Aimé went to take lodgings near to Mme Bontemps’s villa; he became acquainted with a chambermaid and a man from whom Albertine often hired a car for the day. These two people had noticed nothing. In a second letter, Aimé told me that a young laundry-maid from the town had told him that Albertine had a special way of squeezing her arm when she brought her linen back. “But,” he said, “this young lady had never done anything more than that with her.” I sent Aimé the money which paid for his trip and which also purchased the ill that his letter had just caused me, although I was struggling to cure this by telling myself that she had merely shown a sign of affection which proved no immoral intent, when I received a telegram from Aimé, saying: “have learned most interesting things. have lots of news for monsieur. letter follows.” The next day I received a letter whose envelope was enough to make me tremble; I knew that it was from Aimé, for everyone, however humble, is a master of those familiar little household creatures whose life lies as it were suspended on the paper, that is, the unique characters of his handwriting which he alone possesses.
“At first the young laundry-maid didn’t want to tell me a thing, she assured me that Mlle Albertine had never done more than pinch her arm. But to get her to talk I took her out to dinner and plied her with drink. Then she told me that Mlle Albertine often met her on the banks of the Loire when she went bathing; that Mlle Albertine, who rose early in the morning to bathe, used to meet her on the riverside at a place where the woods are so thick that no one can see you, and besides there’s no one about to see you so early in the morning. Then the laundry-maid brought her girl-friends and they went for a dip, and afterward, as it was already very hot out there and you could feel the heat beating down even under the trees, they stayed in the grass to dry one another, to tickle and caress one another and play games together. The young laundry-maid confessed that she enjoyed playing games with her girl-friends, and that when she saw that Mlle Albertine kept rubbing up against her in her bath-robe, she got her to take it off and caressed her by running her tongue down her neck and her arms, and even down the soles of her feet when Mlle Albertine stretched them out toward her. The laundry-maid also got undressed, and they played around, pushing one another into the water. That evening she told me nothing more. But dedicated as always to your service and ready to do anything to please you, I took the young laundry-maid home to bed with me. She asked me if I wanted her to do to me what she did to Mlle Albertine when the latter removed her bathing-dress. And she said: (If you could have seen how she quivered, that young lady, she said: (Oh! I’m in heaven) and she got so excited that she could not help biting me.) I could still see the mark on the young laundry-maid’s arm. And I understood Mlle Albertine’s enjoyment, for the young wench is really very talented.”
I had suffered badly enough in Balbec when Albertine had told me of her friendship with Mlle Vinteuil. But Albertine had been there to console me. Yet later, after I had managed to drive Albertine away from me by trying to find out too much about her activities, and Françoise had announced that she was no longer at home, and I found myself all alone, I had suffered more. But at least the Albertine whom I had loved remained in my heart. Now what I found in her place—punishing me for having pushed my curiosity too far and contradicting my supposition that death should have put an end to this curiosity—was a different young lady, multiplying lies and deceit in just those cases where she had so gently reassured me by swearing that she had never tasted those pleasures which, intoxicated with regaining the freedom that she had left me in order to savor, she had in fact indulged to the point of swooning, to the extent of biting the young laundry-maid whom she met at sunrise on the banks of the Loire and to whom she declared, “I’m in heaven.” A different Albertine, and not only in the sense in which we employ the term when referring to other people. When other people turn out to be different from what we had imagined, this difference usually does not affect us deeply, and since the diviner’s wand of our intuition is unable to produce surface movements greater than the inner swings which it detects, it is only on the skin of other people’s lives that we are able to situate these differences. In former times when I learned that one woman loved other women, this did not seem to me to make her a different woman, a woman of a different essence. But when it comes to concern a woman whom we love ourselves, we need, in order to rid ourselves of the pain caused by the idea that it may be true, to find out not only what she has done, but also what she felt when she did it and what she was thinking about while she was doing it; then wading further out we enter deeper into our pain until we reach that mysterious essence. I suffered in the very depths of my being, in my body as well as my heart, much more than I would have done from the fear of losing my own life, from this curiosity which drew on all the united forces of my intellect and my unconscious mind; and in this way I projected into the very depths of Albertine’s own being everything that I now learned about her. And the pain which had thus so deeply driven home the truth about Albertine’s vice did much later render me one last service. Like the harm that I had caused my grandmother, the harm that Albertine had caused me was a last link between her and me and one link which survived even her memory, for, following the law of conservation of energy that is the law of all physics, suffering need not even be instructed by memory in order to function: thus a man who has forgotten the enchanted nights he had spent in the woods beneath the moonlight still suffers from the rheumatism which he contracted there.
These tastes which, despite her denials, she had, these tastes which were at last revealed to me, not through cold reasoning but through the searing anguish that I felt on reading the words, “I’m in heaven,” a suffering which gave them a special quality, these tastes did not merely accrue to my image of Albertine as the hermit crab acquires a new shell that it drags along behind it, but rather as one salt which comes into contact with another changes not only that salt’s color, but even its nature. Whereas the young laundry-maid must have said to her girl-friends, “Just imagine, who’d have thought it, d’you know that she’s one too?,” for me it was not merely a vice which they initially failed to suspect, which they then added into Albertine’s character, but the discovery that she was a different person, a person like them, speaking the same language, making her the compatriot of strangers, making her even more foreign to me, proving that what I had known of her, what I harbored in my heart, was no more than a tiny fragment of her, and that the remainder, which took on such dimensions not only for already being that so mysterious and important thing, individual desire, but also for her sharing it with others, which she had always hidden from me, keeping me away from it, as a woman might have hidden from me the fact that she was an enemy spy, yet more treacherously than such a spy, who deceives only regarding her nationality, whereas Albertine deceived me regarding the nature of her deepest being, in that she did not belong to the common race of humanity, but to an alien breed that intermingles with it and hides within it, but never entirely fuses with it. As it happened I had seen two paintings by Elstir with naked women in a thickly wooded landscape. In one of them one of the girls raises her foot as Albertine must have done when she stretched it out toward the laundry-maid. With her other foot, she is pushing the other girl, who is raising one leg in the air and playfully protesting, and just skimming the surface of the blue water with her other foot as she falls. Now I remembered that the line of her raised thigh made the same sinuous swan’s-neck of a curve against the angle of her knee that Albertine’s thigh did when she lay beside me on the bed, and I had often wished that I could tell her that she reminded me of these paintings. But I had not done so, in order to avoid awakening within her visions of naked female figures. Now I saw her, along with the laundry-maid and her friends, recomposing the group that I had so admired when I took my place amid Albertine’s girl-friends at Balbec. And if I had been a connoisseur responding to beauty alone, I would have acknowledged that Albertine recomposed this group a thousand times more beautifully now
that its elements were statues of nude goddesses like those which great sculptors scattered around Versailles, whether planting them among the groves or leaving them to be washed and polished by the watery caress of the fountains. As I saw her now beside the laundry-maid, I saw her in terms of those girls at the water’s edge, whose nude forms were reduplicated in feminine marble amid the bushes and undergrowth and steeped in water like some marine bas-relief. Remembering what she had been like on my bed, I thought that I recognized the line of her thigh. As I visualized it, it became the neck of a swan, seeking the other girl’s mouth. Then I no longer saw even a thigh, but the bold neck of a swan, like the one in a sketch I knew where it tremulously seeks out Leda’s mouth as she openly yields to the spasms of female desire, and where, because it is only a swan, she seems more alone, just as we discover over the telephone the inflections of a voice that we do not notice until we are able to detach it from the face which for us gives its expressions their concrete form. In this study, pleasure, instead of being directed at the woman who inspires it but who is absent and replaced by a motionless swan, is focused within the woman who feels it. There were moments when communications between my heart and my memory were cut. What Albertine had done with the laundry-maid was no longer signified by anything more than an almost algebraic shorthand which meant nothing to me: yet a hundred times an hour the current was restored and my heart was scorched by a hellish and pitiless fire as I saw Albertine brought truly back to life by my jealousy, stretching out beneath the caresses of the young laundry-maid, telling her, “I’m in heaven.” As she was alive at the moment when she committed her misdeed, that is to say at the moment where I now found myself, I was not content merely to learn of this misdeed, I would have liked her to know that I knew. In this way, although in such moments I felt regret at the thought that I would never see her again, this regret was informed by my jealousy and quite different from the heart-rending regret which I felt in the moments when I loved her; it was the regret that I was not able to say to her: “You thought that I would never know what you did after you left me, and yet I know everything, the laundry-maid on the banks of the Loire, you told her, ‘I’m in heaven,’ I saw the love bite.” Of course I also thought: “Why torture myself? The girl who took her pleasure with the laundry-maid exists no more and therefore is not a person whose actions have retained any import. She cannot tell herself that I know. But nor can she tell herself that I do not know, since she cannot tell herself anything at all.” But I was less convinced by this argument than by my visions of her pleasure, which brought me back to the moment when she had experienced it. Nothing exists for us but what we feel, and we project this into the past, as into the future, without allowing ourselves to be restrained by the fictitious barrier of death. If at such moments my regret that she was dead was subject to the influence of my jealousy and took this particular form, this influence extended naturally to my dreams of the occult and the immortal, which were no more than an attempt to put my desires into practice. Thus at such moments, if I had been able to invoke her by turning a table, as Bergotte believed was possible, or to meet her in another life, as the Abbé X*** would have it, I would have wished to do so only in order to be able to repeat to her, “I know about the laundry maid. You said: ‘I’m in heaven’; I saw the bite.” What I fell back on to help me fight against this image of the laundry-maid, was, admittedly after it had been there for some time, this image itself, because we only really take cognizance of something which is new, something which abruptly introduces a change of tone that strikes our sensibility, something that habit has not yet replaced with its pale replicas. But it was above all this fracturing of Albertine into many parts, into many Albertines, which constituted her sole mode of existence within me. Moments recurred when she had been nothing but kind, or intelligent, or serious, or even a lover of sport above all. And was it not right that this fragmentation should soothe me? For although in itself it was quite unreal, although it depended on the successive forms of the hours when it appeared to me, forms which remained those of my memory, as the curves in the images projected by the magic lantern depended on the curves of its colored slides, did it not in its way represent a perfectly objective truth, which is the fact that none of us is a single being, for we are constituted of many people who do not all have the same moral qualities, and the fact that if the immoral Albertine had indeed existed, this did not preclude the existence of others, like the one who liked to chat about Saint-Simon in her room; the one who, on the evening when I had told her that we should part, had said with such sadness, “To think that I shall never see this pianola and this room, again” and who, when she had seen what an emotional shock my own deceit had finally given me, had cried out in such sincere pity, “Oh, no, anything rather than upset you, I agree, I shall not try to see you again!”? Then I was no longer alone. Once this kindly Albertine had returned, I had won back the only person whom I could ask for the antidote to the suffering caused by Albertine. Of course I did still want to discuss the affair of the laundry-maid with her, but no longer in the mode of a cruel triumph making a vicious display of the fact that I was in the know. As I would have done while Albertine was alive, I asked her tenderly whether the laundry-maid affair was true. She swore that it was not, that Aimé was not very truthful and that because he wanted to appear worthy of the wages that I paid him, he had not wanted to return empty-handed and had got the laundry-maid to say whatever he wanted. Of course Albertine had told me a string of lies. And yet in the ebb and flow of her contradictory statements, I felt that there had been a certain progress, thanks to my efforts. I could not have sworn that she did not confide in me even at the start (involuntarily, perhaps, in a phrase that slipped out): I could no longer remember. And then, she had such odd ways of referring to certain things that they might be significant, or they might not be. But her sense of my jealousy had led her afterward to retract in horror what she had at first complaisantly admitted. Actually, Albertine had not even needed to say this to me. For me to be persuaded of her innocence it was enough for me to be able to kiss her, and now I could, now that the wall which had separated us, that invisible but intractable wall which rises between two lovers who have quarreled and which kisses cannot breach, had fallen. No, she had no need to tell me anything. She might have done whatever she wished, poor girl, there were feelings which could unite us, beyond whatever divided us. If the affair were true, if Albertine had hidden her inclinations from me, it was in order to spare my grief. I had had the sweet pleasure of hearing this Albertine say so herself. Besides, had I ever known a different Albertine? The two main causes of misunderstanding in a relationship with another person are either that we ourselves are kind-hearted, or else that we are in love with the other person. We fall in love with a smile, the look in someone’s eyes, a shoulder. That is enough; then during the long hours of hope or sadness, we create a person, we compose a character. And later, when we come to know better the person we love, we can no more, whatever cruel realities confront us, detach this kind disposition, this amorous feminine nature, from the person who has that look, or that shoulder, than we can remove her youth from a woman who has grown older but whom we have known since she was young. I called to mind the beautiful, kind, compassionate eyes of this Albertine, her plump cheeks and her neck with its grainy texture. It was the image of a dead woman, but since this dead woman was still alive, it was easy for me to do immediately what I would not have failed to do during her lifetime if she had still been by my side (and what I would do if I were ever to meet her again in another life), I forgave her.
The moments which I had spent in the company of this Albertine were so precious to me that I wished I had never forgotten a single one of them. Yet sometimes, as one comes across the remnants of a squandered fortune, I retrieved some which I thought I had lost: tying a scarf behind my neck instead of in front, I remembered a drive which I had never since recalled, when Albertine had kissed me and then arranged my scarf in this fashion to pr
event the cold air from chilling my throat. So simple a drive, restored to my memory by so humble a gesture, gave me the pleasure afforded by those personal possessions which have belonged to someone we have dearly loved and which are priceless when they are brought to us by her old maidservant; my sorrow was enriched by this, all the more since I had never thought of this scarf again.
Now Albertine, once more set free, resumed her flight; men and women followed in her wake. She was alive within me. I realized that my vast, protracted love for her was as it were the ghost of the feelings that I had felt for her, reproducing their diverse phases and obeying the same laws as the emotional reality which it reflected beyond her death. For I understood plainly that if I had been able to insert some intervals between my thoughts of Albertine, and had these lasted too long, I would have ceased to love her; this interruption would have made me indifferent to her, as I had now become toward my grandmother. Too long a time spent not thinking of her would have broken in my memory the continuity which is the very principle of life, although it may sometimes be reconstituted even after it has lapsed for some time. Had this not been the case with my love for Albertine while she was alive, which had been able to pick up the threads where they had left off after long periods of not thinking of her? At all events my memory must have been subject to the same laws and equally unable to withstand extended intervals, for after Albertine’s death it did no more than reflect, like the aurora borealis, the emotions that I had felt for her, as if it were merely the shadow of my love.
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