Meanwhile, I read her letter again, and was after all disappointed to be reminded of how little there is of a person in a letter. Doubtless the characters traced on the paper express our thoughts, as do also our features; it is still a thought of some kind that we are confronted with. But even so, in the person, the thought is not apparent to us until it has been diffused through the corolla of the face opened up like a water lily. This modifies it considerably, after all. And it is perhaps one of the causes of our perpetual disappointments in love, this perpetual displacement whereby, in response to our expectation of the ideal person whom we love, each meeting provides us with a person in flesh and blood who yet contains so little trace of our dream. And then, when we demand something of this person, we receive from her a letter in which even of the person very little remains, as in the letters of an algebraical formula there no longer remains the precise value of the arithmetical figures, which themselves do not contain the qualities of the fruit or flowers that they enumerate. And yet “love,” the “beloved,” her letters, are perhaps nevertheless translations (unsatisfying though it may be to pass from one to the other) of the same reality, since the letter seems to us inadequate only while we are reading it, but we sweat blood until its arrival, and it is sufficient to calm our anguish, if not to appease, with its tiny black symbols, our desire which knows that it contains after all only the equivalent of a word, a smile, a kiss, not those things themselves.
I wrote to Albertine:
“Dear friend, I was just about to write to you. Thank you for saying that if I had been in need of you you would have come at once; it is good of you to have so exalted a sense of loyalty to an old friend, and my regard for you can only be increased thereby. But no, I did not ask and I shall not ask you to return; our seeing each other again—for a long time to come—might not perhaps be painful to you, a heartless girl. To me, whom at times you have thought so cold, it would be most painful. Life has driven us apart. You have made a decision which I consider very wise, and which you made at the right moment, with wonderful prescience, for you left me on the day when I had just received my mother’s consent to my asking for your hand. I would have told you this when I awoke, when I received her letter (at the same time as yours). Perhaps you would have been afraid of hurting me by leaving there and then. And we might perhaps have linked our lives together in what (who knows?) could have been unhappiness. If that was what was in store for us, then I bless you for your wisdom. We should lose all the fruit of it were we to meet again. This is not to say that I should not find it a temptation. But I claim no great credit for resisting it. You know what an inconstant person I am and how quickly I forget. Therefore I am not greatly to be pitied. As you have told me often, I am first and foremost a man of habit. The habits which I am beginning to form in your absence are not as yet very strong. Naturally, for the moment, the habits which I shared with you and which your departure has disturbed are still the stronger. They will not remain so for very long. For that reason, indeed, I had thought of taking advantage of these last few days in which our meeting would not yet be for me what it will be in a fortnight’s time, perhaps even sooner, a … (forgive my frankness) an inconvenience—I had thought of taking advantage of them, before oblivion finally comes, in order to settle certain little material questions with you, in which you might, as a kind and charming friend, have rendered a service to him who for five minutes imagined himself your future husband. Since I never doubted my mother’s approval, and since moreover I desired that we should each of us enjoy all that liberty of which you had too generously and abundantly made a sacrifice which was acceptable for a few weeks’ living together but would have become as hateful to you as to myself now that we were to spend the rest of our lives together (it almost pains me as I write to you to think that this nearly happened, that we came within a few seconds of it), I had thought of organising our existence in the most independent manner possible, and to begin with I wished you to have that yacht in which you could go cruising while I, not being well enough to accompany you, would wait for you in port (I had written to Elstir to ask for his advice, since you admire his taste); and on land I wished you to have a motor-car to yourself, for your very own, in which you could go out, could travel wherever you chose. The yacht was almost ready, it is named, after a wish that you expressed at Balbec, the Swan. And remembering that you preferred Rolls-Royces to any other cars, I had ordered one. But now that we are never to meet again, as I have no hope of persuading you to accept either the boat or the car (to me they would be quite useless), I had thought—as I had ordered them through a middleman, in your name—that you might perhaps by countermanding them yourself save me the expense of the yacht and the car which are no longer required. But this, and many other matters, would have needed to be discussed. And I find that so long as I am capable of falling in love with you again, which will not be for long, it would be madness, for the sake of a sailing boat and a Rolls-Royce, to meet again and to jeopardise your life’s happiness since you have decided that it lies in your living apart from me. No, I prefer to keep the Rolls and even the yacht. And as I shall make no use of them and they are likely to remain for ever, one in its dock, dismantled, the other in its garage, I shall have engraved on the … of the yacht (Heavens, I’m afraid of calling it the wrong thing and committing a heresy which would shock you) those lines of Mallarmé which you used to like:
A swan of olden times recalls that he,
Splendid yet void of hope to free himself,
Had left unsung the realm of life itself
When sterile winter glittered with ennui.
You remember—it’s the poem that begins: “he lively, lovely, virginal today.” Alas, today is no longer either virginal or lovely. But those who, like me, know that they will very soon make of it an endurable “tomorrow” are seldom endurable themselves. As for the Rolls, it would deserve rather those other lines of the same poet which you said you could not understand:
Say then if I am not joyful
Thunder and rubies at the axle
To see in the air pierced by this fire
With every scattered palatine
Dying as though in purple of Tyre
The wheel of my chariot vespertine.
Farewell for ever, my little Albertine, and thank you once again for the enjoyable drive which we went for together on the eve of our separation. I retain a very pleasant memory of it.
PS. I make no reference to what you tell me of the alleged suggestions which Saint-Loup (whom I do not for a moment believe to be in Touraine) may have made to your aunt. It’s pure Sherlock Holmes. What do you take me for?”
No doubt, just as I had said in the past to Albertine: “I don’t love you,” in order that she should love me, “I forget people when I don’t see them,” in order that she might see me often, “I have decided to leave you,” in order to forestall any idea of separation, now it was because I was absolutely determined that she must return within a week that I said to her: “Farewell for ever;” it was because I wished to see her again that I said to her: “I think it would be dangerous to see you;” it was because living apart from her seemed to me worse than death that I wrote to her: “You were right, we would be unhappy together.” Alas, in writing this sham letter in order to appear not to need her (the only vestige of pride that survived from my former love for Gilberte in my love for Albertine), and also to enjoy the pleasure of saying certain things which were only capable of moving me and not her, I ought to have foreseen from the start that it was possible that it would invite a negative response, that is to say, one which substantiated what I had said; that this was indeed probable, for even had Albertine been less intelligent than she was, she would never have doubted for an instant that what I said to her was untrue. Indeed, without pausing to consider the intentions that I expressed in this letter, the mere fact of my writing it, even if it had not been preceded by Saint-Loup’s intervention, was enough to prove to her that I desired her return and to p
rompt her to let me become more and more inextricably ensnared. Then, having foreseen the possibility of a negative reply, I ought also to have foreseen that this reply would at once revive in its fullest intensity my love for Albertine. And I ought, still before posting my letter, to have asked myself whether, in the event of Albertine’s replying in the same tone and refusing to return, I should have sufficient control over my grief to force myself to remain silent, not to telegraph to her “Come back,” not to send her some other emissary—all of which, after I had written to her to say that we would never meet again, would make it perfectly obvious that I could not do without her, and would lead to her refusing more emphatically than ever, whereupon, unable to endure my anguish for another moment, I would go down to her myself and might, for all I knew, be refused admission. And doubtless this would have been, after three enormous blunders, the worst of all, after which there would be nothing left but to kill myself in front of her house. But the disastrous way in which the psychopathological universe is constructed has decreed that the clumsy act, the act which we ought most sedulously to avoid, is precisely the act that will calm us, the act that, opening before us, until we discover its outcome, fresh avenues of hope, momentarily relieves us of the intolerable pain which a refusal has aroused in us. So that, when the pain is too acute, we dash headlong into the blunder that consists in writing to, in sending somebody to intercede with, in going in person to see, in proving that we cannot do without, the woman we love.
But I foresaw none of all this. The probable outcome of my letter seemed to me on the contrary to be to make Albertine return to me at once. And so, with this outcome in mind, I had felt a sweet pleasure in writing the letter. But at the same time I had not ceased to shed tears while writing it; partly, first of all, in the same way as on the day when I had acted a pretence of separation, because, as the words represented for me the idea which they expressed to me although they were addressed to a different end (uttered mendaciously because my pride forbade me to admit that I loved), they carried their own load of sorrow, but also because I felt that the idea contained a grain of truth.
As this letter seemed to me to be certain of its effect, I began to regret that I had sent it. For when I pictured to myself Albertine’s return and what an easy matter it was after all, suddenly all the reasons which made our marriage a thing disastrous to myself returned in their fullest force. I hoped that she would refuse to come back. I was in the process of calculating that my liberty, my whole future depended upon her refusal, that I had been mad to write to her, that I ought to have retrieved my letter which, alas, had gone, when Françoise brought it back to me (at the same time handing me the newspaper which she had just brought upstairs). She was not certain how many stamps it required. But immediately I changed my mind; I hoped that Albertine would not return, but I wanted the decision to come from her, so as to put an end to my anxiety, and I handed the letter back to Françoise. I opened the newspaper. It announced a performance by Berma. Then I remembered the two different ways in which I had listened to Phèdre, and it was now in a third way that I thought of the declaration scene. It seemed to me that what I had so often recited to myself, and had seen and heard in the theatre, was the statement of the laws which I was to experience in my life. There are things in our hearts to which we do not realise how strongly we are attached. Or else, if we live without them, it is because day after day, from fear of failure, or of being made to suffer, we put off entering into possession of them. This was what had happened to me in the case of Gilberte, when I thought that I was giving her up. If before the time comes when we are entirely detached from these things—a time long subsequent to that in which we believe ourselves to be detached from them—the girl we love becomes, for instance, engaged to someone else, we are driven mad, we can no longer endure the life which appeared to us to be so mournfully calm. Or else, if the thing is already in our possession, we feel that it is a burden, that we should be only too glad to be rid of it; and this was what had happened to me in the case of Albertine. But let a sudden departure remove the unwanted person from us, and we can no longer bear to live. Now, did not the “argument” of Phèdre combine these two cases? Hippolyte is about to leave. Phèdre, who until then has gone out of her way to court his enmity, from qualms of conscience, she says (or rather the poet makes her say), but really because she does not see that it can lead anywhere and feels that she is not loved, Phèdre can endure the situation no longer. She comes to him to confess her love, and this was the scene which I had so often recited to myself:
They say a prompt departure takes you from us.
Doubtless Hippolyte’s departure is a secondary reason, one may feel, compared to the death of Thésée. And similarly when, a few lines further on, Phèdre pretends for a moment that she has been misunderstood:
Would I have cast off all care for my honour?
we may suppose that it is because Hippolyte has repulsed her declaration:
Do you not remember,
Lady, Theseus is your husband, and my father?
But if he had evinced no indignation, Phèdre, her happiness achieved, might have had the same feeling that it did not amount to much. Whereas, as soon as she sees that it still eludes her grasp, that Hippolyte thinks he has misunderstood her and makes apologies, then, like myself when I decided to give my letter back to Françoise, she decides that the refusal must come from him, decides to stake everything on one last throw of the dice:
Ah, cruel! You have understood me all too well.
And even the very harshness with which, I had been told, Swann had treated Odette, or with which I myself had treated Albertine, a harshness which substituted for the original love a new love composed of pity, tenderness, the need for an outpouring of emotion which was merely a variant of the first, is to be found also in this scene:
You hated me the more, I did not love you less.
Your misfortunes lent you further and fresh charms.
What proves that it is not to the “care for her honour” that Phèdre attaches most importance is that she would have forgiven Hippolyte and turned a deaf ear to Oenone’s advice had she not learned that Hippolyte was in love with Aricie. For jealousy, which in love is equivalent to the loss of all happiness, outweighs mere loss of reputation. It is then that she allows Oenone (who is merely a name for the baser side of herself) to slander Hippolyte without taking upon herself the “burden of his defence” and thus sends the man who will have none of her to a fate the calamities of which are moreover no consolation to herself, since her own suicide follows immediately upon the death of Hippolyte. Thus at least it was that, reducing the part played by all the “Jansenist” scruples, as Bergotte would have put it, which Racine ascribed to Phèdre to make her appear less guilty, I saw this scene, as a sort of prophecy of the amorous episodes in my own life. These reflexions had, however, in no way altered my resolve, and I handed my letter to Françoise so that she might post it after all, in order to carry into effect that approach to Albertine which seemed to me to be essential now that I had learned that my former attempt had failed. And no doubt we are wrong when we suppose that the fulfilment of our desire is a small matter, since as soon as we believe that it cannot be realised we become intent upon it once again, and decide that it was not worth our while to pursue it only when we are quite certain that our attempt will not fail. And yet we are right also. For if that fulfilment, if the achievement of happiness, appears of small account only in the light of certainty, nevertheless it is an unstable element from which only sorrows can arise. And those sorrows will be all the greater the more completely our desire will have been fulfilled, all the more impossible to endure when our happiness has been, in defiance of the law of nature, prolonged for a certain time, when it has received the consecration of habit. In another sense, too, these two tendencies, in this particular case that which made me anxious that my letter should be posted, and, when I thought that it had gone, that which made me regret the fact, have each of them a cer
tain element of truth. As regards the first tendency, it is only too understandable that we should go in pursuit of our happiness—or misery—and that at the same time we should hope to keep before us, by this latest action which is about to involve us in its consequences, a state of expectancy which does not leave us in absolute despair, in a word that we should seek to convert into other forms which, we imagine, must be less painful to us, the malady from which we are suffering. But the other tendency is no less important, for, born of our belief in the success of our enterprise, it is simply an anticipation of the disillusionment which we should very soon feel in the presence of a satisfied desire, our regret at having fixed for ourselves, at the expense of others which are necessarily excluded, this particular form of happiness.
I gave the letter back to Françoise and asked her to go out at once and post it. As soon as it had gone, I began once more to think of Albertine’s return as imminent. The thought did not fail to introduce into my mind certain pleasing images which neutralised to some extent the dangers I foresaw in her return. The pleasure, so long lost, of having her with me was intoxicating.
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true; I had learned this only too well with Gilberte; the indifference I had feigned while never ceasing to weep had eventually become a fact; gradually life, as I told Gilberte in a lying formula which retrospectively had come true, life had driven us apart. I remembered this, saying to myself: “If Albertine allows a few months to go by, my lies will become the truth. And now that the worst moments are over, isn’t it to be wished that she will allow this month to elapse? If she returns, I shall have to renounce the true life which certainly I am not in a fit state to enjoy as yet, but which as time goes on may begin to offer me attractions while my memory of Albertine grows fainter.”
The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle Page 319