I would have been incapable of reviving Albertine because I was incapable of reviving myself, of reviving my former self. Life, with its habit of changing the face of the world through incessant but infinitely small adjustments, had not told me the day after the death of Albertine to “Become someone else,” but, through changes too imperceptible to allow me even to notice the fact that I was changing, had renewed almost everything about me, in such a way that my thoughts were already accustomed to their new master—my new self—by the time they noticed that he had changed; and that it was he who mattered. My affection for Albertine and my jealousy depended, as we have seen, on the irradiation by association of ideas of certain kernels of sweet or painful impressions, on the memory of Mlle Vinteuil at Montjouvain, on the gentle good-night kisses that Albertine bestowed on my neck. But as these impressions grew weaker, the vast field of impressions that they dyed with their anxious or soothing tints had recovered their neutral tones. Once oblivion had captured one or two high peaks of suffering and pleasure, the resistance of my love was vanquished, I no longer loved Albertine. I tried to call her to mind. When two days after Albertine’s departure I was horrified to find that I had survived forty-eight hours without her, that was an accurate foreboding. The same thing had happened when on a previous occasion I had written to Gilberte, thinking: if this goes on for another two years, I shall love her no longer. And if when Swann had asked me to see Gilberte again, I had felt as uncomfortable as if I were asked to welcome her back from the dead, in Albertine’s case death—or what I had believed to be death—had functioned to the same effect as the prolonged separation in the case of Gilberte. Death functions only as absence. The monster whose appearance had made my love tremble, oblivion, had indeed finally, or so I believed, devoured it. Not only did the news that she was alive not reawaken my love, not only did it allow me to note how far I had traveled down the road to indifference, but it instantaneously accelerated the process so abruptly that I wondered retrospectively if formerly, the opposite news, that of Albertine’s death, had not acted inversely, by completing the process of her departure, exciting my love and delaying its decline. And indeed, as soon as knowing that she was alive and that I could reach her had made her suddenly worthless to me, I wondered whether Françoise’s insinuations, the separation itself, and even her death (imagined but believed to be real) had not prolonged my love, in so far as the efforts of third parties or even fate to separate us from a woman do no more than attach us more closely to her. Now it was the opposite that happened. Actually I did try to recall her, and perhaps because I had only to say the word to have her all to myself, the memory that recurred was that of a girl already quite stout and mannish, in whose faded features there sprouted like a seed the profile of Mme Bontemps. What she might have done with Andrée or other girls was no longer of interest to me. I no longer suffered from the malady that I had so long believed to be incurable, and in fact I might have guessed as much. Of course missing a mistress, and the jealousy that lingers on afterward, are physical illnesses just as much as tuberculosis or leukemia. Yet we need to distinguish among the physical maladies between those that are caused by a purely physical agency and those that act on the body only through the medium of the intellect. Above all, if the part of our intellect that serves as the means of transmission is memory—that is if the cause is annulled or removed—however cruel our suffering is, however deep seems the disturbance wrought on our organism, it is extremely rare, given the power of thought to renew itself or rather its inability to remain unchanged, unlike bodily tissues, for the prognosis to be unfavorable. After a period of time within which a patient suffering from cancer would have died, it is very rare for a widow or an unconsolable father not to have recovered. I recovered. Should I for the sake of that girl, who now appeared to me so bloated and who certainly must have aged as all the girls that she had loved had aged, should I for her sake renounce the dazzling girl who was my memory of yesterday, my hope for tomorrow (and to whom I would be unable to offer anything if married to Albertine), should renounce this “new Albertine,” “non point telle que l’ont vue les Enfers” “mais fidèle, mais fière et même un peu farouche”?15 It was she who now was what Albertine had formerly been: my love for Albertine had been only a passing form of my devotion to youth. We think we love a girl, and in her we love no more, alas, than that dawn which their face momentarily reflects. The night passed. In the morning I returned the dispatch to the hotel porter saying that it had been handed to me by mistake and that it wasn’t addressed to me. He told me that the fact that it had been opened would cause him problems, that I would do better to keep it; I put it back in my pocket but promised myself that I would act as if I had never received it. I had definitively stopped loving Albertine. In such fashion this love, after diverging so much from what I had foreseen, in the light of my love for Gilberte; after causing me to make such a long and painful detour, finally in its turn, after claiming exemption, surrendered, as had my love for Gilberte, to the universal rule of oblivion.
But then I wondered: I used to value Albertine more than myself; I no longer value her now because for a period of time I have ceased to see her. But my desire not to be separated from myself by death, to revive after death, was a desire unlike the desire never to be separated from Albertine, it continued to last. Was that because I believed I was more precious than she, because when I loved her, I loved myself more? No, it was because in ceasing to see her, I had ceased to love her, and because I had not ceased to love myself since my daily relationship with myself had not been interrupted as had that with Albertine. But what if the relationship with my body, and with myself, had also been interrupted? Surely the result would be the same. Our love of life is no more than an old affair that we do not know how to discontinue. Its strength lies in its permanence. But death, which interrupts it, will cure us of our desire for immortality.
After lunch, whenever I did not set out to wander around Venice alone, I got ready to go out with my mother, and I went up to my bedroom to fetch the exercise books in which I would take notes for the study of Ruskin that I was engaged in.16 From the abrupt angles of the wall whose pressure distorted the corners of the room, I could sense the restrictions imposed by the sea and the scant provision of land. And as I went down to meet my mother, who was waiting for me, at this time of day when in Combray it was such a pleasure to sample the imminent sun in the darkness preserved by the closed shutters, here from top to bottom of the marble staircase, where one had no more idea than one would in a Renaissance painting whether it was built inside a palace or raised on a galley, the same coolness and the same feeling of external radiance were achieved thanks to the canvas blinds wafting before the ever-open windows, through which in a constant draft the warm air and the greenish sunlight slid as if on a floating surface, evoking the movements, the brightness and the instability of the neighboring waves. Most often it was St. Mark’s that I set out for, and with all the more pleasure because the church, which required a gondola to reach it, did not represent for me a mere monument, but as it were the terminus of a marine journey over springtime waters, with which St. Mark’s formed an indivisible, living whole. My mother and I entered the baptistery, both of us treading underfoot the marble and glass mosaics which paved it, and seeing before us the wide arches, whose waisted, pink surfaces have been slightly inflected by the passage of time, which, where time has respected the freshness of its coloring, lends the church an air of having been constructed from a soft and malleable material like the wax of giant honeycomb cells; but where, on the contrary, time has hardened the material and where artists have enhanced it with openwork and gold, it takes on the guise of some precious binding in Cordoban leather of the colossal gospel formed by Venice. My mother, seeing that I needed to spend a long time studying the mosaics representing the baptism of Christ and feeling the ice-cold air that fell around us in the baptistery, threw a shawl over my shoulders. When I was in Balbec with Albertine, I thought that sh
e illustrated one of those misguided illusions that cloud the minds of so many people unable to think clearly, when she told me of the pleasure—which I judged entirely unfounded—that she would derive from seeing a picture in my company. Today I am sure that this pleasure, if not of seeing, then at least of having seen something beautiful in the company of certain persons, does exist. The time has now come for me when, on remembering the baptistery, facing the waters of the Jordan where St. John immersed Christ while the gondola awaited us by the Piazzetta, I cannot remain indifferent to the fact that there was by my side in this cool twilight a woman clothed in mourning, whose respectful but enthusiastic fervor matched that of the elderly woman who can be seen in Venice in Carpaccio’s St. Ursula,17 and that nothing can ever again remove this red-cheeked, sad-eyed woman, in her black veils, from the softly lit sanctuary of St. Mark’s where I am certain to find her, because I have reserved a place there in perpetuity, alongside the mosaics, for her, for my mother. Carpaccio, whom I have just cited, and who was the painter that we preferred to visit when I was not working at St. Mark’s, on one occasion almost revived my love for Albertine. It was the first time that I had seen The Patriarch of Grado exorcizing one possessed.18 I was looking at the admirable carmine and violet sky against which stand those tall, inlaid chimneys, whose waisted forms and red, tulip-like blooms call to mind so many paintings of Venice by Whistler. Then my eyes traveled from the old wooden Rialto bridge to the fifteenth-century Ponte Vecchio and its marble palaces decorated with gilded capitals, and returned to the Canal where the boats are steered by youths wearing pink doublets and caps topped with osprey feathers, almost identical to those which faithfully recalled Carpaccio in the dazzling ballet The Legend of St. Joseph19 by Sert, Strauss and Kessler. And finally, before leaving the painting, my eyes returned to the quay, which was teeming with scenes from the Venetian life of the time. I saw the barber wiping his razor, the negro carrying his barrel, the Muslims in conversation, Venetian noblemen dressed in ample brocade or damask robes and cherry-colored velvet caps, when suddenly I felt a slight tug at my heart. On the back of one of the Companions of la Calza,20 recognizable from the gold and pearl embroidery which inscribed on their collar or their sleeve the proud guild of which they were members, I had just recognized the coat that Albertine had worn to accompany me to Versailles in an open carriage, that evening when I was far from suspecting that hardly fifteen hours were to separate me from the moment of her departure. As she was always ready for anything, when I had asked her to leave, on the sad day that in her last letter she was to name: twice twilit, since night was soon to fall and we would part, she had slung over her shoulders a Fortuny coat that she was to take away with her the following morning and that I had never since recalled to mind. Now it was in this painting by Carpaccio that this brilliant scion of Venice had found it, it was from the shoulders of this Companion of la Calza that he had unclasped it, in order to drape it over the shoulders of so many Parisian ladies, who were doubtless as ignorant as I had been of the fact that the original could be found among a group of aristocrats in the foreground of the Patriarch of Grado in one of the rooms of the Accademia in Venice. I had recognized it all, and the forgotten coat having restored to me, as I looked at it, the eyes and the heart of the man who that night was to leave for Versailles with Albertine, for a few seconds I was invaded with indistinct, impermanent feelings of desire and melancholy.
And finally there were days when my mother and I were not content to stay in the museums and the churches of Venice, and so one day when the weather was particularly fine, wanting to see those Vices and Virtues whose reproductions M. Swann had given me, and which were probably still pinned upon the wall of the study in our house at Combray, we traveled out to Padua; after crossing the gardens of the Arena Chapel under the midday sun, I entered the chapel with its Giottos21 where the whole ceiling vault and the background of the frescoes are so blue that it seems as if the radiant daylight had crossed the threshold at the same time as the visitor and had come for a moment to seek out shade and fresh air for its limpid sky; whose purity, once cleansed of the gilding applied by the sunlight, took on only a very slightly darker tone, as happens during those brief moments of respite which interrupt the finest days, when, without a cloud in sight, the sun averts its gaze for a moment and the azure sky, growing still softer, darkens. In the sky thus transposed onto a blue-toned stone heaven, I caught my first glimpse of angels in flight, for M. Swann had given me reproductions only of the Virtues and Vices and not of the frescoes that retrace the story of Christ and the Virgin Mary. And now I detected in the flight of these angels the same effect of concrete and literally real action as I had in the postures of Charity or Envy. With all the celestial fervor, or at least, the well-behaved, childish concentration, that joins their little hands in prayer, the angels in the Arena Chapel are represented rather as if they were a distinct species of flighted fowl that had actually existed and had been portrayed in Old and New Testament times. These small creatures can always be relied on to flutter in escort ahead of any passing saint; there are always one or two in the air in readiness, and, since they are real creatures, actually able to fly, you can see them taking off, climbing and banking, looping the loop with the greatest of ease, diving head-first toward the ground with a great flurry of wings designed to keep them in the air against the laws of gravity, and they call to mind much more some extinct variety of bird, or the young pupils of Roland Garros22 learning to glide, than angels of the art of the Renaissance or later periods, whose wings are purely emblematic and whose deportment is usually no different from that of flightless celestial beings.
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