Fortunately, I found most opportunely in my memory—as there are always all sorts of things, some noxious, others salutary, in that jumble from which recollections come to light only one by one—I discovered, as a craftsman discovers the object that will serve for what he wishes to make, a remark of my grandmother’s. She had said to me, with reference to an improbable story which the bath-attendant had told Mme de Villeparisis: “She is a woman who must suffer from a disease of mendacity.” This memory was a great comfort to me. What significance could there be in the story she had told Aimé? Especially as, after all, she had seen nothing. A girl can come and take a shower with her friends without necessarily meaning any harm. Perhaps the woman had exaggerated the size of the tip in order to boast. I had indeed heard Françoise maintain once that my aunt Leonie had said in her hearing that she had “a million a month to spend,” which was utter nonsense; another time that she had seen my aunt Leonie give Eulalie four thousand-franc notes, whereas a fifty-franc note folded in four seemed to me scarcely probable. And thus I sought to rid myself—and gradually succeeded in ridding myself—of the painful certainty which I had taken such trouble to acquire, tossed to and fro as I still was between the desire to know and the fear of suffering. Then my tenderness could revive anew, but, simultaneously with it, a sorrow at being parted from Albertine which made me perhaps even more wretched than I had been during the recent hours when it had been jealousy that tormented me. But the latter suddenly revived at the thought of Balbec, because of the vision which all at once reappeared (and which until then had never made me suffer and indeed appeared one of the most innocuous in my memory) of the dining-room at Balbec in the evening, with all that populace crowded together in the dark on the other side of the window, as in front of the luminous wall of an aquarium, watching the strange creatures moving around in the light but (and this I had never thought of) in its conglomeration causing the fisher-girls and other daughters of the people to brush against girls of the bourgeoisie envious of that luxury, new to Balbec, from which, if not their means, at any rate parsimony and tradition excluded their parents, girls among whom there had certainly been almost every evening Albertine whom I did not know and who doubtless used to pick up some little girl whom she would meet a few minutes later in the dark, upon the sands, or else in a deserted bathing hut at the foot of the cliff. Then my sadness would return as I heard like a sentence of banishment the sound of the lift, which instead of stopping at my floor went on higher. And yet the only person from whom I could have hoped for a visit would never come again, for she was dead. And in spite of this, when the lift did stop at my floor, my heart leapt, and for an instant I said to myself: “What if it was only a dream after all! Perhaps it’s her—she’s going to ring the bell, she has come back, Françoise will come in and say with more alarm than anger—for she’s even more superstitious than vindictive, and would be less afraid of the living girl than of what she will perhaps take for a ghost—‘Monsieur will never guess who’s here.’ ” I tried not to think of anything, to take up a newspaper. But I found it impossible to read all those articles written by men who felt no real grief. Of a trivial song, one of them said: “It moves one to tears” whereas I myself would have listened to it with joy had Albertine been alive. Another, albeit a great writer, having been greeted with applause when he alighted from a train, said that he had received “an unforgettable welcome,” whereas I, if it had been I who received that welcome, would not have given it even a moment’s thought. And a third assured his readers that but for tiresome politics life in Paris would be “altogether delightful,” whereas I knew well that even without politics that life could not but be odious to me, and would have seemed to me delightful, even with politics, if I had found Albertine again. The field sports correspondent said (we were in the month of May): “This season of the year is truly distressing, nay, catastrophic, to the true sportsman, for there is nothing, absolutely nothing in the way of game,” and the art critic said of the Salon: “Faced with this method of arranging an exhibition one is overcome by an immense discouragement, by an infinite gloom …” If the strength of my feelings made me regard as untruthful and colourless the expressions of men who had no true happiness or sorrow in their lives, on the other hand the most insignificant lines which could, however remotely, be related either to Normandy, or to Touraine, or to hydrotherapeutic establishments, or to Lea, or to the Princesse de Guermantes, or to love, or to absence, or to infidelity, at once brought back before my eyes the image of Albertine, without my having the time to turn away from it, and my tears started afresh. In any case, usually I could not even read these newspapers, for the mere act of opening one of them reminded me at once that I used to open them when Albertine was alive, and that she was alive no longer; and I let it drop without having the strength to unfold its pages. Each impression called up an impression that was identical but marred, because Albertine’s existence had been excised from it, so that I never had the heart to live these mutilated minutes to the end. Even when she gradually ceased to be present in my thoughts and all-powerful over my heart, I felt a sudden pang if I had occasion, as in the time when she was there, to go into her room, to grope for the light, to sit down by the pianola. Divided into a number of little household gods, she dwelt for a long time in the flame of the candle, the doorknob, the back of a chair, and other domains more immaterial such as a night of insomnia or the emotion that was caused me by the first visit of a woman who had attracted me. In spite of this the few sentences which I read in the course of a day, or which my mind recalled that I had read, often aroused in me a cruel jealousy. To do this, they required not so much to supply me with a valid proof of the immorality of women as to revive an old impression connected with the life of Albertine. Transported then to a forgotten moment the force of which had not been blunted by the habit of thinking of it, and in which Albertine still lived, her misdeeds became more immediate, more painful, more agonising. Then I asked myself whether I could be certain that the bath-attendant’s revelations were false. A good way of finding out the truth would be to send Aimé to Touraine, to spend a few days in the neighbourhood of Mme Bontemps’s villa. If Albertine enjoyed the pleasures which one woman takes with others, if it was in order not to be deprived of them any longer that she had left me, she must, as soon as she was free, have sought to indulge in them and have succeeded, in a neighbourhood which she knew and to which she would not have chosen to withdraw had she not expected to find greater facilities there than with me. No doubt there was nothing extraordinary in the fact that Albertine’s death had so little altered my preoccupations. When one’s mistress is alive, a large proportion of the thoughts which form what one calls one’s love comes to one during the hours when she is not by one’s side. Thus one acquires the habit of having as the object of one’s musings an absent person, and one who, even if she remains absent for a few hours only, during those hours is no more than a memory. Hence death does not make any great difference. When Aimé returned, I asked him to go down to Châtellerault, and thus by virtue not only of my thoughts, my sorrows, the emotion caused me by a name connected, however remotely, with a certain person, but also of all my actions, the inquiries that I undertook, the use that I made of my money, all of which was devoted to the discovery of Albertine’s actions, I may say that throughout the whole of that year my life remained fully occupied with a love affair, a veritable liaison. And she who was its object was dead. It is often said that something may survive of a person after his death, if that person was an artist and put a little of himself into his work. It is perhaps in the same way that a sort of cutting taken from one person and grafted on to the heart of another continues to carry on its existence even when the person from whom it had been detached has perished.
Aimé took lodgings close to Mme Bontemps’s villa; he made the acquaintance of a maidservant, and of a livery-stable keeper from whom Albertine had often hired a carriage by the day. These people had noticed nothing. In a second letter, Aimé inf
ormed me that he had learned from a young laundry-girl in the town that Albertine had a peculiar way of gripping her arm when she brought back the washing. “But,” she said, “the young lady never did anything more.” I sent Aimé the money to pay for his journey, to pay for the pain he had caused me by his letter, and meanwhile I was doing my best to heal it by telling myself that what he had described was a familiarity which gave no proof of any vicious desire, when I received a telegram from him: “Have learned most interesting things. Have heaps of news for Monsieur. Letter follows.” On the following day came a letter the envelope of which was enough to make me tremble; I had recognised that it was from Aimé, for every person, even the humblest, has under his control those little familiar creatures, at once alive and reclining in a sort of torpor upon the paper: the characters of his handwriting which he alone possesses.
“At first the young laundry-girl refused to tell me anything, she assured me that Mlle Albertine had never done anything more than pinch her arm. But to get her to talk, I took her out to dinner and gave her plenty to drink. Then she told me that Mlle Albertine often used to meet her on the bank of the Loire, when she went to bathe, that Mlle Albertine, who was in the habit of getting up very early to go and bathe, was in the habit of meeting her by the water’s edge, at a spot where the trees are so thick that nobody can see you, and besides there is nobody who can see you at that hour in the morning. Then the laundry-girl brought her girlfriends and they bathed and afterwards, as it is already very hot down there and the sun beats down on you even through the trees, they used to lie about on the grass drying themselves and playing and stroking and tickling one another. The young laundry-girl confessed to me that she enjoyed playing around with her girlfriends and that seeing that Mlle Albertine was always rubbing up against her in her bathing-wrap she made her take it off and used to caress her with her tongue along the throat and arms, even on the soles of her feet which Mlle Albertine held out to her. The laundry-girl undressed too, and they played at pushing each other into the water. After that she told me nothing more, but being always at your service and ready to do anything to oblige you, I took the young laundry-girl to bed with me. She asked me if I would like her to do to me what she used to do to Mlle Albertine when she took off her bathing-dress. And she said to me: (If you could have seen how she used to wriggle, that young lady, she said to me (oh, it’s too heavenly) and she got so excited that she could not keep from biting me.) I could still see the marks on the laundry-girl’s arms. And I can understand Mlle Albertine’s pleasure, for that young wench is really a very good performer.”
I had suffered indeed at Balbec when Albertine told me of her friendship with Mlle Vinteuil. But Albertine was there to console me. Then, when by my excessive curiosity as to her actions I had succeeded in making Albertine leave me, when Françoise informed me that she was no longer in the house and I found myself alone, I had suffered even more. But at least the Albertine whom I had loved remained in my heart. Now, in her place—to punish me for having pushed even further a curiosity to which, contrary to what I had supposed, death had not put an end—what I found was a different girl, heaping up lies and deceit there where the other had so sweetly reassured me by swearing that she had never tasted those pleasures, which in the intoxication of her recaptured liberty she had set out to enjoy to the point of fainting, to the point of biting that young laundress whom she used to meet at sunrise, on the bank of the Loire, and to whom she used to say “Oh, it’s too heavenly.” A different Albertine, not only in the sense in which we understand the word different when we apply it to other people. If people are different from what we have supposed, as this difference does not affect us deeply, and the pendulum of intuition cannot swing outward with a greater oscillation than that of its inward swing, it is only in superficial areas of their being that we situate these differences. Formerly, when I learned that a woman loved other women, she did not seem to me on that account to be a quintessentially different woman. But in the case of a woman one loves, in order to rid oneself of the pain one feels at the thought that such a thing is possible, one wants to know not only what she has done, but what she felt while she was doing it, what she thought of what she was doing; then, probing ever more deeply, through the intensity of one’s pain one arrives at the mystery, the quintessence. I suffered to the very depths of my being, in my body and in my heart, far more than the pain of losing my life would have made me suffer, from this curiosity to which all the force of my intelligence and my unconscious contributed; and thus it was into the core of Albertine’s own being that I now projected everything that I learned about her. And the pain that the revelation of her vice had thus driven into me to such a depth was to render me, much later, a final service. Like the harm that I had done my grandmother, the harm that Albertine had done me was a last bond between her and myself which outlived memory even, for with the conservation of energy which belongs to everything that is physical, suffering has no need of the lessons of memory. Thus a man who has forgotten the glorious nights spent by moonlight in the woods, suffers still from the rheumatism which he then contracted.
Those tastes which she had denied but which were hers, those tastes the discovery of which had come to me not by a cold process of reasoning but in the burning anguish I had felt on reading the words “Oh, it’s too heavenly,” an anguish that gave them a qualitative distinction, those tastes were not merely added to the image of Albertine as the new shell which it drags after it is affixed to the hermit crab, but rather as a salt which, coming in contact with another salt, alters not only its colour but its nature. When the laundry-girl must have said to her friends, “Just fancy, I’d never have believed it, but the young lady is one too,” to me it was not merely a vice hitherto unsuspected by them that they added to Albertine’s person, but the discovery that she was another person, a person like themselves, speaking the same language, and this, by making her the compatriot of others, made her even more alien to myself, proved that what I had possessed of her, what I carried in my heart, was only quite a small part of her, and that the rest, which was made so extensive by not being merely that thing which is already mysteriously important enough, an individual desire, but being shared with others, she had always concealed from me, had kept me away from, as a woman might conceal from me that she was a native of an enemy country and a spy, and far more treacherously even than a spy, for the latter deceives us only as to her nationality, whereas Albertine had deceived me as to her profoundest humanity, the fact that she did not belong to ordinary humankind, but to an alien race which moves among it, hides itself among it and never merges with it. I had as it happened seen two paintings by Elstir showing naked women in a thickly wooded landscape. In one of them, a girl is raising her foot as Albertine must have raised hers when she offered it to the laundress. With her other foot she is pushing into the water another girl who gaily resists, her thigh raised, her foot barely dipping into the blue water. I remembered now that the raised thigh made the same swan’s-neck curve with the angle of the knee as was made by the line of Albertine’s thigh when she was lying by my side on the bed, and I had often meant to tell her that she reminded me of those paintings. But I had refrained from doing so, for fear of awakening in her mind the image of naked female bodies. Now I saw her, side by side with the laundry-girl and her friends, recomposing the group which I had so loved when I was sitting among Albertine’s friends at Balbec. And if I had been an art-lover responsive to beauty alone, I should have recognised that Albertine recomposed it a thousand times more ravishingly, now that its elements were the nude statues of goddesses like those which the great sculptors scattered among the groves of Versailles or arrayed round the fountains to be washed and polished by the caresses of their waters. Now, beside the laundry-girl, I saw her, a girl at the water’s edge, in their twofold nudity of marble statues in the midst of a grove of vegetation and dipping into the water like aquatic bas-reliefs. Remembering Albertine as she lay on my bed, I seemed to see the curve of he
r thigh, I saw it as a swan’s neck, seeking the other girl’s mouth. Then I no longer even saw a thigh, but simply the bold neck of a swan, like the one in a stirring sketch seeking the mouth of a Leda who is seen in all the specific palpitation of feminine pleasure, because there is no one else with her but a swan, and she seems more alone, just as one discovers on the telephone the inflexions of a voice which one fails to perceive so long as it is not dissociated from a face in which one objectivises its expression. In this sketch, the pleasure, instead of reaching out to the woman who inspires it and who is absent, replaced by an inert swan, is concentrated in her who feels it. At moments the contact between my heart and my memory was interrupted. What Albertine had done with the laundry-girl was indicated to me now only by quasi-algebraic abbreviations which no longer meant anything to me; but a hundred times an hour the interrupted current was restored, and my heart was pitilessly scorched by a fire from hell, while I saw Albertine, resurrected by my jealousy, really alive, stiffen beneath the caresses of the young laundry-girl to whom she was saying: “Oh, it’s too heavenly.”
The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle Page 327