When he had consulted the time-table, he saw that he could not leave Paris before the evening. Françoise asked me: “Should I remove Miss Albertine’s bed from the study?” “On the contrary,” I replied, “please make it up.” I was hoping that she would return from one day to the next and I did not want Françoise even to guess that this might be in doubt. I needed Albertine’s departure to seem to have been agreed with me, with no implication that she loved me any the less. But Françoise looked at me with an air, if not of incredulity, at least of doubt. She too had her own two hypotheses. Her nostrils flared as she scented trouble, and she must have been scenting it for some time. And if she was not perfectly sure, it was perhaps only because, like me, she was suspicious of believing absolutely in something that would give her too much pleasure. Now the burden of the affair weighed not on my exhausted mind but on Saint-Loup. I was buoyed up by the joyful feeling that I had reached a decision, saying to myself, “I have returned her shot, on the volley.”
Saint-Loup could barely have caught the train when I bumped into Bloch in my lobby, not having heard him ring the door-bell, so that I had no alternative but to entertain him for a moment. Recently he had met me out walking with Albertine (whom he knew from Balbec) one day when she was in a bad mood. “I have dined with M. Bontemps,” he told me, “and as I have some influence on him, I told him that I was distressed to note that his niece was not more kindly disposed toward you, and that he ought to implore her to address this issue.” I seethed with rage: this imploring and complaining would undermine the whole impact of Saint-Loup’s enterprise and would implicate me directly as far as Albertine was concerned by making me seem to beseech her. To add insult to injury Françoise had remained in the lobby and heard everything. I protested vigorously to Bloch, telling him that I had never asked him to undertake any such mission and that moreover the facts he mentioned were untrue. From then on Bloch started smiling more and more broadly, less, I believe, from amusement than from embarrassment at having annoyed me. He jokingly expressed his astonishment at having aroused such anger. Perhaps he said this to diminish in my eyes the importance of his indiscreet initiative, perhaps because he was of a cowardly nature and wallowed pleasurably and languidly in a life of lies, like a jelly-fish floating on the surface of the sea, or perhaps because, even had he been of another race of men, other people, since they can never share exactly our point of view, do not understand the extent of the harm that their randomly chosen words can cause. I had only just shown him the door, finding no remedy for what he had done, when the bell rang again and Françoise handed me a summons from a chief inspector of police. The parents of the little girl that I had taken home with me for an hour had decided to lodge a complaint against me for seducing a minor. There are moments in our lives when a kind of beauty is born of the multiplicity of the trials, interwoven like Wagnerian motifs, that assail us, as well as of the simultaneous realization that real events do not fit into the pattern of reflections pictured in the poor little mirror called the future that the intellect holds out before our eyes, but lurk on the threshold ready to pounce on us, like a detective waiting to catch someone in flagrante delicto. Already, left to their own devices, events evolve, whether because failure amplifies their importance in our eyes or whether because satisfaction reduces it. But they rarely come singly. The sentiments aroused by each of them contradict each other, and to a certain extent, as I felt while on my way to meet the chief inspector, fear is at least a temporary and fairly potent emetic for emotional troubles. At the police station I was greeted with insults from the parents, who told me that they would not “swallow that kind of deal” and handed back the five hundred francs, which I refused to accept, and by the chief inspector, who, taking as his model the supreme talent of presiding magistrates for “repartee,” seized on a single word in each sentence I uttered and used it as part of a witty and crushing rejoinder. No one even discussed my innocence in the case, for it was the one hypothesis that no one would entertain for a minute. Nevertheless the difficulty of bringing a charge meant that I was let off with this ferocious grilling, which lasted as long as the parents were there. But as soon as they had left, the chief inspector, who had a weakness for little girls, changed his tone of voice and reprimanded me as a partner in crime: “Another time you should take more care. Good Lord, don’t pick them up so abruptly, it’s bound to fail. Besides, you can find plenty of little girls better than her, and far cheaper. The price you paid was ridiculously steep.” I felt so sure that he would misunderstand me if I tried to explain myself that I took advantage of his invitation to leave, without saying another word. Each stranger I passed on the way home seemed to be a police inspector spying on my every act and gesture. But this leitmotif, like that of my anger against Bloch, faded, leaving room only for that of Albertine’s departure. Now this motif started up again, but on an almost joyful note now that Saint-Loup had left. Since he had taken it upon himself to go to see Mme Bontemps, my suffering had become more diffuse. I believed that it was because I had acted, and I believed it in all good faith, for we never know what is hidden in the depths of our own souls. Deep down, what made me happy was not that I had passed the burden of my indecision on to Saint-Loup, as I believed. Actually I was not entirely mistaken; the specific remedy for the cure of an unfortunate event (and three-quarters of all events are unfortunate) is a decision; for deciding has the effect of suddenly reversing our thoughts and stemming the flow of those which derive from the past event and prolong its resonance, blocking it with a contrary flow of thoughts, brought in from outside, from the future. But these new thoughts are beneficial for us chiefly (as with those that invaded me at that moment) when what they bring us from the depths of the future is hope. Deep down what made me so happy was the secret certainty that, since Saint-Loup’s mission could not fail, Albertine was bound to return. I understood this when as soon as I had not received a reply from Saint-Loup by the end of the first day, I started to suffer again. It was therefore not my deciding to surrender all powers to him that was the cause of my joy, which otherwise would have been boundless, but my thinking “Success is certain” while saying “What will be, will be.” And the thought, aroused by his delay, that in fact something other than success could arise was so hateful to me that I had lost my gaiety. It is in fact our prediction, our expectation of happy events that fills us with a joy which we attribute to other causes and which ceases only when it plunges us back into our sorrows, if we are no longer so sure that our wishes will be fulfilled. It is always this invisible belief that sustains the whole structure of our sensibility, which, when deprived of this, crumbles. We have seen how this determines for us the value or the nullity of people, our enthusiasm or boredom on meeting them. Similarly it decides whether a sorrow seems tolerable and unexceptional, simply because we are convinced that it will come to an end, or whether it suddenly expands until someone’s presence becomes as important as our own lives, sometimes more. One extra thing finally made the pain I felt in my heart, which, I have to admit, had diminished, as acute as it had been at the start. This was rereading a phrase from Albertine’s letter. However much we love a person, the suffering caused by losing her, when in our solitude we have nothing else on our mind, which can to a certain extent give the suffering whatever form it wants, is bearable and differs from the less human and personal suffering of those more unpredictable and eccentric accidents of our mental or emotional worlds—which are caused less directly by the person herself than by the manner in which we have learned that we will never see her again. As for Albertine, I could think of her and weep quietly, accepting that I would no more see her this evening than I had yesterday, but to reread “my decision is irrevocable” was something else, it was like taking some drug so dangerous that it could cause a fatal heart attack. There are in the actions, details and letters of a separation, specific dangers which amplify and distort even the pain that people can cause us. But this suffering did not last long. Despite everything, I was
so sure of Saint-Loup’s skill and success, and Albertine’s return seemed to me to be something so certain, that I started to wonder whether I had been right to want it. Unfortunately for me, who had thought the police affair was over and done with, Françoise came to announce that an inspector had called to inquire whether I might not be in the habit of inviting young girls home, and that the concierge, thinking that he meant Albertine, had replied that I was, and that, from then on, the house seemed to be under surveillance. From that moment on it would never again be possible for me to invite a little girl into my home to share my sorrows, without running the risk of being shamed in front of her by an inspector springing up and making her see me as a criminal. And at one and the same time I realized how we live more through certain dreams than we think, for the impossibility of ever cradling a little girl in my arms seemed to drain my life of all value for evermore, but in addition I realized how easy it is to understand that people may easily risk their fortunes and their lives, when we think that self-interest and the fear of death rule the world. For if I had thought that the arrival of the police could cause even a little girl who did not know me to form a shameful idea of me, how much I would rather have killed myself! There was not even any possible comparison between the two kinds of suffering. But in real life people never think that those to whom they offer money, or whom they threaten to kill, might have a mistress or even simply a companion whose esteem they value, even if they do not value their own. But, suddenly, in a moment of unwitting confusion (for in fact I had never imagined that if Albertine had not been over the age of consent, she would have lived with me, let alone been my mistress), I thought that “the seduction of minors” could also refer to Albertine. Thus my life seemed walled in on all sides. And at the thought that I had not lived a chaste life with her, I found in the punishment inflicted on me for having cradled an unknown little girl in my arms the balance which always occurs in human punishment, suggesting that there is hardly ever either a just condemnation or a judicial error, but a kind of harmony between the false notion of an innocent act entertained by the judge and the culpable actions which he has ignored. But then, thinking that Albertine’s return could bring upon me an ignominious charge which would degrade me in her eyes and would perhaps cause her some harm that she would not forgive me, I ceased to wish for her return, which terrified me. I wished I could telegraph her immediately not to return. Then immediately, drowning all else, a passionate desire for her return invaded me. It was because, having envisaged for a moment the possibility of telling her not to return and of living without her, I suddenly felt on the contrary ready to sacrifice all travel, all pleasure, all work, for Albertine to return! Oh, how my love for Albertine, whose outcome I had thought I could predict after what had happened to my love for Gilberte, had developed in exactly the opposite way to the latter! How impossible it was for me to continue not to see her! And with every action accomplished, even the most trivial, as long as it had previously been bathed in the happy atmosphere of Albertine’s presence, I found it necessary each time, with further effort and equal suffering, to renew my apprenticeship of separation. Then competition with other forms of life cast this new pain into the shadows, and during those days, which were the first days of spring, I even experienced, while waiting for Saint-Loup to arrange to see Mme Bontemps, a few moments of pleasant calm, imagining Venice and meeting beautiful, unknown women. As soon as I realized this I felt panic within me. The calm which I had just sampled was the first appearance of the great but intermittent force which would struggle within me against pain and against love, and would ultimately overcome them. What I had just had a foretaste and foreboding of, if only for a moment, was that which would later become a permanent state for me, a life where I would no longer suffer because of Albertine, where I would no longer love her. And my love, which had just recognized the only enemy able to vanquish it, the act of forgetting, started to tremble, like a lion enclosed in a cage which has suddenly seen the python that will devour it.
I thought constantly of Albertine, and when Françoise entered my room she could never say, “There are no letters” soon enough to cut short my anxiety. But from time to time, by letting some current of ideas or other flow through my sorrow, I managed to refresh and ventilate a little the stuffy atmosphere of my heart. But then in the evening, if I managed to get off to sleep, it was as if the memory of Albertine had been the medicine which had induced my sleep, which as its effects wore off, would waken me. I thought of Albertine all the time that I was asleep. It was a very special sleep, which only she could provide me with and, what is more, one where I would not have been free, as I might during my waking hours, to think of anything else. Sleep and her memory were like two substances mingled together to form a sleeping-draft. Moreover during my waking hours my suffering increased day by day instead of diminishing. Not that the work of forgetting was not under way, but it was precisely this process that enhanced my idealization of the missing image and thereby the absorption of my initial suffering into the other analogous sufferings which reinforced it. Even then this image was bearable. But if I suddenly thought of her room, her room with its bed lying empty, of her piano, of her motor-car, I lost all my strength, I closed my eyes, and my head slumped on my shoulder as if I were about to faint. The sound of a door opening hurt me almost as much, because it was not being opened by her.
When there might be a telegram from Saint-Loup I did not dare ask, “Is there a telegram?” One did finally come, but it only postponed everything by saying, “The ladies have gone away for three days.” Doubtless, if I had tolerated the four days that had already elapsed since her departure, it was because I said to myself, “It’s only a matter of time, she will be back before the end of the week.” But this argument could not prevent the fact that for my heart and for my body, the actions which I had to perform were the same: to live without her, to go home and find her not there, to walk past the door to her room—the courage to open it still failed me—knowing that she was not there, to go to bed without saying good-night to her, those were actions which my heart had had to perform to the full, for all their terror, and in just the same way as if I were never to see Albertine again. Yet the fact that I had already performed them four times in my heart proved that I was now capable of continuing to do so. And soon perhaps I would no longer need to rely on this argument—the imminent return of Albertine—which was helping me to continue to live (I could say to myself, “She will never return,” and carry on living regardless, as I had done for the last four days), just as a cripple who has learned how to walk again can throw away his crutches. No doubt in the evening when I came home I still found memories which left me breathless and suffocating with emptiness and loneliness, memories juxtaposed in an interminable series of all the evenings when Albertine was waiting for me; but already I found the memory of the day before, the day before that and the two preceding evenings, that is the memory of the four evenings which had passed since Albertine’s departure, during which I had remained on my own without her, yet when I had none the less survived for four evenings already, composing a very thin layer of memories compared to the others, but which might perhaps thicken with every passing day. I need hardly describe the letter of proposal which I received at that period from a niece of Mme de Guermantes, reputedly the prettiest young lady in Paris, nor the advances made to me by the Duc de Guermantes on behalf of her parents, resigned in the interests of their daughter’s happiness to such a misalliance and with such an unequal party. Such events, which might otherwise touch our self-esteem, are too painful when we are in love. We would like to reveal their import, were it not tactless to do so, to the other lady, who has formed a less favorable opinion of us, although this opinion would still not be modified if she learned that we might be the object of an entirely different opinion. What the Duc’s niece wrote to me could only have irritated Albertine.
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