Moreover my grief assumed so many forms that at times I no longer recognised it; I wanted to experience a great love; I wanted to find a woman who would live with me; this seemed to me to be the sign that I no longer loved Albertine, whereas it meant that I loved her still. Now, freed, she had taken flight again; men, women followed her. But she lived in me. I realised that this need to experience a great love was, quite as much as the desire to kiss Albertine’s plump cheeks, merely a part of my regret. And at heart I was happy not to fall in love with another woman; I realised that this continuing love for Albertine was like the ghost of the feeling I had had for her, reproducing its various stages and obeying the same laws as the sentimental reality which it reflected on the further side of death. For I was well aware that if I could extend the intervals between my thoughts of Albertine, I should have ceased to love her if the gap had been too wide; I should have become indifferent to her as I was now indifferent to my grandmother. Too much time spent without thinking of her would have broken, in my memory, the continuity which is the very principle of life, though it may recover and resume after a certain lapse of time. Had not this been the case with my love for Albertine when she was alive, a love which had been able to revive after a quite long interval during which I had not given her a thought? My memory must have been obedient to the same laws, must have been unable to endure longer intervals, for it simply went on reflecting, like an aurora borealis, after Albertine’s death the feeling I had had for her; it was like the phantom of my love. It was when I had forgotten her that I might think it wiser and happier to live without love. Thus my regret for Albertine, because it was it that aroused in me the need of a sister, made that need unassuageable. And as my regret for Albertine grew fainter, the need of a sister, which was only an unconscious form of that regret, would become less imperious. And yet these two residues of my love did not follow the same rate of progress in their gradual decline. There were hours when I was determined to marry, so completely had the former been eclipsed, while the latter on the contrary remained very strong. And on the other hand, later on, my jealous memories having died away, suddenly at times a feeling of tenderness for Albertine would well up in my heart, and then, thinking of my own love affairs with other women, I told myself that she would have understood, would have shared them—and her vice became almost a reason for loving her. At times my jealousy revived in moments when I no longer remembered Albertine, although it was of her that I was jealous. I thought that I was jealous of Andrée, apropos of whom I heard at that time of an amorous adventure she was having. But Andrée was to me merely a substitute, a by-road, a connecting link which brought me indirectly to Albertine. So it is that in dreams we give a different face, a different name to a person as to whose underlying identity we are not mistaken. When all was said, notwithstanding the continuing ebb and flow which upset in these particular instances the general law, the sentiments that Albertine had bequeathed to me were more difficult to extinguish than the memory of their original cause. Not only the sentiments, but the sensations. Different in this respect from Swann who, when he had begun to cease to love Odette, had not even been able to re-create in himself the sensation of his love, I felt myself still reliving a past which was now no more than the story of another person; my personality was now somehow split in two, and while the upper part was already hard and chilled, it still burned at its base whenever a spark made the old current pass through it, even after my mind had long ceased to conceive of Albertine. And as no image of her accompanied the painful palpitations that were substituted for it, and the tears that were brought to my eyes by a cold breeze blowing as at Balbec through apple-trees already pink with blossom, I came to wonder whether the renewal of my grief was not due to entirely pathological causes and whether what I took to be the revival of a memory and the final period of a lingering love was not rather the first stage of heart-disease.
There are in certain affections secondary symptoms which the sufferer is too apt to confuse with the malady itself. When they cease, he is surprised to find himself nearer to recovery than he had supposed. Of this sort had been the suffering caused me—the “complication” brought about—by Aimé’s letters with regard to the bathing establishment and the laundry-girls. But a spiritual healer, had such a person visited me, would have found that, in other respects, my grief itself was on the way to recovery. Doubtless, since I was a man, one of those amphibious creatures who are plunged simultaneously in the past and in the reality of the present, there still existed in me a contradiction between the living memory of Albertine and my consciousness of her death. But this contradiction was in a sense the converse of what it had been before. The idea that Albertine was dead, which at first used to contest so furiously with the idea that she was alive that I was obliged to run away from it as children run away from an oncoming wave, by the very force of its incessant onslaughts had ended by capturing the place in my mind that a short while before was still occupied by the idea of her life. Without my being precisely aware of it, it was now this idea of Albertine’s death—no longer the present memory of her life—that for the most part formed the basis of my unconscious musings, with the result that if I interrupted them suddenly to reflect upon myself, what surprised me was not, as during the first days, that Albertine, so alive in me, could be no longer existent upon the earth, could be dead, but that Albertine, who no longer existed upon the earth, who was dead, should have remained so alive in me. Built up and held together by the contiguity of the memories that followed one another, the black tunnel in which my thoughts had lain dreaming so long that they had even ceased to be aware of it was suddenly broken by an interval of sunlight, bathing in the distance a blue and smiling universe where Albertine was no more than a memory, insignificant and full of charm. Was it she, I wondered, who was the true Albertine, or was it the person who, in the darkness through which I had so long been travelling, seemed to me the sole reality? The person I had been so short a time ago, who lived only in the perpetual expectation of the moment when Albertine would come in to say good-night and kiss him, was now made to appear to me, by a sort of multiplication of myself, as no more than a faint fragment of me, already half stripped away, and, like a flower unfolding its petals, I felt the rejuvenating refreshment of an exfoliation. However, these brief illuminations succeeded perhaps only in making me more conscious of my love for Albertine, as happens with every idea that is too constant, needing opposition to make it affirm itself. People who were alive during the war of 1870, for instance, say that the idea of war ended by seeming to them natural, not because they did not think enough about the war, but because they thought of it all the time. And in order to understand how strange and momentous a fact war is, it was necessary that, something else wrenching them out of their permanent obsession, they should forget for a moment that a state of war prevailed and should find themselves once again as they had been in peacetime, until all of a sudden, against that momentary blank, there stood out clearly at last the monstrous reality which they had long ceased to see, since there had been nothing else visible.
If only this withdrawal of my different impressions of Albertine had at least been carried out not in echelon but simultaneously, evenly, frontally, along the whole line of my memory, the recollections of her infidelities receding at the same time as those of her sweetness, forgetting would have brought me solace. It was not so. As upon a beach where the tide recedes unevenly, I would be assailed by the onrush of one of my suspicions when the image of her tender presence had already withdrawn too far from me to be able to bring me its remedial balm.
The betrayals had made me suffer because, however remote the year in which they had occurred, to me they were not remote; but I suffered from them less when they became remote, that is to say when I pictured them to myself less vividly, for the remoteness of a thing is in proportion rather to the visual power of the memory that is looking at it than to the real duration of the intervening days, as the memory of last night’s dream may s
eem to us more distant in its imprecision and dimness than an event which is many years old. But, although the idea of Albertine’s death made some headway in me, the reflux of the sensation that she was alive, if it did not arrest that progress, obstructed it nevertheless and prevented its being regular. And I realise now that during this period (doubtless because of my having forgotten the hours in which she had been cloistered in my house, hours which, by dispelling my anguish at misdeeds which seemed to me almost unimportant because I knew that she was not committing them, had become tantamount to so many proofs of her innocence), I underwent the martyrdom of living in the constant company of an idea quite as novel as the idea that Albertine was dead (until then I had always started from the idea that she was alive), with an idea which I should have supposed it to be equally impossible to endure and which, without my noticing it, was gradually forming the basis of my consciousness, substituting itself for the idea that Albertine was innocent: the idea that she was guilty. When I thought I was doubting her, I was on the contrary believing in her; similarly I took as the starting point of my other ideas the certainty—often proved false as the contrary idea had been—of her guilt, while continuing to imagine that I still felt doubts. I must have suffered a great deal during this period, but I realise that it had to be so. One is cured of suffering only by experiencing it to the full. By protecting Albertine from any contact with the outside world, by creating for myself the illusion that she was innocent, and also, later on, by adopting as the basis of my reasoning the thought that she was alive, I was merely postponing the hour of recovery, because I was postponing the long hours of necessary suffering that must precede it. Now with regard to these ideas of Albertine’s guilt, habit, were it to come into play, would do so in accordance with the same laws as I had already experienced in the course of my life. Just as the name Guermantes had lost the significance and the charm of a road bordered with red and purple flowers and of the window of Gilbert the Bad, Albertine’s presence that of the blue undulations of the sea, the names of Swann, of the lift-boy, of the Princesse de Guermantes and so many others, all that they had meant to me—that charm and that significance leaving me with a mere word which they considered big enough to stand on its own feet, as a man who comes to set a subordinate to work gives him his instructions and after a few weeks withdraws—similarly the painful knowledge of Albertine’s guilt would be expelled from me by habit. Moreover between now and then, like an attack launched from both flanks at once, in this action undertaken by habit two allies would mutually lend a hand. It was because this idea of Albertine’s guilt would become for me more probable, more habitual, that it would become less painful. But at the same time, because it would be less painful, the objections against my certainty of her guilt, which were inspired in my mind only by my desire not to suffer too acutely, would collapse one by one; and, one action precipitating another, I should pass quickly enough from the certainty of Albertine’s innocence to the certainty of her guilt. I had to live with the idea of Albertine’s death, with the idea of her misdeeds, in order for these ideas to become habitual, that is to say in order to be able to forget these ideas and in the end forget Albertine herself.
I had not yet reached this stage. At one time it was my memory, made clearer by some intellectual excitement—such as reading a book—which revived my grief; at other times it was on the contrary my grief—when it was aroused, for instance, by the anguish of a spell of stormy weather—which raised higher, brought nearer to the light, some memory of our love. Moreover these revivals of my love for Albertine might occur after an interval of indifference interspersed with other curiosities, as, after the long interval which had begun with her refusal to let me kiss her at Balbec and during which I had thought far more about Mme de Guermantes, about Andrée, about Mlle de Stermaria, it had revived when I had started seeing her regularly again. But even now various preoccupations could bring about a separation—from a dead woman, this time—in which she left me more indifferent. All this for the same reason, that she was a living person for me. And even later on, when I loved her less, it remained nevertheless for me one of those desires of which we quickly tire, but which revive when we have allowed them to lie dormant for a while. I pursued one living woman, then another, then I returned to my dead one. Often it was in the most obscure recesses of myself, when I could no longer form any clear idea of Albertine, that a name would come by chance to stimulate painful reactions which I supposed to be no longer possible, like those dying people whose brain is no longer capable of thought and who are made to contract their muscles by the prick of a needle. And, during long periods, these stimulations occurred to me so rarely that I was driven to seek for myself occasions for grief, for a pang of jealousy, in an attempt to re-establish contact with the past, to remember her better. For, since regret for a woman is only a recrudescence of love and remains subject to the same laws, the keenness of my regret was intensified by the same causes which in Albertine’s lifetime had increased my love for her and in the front rank of which had always appeared jealousy and grief. But as a rule these occasions—for an illness or a war can always last far longer than the most prophetic wisdom has calculated—took me unawares and caused me such violent shocks that I thought far more of protecting myself against suffering than of appealing to them for a memory.
Moreover a word did not even need to be connected, like “Chaumont,” with some suspicion (even a syllable common to two different names was sufficient for my memory—as for an electrician who is happy with any substance that is a good conductor—to restore the contact between Albertine and my heart) in order to reawaken that suspicion, to be the password, the “Open sesame” unlocking the door of a past which one had ceased to take into account because, having seen more than enough of it, literally one no longer possessed it; one had been shorn of it, had supposed that by this subtraction one’s own personality had changed its form, like a geometrical figure which by the removal of an angle would lose one of its sides; certain phrases, for instance, in which there occurred the name of a street or a road where Albertine might have been, were sufficient to incarnate a potential, non-existent jealousy, in quest of a body, a dwelling, some physical location, some particular realisation.
Often it was simply during my sleep that these “reprises,” these “da capos” of one’s dreams, which turn back several pages of one’s memory, several leaves of the calendar at once, brought me back, made me regress to a painful but remote impression which had long since given place to others but which now became present once more. As a rule, it was accompanied by a whole stage-setting, clumsy but striking, which, giving me the illusion of reality, brought before my eyes, voiced in my ears, what thenceforward dated from that night. Besides, in the history of a love-affair and of its struggles against forgetfulness, do not our dreams occupy an even larger place than our waking state, since they take no account of the infinitesimal divisions of time, suppress transitions, oppose sharp contrasts, undo in an instant the web of consolation so slowly woven during the day, and contrive for us, by night, a meeting with her whom we would eventually have forgotten, provided always that we did not see her again? For whatever people may say, we can perfectly well have in a dream the impression that what is happening in it is real. It would be impossible only for reasons drawn from our waking experience, an experience which at that moment is hidden from us. With the result that this supposititious life seems to us real. Sometimes, by a defect in the internal lighting which spoiled the success of the play, my well-staged memories giving me the illusion of life, I really believed that I had arranged to meet Albertine, that I was seeing her again, but then I found myself incapable of advancing to meet her, of uttering the words which I meant to say to her, of relighting in order to see her the torch that had gone out—impossibilities which were simply in my dream the immobility, the dumbness, the blindness of the sleeper—as suddenly one sees a huge shadow which ought not to be visible obliterate the figures on the screen of a magic lantern, a
shadow which is that of the lantern itself, or that of the operator. At other times Albertine was present in my dream, and proposed to leave me once again, without my being moved by her resolve. This was because a warning ray of light had managed to filter into the darkness of my sleep, and what deprived Albertine’s future actions, her threatened departure, of any importance for me was the knowledge that she was dead. But often, even more clearly, this memory that Albertine was dead was combined, without destroying it, with the sensation that she was alive. I chatted to her, and while I was speaking my grandmother moved to and fro at the back of the room. Part of her chin had crumbled away like a corroded statue, but I found nothing unusual in that. I told Albertine that I had various questions to ask her with regard to the bathing establishment at Balbec, and to a certain laundress in Touraine, but I would put them off till later since we had plenty of time and there was no longer any urgency. She assured me that she was not doing anything wrong and that she had merely, the day before, kissed Mlle Vinteuil on the lips. “What? Is she here?” “Yes, in fact it’s time for me to leave you, as I have to go and see her presently.” And since, now that Albertine was dead, I no longer kept her a prisoner in my house as in the last months of her life, her visit to Mlle Vinteuil perturbed me. I did not want to show it; Albertine told me that she had done no more than kiss her, but she was evidently beginning to lie again as in the days when she used to deny everything. Presently, no doubt, she would not be content merely with kissing Mlle Vinteuil. Doubtless from a certain point of view I was wrong to let myself be disturbed like this, since, according to what we are told, the dead can feel nothing, can do nothing. People say so, but this did not alter the fact that my grandmother, who was dead, had continued nevertheless to live for many years, and at that moment was walking to and fro in my room. And no doubt, once I was awake, this idea of a dead woman who continued to live ought to have become as impossible for me to understand as it is to explain. But I had already formed it so many times in the course of those transient periods of madness which are our dreams, that I had become in time familiar with it; our memory of dreams may become lasting, if they repeat themselves often enough. And long after my dream had ended, I remained tormented by that kiss which Albertine had told me she had given in words which I thought I could still hear. And indeed they must have passed very close to my ear since it was I myself who had uttered them. All day long, I continued to talk to Albertine; I questioned her, I forgave her, I made up for my forgetfulness of the things which I had always meant to say to her during her life. And all of a sudden I was startled by the thought that the creature invoked by memory to whom all these remarks were addressed no longer bore any relation to reality, that death had destroyed the various parts of the face to which the continual thrust of the will to live, now abolished, had alone given the unity of a person.
In Search of Lost Time, Volume V Page 65