In Search of Lost Time, Volume V Read online

  Of a laundry girl, on a Sunday, there was not the slightest prospect. As for the baker’s girl, as ill luck would have it she had rung the bell when Françoise was not about, had left her loaves in their basket on the landing, and had made off. The greengrocer’s girl would not call until much later. Once, I had gone to order a cheese at the dairy, and among the various young female employees had noticed a startling towhead, tall in stature though little more than a child, who seemed to be day-dreaming, amid the other errand-girls, in a distinctly haughty attitude. I had seen her from a distance only, and for so brief an instant that I could not have described her appearance, except to say that she must have grown too fast and that her head supported a mane that gave the impression far less of capillary characteristics than of a sculptor’s stylised rendering of the separate meanderings of parallel snow-tracks on a mountainside. This was all that I had been able to make out, apart from a sharply defined nose (a rare thing in a child) in a thin face, which recalled the beaks of baby vultures. It was not only the clustering of her comrades round her that prevented me from seeing her distinctly, but also my uncertainty whether the sentiments which I might, at first sight and subsequently, inspire in her would be those of shy pride, or of irony, or of a scorn which she would express later on to her friends. These alternative suppositions which I had formed about her in a flash had thickened the blurred atmosphere around her in which she was veiled like a goddess in a cloud shaken by thunder. For moral uncertainty is a greater obstacle to an exact visual perception than any defect of vision would be. In this too skinny young person, who also struck one’s attention too forcibly, the excess of what another person would perhaps have called her charms was precisely what was calculated to repel me, but had nevertheless had the effect of preventing me from even noticing, let alone remembering, anything about the other dairymaids, whom the aquiline nose of this one and her uninviting look, pensive, private, seeming to be passing judgment, had totally eclipsed, as a white streak of lightning plunges the surrounding countryside into darkness. And thus, of my call to order a cheese at the dairy, I had remembered (if one can say “remember” in speaking of someone so carelessly observed that one adapts to the nullity of the face ten different noses in succession), I had remembered only the girl I had found unpleasing. This can be enough to set a love affair in motion. And yet I might have forgotten the startling towhead and might never have wished to see her again, had not Françoise told me that, though still quite a nipper, she had all her wits about her and would shortly be leaving her employer, since she had been going too fast and owed money in the neighbourhood. It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure may be a beginning of beauty.

  I began to read Mamma’s letter. Behind her quotations from Mme de Sévigné (“If my thoughts are not entirely black at Combray, they are at least dark grey; I think of you constantly; I long for you; your health, your affairs, your absence: think how they must seem to me when the dusk descends”) I sensed that my mother was vexed to find Albertine’s stay in the house prolonged, and my intention of marriage, although not yet announced to the betrothed, confirmed. She did not express her annoyance more directly because she was afraid that I might leave her letters lying about. Even then, veiled as they were, she reproached me for not informing her immediately, after each of them, that I had received it: “You remember how Mme de Sévigné used to say: ‘When one is far away, one no longer laughs at letters which begin: I have received yours.’” Without referring to what distressed her most, she expressed displeasure at my lavish expenditure: “Where on earth does all your money go? It is distressing enough that, like Charles de Sévigné, you do not know what you want and are ‘two or three people at once,’ but do try at least not to be like him in spending money so that I may never have to say of you: ‘He has discovered how to spend and have nothing to show, how to lose without gambling and how to pay without clearing himself of debt.’”

  I had just finished Mamma’s letter when Françoise returned to tell me that she had in the house that same rather too forward young dairymaid of whom she had spoken to me. “She can quite well take Monsieur’s letter and do his shopping for him if it’s not too far. You’ll see, she’s just like a Little Red Ridinghood.” Françoise went to fetch the girl, and I could hear her showing the way and saying: “Come along now, frightened because there’s a passage! Stuff and nonsense, I never thought you’d be such a goose. Have I got to lead you by the hand?” And Françoise, like a good and faithful servant who means to see that her master is respected as she respects him herself, had draped herself in the majesty that ennobles the procuress in the paintings of the old masters, wherein the mistress and the lover fade into insignificance by comparison.

  Elstir, when he gazed at the violets, had no need to bother about what they were doing. The entry of the young dairymaid at once robbed me of my contemplative calm; I could no longer think of anything except how to give plausibility to the fable of the letter that she was to deliver and I began to write quickly without venturing to cast more than a furtive glance at her, so that I might not seem to have brought her into my room to be scrutinised. She was invested for me with that charm of the unknown which would not have existed for me in a pretty girl whom I had found in one of those houses where they attend on one. She was neither naked nor in disguise, but a genuine dairymaid, one of those whom we picture to ourselves as being so pretty when we do not have the time to approach them; she was a particle of what constitutes the eternal desire, the eternal regret of life, the twofold current of which is at length diverted, directed towards us. Twofold, for if it is a question of the unknown, of a person who, from her stature, her proportions, her indifferent glance, her haughty calm, we suspect must be divine, at the same time we want this woman to be thoroughly specialised in her profession, enabling us to escape from ourselves into that world which a special costume makes us romantically believe to be different. Indeed, if we wanted to embody in a formula the law of our amorous curiosities, we should have to seek it in the maximum divergence between a woman glimpsed and a woman approached and caressed. If the women of what used at one time to be called the closed houses, if prostitutes themselves (provided that we know them to be prostitutes) attract us so little, it is not because they are less beautiful than other women, but because they are ready and waiting; because they already offer us precisely what we seek to attain; it is because they are not conquests. The divergence, there, is at its minimum. A whore smiles at us in the street as she will smile when she is by our side. We are sculptors. We want to obtain of a woman a statue entirely different from the one she has presented to us. We have seen a girl strolling, indifferent and insolent, along the seashore, we have seen a shop-assistant, serious and active behind her counter, who will answer us curtly if only to avoid being subjected to the jibes of her comrades, or a fruit-vendor who barely answers us at all. Whereupon we will not rest until we can discover by experiment whether the proud girl on the seashore, the shop-assistant obsessed with what other people will say, the aloof fruit-vendor, cannot be made, by skilful handling on our part, to relax their uncompromising attitude, to throw about our necks those arms that were laden with fruit, to bend towards our lips, with a smile of consent, eyes hitherto cold or absent—oh, the beauty of the eyes of a working-girl, eyes which were stern in working hours when she was afraid of the scan-dalmongering of her companions, eyes which shunned our obsessive gaze and which, now that we have seen her alone and face to face, allow their pupils to light up with sunny laughter when we speak of making love! Between the shopgirl, or the laundress busy with her iron, or the fruit-seller, or the dairymaid—and that selfsame wench when she is about to become one’s mistress, the maximum divergence is attained, stretched indeed to its extreme limits, and varied by those habitual gestures of her profession which make a pair of arms describe, during the hours of toil, an arabesque as different as it is possible to imagine from those supple bonds that already every evenin
g are fastened about one’s neck while the mouth shapes itself for a kiss. And so one spends one’s life in anxious approaches, constantly renewed, to serious working-girls whose calling seems to distance them from one. Once they are in one’s arms, they are no longer what they were, the distance that one dreamed of bridging is abolished. But one begins anew with other women, one devotes all one’s time, all one’s money, all one’s energy to these enterprises, one is enraged by the too cautious driver who may make us miss the first rendezvous, one works oneself up into a fever. And yet one knows that this first rendezvous will bring the end of an illusion. No matter: as long as the illusion lasts one wants to see whether one can convert it into reality, and then one thinks of the laundress whose coldness one remarked. Amorous curiosity is like the curiosity aroused in us by the names of places; perpetually disappointed, it revives and remains for ever insatiable.

  Alas, as soon as she stood before me, the fair dairymaid with the streaky locks, stripped of all the desires and imaginings that had been aroused in me, was reduced to her mere self. The quivering cloud of my suppositions no longer enveloped her in a dizzying haze. She acquired an almost apologetic air from having (in place of the ten, the twenty that I recalled in turn without being able to fix them in my memory) but a single nose, rounder than I had thought, which gave her a hint of stupidity and had in any case lost the faculty of multiplying itself. This flyaway caught on the wing, inert, crushed, incapable of adding anything to its own paltry appearance, no longer had my imagination to collaborate with it. Fallen into the inertia of reality, I sought to spring back again; her cheeks, which I had not noticed in the shop, appeared to me so pretty that I was abashed, and to recover my composure said to the young dairymaid: “Would you be so kind as to hand me the Figaro which is lying there. I must make sure of the address to which I am going to send you.” Thereupon, as she picked up the newspaper, she disclosed as far as her elbow the red sleeve of her jersey and handed me the conservative sheet with a neat and courteous gesture which pleased me by its swift familiarity, its fluffy appearance and its scarlet hue. While I was opening the Figaro, for the sake of something to say, and without raising my eyes, I asked the girl: “What do you call that red knitted thing you’re wearing? It’s very pretty.” She replied: “It’s my sweater.” For, by a slight downward tendency common to all fashions, the garments and words which a few years earlier seemed to belong to the relatively smart world of Albertine’s friends, were now the currency of working-girls. “Are you quite sure it won’t be giving you too much trouble,” I said, while I pretended to be searching the columns of the Figaro, “if I send you rather a long way?” As soon as I myself thus appeared to consider the job I wanted her to do for me somewhat arduous, she began to feel that it would be a nuisance to her: “The only thing is, I’m supposed to be going for a ride on my bike this afternoon. You see, Sunday’s the only day we’ve got.” “But won’t you catch cold, going bare-headed like that?” “Oh, I shan’t be bare-headed, I’ll have my cap, and I could get on without it with all the hair I have.” I raised my eyes to those flavescent, frizzy locks and felt myself caught in their swirl and swept away, with a throbbing heart, amid the lightning and the blasts of a hurricane of beauty. I continued to study the newspaper, but although it was only to keep myself in countenance and to gain time, while only pretending to read I nevertheless took in the meaning of the words that were before my eyes, and my attention was caught by the following: “To the programme already announced for this afternoon in the great hall of the Trocadéro must be added the name of Mlle Lea who has consented to appear in Les Fourberies de Nérine. She will of course take the part of Nérine, which she plays with dazzling verve and bewitching gaiety.” It was as though an invisible hand had brutally torn from my heart the bandage beneath which its wound had begun to heal since my return from Balbec. The flood of my anguish came pouring out in torrents. Lea was the actress friend of the two girls at Balbec whom Albertine, without appearing to see them, had watched in the mirror, one afternoon at the Casino. It was true that at Balbec Albertine, at the name of Lea, had adopted a particular tone of solemnity in order to say to me, almost shocked that anyone could suspect such a pattern of virtue: “Oh no, she isn’t in the least that sort of woman. She’s a very nice person.” Unfortunately for me, when Albertine made an assertion of this kind, it was invariably a first stage in a series of different assertions. Shortly after the first would come this second one: “I don’t know her.” In the third phase, after Albertine had spoken to me of somebody who was “above suspicion” and whom (in the second place) she did not know, she would gradually forget first of all that she had said that she did not know the person and then, unwittingly contradicting herself, would inform me that she did. This first lapse of memory having occurred, and the new assertion been made, a second lapse of memory would begin, concerning the person’s being above suspicion. “Isn’t so and so,” I would ask, “one of those women?” “Why, of course, everybody knows that!” Immediately the note of solemnity was sounded afresh in an assertion which was a vague echo, greatly reduced, of the first assertion of all. “I’m bound to say that she has always behaved perfectly properly with me. Of course, she knows that I’d soon send her about her business if she tried it on. But that’s neither here nor there. I’m obliged to give her credit for the genuine respect she has always shown me. It’s easy to see she knew the sort of person she had to deal with.” We remember the truth because it has a name, is rooted in the past, but a makeshift lie is quickly forgotten. Albertine would forget this latest lie, her fourth, and, one day when she was anxious to gain my confidence by confiding in me, would open up to me with regard to the same person who at the outset had been so respectable and whom she did not know: “She took quite a fancy to me at one time. Three or four times she asked me to walk home with her and to come up and see her. I saw no harm in walking home with her, in front of lots of people, in broad daylight, in the open air. But when we reached her front door I always made some excuse and I never went upstairs.” Shortly after this, Albertine would make some remark about the beautiful things that this lady had in her house. By proceeding from one approximation to another one would doubtless have succeeded in getting her to tell the truth, a truth which was perhaps less serious than I was inclined to believe, for, though susceptible to women, she perhaps preferred a male lover, and, now that she had me, might not have given a thought to Lea.

  Already, in the case of quite a number of women at any rate, it would have been enough for me to gather together and present to my mistress a synthesis of her contradictory statements, in order to convict her of her misdeeds (misdeeds which, like astronomical laws, it is a great deal easier to deduce by a process of reasoning than to detect and observe in reality). But then she would have preferred to say that one of her statements had been a lie, the withdrawal of which would thus bring about the collapse of my whole system of deduction, rather than acknowledge that everything she had told me from the start was simply a tissue of mendacious tales. There are similar tales in the Arabian Nights which we find charming. They pain us coming from a person whom we love, and thereby enable us to penetrate a little deeper in our knowledge of human nature instead of being content to play around on its surface. Grief enters into us and forces us, out of painful curiosity, to probe. Whence emerge truths which we feel that we have no right to keep hidden, so much so that a dying atheist who has discovered them, certain of his own extinction, indifferent to fame, will nevertheless devote his last hours on earth to an attempt to make them known.

  However, I was still at the first stage of enlightenment with regard to Lea. I was not even aware whether Albertine knew her. No matter, it came to the same thing. I must at all costs prevent her from renewing this acquaintance or making the acquaintance of this stranger at the Trocadéro. I say that I did not know whether she knew Lea or not; yet I must in fact have learned this at Balbec, from Albertine herself. For amnesia obliterated from my mind as well as from Albertine
’s a great many of the statements that she had made to me. Memory, instead of being a duplicate, always present before one’s eyes, of the various events of one’s life, is rather a void from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables one to resuscitate dead recollections; but even then there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into that potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain for ever unverifiable. One pays no attention to anything that one does not connect with the real life of the woman one loves; one forgets immediately what she has said to one about such and such an incident or such and such people one does not know, and her expression while she was saying it. And so when, in due course, one’s jealousy is aroused by these same people, and seeks to ascertain whether or not it is mistaken, whether it is indeed they who are responsible for one’s mistress’s impatience to go out, and her annoyance when one has prevented her from doing so by returning earlier than usual, one’s jealousy, ransacking the past in search of a clue, can find nothing; always retrospective, it is like a historian who has to write the history of a period for which he has no documents; always belated, it dashes like an enraged bull to the spot where it will not find the dazzling, arrogant creature who is tormenting it and whom the crowd admire for his splendour and cunning. Jealousy thrashes around in the void, uncertain as we are in those dreams in which we are distressed because we cannot find in his empty house a person whom we have known well in life, but who here perhaps is another person and has merely borrowed the features of our friend, uncertain as we are even more after we awake when we seek to identify this or that detail of our dream. What was one’s mistress’s expression when she told one that? Did she not look happy, was she not actually whistling, a thing that she never does unless she has some amorous thought in her mind and finds one’s presence importunate and irritating? Did she not tell one something that is contradicted by what she now affirms, that she knows or does not know such and such a person? One does not know, and one will never know; one searches desperately among the unsubstantial fragments of a dream, and all the time one’s life with one’s mistress goes on, a life that is oblivious of what may well be of importance to one, and attentive to what is perhaps of none, a life hagridden by people who have no real connexion with one, full of lapses of memory, gaps, vain anxieties, a life as illusory as a dream.