At least I was happy that before her death she had written me this letter and, above all, had sent that last telegram, which proved that she would have returned to me if she had lived. It seemed to me that this made things not only sweeter but also more beautiful, for the event would have been incomplete without this telegram and would have been less of a work of art and destiny. Yet, in fact, it would have been these just as much if it had been different; for any event is a kind of mold of a particular shape, and, whatever this may be, it imposes on the series of incidents which it has come to interrupt a design which seems conclusive and which we believe to be the only one possible, because we do not know the alternative which might have taken its place.
Why had she not told me, “I do have those inclinations”? I would have yielded, I would have let her indulge them, and even then I would still have embraced her. How sad I felt to have to remember the way she had lied to me, three days before she left me, swearing that she had never had such a relationship with Mlle Vinteuil and her girl-friend, while her own blushes confessed the opposite! Poor girl, at least she had been honest enough not to wish to swear that the pleasure of seeing Mlle Vinteuil and her girl-friend again had nothing to do with her desire to go to the Verdurins’ that day. Why did she not follow through with a complete confession rather than make up such an extravagant story? Perhaps, incidentally, it might have been partly my fault if, despite all my entreaties, which were repulsed by her firm denials, she had never been prepared to tell me, “I do have those inclinations.” Perhaps it was partly my fault because at Balbec, the day when, after Mme de Cambremer’s visit, I had had my first argument on this subject with Albertine and when I was so far from believing that she could have had anything but an over-passionate friendship with Andrée, that I had expressed my disgust for this kind of behavior too violently and condemned it too categorically. I could not remember whether Albertine had blushed when I had naïvely uttered my abhorrence of all that, I could not remember, for often it is only long after the event that we wish we could know what the attitude of some person had been, at a moment when we were paying no attention to it at all, and which later, when we think back over our conversation, would clear up a sensitive problem. But there is a blank in our memory, no trace of it exists. And how often have we not paid sufficient attention at the time to things which could already have seemed important to us, have we not heard a phrase or noticed a gesture correctly, or else have simply forgotten them. And when later, eager to discover the truth, we proceed from deduction to deduction, leafing through our memory like a dossier of eye-witness accounts, we do reach this phrase or that gesture, there is no way we can remember, we keep starting the same journey all over again, but to no avail, for the path leads no further. Did she blush? I don’t know if she did, but she could not have failed to have heard my words, and the memory of them had brought her to a halt when she may have been on the point of confessing to me. And now that she was nowhere to be found, I could have roamed the earth from pole to pole without meeting Albertine; reality had swallowed her up, formed a smooth surface and erased every trace of the person who had drowned in its depths. She was no more than a name, like a Mme de Charlus of whom those who had known her said with an indifferent air, “She was delightful.” But I could not consider for more than a moment the existence of this reality which Albertine no longer knew, for within me, where all my feelings and my thoughts related to her life, my friend was only too alive. Perhaps if she had known this, she might have been touched to see that her friend had not forgotten her, now that her own life was finished, and she would have appreciated things which previously had left her indifferent. But as we would prefer to abstain from infidelity, however secret, as long as we fear that the woman whom we love does not abstain, I was afraid that if the dead live on somewhere, my grandmother would know my forgetfulness as surely as Albertine my memories of her. And when all is said and done, even in the case of this same dead woman, are we sure that the joy we would have of learning that she knew certain things would compensate for the terror of thinking that she knew them all? And, however savage the sacrifice, would we not sometimes renounce keeping them on after their death as friends, for fear of having them also as judges?
My jealous curiosity about what Albertine might have done was infinite. I paid who knows how many women, who taught me nothing. If my curiosity was so lively, it is because people do not die immediately for us, they remain bathed in a kind of aura of life which bears no relation to real immortality but which continues to occupy our thoughts in the same way as it did when they were alive. It is as if they had left on a voyage. Theirs is a very pagan survival. Conversely, when we have ceased to be in love, the curiosity aroused by the person we love dies even before the person herself does. Thus I would no longer have taken a single step to discover with whom Gilberte had gone for a walk on the Champs-Elysées on such and such an evening. And yet, even if I felt that such moments of curiosity were exactly similar, valueless in themselves and incapable of lasting, I continued to sacrifice everything to the cruel satisfaction of their passing pangs, despite knowing in advance that my separation from Albertine, enforced by her death, would lead me to the same state of indifference as had my intentional separation from Gilberte. If Albertine had been able to tell what was going to happen, she would have stayed by my side. But that was tantamount to saying that, once she had seen herself dead, she would have preferred to stay alive by my side. Through the very contradiction which it implied, such a supposition was absurd. But that did not make it harmless, for as I imagined how pleased Albertine, if she could know and retrospectively understand, would be to return to me, I saw her by my side, I wanted to embrace her, but alas it was impossible, she would never return, she was dead. My imagination sought her in the skies, on evenings like those when we were still able to gaze up at it together; I tried to wing my affections toward her, beyond the moonlight that she loved, to console her for no longer being alive, and this love for a person who had become so remote was like a religion, my thoughts rose toward her like prayers. Desire is so strong that it engenders belief; I had believed that Albertine would not leave, because it was my desire; because this was my desire, I believed that she was not dead; I started to read books about turning tables, I started to believe in the possible immortality of the soul. But that was not sufficient for me. I needed after her death to be reunited with her body, as if eternity could resemble life. Do I mean “life”? I was even more demanding. I would have liked not to be deprived by death for ever more of those pleasures which death is not alone in taking from us. For even without death they would finally have withered, they had already started to do so through the action of long-standing habit and new attractions. Then, in real life, Albertine, even physically, would have gradually changed, and day by day I would have adapted to this change. But my memory, evoking only moments from her life, wanted to see her again in a certain guise that would no longer have been hers even if she had still been alive; what it wanted was a miracle to satisfy the natural, arbitrary limits of memory, trapped in the past. And yet I imagined this living creature with all the naïvety of the theologians of antiquity, granting me, not the explanations which she could have offered, but, through a supreme contradiction, those which she had always refused to give me while she was alive. And thus her death was a kind of dream, my love would seem to her an unexpected happiness; of death I retained only the usefulness and optimism of an outcome which simplifies and settles everything.
Sometimes I did not imagine our reunion as far away as in another world. Just as in former times when I knew Gilberte only as a playmate on the Champs-Elysées, in the evenings at home I imagined that I would receive a letter from her where she would admit that she loved me and that she was about to come home, so a similar force of desire, taking no more notice of the laws of physics which might prevent it than in the previous case of Gilberte, when, actually, my desire had not been mistaken because it did have the last word, led me
now to believe that I was about to receive a message from Albertine, telling me that she had indeed had a riding accident, but that, like a character in some novel (and as does sometimes happen after all in the case of people long believed dead), she had not wanted me to learn that she had recovered and was asking me contritely, now that she was better, to take her back permanently. And, understanding perfectly well how people who otherwise seem quite rational entertain certain harmless follies, I felt coexist within me the certainty that she was dead, and the ceaseless hope of seeing her walk through the door.
I had not yet received any news from Aimé, although he had surely arrived in Balbec by now. No doubt my inquiry was directed at a peripheral and arbitrarily chosen point. If Albertine’s life had really been laden with guilt, it must have been full of far graver events which chance had not let me encounter, as it had when Albertine had blushed over the question of the bath-robe. But these were precisely the things that did not exist in my eyes because I had not seen them. Yet it was quite arbitrarily that I had marked out that particular day as significant and, some years afterward, was attempting to reconstruct it. If Albertine had loved women, there were thousands of other days in her life whose time-table had escaped me and yet which could be just as interesting for me to know; I could have sent Aimé to many other places in Balbec, to many other towns rather than Balbec. But precisely because I had no knowledge of her time-table on those days, I could not picture them in my imagination, they had no existence within it. People and things started to exist for me only when they took on an individual existence in my imagination. If there were thousands of others of the same sort, they became for me merely typical of the rest. If, concerning my suspicions about Albertine, I had for so long desired to know what had happened in the showers, it was in the same way that, although I knew that there were numerous young ladies or chambermaids who were equally likely candidates and who could equally well have come to my attention, those women whom I desired to meet—since it was those that Saint-Loup had told me about, those who existed individually for me—were the young ladies who frequented houses of ill fame, and Mme Putbus’s chambermaid. The obstacles that my health, my indecision, my “procrastination” as Saint-Loup called it, placed in my way when I tried to accomplish anything had led me to delay from day to day, from month to month, from year to year, the clarification of certain suspicions, just as it had the accomplishment of certain desires. But I kept them in my memory, promising not to forget to get to know the reality that lay behind them, because they alone obsessed me (since the others could not take shape before my eyes, and so had no existence) and also because the very chance that had selected them from the real world was a guarantee that it was indeed through them that I would be able to make contact with a little of reality, a little of the real life that I coveted but which eluded me. And again, would not one single little fact, if carefully chosen, enable the experimenter to decide on the general law which will make known the truth about thousands of analogous cases? Although Albertine existed in my memory only in the states in which she had appeared successively during her life, that is, subdivided into a series of temporal fractions, my thoughts, restoring her unity, reconstituted her as a person, and it is on this person that I wanted to form an overall judgment, to know whether she had lied, whether she had loved women, and whether it was in order to be free to frequent them that she had left me. What the bath-house girl had to say might resolve once and for all my doubts over Albertine’s morals.
My doubts! Alas, I had thought that I would be indifferent, even pleased, at the prospect of never seeing Albertine again, until her departure revealed my mistake. Similarly, her death had taught me how mistaken I was occasionally to believe that I would welcome her death and to suppose that it would liberate me. It happened the same way when, on receiving Aimé’s letter, I understood that, if I had not so far suffered too cruelly from my doubts over Albertine’s virtue, it was because in fact they were not really doubts. My happiness and my life needed Albertine to be virtuous, thus they had posited once for all that she was. Armed with this salutary faith, I could safely allow my mind to play sadly with the suppositions which it formulated without believing in them. I thought, “Perhaps she does love women,” as one thinks, “I might die during the night”; we say the words to ourselves, but we do not believe them, we make plans for the morrow. This explains how, in mistakenly believing myself to be uncertain as to whether Albertine loved women or not and consequently believing that a guilty act proven against Albertine would add nothing to what I had often envisaged, I came, once faced with the images elicited by Aimé’s letter, which others would have found insignificant, to experience an unexpected suffering, the most cruel that I had yet experienced and which, alas, formed with these images, with the image of Albertine herself, into a sort of precipitate, as one says in chemistry, where everything was indivisible and of which the text of Aimé’s letter, which I have laid out in a purely conventional fashion, can give no idea, since each of the words that composed it was immediately transformed and colored for ever by the suffering that it had just induced.
“Dear Monsieur,
“Would Monsieur please forgive me for not having written to Monsieur sooner. The person that Monsieur had requested me to see had taken her leave for two days, and, wishing to respond to the confidence that Monsieur had placed in me, I did not want to return empty-handed. I have just had a chat at last with that person who remembers all quite clearly (Mlle A.)”
Aimé, who had a certain smattering of education, wanted to place Mlle A. in italics or between inverted commas. But when he wanted to use inverted commas he drew brackets, and when he wanted to put something in brackets he used inverted commas. Similarly, Françoise would say that someone was waiting in the same street as me when she meant that he was resident there, but that someone could reside, rather than wait, for a minute or two, since the mistakes made by simple people consist most often in exchanging terms—as the French language itself has done—which over the centuries have changed places with each other.
“According to her, what Monsieur had suspected is absolutely certain. Firstly, it was she who looked after (Mlle A.) whenever the latter came to the bath-house. (Mlle A.) very often came to take a shower accompanied by a tall woman older than herself, dressed always in gray, and whom the bath-house girl without knowing her name knew of as a result of often having seen her on the look-out for girls. But she paid no more attention to the others after she had got to know (Mlle A.). She and (Mlle A.) always locked themselves in the cabin, stayed inside a long time, and the lady in gray gave the lady with whom I had this chat a tip of at least ten francs. As the latter person said to me, you can guess that if they had spent their time making daisy chains they wouldn’t have given me a ten-franc tip. (Mlle A.) also used to go there sometimes with a very dark-skinned woman, who wore a lorgnette. But most often (Mlle A.) came with girls younger than her, especially a very red-haired one. Except for the lady in gray, the persons that (Mlle A.) habitually brought along with her were not from Balbec and often must have come from quite far away. They never went in together, but (Mlle A.) went in, telling me to leave the cabin door unlocked, that she was expecting a friend, and the person with whom I have spoken knew what that meant. That person was unable to give me further details owing to her not remembering very well, ‘which is easy to understand after so long.’ Besides, this person did not attempt to find out, because she is very discreet and because it was in her interest, for (Mlle A.) brought her in lots of money. She was very sincerely moved by the news of her death. It is true that in one so young it is a great mishap both for her and her family. I await Monsieur’s orders to know if I may leave Balbec where I am unlikely to learn no more. I wish to thank Monsieur again for the little outing that he has thus procured me and which I have found very pleasant all the more because the weather is more than favorable. The signs are good for this year’s season. We hope that Monsieur will put in a brief apparition.<
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