselves the problem (so
superfluous that we shall no longer take the trouble to consider
it) save in relation to the person herself—the series of emotions
and agonies being forgotten, at least in so far as she is
concerned, for it may have developed afresh but in connexion with
another person. Before this, when it was still attached to her, we
supposed that our happiness was dependent upon her presence; it
depended merely upon the cessation of our anxiety. Our subconscious
was therefore more clairvoyant than ourselves at that moment, when
it made the form of the beloved woman so minute, a form which we
had indeed perhaps forgotten, which we might have failed to
remember clearly and thought unattractive, in the terrible drama in
which finding her again in order to cease from expecting her
becomes an absolutely vital matter. Minute proportions of the
woman's form, a logical and necessary effect of the fashion in
which love develops, a clear allegory of the subjective nature of
that love.The spirit in which Albertine had left me was similar no
doubt to that of the nations who pave the way by a demonstration of
their armed force for the exercise of their diplomacy. She could
not have left me save in the hope of obtaining from me better
terms, greater freedom, more comfort. In that case the one of us
who would have conquered would have been myself, had I had the
strength to await the moment when, seeing that she could gain
nothing, she would return of her own accord. But if at cards, or in
war, where victory alone matters, we can hold out against bluff,
the conditions are not the same that are created by love and
jealousy, not to mention suffering. If, in order to wait, to 'hold
out,' I allowed Albertine to remain away from me for several days,
for several weeks perhaps, I was ruining what had been my sole
purpose for more than a year, never to leave her by herself for a
single hour. All my precautions were rendered fruitless, if I
allowed her the time, the opportunity to betray me as often as she
might choose, and if in the end she did return to me, I should
never again be able to forget the time when she had been alone, and
even if I won in the end, nevertheless in the past, that is to say
irreparably, I should be the vanquished party.As for the means of bringing Albertine back, they had all the
more chance of success the more plausible the hypothesis appeared
that she had left me only in the hope of being summoned back upon
more favourable terms. And no doubt to the people who did not
believe in Albertine's sincerity, certainly to Françoise for
instance, this was the more plausible hypothesis. But my reason, to
which the only explanation of certain bouts of ill humour, of
certain attitudes had appeared, before I knew anything, to be that
she had planned a final departure, found it difficult to believe
that, now that her departure had occurred, it was a mere feint. I
say my reason, not myself. The hypothesis of a feint became all the
more necessary to me the more improbable it was, and gained in
strength what it lost in probability. When we find ourselves on the
brink of the abyss, and it seems as though God has forsaken us, we
no longer hesitate to expect a miracle of Him.I realise that in all this I was the most apathetic, albeit
the most anxious of detectives. But Albertine's flight had not
restored to myself the faculties of which the habit of having her
watched by other people had deprived me. I could think of one thing
only: how to employ some one else upon the search for her. This
other person was Saint-Loup, who agreed. The transference of the
anxiety of so many days to another person filled me with joy and I
quivered with the certainty of success, my hands becoming suddenly
dry again as in the past, and no longer moist with that sweat in
which Françoise had bathed me when she said: "Mademoiselle
Albertine has gone."The reader may remember that when I decided to live with
Albertine, and even to marry her, it was in order to guard her, to
know what she was doing, to prevent her from returning to her old
habits with Mlle. Vinteuil. It had been in the appalling anguish
caused by her revelation at Balbec when she had told me, as a thing
that was quite natural, and I succeeded, albeit it was the greatest
grief that I had ever yet felt in my life, in seeming to find quite
natural the thing which in my worst suppositions I had never had
the audacity to imagine. (It is astonishing what a want of
imagination jealousy, which spends its time in weaving little
suppositions of what is untrue, shews when it is a question of
discovering the truth.) Now this love, born first and foremost of a
need to prevent Albertine from doing wrong, this love had preserved
in the sequel the marks of its origin. Being with her mattered
little to me so long as I could prevent her from "being on the
run," from going to this place or to that. In order to prevent her,
I had had recourse to the vigilance, to the company of the people
who went about with her, and they had only to give me at the end of
the day a report that was fairly reassuring for my anxieties to
vanish in good humour.Having given myself the assurance that, whatever steps I
might have to take, Albertine would be back in the house that same
evening, I had granted a respite to the grief which Françoise had
caused me when she told me that Albertine had gone (because at that
moment my mind taken by surprise had believed for an instant that
her departure was final). But after an interruption, when with an
impulse of its own independent life the initial suffering revived
spontaneously in me, it was just as keen as before, because it was
anterior to the consoling promise that I had given myself to bring
Albertine back that evening. This utterance, which would have
calmed it, my suffering had not heard. To set in motion the means
of bringing about her return, once again, not that such an attitude
on my part would ever have proved very successful, but because I
had always adopted it since I had been in love with Albertine, I
was condemned to behave as though I did not love her, was not
pained by her departure, I was condemned to continue to lie to her.
I might be all the more energetic in my efforts to bring her back
in that personally I should appear to have given her up for good. I
decided to write Albertine a farewell letter in which I would
regard her departure as final, while I would send Saint-Loup down
to put upon Mme. Bontemps, as though without my knowledge, the most
brutal pressure to make Albertine return as soon as possible. No
doubt I had had experience with Gilberte of the danger of letters
expressing an indifference which, feigned at first, ends by
becoming genuine. And this experience ought to have restrained me
from writing to Albertine letters of the same sort as those that I
had written to Gilberte. But what we call experience is merely the
revelation to our own eyes of a trait in our character which
naturally reappears, and reappears all the more markedly because we
have already brought it into prominence once of our own accord, so
that the spontaneous impulse which guided us on the first occasion
finds itself reinforced by all the suggestions of memory. The human
plagiarism which it is most difficult to avoid, for individuals
(and even for nations which persevere in their faults and continue
to aggravate them) is the plagiarism of ourself.Knowing that Saint-Loup was in Paris I had sent for him
immediately; he came in haste to my rescue, swift and efficient as
he had been long ago at Doncières, and agreed to set off at once
for Touraine. I suggested to him the following arrangement. He was
to take the train to Châtellerault, find out where Mme. Bontemps
lived, and wait until Albertine should have left the house, since
there was a risk of her recognising him. "But does the girl you are
speaking of know me, then?" he asked. I told him that I did not
think so. This plan of action filled me with indescribable joy. It
was nevertheless diametrically opposed to my original intention: to
arrange things so that I should not appear to be seeking
Albertine's return; whereas by so acting I must inevitably appear
to be seeking it, but this plan had inestimable advantage over 'the
proper thing to do' that it enabled me to say to myself that some
one sent by me was going to see Albertine, and would doubtless
bring her back with him. And if I had been able to read my own
heart clearly at the start, I might have foreseen that it was this
solution, hidden in the darkness, which I felt to be deplorable,
that would ultimately prevail over the alternative course of
patience which I had decided to choose, from want of will-power. As
Saint-Loup already appeared slightly surprised to learn that a girl
had been living with me through the whole winter without my having
said a word to him about her, as moreover he had often spoken to me
of the girl who had been at Balbec and I had never said in reply:
"But she is living here," he might be annoyed by my want of
confidence. There was always the risk of Mme. Bontemps's mentioning
Balbec to him. But I was too impatient for his departure, for his
arrival at the other end, to wish, to be able to think of the
possible consequences of his journey. As for the risk of his
recognising Albertine (at whom he had resolutely refrained from
looking when he had met her at Doncières), she had, as everyone
admitted, so altered and had grown so much stouter that it was
hardly likely. He asked me whether I had not a picture of
Albertine. I replied at first that I had not, so that he might not
have a chance, from her photograph, taken about the time of our
stay at Balbec, of recognising Albertine, though he had had no more
than a glimpse of her in the railway carriage. But then I
remembered that in the photograph she would be already as different
from the Albertine of Balbec as the living Albertine now was, and
that he would recognise her no better from her photograph than in
the flesh. While I was looking for it, he laid his hand gently upon
my brow, by way of consoling me. I was touched by the distress
which the grief that he guessed me to be feeling was causing him.
For one thing, however final his rupture with Rachel, what he had
felt at that time was not yet so remote that he had not a special
sympathy, a special pity for this sort of suffering, as we feel
ourselves more closely akin to a person who is afflicted with the
same malady as ourselves. Besides, he had so strong an affection
for myself that the thought of my suffering was intolerable to him.
And so he conceived, towards her who was the cause of my suffering,
a rancour mingled with admiration. He regarded me as so superior a
being that he supposed that if I were to subject myself to another
person she must be indeed extraordinary. I quite expected that he
would think Albertine, in her photograph, pretty, but as at the
same time I did not imagine that it would produce upon him the
impression that Helen made upon the Trojan elders, as I continued
to look for it, I said modestly: "Oh! you know, you mustn't imagine
things, for one thing it is a bad photograph, and besides there's
nothing startling about her, she is not a beauty, she is merely
very nice." "Oh, yes, she must be wonderful," he said with a
simple, sincere enthusiasm as he sought to form a mental picture of
the person who was capable of plunging me in such despair and
agitation. "I am angry with her because she has hurt you, but at
the same time one can't help seeing that a man who is an artist to
his fingertips like you, that you, who love beauty in everything
and with so passionate a love, were predestined to suffer more than
the ordinary person when you found it in a woman." At last I
managed to find her photograph. "She is bound to be wonderful,"
still came from Robert, who had not seen that I was holding out the
photograph to him. All at once he caught sight of it, he held it
for a moment between his hands. His face expressed a stupefaction
which amounted to stupidity. "Is this the girl you are in love
with?" he said at length in a tone from which astonishment was
banished by his fear of making me angry. He made no remark upon it,
he had assumed the reasonable, prudent, inevitably somewhat
disdainful air which we assume before a sick person—even if he has
been in the past a man of outstanding gifts, and our friend—who is
now nothing of the sort, for, raving mad, he speaks to us of a
celestial being who has appeared to him, and continues to behold
this being where we, the sane man, can see nothing but a quilt on
the bed. I at once understood Robert's astonishment and that it was
the same in which the sight of his mistress had plunged me, with
this difference only that I had recognised in her a woman whom I
already knew, whereas he supposed that he had never seen Albertine.
But no doubt the difference between our respective impressions of
the same person was equally great. The time was past when I had
timidly begun at Balbec by adding to my visual sensations when I
gazed at Albertine sensations of taste, of smell, of touch. Since
then, other more profound, more pleasant, more indefinable
sensations had been added to them, and afterwards painful
sensations. In short, Albertine was merely, like a stone round
which snow has gathered, the generating centre of an immense
structure which rose above the plane of my heart. Robert, to whom
all this stratification of sensations was invisible, grasped only a
residue of it which it prevented me, on the contrary, from
perceiving. What had disconcerted Robert when his eyes fell upon
Albertine's photograph was not the consternation of the Trojan
elders when they saw Helen go by and said: "All our misfortunes are
not worth a single glance from her eyes," but the exactly opposite
impression which may be expressed by: "What, it is for this that he
has worked himself into such a state, has grieved himself so, has
done so many idiotic things!" It must indeed be admitted that this
sort of reaction at the sight of the person who has caused the
suffering, upset the life, sometimes brought about the death of
some one whom we love, is infinitely more frequent than that felt
by the Trojan elders, and is in short habitual. This is not merely
because love is individual, nor because, when we do not feel it,
finding it avoidable and philosophising upon the folly of other
people come naturally to us. No, it is because, when it has reached
the stage at which it causes such misery, the structure composed of
the sensations interposed between the face of the woman and the
eyes of her lover—the huge egg of pain which encases it and
conceals it as a mantle of snow conceals a fountain—is already
raised so high that the point at which the lover's gaze comes to
rest, the point at which he finds his pleasure and his sufferings,
is as far from the point which other people see as is the real sun
from the place in which its condensed light enables us to see it in
the sky. And what is more, during this time, beneath the chrysalis
of griefs and affections which render invisible to the lover the
worst metamorphoses of the beloved object, her face has had time to
grow old and to change. With the result that if the face which the
lover saw on the first occasion is very far removed from that which
he has seen since he has been in love and has been made to suffer,
it is, in the opposite direction, equally far from the face which
may now be seen by the indifferent onlooker. (What would have
happened if, instead of the photograph of one who was still a girl,
Robert had seen the photograph of an elderly mistress?) And indeed
we have no need to see for the first time the woman who has caused
such an upheaval, in order to feel this astonishment. Often we know
her already, as my great-uncle knew Odette. Then the optical
difference extends not merely to the bodily aspect, but to the
character, to the individual importance. It is more likely than not
that the woman who is causing the man who is in love with her to
suffer has already behaved perfectly towards some one who was not
interested in her, just as Odette who was so cruel to Swann had
been the sedulous 'lady in pink' to my great-uncle, or indeed that
the person whose every decision is calculated in advance with as
much dread as that of a deity by the man who is in love with her,
appears as a person of no importance, only too glad to do anything
that he may require of her, in the eyes of the man who is not in
love with her, as Saint-Loup's mistress appeared to me who saw in
her nothing more than that 'Rachel, when from the Lord' who had so
repeatedly been offered me. I recalled my own stupefaction, that
first time that I met her with Saint-Loup, at the thought that
anybody could be tormented by not knowing what such a woman had
been doing, by the itch to know what she might have said in a
whisper to some other man, why she had desired a rupture. And I
felt that all this past existence—but, in this case,
Albertine's—toward which every fibre of my heart, of my life was
directed with a throbbing, clumsy pain, must appear just as
insignificant to Saint-Loup as it would one day, perhaps, appear to
myself. I felt that I would pass perhaps gradually, so far as the
insignificance or gravity of Albertine's past was concerned, from
the state of mind in which I was at the moment to that of
Saint-Loup, for I was under no illusion as to what Saint-Loup might
be thinking, as to what anyone else than the lover himself might
think. And I was not unduly distressed. Let us leave pretty women
to men devoid of imagination. I recalled that tragic explanation of
so many of us which is furnished by an inspired but not lifelike
portrait, such as Elstir's portrait of Odette, which is a portrait
not so much of a mistress as of our degrading love for her. There
was lacking only what we find in so many portraits—that the painter
should have been at once a great artist and a lover (and even then
it was said that Elstir had been in love with Odette). This
disparity, the whole life of a lover—of a lover whose acts of folly
nobody understands—the whole life of a Swann goes to prove. But let
the lover be embodied in a painter like Elstir and then we have the
clue to the enigma, we have at length before our eyes those lips
which the common herd have never perceived, that nose which nobody
has ever seen, that unsuspected carriage. The portrait says: "What
I have loved, what has made me suffer, what I have never ceased to
behold is this." By an inverse gymnastic, I who had made a mental
effort to add to Rachel all that Saint-Loup had added to her of
himself, I attempted to subtract the support of my heart and mind
from the composition of Albertine and to picture her to myself as
she must appear to Saint-Loup, as Rachel had appeared to me. Those
differences, even though we were to observe them ourselves, what
importance would we attach to them? When, in the summer at Balbec,
Albertine used to wait for me beneath the arcades of Incarville and
spring into my carriage, not only had she not yet put on weight,
she had, as a result of too much exercise, begun to waste; thin,
made plainer by an ugly hat which left visible only the tip of an
ugly nose, and a side-view, pale cheeks like white slugs, I
recognised very little of her, enough however to know, when she
sprang into the carriage, that it was she, that she had been
punctual in keeping our appointment and had not gone somewhere
else; and this was enough; what we love is too much in the past,
consists too much in the time that we have spent together for us to
require the whole woman; we wish only to be sure that it is she,
not to be mistaken as to her identity, a thing far more important
than beauty to those who are in love; her cheeks may grow hollow,
her body thin, even to those who were originally most proud, in the
eyes of the world, of their domination over beauty, that little tip
of a nose, that sign in which is summed up the permanent
personality of a woman, that algebraical formula, that constant, is
sufficient to prevent a man who is courted in the highest society
and is in love with her from being free upon a single evening
because he is spending his evenings in brushing and entangling,
until it is time to go to bed, the hair of the woman whom he loves,
or simply in staying by her side, so that he may be with her or she
with him, or merely that she may not be with other
people.
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