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

by Marcel Proust

  It would perhaps have been a peculiarly opportune moment for giving up a woman whom no very recent or very keen suffering obliged me to ask for the balm against a malady which those who have caused it possess. I was calmed by these very outings, which, even if I considered them at the time merely as a foretaste of a morrow which itself, notwithstanding the longing with which it filled me, would not be different from today, had the charm of having been torn from the places which Albertine had frequented hitherto and where I had not been with her, at her aunt’s or with her girlfriends—the charm not of a positive joy but simply of the assuagement of an anxiety, and yet extremely potent. For at an interval of a few days, when my thoughts turned to the farm outside which we had sat drinking cider, or simply to the stroll we had taken round Saint-Mars-le-Vêtu, remembering that Albertine had been walking by my side in her toque, the sense of her presence added of a sudden so strong a healing virtue to the indifferent image of the modern church that at the moment when the sunlit façade came thus of its own accord to pose before me in memory, it was like a great soothing compress laid upon my heart. I would drop Albertine at Parville, but only to join her again in the evening and lie stretched out by her side, in the darkness, upon the beach. True, I did not see her every day, yet I could say to myself: “If she were to give an account of how she spent her time, her life, it would still be me who played the largest part in it”; and we spent together long hours on end which brought into my days so sweet an intoxication that even when, at Parville, she jumped from the car which I was to send to fetch her an hour later, I felt no more alone in it than if before leaving me she had strewn it with flowers. I could have dispensed with seeing her every day; I was happy when I left her, and I knew that the calming effect of that happiness might last for several days. But at that moment I would hear Albertine as she left me say to her aunt or to a girlfriend: “Tomorrow at eight-thirty, then. We mustn’t be late, the others will be ready at a quarter past.” The conversation of a woman one loves is like the ground above a dangerous subterranean stretch of water; one senses constantly beneath the words the presence, the penetrating chill of an invisible pool; one perceives here and there its treacherous seepage, but the water itself remains hidden. The moment I heard these words of Albertine’s my calm was destroyed. I wanted to ask her to let me see her the following morning, so as to prevent her from going to this mysterious rendezvous at half past eight which had been mentioned in my presence only in veiled terms. She would no doubt have begun by obeying me, while regretting that she had to give up her plans; in time she would have discovered my permanent need to upset them; I should have become the person from whom one hides things. And yet it is probable that these gatherings from which I was excluded amounted to very little, and that it was perhaps from the fear that I might find one or other of the participants vulgar or boring that I was not invited to them. Unfortunately this life so closely involved with Albertine’s had an effect not only upon myself; to me it brought calm; to my mother it caused anxieties, her confession of which destroyed my calm. Once, as I entered the hotel happy in my own mind, resolved to terminate some day or other an existence the end of which I imagined to depend upon my own volition, my mother said to me, hearing me send a message to the chauffeur to go and fetch Albertine: “How you do spend money!” (Françoise in her simple and expressive language used to say with greater force: “That’s the way the money goes.”) “Try,” Mamma went on, “not to become like Charles de Sévigné, of whom his mother said: ‘His hand is a crucible in which gold melts.’ Besides, I do really think you’ve gone about with Albertine quite enough. I assure you you’re overdoing it, even to her it may seem ridiculous. I was delighted that you’d found some sort of distraction, and I’m not asking you never to see her again, but simply that it should be possible to meet one of you without the other.”

  My life with Albertine, a life devoid of keen pleasures—that is to say of keen pleasures that I could feel—that life which I intended to change at any moment, choosing a moment of calm, became suddenly necessary to me once more when, by these words of Mamma’s, it seemed to be threatened. I told my mother that her words would delay for perhaps two months the decision for which they asked, which otherwise I would have reached before the end of that week. In order not to sadden me, Mamma laughed at this instantaneous effect of her advice, and promised not to raise the subject again so as not to prevent the rebirth of my good intention. But, since my grandmother’s death, whenever Mamma gave way to mirth, the incipient laugh would be cut short and would end in an almost heartbroken expression of sorrow, whether from remorse at having been able for an instant to forget, or else from the recrudescence which this brief moment of forgetfulness had brought to her painful obsession. But to the thoughts aroused in her by the memory of my grandmother, a memory that was rooted in my mother’s mind, I felt that on this occasion there were added others relating to myself, to what my mother dreaded as the sequel of my intimacy with Albertine; an intimacy which she dared not, however, hinder in view of what I had just told her. But she did not appear convinced that I was not mistaken. She remembered all the years in which my grandmother and she had refrained from speaking to me about my work and the need for a healthier way of life which, I used to say, the agitation into which their exhortations threw me alone prevented me from beginning, and which, notwithstanding their obedient silence, I had failed to pursue.

  After dinner the car would bring Albertine back; there was still a glimmer of daylight; the air was less warm, but after a scorching day we both dreamed of delicious coolness; then to our fevered eyes the narrow slip of moon would appear at first (as on the evening when I had gone to the Princesse de Guermantes’s and Albertine had telephoned me) like the delicate rind, then like the cool section of a fruit which an invisible knife was beginning to peel in the sky. Sometimes it was I who would go to fetch my beloved, a little later in that case; she would be waiting for me under the arcade of the market at Maineville. At first I could not make her out; I would begin to fear that she might not be coming, that she had misunderstood me. Then I would see her, in her white blouse with blue spots, spring into the car by my side with the light bound of a young animal rather than a girl. And it was like a dog too that she would begin to caress me interminably. When night had completely fallen and, as the manager of the hotel remarked to me, the sky was all “studied” with stars, if we did not go for a drive in the forest with a bottle of champagne, then, heedless of the late strollers on the faintly lighted esplanade, who in any case could not have seen anything a yard away on the dark sand, we would stretch out in the shelter of the dunes; that same body whose suppleness contained all the feminine, marine and sportive grace of the girls whom I had seen that first time against the horizon of the waves, I held pressed against my own, beneath the same rug, by the edge of the motionless sea divided by a tremulous path of light; and we listened to it with the same untiring pleasure, whether it held back its breath, suspended for so long that one thought the reflux would never come, or whether at last it gasped out at our feet the long-awaited murmur. Finally I would take Albertine back to Parville. When we reached her house, we were obliged to break off our kisses for fear that someone might see us; not wishing to go to bed, she would return with me to Balbec, from whence I would take her back for the last time to Parville; the chauffeurs of those early days of the motor-car were people who went to bed at all hours. And indeed I would return to Balbec only with the first dews of morning, alone this time, but still surrounded with the presence of my beloved, gorged with an inexhaustible provision of kisses. On my table I would find a telegram or a postcard. Albertine again! She had written them at Quetteholme when I had gone off by myself in the car, to tell me that she was thinking of me. I would re-read them as I got into bed. Then, above the curtains, I would glimpse the bright streak of the daylight and would say to myself that we must be in love with one another after all, since we had spent the night in one another’s arms. When, next morning, I caugh
t sight of Albertine on the front, I was so afraid of her telling me that she was not free that day, and could not accede to my request that we should go out together, that I would delay it for as long as possible. I would be all the more uneasy since she had a cold, preoccupied air; people were passing whom she knew; doubtless she had made plans for the afternoon from which I was excluded. I would gaze at her, I would gaze at that rosy face of Albertine’s, tantalising me with the enigma of her intentions, the unknown decision which was to create the happiness or misery of my afternoon. It was a whole state of soul, a whole future existence that had assumed before my eyes the allegorical and fateful form of a girl. And when at last I made up my mind, when, with the most indifferent air that I could muster, I asked: “Are we going out together now, and again this evening?” and she replied: “With the greatest pleasure,” then the sudden replacement, in the rosy face, of my long uneasiness by a delicious sense of ease would make even more precious to me those forms to which I was perpetually indebted for the sense of well-being and relief that we feel after a storm has broken. I repeated to myself: “How sweet she is, what an adorable creature!” in an excitement less fertile than that caused by intoxication, scarcely more profound than that of friendship, but far superior to that of social life. We would cancel our order for the car only on the days when there was a dinner-party at the Verdurins’ and on those when, Albertine not being free to go out with me, I took the opportunity to inform anybody who wished to see me that I should be remaining at Balbec. I gave Saint-Loup permission to come on these days, but on these days only. For on one occasion when he had arrived unexpectedly, I had preferred to forgo the pleasure of seeing Albertine rather than run the risk of his meeting her, than endanger the state of happy calm in which I had dwelt for some time and see my jealousy revive. And my mind had not been set at rest until after Saint-Loup had gone. Therefore he made it a rule, regretfully but scrupulously observed, never to come to Balbec unless summoned there by me. In the past, when I thought with longing of the hours that Mme de Guermantes spent in his company, how I had valued the privilege of seeing him! People never cease to change place in relation to ourselves. In the imperceptible but eternal march of the world, we regard them as motionless, in a moment of vision too brief for us to perceive the motion that is sweeping them on. But we have only to select in our memory two pictures taken of them at different moments, close enough together however for them not to have altered in themselves—perceptibly, that is to say—and the difference between the two pictures is a measure of the displacement that they have undergone in relation to us. Robert alarmed me dreadfully by speaking to me of the Verdurins, for I was afraid that he might ask me to take him there, which would have been enough, because of the jealousy I should constantly feel, to spoil all the pleasure that I found in going there with Albertine. But fortunately he assured me that, on the contrary, the one thing he desired above all others was not to know them. “No,” he said to me, “I find that sort of clerical atmosphere maddening.” I did not at first understand the application of the adjective “clerical” to the Verdurins, but the sequel to his remark clarified his meaning, betraying his concessions to those fashions in words which one is often astonished to see adopted by intelligent men. “I mean the sort of circles,” he said, “where people form a tribe, a religious order, a chapel. You aren’t going to tell me that they’re not a little sect; they’re all honey to the people who belong, no words bad enough for those who don’t. The question is not, as for Hamlet, to be or not to be, but to belong or not to belong. You belong, my uncle Charlus belongs. But I can’t help it, I’ve never gone in for that sort of thing, it isn’t my fault.”