After that one moment when, looking at Andrée, I thought I caught a glimpse of the pleasures in which I had so often tried to imagine Albertine indulging, there was another occasion when I thought that I surprised their presence, but this time through my ears, not my eyes. I had asked for two laundry-maids from a neighborhood which Albertine often used to frequent to be invited to a house of ill-fame. As one caressed the other, her partner started suddenly to make a noise which at first I was unable to interpret, for we never perfectly understand the significance of a strange sound which expresses a sensation that we do not ourselves feel. If we are listening in an adjoining room, without being able to see, we may take for a fit of giggles the screams of a patient operated on without anesthetic; and as for the sounds made by a mother who has just learned of the death of her child, it could seem to us, if we did not know the cause, as difficult to ascribe to the human tongue as the sounds emitted by an animal or a harp. It takes us a while to understand that both kinds of sound express by analogy something we call suffering, however different from our own experience, and similarly it took me a while to understand that this particular sound expressed by analogy something, however different, which I had experienced, what I called pleasure; and this pleasure must have been very powerful to shake the person who felt it to such an extent that it drew from her this unknown language, which seemed to designate and comment on all the stages of dramatic delight experienced by the young woman hidden from my eyes by the curtain permanently drawn against anyone but themselves over what happens in the mysterious private depths of every human creature. At all events these two young things were unable to tell me anything, they had never even heard of Albertine.
Novelists often claim in their introductions that somewhere on their travels abroad they have met someone who has told them of another person’s life. They then let this traveling companion tell the tale, and their novel is precisely the story they hear. Thus Stendhal heard about Fabrice del Dongo’s life29 from a canon in Padua. When we are in love, that is, when some other person’s life seems to be a great mystery to us, how we would like to come across such a well-informed narrator! For he surely exists. Do we ourselves not quite dispassionately tell the life story of some woman or other to one of our friends or to a stranger who knew nothing of her love affairs but who listens to us out of sheer curiosity? The man I was at the time when I told Bloch about the Princesse de Guermantes or Mme Swann, the man who could have spoken to me of Albertine, there always is such a person . . . but we will never meet him. It seemed to me that if I could have met women who had known her, I would have found out everything that I needed to know. And yet to a stranger it must have seemed as if nobody could know her life better than me. Did I not even know her best friend, Andrée? Thus it is that we believe that a minister’s friend must know the truth about certain affairs or he would not be caught up in his trial. But the friend knows from personal experience that each time he has discussed politics with the minister, the latter spoke in general terms and told him no more than he might read in the newspapers, or if he had a request, his repeated appeals for the minister’s help were met each time by the phrase “I can do nothing about it,” which the friend himself can do nothing about. I thought “If only I had been able to meet such and such a witness!” from whom, if I had met them, I would have been able to obtain no more than I had from Andrée, who was herself the guardian of a secret which she refused to deliver. I was different again in this from Swann, who, when he was no longer jealous, ceased to be curious about what Odette might have done with Forcheville; even when my jealousy had subsided, the only thing that held any charm for me was to get to know Albertine’s laundry-maid and other girls from her neighborhood, in order to reconstruct her life and relationships there. And since desire always arises from something we have already found impressive, as I had found happened with Gilberte, or with the Duchesse de Guermantes, it was in the neighborhoods where Albertine had formerly lived that I sought out women of her milieu, who were the only women whose presence I desired. Even if they could tell me nothing, the only women to whom I felt attracted were those that Albertine had known or whom she might have known, women of her milieu or of the circles which she frequented, in short women who for me possessed the attraction of resembling her or of being those who would have attracted her. Recalling in this way either Albertine herself or the kind of woman that appealed to her, these women awakened in me painful feelings, whether of jealousy or regret, which later, as my grief subsided, changed into a curiosity which was not without charm. And these women were mostly working-class girls, since their lives were so different from my experience. Of course, it is only in our minds that we ever possess anything, and we do not possess a painting because we have it in our dining-room, if we do not understand it, nor a country because we merely reside in it without ever looking at it. But I have to say that in former times I did have the illusion that I possessed Balbec once more, when Albertine came to see me in Paris and I held her in my arms; just as I made a rather glancing not to say furtive contact with Albertine’s life when I tasted the atmosphere of a workshop, shop-counter gossip, or life in the slums, in the arms of a working-girl. Always related to Albertine—as Albertine herself had been related to Balbec—Andrée and these other women were those kinds of substitutes for pleasure which replace each other in diminishing order and allow us to relinquish the pleasures that we are unable to attain, like staying in Balbec or loving Albertine, those kinds of pleasure which (just as going to the Louvre to see a Titian that used to be in Venice consoles us for being unable to go to Venice), as they fan out into a series of infinite nuances, arrange our lives into a set of concentric, continuous, harmonious but gradually fading circles, around an initial desire that has set the tone, eliminated everything that does not blend with it and has imposed its dominant tone (as happened to me for instance with the Duchesse de Guermantes and with Gilberte). Andrée and these other women acted the same part in my desire to have Albertine close at hand, which I knew I could no longer gratify, as had one evening, in the days when I knew Albertine only by sight, the fresh, sinuous, sunlit form of a bunch of grapes.
Now that they were associated with the memory of my love, the physical and social attributes of Albertine, whom I had loved in spite of them, had the opposite effect, that of orientating my desire toward what previously it would have least naturally chosen, dark-haired girls from the lower-middle classes. Of course what was starting partially to revive within me was the immense desire that my love for Albertine had been unable to assuage, that immense desire to know life which I used to feel on the roads near Balbec or the streets of Paris, the desire which had so made me suffer when, supposing that it also existed in Albertine’s heart, I had attempted to deprive her of the means of satisfying that desire with anyone other than myself. Now that I was able to bear the thought of her desires, and since this thought was immediately aroused by the upsurge of my own desires, bringing our two boundless appetites into union, I would have liked us to have been able to indulge them together, and I thought, “She would have liked that girl,” but as this oblique reference suddenly made me think of her and her death, I felt too sad to follow my desires any further. Just as in former times the Méséglise and the Guermantes ways had established the foundations of my taste for the countryside and would have prevented me from finding deep charm in a neighborhood with no old church or cornflowers or buttercups, so in the same way it was by linking them within me to the charms of the past that my love for Albertine made me seek certain types of women to the exclusion of others; as in the days before I had fallen in love, I started to feel the need for harmonics emanating from her which could become interchangeable with my memory as it became gradually less exclusive. I could not now have found pleasure in the company of a proud, blonde duchess, because she would not have evoked in me any of the emotions which derived from Albertine, from my desire for her, from the jealousy I had felt for her loves, or from my suffering over her
death. For in order to gain strength, our sensations need to trigger within us something other than themselves, a sentiment which cannot find its satisfaction in pleasure but which becomes added to desire, swells it and makes it cling desperately to pleasure. The more the love that Albertine might have felt for certain women gradually ceased to make me suffer, the more it attached these women to my past, making them into something real; just as the memory of Combray gave greater reality to its old buttercups and hawthorn than to the new flowers of spring. Even when I thought of Andrée, I no longer said furiously, “Albertine loved her,” but, on the contrary, in order to explain my own desire to myself, I said tenderly, “Albertine was fond of her.” I now understood those widowers whom one believes to be consoled and who prove on the contrary that they are inconsolable because they have married again, this time with their wife’s sister.
Thus my dying love seemed to make new loves possible for me, and Albertine, like those women long loved for their own sake who later, feeling their lover’s ardor waning, preserve their power by settling for the role of go-between, as La Pompadour did for Louis XV,30 served up a whole series of new young girls for me. Previously my time had been divided into periods when I desired first one woman, then another. When the violent pleasures offered by the one had been appeased, I fancied the other, who offered an almost pure tenderness, until the need for more artful caresses brought back the desire for the first. Now this oscillation had come to an end, or rather, one of its phases had become indefinitely protracted. What I would have preferred was that the new arrival should come and live with me, and before leaving me in the evening, give me a friendly, sisterly kiss. So that I might have come to believe—had I not had the experience of the intolerable presence of the other person—that I missed the kiss more than any particular lips, the pleasure more than love, the habit more than the person. I would have also liked the newcomer to play Vinteuil for me as Albertine had, to discuss Elstir with me as she had. All of this was impossible. Their love was not worthy of hers, I thought; whether because a love which could include all those episodes, the visits to museums, the evenings at concerts, the whole complicated life which generates correspondence, conversation, the flirtation preceding the relationship itself and the solemn friendship that follows, draws on deeper resources than love for a woman who knows only how to yield, as an orchestra has more resources than a piano; or whether because at a deeper level my need for the same sort of affection that Albertine used to give me, the affection of a reasonably well-educated girl who acted at the same time as a sister, was only—like my need for girls from the same milieu as Albertine—a revival of my memory of Albertine, of my memory of my love for her. And once more I felt above all that memory is not creative, that it is incapable of desiring anything different or even anything better than what we have already possessed; and then that it is mental, so that reality cannot provide it with the state to which it aspires; and finally that the rebirth which it incarnates, since it emanates from a dead person, is less the rebirth of the need for love, as it would have us believe, than that of the need for the missing person. So that even the resemblance to Albertine of the woman whom I had chosen, and the resemblance of her affections, if I managed to obtain them, to those of Albertine, only made me feel all the more the absence of what I had been looking for without realizing it, of what was indispensable for the rebirth of my love, that is Albertine herself, the period that we had lived together, the past which I was seeking without realizing it. Of course on sunny days Paris appeared to me endlessly blooming with young girls whom I did not desire but who sprang from the dark roots of my desire for Albertine and the unknown nights that she had spent far from home. These were the sort of girl of whom when we first met, when she was not wary of me, she had said, “What a ravishing little girl, look at her lovely hair!” All my former curiosity about her life when I knew her only by sight, and on the other hand all my desires to live life to the full, became fused in that one curious urge, to know the manner in which Albertine felt pleasure, to see her with other women, perhaps because thus, once they had left, I would remain alone with her, her last and only master. And if I could have seen her hesitate as to whether it was worth spending the evening with one girl or another, and noted her satiety or perhaps her disappointment when the girl had gone, I could have clarified and reduced to more sensible proportions the jealousy inspired in me by Albertine, because in seeing how she experienced her pleasures I would have taken the measure of them and discovered their limits.
How much pleasure and sweetness had been lost to us both, I thought, because of her fierce determination to deny her inclinations! And as I once again tried to find what had been the reason for this obstinacy, suddenly there came to me the memory of a remark that I had made one day in Balbec when she had offered me a pencil. In reproaching her with not letting me embrace her, I had told her that I found the thought of our kissing as natural as I found the thought of a woman having relations with another woman repellent. Alas, perhaps Albertine had remembered.
I took home with me the girls who should have appealed to me least. I stroked their sleek, prim tresses, I admired their finely chiseled little noses or their pale Spanish complexions. Of course even in former times, even with women whom I happened to glimpse on the roads around Balbec or on the streets of Paris, I had felt how singular was my desire and how false it would be to try to assuage it with a different object. But life, gradually revealing to me the permanence of our needs, had taught me that if a person is unobtainable we have to settle for someone else, and I felt that what I had asked of Albertine could have been supplied by another, like Mlle de Stermaria. But it had been Albertine; and between the satisfaction of my need for affection and the specific features of her body the cross-stitch of memories had become so intertwined that I could no longer tear my urge for affection away from the body of Albertine, which had become embroidered into my memory. Only she could bring me happiness. The idea of her uniqueness was no longer a metaphysical a priori deriving from Albertine’s individual qualities, as formerly for various passing women, but an a posteriori constituted by my contingent but inseparably entangled memories. I could no longer yearn for any affection without needing her and suffering from her absence. In this way the very similarity of the woman I chose, and of the affection I sought, to the happiness that I had known, only made me all the more aware of everything they lacked in order to revive it. I felt the same emptiness in them that I had felt in my room since Albertine had left, the emptiness which I had hoped to fill by holding these women in my arms. For they had never spoken to me of Vinteuil’s music or Saint-Simon’s Memoirs,31 had never put on too much perfume before coming to see me, never playfully brushed their eyelashes against mine, the kind of things which take on importance because they seem to allow us to cradle the sexual act itself within our dreams and create an illusion of love, but in fact because they were part and parcel of my memory of Albertine and because she was the person whom I was hoping to find. The qualities that these women shared with Albertine made me feel more keenly what they lacked, which was everything, but an everything which could never exist again, since Albertine was dead. And thus my love for Albertine, which had drawn me toward these women, made me feel indifferent toward them, and my regret for Albertine and the persistence of my jealousy, which had already outlasted my most pessimistic forecasts, would doubtless not have changed very much if their existence, isolated from the rest of my life, had been subject only to the play of my memories, to the actions and reactions of a psychology applicable to motionless states, and had not been sucked into a vaster system where souls move through time as bodies through space. As there is a spatial geometry, so there is a temporal psychology, where the calculations of a two-dimensional psychology would no longer be accurate because they would not account for Time and one of the forms that it assumes, that is, forgetting; the process of forgetting, whose force I was starting to feel and which is such a powerful tool of adaptation to r
eality because it gradually destroys in us the remnants of the past which constantly contradict it. And of course I might have guessed much sooner that one day I would no longer love Albertine. When I had understood the difference that there was between the importance of her person and her actions for me as opposed to for others, implying that my love was less a love for her than a love within me, I could have drawn diverse conclusions from this subjective character of my love, including the fact that, since it was a state of mind, it could clearly survive longer than the person concerned, but also that having no real link with this person, having no material support outside her, it must, like all states of mind, even the most long-lasting, one day find itself worn out and have to be “replaced,” and that on that day everything that seemed to me to be so sweetly and indissolubly linked to Albertine would no longer exist for me. The problem with people is that for us they are no more than prints in our mental museum, which fade on exposure. And it is precisely because of this that they form the basis of projects illuminated by our thoughts, but thoughts tire and memories collapse: the day would come when I would happily give Albertine’s room to the first girl who wanted it, as I had given Albertine the agate marble or other gifts of Gilberte’s.
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