At Balbec, when I had first longed to know Albertine, was it not because she had seemed to me representative of those girls the sight of whom had so often brought me to a standstill in the streets of towns or on country roads, and because she might epitomise their life for me? And was it not natural that now the waning star of my love in which they had been condensed should disperse once again in this scattered dust of nebulae? All of them seemed to me Albertines—the image that I carried inside me making me find her everywhere—and indeed, at the bend of an avenue, a girl getting into a motor-car recalled her so strongly, was so exactly of the same build, that I wondered for an instant whether it was not her that I had just seen, whether people had not been deceiving me when they sent me the report of her death. I recalled her thus at the corner of an avenue, perhaps at Balbec, getting into a car in the same way, at a time when she was so full of confidence in life. And I did not merely record with my eyes, as one of those superficial phenomena which occur so often in the course of a walk, this other girl’s action in climbing into the car: become a sort of sustained action, it seemed to me to extend also into the past by virtue of the memory which had been superimposed upon it and which pressed so voluptuously, so sadly against my heart. But by this time the girl had vanished.
A little further on I saw a group of three girls, slightly older, young women perhaps, whose elegant and energetic appearance corresponded so closely with what had attracted me on the day when I first saw Albertine and her friends that I hastened in pursuit of them and, when they stopped a carriage, looked frantically in every direction for another. I found one, but it was too late. I failed to overtake them. A few days later, however, on coming home, I saw emerging from the portico of our house the three girls whom I had followed in the Bois. They were absolutely typical, the two dark ones especially, except that they were slightly older, of those wellborn girls who so often, seen from my window or encountered in the street, had made me form countless plans, had given me a taste for life, but whom I had never succeeded in getting to know. The fair one had a rather more delicate, almost an invalid air, which appealed to me less. It was she, nevertheless, who was responsible for my not contenting myself with gazing at them for a moment, having stopped dead, with one of those looks which, by their fixed absorption, their application as to a problem, seem to be concerned with something far beyond what meets the eye. I should doubtless have allowed them to disappear, as I had allowed so many others, if, as they walked past me, the fair-haired one—was it because I was scrutinising them so closely?—had not darted a furtive glance at me and then, turning round after having passed me, a second one that set me aflame. However, as she ceased to pay attention to me and resumed her conversation with her friends, my ardour would doubtless have subsided, had it not been increased a hundredfold by the following discovery. When I asked the concierge who they were, “They asked for Mme la Duchesse,” he informed me. “I think only one of them knows her and the others were simply accompanying her as far as the door. Here’s the name, I don’t know whether I’ve taken it down properly.” And I read: “Mlle Déporcheville,” which it was easy to correct to “d’Eporcheville,” that is to say the name, more or less, so far as I could remember, of the girl of excellent family, vaguely connected with the Guermantes, whom Robert had told me that he had met in a disorderly house and with whom he had had relations. I now understood the meaning of her glance, why she had turned round without letting her companions see. How often I had thought about her, trying to visualise her from the name that Robert had given me! And here I had just seen her, in no way different from her friends, but for that clandestine glance which established between herself and me a secret entry into the parts of her life which were evidently hidden from her friends and which made her appear more accessible—already almost half mine—and more soft-hearted than girls of the aristocracy usually are. In the mind of this girl, she and I now had in common the hours that we might have spent together if she was free to make an assignation with me. Was it not this that her glance had sought to express to me with an eloquence that was intelligible to me alone? My heart beat wildly. I could not have given an exact description of Mlle d’Eporcheville’s appearance, I could only picture vaguely a fair-skinned face viewed from the side; but I was madly in love with her. All of a sudden I realised that I was reasoning as though, of the three girls, Mlle d’Eporcheville must be the fair one who had turned round and looked at me twice. But the concierge had not told me this. I returned to his lodge and questioned him again. He told me that he could not enlighten me on the subject, because they had come today for the first time and while he was not there. But he would ask his wife who had seen them once before. She was busy at the moment scrubbing the service stairs. Which of us has not experienced in the course of his life exquisite uncertainties more or less similar to this? A charitable friend, to whom one describes a girl one has seen at a ball, concludes from the description that she must be one of his friends and invites one to meet her. But among so many others, and on the basis of a mere verbal portrait, is there not a possibility of error? The girl you are about to see may well turn out to be a different girl from the one you desire. On the other hand, you may be about to see, holding out her hand to you with a smile, precisely the girl whom you hoped that she would be. This latter case is not infrequent, and, without being justified always by a reasoning as convincing as mine with respect to Mlle d’Eporcheville, arises from a sort of intuition as well as from that wind of fortune which favours us at times. Then, on seeing her, one says to oneself: “She was the one.” I remembered that, among the little band of girls who used to parade along the beach, I had guessed correctly which was named Albertine Simonet. This memory caused me a sharp but transient pang, and while the concierge went in search of his wife, my chief anxiety—as I thought of Mlle d’Eporcheville, and since in those minutes spent waiting during which a name or piece of information which we have for some reason or other fitted to a face finds itself free for an instant and floats between several, ready, if it belongs to a new one, to make the original face to which it had applied retrospectively strange, innocent, elusive—was that the concierge was perhaps going to inform me that Mlle d’Eporcheville was, on the contrary, one of the two dark girls. In that event, the being in whose existence I believed would vanish, the being whom I already loved, whom I now thought only of possessing, that sly, blonde Mlle d’Eporcheville whom the fateful answer must then separate into two distinct elements, which I had arbitrarily united after the fashion of a novelist who blends diverse elements borrowed from reality in order to create an imaginary character, elements which, taken separately—the name failing to corroborate the supposed intention of the glance—lost all their meaning. In that case my arguments would be nullified, but how greatly, on the contrary, they found themselves strengthened when the concierge returned to tell me that Mlle d’Eporcheville was indeed the fair girl.
From then on I could no longer believe that it was a case of homonymy. It would have been too great a coincidence that of these three girls one should be named Mlle d’Eporcheville, that she should be precisely (and this was an initial, highly relevant corroboration of my supposition) the one who had looked at me in that way, almost smiling at me, and that it should not be she who frequented houses of assignation.
Then began a day of wild excitement. Even before setting out to buy everything in which I thought it proper to array myself in order to create a favourable impression when I went to call upon Mme de Guermantes two days later, when (the concierge had informed me) the young lady would be coming back to see the Duchess, in whose house I should thus find a willing girl with whom I would arrange a rendezvous (for I could easily find an opportunity of speaking to her alone in a corner of the drawingroom), I decided, to make assurance doubly sure, to telegraph Robert to ask him for the girl’s exact name and description, hoping to have his reply within forty-eight hours (I did not think for an instant of anything else, not even of Albertine), for I was determine
d, whatever might happen to me in the meantime, even if I had to be carried down in a chair because I was too ill to walk, to pay a call on the Duchess at the appropriate hour. If I telegraphed to Saint-Loup it was not that I had any lingering doubt as to the identity of the person, it was not that the girl whom I had seen and the girl of whom he had spoken were still distinct personalities in my mind. I had no doubt whatever that they were the same person. But in my impatience at the enforced interval of forty-eight hours, it was a pleasure to me, it gave me already a sort of secret power over her, to receive a telegram concerning her, filled with detailed information. At the telegraph office, as I drafted my message with the animation of a man who is fired by hope, I remarked how much less helpless I was now than in my boyhood, and in relation to Mlle d’Eporcheville than I had been in relation to Gilberte. I had merely had to take the trouble to write out my telegram, and thereafter the clerk had only to take it from me, and the swiftest channels of electric communication to transmit it, and the whole length and breadth of France and the Mediterranean, together with the whole of Robert’s roistering life applied to the identification of the person I had just met, would be placed at the service of the romance which I had just sketched out and to which I need no longer give a thought, for they would undertake to bring it to a conclusion one way or the other before twenty-four hours had passed. Whereas in the old days, brought home by Françoise from the Champs-Elysées, brooding alone in the house over my impotent desires, unable to make use of the practical devices of civilisation, I loved like a savage, or indeed, for I was not even free to move about, like a flower. From this moment onwards I was in a continual fever; a request from my father to go away with him for a couple of days, which would have obliged me to forgo my visit to the Duchess, filled me with such rage and despair that my mother intervened and persuaded my father to allow me to remain in Paris. But for several hours my fury refused to be allayed, while my desire for Mlle d’Eporcheville was increased a hundredfold by the obstacle that had been placed between us, by the fear which I had felt for a moment that those hours of my visit to Mme de Guermantes, at the prospect of which I smiled in constant anticipation, as at an assured blessing of which nothing could deprive me, might not occur. Certain philosophers assert that the external world does not exist, and that it is within ourselves that we develop our lives. However that may be, love, even in its humblest beginnings, is a striking example of how little reality means to us. Had I been obliged to draw from memory a portrait of Mlle d’Eporcheville, to furnish a description of her, or even to recognise her in the street, I should have found it impossible. I had glimpsed her in profile, on the move, and she had struck me as being simple, pretty, tall and fair; I could not have said more. But all the reflexes of desire, of anxiety, of the mortal blow struck by the fear of not seeing her if my father took me away, all these things, associated with an image of which on the whole I knew nothing, and as to which it was enough that I knew it to be agreeable, already constituted a state of love. At last, on the following morning, after a night of happy sleeplessness I received Saint-Loup’s telegram: “De l’Orgeville, de particle, orge barley, like rye, ville, like town, small, dark, plump, is at present in Switzerland.” It was not the girl.
A moment later my mother came into my room with the mail, put it down carelessly on my bed as though she were thinking of something else, and withdrew at once to leave me on my own. And I, who was familiar with my dear Mamma’s little subterfuges and knew that one could always read the truth in her face without fear of being mistaken, if one took as a key to the cipher her desire to give pleasure to others, I smiled and thought: “There must be something interesting for me in the post, and Mamma assumed that indifferent, absent-minded air so that my surprise might be complete and so as not to be like the people who take away half your pleasure by telling you of it beforehand. And she didn’t stay with me because she was afraid that out of pride I might conceal my pleasure and so feel it less keenly.” Meanwhile, on reaching the door, my mother had run into Françoise who was coming into the room, and forcing her to turn back, had dragged her out with her, somewhat alarmed, offended and surprised; for Françoise considered that her duties conferred upon her the privilege of entering my room at any hour of the day and of remaining there if she chose. But already, upon her features, astonishment and anger had vanished beneath a dark and sticky smile of transcendent pity and philosophical irony, a viscous liquid secreted, in order to heal her wound, by her outraged self-esteem. So that she might not feel herself despised, she despised us. Moreover she knew that we were masters, in other words capricious creatures, who, not being conspicuously intelligent, take pleasure in imposing by fear upon clever people, upon servants, in order to prove that they are the masters, absurd tasks such as boiling water in times of epidemic, washing down a room with a damp cloth, and leaving it at the very moment when you wanted to come into it. Mamma had placed the post by my side, so that I might not overlook it. I could see however that it consisted only of newspapers. No doubt there was some article by a writer whom I admired, which, as he wrote seldom, would be a surprise for me. I went to the window, and drew back the curtains. Above the pale and misty daylight, the sky glowed pink, like the stoves that are being lighted in kitchens at that hour, and the sight of it filled me with hope and with a longing to spend the night in a train and awake at the little country station where I had seen the milk-girl with the rosy cheeks.
I opened the Figaro. What a bore! The main article had the same title as the article which I had sent to the paper and which had not appeared. But not merely the same title … why, here were several words that were absolutely identical. This was really too bad. I must write and complain. Meanwhile I could hear Françoise who, indignant at having been banished from my room, into which she considered that she had the right of entry, was grumbling: “It’s a proper shame, a kid I saw brought into the world. I didn’t see him when his mother bore him, to be sure. But when I first knew him, to say the most, it wasn’t five years since he was birthed!” But it wasn’t merely a few words, it was the whole thing, and there was my signature … It was my article that had appeared at last! But my brain which, even at that period, had begun to show signs of age and to tire easily, continued for a moment longer to reason as though it had not understood that this was my article, like an old man who is obliged to complete a movement that he has begun even if it has become unnecessary, even if an unforeseen obstacle, in the face of which he ought at once to draw back, makes it dangerous. Then I considered the spiritual bread of life that a newspaper is, still warm and damp from the press and the morning fog in which it is distributed, at daybreak, to the housemaids who bring it to their masters with their morning coffee, a miraculous, self-multiplying bread which is at the same time one and ten thousand, which remains the same for each person while penetrating innumerably into every house at once.
What I was holding in my hand was not a particular copy of the newspaper, but one out of the ten thousand; it was not merely what had been written by me, but what had been written by me and read by everyone. To appreciate exactly the phenomenon which was occurring at this moment in other houses, it was essential that I read this article not as its author but as one of the readers of the paper; what I was holding in my hand was not only what I had written, it was the symbol of its incarnation in so many minds. But then came an initial anxiety. Would the reader who had not been forewarned see this article? I opened the paper carelessly as would such a reader, even assuming an air of not knowing what there was this morning in my paper, of being in a hurry to look at the social and political news. But my article was so long that my eye, which was avoiding it (in order to be absolutely fair and not load the dice in my favour, as a person who is waiting counts very slowly on purpose) picked up a fragment of it in passing. But many of those readers who notice the main article and even read it do not look at the signature; I myself would be quite incapable of saying who had written the main article of the day before. And I no
w made up my mind always to read them, and the author’s name too; but, like a jealous lover who refrains from being unfaithful to his mistress in order to believe in her fidelity, I reflected sadly that my own future attention would not compel, had not compelled the reciprocal attention of other people. And besides, there were those who would have gone out shooting, and those who would have left the house too early. But still, a few people would read it. I did as they would do: I began. Although I was well aware that many people who read this article would find it detestable, at the moment of reading it the meaning that each word conveyed to me seemed to me to be printed on the paper, and I could not believe that every other reader on opening his eyes would not see directly the images that I saw, assuming—with the same naivety as those who believe that it is the actual speech they have uttered that proceeds just as it is along the telephone wires—that the author’s thought is directly perceived by the reader, whereas quite other thoughts form in the latter’s mind; at the very moment in which I was trying to be an ordinary reader, my mind was rewriting my article while reading it. If M. de Guermantes did not understand some sentence which would appeal to Bloch, he might, on the other hand, be amused by some reflexion which Bloch would scorn. Thus, a fresh admirer presenting himself for each section which the previous reader seemed to disregard, the article as a whole was lifted to the skies by a swarm of readers and prevailed over my own self-distrust, since I no longer needed to bolster it. The truth of the matter is that the value of an article, however remarkable it may be, is like that of those passages in parliamentary reports in which the words “We shall see,” uttered by the Minister, only take on their full consequence when read thus: THE PRIME MINISTER, MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR AND OF RELIGIOUS AFFAIRS: “We shall see!” (Loud exclamations on the extreme Left. “Hear, hear,” from some Left and Centre benches)—an ending better than the middle and worthy of the beginning. Part of the beauty—and it is the original flaw in this type of literature, from which the famous Lundis are not exempt—lies in the impression made on the readers. It is a collective Venus, of which we have but one truncated limb if we confine ourselves to the thought of the author, for it is fully realised only in the minds of his readers. In them it finds completion. And since a crowd, even a select crowd, is not an artist, this final seal which it sets upon the article must always retain a trace of the commonplace. Thus Sainte-Beuve, on a Monday, could imagine Mme de Boigne in her four-poster bed reading his article in the Constitutionnel, and appreciating some pretty sentence which he had taken a long delight in composing and which might never, perhaps, have flowed from his pen had he not thought it opportune to stuff it into his article in order to make a more far-reaching impression. Doubtless the Chancellor,27 reading it too, would mention it during the visit he would pay to his old friend and mistress a little later. And when he dropped him home in his carriage that evening, the Duc de Noailles in his grey trousers would tell him what had been thought of it in society, if a note from Mme d’Arbouville had not already informed him.
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