The fear that Albertine was perhaps going to say to me: “I want to be allowed to go out by myself at certain hours, I want to be able to stay away for twenty-four hours,” or some such request for freedom which I did not attempt to define, but which alarmed me, this fear had crossed my mind for a moment during the Verdurin reception. But it had been dispelled, contradicted moreover by the memory of Albertine’s constant assurances of how happy she was with me. The intention to leave me, if it existed in Albertine, manifested itself only in an obscure fashion, in certain mournful glances, certain gestures of impatience, remarks which meant nothing of the sort but which, if one analysed them (and there was not even any need for analysis, for one understands at once this language of passion, even the most uneducated understand these remarks which can be explained only by vanity, rancour, jealousy, unexpressed as it happens, but detectable at once by the interlocutor through an intuitive faculty which, like the “good sense” of which Descartes speaks, is “the most evenly distributed thing in the world”), could only be explained by the presence in her of a sentiment which she concealed and which might lead her to form plans for another life without me. Just as this intention did not express itself in her speech in a logical fashion, so the presentiment of this intention, which I had felt tonight, remained just as vague in me. I continued to live by the hypothesis which accepted as true everything that Albertine told me. But it may be that during this time a wholly contrary hypothesis, of which I refused to think, never left me; this is all the more probable since otherwise I should not have felt uncomfortable about telling Albertine that I had been to the Verdurins’, and my lack of astonishment at her anger would not have been comprehensible. So that what probably existed in me was an idea of Albertine entirely contrary to that which my reason formed of her, and also to that which her own words suggested, an Albertine who was none the less not wholly invented, since she was like an internal mirror of certain impulses that occurred in her, such as her ill-humour at my having gone to the Verdurins’. Besides, for a long time past, my constant anxieties, my fear of telling Albertine that I loved her, all this corresponded to another hypothesis which explained far more things and had also this to be said for it, that if one adopted the first hypothesis the second became more probable, for by allowing myself to give way to effusions of tenderness for Albertine, I obtained from her nothing but irritation (to which moreover she assigned a different cause).
I may say that what had seemed to me most serious and had struck me most forcibly as a symptom of the fact that she anticipated my accusation was that she had said to me: “I believe Mlle Vinteuil was to be there,” to which I had replied in the cruellest possible way: “You didn’t tell me you’d met her.” As soon as I found Albertine less than nice, instead of telling her I was sad, I became nasty.
Analysing my feelings on the basis of this, on the basis of the unvarying system of ripostes expressing the opposite of what I felt, I can be quite certain that if, that night, I told her that I was going to leave her, it was because—even before I had realised it—I was afraid that she might desire some freedom (I should have been hard put to it to say what this freedom was that made me tremble, but anyhow a freedom which might have given her an opportunity of being unfaithful to me, or at least which was such that I should no longer have been able to be certain that she was not) and because I wanted to show her, from pride and from cunning, that I was very far from fearing anything of the sort, as I had already shown at Balbec, when I was anxious that she should have a good opinion of me, and later on, when I was anxious that she should not have time to feel bored with me.
Finally, the objection that might be offered to this second, unformulated hypothesis, that everything that Albertine said to me indicated on the contrary that the life which she preferred was the life she led in my house, rest, quiet, reading, solitude, a loathing for Sapphic loves, and so forth, need not be considered seriously. For if on her part Albertine had wanted to gauge what I felt from what I said to her, she would have learned the exact opposite of the truth, since I never expressed a desire to part from her except when I was unable to do without her, and at Balbec I had twice confessed to her that I was in love with another woman, first Andrée, then a mysterious stranger, on the two occasions when jealousy had revived my love for her. My words, therefore, did not in the least reflect my feelings. If the reader has no more than a faint impression of these, that is because, as narrator, I expose my feelings to him at the same time as I repeat my words. But if I concealed the former and he were acquainted only with the latter, my actions, so little in keeping with them, would so often give him the impression of strange reversals that he would think me more or less mad. A procedure which would not, for that matter, be much more false than the one I adopted, for the images which prompted me to action, so opposed to those which were portrayed in my words, were at that moment extremely obscure; I was but imperfectly aware of the nature which guided my actions; today, I have a clear conception of its subjective truth. As for its objective truth, that is to say whether the intuitions of that nature grasped more exactly than my reason Albertine’s true intentions, whether I was right to trust to that nature or whether on the contrary it did not alter Albertine’s intentions instead of making them plain—that I find difficult to say.
That vague fear which I had felt at the Verdurins’ that Albertine might leave me had at first subsided. When I returned home, it had been with the feeling that I myself was a captive, not with that of finding a captive in the house. But the fear that had subsided had gripped me even more violently when, as soon as I informed Albertine that I had been to the Verdurins’, I saw her face veiled with a look of enigmatic irritation which moreover was not making itself visible for the first time. I knew perfectly well that it was only the crystallisation in the flesh of reasoned grievances, of ideas clear to the person who forms but does not express them, a synthesis rendered visible but not therefore rational, which he who gathers its precious residue from the face of the beloved endeavours in his turn, so that he may understand what is occurring in her, to reduce by analysis to its intellectual elements. The approximate equation of that unknown quantity which Albertine’s thoughts were to me had given me, more or less, the following: “I knew his suspicions, I was sure that he would attempt to verify them, and so that I might not hinder him, he has worked out his little plan in secret.” But if this was the state of mind (which she had never expressed to me) in which Albertine was living, must she not regard with horror, no longer have the strength to lead, might she not at any moment decide to terminate, a life in which, if she was, in desire at any rate, guilty, she must feel herself suspected, hunted, prevented from ever yielding to her desires, without thereby disarming my jealousy, and in which, if she was innocent in intention and fact, she had had every right, for some time past, to feel discouraged, seeing that, ever since Balbec, where she had shown so much perseverance in avoiding the risk of ever being alone with Andrée, until this very day when she had given up the idea of going to the Verdures’ and of staying at the Trocadéro, she had not succeeded in regaining my trust? All the more so because I could not say that her behaviour was not exemplary. If at Balbec, when anyone mentioned girls who behaved scandalously, she used often to copy their laughter, their wrigglings, their general manner, which was a torture to me because of what I supposed it must mean to her girlfriends, now that she knew my opinion on the subject she ceased, as soon as anyone made an allusion to things of that sort, to take part in the conversation, not only orally but with her facial expression. Whether it was in order not to contribute her share to the slanders that were being uttered about some woman or other, or for a quite different reason, the only thing that was noticeable then, upon those so mobile features, was that as soon as the topic was broached they had made their inattention evident, while preserving exactly the same expression as they had worn a moment earlier. And this immobility of even a light expression was as heavy as a silence. It would have been impossible t
o say whether she blamed, whether she approved, whether she knew or did not know about these things. Her features no longer bore any relation to anything except one another. Her nose, her mouth, her eyes formed a perfect harmony, isolated from everything else; she looked like a pastel, and seemed to have no more heard what had just been said than if it had been uttered in front of a portrait by La Tour.
My servitude, which had again been brought home to me when, as I gave the driver Brichot’s address, I had seen her lighted window, had ceased to weigh upon me shortly afterwards, when I saw that Albertine appeared so cruelly conscious of her own. And in order that it might seem to her less burdensome, that she might not decide to break her bonds of her own accord, I had felt that the most effective plan was to give her the impression that it would not be permanent and that I myself was looking forward to its termination. Seeing that my feint had proved successful, I might well have felt happy, in the first place because what I had so dreaded, Albertine’s supposed wish to leave me, seemed to be ruled out, and secondly because, quite apart from the object that I had had in mind, the very success of my feint, by proving that I was something more to Albertine than a scorned lover, whose jealousy is flouted, all of his ruses detected in advance, restored to our love a sort of virginity, revived for it the days in which she could still, at Balbec, so readily believe that I was in love with another woman. Doubtless she would no longer have believed that, but she gave credence to my feigned determination to part from her now and for ever.
She appeared to suspect that the cause of it might lie at the Verdurins’. I told her that I had seen a dramatist (Bloch), who was a great friend of Lea’s and to whom Lea had said some strange things (I hoped by telling her this to make her think that I knew a great deal more than I cared to say about Bloch’s cousins). But feeling a need to calm the agitation induced in me by my pretence of a rupture, I said to her: “Albertine, can you swear that you have never lied to me?”
She gazed fixedly into space before replying: “Yes … that’s to say no. I was wrong to tell you that Andrée was greatly taken with Bloch. We never met him.”
“Then why did you say so?”
“Because I was afraid that you believed other stories about her.”
“That’s all?”
She stared once again into space and then said: “I ought not to have kept from you a three weeks’ trip I went on with Lea. But I knew you so slightly in those days!”
“It was before Balbec?”
“Before the second time, yes.”
And that very morning, she had told me that she did not know Lea! I watched a tongue of flame seize and devour in an instant a novel which I had spent millions of minutes in writing. To what end? To what end? Of course I realised that Albertine had revealed these two facts to me because she thought that I had learned them indirectly from Lea; and that there was no reason why a hundred similar facts should not exist. I realised too that Albertine’s words, when one interrogated her, never contained an atom of truth, that the truth was something she let slip only in spite of herself, as a result of a sudden mixing together in her mind of the facts which she had previously been determined to conceal with the belief that one had got wind of them.
“But two things are nothing,” I said to Albertine, “let’s have as many as four, so that you may leave me with some memories. What other revelations have you got for me?”
Once again she stared into space. To what belief in a future life was she adapting her falsehood, with what gods less accommodating than she had supposed was she seeking to make a deal? It cannot have been an easy matter, for her silence and the fixity of her gaze continued for some time.
“No, nothing else,” she said at length. And, notwithstanding my persistence, she adhered, easily now, to “nothing else.” And what a lie! For, from the moment she had acquired those tastes until the day when she had been shut up in my house, how many times, in how many places, on how many excursions must she have gratified them! The daughters of Gomorrah are at once rare enough and numerous enough for one not to pass unnoticed by another in any given crowd. Thenceforward, a rendezvous is an easy matter.
I remembered with horror an evening which at the time had struck me as merely absurd. One of my friends had invited me to dine at a restaurant with his mistress and another of his friends who had also brought his. The two women were not long in coming to an understanding, but were so impatient to enjoy one another that already at the soup stage their feet were searching for one another, often finding mine. Presently their legs were intertwined. My two friends noticed nothing; I was in agonies. One of the women, who could contain herself no longer, stooped under the table, saying that she had dropped something. Then one of them complained of a headache and asked to go upstairs to the lavatory. The other remembered that it was time for her to go and meet a woman friend at the theatre. Finally I was left alone with my two friends, who suspected nothing. The lady with the headache reappeared, but begged to be allowed to go home by herself to wait for her lover at his house, so that she might take a febrifuge. The two women became great friends and used to go about together, one of them, dressed as a man, picking up little girls and taking them home to the other to be initiated. This other had a little boy with whom she would pretend to be displeased and would hand him over for correction to her friend, who went to it with a will. One may say that there was no place, however public, in which they did not do what is most secret.
“But Lea behaved perfectly properly with me throughout the trip,” Albertine told me. “In fact she was a great deal more reserved than plenty of society women.”
“Are there any society women who have shown a lack of reserve with you, Albertine?”
“Never.”
“Then what do you mean?”
“Oh, well, she was less free in her speech.”
“For instance?”
“She would never, like many of the women you meet, have used the expression ‘rotten,’ or say: ‘I don’t care a damn for anybody.’ ”
The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle Page 306