These changes in atmosphere cause other changes in the inner man, awakening forgotten selves, counteracting the lethargy of habit, reviving the force of memories here, of suffering there. How much more so for me if this new climate recalled days in Balbec when Albertine, despite the threat of rain, for instance, had set out, God knows why, for a long ride, strapped tightly into her rubbers! If she had still been alive today, she would doubtless be setting off, in similar weather, on a similar expedition in Touraine. But since she was no longer able to do so, I should not have suffered from this thought; but the slightest change in the weather renewed my aches and pains, as it would in the missing limb of an amputee.
Suddenly there came a memory which I had not seen for a long time, for it had remained dissolved in the transparent, fluid expanses of my memory, until it formed into crystals. Thus it had happened that several years before, when we were talking about her bath-robe, Albertine had blushed. In those days I was not jealous of her. But afterward I wished I could ask her if she could remember this conversation and tell me why she had blushed. It had concerned me all the more since I had been told that Léa’s two young girl-friends frequented her hotel’s bathing establishment and, so people said, not only to take a shower. But for fear of annoying Albertine, or in the hope of better days to come, I had constantly postponed discussing it with her, and then I forgot about it. However, shortly after Albertine’s death, I caught a glimpse of this memory, imprinted with the irritating but solemn character of an enigma left eternally insoluble by the death of the only person who could have shed light on it. Could I not at least try to learn whether Albertine might not perhaps have committed some real or even apparent misdemeanor in this bathing establishment? By sending someone to Balbec, I might possibly succeed. As long as she was alive, I am sure that I would not have learned anything. But tongues are strangely loosened and are swift to denounce people’s faults when the revenge of the person accused is no longer to be feared. As the constitution of the imagination, which remains rudimentary and simplistic (not having passed through the various transformations which palliate the primitive models of human invention, which we now hardly recognize, whether we think of the barometer, the balloon or the telephone, etc., compared to their later improvements), allows us to see so few things at once, this memory of the bath-house took over the whole field of my inner vision.
Sometimes, in the dark alleyways of sleep, I stumbled over one of those bad dreams which we do not take very seriously, for the main reason that the sadness which they instill in us, like the sickness following an anesthetic, rarely lasts more than an hour after our awakening, but for another reason too, which is that they occur very rarely, hardly more than once every two or three years. And even then we are not sure whether we have already encountered them—or whether our impression of déjà vu might not be either projected on to them by an illusion, or a reduplication (for it is more than a repetition) of our experience.
Of course, since I had my doubts about Albertine’s life, and her death, I ought to have started my enquiries much sooner. But the same lethargy and cowardice that had kept me submissive to Albertine while she was there, prevented me from undertaking anything from the time that I no longer saw her. And yet sometimes a flash of energy may emerge from the weakness which has dogged us for years. I decided to make at least one inquiry, however partial. You might have thought that there had been nothing else in Albertine’s life. I wondered whom I might send to try to make enquiries on the spot, in Balbec. Aimé seemed to be the right choice. Apart from the fact that he had an excellent knowledge of the location, he belonged to that category of working people who look after their own interests, are faithful to those they serve, are indifferent to all varieties of morality, and who—because if we pay them well they ignore anything that would hinder their devotion to our will, for they reveal themselves to be as incapable of indiscretion, lethargy or impropriety as they are of scruples—pass for “good men.” These are men in whom we may place complete confidence. When Aimé had left, I thought how much more effective it would have been for me if I could have asked Albertine herself about what he was going to try to discover there. And straight away the thought of this question that I wished I could have put to Albertine, that I was going to put to her, brought her back to my side, not thanks to an effort of resurrection but through one of those chance encounters which—as happens in the kind of photograph which is a snapshot, rather than a “posed” portrait—always breathe life into the person; at the same time as I imagined our conversation, I felt how impossible it was; approaching it from a different angle, I had again come up against the idea that Albertine was dead, Albertine, who inspired in me the kind of affection that we have for absent women whose embellished image is uncorrected by any real sighting of them, but also inspired sadness, from the thought that the poor young thing was deprived for ever of the pleasures of life. And immediately I shifted suddenly from being tortured by jealousy to feeling despair at our separation.
What now filled my heart, instead of suspicion and hatred, was the tender memory of hours of affectionate intimacy passed with the sister whom death had really made me lose, since my sorrow was directed not at what Albertine had been for me but at what my heart, desiring to participate in the more general emotions of love, had come to persuade me that she was; then I realized that this life which had so bored me—or at least so I thought—had, on the contrary, been delicious; I felt now that the briefest moments spent talking with her about even the most trivial things had been augmented and suffused with a voluptuousness which, it is true, I had not noticed at the time, but which had already caused me to seek them out so persistently and so exclusively; the slightest details which I recalled, such as the movements that she made when sitting beside me in the car, or sitting opposite me at the table in her room, sent through my soul ripples of sweetness and sadness which gradually spread out to overflow it entirely.
I had never found this room where we dined attractive: I had only told Albertine that I did, so that my friend would be happy to live in it. Now the curtains, the chairs and the books no longer left me unmoved. It is not only art which is able to imbue the most insignificant things with charm and mystery; this same power to bring them into an intimate relationship with ourselves is also granted to suffering. At the time I had paid no attention to the dinner which we had eaten together on our return from the Bois de Boulogne, before I went to the Verdurins’, a dinner whose grave sweetness now filled my eyes with tears. The impressions created by love are disproportionate to our other impressions of life, but we do not realize this when they are mingled together. It is not from below, in the tumultuous streets and the close-packed neighboring houses, it is only as we move away to the slopes of a nearby hill, to a distance where the whole town has disappeared or forms only a confused mass at ground level, that we are able, in the contemplative and welcoming solitude of the evening, to appreciate the unique, pure, and eternal height of a cathedral. I attempted to embrace the image of Albertine through my tears while thinking of all the serious and perceptive remarks that she had made that evening. One morning I thought that I glimpsed the oblong shape of a hill surrounded by mist, and felt the warmth of a cup of chocolate, while my heart was horribly wrung by the memory of the afternoon when Albertine had come to see me and when I had kissed her for the first time: it was because I had just heard the boiler gurgle as it was relit. And in my anger I threw away an invitation to Mme Verdurin’s that Françoise had just brought me. How much more strongly the impression, which I had had when I went to dine for the first time at La Raspelière, that death does not strike all its creatures at the same age impressed me now that Albertine was dead so young, while Brichot continued to dine with Mme Verdurin, who was still entertaining guests and would perhaps continue to do so for years to come! Immediately Brichot’s name reminded me how he had accompanied me home at the end of that same evening, and I had seen the light at Albertine’s window from down below. I
had already thought back to this on a number of occasions, but I had never approached this memory from the same angle. For, although our memories are entirely personal, they resemble those estates which have hidden side-gates, which often we ourselves have not discovered and have to have opened by a neighbor, so that we find ourselves arriving home from at least one direction which we had never taken before. Then, thinking of the void which would greet me on my return home and the fact that I would never again see Albertine’s room from down below, since its light was for ever extinguished, I understood how mistaken I had been, on leaving Brichot that evening, to believe that I felt disappointment and regret at not being able to walk away and seek love elsewhere; I understood how mistaken I had been, and that it was only because I believed myself to be in absolutely safe possession of the treasure whose reflections poured down on me from above that I had neglected to assess its worth, which inevitably led me to see it as less valuable than other pleasures, however slight, to which I did attribute value because I was reduced to imagining them. I understood what a plenitude of sweetness and life this light, which seemed to emanate from a prison, contained for me, and how it was none other than the materialization of something that had intoxicated me for a moment but had then appeared for ever unattainable the evening when Albertine had slept under the same roof as me at Balbec; I understood that the life which I had led with her in my home in Paris, which was her home, was precisely the attainment of that profound peace of which I had dreamed.
I would never have been able to console myself if the conversation which I had had with Albertine when returning from the Bois de Boulogne before that last soirée at the Verdurins’ had never taken place, that conversation which had tended to fuse Albertine with my intellectual life and had in certain areas made us one and the same being. For there is no doubt that if I lingered affectionately over her intelligence and her kindness for me, it was not because they were greater than those of other people whom I had known; had Mme de Cambremer not said to me at Balbec, “How could you possibly spend whole days with your cousin when you could spend them with Elstir, who is a genius!”? I appreciated Albertine’s intelligence because she evoked in me by association what I referred to as her sweetness, as we attribute to the sweetness of a fruit a certain sensation which exists only in our palate. And in fact, when I thought of Albertine’s intelligence, my lips moved instinctively forward to taste a memory whose reality I liked to think of as external and consisting in the objective superiority of a person. I have to say that I had known people whose intelligence was superior. But the infinite extent, or the egoism, of love causes us to love people whose intellectual and moral features are the least objectively defined for us, we readjust them endlessly according to our desires and our fears, we cannot separate them from ourselves, they are no more than a vast and vague terrain where we externalize our affection. Even our own bodies, where we are assailed by so many pains and pleasures, do not display a silhouette as clear as that of a tree or a house or a passing stranger. And perhaps I had been wrong not to try harder to get to know Albertine in her own right. Just as where her charm was concerned I had for some time considered only the different positions in the calendar of the years that she adopted in my memories, and just as I had been surprised to see her spontaneously enriched with transformations which seemed to go beyond any simple difference of perspective, so I ought to have tried to understand her character in the same way as that of any other person, and perhaps this might have explained to me why she hid her secret so persistently from me and might have enabled me to cut short this strangely savage conflict between us, which had led to the death of Albertine. And with my great pity for her at that time I felt great shame in surviving her. Indeed it seemed to me, in the moments when I suffered the least, that I almost benefited from her death, for a woman is all the more useful in our lives if she is an agent of sorrow rather than an element of happiness, and there is not a single woman whose possession is as precious as the truths which she enables us to discover by making us suffer. In such moments, connecting my grandmother’s death with that of Albertine, it seemed to me that my life was besmirched by a double murder for which only the cowardice of society could forgive me. I had dreamed of being appreciated by Albertine, of not being misunderstood by her, believing that it was for the greater satisfaction of being appreciated and not misunderstood, whereas so many others could have done it better. We wish to be understood because we wish to be loved, and we wish to be loved because it is we who are in love. Whether others understand us is unimportant, and their love importunate. My joy at having possessed a little of Albertine’s intellect and of her heart did not derive from their intrinsic value, but from the fact that this possession was one more step on the way toward the total possession of Albertine, which had been my aim and my fantasy from the first day that I had seen her. When we speak of a woman’s “kindness,” we are probably only projecting outside ourselves the pleasure that we feel on seeing her, like children when they say, “My dear little bed, my dear little pillow, my dear little hawthorn blossom.” Which may also by the way explain why men never say of a woman who is faithful to them, “She is so kind,” but do so often say it of a woman who is unfaithful. Mme de Cambremer judged, quite rightly, that Elstir had great spiritual charm. But we cannot judge in the same way the charm of someone who, like everyone else external to us, is depicted on the fringes of our consciousness and the charm of someone who, as a result of a series of unintentional but persistent errors of navigation, has become lodged within our own bodies, to such an extent that we ask ourselves retrospectively if having looked at some woman on a certain day in the corridor of a little coastal railway train has not made us experience as much suffering as would be caused by a surgeon trying to remove a bullet from our heart. A simple croissant, as we start to eat it, can make us experience more pleasure than all the bunting, rock partridge and leveret dined on by Louis XV, and the blade of grass quivering a few inches away from our eyes when we are lying down on the mountainside may mask the towering peak of the mountain top if this is several miles away. In fact our mistake is not that we over-appreciate the intelligence and the kindness of the woman we love, however small they may really be. Our mistake is to remain indifferent to the kindness and the intelligence of others. Falsehood or goodness only start to generate the indignation or gratitude that they should normally always stimulate in us when they come from a woman whom we love, and physical desire has the marvelous power of setting a true value for the intellect as well as providing solid foundations for our moral life. I would never again encounter that divine thing: a person with whom I could discuss everything, in whom I could confide all. Confide? But did not other people show me more confidence than Albertine? Did I not have more wide-ranging conversations with others? Is the point that confiding and conversing are in themselves paltry things, whose imperfections are neither here nor there, until they are blended with love, which alone is divine? I had a vision of Albertine’s pink face beneath her black hair as she sat at the pianola; I felt her tongue against my lips as she tried to part them, her maternal, nourishing, holy, inedible tongue, whose hidden fire and secret dew prevented her caresses from being superficial, even when she did no more than slide her tongue along the surface of my neck or my stomach, as if they somehow issued from her inner flesh, turned inside out like a piece of material exposing its lining, endowing even the most external contact with the mysterious sweetness of a penetration.
I cannot even say that what made me feel the loss of all these moments of utter sweetness, which nothing could ever bring back to me, was actually despair. In order to despair of this life, when we see that it will be irremediably unhappy for evermore, we must still desire to cling to it. I had been desperate in Balbec when I saw day dawn and understood that no day would ever again bring me happiness. I had remained just as self-centered since then, but the self to which I had latterly become attached, the self that constituted my inner reserves, those which bri
ng into play the instinct of preservation, this self was no longer alive; when I thought of my vital strengths, of my life force, of what was best in me, I thought of this one treasure which I had possessed (which I alone had possessed since others could not know precisely the hidden feelings that it had inspired in me) and which no one could now take away from me since I no longer possessed it. And to tell the truth, I had only ever possessed it in so far as I had always tried to imagine myself possessing it. I had not only been imprudent enough, while watching Albertine with my lips and lodging her in my heart, to make her live within me, as well as committing that other folly of mingling domestic love with the pleasure of the senses. I had also tried to convince myself that our relationship was one of love, that what we engaged in together was what people call love, because she obediently returned the kisses that I gave her. And from having acquired the habit of believing this, I had lost not only a woman whom I loved, but a woman who loved me, my sister, my child, my tender mistress. And finally I had experienced a happiness and an unhappiness which Swann had not known, precisely because, during all the time that he had loved Odette and had been so jealous of her, there were days when he had hardly seen her at all, since it was virtually impossible for him to go and call on her whenever she called off their appointment at the last moment. But afterward he had had her to himself, as his wife, until he died. Whereas I, on the other hand, even while I was so jealous of Albertine, was happier than Swann, for I had her at home with me. I had in fact attained what Swann had so often dreamed of and what he had achieved in reality only when he had become indifferent to it. But ultimately I had not kept Albertine as he had kept Odette. She had fled, she had died. For nothing is ever repeated exactly, and the most analogous lives, even those which due to likeness of character and similarity of circumstance one may choose to present as symmetrical, remain in many aspects opposed. In losing my life I would not have lost much; I would have lost only an empty form, the frame for a missing masterpiece. Indifferent to what I might henceforth fill it in with, but happy and proud of what it had contained, I fell back on the memory of such sweet moments, and this moral support gave me a feeling of well-being that even the approach of death would not have disturbed.
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