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

by Marcel Proust

  But above all we must remember this: on the one hand, lying is often a trait of character; on the other hand, in women who would not otherwise be liars, it is a natural defence, improvised at first, then more and more organised, against that sudden danger which would be capable of destroying all life: love. Furthermore, it is not by mere chance that sensitive, intellectual men invariably give themselves to insensitive and inferior women, and moreover remain attached to them, and that the proof that they are not loved does not in the least cure them of the urge to sacrifice everything to keep such women with them. If I say that such men need to suffer, I am saying something that is accurate while suppressing the preliminary truths which make that need—involuntary in a sense—to suffer a perfectly understandable consequence of those truths. Not to mention the fact that, all-round natures being rare, a man who is highly sensitive and highly intellectual will generally have little will-power, will be the plaything of habit and of that fear of suffering in the immediate present which condemns to perpetual suffering—and that in these conditions he will never be prepared to repudiate the woman who does not love him. One may be surprised that he should be content with so little love, but one ought rather to picture to oneself the anguish that may be caused him by the love which he himself feels. An anguish which one ought not to pity unduly, for those terrible commotions that are caused by an unrequited love, by the departure or the death of a mistress, are like those attacks of paralysis which at first leave us helpless, but after which the muscles tend gradually to recover their vital elasticity and energy. What is more, this anguish does not lack compensation. These sensitive and intellectual persons are as a rule little inclined to falsehood. It takes them all the more unawares in that, however intelligent they may be, they live in the world of the possible, live in the anguish which a woman has just inflicted on them rather than in the clear perception of what she wanted, what she did, what she loved, a perception granted chiefly to self-willed natures which need it in order to prepare against the future instead of lamenting the past. And so these persons feel that they are betrayed without quite knowing how. Wherefore the mediocre woman whom we are astonished to see them loving enriches the universe for them far more than an intelligent woman would have done. Behind each of her words, they feel that a lie is lurking, behind each house to which she says that she has gone, another house, behind each action, each person, another action, another person. Of course they do not know what or whom, they do not have the energy, would not perhaps find it possible, to discover. A lying woman, by an extremely simple trick, can beguile, without taking the trouble to change her method, any number of people, and, what is more, the very person who ought to have discovered the trick. All this confronts the sensitive intellectual with a universe full of depths which his jealousy longs to plumb and which are not without interest to his intelligence.

  Without being precisely a man of that category, I was going perhaps to learn, now that Albertine was dead, the secret of her life. Here again, do not these indiscretions which come to light only after a person’s life on earth is ended prove that nobody really believes in a future life? If these indiscretions are true, one ought to fear the resentment of a woman whose actions one reveals fully as much in anticipation of meeting her in heaven as one feared it while she was alive and one felt bound to keep her secret. And if these indiscretions are false, invented because she is no longer present to contradict them, one ought to be even more afraid of the dead woman’s wrath if one believed in heaven. But no one does believe in it.

  On the whole, I did not understand any better than before why Albertine had left me. If the face of a woman can with difficulty be grasped by the eyes, which cannot take in the whole of its mobile surface, or by the lips, or still less by the memory, if it is shrouded in obscurity according to her social position, according to the level at which we are situated, how much thicker is the veil drawn between those of her actions which we see and her motives! Motives are situated at a deeper level, which we do not perceive, and moreover engender actions other than those of which we are aware and often in absolute contradiction to them. When has there not been some man in public life, regarded as a saint by his friends, who is discovered to have forged documents, robbed the State, betrayed his country? How often is a great nobleman robbed by a steward whom he has brought up from childhood, ready to swear that he was an excellent man, as possibly he was! And how much more impenetrable does it become, this curtain that screens another’s motives, if we are in love with that person, for it clouds our judgment and also obscures the actions of one who, feeling that she is loved, ceases suddenly to set any store by what otherwise would have seemed to her important, such as wealth for example. Perhaps also it induces her to feign to some extent this scorn for wealth in the hope of obtaining more by making us suffer. The bargaining instinct may also enter into everything else; and even actual incidents in her life, an intrigue which she has confided to no one for fear of its being revealed to us, which many people might for all that have discovered had they felt the same passionate desire to know it as we ourselves while preserving a greater equanimity of mind and arousing fewer suspicions in the guilty party, an intrigue of which certain people have in fact not been unaware—but people whom we do not know and would not know how to find. And among all these reasons for her adopting an inexplicable attitude towards us, we must include those idiosyncrasies of character which impel people, whether from indifference to their own interests, or from hatred, or from love of freedom, or under the impulse of anger, or from fear of what certain people will think, to do the opposite of what we expected. And then there are the differences of environment, of upbringing, in which we refuse to believe because, when we are talking together, they are effaced by our words, but which return when we are apart to direct the actions of each of us from so opposite a point of view that no true meeting of minds is possible.

  “Anyhow there’s no need to seek out all these explanations,” Andrée went on. “Heaven knows I was fond of Albertine, and she was a really nice creature, but, especially after she had typhoid (a year before you first met us all), she was an absolute madcap. All of a sudden she would get sick of what she was doing, all her plans would have to be changed that very minute, and she herself probably couldn’t say why. You remember the year when you first came to Balbec, the year when you met us all? One fine day she got somebody to send her a telegram calling her back to Paris; she barely had time to pack her trunks. But there was absolutely no reason for her to go. All the pretexts she gave were false. Paris would be a deadly bore at that moment. We were all of us still at Balbec. The golf club wasn’t closed, indeed the heats for the cup which she was so keen on winning weren’t finished. She’d certainly have won it. It only meant staying on for another week. Well, off she went at a gallop. I often spoke to her about it later. She said herself that she didn’t know why she had left, that she felt homesick (the home being Paris, you can imagine how likely that was), that she didn’t feel happy at Balbec, that she thought there were people there who sneered at her.”

  And I told myself there was this much truth in what Andrée said: that if differences between minds account for the different impressions produced upon one person and another by the same work, and differences of feeling account for the impossibility of captivating a person who does not love you, there are also differences between characters, peculiarities in a single character, which are also motives for action. Then I ceased to think about this explanation and said to myself how difficult it is to know the truth in this world.

  I had indeed noticed Albertine’s desire to go to Mme Verdurin’s and her concealment of it: I had not been mistaken on that point. But then even if we do thus manage to grasp one fact, all the others, which we perceive only in their outward appearance, escape us, and we see only a succession of flat silhouettes of which we say to ourselves: it is this, it is that, it is because of her, or it is because of someone else. The revelation that Mlle Vinteuil was expected had seemed t
o me the true explanation, all the more so because Albertine, forestalling me, had spoken to me about it. And subsequently had she not refused to swear to me that Mlle Vinteuil’s presence gave her no pleasure? And here, with regard to this young man, I remembered a point which I had forgotten. A short time before, while Albertine was living with me, I had met him, and he had been—in contrast to his attitude at Balbec—extremely friendly, even affectionate towards me, had begged me to allow him to call on me, a request which I had refused for a number of reasons. And now I realised that it was quite simply because, knowing that Albertine was living in my house, he had wanted to be on good terms with me so as to have every facility for seeing her and for carrying her off from me, and I concluded that he was a scoundrel. Some time later, when I attended the first performances of this young man’s work, although I continued to think that if he had been so anxious to call on me, it was for Albertine’s sake, and although I felt this to be reprehensible, I remembered that in the past, if I had gone down to Doncières to see Saint-Loup, it was really because I was in love with Mme de Guermantes. It is true that the two cases were not quite the same: Saint-Loup not being in love with Mme de Guermantes, there was in my display of affection for him a trace of duplicity perhaps, but no treason. But I reflected afterwards that this affection which one feels for the person who possesses the object of one’s desire is something that one feels equally even if he himself also loves that object. No doubt, one ought in that case to resist a friendship which will lead one straight to betrayal. And I think that this is what I have always done. But in the case of those who lack the strength to resist, we cannot say that the friendship they affect for their rival is a mere sham; they feel it sincerely and for that reason display it with a fervour which, once the betrayal has been accomplished, can cause the betrayed husband or lover to say with amazed indignation: “If you had heard the protestations of affection that the wretch showered on me! That a person should come to rob a man of his treasure, that I can understand. But that he should feel the diabolical need to assure him of his friendship first of all strikes me as a degree of ignominy and perversity almost impossible to imagine.” No, in fact, there is no perverse pleasure in it, nor even an absolutely conscious lie.

  The affection of this sort which Albertine’s pseudofiancé had manifested for me that day had yet another excuse, being more complex than a simple by-product of his love for Albertine. It was only a short time since he had known himself to be, confessed himself to be, been anxious to be proclaimed an intellectual. For the first time, values other than sporting or hedonistic existed for him. The fact that I enjoyed the esteem of Elstir and Bergotte, that Albertine had perhaps told him of the way I talked about writers, which had led her to imagine that I might myself be able to write, meant that all of a sudden I had become to him (to the new man whom he at last realised himself to be) an interesting person whose friendship he would have liked to cultivate, to whom he would have liked to confide his plans, whom he might perhaps have asked for an introduction to Elstir. So that he was in fact sincere when he asked if he might call on me, expressing a regard for me to which intellectual reasons as well as a reflexion of Albertine imparted a certain veracity. No doubt it was not for that that he was so anxious to come and see me and would have dropped everything in order to do so. But of this last reason, which did little more than raise to a sort of impassioned paroxysm the two other reasons, he was perhaps unaware himself, and the other two existed really, as might really have existed in Albertine, when she had been anxious to go to Mme Verdurin’s on the afternoon of the rehearsal, the perfectly respectable pleasure that she would feel in meeting again friends of her childhood who in her eyes were no more depraved than she was in theirs, in talking to them, in showing them, by the mere fact of her presence at the Verdurins’, that the poor little girl whom they had known was now invited to a noted salon, the pleasure also that she might perhaps have felt in listening to Vinteuil’s music. If all this was true, the blush that had risen to Albertine’s cheeks when I had mentioned Mlle Vinteuil was due to the fact that I had done so in the context of that afternoon party which she had tried to keep secret from me because of the marriage proposal of which I was not to know. Albertine’s refusal to swear to me that she would have felt no pleasure in meeting Mlle Vinteuil again at that party had at the moment intensified my torment, strengthened my suspicions, but proved to me in retrospect that she had wanted to be sincere, even over an innocent matter, perhaps simply because it was an innocent matter. There nevertheless remained what Andrée had told me about her relations with Albertine. Perhaps, however, even without going so far as to believe that Andrée had invented them solely that I should not be happy, or able to feel superior to her, I could still suppose that she had slightly exaggerated her account of what she used to do with Albertine, and that Albertine, by a mental reservation, also minimised slightly what she had done with Andrée, making use Jesuitically of certain definitions which I had stupidly formulated on the subject, judging that her relations with Andrée did not fall into the category of what she was obliged to confess to me and that she could deny them without lying. But why should I believe that it was she rather than Andrée who was lying? Truth and life are very difficult to fathom, and I retained of them, without really having got to know them, an impression in which sadness was perhaps actually eclipsed by exhaustion.

  Chapter Three

  SOJOURN IN VENICE

  My mother had taken me to spend a few weeks in Venice, and—as beauty may exist in the most precious as well as in the humblest things—I received there impressions analogous to those which I had felt so often in the past at Combray, but transposed into a wholly different and far richer key. When, at ten o’clock in the morning, my shutters were thrown open, I saw blazing there, instead of the gleaming black marble into which the slates of Saint-Hilaire used to turn, the golden angel on the campanile of St Mark’s. Glittering in a sunlight which made it almost impossible to keep one’s eyes upon it, this angel promised me, with its outstretched arms, for the moment when I appeared on the Piazzetta half an hour later, a joy more certain than any that it could ever in the past have been bidden to announce to men of good will. I could see nothing else so long as I remained in bed, but as the whole world is merely a vast sundial, a single sunlit segment of which enables us to tell what time it is, on the very first morning I was reminded of the shops in the Place de l’Eglise at Combray, which, on Sunday mornings, were always on the point of shutting when I arrived for mass, while the straw in the marketplace smelt strongly in the already hot sunlight. But on the second morning, what I saw on awakening, what made me get out of bed (because they had taken the place in my memory and in my desire of the recollections of Combray), were the impressions of my first morning stroll in Venice, in Venice where everyday life was no less real than in Combray, where as in Combray on Sunday mornings one had the pleasure of stepping down into a festive street, but where that street was entirely paved with sapphire-blue water, cooled by warm breezes and of a colour so durable that my tired eyes might rest their gaze upon it in search of relaxation without fear of its blenching. Like the good folk of the Rue de l’Oiseau at Combray, so also in this strange town, the inhabitants actually emerged from houses lined up side by side along the main street, but the role played there by houses of casting a patch of shade at their feet was entrusted in Venice to palaces of porphyry and jasper, above the arched doors of which the head of a bearded god (breaking the alignment, like the knocker on a door at Combray) had the effect of darkening with its shadow, not the brownness of the earth, but the splendid blueness of the water. On the Piazza, the shadow that would have been produced at Combray by the awning over the draper’s shop and the barber’s pole was a carpet of little blue flowers strewn at its feet upon the desert of sun-scorched flagstones by the relief of a Renaissance façade, which is not to say that, when the sun beat down, one was not obliged, in Venice as at Combray, to pull down the blinds, even beside the canal, but the
y hung between the quatrefoils and foliage of Gothic windows. Of this sort was the window in our hotel behind the balusters of which my mother sat waiting for me, gazing at the canal with a patience which she would not have displayed in the old days at Combray, at a time when, cherishing hopes for my future which had never been realised, she was unwilling to let me see how much she loved me. Nowadays she was well aware that an apparent coldness on her part would alter nothing, and the affection she lavished upon me was like those forbidden foods which are no longer withheld from invalids when it is certain that they are past recovery. True, the humble details which gave an individuality to the window of my aunt Leonie’s bedroom seen from the Rue de l’Oiseau, the impression of asymmetry caused by its unequal distance from the windows on either side of it, the exceptional height of its wooden ledge, the angled bar which served to open the shutters, the two curtains of glossy blue satin tied back with loops—the equivalent of all these things existed in this hotel in Venice where I could hear also those words, so distinctive and so eloquent, which enable us to recognise from a distance the dwelling to which we are going home to lunch, and afterwards remain in our memory as testimony that, for a certain period of time, that dwelling was ours; but the task of uttering them had, in Venice, devolved not, as at Combray and most other places, upon the simplest, not to say the ugliest things, but upon the ogive, still half Arab, of a façade which is reproduced in all the architectural museums and all the illustrated art books as one of the supreme achievements of the domestic architecture of the Middle Ages; from a long way away and when I had barely passed San Giorgio Maggiore, I caught sight of this ogival window which had already seen me, and the thrust of its pointed arches added to its smile of welcome the distinction of a loftier, scarcely comprehensible gaze. And because, behind its multi-coloured marble balusters, Mamma was sitting reading while she waited for me to return, her face shrouded in a tulle veil as heartrending in its whiteness as her hair to me who sensed that, hiding her tears, she had pinned it to her straw hat not so much with the idea of appearing “dressed” in the eyes of the hotel staff as in order to appear to me to be less in mourning, less sad, almost consoled for the death of my grandmother; because, not having recognised me at first, as soon as I called to her from the gondola, she sent out to me, from the bottom of her heart, a love which stopped only where there was no longer any corporeal matter to sustain it, on the surface of her impassioned gaze which she brought as close to me as possible, which she tried to thrust forward to the advanced post of her lips, in a smile which seemed to be kissing me, within the frame and beneath the canopy of the more discreet smile of the arched window lit up by the midday sun—because of this, that window has assumed in my memory the precious quality of things that have had, simultaneously with us, side by side with us, their share in a certain hour that struck, the same for us and for them; and however full of admirable tracery its mullions may be, that illustrious window retains in my eyes the intimate aspect of a man of genius with whom we have spent a month in some holiday resort, where he has acquired a friendly regard for us; and if, ever since then, whenever I see a cast of that window in a museum, I am obliged to hold back my tears, it is simply because it says to me the thing that touches me more than anything else in the world: “I remember your mother so well.”