But I predicted none of this. The likely result of my letter seemed to me on the contrary to be to make Albertine return as soon as possible. So, since I was thinking of this outcome I felt greatly soothed as I wrote the letter. But at the same time I had not ceased to weep while I was writing it; at first rather in the same way as the day when I had faked a separation, because the words rendered present to me the idea that they expressed, although they aimed to produce the opposite effect (uttering their lies out of pride in order to avoid admitting that I loved her), they were charged with sadness, but I did also feel that there was some truth in the idea.
Since the effect of this letter seemed certain to me, I regretted having sent it. For in imagining Albertine’s return as ultimately so simple, suddenly all the reasons that had made our marriage seem wrong for me returned in full strength. I hoped that she would refuse to return. I was starting to calculate how much my freedom and my whole future life hung on her refusal; how crazy I had been to write; how I should have retrieved my letter (alas, now sent), when Françoise brought it back to me, along with the newspaper which she was bringing upstairs. She was unsure how many stamps my letter required. But I immediately changed my mind; I did not want Albertine to return, however, in order to alleviate my anxiety, I wanted this to be her own decision, and so I decided to give the letter back to Françoise. I opened the newspaper. It announced the death of La Berma. Then I remembered the two different ways in which I had listened to Phèdre, but now there was a third way for me to think of the declaration scene. It seemed to me that what I had so often recited to myself and what I had listened to in the theater, was the expression of laws that I would come to experience in my own life. There are in our soul things which are dearer to us than we realize. Or else, if we do yearn for them, it is because from day to day, for fear of failure or suffering, we delay taking full possession of them. That is what happened to me in the case of Gilberte, when I had thought that I could do without her. If, before the moment when we are entirely detached from these things, which occurs long after the moment when we first believe ourselves detached, if for instance the young lady gets engaged, we become insane and we find that we can no longer bear our life, which seemed so monotonous and calm. Or if the object of our desire is in our possession, we believe that she is a burden to us, that we would gladly be rid of her; which is what had happened to me in the case of Albertine. But just let the indifferent object be removed by her departure, and we can no longer live. Now did not the “argument” of Phèdre combine the two cases? Hippolyte is about to leave. Phèdre, who until then has taken care to court his hostility, from moral duty, so she says, or rather, as the poet makes her say, because she does not believe that she could succeed, and because she does not feel loved, and can now hold out no longer. She comes to him to admit her love, and this is the scene that I had so often recited to myself:
On dit qu’un prompt départ vous éloigne de nous.10
Doubtless this reason for the departure of Hippolyte is incidental, we might think, compared with that of the death of Theseus. And even when, a few lines later, Phèdre pretends for a moment to have been misunderstood:
. . . Aurais-je perdu tout le soin de ma gloire,11
we might suppose that it is because Hippolyte has rejected her declaration:
Madame, oubliez-vous
Que Thésée est mon père, et qu’il est votre époux?12
But even had he not had this indignant reaction, and had Phèdre seen happiness within her grasp, she might still have felt that it was of little worth. But as soon as she sees that it escapes her, that Hippolyte thinks that he has misunderstood her and makes his excuses, then, just as I did the moment after handing my letter to Françoise, she wants the rejection to come from him, she wants to try one last chance:
Ah cruel, tu m’as trop entendue!13
And even Swann’s harshness toward Odette, of which I had heard tell, or mine toward Albertine, a harshness which substitutes for the former love a new one, composed of pity, tenderness and a need to find expression for emotion, and which is only a variant of the former love, even these can be also be found in this scene:
Tu me haïssais plus, je ne t’aimais pas moins.
Tes malheurs te prêtait encor de nouveaux charmes.14
The proof that “care for her good name” is not what Phèdre holds most dear is that she would forgive Hippolyte and would turn her back on Oenone’s good counsel, if she did not learn at this moment that Hippolyte was in love with Aricie. For jealousy, which in love is tantamount to the loss of all happiness, touches us so much more than the loss of reputation. Then it is that she lets Oenone (who is only a name for her baser self) slander Hippolyte without taking “care to defend him” and thus sends the man who refuses to love her to a fate which, however calamitous, still offers her no consolation, since her own, self-inflicted death follows swiftly on from that of Hippolyte. This, minimizing the share of all the “Jansenist” scruples,15 as Bergotte would have called them, which Racine has allocated to Phèdre in order to make her seem less guilty, is at any rate how this scene appeared to me, almost as a prophecy of the kind of love-scenes that I would come to enact in my own lifetime. None the less, these reflections had not altered my determination in the slightest, and I held out the letter to Françoise for her to take it finally to the post, so as to have made this approach toward Albertine, which seemed indispensable to me the minute I heard that it had not been accomplished. And we are doubtless wrong to believe that fulfilling our desires is of little account, since as soon as we believe it possible for them not to be fulfilled, we need them once more, and it is only when we are quite certain that they cannot escape us that we feel that they are not worth pursuing. And, in a way, we are not wrong. For if this attainment of our desires and our happiness seem trivial only when they are secure, they none the less contain unstable elements from which nothing but sorrow can emerge. And the more completely our desires have been realized and the longer the happiness has been prolonged, against the laws of nature, and has been consecrated by habit, the stronger the sorrow, the more impossible to bear. In another sense too, the two tendencies, in this case the one which made me want my letter to be sent and, when I thought that it had been, to regret this, are both true in their way. As for the first tendency, it is only too easy to understand that we should pursue our happiness—or our unhappiness—while hoping at the same time, through the consequences of this new action as they start to unfold, to maintain expectations that will not leave us in total despair, in a word, which might manage to transform the misfortune which afflicts us into other forms that we imagine we must find less cruel. But the other tendency is no less important, for, born of our belief in the success of our enterprise, it is quite simply a beginning, the anticipated beginning of the disillusionment that we should soon experience if faced with the satisfaction of our desires, our regret at having settled on this form of happiness at the expense of excluding others. I handed the letter back to Françoise, telling her to take it quickly to the post-office. As soon as my letter had left, I again envisaged Albertine’s return as imminent. This brought into my mind a constant stream of graceful images, whose sweetness could not help neutralize the dangers that I saw in this return. I was intoxicated by the prospect of recovering the long-lost sweetness of having her by my side.
Time passes, and gradually all the things which we have falsely alleged come true, an experience which had affected me only too strongly with Gilberte; the indifference that I had feigned while I sobbed day and night had come to exist; gradually, as I told Gilberte in a mendacious dictum which had retrospectively come true, life had driven us apart. I remembered this and thought: “If Albertine waits for a few months, my lies will come true. And now that the worst is over, would it not be in her best interest to allow that moment to pass? If she returns, I shall have to renounce my true life, which I admit that I was not yet able to enjo
y, but which could gradually start to become more attractive as the memory of Albertine becomes gradually weaker.” I cannot claim that the process of forgetting was not already at work. But one of the effects of forgetting was precisely to make many of the unpleasant sides to Albertine’s character and the hours of boredom that I had endured at her side, no longer figure in my memory and thus cease to be reasons for me to wish that she were no longer there, as I had done while she was still with me, and to give me a summary image of her, embellished with all the love that I had felt for other women. In this particular guise, forgetting, although still working within me to accustom me to our separation, only made me see Albertine as sweeter and more beautiful than ever, and made me desire her return all the more.
On many occasions after Albertine’s departure, whenever it seemed to me that I would not look as if I had been crying, I rang for Françoise and said: “We ought to make sure that Mademoiselle Albertine has not left anything behind. Don’t forget to clean her room so that everything is ready for her when she returns.” Or simply: “Actually, it was only the other day, I suppose it must have been the day before she left, that Mademoiselle Albertine was talking to me about . . .” I wanted to curtail the odious relish that Françoise took in Albertine’s absence, by making her realize that it would be short-lived; I also wanted to show Françoise that I had no qualms about discussing her departure and to present it—as do certain generals who refer to their forced retreats as “strategic withdrawals executed according to contingency plans”—as intended, as constituting an interlude whose true significance I was momentarily dissimulating, but not at all as the end of my friendship with Albertine. By constantly mentioning her, I hoped ultimately to bring something of her back into the room, like a breath of fresh air, since her departure had emptied the room and made it impossible to breathe. And then again, we try to reduce the scale of our suffering by bringing it into our everyday conversation between ordering a suit and choosing the menu for dinner.
While she was tidying Albertine’s room, Françoise’s curiosity led her to open the drawer of a little rosewood table where my friend used to place the personal jewelry that she removed when she went to bed. “Oh, Monsieur! Mademoiselle Albertine has forgotten to take her rings, she has left them in the drawer.” My first reaction was to say: “We must send them on to her.” But that would look as if I were not sure that she would return. “Well,” I replied after a moment’s silence, “it’s hardly worth the trouble for the short time that she will be away. Give them to me and. I’ll take care of it.” Françoise handed them to me with some reluctance. She detested Albertine, but she judged me by her own standards and imagined that no one could hand me a letter written by my friend without fearing that I would open it. I took the rings. “I hope that Monsieur will be careful not to lose them,” said Françoise, “just look how beautiful they are! I don’t know who gave her them, whether it was Monsieur or somebody else, but I know it must be somebody rich who has good taste!”—It wasn’t me, I replied, and besides the two did not come from the same person, one was given her by her aunt and she bought the other herself.—Not from the same person! Françoise cried, “Monsieur must be joking, they are identical, except for the ruby that they added to one of them, there is the same eagle on both of them and the same initials inside.” I do not know whether Françoise was aware of the pain that she was causing, but a smile started to creep over her face and remained there. “What do you mean, the same eagle? You must be mad. On the one without the ruby you’re right, there is an eagle, but on the other one there’s an engraving of a sort of man’s head.—A man’s head? Where did Monsieur see that? Even with my reading-glasses I saw straight away that it was one of the eagle’s wings; if Monsieur will take his magnifying glass, he will see the other wing on the other side and the head and the beak in the middle. You can see every feather. Oh, what a fine piece of work.” My anxious need to know whether Albertine had lied to me made me forget that I should have stood on my dignity in Françoise’s company and denied her the cruel pleasure which she took, if not in tormenting me, at least in denigrating my friend. I gasped as Françoise went to fetch my magnifying glass, then I took it and asked her to show me the eagle on the ruby ring; she had no trouble in helping me to identify the wings, stylized in the same manner as on the other ring, with the head and every feather picked out in relief. She also pointed out similar insignia in the ruby ring, although in this case it is true that they were accompanied by others. And inside both were Albertine’s initials. “But I am amazed that Monsieur needed to take so much trouble to see that they were the same ring,” said Françoise. “Even if you don’t look close up, you can see the same craftsmanship, the same way of working the gold, the same shape. Just by looking at them I would have sworn that they came from the same place. It stands out like a dish by a good cook.” And indeed, the curiosity of the servant, accustomed to noting details with terrifying precision and spurred on by hatred, joined forces, in this expert scrutiny, with her good taste, the same taste in fact that she displayed in her cooking, and which was perhaps whetted, as I had noticed in the style of her dress when we set out for Balbec, by the coquetry of a woman who used to be pretty and who had taken note of the dresses and jewelry of other women. If I had opened the wrong medicine chest and if, instead of taking a few veronal tablets one day when I felt that I had drunk too many cups of tea, I had taken as many cups of coffee, my heart could not have beaten more violently. I asked Françoise to leave the room. I wished that I could have seen Albertine immediately. My revulsion at her falsehood and my jealousy of someone unknown were augmented by my pain at learning that she had accepted presents in this way. It is true that I had given her more, but a woman whom we are keeping does not seem to us to be a kept woman as long as we know that she is not being kept by anyone else. And yet since I had never ceased to spend so much money on her, I kept her despite this moral weakness; this weakness that I had allowed in her, perhaps encouraged, possibly even created. And then, just as we have the ability to tell ourselves stories in order to alleviate our pains, just as we manage when we are dying of hunger to persuade ourselves that some stranger is about to leave us a fortune of a hundred million francs, I imagined Albertine in my arms, explaining to me in a word that she had bought the second ring because of the similar design and that it was she who had had the initials engraved. But this exploration was still tender, it had not yet had time to put its salutary roots down into my mind, and my pain was not to be so easily appeased. And I wondered how many men who say that their mistresses are very kind suffer similar torments and thus lie to others as well as themselves. Yet they do not entirely lie; they do spend genuinely delicious hours with these women; but all the tenderness that these women show their lovers in the presence of their friends, to flatter their pride, and all the tenderness that they reserve for their lovers in private, to allow themselves to be worshipped, mask unknown hours where the lover has suffered, doubted and searched endlessly, but in vain, to discover the truth! Such suffering inevitably accompanies the sweetness of loving a woman and delighting in even her most trivial remarks, while knowing that they are trivial, as long as they are permeated with her scent. At this moment I could no longer delight in breathing Albertine’s scent through my memory. I sat downcast, holding the two rings in my hand, looking at that pitiless eagle whose beak was tearing at my heart, whose wings with their chiseled feathers had flown off with the confidence that I still placed in my friend, and under whose claws my lacerated mind could no longer for a moment escape the questions ceaselessly raised about that stranger, whose name the eagle surely symbolized while none the less refusing to allow me to read it, the woman whom she had doubtless loved in the past and whom she had certainly seen again not so long ago, since it was on that unspeakably sweet and intimate day which we had spent walking in the Bois de Boulogne together that I had seen for the first time the second ring, the one where the eagle looked as if it was dipping its beak in the bright, bl
oody pool of the ruby.
Yet even if from morning to night I continually pined over Albertine’s departure, this did not mean that I thought only of her. On the one hand her charm had gradually permeated objects which finally became very distant from her, but were none the less galvanized by the same emotions as those she inspired in me, if something made me think of Incarville, or the Verdurins, or Léa’s latest role, a wave of suffering flooded over me. On the other hand, what I myself called “thinking of Albertine” was in fact thinking of ways of getting her to return, of meeting up with her, of finding out what she was doing. So that if, during these hours of unremitting torture, my suffering could have been displayed in graphic form, it would have shown images of the Orsay railway station,16 the banknotes offered to Mme Bontemps, Saint-Loup leaning over a post-office counter filling in a form to send me a telegram, but never a picture of Albertine. In the same way that during the course of our lives we, in our egoism, constantly see before our eyes the goals which our selves find valuable, but do not perceive the “I” itself which never ceases to scrutinize them, so the desire that directs our actions swoops down upon them, but never looks back on itself, either because it is too utilitarian and, spurning knowledge, prefers to rush into action, or because we search out the future in order to compensate for the disappointments of the present, or even because the indolence of the mind tempts it to slide down the slippery slope of the imagination rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection. In fact in the moments of crisis when we are prepared to stake our very life, as the person on whom it depends reveals the increasingly vast place that she takes up for us, leaving nothing in our world undisturbed by her presence, proportionally the image of this person decreases until it is no longer perceptible. We feel the impact of her presence all around us through the emotions that we feel; but the cause, the person herself, is nowhere to be found. During those days I was so unable to call Albertine’s image to mind that I might almost have thought that I did not love her, just as my mother, in those moments of despair when she found herself totally incapable of picturing my grandmother (except on one occasion in a random encounter in a dream which made such an impression on her that, although she was asleep, she forced herself, with the little strength left to her in her sleep, to make it last), might have reproached herself and did in fact reproach herself with not missing her mother, whose dream had struck her a mortal blow, but whose features eluded her memory.
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