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.
Befor
e I explain why the information that he gave me made me so unhappy, I must relate an incident which occurred immediately before his visit and the memory of which so disturbed me afterwards that it weakened, if not the painful impression made on me by my conversation with Saint-Loup, at any rate the practical effect of that conversation. This incident was as follows. Burning with impatience to see Saint-Loup, I was waiting for him on the staircase (a thing which I could not have done had my mother been at home, for it was what she most abominated, next to “talking out of the window”) when I heard the following words: “What! you mean to say you don’t know how to get a fellow you don’t like sacked? It’s not difficult. For instance, you need only hide the things he has to take in. Then, when they’re in a hurry and ring for him, he can’t find anything, he loses his head. My aunt will be furious with him, and will say to you: ‘But what’s the man doing?’ When he does show his face, everybody will be raging, and he won’t have what’s wanted. After this has happened four or five times you may be sure that he’ll be sacked, especially if you take care to dirty the things that he’s supposed to bring in clean, and a dozen other tricks of that kind.”
I remained speechless with astonishment, for these cruel, Machiavellian words were uttered by the voice of Saint-Loup. Now I had always regarded him as so kind, so tender-hearted a person that these words had the same effect on me as if he had been rehearsing the role of Satan for a play: it could not be in his own name that he was speaking.
“But, after all, a man has to earn his living,” said the other person, of whom I then caught sight and who was one of the Duchesse de Guermantes’s footmen.
“What the hell does that matter to you so long as you’re all right?” Saint-Loup replied callously. “It will be all the more fun for you, having a whipping-boy. You can easily spill ink over his livery just when he has to go and wait at a big dinner-party, and never leave him in peace for a moment until he’s only too glad to give notice. Anyhow, I can put a spoke in his wheel. I shall tell my aunt that I admire your patience in working with a great lout like that, and so dirty too.”
I showed myself, and Saint-Loup came to greet me, but my confidence in him was shaken since I had heard him speak in a manner so different from anything that I knew. And I wondered whether a person who was capable of acting so cruelly towards some poor wretch might not have played the part of a traitor towards me on his mission to Mme Bontemps. This reflexion served mainly, after he had left, to help me not to regard his failure as a proof that I myself might not succeed. But while he was with me, it was still of the Saint-Loup of old, and especially of the friend who had just come from Mme Bontemps, that I thought. He began by saying: “You feel that I ought to have telephoned to you more often, but I was always told that you were engaged.” But the point at which my pain became unendurable was when he said: “To begin where my last telegram left you, after going through a sort of shed, I went into the house and at the end of a long passage was shown into a drawing-room.”
At these words, shed, passage, drawing-room, and before he had even finished uttering them, my heart was convulsed more instantaneously than by an electric current, for the force that circles the earth most times in a second is not electricity but pain. How I repeated to myself these words, shed, passage, drawing-room, renewing the shock at will, after Saint-Loup had left me! In a shed one girl can hide with another. And in that drawing-room, who knew what Albertine did when her aunt was not there? Had I then imagined the house in which she was living as incapable of possessing either a shed or a drawing-room? No, I had not imagined it at all, except as a vague dwelling. I had suffered first of all when the place where Albertine was had acquired a geographical identity, when I had learned that, instead of being in two or three possible places, she was in Touraine; those words uttered by her concierge had marked in my heart as upon a map the place where I must suffer. But once I had grown accustomed to the idea that she was in a house in Touraine, I had still not seen the house; never had there occurred to my imagination this appalling idea of a drawing-room, a shed, a passage, which struck me now, facing me in the retina of Saint-Loup’s eyes which had seen them, as the rooms in which Albertine came and went, lived her life, as those rooms in particular and not an infinity of possible rooms which had cancelled one another out. With the words shed, passage, drawing-room, I became aware of my folly in having left Albertine for a week in that accursed place whose existence (instead of its mere possibility) had just been revealed to me. Alas! when Saint-Loup told me also that in this drawing-room he had heard someone singing at the top of her voice in an adjoining room and that it was Albertine who was singing, I realised with despair that, rid of me at last, she was happy! She had regained her freedom. And I had been thinking that she would come to take the place of Andrée! My grief turned to anger with Saint-Loup.
“That’s the one thing in the world I asked you to avoid, that she should know of your coming.”
“Do you think it was easy! They assured me that she wasn’t in the house. Oh, I know very well that you’re not pleased with me, I could tell that from your telegrams. But you’re not being fair; I did what I could.”
Set free once more, released from the cage in which, here at home, I used to leave her for days on end without letting her come to my room, Albertine had regained all her attraction in my eyes; she had become once more the girl whom everyone pursued, the marvellous bird of the earliest days.
“Anyhow, to sum up—as regards the money, I don’t know what to say to you. I found myself addressing a woman who seemed to me to be so scrupulous that I was afraid of offending her. However, she didn’t say a word when I mentioned the money. In fact, a little later she told me that she was touched to find that we understood one another so well. And yet everything that she said afterwards was so delicate, so refined, that it seemed to me impossible that she could have been referring to my offer of money when she said: ‘We understand one another so well,’ for after all I was behaving like a cad.”
“But perhaps she didn’t understand what you meant, perhaps she didn’t hear. You ought to have repeated the offer, because then it would certainly have worked.”
“But how could she possibly not have heard? I spoke to her as I’m speaking to you, and she’s neither deaf nor mad.”
“And she made no comment?”
“None.”
“You ought to have repeated the offer.”
“How do you mean, repeat it? As soon as we met I saw what sort of person she was. I said to myself that you’d been mistaken, that you were making me commit the most awful gaffe, and that it would be terribly difficult to offer her the money like that. I did it, however, to oblige you, convinced that she’d turn me out of the house.”
“But she didn’t. Therefore, either she hadn’t heard you and you should have started afresh, or you could have pursued the subject.”
“You say: ‘She hadn’t heard,’ because you were here in Paris, but, I repeat, if you’d been present at our conversation, there wasn’t a sound to interrupt us, I said it quite plainly, it’s not possible that she failed to understand.”
“But anyhow she’s quite convinced that I’ve always wished to marry her niece?”
“No, as to that, if you want my opinion, she didn’t believe that you had any intention of marrying the girl. She told me that you yourself had informed her niece that you wished to leave her. I’m not really sure that she’s convinced even now that you want to marry.”
This reassured me slightly by showing me that I was in a less humiliating position, and therefore more capable of being still loved, more free to take some decisive action. Nevertheless I was tormented.
“I’m sorry, because I can see you’re not pleased,” Saint-Loup went on.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5: The Captive, the Fugitive Page 57