A song of farewell rises from troubled springs,
which in its turn became “an old jingle of Massenet’s the child is always dinning into our ears.”
A cloud passed, blotting out the sun; I saw the prudish, leafy screen of glass grow dim and revert to a grey monochrome.
The partition that divided our two dressing-rooms (Albertine’s, identical with my own, was a bathroom which Mamma, who had another at the opposite end of the flat, had never used for fear of disturbing my rest) was so thin that we could talk to each other as we washed in double privacy, carrying on a conversation that was interrupted only by the sound of the water, in that intimacy which is so often permitted in hotels by the smallness and proximity of the rooms but which, in private houses in Paris, is so rare.
On other mornings, I would remain in bed, drowsing for as long as I chose, for orders had been given that no one was to enter my room until I had rung the bell, an act which, owing to the awkward position in which the electric push had been hung above my bed, took such a time that often, tired of feeling for it and glad to be left alone, I would lie back for some moments and almost fall asleep again. It was not that I was wholly indifferent to Albertine’s presence in the house. Her separation from her girlfriends had succeeded in sparing my heart any fresh anguish. It kept it in a state of repose, in a semi-immobility which would help it to recover. But this calm which my mistress procured for me was an assuagement of suffering rather than a joy. Not that it did not enable me to taste many joys from which the intensity of my anguish had debarred me, but, far from my owing them to Albertine, who in any case I no longer found very pretty and with whom I was bored, with whom I was indeed clearly conscious that I was not in love, I tasted these joys on the contrary when Albertine was not with me. And so, to begin the morning, I did not send for her at once, especially if it was a fine day. For some moments, knowing that he would make me happier than Albertine, I remained closeted with the little person inside me, the melodious psalmist of the rising sun, of whom I have already spoken. Of the different persons who compose our personality, it is not the most obvious that are the most essential. In myself, when ill health has succeeded in uprooting them one after another, there will still remain two or three endowed with a hardier constitution than the rest, notably a certain philosopher who is happy only when he has discovered between two works of art, between two sensations, a common element. But I have sometimes wondered whether the last of all might not be this little mannikin, very similar to another whom the optician at Combray used to set up in his shop window to forecast the weather, and who, doffing his hood when the sun shone, would put it on again if it was going to rain. I know how selfish this little mannikin is; I may be suffering from an attack of breathlessness which only the coming of rain would assuage, but he pays no heed, and, at the first drops so impatiently awaited, all his gaiety forgotten, he sullenly pulls down his hood. Conversely, I dare say that in my last agony, when all my other “selves” are dead, if a ray of sunshine steals into the room while I am drawing my last breath, the little barometric mannikin will feel a great relief, and will throw back his hood to sing: “Ah, fine weather at last!”
I would ring for Françoise. I would open the Figaro. I would scan its columns and ascertain that it did not contain an article, or so-called article, which I had sent to the editor, and which was no more than a slightly revised version of the page that had recently come to light, written long ago in Dr Percepied’s carriage, as I gazed at the spires of Martinville. Then I would read Mamma’s letter. She found it odd, if not shocking, that a girl should be living alone with me. On the first day, at the moment of leaving Balbec, when she saw how wretched I was and was worried about leaving me by myself, my mother had perhaps been glad when she heard that Albertine was travelling with us and saw that, side by side with our own boxes (those boxes among which I had spent the night in tears in the hotel at Balbec) Albertine’s too—narrow and black, having for me the appearance of coffins, and as to which I did not know whether they would bring life or death to our house—had been loaded on to the “twister.” But I had never even asked myself the question, being all overjoyed, in the radiant morning, after the fear of having to remain at Balbec, that I was taking Albertine with me. But if at the start my mother had not been hostile to this proposal (speaking kindly to my friend like a mother whose son has been seriously wounded and who is grateful to the young mistress who is nursing him with loving care), she had become so now that it had been all too completely realised and the girl was prolonging her sojourn in our house, moreover in the absence of my parents. I cannot, however, say that my mother ever openly manifested this hostility to me. As in the past, when she had ceased to dare to reproach me with my nervous instability and my laziness, now she had qualms—which perhaps I did not altogether perceive or did not wish to perceive at the time—about running the risk, by offering any criticism of the girl to whom I had told her that I intended to make an offer of marriage, of casting a shadow over my life, making me in time to come less devoted to my wife, of sowing perhaps, for a season when she herself would no longer be there, the seeds of remorse at having grieved her by marrying Albertine. Mamma preferred to seem to be approving a choice which she felt herself powerless to make me reconsider. But all the people who saw her at that time have since told me that in addition to her grief at having lost her mother she had an air of constant preoccupation. This mental strife, this inward debate, had the effect of overheating my mother’s brow, and she was constantly opening the windows to let in the fresh air. But she failed to come to any decision, for fear of influencing me in the wrong direction and so spoiling what she believed to be my happiness. She could not even bring herself to forbid me to keep Albertine for the time being in our house. She did not wish to appear more strict than Mme Bontemps, who was the person principally concerned, and who saw no harm in the arrangement, which greatly surprised my mother. All the same, she regretted that she had been obliged to leave us together, by departing just at that moment for Combray where she might have to remain (and did in fact remain) for many months, during which my great-aunt required her incessant attention by day and night. Everything was made easier for her down there thanks to the kindness and devotion of Legrandin who, sparing himself no pains, kept putting off his return to Paris from week to week, not that he knew my aunt at all well, but simply, first of all, because she had been his mother’s friend, and also because he knew that the invalid, condemned to die, valued his attentions and could not do without him. Snobbery is a grave disease, but it is localised and so does not utterly corrupt the soul. I, on the other hand, unlike Mamma, was extremely glad of her absence at Combray, but for which I should have been afraid (being unable to tell Albertine to conceal it) of her learning of the girl’s friendship with Mlle Vinteuil. This would have been to my mother an insurmountable obstacle, not merely to a marriage about which she had meanwhile begged me to say nothing definite as yet to Albertine, and the thought of which was becoming more and more intolerable to myself, but even to the latter’s being allowed to stay for any length of time in the house. Failing so grave a reason, of which she was not aware, Mamma, through the dual effect of the edifying and liberating example of my grandmother, according to whom, in her admiration of George Sand, virtue consisted in nobility of soul, and of my own corrupting influence, was now indulgent towards women whose conduct she would have condemned in the past, or even now had they been any of her own middle-class friends in Paris or Combray, but whose large-heartedness I extolled to her and whom she forgave much because of their affection for me.
However all this may be, and even apart from any question of propriety, I doubt whether Mamma could have put up with Albertine, since she had retained from Combray, from my aunt Leonie, from all her kindred, habits of punctuality and order of which my mistress had not the remotest conception. She would never think of shutting a door and, by the same token, would no more hesitate to enter a room if the door stood open than would a dog
or a cat. Her somewhat inconvenient charm was, in fact, that of behaving in the household not so much like a girl as like a domestic animal which comes into a room and goes out again and is to be found wherever one least expects to find it, and she would often—something that I found profoundly restful—come and lie down beside me on my bed, making a place for herself from which she never stirred, without disturbing me as a person would have done. She ended, however, by conforming to my hours of sleep, and not only never attempted to enter my room but would take care not to make a sound until I had rung my bell. It was Françoise who impressed these rules of conduct upon her. She was one of those Combray servants, conscious of their master’s place in the world, who feel that the least that they can do is to see that he is treated with all the respect to which they consider him entitled. When a stranger on leaving after a visit gave Françoise a tip to be shared with the kitchenmaid, he had barely slipped his coin into her hand before Françoise, with an unparalleled display of speed, tact and energy, had passed the word to the kitchenmaid who came forward to thank him, not in a murmur, but openly and clearly, as Françoise had told her that she must do. The parish priest of Combray was no genius, but he also knew what was right and proper. Under his instruction, the daughter of some Protestant cousins of Mme Sazerat’s had been converted to Catholicism, and her family had behaved impeccably towards him. There was a question of her marrying a young nobleman of Méséglise. The young man’s parents wrote to inquire about her in a somewhat arrogant letter, in which they expressed contempt for her Protestant origin. The priest replied in such a tone that the Méséglise nobleman, crushed and grovelling, wrote a very different letter in which he begged as the most precious favour to marry the girl.
Françoise deserved no special credit for making Albertine respect my slumbers. She was imbued with the tradition. From her studied silence, or the peremptory response that she made to a proposal to enter my room, or to send in some message to me, which Albertine had expressed in all innocence, the latter realised with astonishment that she was now living in an alien world, where strange customs prevailed, governed by rules of conduct which one must never dream of infringing. She had already had a forewarning of this at Balbec, but, in Paris, made no attempt to resist, and would wait patiently every morning for the sound of my bell before venturing to make any noise.
The training that Françoise gave her was also salutary for our old servant herself, in that it gradually stilled the lamentations which, ever since our return from Balbec, she had not ceased to utter. For, just as we were boarding the train, she had remembered that she had failed to say good-bye to the housekeeper of the hotel, a mustachioed lady who looked after the bedroom floors and barely knew Françoise by sight, but had been comparatively civil to her. Françoise insisted on getting out of the train, going back to the hotel, making her farewells to the housekeeper, and postponing her departure for Paris until the following day. Common sense, coupled with my sudden horror of Balbec, restrained me from granting her this concession, but my refusal had infected her with a morbid ill-humour which the change of air had not sufficed to cure and which lingered on in Paris. For, according to Françoise’s code, as illustrated in the carvings of Saint-André-des-Champs, to wish for the death of an enemy, or even to inflict it, is not forbidden, but it is a horrible sin not to do the right thing, not to return a civility, to omit, like a regular churl, to say good-bye to the housekeeper before leaving a hotel. Throughout the journey, the continually recurring memory of her not having taken leave of this woman had dyed Françoise’s cheeks with a scarlet flush that was quite alarming. And if she refused to eat or drink until we reached Paris, it was perhaps because this memory was a real “weight” on her stomach (every social class has its own pathology) even more than to punish us.
Among the reasons which led Mamma to write me a letter every day, a letter which never failed to include some quotation from Mme de Sévigné, was the memory of my grandmother. Mamma would write to me: “Mme Sazerat gave us one of those little luncheons of which she possesses the secret and which, as your poor grandmother would have said, quoting Mme de Sévigné, deprive us of solitude without affording us company.” In one of my earlier replies I was inept enough to write to Mamma: “By those quotations, your mother would recognise you at once.” Which brought me, three days later, the reproof: “My poor boy, if it was to speak to me of my mother, your reference to Mme de Sévigné was most inappropriate. She would have answered you as she answered Mme de Grignan: ‘So she was nothing to you? I had supposed that you were related.’ ”
By this time, I would hear my mistress leaving or returning to her room. I would ring the bell, for it was time now for Andrée to arrive with the chauffeur, Morel’s friend, lent me by the Verdurins, to take Albertine out. I had spoken to the latter of the remote possibility of our marriage; but I had never made her any formal promise; she herself, from discretion, when I said to her: “I don’t know, but it might perhaps be possible,” had shaken her head with a melancholy smile, as much as to say “Oh, no it won’t,” which meant: “I’m too poor.” And so, while I continued to say: “Nothing could be less certain” when speaking of plans for the future, for the present I did everything in my power to amuse her, to make her life agreeable, with perhaps the unconscious design of thereby making her wish to marry me. She herself laughed at my lavish generosity. “Andrée’s mother would pull a bit of a face if she saw me turn into a rich lady like herself, what she calls a lady who has ‘horses, carriages, pictures.’ What? Did I never tell you that she says that. Oh, she’s quite a type! What surprises me is that she raises pictures to the same dignity as horses and carriages.”
We shall see in due course that, in spite of stupid habits of speech which she had not outgrown, Albertine had developed to an astonishing degree. This was a matter of complete indifference to me, a woman’s intellectual qualities having always interested me so little that if I pointed them out to some woman or other it was solely out of politeness. Celeste’s curious genius alone might perhaps appeal to me. In spite of myself, I would continue to smile for some moments, when, for instance, having ascertained that Albertine was not in my room, she accosted me with: “Heavenly deity perched on a bed!” “But why, Celeste,” I would say, “why deity?” “Oh, if you suppose that you have anything in common with the mortals who make their pilgrimage on our vile earth, you are greatly mistaken!” “But why ‘perched’ on a bed? Can’t you see that I’m lying in bed?” “You never lie. Who ever saw anybody lie like that? You’ve just alighted there. With your white pyjamas, and the way you twist your neck, you look for all the world like a dove.”
Albertine, even in the discussion of the most trivial matters, expressed herself very differently from the little girl that she had been only a few years earlier at Balbec. She would go so far as to declare, in connexion with a political incident of which she disapproved: “I consider that fearsome,” and I am not sure that it was not about this time that she learned to say, when she wanted to indicate that she thought a book badly written: “It’s interesting, but really, it might have been written by a pig.”
The rule that she must not enter my room until I had rung amused her greatly. As she had adopted our family habit of quotation, and in following it drew upon the plays in which she had acted at her convent and for which I had expressed a liking, she always compared me to Assuerus:1
And death is the reward of whoso dares
To venture in his presence unawares …
None is exempt; nor is there any whom
Degree or sex can save from such a doom;
Even I myself …
Like all the rest, I by this law am bound;
And, to address him, I must first be found
By him, or he must call me to his side.
Physically, too, she had changed. Her blue, almond-shaped eyes—now even more elongated—had altered in appearance; they were indeed of the same colour, but seemed to have passed into a liquid state. So much so that,
when she closed them, it was as though a pair of curtains had been drawn to shut out a view of the sea. It was no doubt this aspect of her person that I remembered most vividly each night on leaving her. For, quite contrarily, every morning the ripple of her hair, for instance, continued to give me the same surprise, as though it were some novelty that I had never seen before. And yet, above the smiling eyes of a girl, what could be more beautiful than that clustering coronet of black violets? The smile offers greater friendship; but the little gleaming coils of blossoming hair, more akin to the flesh of which they seem to be a transposition into tiny wavelets, are more provocative of desire.
As soon as she entered my room, she would spring on to my bed and sometimes would expatiate upon my type of intellect, would vow in a transport of sincerity that she would sooner die than leave me: this was on mornings when I had shaved before sending for her. She was one of those women who can never distinguish the cause of what they feel. The pleasure they derive from a fresh complexion they explain to themselves by the moral qualities of the man who seems to offer them a possibility of future happiness, which is capable, however, of diminishing and becoming less compelling the longer he refrains from shaving.
I would inquire where she was thinking of going.
“I believe Andrée wants to take me to the Buttes-Chaumont; I’ve never been there.”
Of course it was impossible for me to discern among so many other words whether beneath these a falsehood lay concealed. Besides, I could trust Andrée to tell me of all the places that she visited with Albertine. At Balbec, when I had felt utterly weary of Albertine, I had made up my mind to say, untruthfully, to Andrée: “My little Andrée, if only I had met you again sooner, it’s you that I would have loved! But now my heart is pledged to another. All the same, we can see a great deal of each other, for my love is causing me great unhappiness, and you will help me to find consolation.” And now these same lying words had become true within the space of three weeks. Perhaps Andrée had believed in Paris that it was indeed a lie and that I was in love with her, as she would doubtless have believed at Balbec. For the truth is so variable for each of us, that other people have difficulty in recognising what it is. And as I knew that she would tell me everything that she and Albertine had done, I had asked her, and she had agreed, to come and call for Albertine almost every day. Thus I could without anxiety remain at home. Also, Andrée’s privileged position as one of the girls of the little band gave me confidence that she would obtain everything I might want from Albertine. Truly, I could have said to her now in all sincerity that she would be capable of setting my mind at rest.
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