Contrary to the habitual order of her holiday movements, this year she had come straight from Balbec, where furthermore she had not stayed nearly so late as usual. It was a long time since I had seen her. And since I did not know even by name the people with whom she was in the habit of mixing in Paris, I knew nothing of her life during the periods in which she abstained from coming to see me. These lasted often for quite a time. Then, one fine day, in would burst Albertine whose rosy apparitions and silent visits left me little if any better informed as to what she might have been doing during an interval which remained plunged in that darkness of her hidden life which my eyes felt little anxiety to penetrate.
This time, however, certain signs seemed to indicate that some new experience must have entered into that life. And yet, perhaps, all that one was entitled to conclude from them was that girls change very rapidly at the age which Albertine had now reached. For instance, her intelligence was now more in evidence, and on my reminding her of the day when she had insisted with so much ardour on the superiority of her idea of making Sophocles write “My dear Racine,” she was the first to laugh, quite whole-heartedly. “Andrée was quite right, it was stupid of me,” she admitted. “Sophocles ought to have begun: ‘Sir.’ ” I replied that Andrée’s “Sir” and “Dear Sir” were no less comic than her own “My dear Racine,” or Gisèle’s “My dear friend,” but that after all the really stupid people were the professors for making Sophocles write letters to Racine. Here, however, Albertine was unable to follow me. She could not see what was stupid about it; her intelligence was opening up, but was not fully developed. There were other more attractive novelties in her; I sensed, in this same pretty girl who had just sat down by my bed, something that was different; and in those lines which, in the look and the features of the face, express a person’s habitual volition, a change of front, a partial conversion, as though something had happened to break down those resistances I had come up against in Balbec one long-ago evening when we had formed a couple symmetrical with but the converse of our present arrangement, for then it had been she who was lying down and I by her bedside. Wishing and not daring to ascertain whether she would now let herself be kissed, every time that she rose to go I asked her to stay a little longer. This was a concession not very easy to obtain, for although she had nothing to do (otherwise she would have rushed out of the house) she was a person methodical in her habits and moreover not very gracious towards me, seeming no longer to take pleasure in my company. Yet each time, after looking at her watch, she sat down again at my request until finally she had spent several hours with me without my having asked her for anything; the things I said to her were connected with those I had said during the preceding hours, and were totally unconnected with what I was thinking about, what I desired from her, remaining obstinately parallel thereto. There is nothing like desire for preventing the things one says from bearing any resemblance to what one has in one’s mind. Time presses, and yet it seems as though we were seeking to gain time by speaking of subjects absolutely alien to the one that preoccupies us. We go on chatting, whereas the sentence we should like to utter would have been accompanied by a gesture, if indeed we have not (to give ourselves the pleasure of immediate action and to gratify the curiosity we feel as to the reactions which will follow it, without saying a word, without a by-your-leave) already made this gesture. Certainly I was not in the least in love with Albertine; child of the mists outside, she could simply satisfy the fanciful desire which the change of weather had awakened in me and which was midway between the desires that are satisfied by the arts of the kitchen and of monumental sculpture respectively, for it made me dream simultaneously of mingling with my flesh a substance different and warm, and of attaching at some point to my recumbent body a divergent one, as the body of Eve barely holds by the feet to the side of Adam, to whose body hers is almost perpendicular, in those Romanesque bas-reliefs in the church at Balbec which represent in so noble and so reposeful a fashion, still almost like a classical frieze, the creation of woman; God in them is everywhere, followed, as by two ministers, by two little angels in whom one recognises—like those winged, swarming summer creatures which winter has caught by surprise and spared—cupids from Herculaneum still surviving well into the thirteenth century, and winging their last slow flight, weary but never failing in the grace that might be expected of them, over the whole front of the porch.
As for this pleasure which by accomplishing my desire would have released me from these musings and which I should have sought quite as readily from any other pretty woman, had I been asked upon what—in the course of this endless chatter throughout which I was at pains to keep from Albertine the one thing that was in my mind—my optimistic assumption with regard to her possible complaisances was based, I should perhaps have answered that this assumption was due (while the forgotten outlines of Albertine’s voice retraced for me the contour of her personality) to the advent of certain words which had not formed part of her vocabulary, or at least not in the acceptation which she now gave them. Thus, when she said to me that Elstir was stupid and I protested: “You don’t understand,” she replied, smiling, “I mean that he was stupid in that instance, but of course I know he’s a very distinguished person, really.”
Similarly, wishing to say of the Fontainebleau golf club that it was smart, she declared: “It’s really quite a selection.”
Speaking of a duel I had fought, she said of my seconds: “What very choice seconds,” and looking at my face confessed that she would like to see me “sport a moustache.” She even went so far (and at this point my chances appeared to me very great) as to announce, in a phrase of which I would have sworn that she was ignorant a year earlier, that since she had last seen Gisèle there had passed a certain “lapse of time.” This was not to say that Albertine had not already possessed, when I was at Balbec, a quite adequate assortment of those expressions which reveal at once that one comes of a well-to-do family and which, year by year, a mother passes on to her daughter just as she gradually bestows on her, as the girl grows up, her own jewels on important occasions. It was evident that Albertine had ceased to be a little girl when one day, to express her thanks for a present which a strange lady had given her, she had said: “I’m quite overcome.” Mme Bontemps had been unable to refrain from looking across at her husband, whose comment was: “Well, well, and she’s only fourteen.”
Her more pronounced nubility had struck home when Albertine, speaking of another girl whom she considered ill-bred, said: “One can’t even tell whether she’s pretty, because she paints her face a foot thick.” Finally, though still only a girl, she already displayed the manner of a grown woman of her upbringing and station when she said, of someone whose face twitched: “I can’t look at him, because it makes me want to do the same,” or, if someone else were being imitated: “The absurd thing about it is that when you imitate her voice you look exactly like her.” All this is drawn from the social treasury. But the point was that it did not seem to me possible that Albertine’s natural environment could have supplied her with “distinguished” in the sense in which my father would say of a colleague whom he had not actually met but whose intellectual attainments he had heard praised: “It appears he’s a very distinguished person.” “Selection,” even when used of a golf club, struck me as being as incompatible with the Simonet family as it would be, if preceded by the adjective “natural,” with a text published centuries before the researches of Darwin. “Lapse of time” seemed to me to augur better still. Finally there appeared the evidence of certain upheavals, the nature of which was unknown to me, but sufficient to justify me in all my hopes, when Albertine observed, with the self-satisfaction of a person whose opinion is by no means to be despised:
“To my mind, that is the best thing that could possibly happen. I regard it as the best solution, the stylish way out.”
This was so novel, so manifestly an alluvial deposit leading one to suspect such capricious wanderings over ground hitherto unk
nown to her, that on hearing the words “to my mind” I drew Albertine towards me, and at “I regard” sat her down on my bed.
No doubt it happens that women of moderate culture, on marrying well-read men, receive such expressions as part of their dowry. And shortly after the metamorphosis which follows the wedding night, when they start paying calls and are stand-offish with their old friends, one notices with surprise that they have turned into matrons if, in decreeing that some person is intelligent, they sound both “1”s in the word; but that is precisely the sign of a change of state, and it seemed to me that there was a world of difference between the new expressions and the vocabulary of the Albertine I had known of old—a vocabulary in which the most daring flights were to say of any unusual person: “He’s a type,” or, if you suggested a game of cards to her: “I don’t have money to burn,” or again, if any of her friends were to reproach her in terms which she felt to be unjustified: “You really are the limit!”—expressions dictated in such cases by a sort of bourgeois tradition almost as old as the Magnificat itself, which a girl slightly out of temper and confident that she is in the right employs, as the saying is, “quite naturally,” that is to say because she has learned them from her mother, just as she has learned to say her prayers or to curtsey. All these expressions Mme Bontemps had imparted to her at the same time as a hatred of the Jews and a respect for black because it is always suitable and becoming, even without any formal instruction, but as the piping of the parent goldfinches serves as a model for that of the newborn goldfinches so that they in turn grow into true goldfinches also. But when all was said, “selection” appeared to me of alien growth and “I regard” encouraging. Albertine was no longer the same; therefore she might not perhaps act, might not react in the same way.
Not only did I no longer feel any love for her, but I no longer had to consider, as I might have at Balbec, the risk of shattering in her an affection for myself, since it no longer existed. There could be no doubt that she had long since become quite indifferent to me. I was well aware that to her I was no longer in any sense a member of the “little band” into which I had at one time so anxiously sought and had then been so happy to have secured admission. Besides, since she no longer even had, as in the Balbec days, an air of frank good nature, I felt no serious scruples. However, I think what finally decided me was another philological discovery. As, continuing to add fresh links to the external chain of talk behind which I hid my inner desire, I spoke (having Albertine secure now on the corner of my bed) of one of the girls of the little band who was less striking than the rest but whom nevertheless I had thought quite pretty. “Yes,” answered Albertine, “she reminds me of a little mousmé.”19 Clearly, when I first knew Albertine the word was unknown to her. It was probable that, had things followed their normal course, she would never have learned it, and for my part I should have seen no cause for regret in that, for there is no more repulsive word in the language. The mere sound of it sets one’s teeth on edge as when one has put too large a spoonful of ice in one’s mouth. But coming from Albertine, pretty as she was, not even “mousmé” could strike me as unpleasing. On the contrary, I felt it to be a revelation, if not of an external initiation, at any rate of an internal evolution. Unfortunately it was now time for me to bid her good-bye if I wished her to reach home in time for her dinner, and myself to be out of bed and dressed in time for my own. It was Françoise who was preparing it; she did not like it to be delayed, and must already have found it an infringement of one of the articles of her code that Albertine, in the absence of my parents, should be paying me so prolonged a visit, and one which was going to make everything late. But before “mousmé” all these arguments fell to the ground and I hastened to say:
“You know, I’m not in the least ticklish. You could go on tickling me for a whole hour and I wouldn’t feel it.”
“Really?”
“I assure you.”
She understood, doubtless, that this was the awkward expression of a desire on my part, for, like a person who offers to give you an introduction for which you have not ventured to ask, though what you have said has shown him that it would be of great service to you:
“Would you like me to try?” she inquired with womanly meekness.
“Just as you like, but you would be more comfortable if you lay down properly on the bed.”
“Like that?”
“No, further in.”
“You’re sure I’m not too heavy?”
As she uttered these words the door opened and Françoise walked in carrying a lamp. Albertine just had time to scramble back on to her chair. Perhaps Françoise had chosen this moment to confound us, having been listening at the door or even peeping through the keyhole. But there was no need to suppose anything of the sort; she might well have scorned to assure herself by the use of her eyes of what her instinct must plainly enough have detected, for by dint of living with me and my parents she had succeeded in acquiring, through fear, prudence, alertness and cunning, that instinctive and almost divinatory knowledge of us all that the mariner has of the sea, the quarry has of the hunter, and if not the physician, often at any rate the invalid has of disease. The amount of knowledge that she managed to acquire would have astounded a stranger with as good reason as does the advanced state of certain arts and sciences among the ancients, given the almost non-existent means of information at their disposal (hers were no less exiguous; they consisted of a few casual remarks forming barely a twentieth part of our conversation at dinner, caught on the wing by the butler and inaccurately transmitted to the kitchen). And even her mistakes were due, like theirs, like the fables in which Plato believed, rather to a false conception of the world and to preconceived ideas than to inadequacy of material resources. Thus even in our own day it has been possible for the most important discoveries as to the habits of insects to be made by a scientist who had access to no laboratory and no apparatus of any sort. But if the drawbacks arising from her menial position had not prevented her from acquiring a stock of learning indispensable to the art which was its ultimate goal—and which consisted in putting us to confusion by communicating to us the results of her discoveries—the limitations under which she worked had done more; in this case the impediment, not content with merely not paralysing the flight of her imagination, had powerfully reinforced it. Of course Françoise neglected no artificial aids, those for example of diction and attitude. Since (if she never believed what we said to her in the hope that she would believe it) she accepted without the slightest hesitation the truth of anything, however absurd, that a person of her own condition in life might tell her which might at the same time offend our notions, just as her way of listening to our assertions bore witness to her incredulity, so the accents in which (the use of indirect speech enabling her to hurl the most deadly insults at us with impunity) she reported the narrative of a cook who had told her how she had threatened her employers and, by calling them “dung” in public, had wrung from them any number of privileges and concessions, showed that she regarded the story as gospel. Françoise went so far as to add: “I’m sure if I had been the mistress I should have been quite vexed.” In vain might we, despite our original dislike of the lady on the fourth floor, shrug our shoulders, as though at an unlikely fable, at this unedifying report, the teller knew how to invest her tone with the trenchant assertiveness of the most irrefutable and most irritating affirmation.
But above all, just as writers, when they are bound hand and foot by the tyranny of a monarch or of a school of poetry, by the constraints of prosodic laws or of a state religion, often attain a power of concentration from which they would have been dispensed under a system of political liberty or literary anarchy, so Françoise, not being able to reply to us in an explicit fashion, spoke like Tiresias and would have written like Tacitus. She managed to embody everything that she could not express directly in a sentence for which we could not find fault with her without accusing ourselves, indeed in less than a sentence, in a silence,
in the way in which she placed an object in a room.
Thus, whenever I inadvertently left on my table, among a pile of other letters, one which it was imperative that she should not see, because, for instance, it referred to her with a malevolence which afforded a presumption of the same feeling towards her in the recipient as in the writer, that evening, if I came home with a feeling of uneasiness and went straight to my room, there on top of my letters, neatly arranged in a symmetrical pile, the compromising document caught my eye as it could not possibly have failed to catch the eye of Françoise, placed by her right at the top, almost apart from the rest, in a prominence that was a form of speech, that had an eloquence all its own, and, as soon as I crossed the threshold, made me start as I would at a cry. She excelled in the preparation of these stage effects, intended to so enlighten the spectator, in her absence, that he already knew that she knew everything when in due course she made her entry. She possessed, for thus making an inanimate object speak, the art, at once inspired and painstaking, of an Irving or a Frédérick Lemaître. On this occasion, holding over Albertine and myself the lighted lamp whose searching beams missed none of the still visible depressions which the girl’s body had made in the counterpane, Françoise conjured up a picture of “Justice shedding light upon Crime.” Albertine’s face did not suffer by this illumination. It revealed on her cheeks the same sunny burnish that had charmed me at Balbec. This face of hers, which sometimes, out of doors, made a general effect of livid pallor, now showed, in the light of the lamp, surfaces so glowingly, so uniformly coloured, so firm and so smooth, that one might have compared them to the sustained flesh tints of certain flowers. Taken aback meanwhile by Françoise’s unexpected entry, I exclaimed:
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