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

by Marcel Proust

  At the same time, Albertine preserved, inseparably attached to her, all my impressions of a series of seascapes of which I was particularly fond. I felt that in kissing her cheeks I should be kissing the whole of Balbec beach.

  “If you really don’t mind my kissing you, I’d rather put it off for a while and choose a good moment. Only you mustn’t forget that you’ve said I may. I want a voucher: ‘Valid for one kiss.’ ”

  “Do I have to sign it?”

  “But if I took it now, should I be entitled to another later on?”

  “You do make me laugh with your vouchers: I shall issue a new one every now and then.”

  “Tell me, just one thing more. You know, at Balbec, before I got to know you, you used often to have a hard, calculating look. You couldn’t tell me what you were thinking about when you looked like that?”

  “No, I don’t remember at all.”

  “Wait, this may remind you: one day your friend Gisèle jumped with her feet together over the chair an old gentleman was sitting in. Try to remember what was in your mind at that moment.”

  “Gisèle was the one we saw least of. She did belong to the group, I suppose, but not properly. I expect I thought that she was very ill-bred and common.”

  “Oh, is that all?”

  I should have liked, before kissing her, to be able to breathe into her anew the mystery which she had had for me on the beach before I knew her, to discover in her the place where she had lived earlier still; in its stead at least, if I knew nothing of it, I could insinuate all the memories of our life at Balbec, the sound of the waves breaking beneath my window, the shouts of the children. But when I let my eyes glide over the charming pink globe of her cheeks, the gently curving surfaces of which expired beneath the first foothills of her beautiful black hair which ran in undulating ridges, thrust out its escarpments, and moulded the hollows and ripples of its valleys, I could not help saying to myself: “Now at last, after failing at Balbec, I am going to discover the fragrance of the secret rose that blooms in Albertine’s cheeks. And, since the cycles through which we are able to make things and people pass in the course of our existence are comparatively few, perhaps I shall be able to consider mine in a certain sense fulfilled when, having taken out of its distant frame the blossoming face that I had chosen from among all others, I shall have brought it onto this new plane, where I shall at last have knowledge of it through my lips.” I told myself this because I believed that there was such a thing as knowledge acquired by the lips; I told myself that I was going to know the taste of this fleshly rose, because I had not stopped to think that man, a creature obviously less rudimentary than the sea-urchin or even the whale, nevertheless lacks a certain number of essential organs, and notably possesses none that will serve for kissing. For this absent organ he substitutes his lips, and thereby arrives perhaps at a slightly more satisfying result than if he were reduced to caressing the beloved with a horny tusk. But a pair of lips, designed to convey to the palate the taste of whatever whets their appetite, must be content, without understanding their mistake or admitting their disappointment, with roaming over the surface and with coming to a halt at the barrier of the impenetrable but irresistible cheek. Moreover at the moment of actual contact with the flesh, the lips, even on the assumption that they might become more expert and better endowed, would doubtless be unable to enjoy any more fully the savour which nature prevents their ever actually grasping, for in that desolate zone in which they are unable to find their proper nourishment they are alone, the sense of sight, then that of smell, having long since deserted them. At first, as my mouth began gradually to approach the cheeks which my eyes had recommended it to kiss, my eyes, in changing position, saw a different pair of cheeks; the neck, observed at closer range and as though through a magnifying-glass, showed in its coarser grain a robustness which modified the character of the face.

  Apart from the most recent applications of photography—which huddle at the foot of a cathedral all the houses that so often, from close to, appeared to us to reach almost to the height of the towers, which drill and deploy like a regiment, in file, in extended order, in serried masses, the same monuments, bring together the two columns on the Piazzetta which a moment ago were so far apart, thrust away the adjoining dome of the Salute and in a pale and toneless background manage to include a whole immense horizon within the span of a bridge, in the embrasure of a window, among the leaves of a tree that stands in the foreground and is more vigorous in tone, or frame a single church successively in the arcades of all the others—I can think of nothing that can to so great a degree as a kiss evoke out of what we believed to be a thing with one definite aspect the hundred other things which it may equally well be, since each is related to a no less legitimate perspective. In short, just as at Balbec Albertine had often appeared different to me, so now—as if, prodigiously accelerating the speed of the changes of perspective and changes of colouring which a person presents to us in the course of our various encounters, I had sought to contain them all in the space of a few seconds so as to reproduce experimentally the phenomenon which diversifies the individuality of a fellow-creature, and to draw out one from another, like a nest of boxes, all the possibilities that it contains—so now, during this brief journey of my lips towards her cheek, it was ten Albertines that I saw; this one girl being like a many-headed goddess, the head I had seen last, when I tried to approach it, gave way to another. At least so long as I had not touched that head, I could still see it, and a faint perfume came to me from it. But alas—for in this matter of kissing our nostrils and eyes are as ill-placed as our lips are ill-made—suddenly my eyes ceased to see, then my nose, crushed by the collision, no longer perceived any odour, and, without thereby gaining any clearer idea of the taste of the rose of my desire, I learned, from these obnoxious signs, that at last I was in the act of kissing Albertine’s cheek.

  Was it because we were enacting (represented by the rotation of a solid body) the converse of our scene together at Balbec, because it was I who was lying in bed and she who was up, capable of evading a brutal attack and of controlling the course of events, that she allowed me to take so easily now what she had refused me on the former occasion with so forbidding a look? (No doubt from that earlier look the voluptuous expression which her face assumed now at the approach of my lips differed only by an infinitesimal deviation of its lines but one in which may be contained all the disparity that there is between the gesture of finishing off a wounded man and that of giving him succour, between a sublime and a hideous portrait.) Not knowing whether I had to give credit and thanks for this change of attitude to some unwitting benefactor who in these last months, in Paris or at Balbec, had been working on my behalf, I supposed that the respective positions in which we were now placed was the principal cause of it. It was quite another explanation, however, that Albertine offered me; precisely this: “Oh, well, you see, that time at Balbec I didn’t know you properly. For all I knew, you might have meant mischief.” This argument left me perplexed. Albertine was no doubt sincere in advancing it—so difficult is it for a woman to recognise in the movements of her limbs, in the sensations felt by her body, during a tête-à-tête with a male friend, the unknown sin into which she trembled to think that a stranger might be planning her fall!

  In any case, whatever the modifications that had occurred recently in her life and that might perhaps have explained why it was that she now so readily accorded to my momentary and purely physical desire what at Balbec she had refused with horror to allow to my love, an even more surprising one manifested itself in Albertine that same evening as soon as her caresses had procured in me the satisfaction which she could not fail to notice and which, indeed, I had been afraid might provoke in her the instinctive movement of revulsion and offended modesty which Gilberte had made at a similar moment behind the laurel shrubbery in the Champs-Elysées.

  The exact opposite happened. Already, when I had first made her lie on my bed and had begun to fondle her,
Albertine had assumed an air which I did not remember in her, of docile good will, of an almost childish simplicity. Obliterating every trace of her customary preoccupations and pretensions, the moment preceding pleasure, similar in this respect to the moment that follows death, had restored to her rejuvenated features what seemed like the innocence of earliest childhood. And no doubt everyone whose special talent is suddenly brought into play becomes modest, diligent and charming; especially if by this talent such persons know that they are giving us a great pleasure, are themselves made happy by it, and want us to enjoy it to the full. But in this new expression on Albertine’s face there was more than disinterestedness and professional conscientiousness and generosity, there was a sort of conventional and unexpected zeal; and it was further than to her own childhood, it was to the infancy of her race that she had reverted. Very different from myself, who had looked for nothing more than a physical alleviation, which I had finally secured, Albertine seemed to feel that it would indicate a certain coarseness on her part were she to think that this material pleasure could be unaccompanied by a moral sentiment or was to be regarded as terminating anything. She, who had earlier been in so great a hurry, now, doubtless because she felt that kisses implied love and that love took precedence over all other duties, said when I reminded her of her dinner:

  “Oh, but that doesn’t matter in the least. I’ve got plenty of time.”

  She seemed embarrassed at the idea of getting up and going immediately after what had happened, embarrassed from a sense of propriety, just as Françoise when, without feeling thirsty, she had felt herself bound to accept with a seemly gaiety the glass of wine which Jupien offered her, would never have dared to leave him as soon as the last drops were drained, however urgent the call of duty. Albertine—and this was perhaps, with another which the reader will learn in due course, one of the reasons which had made me unconsciously desire her—was one of the incarnations of the little French peasant whose type may be seen in stone at Saint-André-des-Champs. As in Françoise, who presently, however, was to become her deadly enemy, I recognised in her a courtesy towards the host and the stranger, a sense of propriety, a respect for the bedside.

  Françoise, who after the death of my aunt felt obliged to speak only in a doleful tone, would, in the months that preceded her daughter’s marriage, have been quite shocked if the girl had not taken her lover’s arm when the young couple walked out together. Albertine lying motionless beside me said:

  “What nice hair you have; what nice eyes—you’re sweet.”

  When, after pointing out to her that it was getting late, I added: “You don’t believe me?”, she replied, what was perhaps true, but only since the minute before and for the next few hours:

  “I always believe you.”

  She spoke to me of myself, my family, my social background. She said: “Oh, I know your parents know some very nice people. You’re a friend of Robert Forestier and Suzanne Delage.” For a moment these names conveyed absolutely nothing to me. But suddenly I remembered that I had indeed played as a child in the Champs-Elysées with Robert Forestier, whom I had never seen since. As for Suzanne Delage, she was the great-niece of Mme Blandais, and I had once been due to go to a dancing lesson, and even to take a small part in a play in her parents’ house. But the fear of getting a fit of giggles and a nose-bleed had at the last moment prevented me, so that I had never set eyes on her. I had at the most a vague idea that I had once heard that the Swanns’ feather-hatted governess had at one time been with the Delages, but perhaps it was only a sister of this governess, or a friend. I protested to Albertine that Robert Forestier and Suzanne Delage occupied a very small place in my life. “That may be; but your mothers are friends, I can place you by that. I often pass Suzanne Delage in the Avenue de Messine. I admire her style.” Our mothers were acquainted only in the imagination of Mme Bontemps, who having heard that I had at one time played with Robert Forestier, to whom, it appeared, I used to recite poetry, had concluded from that that we were bound by family ties. She could never, I gathered, hear my mother’s name mentioned without observing: “Oh yes, she belongs to the Delage-Forestier set,” giving my parents a good mark which they had done nothing to deserve.

  Quite apart from this, Albertine’s social notions were fatuous in the extreme. She regarded the Simonnets with a double “n” as inferior not only to the Simonets with a single “n” but to everyone in the world. That someone else should bear the same name as yourself without belonging to your family is an excellent reason for despising him. Of course there are exceptions. It may happen that two Simonnets (introduced to one another at one of those gatherings where one feels the need to talk, no matter what about, and where moreover one is instinctively well disposed towards strangers, for instance in a funeral procession on its way to the cemetery), finding that they have the same name, will seek with mutual affability though without success to discover a possible kinship. But that is only an exception. Plenty of people are disreputable, without our either knowing or caring. If, however, a similarity of names brings to our door letters addressed to them, or vice versa, we at once feel a mistrust, often justified, as to their moral worth. We are afraid of being confused with them, and forestall the mistake by a grimace of disgust when anyone refers to them in our hearing. When we read our own name, as borne by them, in the newspaper, they seem to have usurped it. The transgressions of other members of the social organism are a matter of indifference to us. We lay the burden of them the more heavily upon our namesakes. The hatred which we bear towards the other Simonnets is all the stronger in that it is not a personal feeling but has been transmitted hereditarily. After the second generation we remember only the expression of disgust with which our grandparents used to refer to the other Simonnets; we know nothing of the reason; we should not be surprised to learn that it had begun with a murder. Until, as is not uncommon, the day comes when a male Simonnet and a female Simonnet who are not in any way related are joined together in matrimony and so repair the breach.

  Not only did Albertine speak to me of Robert Forestier and Suzanne Delage, but spontaneously, with that impulse to confide which the juxtaposition of two human bodies creates, at the beginning at least, during a first phase before it has engendered a special duplicity and reticence in one person towards the other, she told me a story about her own family and one of Andrée’s uncles, of which, at Balbec, she had refused to say a word; but she now felt that she ought not to appear to have any secrets from me. Now, had her dearest friend said anything to her against me, she would have made a point of repeating it to me.

  I insisted on her going home, and finally she did go, but she was so ashamed on my account at my discourtesy that she laughed almost as though to apologise for me, as a hostess to whose party you have gone without dressing makes the best of you but is offended nevertheless.

  “What are you laughing at?” I inquired.

  “I’m not laughing, I’m smiling at you,” she replied tenderly. “When am I going to see you again?” she went on, as though declining to admit that what had just happened between us, since it is generally the consummation of it, might not be at least the prelude to a great friendship, a pre-existent friendship which we owed it to ourselves to discover, to confess, and which alone could account for what we had indulged in.