“My little Albertine, I don’t know, the letters are anonymous, but from people whom you would perhaps have no difficulty in finding” (this to show her that I did not believe that she would try) “for they must know you quite well. The last one, I must admit (and I mention it because it deals with a trivial thing and there’s nothing at all unpleasant in it), made me furious all the same. It informed me that if, on the day when we left Balbec, you first of all wished to remain there and then decided to go, that was because in the meantime you had received a letter from Andrée telling you that she wasn’t coming.”
“I know quite well that Andrée wrote to tell me that she wasn’t coming, in fact she telegraphed; I can’t show you the telegram because I didn’t keep it, but it wasn’t that day. Besides, even if it had been that day, what difference do you suppose it could make to me whether Andrée came or not?”
The words “what difference do you suppose it could make to me” were a proof of anger and that it did make some difference, but were not necessarily a proof that Albertine had returned to Paris solely from a desire to see Andrée. Whenever Albertine saw one of the real or alleged motives of one of her actions discovered by a person to whom she had pleaded a different motive, she became angry, even if the person was someone for whose sake she had really performed the action. That Albertine believed that this information about what she had been doing did not come to me from anonymous letters which I had received willy-nilly but was eagerly solicited by me could never have been deduced from the words which she next uttered, in which she appeared to accept my story of the anonymous letters, but rather from her look of fury with me, a fury which appeared to be merely the explosion of her previous ill-humour, just as the espionage in which, on this hypothesis, she must suppose that I had been indulging would have been only the culmination of a surveillance of all her actions which she had suspected for a long time past. Her anger extended even to Andrée herself, and deciding no doubt that from now on I should no longer be unworried even when she went out with Andrée, she went on: “Besides, Andrée exasperates me. She’s a deadly bore. I never want to go anywhere with her again. You can tell that to the people who informed you that I came back to Paris for her sake. Suppose I were to tell you that after all the years I’ve known Andrée I couldn’t even describe her face to you, so little have I ever looked at it!”
But at Balbec, that first year, she had said to me: “Andrée is lovely.” It is true that this did not mean that she had had amorous relations with her, and indeed I had never heard her speak at that time except with indignation of any relations of that sort. But was it not possible that she had changed, even without being aware that she had changed, not thinking that her amusements with a girlfriend were the same thing as the immoral relations, not very clearly defined in her own mind, which she condemned in other women? Was this not possible, since this same change, and this same unawareness of change, had occurred in her relations with myself, whose kisses she had repulsed at Balbec with such indignation, kisses which afterwards she was to give me of her own accord every day, which, I hoped, she would give me for a long time to come, which she was going to give me in a moment?
“But, my darling, how do you expect me to tell them when I don’t know who they are?”
This answer was so forceful that it ought to have dissolved the objections and doubts which I saw crystallised in Albertine’s pupils. But it left them intact. I was now silent, and yet she continued to gaze at me with that persistent attention which we give to someone who has not finished speaking. I asked her forgiveness once more. She replied that she had nothing to forgive me. She had become very gentle again. But, beneath her sad and troubled features, it seemed to me that a secret plan had taken shape. I knew quite well that she could not leave me without warning me; in fact she could neither want to leave me (it was in a week’s time that she was to try on the new Fortuny gowns), nor decently do so, as my mother was returning to Paris at the end of the week and her aunt also. Why, since it was impossible for her to leave, did I repeat to her several times that we should be going out together next day to look at some Venetian glass which I wished to give her, and why was I comforted when I heard her say that that was agreed? When it was time for her to say good-night and I kissed her, she did not behave as usual, but turned her face away—it was barely a minute or two since I had been thinking how pleasing it was that she now gave me every evening what she had refused me at Balbec—and did not return my kiss. It was as though, having quarrelled with me, she was not prepared to give me a token of affection which might later on have appeared to me an act of duplicity that belied the quarrel. It was as though she was attuning her actions to that quarrel, and yet with moderation, whether so as not to announce it, or because, while breaking off carnal relations with me, she wished nevertheless to remain my friend. I kissed her then a second time, pressing to my heart the shimmering golden azure of the Grand Canal and the mating birds, symbols of death and resurrection. But for the second time, instead of returning my kiss, she drew away with the sort of instinctive and baleful obstinacy of animals that feel the hand of death. This presentiment which she seemed to be expressing overcame me too, and filled me with such anxious dread that when she had reached the door I could not bear to let her go, and called her back.
“Albertine,” I said to her, “I’m not at all sleepy. If you don’t want to go to sleep yourself, you might stay here a little longer, if you like, but I don’t really mind, and I don’t on any account want to tire you.” I felt that if I had been able to make her undress, and to have her there in her white nightdress, in which she seemed pinker and warmer, in which she excited my senses more keenly, the reconciliation would have been more complete. But I hesitated for an instant, for the sky-blue border of her dress added to her face a beauty, a luminosity, without which she would have seemed to me harder.
She came back slowly and said to me very sweetly, and still with the same downcast, sorrowful expression: “I can stay as long as you like, I’m not sleepy.” Her reply calmed me, for, so long as she was in the room, I felt that I could prepare for the future, and it also reflected friendliness and obedience, but of a certain sort, which seemed to me to be limited by that secret which I sensed behind her sorrowful gaze, her altered manner, altered partly in spite of herself, partly no doubt to attune it in advance to something which I did not know. I felt that, all the same, I needed only to have her all in white, with her throat bare, in front of me, as I had seen her at Balbec in bed, to find the courage which would oblige her to yield.
“Since you’re being kind enough to stay here a moment to console me, you ought to take off your gown, it’s too hot, too stiff, I dare not approach you for fear of crumpling that fine stuff, and there are those fateful birds between us. Undress, my darling.”
“No, I couldn’t possibly take off this dress here. I shall undress in my own room presently.”
“Then you won’t even come and sit down on my bed?”
“Why, of course.”
She remained, however, some way away from me, by my feet. We talked. Suddenly we heard the regular rhythm of a plaintive call. It was the pigeons beginning to coo. “That proves that day has come already,” said Albertine; and, her brows almost knitted, as though she missed, by living with me, the joys of the fine weather, “Spring has begun, if the pigeons have returned.” The resemblance between their cooing and the crow of the cock was as profound and as obscure as, in Vinteuil’s septet, the resemblance between the theme of the adagio and that of the opening and closing passages, it being built on the same key-theme but so transformed by differences of tonality, tempo, etc. that the lay listener who opens a book on Vinteuil is astonished to find that they are all three based on the same four notes, four notes which for that matter he may pick out with one finger upon the piano without recognising any of the three passages. Likewise, this melancholy refrain performed by the pigeons was a sort of cockcrow in the minor key, which did not soar up into the sky, did not r
ise vertically, but, regular as the braying of a donkey, enveloped in sweetness, went from one pigeon to another along a single horizontal line, and never raised itself, never changed its lateral plaint into that joyous appeal which had been uttered so often in the allegro of the introduction and the finale. I know that I then uttered the word “death,” as though Albertine were about to die. It seems that events are larger than the moment in which they occur and cannot be entirely contained in it. Certainly they overflow into the future through the memory that we retain of them, but they demand a place also in the time that precedes them. One may say that we do not then see them as they are to be, but in memory are they not modified too?
When I saw that she deliberately refrained from kissing me, realising that I was merely wasting my time, that it was only after a kiss that the really soothing moments would begin, I said to her: “Good-night, it’s too late,” because that would make her kiss me and we would go on kissing afterwards. But after saying to me, “Good-night, try and sleep well,” she contented herself with letting me kiss her on the cheek, exactly as she had done twice before. This time I dared not call her back. But my heart beat so violently that I could not lie down again. Like a bird flying from one end of its cage to the other I alternated between anxiety lest Albertine should leave me and a state of comparative calm. This calm was produced by the argument which I kept repeating several times a minute: “She cannot go without warning me, and she never said anything about going,” and I was more or less calmed. But at once I said to myself: “But what if tomorrow I find her gone! My very anxiety must be founded on something. Why didn’t she kiss me?” At this my heart ached horribly. Then it was slightly soothed by the argument which I advanced once more, but I ended with a headache, so incessant and monotonous was this fluctuation of my thoughts. There are thus certain mental states, and especially anxiety, which, offering us only two alternatives, are somehow as atrociously circumscribed as a simple physical pain. I perpetually repeated both the argument which justified my anxiety and the one which proved it false and reassured me, within as narrow a space as the sick man who explores without ceasing, on an internal impulse, the organ that is causing his suffering and withdraws for an instant from the painful spot only to return to it a moment later. Suddenly, in the silence of the night, I was startled by a noise which, though apparently insignificant, filled me with terror, the noise of Albertine’s window being violently opened. When I heard nothing more, I wondered why this noise had caused me such alarm. In itself there was nothing so extraordinary about it, but I probably gave it two interpretations which alarmed me equally. In the first place it was one of the conventions of our life together that, since I was afraid of draughts, nobody must ever open a window at night. This had been explained to Albertine when she came to stay in the house, and although she was convinced that this was a fad on my part and thoroughly unhealthy, she had promised me that she would never infringe the rule. And she was so timorous about everything that she knew to be my wish, even if she disapproved of it, that she would have gone to sleep amid the fumes of a smouldering fire rather than open her window, just as, however important the circumstances, she would not have had me woken up in the morning. It was only one of the minor conventions of our life, but if she was prepared to violate this one without consulting me, might it not mean that she no longer needed to behave with circumspection, that she would violate them all just as easily? Besides, the noise had been violent, almost rude, as though she had flung the window open, crimson with rage, saying to herself: “This life is stifling me. I don’t care, I must have air!” I did not exactly say all this to myself, but I continued to think, as of an omen more mysterious and more funereal than the hoot of an owl, of that sound of the window which Albertine had opened. Filled with an agitation such as I had not perhaps felt since the evening at Combray when Swann had been dining downstairs, I paced the corridor all night long, hoping, by the noise that I made, to attract Albertine’s attention, hoping that she would take pity on me and would call me to her, but I heard no sound from her room. At Combray, I had asked my mother to come. But with my mother I feared only her anger; I knew that I would not diminish her affection by displaying mine. This made me hesitate to call out to Albertine. Gradually I began to feel that it was too late. She must long have been asleep. I went back to bed. In the morning, as soon as I awoke, since no one ever came to my room, whatever happened, without a summons, I rang for Françoise. And at the same time I thought: “I must speak to Albertine about a yacht which I mean to have built for her.” As I took my letters I said to Françoise without looking at her: “I shall have something to say to Mlle Albertine presently. Is she up yet?” “Yes, she got up early.” I felt untold anxieties which I could scarcely contain rise up in me as in a gust of wind. The tumult in my chest was so great that I was quite out of breath, as though buffeted by a storm. “Ah! but where is she just now?” “I expect she’s in her room.” “Ah! good! Well, I shall see her presently.” I breathed again; my agitation subsided; Albertine was here; it was almost a matter of indifference to me whether she was or not. Besides, had it not been absurd of me to suppose that she could possibly not be there? I fell asleep, but, in spite of my certainty that she would not leave me, it was a light sleep and its lightness related to her alone. For the sounds that were obviously connected with work in the courtyard, while I heard them vaguely in my sleep, left me untroubled, whereas the slightest rustle that came from her room, when she left it, or noiselessly returned, pressing the bell so gently, made me start, ran through my whole body, left me with a palpitating heart, although I had heard it in a deep drowse, just as my grandmother in the last days before her death, when she was plunged in a motionless torpor which nothing could disturb and which the doctors called coma, would begin, I was told, to tremble for a moment like a leaf when she heard the three rings with which I was in the habit of summoning Françoise, and which, even when I made them softer, during that week, so as not to disturb the silence of the death-chamber, nobody, Françoise assured me, could mistake for anyone else’s ring because of a way that I had, and was quite unconscious of having, of pressing the bell. Had I then myself entered into my last agony? Was this the approach of death?
That day and the next we went out together, since Albertine refused to go out again with Andrée. I did not even mention the yacht to her. These outings had completely restored my peace of mind. But in the evening she had continued to embrace me in the same new way, which left me furious. I could interpret it now in no other way than as a means of showing me that she was sulking, which seemed to me perfectly absurd after the kindnesses I continued to heap upon her. And so, no longer receiving from her even those carnal satisfactions on which I depended, finding her ugly in her ill humour, I felt all the more keenly my deprivation of all the women and of the travels for which these first warm days reawakened my desire. Thanks no doubt to scattered memories of forgotten assignations that I had had, while still a schoolboy, with women, beneath trees already in full leaf, this springtime region in which the journey of our dwelling-place through the seasons had halted three days since beneath a clement sky, and in which all the roads sped away towards picnics in the country, boating parties, pleasure trips, seemed to me to be the land of women just as much as it was the land of trees, and the land in which the pleasure that was everywhere on offer became permissible to my convalescent strength. Resigning myself to idleness, resigning myself to chastity, to tasting pleasure only with a woman whom I did not love, resigning myself to remaining shut up in my room, to not travelling, all this was possible in the old world where we had been only yesterday, the empty world of winter, but not any longer in this new leafy world, in which I had awoken like a young Adam faced for the first time with the problem of existence, of happiness, and not bowed down beneath the accumulation of previous negative solutions. Albertine’s presence weighed upon me. I looked at her, grim-faced and sullen, and felt it was a pity we had not broken with each other. I wanted to go to
Venice, I wanted in the meantime to go to the Louvre to look at Venetian pictures and to the Luxembourg to see the two Elstirs which, as I had just heard, the Princesse de Guermantes had recently sold to that gallery, those that I had so greatly admired at the Duchesse de Guermantes’s, the Pleasures of the Dance and the Portrait of the X Family. But I was afraid that, in the former, certain lascivious poses might give Albertine a desire, a nostalgic longing for popular rejoicings, might make her think that perhaps a certain life which she had never led, a life of fireworks and suburban pleasure-grounds, had something to recommend it. Already, in anticipation, I was afraid lest, on the Fourteenth of July, she would ask me to take her to a popular ball and I longed for some impossible event which would do away with the national holiday. And besides, there were also in those Elstirs nude female figures in verdant southern landscapes which might make Albertine think of certain pleasures, albeit Elstir himself (but would she not degrade his work?) had seen in them no more than sculptural beauty, or rather the beauty of white monuments, which women’s bodies seated amidst verdure assume.
And so I resigned myself to abandoning that pleasure and decided instead to go to Versailles. Not wanting to go out with Andrée, Albertine had remained in her room, reading, in her Fortuny dressing-gown. I asked her if she would like to go with me to Versailles. She had the charming quality of being always ready for anything, perhaps because she had been accustomed in the past to spend half her time as the guest of other people, and, just as she had made up her mind to come to Paris in two minutes, she said to me: “I can come as I am if we don’t get out of the car.” She hesitated for a moment between two Fortuny coats beneath which to conceal her dressing-gown—as she might have hesitated between two friends in choosing an escort—chose a beautiful dark-blue one, and stuck a pin into a hat. In a minute, she was ready, before I had put on my overcoat, and we went to Versailles. This very promptitude, this absolute docility left me more reassured, as though, without having any precise reason for anxiety, I had indeed been in need of reassurance. “After all I have nothing to fear. She does everything that I ask, in spite of the noise of her window the other night. The moment I spoke of going out, she flung that blue coat over her gown and out she came. That’s not what a rebel would have done, a person who was no longer on friendly terms with me,” I said to myself as we went to Versailles. We stayed there a long time. The sky consisted entirely of that radiant and slightly pale blue which the wayfarer lying in a field sees at times above his head, but so uniform and so deep that one feels that the pigment of which it is composed has been applied without the least alloy and with such an inexhaustible richness that one might delve more and more deeply into its substance without encountering an atom of anything but the same blue. I thought of my grandmother who—in human art as in nature—loved grandeur, and who used to enjoy gazing at the steeple of Saint-Hilaire soaring into that same blue. Suddenly I felt once again a longing for my lost freedom on hearing a noise which I did not at first recognise and which my grandmother would also have loved. It was like the buzz of a wasp. “Look,” said Albertine, “there’s an aeroplane, high up there, very very high.” I looked all over the sky but could see only, unmarred by any black spot, the unbroken pallor of the unalloyed blue. I continued nevertheless to hear the humming of the wings, which suddenly entered my field of vision. Up there, a pair of tiny wings, dark and flashing, punctured the continuous blue of the unalterable sky. I had at last been able to attach the buzzing to its cause, to that little insect throbbing up there in the sky, probably six thousand feet above me; I could see it hum. Perhaps at a time when distances by land had not yet been habitually shortened by speed as they are today, the whistle of a passing train two thousand yards away was endowed with that beauty which now and for some time to come will stir our emotions in the drone of an aeroplane six thousand feet up, at the thought that the distances traversed in this vertical journey are the same as those on the ground, and that in this other direction, where measurements appear different to us because the reach seemed impossible, an aeroplane at six thousand feet is no further away than a train at two thousand yards, is nearer even, the identical trajectory occurring in a purer medium, with no obstacle between the traveller and his starting point, just as on the sea or across the plains, in calm weather, the wake of a ship that is already far away or the breath of a single zephyr will furrow the ocean of water or of corn.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5: The Captive, the Fugitive Page 49