Chapter Two
Although it was simply a Sunday in autumn, I had been born again, life lay intact before me, for that morning, after a succession of mild days, there had been a cold fog which had not cleared until nearly midday: and a change in the weather is sufficient to create the world and ourselves anew. Formerly, when the wind howled in my chimney, I would listen to the blows which it struck on the iron trap with as keen an emotion as if, like the famous chords with which the Fifth Symphony opens, they had been the irresistible calls of a mysterious destiny. Every change in the aspect of nature offers us a similar transformation by adapting our desires so as to harmonise with the new form of things. The mist, from the moment of my awakening, had made of me, instead of the centrifugal being which one is on fine days, a man turned in on himself, longing for the chimney corner and the shared bed, a shivering Adam in quest of a sedentary Eve, in this different world.
Between the soft grey tint of a morning landscape and the taste of a cup of chocolate I incorporated all the originality of the physical, intellectual and moral life which I had taken with me to Doncières about a year earlier and which, blazoned with the oblong form of a bare hillside—always present even when it was invisible—formed in me a series of pleasures entirely distinct from all others, incommunicable to my friends in the sense that the impressions, richly interwoven with one another, which orchestrated them were a great deal more characteristic of them to my unconscious mind than any facts that I might have related. From this point of view the new world in which this morning’s fog had immersed me was a world already known to me (which only made it more real) and forgotten for some time (which restored all its novelty). And I was able to look at several of the pictures of misty landscapes which my memory had acquired, notably a series of “Mornings at Doncières,” including my first morning there in barracks and another in a neighbouring country house where I had gone with Saint-Loup to spend the night, from the windows of which, when I had drawn back the curtains at daybreak before getting back into bed, in the first a trooper, in the second (on the thin margin of a pond and a wood, all the rest of which was engulfed in the uniform and liquid softness of the mist) a coachman busy polishing harness, had appeared to me like those rare figures, scarcely visible to the eye that is obliged to adapt itself to the mysterious vagueness of the half-light, which emerge from a faded fresco.
It was from my bed that I was contemplating these memories that afternoon, for I had returned to it to wait until the hour came at which, taking advantage of the absence of my parents who had gone for a few days to Combray, I proposed to get up and go to a little play which was being given that evening in Mme de Villeparisis’s drawing-room. Had they been at home I should perhaps not have ventured to do so; my mother, in the delicacy of her respect for my grandmother’s memory, wished the tokens of regret that were paid to it to be freely and sincerely given; she would not have forbidden me this outing, but she would have disapproved of it. From Combray, on the other hand, had I consulted her wishes, she would not have replied with a melancholy: “Do just as you like; you’re old enough now to know what is right or wrong,” but, reproaching herself for having left me alone in Paris, and measuring my grief by her own, would have wished for it distractions of a sort which she herself would have eschewed and which she persuaded herself that my grandmother, solicitous above all things for my health and my nervous equilibrium, would have recommended for me.
That morning the boiler of the new central heating installation had been turned on for the first time. Its disagreeable sound—an intermittent hiccup—had no connexion with my memories of Doncières. But its prolonged encounter with them in my thoughts that afternoon was to give it so lasting an affinity with them that whenever, after succeeding more or less in forgetting it, I heard the central heating again it would bring them back to me.
There was no one else in the house but Françoise. The fog had lifted. The grey light, falling like a fine rain, wove without ceasing a transparent web through which the Sunday strollers appeared in a silvery sheen. I had flung to the foot of my bed the Figaro, for which I had been sending out religiously every morning ever since I had sent in an article which it had not yet printed; despite the absence of sun, the intensity of the daylight was an indication that we were still only half-way through the afternoon. The tulle window-curtains, vaporous and friable as they would not have been on a fine day, had that same blend of softness and brittleness that dragon-flies’ wings have, and Venetian glass. It depressed me all the more that I should be spending this Sunday alone because I had sent a note that morning to Mlle de Stermaria. Robert de Saint-Loup, whom his mother had at length succeeded—after painful abortive attempts—in parting from his mistress, and who immediately afterwards had been sent to Morocco in the hope of forgetting the woman he had already for some time ceased to love, had sent me a line, which had reached me the day before, announcing his imminent arrival in France for a short spell of leave. As he would only be passing through Paris (where his family were doubtless afraid of seeing him renew relations with Rachel), he informed me, to show me that he had been thinking of me, that he had met at Tangier Mlle or rather Mme (for she had divorced her husband after three months of marriage) de Stermaria. And Robert, remembering what I had said to him at Balbec, had asked on my behalf for an assignation with the young woman. She would be delighted to dine with me, she had told him, on one of the evenings which she would be spending in Paris before her return to Brittany. He told me to lose no time in writing to Mme de Stermaria, for she must certainly have arrived.
Saint-Loup’s letter had come as no surprise to me, even though I had had no news of him since, at the time of my grandmother’s illness, he had accused me of perfidy and treachery. I had grasped at once what must have happened. Rachel, who liked to provoke his jealousy (she also had other causes for resentment against me), had persuaded her lover that I had made sly attempts to have relations with her in his absence. It is probable that he continued to believe in the truth of this allegation, but he had ceased to be in love with her, which meant that its truth or falsehood had become a matter of complete indifference to him, and our friendship alone remained. When, on meeting him again, I tried to talk to him about his accusations, he merely gave me a benign and affectionate smile which seemed to be a sort of apology, and then changed the subject. All this was not to say that he did not, a little later, see Rachel occasionally when he was in Paris. Those who have played a big part in one’s life very rarely disappear from it suddenly for good. They return to it at odd moments (so much so that people suspect a renewal of old love) before leaving it for ever. Saint-Loup’s breach with Rachel had very soon become less painful to him, thanks to the soothing pleasure that was given him by her incessant demands for money. Jealousy, which prolongs the course of love, is not capable of containing many more ingredients than the other products of the imagination. If one takes with one, when one starts on a journey, three or four images which incidentally one is sure to lose on the way (such as the lilies and anemones heaped on the Ponte Vecchio, or the Persian church shrouded in mist), one’s trunk is already pretty full. When one leaves a mistress, one would be just as glad, until one has begun to forget her, that she should not become the property of three or four potential protectors whom one pictures in one’s mind’s eye, of whom, that is to say, one is jealous: all those whom one does not so picture count for nothing. Now frequent demands for money from a cast-off mistress no more give one a complete idea of her life than charts showing a high temperature would of her illness. But the latter would at any rate be an indication that she was ill, and the former furnish a presumption, vague enough it is true, that the forsaken one or forsaker (whichever she be) cannot have found anything very remarkable in the way of rich protectors. And so each demand is welcomed with the joy which a lull produces in the jealous one’s sufferings, and answered with the immediate dispatch of money, for naturally one does not like to think of her being in want of anything except lovers (on
e of the three lovers one has in one’s mind’s eye), until time has enabled one to regain one’s composure and to learn one’s successor’s name without wilting. Sometimes Rachel came in so late at night that she could ask her former lover’s permission to lie down beside him until the morning. This was a great comfort to Robert, for it reminded him how intimately, after all, they had lived together, simply to see that even if he took the greater part of the bed for himself it did not in the least interfere with her sleep. He realised that she was more comfortable, lying close to his familiar body, than she would have been elsewhere, that she felt herself by his side—even in an hotel—to be in a bedroom known of old in which one has one’s habits, in which one sleeps better. He felt that his shoulders, his limbs, all of him, were for her, even when he was unduly restless from insomnia or thinking of the things he had to do, so entirely usual that they could not disturb her and that the perception of them added still further to her sense of repose.
To revert to where we were, I had been all the more excited by Robert’s letter in that I could read between the lines what he had not ventured to write more explicitly. “You can most certainly ask her to dine in a private room,” he told me. “She is a charming young person, with a delightful nature—you will get on splendidly with her, and I am sure you will have a most enjoyable evening together.” As my parents were returning at the end of the week, on Saturday or Sunday, and after that I should be obliged to dine every evening at home, I had written at once to Mme de Stermaria proposing any evening that might suit her up to Friday. A message was brought back that I should hear from her in writing that very evening at about eight o’clock. This time would have passed quickly enough if I had had, during the afternoon that separated me from her letter, the help of a visit from someone else. When the hours are wrapped in conversation one ceases to measure, or indeed to notice them; they vanish, and suddenly it is a long way beyond the point at which it escaped you that the nimble truant time impinges once more on your attention. But if we are alone, our preoccupation, by bringing before us the still distant and incessantly awaited moment with the frequency and uniformity of a ticking pendulum, divides, or rather multiplies, the hours by all the minutes which, had we been with friends, we should not have counted. And confronted, by the incessant return of my desire, with the ardent pleasure which I was to enjoy—not for some days, though, alas!—in Mme de Stermaria’s company, this afternoon, which I was going to have to spend alone, seemed to me very empty and very melancholy.
Every now and then I heard the sound of the lift coming up, but it was followed by a second sound, not the one I was hoping for, namely its coming to a halt at our landing, but another very different sound which the lift made in continuing its progress to the floors above and which, because it so often meant the desertion of my floor when I was expecting a visitor, remained for me later, even when I had ceased to wish for visitors, a sound lugubrious in itself, in which there echoed, as it were, a sentence of solitary confinement. Weary, resigned, occupied for several hours still with its immemorial task, the grey day stitched its shimmering needlework of light and shade, and it saddened me to think that I was to be left alone with a thing that knew me no more than would a seamstress who, installed by the window so as to see better while she finishes her work, pays no attention to the person present with her in the room. Suddenly, although I had heard no bell, Françoise opened the door to introduce Albertine, who entered smiling, silent, plump, containing in the plenitude of her body, made ready so that I might continue living them, come to seek me out, the days we had spent together in that Balbec to which I had never since returned. No doubt, whenever we see again a person with whom our relations—however trivial they may be—have now changed, it is like a juxtaposition of two different periods. For this, there is no need for a former mistress to call round to see us as a friend; all that is required is the visit to Paris of someone we have known day by day in a certain kind of life, and that this life should have ceased for us, if only a week ago. On each of Albertine’s smiling, questioning, self-conscious features I could read the questions: “And what about Madame de Villeparisis? And the dancing-master? And the pastry-cook?” When she sat down, her back seemed to be saying: “Well, well, there are no cliffs here, but you don’t mind if I sit down beside you, all the same, as I used to do at Balbec?” She was like an enchantress offering me a mirror that reflected time. In this she resembled all the people whom we seldom see now but with whom at one time we lived on more intimate terms. With Albertine, however, there was something more than this. True, even in our daily encounters at Balbec, I had always been surprised when I caught sight of her, so changeable was her appearance. But now she was scarcely recognisable. Freed from the pink haze that shrouded them, her features had emerged in sharp relief like those of a statue. She had another face, or rather she had a face at last; her body too had grown. There remained scarcely anything now of the sheath in which she had been enclosed and on the surface of which, at Balbec, her future outline had been barely visible.
This time, Albertine had returned to Paris earlier than usual. As a rule she did not arrive until the spring, so that, already disturbed for some weeks past by the storms that were beating down the first flowers, I did not distinguish, in the pleasure that I felt, the return of Albertine from that of the fine weather. It was enough that I should be told that she was in Paris and that she had called at my house, for me to see her again like a rose flowering by the sea. I cannot say whether it was the desire for Balbec or for her that took possession of me then; perhaps my desire for her was itself a lazy, cowardly, and incomplete form of possessing Balbec, as if to possess a thing materially, to take up residence in a town, were tantamount to possessing it spiritually. Besides, even materially, when she was no longer swaying in my imagination before a horizon of sea, but motionless in a room beside me, she seemed to me often a very poor specimen of a rose, so much so that I wanted to shut my eyes in order not to observe this or that blemish of its petals, and to imagine instead that I was inhaling the salt air on the beach.
I may say all this here, although I was not then aware of what was to happen later on. Certainly, it is more reasonable to devote one’s life to women than to postage stamps or old snuff-boxes, even to pictures or statues. But the example of other collections should be a warning to us to diversify, to have not one woman only but several. Those charming associations that a young girl affords with a sea-shore, with the braided tresses of a statue in a church, with an old print, with everything that causes one to love in her, whenever she appears, a delightful picture, those associations are not very stable. When you come to live with a woman you will soon cease to see anything of what made you love her; though it is true that the two sundered elements can be reunited by jealousy. If, after a long period of living together, I was to end by seeing no more in Albertine than an ordinary woman, an intrigue between her and someone she had loved at Balbec would still perhaps have sufficed to reincorporate in her, to amalgamate with her, the beach and the unrolling of the tide. But these secondary associations no longer captivate our eyes; it is to the heart that they are perceptible and fatal. We cannot, under so dangerous a form, regard the renewal of the miracle as a thing to be desired. But I am anticipating the course of years. And here I need only register my regret that I did not have the sense simply to keep my collection of women as people keep their collections of old quizzing glasses, never so complete, in their cabinet, that there is not room always for another and rarer still.
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 li
ttle 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.
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