I had supposed that my love for Albertine was not based on the hope of carnal possession. And yet, when the lesson to be drawn from my experience that evening was, apparently, that such possession was impossible; when, after having had no doubt, that first day on the beach, that Albertine was licentious, and having passed through various intermediate assumptions, it seemed to me to be established that she was absolutely virtuous; when on her return from her aunt’s a week later, she greeted me coldly with: “I forgive you; in fact I’m sorry to have upset you, but you must never do it again”—then in contrast to what I had felt on learning from Bloch that one could have all the women one wanted, and as if, instead of a real girl, I had known a wax doll, my desire to penetrate into her life, to follow her through the places in which she had spent her childhood, to be initiated by her into the sporting life, gradually detached itself from her; my intellectual curiosity as to thoughts on this subject or that did not survive my belief that I might kiss her if I chose. My dreams abandoned her as soon as they ceased to be nourished by the hope of a possession of which I had supposed them to be independent. Thenceforward they found themselves once more at liberty to transfer themselves—according to the attraction that I had found in her on any particular day, above all according to the chances I seemed to detect of my being possibly loved by her—to one or other of Albertine’s friends, and to Andrée first of all. And yet, if Albertine had not existed, perhaps I should not have had the pleasure which I began to feel more and more strongly during the days that followed in the kindness that was shown me by Andrée. Albertine told no one of the rebuff which I had received at her hands. She was one of those pretty girls who, from their earliest youth, on account of their beauty, but especially of an attraction, a charm which remains somewhat mysterious and has its source perhaps in reserves of vitality to which others less favoured by nature come to quench their thirst, have always—in their home circle, among their friends, in society—been more sought after than other more beautiful and richer girls; she was one of those people from whom, before the age of love and much more still after it is reached, more is asked than they themselves ask, more even than they are able to give. From her childhood Albertine had always had round her in an adoring circle four or five little girl friends, among them Andrée who was so far her superior and knew it (and perhaps this attraction which Albertine exerted quite involuntarily had been the origin, had laid the foundations of the little band). This attraction was still potent even at a great social distance, in circles quite brilliant by comparison, where, if there was a pavane to be danced, Albertine would be sent for rather than another girl of better family. The consequence was that, not having a penny to her name, living, not very well, at the expense of M. Bontemps who was said to be a shady individual and was anyhow anxious to be rid of her, she was nevertheless invited, not only to dine but to stay, by people who in Saint-Loup’s eyes might not have had much distinction, but to Rosemonde’s mother or Andrée’s, women who though very rich themselves did not know these people, represented something quite extraordinary. Thus Albertine spent a few weeks every year with the family of one of the Governors of the Bank of France, who was also Chairman of the Board of Directors of a railway company. The wife of this financier entertained prominent people, and had never mentioned her “day” to Andrée’s mother, who thought her wanting in politeness, but was nevertheless prodigiously interested in everything that went on in her house. Accordingly she encouraged Andrée every year to invite Albertine down to their villa, because, she said, it was a charitable act to offer a holiday by the sea to a girl who had not herself the means to travel and whose aunt did so little for her. Andrée’s mother was probably not prompted by the thought that the banker and his wife, learning that Albertine was made much of by her and her daughter, would form a high opinion of them both; still less did she hope that Albertine, kind and clever as she was, would manage to get her invited, or at least to get Andrée invited, to the financier’s garden-parties. But every evening at the dinner-table, while assuming an air of indifference and disdain, she was fascinated by Albertine’s accounts of everything that had happened at the big house while she was staying there, and the names of the other guests, almost all of them people whom she knew by sight or by name. Even the thought that she knew them only in this indirect fashion, that is to say did not know them at all (she called this kind of acquaintance knowing people “all my life”), gave Andrée’s mother a touch of melancholy while she plied Albertine with questions about them in a lofty and distant tone, with pursed lips, and might have left her doubtful and uneasy as to the importance of her own social position had she not been able to reassure herself, to return safely to the “realities of life,” by saying to the butler: “Please tell the chef that his peas aren’t soft enough.” She then recovered her serenity. And she was quite determined that Andrée was to marry nobody but a man, of the best family of course, rich enough for her too to be able to keep a chef and a couple of coachmen. That was the reality, the practical proof of “position.” But the fact that Albertine had dined at the banker’s country house with this or that great lady, and that the said great lady had invited her to stay with her next winter, invested the girl, in the eyes of Andrée’s mother, with a peculiar esteem which went very well with the pity and even contempt aroused by her lack of fortune, a contempt increased by the fact that M. Bontemps had betrayed his flag and—being even vaguely Panamist, it was said—had rallied to the Government. Not that this deterred Andrée’s mother, in her passion for abstract truth, from withering with her scorn the people who appeared to believe that Albertine was of humble origin. “What’s that you say? Why, they’re one of the best families in the country. Simonet with a single ‘n,’ you know!” Certainly, in view of the class of society in which all this went on, in which money plays so important a part, and mere charm makes people ask you out but not marry you, an “acceptable” marriage did not appear to be for Albertine a practical outcome of the so distinguished patronage which she enjoyed but which would not have been held to compensate for her poverty. But even in themselves, and with no prospect of any matrimonial consequence, Albertine’s “successes” excited the envy of certain spiteful mothers, furious at seeing her received “like one of the family” by the banker’s wife, even by Andrée’s mother, whom they scarcely knew. They therefore went about telling mutual friends of theirs and of those two ladies that the latter would be very angry if they knew the truth, which was that Albertine repeated to each of them everything that the intimacy to which she was rashly admitted enabled her to spy out in the household of the other, countless little secrets which it must be infinitely unpleasant to the interested party to have made public. These envious women said this so that it might be repeated and might get Albertine into trouble with her patrons. But, as often happens, their machinations met with no success. The spite that prompted them was too apparent, and their only result was to make the women who had perpetrated them appear rather more contemptible than before. Andrée’s mother was too firm in her opinion of Albertine to change her mind about her now. She looked upon her as “unfortunate,” but the best-natured girl living, and one who was incapable of making anything up except to give pleasure.
If this sort of popularity to which Albertine had attained did not seem likely to lead to any practical result, it had stamped Andrée’s friend with the distinctive characteristic of people who, being always sought after, have never any need to offer themselves, a characteristic (to be found also, and for analogous reasons, at the other end of the social scale, among the smartest women) which consists in their not making any display of the successes they have scored, but rather keeping them to themselves. She would never say of anyone: “So-and-so is anxious to meet me,” would speak of everyone with the greatest good nature, and as if it was she who ran after, who sought to know other people. If someone mentioned a young man who, a few minutes earlier, had been in private conversation with her, heaping the bitterest reproaches upon her bec
ause she had refused him an assignation, so far from proclaiming this in public or betraying any resentment she would stand up for him: “He’s such a nice boy!” Indeed it quite annoyed her to be so attractive to people, since it obliged her to disappoint them, whereas her natural instinct was always to give pleasure. So much did she enjoy giving pleasure that she had come to employ a particular kind of falsehood peculiar to certain utilitarians and men who have “arrived.” Existing, incidentally, in an embryonic state in a vast number of people, this form of insincerity consists in not being able to confine the pleasure arising out of a single act of politeness to a single person. For instance, if Albertine’s aunt wished her niece to accompany her to a not very amusing party, Albertine by going to it might have found it sufficient to extract from the incident the moral profit of having given pleasure to her aunt. But, being courteously welcomed by her host and hostess, she preferred to say to them that she had been wanting to see them for so long that she had finally seized this opportunity and begged her aunt to take her to their party. Even this was not enough: at the same party there might happen to be one of Albertine’s friends who was very unhappy. Albertine would say to her: “I didn’t like the thought of your being here by yourself. I felt it might do you good to have me with you. If you would rather leave the party, go somewhere else, I’m ready to do anything you like. What I want above all is to see you look less unhappy” (which, as it happened, was true also). Sometimes it happened however that the fictitious aim destroyed the real one. Thus Albertine, having a favour to ask on behalf of one of her friends, would go to see a certain lady who could help her. But on arriving at the house of this lady—a kind and sympathetic soul—the girl, unconsciously following the principle of the multiple utilisation of a single action, would think it more affectionate to appear to have come there solely on account of the pleasure she knew she would derive from seeing the lady again. The lady would be deeply touched that Albertine should have taken a long journey out of pure friendship. Seeing her almost overcome by emotion, Albertine liked the lady even more. Only, there was this awkward consequence: she now felt so keenly the pleasure of friendship which she pretended to have been her motive in coming, that she was afraid of making the lady suspect the genuineness of sentiments which were actually quite sincere if she now asked her to do the favour for her friend. The lady would think that Albertine had come for that purpose, which was true, but would conclude also that Albertine had no disinterested pleasure in seeing her, which was false. With the result that she came away without having asked the favour, like a man sometimes who has been so kind to a woman, in the hope of winning her favours, that he refrains from declaring his passion in order not to deprive his kindness of its appearance of nobility. In other instances it would be wrong to say that the true object was sacrificed to the subordinate and subsequently conceived idea, but the two were so incompatible that if the person to whom Albertine endeared herself by stating the second had known of the existence of the first, her pleasure would at once have been turned into the deepest pain. At a much later point in this story, we shall have occasion to see this kind of contradiction expressed in clearer terms. Suffice it to say for the present, borrowing an example from a completely different context, that they occur very frequently in the most divergent situations that life has to offer. A husband has established his mistress in the town where he is quartered with his regiment. His wife, left by herself in Paris, and with an inkling of the truth, grows more and more miserable, and writes her husband letters embittered by jealousy. Then the mistress is obliged to go to Paris for the day. The husband cannot resist her entreaties to him to accompany her, and applies for a twenty-four-hour leave. But since he is a good-natured fellow, and hates making his wife unhappy, he goes to see her and tells her, shedding a few quite genuine tears, that, dismayed by her letters, he has found the means of getting away from his duties to come to her and to console her in his arms. He has thus contrived by a single journey to furnish wife and mistress alike with proofs of his love. But if the wife were to learn the reason for which he has come to Paris, her joy would doubtless be turned into grief, unless her pleasure in seeing the faithless wretch outweighed, in spite of everything, the pain that his infidelities had caused her. Among the men who have struck me as practising most consistently this system of killing several birds with one stone must be included M. de Norpois. He would now and then agree to act as intermediary between two of his friends who had quarrelled, and this led to his being called the most obliging of men. But it was not sufficient for him to appear to be doing a service to the friend who had come to him to request it; he would represent to the other the steps which he was taking to effect a reconciliation as undertaken not at the request of the first friend but in the interest of the second, a notion of which he never had any difficulty in persuading an interlocutor influenced in advance by the idea that he had before him the “most obliging of men.” In this way, playing both ends against the middle, what in stage parlance is known as “doubling” two parts, he never allowed his influence to be in the slightest degree imperilled, and the services which he rendered constituted not an expenditure of capital but a dividend upon some part of his credit. At the same time every service, seemingly rendered twice over, correspondingly enhanced his reputation as an obliging friend, and, better still, a friend whose interventions were efficacious, one who did not simply beat the air, whose efforts were always justified by success, as was shown by the gratitude of both parties. This duplicity in obligingness was—allowing for disappointments such as are the lot of every human being—an important element in M. de Norpois’s character. And often at the Ministry he would make use of my father, who was a simple soul, while making him believe that it was he, M. de Norpois, who was being useful to my father.
Pleasing people more easily than she wished, and having no need to trumpet her conquests abroad, Albertine kept silent about the scene she had had with me by her bedside, which a plain girl would have wished the whole world to know. And yet for her attitude during that scene I could not arrive at any satisfactory explanation. As regards the supposition that she was absolutely chaste (a supposition to which I had first of all attributed the violence with which Albertine had refused to let herself be taken in my arms and kissed, though it was by no means essential to my conception of the kindness, the fundamentally honourable character of my beloved), I could not accept it without a copious revision of its terms. It ran so entirely counter to the hypothesis which I had constructed that day when I saw Albertine for the first time. Then, so many different acts of affectionate sweetness towards myself (a sweetness that was caressing, at times uneasy, alarmed, jealous of my predilection for Andrée) came up on all sides to challenge the brutal gesture with which, to escape from me, she had pulled the bell. Why then had she invited me to come and spend the evening by her bedside? Why did she speak all the time in the language of affection? What is the basis of the desire to see a friend, to be afraid that he may be fonder of someone else than of you, to seek to please him, to tell him, so romantically, that no one else will ever know that he has spent the evening in your room, if you refuse him so simple a pleasure and if it is no pleasure to you? I could not believe, after all, that Albertine’s virtue went as far as that, and I came to wonder whether her violence might not have been due to some reason of vanity, a disagreeable odour, for instance, which she suspected of lingering about her person, and by which she was afraid that I might be repelled, or else of cowardice—if for instance she imagined, in her ignorance of the facts of love, that my state of nervous debility was due to something contagious, communicable to her in a kiss.
She was genuinely distressed by her failure to gratify me, and gave me a little gold pencil, with the virtuous perverseness of people who, touched by your kindness but not prepared to grant what it clamours for, nevertheless want to do something on your behalf—the critic, an article from whose pen would so gratify the novelist, who asks him to dinner instead; the duchess who does not
take the snob with her to the theatre but lends him her box on an evening when she will not be using it herself. To such an extent are those who do the minimum, and might easily do nothing, driven by conscience to do something!
I told Albertine that in giving me this pencil she was giving me great pleasure, and yet not so great as I should have felt if, on the night she had spent at the hotel, she had permitted me to kiss her: “It would have made me so happy! What possible harm could it have done you? I’m amazed that you should have refused me.”
“What amazes me,” she retorted, “is that you should find it amazing. I wonder what sort of girls you must know if my behaviour surprised you.”
“I’m sorry to have annoyed you, but even now I cannot say that I think I was in the wrong. What I feel is that all that sort of thing is of no importance really, and I can’t understand a girl who could so easily give pleasure not consenting to do so. Let’s be quite clear about it,” I went on, throwing a sop of sorts to her moral scruples as I recalled how she and her friends had scarified the girl who went about with the actress Léa, “I don’t mean to say that a girl can behave exactly as she likes and that there’s no such thing as morality. Take, for example, what you were saying the other day about a girl who’s staying at Balbec and her relations with an actress. I call that unspeakable, so unspeakable that I feel sure it must all have been made up by some enemies of the girl and that there can’t be any truth in the story. It strikes me as improbable, impossible. But to allow oneself to be kissed, or even more, by a friend—since you say that I’m your friend …”
“So you are, but I’ve had other friends before now, I’ve known lots of young men who were every bit as friendly, I can assure you. Well, not one of them would ever have dared to do such a thing. They know they’d get their ears boxed if they tried it on. Besides, they never dreamed of doing so. We would shake hands in a straightforward, friendly sort of way, like good pals, but there was never a word said about kissing, and yet we weren’t any the less friends for that. Why, if it’s my friendship you’re after, you’ve nothing to complain of; I must be jolly fond of you to forgive you. But I’m sure you don’t care two hoots about me, really. Own up now, it’s Andrée you’re in love with. Besides, you’re quite right; she’s ever so much nicer than I am, and absolutely ravishing! Oh, you men!”
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