“Goodness, don’t you know that?
“. . . Tous ces bambins, hommes futurs,
Qui suspendent déjà leur jeune rêverie
Aux cils câlins de tes yeux purs.15
“Oh, I almost thought for a moment that I could say:
“Le premier soir qu’il vint ici
De fierté je n’eus plus souci.
Je lui disais: ‘Tu m’aimeras
Aussi longtemps que tu pourras.’
Je ne dormais bien qu’en ses bras.”16
Even if it meant delaying my urgent visit to Andrée for a moment, I was curious to know to which woman this deluge of poems was addressed. I opened the door. They were being recited by M. de Charlus to a soldier whom I soon recognized as Morel and who was about to leave for his thirteen days’ training in the reserves. He was no longer on intimate terms with M. de Charlus but saw him from time to time to ask him a favor. M. de Charlus, who usually expressed his love in more virile terms, also had his sentimental moods. Moreover in his youth, in order to understand and feel poetic language, he had been obliged to imagine it addressed not to a beautiful and wayward lady but to a young man. I left them as swiftly as I could, although I felt that to call on friends with Morel gave M. de Charlus great satisfaction, giving him the momentary illusion of being married again. And what is more he combined within himself the snobbery of royalty with that of a domestic servant.
The memory of Albertine had become so fragmented within me that it no longer caused me sadness and was no more than a transition toward new desires, like a chord that announces a change of key. And even while discounting any idea of indulging fleeting sexual fancies, since I still remained faithful to the memory of Albertine, I was happier to have Andrée by my side than I would have been to have Albertine miraculously restored. For Andrée would be able to tell me more about Albertine than Albertine herself had ever told me. Now my problems concerning Albertine were still present in my mind, although my affections for her, whether physical or emotional, had already vanished. But my desire to know her life, which had diminished less, was now comparatively greater than my need for her presence. Besides, the idea that a woman might have had a relationship with her only provoked in me the desire to have this woman too. I told Andrée this while I caressed her. Then without making the slightest effort to reconcile her words with those which she had uttered a few months previously, Andrée told me with a half-smile: “Oh, yes, but you are a man. So we can’t do quite the same things together that I used to do with Albertine.” And whether she thought she would increase my desire (hoping to tempt her into confidential revelations, I had told her previously that I would like to have relations with a woman who had had them with Albertine) or my sorrow, or perhaps destroy a feeling of superiority over her that she might think I felt from having been the only person to have had a relationship with Albertine, she added: “Oh we both had some good times together, she was so tender, so passionate. Besides, I wasn’t the only one that she liked to take her pleasure with. She had met a handsome lad at Mme Verdurin’s called Morel. They understood each other immediately. He took it upon himself—with her permission to take his own pleasure too, for he liked inexperienced young things and, as soon as he had set them off down the slippery slope, would cast them loose—he took it upon himself to lure young laundry-maids and young fisher-girls from farther along the coast, who could fall in love with a boy but would not have responded to the advances of a girl. As soon as the girl was well and truly under his thumb, he took her to a secluded spot and gave her over to Albertine. Fearing that they might lose Morel, who of course joined in the act, the girls always did what they were told but they lost him all the same, for, from fear of the consequences and also because once or twice was enough for him, he would disappear leaving a false address. He was once bold enough to take one of these girls along with Albertine to a house of ill-fame in Couliville, where four or five women took her together or in succession. But afterward Albertine felt terrible remorse. I think that with you she had overcome her passions and kept postponing the day when she would yield again. And then her friendship with you was so great that her conscience was pricked. But it was inevitable that if ever she left you she would start again. She hoped that you would save her, that you would marry her. Deep down, she felt that it was a kind of criminal folly, and I often wondered if it wasn’t after some such affair, causing some family suicide, that she killed herself. I have to admit that right at the beginning of her stay with you, she had not entirely renounced her games with me. There were days when she seemed to need them, so much so that once, when it would have been so easy elsewhere, she could not bring herself to say good-bye to me before she had taken me to lie down beside her, in your home. Our luck was running out, we nearly got caught. She made the most of the fact that Françoise had gone out on an errand and that you had not yet come home. Then she put out all the lights so that after you had turned the key in the lock you would waste some time searching for the switch, but she had not locked the door to her bedroom. We heard you coming up the stairs, I only just had time to adjust my dress and go downstairs. It was a waste of time, because by an incredible coincidence you had forgotten your key and had to ring. But we had none the less lost our heads so much that, without having time to confer, we both suddenly thought of the same way to hide our embarrassment, by pretending to detest the scent of syringa whereas on the contrary we both adored it. You had brought back with you a long branch of that shrub, which allowed me to turn my head away and hide my confusion. That did not prevent me from making the absurdly clumsy suggestion that Françoise had probably returned and could perhaps open the door for you, although only a second earlier I had lied to you, saying that we had just returned from an excursion and that on our arrival Françoise had not yet left (which was true). But our misfortune—thinking that you had your key—was to have put out the lights, for we were afraid that on your way up you would see them come back on; or at least we hesitated too long. And for three nights Albertine did not sleep a wink because she was constantly afraid that you would be suspicious and would ask Françoise why she had not lit the lamps before she left. For Albertine was very afraid of you, and sometimes was sure that you were deceitful and wicked and basically hated her. After three days she gathered, given your calmness, that you hadn’t even thought of asking Françoise at all and she managed to sleep quietly once more, but she never took up her relationship with me again, whether from fear or remorse, for she claimed that she was very much in love with you, or perhaps she was in love with someone else. At all events, after that it was impossible to mention syringa in her presence without her turning bright red and hiding her face in her hands to try to cover her blushes.”
Like certain moments of good fortune, there are moments of misfortune which come too late, they fail to take on within us the significance that they would have assumed earlier. Andrée’s terrible revelation was that kind of misfortune for me. Doubtless, even when a piece of bad news should make us sad, it may happen that some distraction or the intricate interplay of conversation makes it pass by unheeded, so that, having a thousand things to try to respond to, transformed into another person by the desire to please the present company and protected for a few moments, as we enter this new cycle, from the emotions and the suffering which we discarded on entry and which we will regain when the short period of enchantment is over, we have no time to take it in. Yet if these emotions and suffering are too predominant, we enter only half-heartedly into the ambit of a new and ephemeral world in which, too tied to our suffering, we are unable to become another; then the words strike home to our heart, which we have been unable to disengage. But for some time now, words relating to Albertine, like a poison which has evaporated, no longer retained their toxic powers. The distance was already too great; as a man out walking during the afternoon who sees a faint crescent in the sky and thinks “Is that all there is to the great globe of the moon?,” I thought: �
��Goodness! That truth which I have sought and feared so much, is it only a few words spoken during a conversation and which one cannot fully take in because one is not alone!” Then again, the truth caught me totally unprepared, for Andrée had really exhausted me. Truly I would have preferred to have had more strength to devote to such a revelation; it remained external, for I had not yet found a place for it in my heart. We expect the truth to be revealed to us through new signs, not through a mere sentence, especially one so similar to those phrases that we have so often rehearsed in our minds. The habit of thinking sometimes prevents us from experiencing reality, inoculates us against it and makes it seem no more than yet another thought. There is no idea that does not carry within it its own possible refutation, no word that does not negate the word that negates it.
At all events, this was the sort of useless truth about the life of a dead mistress, if indeed it was true, which suddenly surfaces from the depths just when we no longer have any use for it. Then (doubtless thinking of another woman whom we love now and with whom the same process might occur, for we are no longer interested in the person we have forgotten) we are upset. We think, “If only she were still alive,” we think, “If only the woman who is alive understood all this and could realize that when she dies I shall discover everything she is hiding from me!” But it is a vicious circle. If I had been able to bring Albertine back to life, by the same token I would not have been able to make Andrée reveal anything. It is somewhat akin to the eternal “You’ll see, when I no longer love you,” which is so true and yet so absurd, since we might find out much more if we were no longer in love, but then we would no longer be interested in learning it. In fact, the case is exactly the same. For the woman whom one sees when one no longer loves her, if she tells you everything, it is in fact because she is no longer the same person or because you are no longer the same self: the person who was in love no longer exists. There too death has intervened, has made everything easy and pointless. Such were my reflections, as I adopted the hypothesis that Andrée was telling the truth—which was possible—and inclined to be sincere with me precisely because she now had a relationship with me, showing the same Saint-André-des-Champs qualities as Albertine originally had done with me. She was helped in this matter by the fact that she no longer feared Albertine, for our grasp of people’s reality does not long survive their death and after a few years they are like those gods of discredited religions that one may happily offend because one no longer believes in their existence. But the fact that Andrée no longer believed in the existence of Albertine might result in her feeling fewer moral scruples, not merely over betraying a truth which she had promised not to reveal, but even over devising a lie which retrospectively slandered her alleged accomplice. Was it this lack of fear which enabled her to reveal at last what I took to be the truth or, alternatively, to fabricate a lie, if, for whatever reason, she found me too full of happiness and pride and wanted to deflate them? Perhaps she was annoyed with me (with an annoyance that had been held in abeyance as long as she had seen me miserable and disconsolate) because I had had a relationship with Albertine and because perhaps she envied me—thinking that for this reason I felt myself more favored than she—an advantage that she had perhaps neither obtained nor even sought. Thus it was that I had often heard her tell people that they looked very ill, when it was their healthy complexion and above all their awareness of their healthy complexion that exasperated her, so that, hoping to annoy them, she would tell them that she herself was very well and continued to declare this even when she was quite ill, until the day when the approach of death finally loosened her interest in whether the happy were well or whether they knew that she was dying. But, at the time, this day was still a long way off. Perhaps I had irritated her for some reason unknown to me, as once she had been furious with the young man who was so well-informed about sport but so ignorant about everything else, the man whom we had met at Balbec and who since then had been living with Rachel, and about whom Andrée still spread libelous rumors, hoping to be sued for libel in order to be able to publish dishonorable facts about his father, the falsehood of which he would have been unable to prove. Now perhaps this fury against me, which had abated as soon as she saw how sad I was, was only a relapse. Indeed, even those people whom, her eyes sparkling with rage, she had threatened with disgrace, death and imprisonment, using false witness if need be, as soon as she thought they were unhappy and humiliated, she wished them no ill and was ready to shower them with favors. For she was not basically wicked and if, below the surface, her slightly deeper, rather surprising nature did not confirm the kindness that her first delicate attentions had led people to suppose but rather envy and pride, yet, at an even deeper level, her third-degree, that is, her true nature, even if never quite fully realized, tended toward goodness and love of her neighbor. Only, like all people who live in a state which they wish were better, but know no more of this than their desire for it and do not understand that the first condition is to break with their present state—like neurasthenics or morphine addicts who would like to be cured but only as long as no one deprives them of their tics or their morphine, like certain rather worldly religious souls or artistic minds, aspiring to solitude yet prepared to imagine it only in so far as it does not imply absolutely renouncing their former life—Andrée was ready to love all God’s creatures but only as long as she had first managed to see them failing to triumph and, in order to do so, had humiliated them in advance. She did not understand that one should love even the proud and conquer their pride through love rather than more overweening pride. But the fact is that she was like those invalids who want to be cured by the same much-loved means as sustain their illness and which they would immediately cease to love if they abandoned these means. But one may learn to swim and still prefer to keep one’s feet dry.
As regards the athletic young man, who was a nephew of the Verdurins and whom I had met during my two stays in Balbec, I have to say in passing, and by way of anticipation, that a short while after Andrée’s visit, the account of which I shall resume in a moment, there occurred certain events which created a great impression on me. First of all, this young man (perhaps in memory of Albertine, although I did not know at the time that he had been in love with her) became engaged to Andrée and married her, despite Rachel’s despair, which left him totally unmoved. At that time (that is to say a few months after the visit which I have mentioned) Andrée no longer said that he was a ne’er-do-well, and it was only later that I realized that she had said so purely because she was crazy about him but thought that he was not interested in her. But another fact was even more striking. This young man produced a series of short sketches, using stage-sets and costumes that he had designed himself and which introduced into contemporary art a revolution at least equal to that accomplished by the Ballets Russes.17 In short, those in the know considered his works to be of crucial importance, almost works of genius, and I must say that I share their opinion, thus ratifying to my astonishment Rachel’s earlier views. People who had seen him at Balbec attending only to whether the clothes of the people he had to frequent were well cut or not and spending all his time at baccarat or the races or playing golf or polo, who knew that he had always been the dunce of the class and had even got himself expelled from school (to annoy his parents, he had spent two months living in the notorious house of ill-fame where M. de Charlus believed he had seen Morel), thought that his works had perhaps been composed by Andrée, who, from love for him, wished him to take the credit, or that more probably he used his great personal fortune, only slightly reduced by his follies, to pay some brilliant but needy professional to write them (this kind of wealthy society—not having the gloss which is acquired by frequenting the aristocracy and having no idea of what an artist is like, since for them he is only either an actor whom they invite to recite monologues at their daughters’ engagement parties, where, as soon as he has finished, his fee is discreetly handed him in an another room, or perhaps a pai
nter for whom they will have the daughter pose once she is married, before she has had children and while she still has her looks—tending to believe that everyone in society who writes, composes or paints,18 has his works created for him by someone else and pays to establish his reputation as an author as others do to have a seat in parliament). But none of this was true; for this young man was indeed the author of those admirable works. When I found out, I could not help wavering between different explanations. Either he had indeed spent long years as the “thick-headed brute” that he had seemed and some physiological cataclysm had awoken the Genie slumbering within him, like a Sleeping Beauty; or else during his last turbulent years at school, failing his baccalaureate, running up large gambling debts at Balbec, avoiding riding in the “tram” with his aunt Verdurin’s acquaintances because of their dreadful clothes, there was already a man of genius, perhaps unaware of his genius, having lost the key to the door in the turmoil of his juvenile passions; or even, a man of genius and already aware of it, yet bottom of the class, because while his teacher was mouthing clichés about Cicero, he himself was reading Rimbaud or Goethe. Certainly nothing would have justified this hypothesis when I met him in Balbec, where his preoccupations seemed to me to resolve entirely around the form of horses and the preparation of cocktails. But this is not an irrefutable objection. Perhaps he was very vain, which may be allied to genius, and tried to shine in the way he knew would dazzle the society he lived in and which he could not achieve by showing a profound knowledge of Elective Affinities,19 but rather by knowing how to drive a four-in-hand. Besides I am not sure even that when he had become the author of these fine and original works, he would have much wanted, in the theaters where he was known, to greet anyone who was not wearing a dinner-jacket, since people stay true to their former tastes, yet this would prove in him not stupidity but vanity and even a certain practical sense, a certain insight in adapting his vanity to the mentality of fools whose esteem he needed and for whom the dinner-jacket may well shine more brightly than the eyes of a thinker. Who knows, if seen from an external viewpoint, how many a man of talent or even without talent but with a fondness for things intellectual, like myself for instance, might not have struck someone meeting him at Rivebelle, at the Hôtel de Balbec, or on the promenade at Balbec, of the most utter and pretentious imbecile? Not to mention that for Octave the realm of art must have been something so intimate, lodged so deeply in his most hidden depths, that he would doubtless never have thought of talking about it, as would, for example, Saint-Loup, for whom the arts had the same prestige as teams of horses for Octave. Then he might have had a passion for gambling, and people would say that he never lost it. Even so if the piety which brought to light the unknown works of Vinteuil could emerge from the very dubious world of Montjouvain, I was no less struck to think that perhaps the most striking masterpieces of our times have been nurtured not by taking the Concours Général,20 and following the classic academic route, like the Broglie family,21 but by frequenting the paddock and fashionable cocktail bars. At all events during this period at Balbec the reasons which made me want to meet him and those which made Albertine and her friends anxious to prevent me from meeting him, fell equally wide of the mark, and their only value might have been to highlight the eternal misunderstanding by the “intellectual” (represented in this case by myself) and society (represented by the little gang) of the character of a social figure (the young golfer). I detected no signs of his talent, and his prestige in my eyes—of the same type as that of Mme Blatin formerly—was to be, whatever they claimed, a friend of my young female friends, and more closely linked to their gang than I was. What is more, Albertine and Andrée, symbolizing thereby the inability of society people to exercise a valid judgment on things of the mind and their tendency in such matters to believe in deceptive appearances, were not only not far from finding me stupid because I was curious to find out about such a fool, but were astonished above all that, if I had to choose a golfer, I should go for the most insignificant. If at worst I had wanted to take up with the young Gilbert de Bellœuvre, he was at least a lad who had conversational as well as golfing talents, who had been runner-up in the Concours Général and wrote pleasant verses (and yet who was in fact as thick as they come). Or else, if my aim was to “make a study,” “for a book,” Guy Saumoy, who was completely mad and who had twice abducted a minor, was at least a curious figure who could “interest” me. I would have been “allowed” these two but whatever did I see in the other one? He was clearly a major specimen of the species known as the “thick-headed brute.”
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