In Search of Lost Time, Volume V

by Marcel Proust

  There was only one moment when I felt a kind of hatred for her, which merely sharpened my need to hold on to her. Since, being exclusively jealous of Mlle Vinteuil that night, I thought of the Trocadéro with the greatest indifference (not only because I had sent her there to avoid the Verdurins, but even when I thought of Lea’s presence there, on account of which I had brought her back so that she should not meet her), I mentioned Lea’s name without thinking, and Albertine, at once on her guard, supposing that I had perhaps heard something more, took the initiative and exclaimed volubly, but without looking me straight in the face: “I know her very well. Some of my friends and I went to see her act last year, and after the performance we went behind to her dressing-room. She changed in front of us. It was most interesting.” Then my mind was compelled to relinquish Mlle Vinteuil and, in a despairing effort, in that fruitless hunt through the abysses of possible reconstructions, attached itself to the actress, to that evening when Albertine had gone to see her in her dressing-room. On the one hand, after all the oaths she had sworn to me, and in so truthful a tone, after her complete sacrifice of her freedom, how could I possibly believe that there was anything wrong in it? And yet, on the other hand, were not my suspicions antennae pointing in the direction of the truth, since if she had given up the Verdurins for my sake in order to go to the Trocadéro, nevertheless at the Verdurins’ Mlle Vinteuil had been expected, and at the Trocadéro, which she had moreover given up in order to go for a drive with me, there had been this Lea, who seemed to me to be disturbing me without cause and yet whom, in a remark which I had not extracted from her, she admitted having known on a larger scale than my fears had ever envisaged, in circumstances that were indeed dubious: for what could have induced her to go behind like that to her dressing-room? If I ceased to suffer on account of Mlle Vinteuil when I suffered because of Lea, those two tormentors of my day, it was either because of the inability of my mind to picture too many scenes at one time, or because of the intrusion of my nervous emotions of which my jealousy was but the echo. I could deduce from them only that she had no more belonged to Lea than to Mlle Vinteuil and that I believed in the Lea hypothesis only because she was now uppermost in my mind. But the fact that my jealousies subsided—to revive from time to time one after another—did not mean, either, that they did not correspond each to some truth of which I had had a foreboding, that of these various women I must not say to myself none, but all. I say a foreboding, for I could not project myself to all the points of time and space which I should have had to occupy; and besides, what instinct would have given me the sequence and the co-ordinates to enable me to surprise Albertine at such and such a time with Lea, or with the Balbec girls, or with that friend of Mme Bontemps whom she had brushed against, or with the girl on the tennis-court who had nudged her with her elbow, or with Mlle Vinteuil?

  “My little Albertine,” I replied, “it is very good of you to make me this promise. Anyhow, for the first few years at least, I shall avoid the places where I might meet you. You don’t know whether you’ll be going to Balbec this summer? Because in that case I should arrange not to go there myself.” Now, if I went on in this way, anticipating the future in my lying inventions, it was less with the object of frightening Albertine than that of distressing myself. As a man who at first has had no serious reason for losing his temper becomes completely intoxicated by the sound of his own voice and lets himself be carried away by a fury engendered not by his grievance but by his anger itself as it steadily grows, so I was sliding faster and faster down the slope of my wretchedness, towards an ever more profound despair, with the inertia of a man who feels the cold grip him, makes no effort to struggle against it, and even finds a sort of pleasure in shivering. And if, presently, I had the strength at last to pull myself together, to react, to go into reverse, as I had every intention of doing, it was not so much for the pain that Albertine had caused me by greeting me with such hostility on my return, as for the pain I had felt in imagining, in order to pretend to be settling them, the formalities of an imaginary separation, in foreseeing its consequences, that Albertine’s kiss, when the time came for her to bid me good-night, would have to console me now. In any case, it was important that this leave-taking should not come of its own accord from her, for that would have made more difficult the reversal whereby I would propose to her to abandon the idea of our parting. I therefore continued to remind her that the time to say good-night had long since come and gone, and this, by leaving the initiative to me, enabled me to put it off for a moment longer. And thus I interspersed the questions which I continued to put to Albertine with allusions to our exhaustion and the lateness of the hour.

  “I don’t know where I shall be going,” she replied to the last of these questions with a preoccupied air. “Perhaps I shall go to Touraine, to my aunt’s.” And this first plan that she suggested froze me as though it were beginning actually to put our final separation into effect. She looked round the room, at the pianola, the blue satin armchairs. “I still can’t get used to the idea that I shan’t see all this again, tomorrow, or the next day, or ever. Poor little room. It seems to me quite impossible; I can’t get it into my head.”

  “It had to be; you were unhappy here.”

  “No, I wasn’t at all unhappy, it’s now that I shall be unhappy.”

  “No, I assure you, it’s better for you.”

  “For you, perhaps!”

  I began to stare into space as though, tormented by a great uncertainty, I was struggling with an idea that had just occurred to me. Then, all of a sudden: “Listen, Albertine, you say that you’re happier here, that you’re now going to be unhappy.”

  “Why, of course.”

  “That appals me. Would you like us to try to carry on for a few weeks? Who knows, week by week, we may perhaps go on for a long time. You know that there are temporary arrangements which end by becoming permanent.”

  “Oh, it would be sweet of you!”

  “Only in that case it’s ridiculous of us to have made ourselves wretched like this over nothing for hours on end. It’s like making all the preparations for a long journey and then staying at home. I’m absolutely dead beat.”

  I sat her on my knee, took Bergotte’s manuscript which she so longed to have, and wrote on the cover: “To my little Albertine, in memory of a new lease of life.”

  “Now,” I said to her, “go and sleep until tomorrow, my darling, for you must be worn out.”

  “Most of all I’m very happy.”

  “Do you love me a bit?”

  “A hundred times more than ever.”

  I should have been wrong to be pleased with this little piece of play-acting. Even if it had stopped short of the sort of full-scale production I had given it, even if we had done no more than simply discuss a separation, it would have been serious enough. In conversations of this sort, we imagine that we are speaking not just insincerely, which is true, but freely. Whereas they are generally the first faint murmur of an unsuspected storm, whispered to us without our knowing it. In reality, what we express at such times is the opposite of our desire (which is to live for ever with the one we love), but also the impossibility of living together which is the cause of our daily suffering, a suffering preferred by us to that of a separation, which will, however, end by separating us in spite of ourselves. But not, as a rule, at once. More often than not it happens—this was not, as we shall see, my case with Albertine—that, some time after the words in which we did not believe, we put into action a vague attempt at a deliberate separation, not painful, temporary. We ask the woman, so that afterwards she may be happier in our company, so that we at the same time may momentarily escape from continual bouts of gloom and exhaustion, to go away without us, or to let us go away without her, for a few days—the first that we have spent away from her for a long time past, and something that we should have thought inconceivable. Very soon she returns to take her place by our fireside. Only this separation, short but effectuated, is not so arbitrarily dec
ided upon, not so certainly the only one that we have in mind. The same bouts of gloom begin again, the same difficulty in living together makes itself felt, only a parting is no longer so difficult as before; we have begun by talking about it, and have then put it into practice amicably. But these are only premonitory symptoms which we have failed to recognise. Presently, the temporary and benign separation will be succeeded by the terrible and final separation for which, without knowing it, we have paved the way.

  “Come to my room in five minutes and let me see something of you, my darling one. It would so nice if you would. But afterwards I shall fall asleep at once, for I’m almost dead.”

  It was indeed a dead woman that I saw when, presently, I entered her room. She had fallen asleep as soon as she lay down; her sheets, wrapped round her body like a shroud, had assumed, with their elegant folds, the rigidity of stone. It was as though, reminiscent of certain mediaeval Last Judgments, the head alone was emerging from the tomb, awaiting in its sleep the Archangel’s trumpet. This head had been surprised by sleep almost upside down, the hair dishevelled. Seeing that expressionless body lying there, I asked myself what logarithmic table it constituted, that all the actions in which it might have been involved, from the nudge of an elbow to the brushing of a skirt, should be capable of causing me, stretched out to the infinity of all the points that it had occupied in space and time, and from time to time sharply reawakened in my memory, so intense an anguish, even though I knew that it was determined by impulses and desires of hers which in another person, in herself five years earlier or five years later, would have left me quite indifferent. It was all a lie, but a lie for which I had not the courage to seek any solution other than my own death. And so I remained, in the fur-lined coat which I had not taken off since my return from the Verdurins’, beside that twisted body, that allegorical figure. Allegorising what? My death? My love? Soon I began to hear her regular breathing. I went and sat down on the edge of her bed to take that soothing cure of breeze and contemplation. Then I withdrew very quietly so as not to wake her.

  It was so late that, in the morning, I warned Françoise to tread very softly when she had to pass by the door of Albertine’s room. And so Françoise, convinced that we had spent the night in what she used to call orgies, sarcastically warned the other servants not to “wake the Princess.” And this was one of the things that I dreaded, that Françoise might one day be unable to contain herself any longer, might treat Albertine with insolence, and that this might introduce complications into our life. Françoise was now no longer, as at the time when it distressed her to see Eulalie treated generously by my aunt, of an age to endure her jealousy with fortitude. It distorted, paralysed our old servant’s face to such an extent that at times I wondered, after some outburst of rage, whether she had not had a slight stroke. Having thus asked that Albertine’s sleep should be respected, I was unable to sleep myself. I tried to understand Albertine’s true state of mind. Was it a real peril that I had averted by that wretched farce which I had played, and notwithstanding her assurance that she was so happy living with me, had she really felt at certain moments a longing for freedom, or on the contrary was I to believe what she said? Which of these two hypotheses was the truth? If it often happened to me, especially later on, to extend an incident in my past life to the dimensions of history when I wished to understand some political event, conversely, that morning, in trying to understand the significance of our overnight scene, I could not help identifying it, in spite of all the differences, with a diplomatic incident that had just occurred. I had perhaps the right to reason thus. For it was highly probable that the example of M. de Charlus had guided me unwittingly in the sort of lying scene which I had so often seen him enact with such authority; and what else was this on his part than an unconscious importation into the domain of his private life of the innate tendency of his German blood, guilefully provocative and arrogantly bellicose at need?

  Various persons, among them the Prince of Monaco, having suggested the idea to the French Government that, if it did not dispense with M. Delcassé, a menacing Germany would definitely declare war, the Minister for Foreign Affairs had been asked to resign. Thus the French Government had admitted the hypothesis of an intention to make war upon us if we did not yield. But others thought that it was all a mere “bluff” and that if France had stood firm Germany would not have drawn the sword. No doubt in this case the scenario was not merely different but almost the reverse, since the threat of a rupture had never been put forward by Albertine; but a series of impressions had led me to believe that she was thinking of it, as France had been led to believe it of Germany. On the other hand, if Germany desired peace, to have provoked in the French Government the idea that she was anxious for war was a questionable and dangerous trick. True, my conduct had been adroit enough, if it was the thought that I would never make up my mind to break with her that provoked in Albertine sudden longings for independence. And was it not difficult to believe that she did not have such longings, to shut one’s eyes to a whole secret existence, directed towards the satisfaction of her vice, simply on the strength of the anger with which, on learning that I had gone to see the Verdurins, she had exclaimed: “I thought as much,” and then gone on to reveal everything by saying: “Wasn’t Mlle Vinteuil to be there?” All this was corroborated by Albertine’s meeting with Mme Verdurin of which Andrée had informed me. And yet, perhaps, I told myself, when I tried to go against my own instinct, these sudden longings for independence were caused—supposing them to exist—or would eventually be caused by the opposite theory, to wit, that I had never had any intention of marrying her, that it was when I made, as though involuntarily, an allusion to our approaching separation that I was telling the truth, that I would leave her sooner or later whatever happened—belief which the scene I had fabricated that night could then only have reinforced and which might end by engendering in her the resolution: “If it’s bound to happen sooner or later, we might as well get it over with at once.” Preparations for war, which are recommended by the most misleading of adages as the best way of ensuring peace, on the contrary create first of all the belief in each of the adversaries that the other desires a rupture, a belief which brings the rupture about, and then, when it has occurred, the further belief in each of the two that it is the other that has sought it. Even if the threat was not sincere, its success encourages a repetition. But the exact point up to which a bluff may succeed is difficult to determine; if one party goes too far, the other, which has yielded hitherto, advances in its turn; the first party, no longer capable of changing its methods, accustomed to the idea that to seem not to fear a rupture is the best way of avoiding one (which is what I had done that night with Albertine), and moreover driven by pride to prefer death to surrender, perseveres in its threat until the moment when neither can draw back. The bluff may also be blended with sincerity, may alternate with it, and what was yesterday a game may become a reality tomorrow. Finally it may also happen that one of the adversaries is really determined upon war—that Albertine, for instance, had the intention of sooner or later not continuing this life any longer, or on the contrary that the idea had never even entered her head and that my imagination had invented the whole thing from start to finish.

  Such were the different hypotheses which I considered while she lay asleep that morning. And yet as to the last I can say that never, in the period that followed, did I threaten to leave Albertine unless in response to a hankering for a baleful freedom on her part, a hankering which she did not express to me, but which seemed to me to be implied by certain mysterious dissatisfactions, certain words, certain gestures, for which it could be the only possible explanation and for which she refused to give me any other. Even then, quite often, I noted them without making any allusion to a possible separation, hoping that they were the result of a bad mood which would end that same day. But sometimes that mood would continue without remission for weeks on end, during which Albertine seemed anxious to provoke a conflict
, as though she knew of pleasures which were available at that moment in some more or less remote place and which would continue to influence her until they came to an end, like those atmospheric changes which, right by our own fireside, affect our nerves even when they are occurring as far away as the Balearic islands.

  That morning, while Albertine lay asleep and I was trying to guess what was concealed in her, I received a letter from my mother in which she expressed her anxiety at having heard nothing of what I had decided in these words from Mme de Sévigné: “As for me, I am convinced that he will not marry; but then, why trouble this girl whom he will never marry? Why risk making her refuse suitors whom she will henceforth regard only with scorn? Why disturb the mind of a person whom it would be so easy to avoid?” This letter from my mother brought me back to earth. “Why do I go on seeking after a mysterious soul, interpreting a face, and feeling myself surrounded by presentiments which I dare not explore?” I asked myself. “I’ve been dreaming, the matter is quite simple. I am an indecisive young man, and it is a case of one of those marriages as to which it takes time to find out whether they will happen or not. There is nothing in this peculiar to Albertine.” This thought brought me immense but short-lived relief. Very soon I said to myself: “One can of course reduce everything, if one regards it in its social aspect, to the most commonplace item of newspaper gossip. From outside, it is perhaps thus that I myself would look at it. But I know very well that what is true, what at least is also true, is everything that I have thought, what I have read in Albertine’s eyes, the fears that torment me, the problem that I continually put to myself with regard to Albertine. The story of the hesitant suitor and the broken engagement may correspond to this, as the report of a theatrical performance made by an intelligent reporter may give us the subject of one of Ibsen’s plays. But there is something beyond those facts that are reported. It is true that this other thing exists perhaps, were we capable of seeing it, in all hesitant suitors and in all engagements that drag on, because there is perhaps an element of mystery in everyday life.” It was possible for me to neglect it in the lives of other people, but Albertine’s life and my own I was living from within.