As regards the young sportsman, the Verdurins’ nephew, whom I had met during my two visits to Balbec, it may be recounted here, incidentally and prematurely, that, some time after Andrée’s visit, the account of which will be resumed in a moment, certain events occurred which caused a great sensation. First of all, this young man (perhaps in memory of Albertine with whom I did not then know that he had been in love) became engaged to Andrée and married her, to the despair of Rachel, of which he took no notice. Andrée no longer said then (that is to say some months after the visit of which I have been speaking) that he was a wretch, and I realised later on that she had said so only because she was madly in love with him and felt that he did not want her. But another fact made an even greater impression. This young man produced certain sketches for the theatre, with settings and costumes designed by himself, which effected in contemporary art a revolution at least equal to that brought about by the Russian ballet. In fact, the best-qualified critics regarded his works as being of cardinal importance, almost works of genius, and indeed I agree with them, confirming thus, to my own astonishment, the opinion long held by Rachel. The people who had known him at Balbec, intent only on seeing whether the cut of the clothes of the men with whom he associated was elegant or not, spending all his time at baccarat, at the races, on the golf-course or on the polo-ground, who knew that at school he had always been a dunce and had even been expelled from the lycée (to annoy his parents, he had gone to live for two months in the smart brothel in which M. de Charlus had hoped to surprise Morel), thought that perhaps his productions were the work of Andrée, who was prepared out of love to allow him all the glory, or that more probably he was paying, out of his huge personal fortune at which his excesses had barely nibbled, some inspired but needy professional to create them (this kind of wealthy society, unpolished by contact with the aristocracy and having no idea of what constitutes an artist—who to them is either an actor whom they engage to recite monologues at their daughter’s engagement party, handing him his fee discreetly there and then in another room, or a painter to whom they make her sit once she is married, before the children come and when she is still at her best—are apt to believe that all the society people who write, compose or paint have their work done for them and pay to obtain a reputation as a creative artist as other men pay to secure a seat in Parliament). But all this was untrue, and this young man was indeed the author of those admirable works. When I learned this, I found myself torn between a number of different suppositions. Either he had indeed been for long years the “thickhead” that he appeared to be, and some physiological cataclysm had awakened the dormant genius in him, like a Sleeping Beauty; or else at the time of his turbulent schooldays, of his failures to matriculate, of his heavy gambling losses at Balbec, of his reluctance to get into the little “tram” with his aunt Verdurin’s faithful because of their hideous clothes, he was already a man of genius, distracted perhaps from his genius, which he had left in abeyance in the effervescence of juvenile passions; or again, already a conscious man of genius, and at the bottom of his class only because, while the master was spouting platitudes about Cicero, he himself was reading Rimbaud or Goethe. True, there were no grounds for any such hypothesis when I met him at Balbec, where his interests seemed to me to be centred exclusively on turning out a smart carriage and pair and mixing cocktails. But even this is not an irrefutable objection. He may have been extremely vain—something that is not incompatible with genius—and have sought to shine in the manner which he knew was best calculated to dazzle in the world in which he lived, that is to say, not by showing a profound knowledge of Elective Affinities, but far rather a knowledge of how to drive four-in-hand. Moreover, I am not at all sure that later on, when he had become the creator of those fine and original works, he would have cared greatly, outside the theatres in which he was known, to greet anyone who was not in evening dress, like the “faithful” in their earlier manner, which would be a proof in him not of stupidity but of vanity, and indeed of a certain practical sense, a certain perceptiveness in adapting his vanity to the mentality of the imbeciles whose esteem he valued and in whose eyes a dinner-jacket might perhaps shine with greater brilliance than the gaze of a thinker. Who can say whether, seen from without, some man of talent, or even a man devoid of talent but a lover of the things of the mind, myself for instance, would not have appeared, to anyone who met him at Rivebelle, in the hotel at Balbec, or on the esplanade, the most perfect and pretentious fool? Not to mention that for Octave matters of art must have been something so intimate, inhabiting the most secret recesses of his being, that doubtless it would never have occurred to him to speak of them, as Saint-Loup, for instance, would have done, Saint-Loup for whom the arts had all the glamour that horses and carriages had for Octave. And then he may have had a passion for gambling, and it is said that he retained it. But all the same, if the piety which brought to light the unknown work of Vinteuil emerged from the murky environment of Montjouvain, I was no less struck by the thought that what were perhaps the most extraordinary masterpieces of our day had emerged not from the concours general, from a model, academic education in the manner of the Broglie family, but from the frequentation of paddocks and fashionable bars. In any case, in those days at Balbec, the reasons which made me anxious to know him, and which made Albertine and her friends anxious that I should not know him, were equally extraneous to his merit, and could only have illustrated the eternal misunderstanding between an “intellectual” (represented in this instance by myself) and society (represented by the little band) with regard to a social personality (the young golfer). I had no inkling of his talent, and his prestige in my eyes—like that of Mme Blatin long ago—had been that of being, whatever they might say, the friend of my girlfriends, and more one of their band than myself. On the other hand, Albertine and Andrée, symbolising in this respect the incapacity of society people to bring a sound judgment to bear upon the things of the mind and their propensity to attach themselves in that connexion to false appearances, not only thought me almost idiotic because I took an interest in such an imbecile, but were astonished above all that, golfer for golfer, my choice should have fallen upon the poorest player of them all. If, for instance, I had chosen to make friends with young Gilbert de Belloeuvre, apart from golf he was a boy who had a certain amount of conversation, who had almost succeeded in the concours general and was an agreeable versifier (as a matter of fact he was the stupidest of them all). Or again, if my object had been to “make a study for a book,” Guy Saumoy, who was completely insane, who had abducted two girls, was at least a singular type who might “interest” me. These two might have been allowed me, but the other, what attraction could I find in him? He was the epitome of the “great lout,” of the “thickhead.”
To return to Andrée’s visit, after the disclosure that she had just made to me of her relations with Albertine, she added that the main reason for which Albertine had left me was concern about what her friends of the little band, and other people as well, might think of her living like that with a young man to whom she was not married: “Of course I know it was in your mother’s house. But that makes no difference. You can’t imagine what that sort of girls’ community is like, what they conceal from one another, how they dread one another’s opinion of them. I’ve seen some of them being terribly severe with young men simply because they knew their friends and they were afraid that certain things might be repeated, and then I’ve happened by chance to see those very same girls in a totally different light, much to their chagrin.”
A few months earlier, this knowledge which Andrée appeared to possess of the motives that swayed the girls of the little band would have seemed to me the most precious thing in the world. What she said was perhaps sufficient to explain why Albertine, who had given herself to me afterwards in Paris, had refused to do so at Balbec where I was constantly meeting her friends, a fact which I had absurdly supposed to be so advantageous for being on better terms with her. Perhaps indeed it w
as because she had seen signs of my confiding in Andrée, or because I had rashly told the latter that she was coming to spend the night at the Grand Hotel, that Albertine, who an hour earlier was perhaps ready to let me enjoy certain favours as though that were the simplest thing in the world, had abruptly changed her mind and threatened to ring the bell. But then, she must have been accommodating to lots of others. This thought rekindled my jealousy and I told Andrée that there was something that I wished to ask her.
“You did those things in your grandmother’s empty apartment?”
“Oh, no, never, we’d have been disturbed.”
“Why, I thought … it seemed to me …”
“Besides, Albertine chiefly liked doing it in the country.”
“Oh! where?”
“Originally, when she hadn’t time to go very far, we used to go to the Buttes-Chaumont. She knew a house there. Or else we would lie under the trees, there’s never anyone about. In the grotto of the Petit Trianon, too.”
“There, you see; how am I to believe you? You swore to me, not a year ago, that you’d never done anything at the Buttes-Chaumont.”
“I was afraid of hurting you.”
As I have said, I thought (although not until much later) that on the contrary it was on this second occasion, the day of her confessions, that Andrée had sought to hurt me. And this thought would have occurred to me at once, because I should have felt the need of it, if I had still been as much in love with Albertine. But Andrée’s words did not hurt me sufficiently to make it essential for me to dismiss them immediately as untrue. On the whole, if what Andrée said was true, and I did not doubt it at the time, the real Albertine whom I now discovered, after having known so many diverse forms of Albertine, differed very little from the young bacchante who had loomed up and at once been detected that first day, on the front at Balbec, and who had offered me so many different aspects in succession, as a town alters the disposition of its buildings one after the other as we approach it, to the point of crushing, obliterating the principal monument which alone we could see from a distance, until finally, when we know it well and can judge it exactly, its true proportions prove to be those which the perspective of the first glance had indicated, the rest, through which we passed, being no more than that succession of lines of defence which everything in creation raises against our vision, and which we must cross one after another, at the cost of how much suffering, before we arrive at the heart. If, however, I had no need to believe absolutely in Albertine’s innocence because my suffering had diminished, I can say that conversely, if I did not suffer unduly at this revelation, it was because, some time since, the belief in Albertine’s innocence that I had fabricated for myself had been gradually replaced, without my realising it, by the belief, ever present in my mind, in her guilt. Now if I no longer believed in Albertine’s innocence, it was because I had already ceased to feel the need, the passionate desire to believe in it. It is desire that engenders belief, and if we are not as a rule aware of this, it is because most belief-creating desires—unlike the desire which had persuaded me that Albertine was innocent—end only with our own life. To all the evidence that corroborated my original version, I had stupidly preferred mere assertions by Albertine. Why had I believed them? Lying is essential to humanity. It plays as large a part perhaps as the quest for pleasure, and is moreover governed by that quest. One lies in order to protect one’s pleasure, or one’s honour if the disclosure of one’s pleasure runs counter to one’s honour. One lies all one’s life long, even, especially, perhaps only, to those who love one. For they alone make us fear for our pleasure and desire their esteem. I had at first thought Albertine guilty, and it was only my desire, by utilising the powers of my intelligence to construct an edifice of doubt, that had put me on the wrong track. Perhaps we live surrounded by electric, seismic signs which we must interpret in good faith in order to know the truth about people’s characters. If the truth be told, saddened as I was in spite of everything by Andrée’s words, I thought it fitter that the reality should finally turn out to accord with what my instinct had originally foreboded rather than with the wretched optimism to which I had later so cravenly surrendered. I preferred that life should remain on the same level as my intuitions. Those, moreover, that I had had that first day on the beach, when I had believed that these girls were the incarnation of frenzied pleasure, of vice, and again on the evening when I had seen Albertine’s governess leading that passionate girl home to the little villa, as one drives into its cage a wild animal which nothing, later on, despite appearances, will ever succeed in taming—did not those intuitions accord with what Bloch had told me when he had made the world seem so fair to my eyes by showing me, making me quiver with excitement on all my walks, at every encounter, the universality of desire? Perhaps, when all was said, it was better that I should not have found those first intuitions verified afresh until now. While the whole of my love for Albertine endured, they would have made me suffer too acutely and it was better that there should have subsisted of them only a trace, my perpetual suspicion of things which I did not see and which nevertheless happened continually so close to me, and perhaps another trace as well, earlier, vaster, which was my love itself. For was it not, despite all the denials of my reason, tantamount to knowing Albertine in all her hideousness, actually to choose her, to love her? And even in the moments when mistrust is stilled, is not love the persistence of that mistrust and a transformation of it, is it not a proof of clairvoyance (a proof unintelligible to the lover himself), since desire, reaching out always towards what is most opposite to oneself, forces one to love what will make one suffer? There is no doubt that, inherent in a woman’s charm, in her eyes, her lips, her figure, are the elements, unknown to us, most calculated to make us unhappy, so much so that to feel attracted to her, to begin to love her, is, however innocent we may pretend it to be, to read already, in a different version, all her betrayals and her misdeeds. And may not those charms which, to attract me, corporealised thus the raw, dangerous, fatal elements of a person, have stood in a more direct relation of cause and effect to those secret poisons than do the seductive luxuriance and the toxic juice of certain venomous flowers? It was perhaps, I told myself, Albertine’s vice itself, the cause of my future sufferings, that had produced in her that honest, frank manner, creating the illusion that one enjoyed with her the same loyal and unqualified comradeship as with a man, just as a parallel vice had produced in M. de Charlus a feminine delicacy of sensibility and mind. In the midst of the most complete blindness, perspicacity subsists in the form of predilection and tenderness; so that it is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since as soon as there is a choice it can only be a bad one.
“Did those excursions to the Buttes-Chaumont take place when you used to call for her here?” I asked Andrée.
“Oh! no, from the day Albertine came back from Balbec with you, except the time I told you about, she never did anything again with me. She wouldn’t even allow me to mention such things to her.”
“But my dear Andrée, why go on lying to me? By the merest chance, for I never try to find out anything, I’ve learned in the minutest detail things of that sort which Albertine did, I can tell you exactly, on the bank of a river with a laundry-girl, only a few days before her death.”
“Ah! perhaps after she’d left you, that I can’t say. She felt that she’d failed, that she’d never again be able to regain your trust.”
These last words shattered me. Then I thought again of the evening of the syringa, and remembered that about a fortnight later, as my jealousy kept changing its object, I had asked Albertine whether she had ever had relations with Andrée, and she had replied: “Oh! never! Of course, I adore Andrée; I have a deep affection for her, but as I might have for a sister, and even if I had the tastes which you seem to suppose, she’s the last person I should have thought of in that connexion. I can swear to you by anything you like, the honour of my aunt, the grave of my poor mother.” I had believed
her. And yet even if my suspicions had not been aroused by the contradiction between her former partial admissions with regard to certain matters and the vehemence with which she had afterwards denied them as soon as she saw that I was not indifferent to them, I ought to have remembered Swann, convinced of the platonic nature of M. de Charlus’s friendships and assuring me of it on the evening of the very day I had seen the tailor and the Baron in the courtyard; I ought to have reflected that there are two worlds one behind the other, one consisting of the things that the best, the sincerest people say, and behind it the world composed of the sequence of what those same people do; so that when a married woman says to you of a young man: “Oh! it’s perfectly true that I have an immense affection for him, but it’s something quite innocent, quite pure, I could swear it on the memory of my parents,” one ought oneself, instead of feeling any hesitation, to swear to oneself that she has probably just come out of the bathroom into which, after every assignation she has with the young man in question, she rushes in order not to have a child. The spray of syringa made me profoundly sad, as did also the thought that Albertine could have believed, and said, that I was treacherous and hostile; and most of all perhaps, certain lies so unexpected that I had difficulty in grasping them. One day Albertine had told me that she had been to an aerodrome where one of the airmen was a friend of hers (this doubtless in order to divert my suspicions from women, thinking that I was less jealous of men), and that it had been amusing to see how dazzled Andrée was by the said airman, by all the compliments he paid Albertine, until finally Andrée had wanted to go up in his aeroplane with him. Now this was a complete fabrication; Andrée had never visited the aerodrome in question.
When Andrée left me, it was dinner-time. “You’ll never guess who has been to see me and stayed at least three hours,” said my mother. “I call it three hours, but it was perhaps longer. She arrived almost on the heels of my first visitor, who was Mme Cottard, sat still and watched everybody come and go—and I had more than thirty callers—and left me only a quarter of an hour ago. If you hadn’t had your friend Andrée with you, I’d have sent for you.”
In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5: The Captive, the Fugitive Page 74