I ought to add that Albertine greatly admired a big bronze I had by Barbedienne which with ample justification Bloch considered extremely ugly. He had perhaps less reason to be surprised at my having kept it. I had never sought, like him, to furnish for aesthetic effect, to arrange rooms artistically. I was too lazy for that, too indifferent to the things that I was in the habit of seeing every day. Since my taste was not involved, I had a right not to modulate my interiors. I might perhaps, in spite of this, have discarded the bronze. But ugly and expensive things are extremely useful, for they possess, in the eyes of people who do not understand us, who do not share our taste and with whom we may be in love, a glamour which a fine object that does not reveal its beauty may lack. Now the people who do not understand us are precisely the people with regard to whom it may be useful to us to take advantage of a prestige which our intellect is enough to ensure for us among superior people. Although Albertine was beginning to show some taste, she still had a certain respect for the bronze, and this was reflected back upon me in an esteem which, coming from Albertine, mattered infinitely more to me than the question of keeping a bronze which was a trifle degrading, since I loved Albertine.
But the thought of my bondage ceased of a sudden to weigh upon me and I looked forward to prolonging it still further, because I seemed to perceive that Albertine was sorely conscious of her own. True, whenever I had asked her whether she was unhappy in my house, she had always replied that she did not know where it would be possible for her to be happier. But often these words were contradicted by an air of nostalgia and edginess. Certainly if she had the tastes with which I had credited her, this prevention from ever satisfying them must have been as frustrating to her as it was calming to myself, calming to such an extent that I should have decided that the hypothesis of my having accused her unjustly was the most probable, had it not been so difficult to fit into this hypothesis the extraordinary pains that Albertine took never to be alone, never to be free to go out with anyone, never to stop for a moment outside the front door when she came in, always to insist on being ostentatiously accompanied, whenever she went to the telephone, by someone who would be able to repeat to me what she had said—by Françoise or Andrée—always to leave me alone with the latter (without appearing to be doing so on purpose) after they had been out together, so that I might obtain a detailed report of their outing. Contrasted with this marvellous docility were occasional gestures of impatience, quickly repressed, which made me wonder whether Albertine might not be planning to shake off her chains.
Certain incidental circumstances seemed to corroborate my supposition. Thus, one day when I had gone out by myself, I ran into Gisele in the neighbourhood of Passy, and we chatted about this and that. Presently, not without pride at being able to do so, I informed her that I saw Albertine constantly. Gisele asked me where she could find her, since she happened to have something to say to her. “What is it?” “Something to do with some young friends of hers.” “What friends? I may perhaps be able to tell you, though that needn’t prevent you from seeing her.” “Oh, girls she knew years ago, I don’t remember their names,” Gisele replied vaguely, beating a retreat. She left me, supposing herself to have spoken with such prudence that I could not conceivably have suspected anything. But falsehood is so unexacting, needs so little help to make itself manifest! If it had been a question of friends of long ago, whose very names she no longer remembered, why did she “happen” to need to speak to Albertine about them? This “happen,” akin to an expression dear to Mme Cottard: “It couldn’t be better timed,” could be applicable only to something particular, opportune, perhaps urgent, relating to specific persons. Besides, simply the way she opened her mouth, as though about to yawn, with a vague expression, when she said to me (almost retreating bodily, as she went into reverse at this point in our conversation): “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t remember their names,” made her face, and in harmony with it her voice, as clear a picture of falsehood as the wholly different air, keen, animated, forthcoming, of her “I happen to have” was of truth. I did not cross-examine Gisele. Of what use would it have been to me? Of course she did not lie in the same way as Albertine. And of course Albertine’s lies pained me more. But they had obviously a point in common: the fact of the lie itself, which in certain cases is self-evident. Not evidence of the reality that the lie conceals. We know that each murderer, individually, imagines that he has arranged everything so cleverly that he will not be caught, but in general, murderers are almost always caught. Liars, on the contrary, are rarely caught, and, among liars, more particularly the woman with whom we are in love. We do not know where she has been, what she has been doing. But as soon as she opens her mouth to speak, to speak of something else beneath which lies hidden the thing that she does not mention, the lie is immediately perceived, and our jealousy increased, since we are conscious of the lie, and cannot succeed in discovering the truth. With Albertine, the impression that she was lying was conveyed by a number of characteristics which we have already observed in the course of this narrative, but especially by the fact that, when she was lying, her story erred either from inadequacy, omission, implausibility, or on the contrary from a surfeit of petty details intended to make it seem plausible. Plausibility, notwithstanding the idea that the liar holds of it, is by no means the same as truth. Whenever, while listening to something that is true, we hear something that is only plausible, that is perhaps more plausible than the truth, that is perhaps too plausible, an ear that is at all musical senses that it is not correct, as with a line that does not scan or a word read aloud in mistake for another. The ear senses it, and if we are in love, the heart takes alarm. Why do we not reflect at the time, when we change the whole course of our life because we do not know whether a woman went along the Rue de Berri or the Rue Washington, why do we not reflect that these few yards of difference, and the woman herself, will be reduced to the hundred millionth part of themselves (that is to say to dimensions far beneath our perception), if we only have the wisdom to remain for a few years without seeing the woman, and that she who has out-Gullivered Gulliver in our eyes will shrink to a Lilliputian whom no microscope—of the heart, at least, for that of the disinterested memory is more powerful and less fragile—can ever again discern! However that may be, if there was a point in common—mendacity itself—between Albertine’s lies and Gisele’s, still Gisele did not lie in the same way as Albertine, nor indeed in the same way as Andrée, but their respective lies dovetailed so neatly into one another, while presenting a great variety, that the little band had the impenetrable solidity of certain commercial houses, booksellers for example or newspaper publishers, where the wretched author will never succeed, notwithstanding the diversity of the persons employed in them, in discovering whether or not he is being swindled. The director of the newspaper or review lies with an attitude of sincerity all the more solemn in that he is frequently obliged to conceal the fact that he himself does exactly the same things and indulges in the same commercial practices as he denounced in other newspaper or theatre directors, in other publishers, when he chose as his banner, when he raised against them the standard of Honesty. The fact of a man’s having proclaimed (as leader of a political party, or in any other capacity) that it is wicked to lie obliges him as a rule to lie more than other people, without on that account abandoning the solemn mask, doffing the august tiara of sincerity. The “honest” gentleman’s partner lies in a different and more ingenuous fashion. He deceives his author as he deceives his wife, with tricks from the vaudeville stage. The sub-editor, a crude, straightforward man, lies quite simply, like an architect who promises that your house will be ready at a date when it will not have been begun. The editor, an angelic soul, flutters from one to another of the three, and without knowing what the matter is, gives them, out of brotherly scruple and affectionate solidarity, the precious support of an unimpeachable word. These four persons live in a state of perpetual dissension to which the arrival of the author puts a stop. Over a
nd above their private quarrels, each of them remembers the paramount military duty of rallying to the support of the threatened “corps.” Without realising it, I had long been playing the part of this author in relation to the little band. If Gisele had been thinking, when she used the word “happen,” of one of Albertine’s friends who was prepared to go away with her as soon as my mistress should have found some pretext or other for leaving me, and had meant to warn Albertine that the hour had now come or would shortly strike, she, Gisele, would have let herself be torn to pieces rather than tell me so; it was quite useless therefore to ply her with questions.
Meetings such as this one with Gisele were not alone in reinforcing my doubts. For instance, I admired Albertine’s paintings. The touching pastimes of a captive, they moved me so that I congratulated her upon them. “No, they’re dreadfully bad, but I’ve never had a drawing lesson in my life.” “But one evening at Balbec you sent word to me that you had stayed at home to have a drawing lesson.” I reminded her of the day and told her that I had realised at the time that people did not have drawing lessons at that hour in the evening. Albertine blushed. “It’s true,” she said, “I wasn’t having drawing lessons. I told you a great many lies at the beginning, that I admit. But I never lie to you now.” How I should have loved to know what were the many lies that she had told me at the beginning! But I knew beforehand that her answers would be fresh lies. And so I contented myself with kissing her. I asked her to tell me one only of those lies. She replied: “Oh, well; for instance when I said that the sea air was bad for me.” I ceased to insist in the face of this unwillingness to oblige.
Every person we love, indeed to a certain extent every person, is to us like Janus, presenting to us a face that pleases us if the person leaves us, a dreary face if we know him or her to be at our perpetual disposal. In the case of Albertine, the prospect of her continued society was painful to me in another way which I cannot explain in this narrative. It is terrible to have the life of another person attached to one’s own like a bomb which one holds in one’s hands, unable to get rid of it without committing a crime. But one has only to compare this with the ups and downs, the dangers, the anxieties, the fear that false but probable things will come to be believed when we will no longer be able to explain them—feelings that one experiences if one lives on intimate terms with a madman. For instance, I pitied M. de Charlus for living with Morel (immediately the memory of the scene that afternoon made me feel that the left side of my chest was heavier than the other); leaving aside the relations that may or may not have existed between them, M. de Charlus must have been unaware at the outset that Morel was mad. Morel’s beauty, his stupidity, his pride must have deterred the Baron from exploring so deeply, until the days of melancholia when Morel accused M. de Charlus of responsibility for his sorrows, without being able to furnish any explanation, abused him for his want of trust with the help of false but extremely subtle arguments, threatened him with desperate resolutions in the midst of which there persisted the most cunning regard for his own most immediate interests. But all this is only a comparison. Albertine was not mad.
To make her chains appear lighter, the clever thing seemed to me to be to make her believe that I myself was about to break them. But I could not confide this mendacious plan to her at that moment, since she had returned so sweetly from the Trocadéro that afternoon; the most I could do, far from distressing her with the threat of a rupture, was to keep to myself those dreams of a perpetual life together which my grateful heart had formed. As I looked at her, I found it hard to restrain myself from pouring them out to her, and she may perhaps have noticed this. Unfortunately the expression of such feelings is not contagious. The case of an affected old woman like M. de Charlus who, by dint of never seeing in his imagination anything but a proud young man, thinks that he has himself become a proud young man, all the more so the more affected and ridiculous he becomes—this case is more general, and it is the misfortune of an impassioned lover not to realise that while he sees in front of him a beautiful face, his mistress is seeing his face, which is not made any more beautiful, far from it, when it is distorted by the pleasure that is aroused in it by the sight of beauty. Nor indeed does love exhaust the generality of this case; we do not see our own bodies, which other people see, and we “follow” our own train of thought, the object, invisible to other people, which is before our eyes. At times the artist reveals this object in his work. Whence it arises that the admirers of that work are disappointed in its author, on whose face that inner beauty is imperfectly reflected.
Retaining from my dream of Venice only what could concern Albertine and sweeten the time she spent in my house, I mentioned a Fortuny gown which we ought to go and order one of these days. I was looking for new pleasures with which to distract her. I would have liked to surprise her with a gift of old French silver, had it been possible to find any. As a matter of fact, when we had planned to acquire a yacht, a plan judged unrealisable by Albertine—and by me whenever I thought her virtuous and life with her began to appear as financially ruinous as marriage to her seemed impossible—we had, though without her believing I would buy one, asked advice from Elstir.
I learned that a death had occurred that day which distressed me greatly—that of Bergotte. It was known that he had been ill for a long time past. Not, of course, with the illness from which he had suffered originally and which was natural. Nature scarcely seems capable of giving us any but quite short illnesses. But medicine has developed the art of prolonging them. Remedies, the respite that they procure, the relapses that a temporary cessation of them provokes, produce a simulacrum of illness to which the patient grows so accustomed that he ends by stabilising it, stylising it, just as children have regular fits of coughing long after they have been cured of the whooping cough. Then the remedies begin to have less effect, the doses are increased, they cease to do any good, but they have begun to do harm thanks to this lasting indisposition. Nature would not have offered them so long a tenure. It is a great wonder that medicine can almost rival nature in forcing a man to remain in bed, to continue taking some drug on pain of death. From then on, the artificially grafted illness has taken root, has become a secondary but a genuine illness, with this difference only, that natural illnesses are cured, but never those which medicine creates, for it does not know the secret of their cure.
For years past Bergotte had ceased to go out of doors. In any case he had never cared for society, or had cared for it for a day only, to despise it as he despised everything else, and in the same fashion, which was his own, namely to despise a thing not because it was beyond his reach but as soon as he had attained it. He lived so simply that nobody suspected how rich he was, and anyone who had known would still have been mistaken, having thought him a miser whereas no one was ever more generous. He was generous above all towards women—girls, one ought rather to say—who were ashamed to receive so much in return for so little. He excused himself in his own eyes because he knew that he could never produce such good work as in an atmosphere of amorous feelings. Love is too strong a word, but pleasure that is at all rooted in the flesh is helpful to literary work because it cancels all other pleasures, for instance the pleasures of society, those which are the same for everyone. And even if this love leads to disillusionment, it does at least stir, even by so doing, the surface of the soul which otherwise would be in danger of becoming stagnant. Desire is therefore not without its value to the writer in detaching him first of all from his fellow men and from conforming to their standards, and afterwards in restoring some degree of movement to a spiritual machine which, after a certain age, tends to come to a standstill. We do not achieve happiness but we gain some insights into the reasons which prevent us from being happy and which would have remained invisible to us but for these sudden revelations of disappointment. Dreams, we know, are not realisable; we might not form any, perhaps, were it not for desire, and it is useful to us to form them in order to see them fail and to learn from their fai
lure. And so Bergotte said to himself: “I spend more than a multimillionaire on girls, but the pleasures or disappointments that they give me make me write a book which brings me in money.” Economically, this argument was absurd, but no doubt he found some charm in thus transmuting gold into caresses and caresses into gold. We saw, at the time of my grandmother’s death, how a weary old age loves repose. Now in society there is nothing but conversation. Vapid though it is, it has the capacity to eliminate women, who become nothing more than questions and answers. Removed from society, women become once more what is so reposeful to a weary old man, an object of contemplation. In any case, now there was no longer any question of all this. I have said that Bergotte never went out of doors, and when he got out of bed for an hour in his room, he would be smothered in shawls, rugs, all the things with which a person covers himself before exposing himself to intense cold or going on a railway journey. He would apologise for them to the few friends whom he allowed to penetrate to his sanctuary; pointing to his tartan plaids, his travelling-rugs, he would say merrily: “After all, my dear fellow, life, as Anaxagoras has said, is a journey.” Thus he went on growing steadily colder, a tiny planet offering a prophetic image of the greater, when gradually heat will withdraw from the earth, then life itself. Then the resurrection will have come to an end, for, however far forward into future generations the works of men may shine, there must none the less be men. If certain species hold out longer against the invading cold, when there are no longer any men, and if we suppose Bergotte’s fame to have lasted until then, suddenly it will be extinguished for all time. It will not be the last animals that will read him, for it is scarcely probable that, like the Apostles at Pentecost, they will be able to understand the speech of the various races of mankind without having learned it.
The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle Page 285