When Albertine came back to my room, she was wearing a black satin dress which had the effect of making her seem paler, of turning her into the pallid, intense Parisian woman, etiolated by lack of fresh air, by the atmosphere of crowds and perhaps by the practice of vice, whose eyes seemed the more uneasy because they were not brightened by any colour in her cheeks.
“Guess,” I said to her, “who I’ve just been talking to on the telephone. Andrée!”
“Andrée?” exclaimed Albertine in a loud, astonished, excited voice that so simple a piece of intelligence hardly seemed to call for. “I hope she remembered to tell you that we met Mme Verdurin the other day.”
“Mme Verdurin? I don’t remember,” I replied as though I were thinking of something else, in order to appear indifferent to this meeting and not to betray Andrée who had told me where Albertine was going next day. But how could I tell whether Andrée was not herself betraying me, whether she would not tell Albertine tomorrow that I had asked her to prevent her at all costs from going to the Verdurins’, and whether she had not already revealed to her that I had on several occasions made similar recommendations? She had assured me that she had never repeated anything, but the value of this assertion was counterbalanced in my mind by the impression that for some time past Albertine’s face had ceased to show the trust that she had placed in me for so long.*
Suffering, when we are in love, ceases from time to time, but only to resume in a different form. We weep to see the beloved no longer respond to us with those bursts of affection, those amorous advances of earlier days; we suffer even more when, having relinquished them with us, she resumes them with others; then, from this suffering, we are distracted by a new and still more agonising pang, the suspicion that she has lied to us about how she spent the previous evening, when she was no doubt unfaithful to us; this suspicion in turn is dispelled, and we are soothed by our mistress’s affectionate kindness; but then a forgotten word comes back to us; we had been told that she was ardent in moments of pleasure, whereas we have always found her calm; we try to picture to ourselves these passionate frenzies with others, we feel how very little we are to her, we observe an air of boredom, longing, melancholy while we are talking, we observe like a black sky the slovenly clothes she puts on when she is with us, keeping for other people the dresses with which she used to flatter us. If, on the contrary, she is affectionate, what joy for a moment! But when we see that little tongue stuck out as though in invitation, we think of those to whom that invitation was so often addressed that even perhaps with me, without her thinking of those others, it had remained for Albertine, by force of long habit, an automatic signal. Then the feeling that she is bored by us returns. But suddenly this pain is reduced to nothing when we think of the unknown evil element in her life, of the places, impossible to identify, where she has been, where she still goes perhaps during the hours when we are not with her, if indeed she is not planning to live there altogether, those places in which she is separated from us, does not belong to us, is happier than when she is with us. Such are the revolving searchlights of jealousy.
Jealousy is moreover a demon that cannot be exorcised, but constantly reappears in new incarnations. Even if we could succeed in exterminating them all, in keeping the beloved for ever, the Spirit of Evil would then adopt another form, more pathetic still, despair at having obtained fidelity only by force, despair at not being loved.
Tender and sweet though Albertine was on certain evenings, she no longer had any of those spontaneous impulses which I remembered from Balbec when she used to say “How very nice you are, really!” and her whole heart seemed to go out to me unrestrained by any of those grievances which she now felt and which she kept to herself because she doubtless considered them irremediable, impossible to forget, unavowable, but which nevertheless created between us a significant verbal prudence on her part or an impassable barrier of silence.
“And may one be allowed to know why you telephoned to Andrée?”
“To ask whether she had any objection to my joining you tomorrow and paying the Verdurins the visit I’ve been promising them since La Raspèliere.”
“Just as you like. But I warn you, there’s an appalling fog this evening, and it’s sure to last over tomorrow. I mention it because I shouldn’t like you to make yourself ill. Personally, I need hardly say that I’d love you to come with us. However,” she added with a thoughtful air, “I’m not at all sure that I’ll go to the Verdurins’. They’ve been so kind to me that I ought, really … Next to you, they’ve been nicer to me than anybody, but there are some things about them that I don’t quite like. I simply must go to the Bon Marché or the Trois-Quartiers and get a white bodice to wear with this dress which is really too black.”
To allow Albertine to go by herself into a big shop crowded with people perpetually brushing against one, provided with so many exits that a woman can always say that when she came out she could not find her carriage which was waiting further along the street, was something that I was quite determined never to consent to, but the thought of it made me extremely unhappy. And yet it did not occur to me that I ought long ago to have ceased to see Albertine, for she had entered, for me, upon that lamentable period in which a person, scattered in space and time, is no longer a woman but a series of events on which we can throw no light, a series of insoluble problems, a sea which, like Xerxes, we scourge with rods in an absurd attempt to punish it for what it has engulfed. Once this period has begun, we are perforce vanquished. Happy are they who understand this in time not to prolong unduly a futile, exhausting struggle, hemmed in on every side by the limits of the imagination, a struggle in which jealousy plays so sorry a part that the same man who, once upon a time, if the eyes of the woman who was always by his side rested for an instant upon another man, imagined an intrigue and suffered endless torments, now resigns himself to allowing her to go out by herself, sometimes with the man whom he knows to be her lover, preferring to the unknowable this torture which at least he knows! It is a question of the rhythm to be adopted, which afterwards one follows from force of habit. Neurotics who could never stay away from a dinner-party will eventually take rest cures which never seem to them to last long enough; women who recently were still of easy virtue live in penitence. Jealous lovers who, to keep an eye on the woman they loved, cut short their hours of sleep, deprived themselves of rest, now feeling that her desires, the world so vast and secret, and time are too much for them, allow her to go out without them, then to travel, and finally separate from her. Jealousy thus perishes for want of nourishment and has survived so long only by clamouring incessantly for fresh food. I was still a long way from this state.
I was now at liberty to go out with Albertine as often as I wished. As there had recently sprung up round Paris a number of aerodromes, which are to aeroplanes what harbours are to ships, and as, ever since the day when, on the way to La Raspelière, that almost mythological encounter with an airman, at whose passage overhead my horse had reared, had been to me like a symbol of liberty, I often chose to end our day’s excursion—with the ready approval of Albertine, a passionate lover of every form of sport—at one of these aerodromes. We went there, she and I, attracted by that incessant stir of departure and arrival which gives so much charm to a stroll along a jetty, or merely along a beach, to those who love the sea, and to loitering about an “aviation centre” to those who love the sky. From time to time, amid the repose of the machines that lay inert and as though at anchor, we would see one being laboriously pulled by a number of mechanics, as a boat is dragged across the sand at the bidding of a tourist who wishes to go for an outing on the sea. Then the engine was started, the machine ran along the ground, gathered speed, until finally, all of a sudden, at right angles, it rose slowly, in the braced and as it were static ecstasy of a horizontal speed suddenly transformed into a majestic, vertical ascent. Albertine could not contain her joy, and would demand explanations of the mechanics who, now that the machine was in the air, were stro
lling back to the sheds. The passenger, meanwhile, was covering mile after mile; the huge skiff, upon which our eyes remained fixed, was now no more than a barely visible dot in the sky, a dot which, however, would gradually recover its solidity, its size, its volume, when, as the time allowed for the excursion drew to an end, the moment came for landing. And we watched with envy, Albertine and I, as he sprang to earth, the passenger who had gone up like that to enjoy in the solitary expanses of the open sky the calm and limpidity of evening. Then, whether from the aerodrome or from some museum or church that we had been visiting, we would return home together for dinner. And yet I did not return home calmed, as I used to be at Balbec by less frequent excursions which I rejoiced to see extend over a whole afternoon and would afterwards contemplate, standing out like clustering flowers, against the rest of Albertine’s life as against an empty sky beneath which one muses pleasantly, without thinking. Albertine’s time did not belong to me then in such ample quantities as today. Yet it had seemed to me then to belong to me much more, because I then took into account—my love rejoicing in them as in the bestowal of a favour—only the hours that she spent with me, whereas now—my jealousy searching anxiously among them for the possibility of a betrayal—it was only those hours that she spent apart from me.
Tomorrow, evidently, she was looking forward to a few such hours. I must choose to cease from suffering or to cease from loving. For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety. I felt that part of Albertine’s life eluded me. Love, in the pain of anxiety as in the bliss of desire, is a demand for a whole. It is born, and it survives, only if some part remains for it to conquer. We love only what we do not wholly possess. Albertine was lying when she told me that she probably would not go to see the Verdurins, as I was lying when I said that I wished to go. She was seeking merely to dissuade me from going out with her, and I, by my abrupt announcement of this plan which I had no intention of putting into practice, to touch what I felt to be her most sensitive spot, to track down the desire that she was concealing and to force her to admit that my company next day would prevent her from gratifying it. She had virtually made this admission by ceasing suddenly to wish to go to see the Verdurins.
“If you don’t want to go to the Verdurins’,” I told her, “there is a splendid charity show at the Trocadéro.” She listened to my exhortations to attend it with a doleful air. I began to be harsh with her as at Balbec, at the time of my first fit of jealousy. Her face reflected her disappointment, and in reproaching her I used the same arguments that had been so often advanced against me by my parents when I was small, and that had appeared so unintelligent and cruel to my misunderstood childhood. “No, in spite of your gloomy look,” I said to Albertine, “I can’t feel sorry for you; I should feel sorry for you if you were ill, if you were in trouble, if you had suffered some bereavement; not that you would mind in the least, I dare say, considering your expenditure of false sensibility over nothing. Besides, I’m not very impressed by the sensibility of people who pretend to be so fond of us and are quite incapable of doing us the smallest favour, and whose minds wander so that they forget to deliver the letter we have entrusted to them on which our whole future depends.”
A great part of what we say being no more than a recitation from memory, I had often heard these words uttered by my mother, who (always ready to explain to me that one ought not to confuse genuine sensibility with sentimentality, what the Germans, whose language she greatly admired despite my grandfather’s loathing for that nation, called Empfindung and Empfindelei) once, when I was in tears, had gone so far as to tell me that Nero was probably highly-strung and was none the better for that. Indeed, like those plants which bifurcate as they grow, side by side with the sensitive boy which was all that I had been, there was now a man of the opposite sort, full of common sense, of severity towards the morbid sensibility of others, a man resembling what my parents had been to me. No doubt, as each of us is obliged to continue in himself the life of his forebears, the level-headed, caustic individual who did not exist in me at the start had joined forces with the sensitive one, and it was natural that I should become in my turn what my parents had been to me. What is more, at the moment when this new personality took shape in me, he found his language ready made in the memory of the sarcastic, scolding things that had been said to me, that I must now say to others, and that came so naturally to my lips, either because I evoked them through mimicry and association of memories, or because the delicate and mysterious incrustations of genetic energy had traced in me unawares, as upon the leaf of a plant, the same intonations, the same gestures, the same attitudes as had been characteristic of those from whom I sprang. Sometimes, playing the sage when talking to Albertine, I seemed to be hearing my grandmother. Indeed it often happened to my mother (so many obscure unconscious currents caused everything in me even down to the tiniest movements of my fingers to be drawn into the same cycles as my parents) to imagine that it was my father at the door, so similar was my knock to his.
Moreover the coupling of contrary elements is the law of life, the principle of fertilisation, and, as we shall see, the cause of many misfortunes. As a rule we detest what resembles ourselves, and our own faults when observed in another person exasperate us. How much the more does a man who has passed the age at which one instinctively displays them, a man who, for instance, has maintained an expression of icy calm through the most aggravating moments, execrate those same faults if it is another man, younger or simpler or stupider, who displays them! There are sensitive people for whom merely to see in other people’s eyes the tears which they themselves have held back is infuriating. It is excessive similarity that, in spite of affection, and sometimes all the more the greater the affection, causes division to reign in families.
Possibly in myself, as in many other people, the second man that I had become was simply another aspect of the first, excitable and sensitive where he himself was concerned, a sage mentor to others. Perhaps it was so also with my parents according to whether they were considered in relation to me or in themselves. In the case of my grandmother and mother it was only too clear that their severity towards me was deliberate on their part and indeed cost them dear, but perhaps even my father’s coldness too was only an external aspect of his sensibility. For it was perhaps the human truth of this twofold aspect—the one concerned with the inner life, the other with social relations—that was expressed in a remark which seemed to me at the time as false in substance as it was commonplace in form, when someone said of my father: “Beneath his icy exterior, he conceals an extraordinary sensibility; the truth is that he’s ashamed of his feelings.” Did it not in fact conceal incessant secret storms, that calm of his, interspersed at times with sententious reflections and ironical comments on the awkward manifestations of sensibility, which now I too affected in my relations with everyone and above all never swerved from, in certain circumstances, with Albertine?
I really believe that I came near that day to making up my mind to break with her and to set out for Venice. What bound me anew in my chains had to do with Normandy, not that she showed any inclination to go to that region where I had been jealous of her (for it was my good fortune that her plans never impinged upon the painful zones in my memory), but because when I happened to say to her: “It’s as though I were speaking to you about your aunt’s friend who lived at Infreville,” she replied angrily, delighted—like everyone in an argument who is anxious to muster as many points as possible on his side—to show me that I was in the wrong and herself in the right: “But my aunt never knew anybody at Infreville, and I’ve never been near the place.” She had forgotten the lie that she had told me one afternoon about the touchy lady with whom she simply must go and have tea, even if by visiting this lady she were to forfeit my friendship and shorten her own life. I did not remind her of her lie. But it shattered me. And once again I postponed our rupture to another day. A person has no need of sincerity
, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by love reciprocal torture.
I saw nothing reprehensible that evening in speaking to her as my grandmother—that mirror of perfection—used to speak to me, nor, when I told her that I would escort her to the Verdurins’, in having adopted the brusque manner of my father, who would never inform us of any decision except in a manner calculated to cause us the maximum of agitation, out of all proportion to the decision itself. So that it was easy for him to call us absurd for appearing so distressed by so small a matter, our distress corresponding in reality to the perturbation that he had aroused in us. And if—like the inflexible wisdom of my grandmother—these arbitrary whims of my father’s had been passed on to me to complement the sensitive nature to which they had so long remained alien and, throughout my whole childhood, had caused so much suffering, that sensitive nature informed them very exactly as to the points at which they could most effectively be aimed: there is no better informer than a reformed thief, or a subject of the nation one is fighting. In certain untruthful families, a brother who has come to call without any apparent reason and makes some casual inquiry on the doorstep as he leaves, appearing scarcely to listen to the answer, indicates thereby to his brother that this inquiry was the sole object of his visit, for the brother is quite familiar with that air of detachment, those words uttered as though in parentheses and at the last moment, having frequently had recourse to them himself. Similarly, there are pathological families, kindred sensibilities, fraternal temperaments, initiated into that mute language which enables the members of a family to understand each other without speaking. Thus who can be more nerve-racking than a neurotic? And then there may have been a deeper and more general cause for my behaviour in these cases. In those brief but inevitable moments when we hate someone we love—moments which last sometimes for a whole lifetime in the case of people we do not love—we do not wish to appear kind in order not to be pitied, but at once as unpleasant and as happy as possible so that our happiness may be truly hateful and wound to the very soul the occasional or permanent enemy. To how many people have I not untruthfully maligned myself, simply in order that my “successes” might seem to them the more immoral and infuriate them the more! The proper thing to do would be to take the opposite course, to show without arrogance that we have generous feelings, instead of taking such pains to hide them. And this would be easy if we were capable of never hating, of always loving. For then we should be so happy to say only the things that can make other people happy, melt their hearts, make them love us.
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