The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle

by Marcel Proust

  I do not say that the process of forgetting was not beginning to operate. But one of the effects of forgetting was precisely—since it meant that many of Albertine’s less pleasing aspects, of the boring hours that I had spent with her, no longer figured in my memory, ceased therefore to be reasons for my wanting her not to be there as I used to when she was—that it gave me a more concise impression of her enhanced by all the love that I had ever felt for other women. In this particular form, forgetfulness, although it was working towards inuring me to separation from her, nevertheless, by showing me a sweeter and more beautiful Albertine, made me long all the more for her return.

  Often, since her departure, when I was confident that I showed no trace of tears, I had rung for Françoise and said to her: “We must make sure that Mademoiselle Albertine hasn’t forgotten anything. See that you do her room so that it’s nice and tidy for her when she comes.” Or simply: “Only the other day Mademoiselle Albertine was saying to me, let me think now, it was the day before she left …” I wanted to diminish Françoise’s detestable pleasure at Albertine’s departure by giving her the impression that it was not to be prolonged. I wanted, too, to show Françoise that I was not afraid to speak of this departure, to proclaim it—like certain generals who describe a forced retreat as a strategic withdrawal in conformity with a prearranged plan—as deliberate, as constituting an episode the true meaning of which I was concealing for the moment, but in no way implying the end of my friendship with Albertine. I wanted, finally, by repeating her name incessantly, to introduce, like a breath of air, something of her into that room in which her departure had left a vacuum, in which I could no longer breathe. Besides, one seeks to reduce the dimensions of one’s grief by fitting it into one’s everyday talk between ordering a suit of clothes and ordering dinner.

  While she was doing Albertine’s room, Françoise, out of curiosity, opened the drawer of a little rosewood table in which my mistress used to put away the ornaments which she discarded when she went to bed. “Oh! Monsieur, Mademoiselle Albertine has forgotten to take her rings, they’re still in the drawer.”

  My first impulse was to say: “We must send them after her.” But this would make me appear uncertain of her return. “Oh well,” I replied after a moment’s silence, “it’s hardly worth while sending them to her as she’s coming back so soon. Give them to me, I shall see about them.”

  Françoise handed me the rings with some misgiving. She loathed Albertine, but, judging me by her own standards, she reckoned that one could not give me a letter in my mistress’s handwriting without the risk of my opening it. I took the rings.

  “Monsieur must take care not to lose them,” said Françoise. “They’re real beauties, they are! I don’t know who gave them to her, whether it was Monsieur or someone else, but I can tell it was someone rich, who had good taste!”

  “It wasn’t me,” I assured her, “and besides, they don’t both come from the same person. One was given her by her aunt and the other she bought for herself.”

  “Not from the same person!” Françoise exclaimed. “Monsieur must be joking, they’re exactly the same, except for the ruby that’s been added to one of them, there’s the same eagle on both, the same initials inside …”

  I do not know whether Françoise was conscious of the pain she was causing me, but a smile began to flicker across her lips and thereafter never left them.

  “What do you mean, the same eagle? You’re talking nonsense. It’s true that the one without the ruby has an eagle on it, but the other has a sort of man’s head carved on it.”

  “A man’s head? Where did Monsieur see that? I had only to put on my specs to see at once that it was one of the eagle’s wings. If Monsieur takes his magnifying glass, he’ll see the other wing on the other side, and the head and the beak in the middle. You can count every feather. Oh, it’s a fine piece of work.”

  My intense anxiety to know whether Albertine had lied to me made me forget that I ought to maintain a certain dignity in Françoise’s presence and deny her the wicked pleasure that she felt, if not in torturing me, at least in harming Albertine. I almost gasped for breath as Françoise went to fetch my magnifying glass. I took it from her, and asked her to show me the eagle on the ring with the ruby. She had no difficulty in making me pick out the wings, stylised in the same way as on the other ring, the relief of the feathers, the head. She also pointed out to me the similar inscriptions, to which, it is true, others were added on the ring with the ruby. And on the inside of both was Albertine’s monogram.

  “But I’m surprised that it should need all this to make Monsieur see that the rings are the same,” said Françoise. “Even without examining them, you can see that it’s the same style, the same way of turning the gold, the same shape. As soon as I looked at them I could have sworn they came from the same place. You can tell straight away, just as you can tell the dishes of a good cook.”

  And indeed, to the curiosity of a servant fanned by hatred and trained to observe details with terrifying precision, there had been added, to assist her in this expert criticism, her natural taste, that same taste, in fact, which she showed in her cookery and which was sharpened perhaps, as I had noticed on the way to Balbec in the way she dressed, by the coquetry of a woman who has once been pretty and has studied the jewellery and dresses of other women. I might have picked up the wrong bottle of pills and, instead of swallowing a few veronal tablets on a day when I felt that I had drunk too many cups of tea, might have swallowed as many caffeine tablets, and my heart would not have pounded more violently. I asked Françoise to leave the room. I would have liked to see Albertine immediately. My horror at her lie, my jealousy of the unknown donor, was combined with pain at the thought that she should have allowed herself to accept presents. I gave her even more, it is true, but a woman whom we are keeping does not seem to us to be a kept woman as long as we are unaware that she is being kept by other men. And yet, since I had never ceased to spend a great deal of money on her, I had taken her in spite of this moral baseness; I had encouraged this baseness of hers, I had perhaps increased, perhaps even created it. Then, just as we have the faculty of making up stories to soothe our anguish, just as we manage, when we are dying of hunger, to persuade ourselves that a stranger is going to leave us a fortune of a hundred million, I imagined Albertine in my arms, explaining to me without the slightest hesitation that it was because of the similarity of its workmanship that she had bought the second ring, that it was she who had had her initials engraved on it. But this explanation was still fragile, it had not yet had time to thrust into my mind its beneficent roots, and my pain could not be so quickly assuaged. And I reflected that many men who tell their friends that their mistress is very sweet to them must suffer similar torments. Thus it is that they lie to others and to themselves. They do not altogether lie; they do spend in her company hours that are genuinely delightful; but the sweetness which she shows her lover in front of his friends and which enables him to preen himself, and the sweetness which she shows him when they are alone together and which enables him to bless her, conceal all too many unrecorded hours in which the lover has suffered, doubted, sought everywhere in vain to discover the truth! Such sufferings are inseparable from the pleasure of loving, of delighting in a woman’s most trivial remarks, remarks which we know to be trivial but which we perfume with her fragrance. At that moment, I was no longer capable of delighting, through memory, in the fragrance of Albertine. Shattered, holding the two rings in my hand, I stared at that pitiless eagle whose beak was rending my heart, whose wings, chiselled in high relief, had borne away the trust that I still retained in my mistress, in whose claws my tortured mind was unable to escape for an instant from the incessantly recurring questions concerning the stranger whose name the eagle doubtless symbolised though without allowing me to decipher it, whom she had doubtless loved in the past, and whom she had doubtless seen again not so long ago, since it was on the day, so peaceful, so loving and so intimate, of our drive t
ogether through the Bois that I had seen, for the first time, the second ring, the one in which the eagle appeared to be dipping its beak in the bright blood of the ruby.

  If, however, from morning till night, I never ceased to grieve over Albertine’s departure, this did not mean that I thought only of her. For one thing, her charm having for a long time past spread gradually over things which had since become quite remote from her, but were none the less electrified by the same emotion as she gave me, if something made me think of Incarville, or of the Verdurins, or of some new part that Lea was playing, a sudden flux of pain would overwhelm me. For another thing, what I myself called thinking of Albertine meant thinking of how I might get her back, how I might join her, how I might discover what she was doing. With the result that if, during those hours of incessant torment, a pictogram could have represented the images that accompanied my sufferings, it would have shown pictures of the Gare d’Orsay, of the banknotes offered to Mme Bontemps, of Saint-Loup stooping over the sloping desk of a telegraph office filling in a telegram form to me, never the picture of Albertine. Just as, throughout the whole course of one’s life, one’s egoism sees before it all the time the objects that are of concern to the self, but never takes in that “I” itself which is perpetually observing them, so the desire which directs our actions descends towards them, but does not reach back to itself, whether because, being unduly utilitarian, it plunges into the action and disdains all knowledge of it, or because it looks to the future to compensate for the disappointments of the present, or because the inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection. In reality, during those hours of crisis in which we would stake our whole life, in proportion as the woman upon whom it depends reveals more and more clearly the immensity of the place that she occupies for us, leaving nothing in the world that is not disrupted by her, so the image of that woman diminishes until it is no longer perceptible. We find in everything the effect of her presence in the emotion that we feel; herself, the cause, we find nowhere. I was so incapable during those days of forming any picture of Albertine that I could almost have believed that I did not love her, just as my mother, in the moments of despair when she was incapable of ever picturing my grandmother (except once in the chance encounter of a dream, the importance of which she felt so strongly, although asleep, that she strove with all the strength that remained to her in her sleep to make it last), might have accused and did in fact accuse herself of not missing her mother, whose death had been a mortal blow to her but whose features eluded her memory.*

  Why should I have supposed that Albertine did not care for women? Because she had said, especially of late, that she did not care for them: but did not our life rest upon a perpetual lie? Never once had she said to me: “Why can’t I go out as and when I choose? Why do you always ask other people what I have been doing?” And yet, after all, the conditions of her life were so unusual that she must have asked me this had she not herself guessed the reason. And was it not understandable that my silence as to the causes of her confinement should be matched by a similar and constant silence on her part as to her perpetual desires, her innumerable memories, her countless hopes and longings? Françoise looked as though she knew that I was lying when I alluded to the imminence of Albertine’s return. And her belief seemed to be founded upon something more than that truth which generally guided our old housekeeper, to the effect that masters do not like to be humiliated in front of their servants, and allow them to know only so much of the truth as does not depart too far from a flattering fiction calculated to maintain respect for themselves. This time, Françoise’s belief seemed to be founded upon something else, as though she had herself aroused and fostered distrust in Albertine’s mind, stimulated her anger, driven her, in short, to the point at which she could predict her departure as inevitable. If this was true, my version of a temporary absence, of which I had known and approved, could be received with nothing but incredulity by Françoise. But the idea that she had formed of Albertine’s venal nature, the exasperation with which, in her hatred, she magnified the “profit” that Albertine was supposed to be making out of me, might to some extent belie that certainty. And so when in her hearing I made an allusion, as if to something perfectly natural, to Albertine’s imminent return, Françoise would look at my face to see whether I was making it up, in the same way as, when the butler teased her by pretending to read out some political news which she hesitated to believe, as for instance the closing of churches and the expulsion of the clergy, even from the other end of the kitchen, and without being able to read it, she would stare instinctively and greedily at the paper, as though she were capable of seeing whether the report was really written there.

  But when Françoise saw that after writing a long letter I added the exact address of Mme Bontemps, her alarm that Albertine might return, hitherto quite vague, began to increase. It grew to the point of consternation when one morning she had to bring me with the rest of my mail a letter on the envelope of which she had recognised Albertine’s handwriting. She wondered whether Albertine’s departure had not been a mere sham, a supposition which distressed her twice over as finally ensuring Albertine’s future presence in the house, and as constituting for me, and thereby, as I was her employer, for herself, the humiliation of having been tricked by Albertine. Impatient though I was to read the letter, I could not refrain from studying for a moment Françoise’s eyes from which all hope had fled, inferring from this omen the imminence of Albertine’s return, as a lover of winter sports concludes with joy that the cold weather is at hand when he sees the swallows fly south. At length Françoise left me, and when I had made sure that she had shut the door behind her, I opened, noiselessly so as not to appear anxious, the letter which ran as follows:

  “Dear friend, thank you for all the nice things you wrote to me. I am at your disposal for the countermanding of the Rolls, if you think that I can help in any way, as I am sure I can. You have only to let me know the name of the agents. You would let yourself be taken for a ride by these people who are only interested in selling, and what would you do with a motor-car, you who never stir out of the house? I am deeply touched that you have kept a happy memory of our last outing. You may be sure that for my part I shall never forget that drive in a double twilight (since night was falling and we were about to part) and that it will be effaced from my thoughts only when the darkness is complete.”

  I felt that this last sentence was merely phrase-making and that Albertine could not possibly retain until death any such sweet memory of this drive from which she had certainly derived no pleasure since she had been impatient to leave me. But I was impressed also, when I thought of the cyclist, the golfer of Balbec, who had read nothing but Esther before she came to know me, to see how gifted she was and how right I had been in thinking that she had enriched herself in my house with new qualities which made her different and more complete. And thus, the words that I had said to her at Balbec: “I feel that my friendship would be of value to you, that I am just the person who could give you what you lack” (I had written by way of dedication on a photograph I gave her: “with the certainty of being providential”), words which I uttered without believing them and simply that she might derive some benefit from my society which would outweigh any possible boredom, these words turned out to have been true as well; as, for that matter, had been my remark to her that I did not wish to see her for fear of falling in love with her. I had said this because on the contrary I knew that in constant proximity my love became deadened and that separation kindled it, but in reality constant proximity had given rise to a need of her that was infinitely stronger than my love in the first weeks at Balbec, so that that remark too had proved true.

  But Albertine’s letter in no way advanced matters. She spoke to me only of writing to the agents. It was essential to break out of this situation, to hasten things on, and I had the following idea. I sent a letter at once to Andrée in which
I told her that Albertine was at her aunt’s, that I felt very lonely, that she would give me immense pleasure if she came and stayed with me for a few days and that, as I did not wish to make any mystery of it, I begged her to inform Albertine. And at the same time I wrote to Albertine as though I had not yet received her letter:

  “Dear friend, forgive me for what I am sure you will understand. I have such a hatred of secrecy that I wanted you to be informed both by her and by myself. I have acquired, from having you staying so charmingly in the house with me, the bad habit of not being able to be alone. Since we have decided that you will not come back, it occurred to me that the person who would best fill your place, because she would make least change in my life, would remind me most of you, is Andrée, and I have asked her to come. So that all this should not appear too sudden, I have spoken to her only of a short visit, but between ourselves I am pretty certain that this time it will be a permanent thing. Don’t you agree that I’m right? You know that your little group of girls at Balbec has always been the social unit that exerted the greatest influence upon me, in which I was most happy to be eventually included. No doubt this influence is still making itself felt. Since the fatal incompatibility of our characters and the mischances of life have decreed that my little Albertine can never be my wife, I believe that I shall nevertheless find a wife—less charming than herself but one whom greater natural affinities will enable perhaps to be happier with me—in Andrée.”

  But after I had sent off this letter, the suspicion occurred to me suddenly that, when Albertine had written to me to say: “I should have been only too glad to come back if you had written to me direct,” she had said this only because I had not written to her, and that had I done so she would still not have come back, that she would be happy to know that Andrée was with me, and was to be my wife, provided that she herself remained free, because she could now, as already for a week past, stultifying the hourly precautions which I had taken during more than six months in Paris, abandon herself to her vices and do what, minute by minute, I had prevented her from doing. I told myself that she was probably making an improper use of her freedom down there, and no doubt this idea which I formed seemed to me sad but remained general, showing me no specific details, and, by the indefinite number of possible mistresses which it allowed me to imagine, prevented me from stopping to consider any one of them, drew my mind on in a sort of perpetual motion not untinged with pain, but with a pain which the absence of any concrete image rendered endurable. It ceased, however, to be endurable and became atrocious when Saint-Loup arrived.