Why might I have believed that Albertine was not attracted to women? Because, especially in recent times, she had said that she was not attracted to them; but was not the life we lived together based on a perpetual lie? Never once had she said to me, “Why am I not free to go out as I wish? Why do you ask other people what I do?” But our life was in fact too singular for her not to have asked if she had not understood the reason. And was it not understandable that my silence over the causes of her sequestration should be countered by an equally inflexible silence over her perpetual desires and countless memories, her countless desires and expectations? Françoise looked as if she knew that I was lying when I referred to Albertine’s imminent return. And her belief seemed founded on rather more than the truth which usually guided our servant, that is, the fact that masters do not like to be humiliated in front of their servants and reveal to them only that part of reality which does not deviate too far from a flattering fiction, liable to maintain respect. On this occasion, Françoise’s belief seemed to be founded on something else, as if she herself had awakened and fueled the suspicions in Albertine’s mind, and fanned her anger, in short as if she had driven her to an extremity where she could tell that her departure was inevitable. If this was true, my version of a temporary absence, known and approved by me, could have been met only with incredulity by Françoise. But her notion of Albertine’s self-interested nature, which, inflamed by her hatred, caused her to magnify the “profit” that Albertine was supposedly extracting from me, could to some extent cause her to doubt her convictions. Thus when in her presence I alluded to Albertine’s imminent return as something wholly natural, Françoise looked into my eyes (in the same way as, when the butler teased her by reading out a piece of political news that she was reluctant to believe, altering the words so as to say, for example, they were going to close down the churches and banish the clergy,17 Françoise, even from the depths of her kitchen, and despite not being able to read, instinctively and eagerly looked at the newspaper), as if she were able to see whether it was really written there or whether I had made it up.
But when Françoise saw me write a long letter and then check the right address for Mme Bontemps, her previously rather vague terror that Albertine might return welled up more strongly than ever within her. It reached a point of veritable consternation when she was obliged one morning to hand me among others a letter where she had recognized Albertine’s handwriting on the envelope. She wondered whether Albertine’s departure had not been purely theatrical, a supposition which she found doubly upsetting, in that it ensured Albertine’s presence in the house permanently for the future and in that it constituted for me, that is, in so far as I was Françoise’s master, for Françoise herself the humiliation of having been manipulated by Albertine. However impatient I was to read Albertine’s letter, I could not help momentarily studying Françoise’s eyes, drained of all hope as they read in this augury the imminent return of Albertine, just as a devotee of winter sports concludes joyfully that winter is nigh when he sees the swallows depart. At last Françoise left, and when I had made sure that she had closed the door, I opened her letter silently, so as not to seem anxious, reading as follows:
“My dear friend, thank you for all your kind remarks, I am at your disposal and shall cancel the order for the Rolls if you think that I may be of assistance, and I do think this likely. You have only to tell me the name of your agent. You would be liable to let yourself be taken in by these people who have only one thing in mind, which is to make a sale; and what would you do with a car, since you never go out? I am very touched that you should have kept such a nice memory of our last outing. Please believe that for my part I shall never forget this excursion and its twofold twilight (since night was falling and we were destined to part) and that it will never be erased from my mind until blackest night finally invades it.”
I felt confident that this last sentence was purely rhetorical and that Albertine could not have kept until her dying day such a sweet memory of an outing which had certainly given her no pleasure, since she had been impatient to leave me. But I also admired the talent of the cyclist and golfer from Balbec, who before making my acquaintance had read nothing by Racine apart from Esther,18 and I realized how right I had been to feel that she had been enriched during her stay with me by new qualities, which had changed her and made her more complete. And thus, the words which I had uttered in Balbec, “I think that my friendship would be valuable for you, that I am just the person who could provide you with what you lack”—I had written as a dedication to her on a photograph: Certain to be providential,—words which I spoke without believing them, only in order to persuade her that frequenting me would be profitable and to minimize the tedium that this might provoke, these words too turned out to be true; as, in fact, did my admission to her that I did not want to see her for fear of falling in love with her. I had said this because, on the contrary, I knew that with constant meeting my love tended to fade and that separation excited it; but in fact the constant meeting had given birth to a need for her infinitely stronger than that first love in Balbec.
But in the end Albertine’s letter was unhelpful. She spoke only of writing to the agent. I must extricate myself from this situation and precipitate matters. I had the following idea. I immediately had a letter sent to Andrée telling her that Albertine was staying with her aunt, that I felt very lonely and that she would do me the greatest favor if she could come and take up residence with me for a few days but that, since I did not want to act behind Albertine’s back, I begged her to let Albertine know. And at the same time I wrote to Albertine, as if I had not yet received her letter:
“My dear friend, forgive me for something you will understand very well, which is that I so detest acting behind people’s backs that I wanted you to be alerted by me as well as by her. Having had the experience of your sweet presence by my side, I have got into the bad habit of not living alone. Since we have decided that you would not return, I thought that the person who would best take your place, because she would change my life least, and would most remind me of you, was Andrée, and I have asked her to come. So that this should not seem too sudden, I have spoken to her of a period of just a few days, but between you and me I think that this time it is something permanent. Do you not think that I am right? You know that your little group of girls at Balbec has always been the social group that has exerted the most influence over me, the one with which I was most pleased to be associated when allowed. There is no doubt that I still feel its prestige. Since our fatal characters and life’s misfortunes have determined that my little Albertine could not be my wife, I believe that I should none the less take a wife—one less charming, but one whose greater compatibility of character ought perhaps to allow her to be happier with me—in Andrée.”
* * *
• • •
But once I had sent this letter, I was suddenly assailed by the suspicion that, Albertine having written, “I would have been only too happy to return if you had written to me direct,” she had said this only because I had not written to her direct and that, if I had done so, she still would not have returned, that she would have been pleased to know that Andrée was living with me and was to become my wife, provided that she, Albertine, remained free, because for a week now, foiling all the precautions that I had taken hour by hour for more than six months, she was able to give free rein to her vices and do every minute of the day what I had been preventing her from doing. I thought that she was probably applying her freedom out there to dubious ends, and no doubt this idea as I formulated it made me sad, but it remained vague, since it pictured nothing specific, and through the indefinite number of women that she had led me to imagine might be her lovers, without letting me dwell on any one in particular, it threw my mind into a sort of perpetual motion which did cause me pain, but a pain which, for lack of any concrete image, was bearable. But it ceased to be so and became atrocious when Saint-Loup returned. Before saying why t
he words that he uttered made me so unhappy, I must relate an incident which occurred immediately before his visit and whose memory so disturbed me that it diluted, if not the painful impression that I gained from my conversation with Saint-Loup, at least the practical impact of this conversation. This incident was the following. Burning with impatience to see Saint-Loup, I was waiting for him on the staircase (which I could not have done if my mother had been in the house, for that, apart from “talking out of the window,” was what she hated most of all), when I heard the following words: “What do you mean! If there is someone you don’t like can’t you get him dismissed? It’s not so difficult. All you have to do, for instance, is hide the things that they will ask him to fetch; then, just when his masters are in a hurry and call for him, he won’t be able to find a thing, he’ll lose his grip: my aunt will be furious with him and ask you: ‘Whatever can he be doing?’ When he does arrive, he’ll be late, everyone will be furious and he won’t have brought what they’d asked for. By the fourth or fifth occasion you can be sure that he will be dismissed, especially if you take care on the sly to make the clean things that he was supposed to fetch dirty, and thousands of tricks like that.” I was struck dumb with stupefaction, for these cruel, Machiavellian words were uttered by the voice of Saint-Loup. Since until then I had always considered him to be someone so fundamentally kind, so sympathetic toward those who suffer, it had the same effect on me as if I had heard him reciting the part of Satan in a play; that is, he could not be speaking in his own name. “But surely everyone should be allowed to earn his living,” replied the other man, whom I then saw and identified as one of the Duchesse de Guermantes’s footmen. “Why should you care a damn as long as you are all right?” Saint-Loup replied wickedly. “You’ll have the added pleasure of having a scapegoat. You can feel free to spill entire ink-wells over his livery just when he is preparing to serve at an important dinner, in short, never leave him in peace for a second, until he prefers to leave of his own accord. As for me, by the way, I’ll put my shoulder to the wheel, I’ll tell my aunt that I admire your patience in serving alongside such a clumsy, uncouth individual.” I announced my presence, and Saint-Loup welcomed me, but my confidence in him was shaken since I had heard him sound such a different man from the one I knew. And I wondered if someone who was capable of acting so cruelly toward a hapless wretch might not have acted treacherously toward me in his mission to Mme Bontemps. This reflection served above all, once he had left me, to help me avoid considering his failure as proof that I could not succeed. But while he was by my side, I had thoughts only for the Saint-Loup of old and above all for the friend who had just left Mme Bontemps, as I thought. He said to me straight away: “You think that I should have telephoned you more often, but they kept telling me you were engaged.” Yet my suffering became unbearable when he said: “To carry on from where my last dispatch left off, I went through a kind of outhouse which led into the house, and they took me down a long corridor into the lounge.” On hearing these words—outhouse, corridor, lounge—and even before he had finished uttering them, my heart was wracked by spasms even more immediately than if it had been connected to an electric current, for the power that can circle the globe the most times per second is not so much electricity as pain. How I repeated these words, outhouse, corridor, lounge, renewing their shock at my leisure, when Saint-Loup had left. In an outhouse, you can hide with a girl-friend. And in that lounge, who knows what Albertine did when her aunt was not there? And yet, had I imagined the house where Albertine was living as able to include neither outhouse nor lounge? No, I had not imagined the house at all, or merely as a vague location. I had suffered first of all when the place where she was staying had become geographically specified for the first time, when I had learned that instead of being in one of two or three possible places she was in Touraine; the words spoken by her concierge had marked out in my heart as on a map the place where I would finally have to suffer. But even when I had got used to the idea that she was in a house in Touraine, I still had not seen the house; never could I have conceived the frightful idea of a lounge, an outhouse and a corridor, which I now saw staring out at me from Saint-Loup’s retina, which had seen them, and appearing in the guise of the rooms which Albertine walked into, passed through and lived in; these specific rooms and not an infinity of other possible rooms which had neutralized one another. In the words outhouse, corridor and lounge, I perceived my folly in having left Albertine for a week in this accursed place, whose existence (rather than its simple possibility) had just been revealed to me. Alas! when Saint-Loup told me in addition that while in this lounge he had heard someone singing at the top of her voice in the next room, and that it was Albertine who was singing, I realized with despair that, once rid of me, she was happy! She had regained her freedom. And all the while I had been thinking that she would come back and take Andrée’s place! My pain turned into anger with Saint-Loup. “Letting her know that you were coming is precisely what I asked you to avoid.—How easy do you think that was! They promised me she wasn’t there. Oh, I know you’re annoyed with me, I could tell from your telegrams. But you are not being fair, I did what I could.” Set free once more, released once again from the cage where I had kept her for days on end without letting her come into my room, she had assumed in my eyes all her old value, she had become once again the object of everyone’s pursuit, the wondrous bird of the earliest days. “Look, to sum up. As for the money, I don’t know what to say, the woman I spoke to seemed so discreet that I was afraid of offending her. But then she didn’t even raise an eyebrow when I did mention money. And a little later she even told me that she was touched to see how well we understood each other. Yet everything she said subsequently was so discreet, so refined, that I found it impossible to believe that she could be talking about the money I was offering when she said: ‘We understand each other so well,’ for basically I was acting like a cad.—But perhaps she didn’t understand; perhaps she didn’t hear what you said; you should have repeated it, for it’s surely the money that would have made everything work out.—But how can you imagine that she couldn’t have heard me? I was talking to her as I’m talking to you now, and she is neither deaf nor mad.—And didn’t she pass any remark at all?—Not one.—You could have repeated it, at least once.—How could I have repeated it? As soon as I went in I saw what she looked like, and I thought that you had been mistaken, that you were making me put my foot in it and that it was terribly difficult to just offer her money like that. Yet I still went ahead, in order to follow your orders, but convinced that she would have me thrown out.—But she didn’t. Therefore either she hadn’t heard what you’d said and you needed to repeat it, or you could have pursued the matter.—It’s all very well for you to say: ‘she hadn’t heard what you said’ because you are here with me, but, let me say it again, if you had been there and listening to our conversation, there was no interruption, I said it quite bluntly, it was impossible for her not to understand.—But was she at least convinced that I have always wanted to marry her niece?—No, if you want my opinion on that, she didn’t believe for one moment that you had the slightest intention of marrying her. She told me that you had told her niece yourself that you wanted to leave her. I don’t know if she is convinced even now that you do intend to get married.” This reassured me somewhat, by making me feel that I appeared less humiliated, therefore more liable still to be loved, and freer to take some decisive steps. And yet I felt tormented. “I’m so sorry, I can see that you are not pleased,” said Saint-Loup. “Oh no, I am touched by your kindness and I am grateful, but it seems to me that you might have . . .—I did my best. Nobody else could have done more, or even as much. Try someone else.—But, how can I? If I had known, I wouldn’t have sent you, but now that your approach has failed, it prevents me from trying again.” I reproached him again with trying to help me and failing. As he was leaving, Saint-Loup had met some young ladies on their way into the house. I had often previously suspected that she knew other gi
rls in the region, but this was the first time that it tormented me so. We really have to suppose that nature has enabled our minds to secrete a natural antidote which cancels out the suppositions which we ceaselessly formulate and makes them harmless; but nothing could immunize me against the girls whom Saint-Loup had encountered. And yet were not all these details precisely what I had sought to glean from everyone about Albertine? Was it not I myself who, in order to know them more fully, had asked Saint-Loup, when he had been summoned to his Colonel’s side, to come to see me at whatever cost? Was it not I who had sought out these details, or rather my ravenous pain, greedy to feed on them to give itself substance? Finally Saint-Loup told me that he had been pleasantly surprised to meet the only person in the vicinity whom he knew, a pretty actress who was on holiday nearby, a former friend of Rachel’s, who had revived memories for him. And this actress’s name was enough for me to think, “Perhaps she was the one”; enough to make me see Albertine flushed and smiling with pleasure, held in the arms of a woman whom I did not know. And in fact why should that not have been the case? Had I ever deprived myself of thinking about other women since I knew Albertine? The evening when I had been to the Princesse de Guermantes for the first time, when I had returned home, was I not thinking much less about the latter than about the young lady who, according to Saint-Loup, frequented houses of ill-fame, and about Mme Putbus’s chambermaid? Was it not for the latter that I had returned to Balbec? More recently, I had been very tempted to go to Venice, so why should Albertine not have been tempted to go to Touraine? Except that, deep down, as I now realized, I would not have left her, I would not have gone to Venice. And even, just as I was thinking, “I shall leave her soon,” I knew in the depths of my heart that I would never leave her, just as I knew that I would never get down to work again, nor lead a healthy life, nor any of the things that I promised myself each day I would do the next. Only, whatever I might believe deep down, I had thought that I was behaving more cleverly by letting her live under the threat of perpetual separation. And doubtless my wretched cleverness had been all too convincing. In any case things could not continue in this way, I could not leave her in Touraine with those girls, with that actress; I could not bear the thought of the life that was slipping away from me. I would await her reply to my letter: if she was doing wrong, alas! one day more or less would make no difference (and perhaps I thought this because, having lost the habit of requiring an account of every minute of her life, a single one of which leaving her free would have driven me mad, my jealousy no longer observed the same time-scale). But as soon as I had received her reply, if it said she did not intend to return, I would go to fetch her back; I would tear her away from her girl-friends by consent or by force. Besides, would it not be better for me to go there myself, now that I had discovered Saint-Loup’s previously unsuspected malice? Who could tell whether he might not have devised a whole conspiracy to keep me away from Albertine? Was it because I had changed, was it because until then I had not been able to suppose that natural causes would one day lead me into such an extraordinary situation, how I would have lied if I had written to her now what I had said to her in Paris, that I hoped no accident would befall her? Oh, if one might have occurred, my life, instead of being for ever poisoned by this ceaseless jealousy, would immediately have recovered, if not happiness, at least the peace bestowed by the suppression of suffering.
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