In Search of Lost Time, Volume V Page 18

  I suddenly realised that the young dairymaid was still in the room. I told her that the place was undoubtedly a long way off, and that I did not need her. Whereupon she also decided that it would be too much trouble: “There’s a fine match this afternoon, and I don’t want to miss it.” I felt that she must already be in the habit of saying “Sport’s the thing,” and that in a few years’ time she would be talking about “living her own life.” I told her that I certainly did not need her any longer, and gave her five francs. Immediately, having little expected this largesse, and telling herself that if she got five francs for doing nothing she would get a great deal more for doing my errand, she began to find that her match was of no importance. “I could easily have taken your message. I can always find time.” But I pushed her towards the door, for I needed to be alone: I must at all costs prevent Albertine from meeting Lea’s girlfriends at the Trocadéro. It was essential that I should succeed in doing so, but I did not yet know how, and during these first few moments I opened my hands, gazed at them, cracked my knuckles, whether because the mind, when it cannot find what it is seeking, in a fit of laziness decides to halt for an instant during which it is vividly aware of the most insignificant things, like the blades of grass on a railway embankment which we see from the carriage window trembling in the wind, when the train stops in the open country—an immobility that is not always more fruitful than that of a captured animal which, paralysed by fear or mesmerised, gazes without moving a muscle—or because I was holding my body in readiness—with my mind at work inside it and, in my mind, the means of action against this or that person—as though it were simply a weapon from which would be fired the shot that would separate Albertine from Lea and her two friends. It is true that, earlier that morning, when Françoise had come in to tell me that Albertine was going to the Trocadéro, I had said to myself: “Albertine is at liberty to do as she pleases,” and had supposed that in this radiant weather her actions would remain without any perceptible importance to me until the evening. But it was not only the morning sun, as I had thought, that had made me so carefree; it was because, having obliged Albertine to abandon the plans that she might perhaps have initiated or even realised at the Verdurins’, and having reduced her to attending a matinee which I myself had chosen and with a view to which she could not have planned anything, I knew that whatever she did would of necessity be innocent. Similarly, if Albertine had said a few moments later: “I don’t really care if I kill myself,” it was because she was certain that she would not kill herself. Surrounding both myself and Albertine there had been this morning (far more than the sunny day) that environment which itself is invisible but through the translucent and changing medium of which we saw, I her actions, she the importance of her own life—that is to say those beliefs which we do not perceive but which are no more assimilable to a pure vacuum than is the air that surrounds us; composing round about us a variable atmosphere, sometimes excellent, often unbreathable, they deserve to be studied and recorded as carefully as the temperature, the barometric pressure, the season, for our days have their own singularity, physical and moral. The belief, which I had failed to notice this morning but in which nevertheless I had been joyously enveloped until the moment when I had looked a second time at the Figaro, that Albertine would do nothing that was not blameless—that belief had vanished. I was no longer living in the fine sunny day, but in another day carved out of it by my anxiety lest Albertine might renew her acquaintance with Lea, and more easily still with the two girls if, as seemed to me probable, they went to applaud the actress at the Trocadéro where it would not be difficult for them to meet Albertine during one of the intervals. I no longer gave a thought to Mlle Vinteuil; the name of Lea had brought back to my mind, to make me jealous, the image of Albertine in the Casino watching the two girls. For I possessed in my memory only a series of Albertines, separate from one another, incomplete, a collection of profiles or snapshots, and so my jealousy was restricted to a discontinuous expression, at once fugitive and fixed, and to the people who had caused that expression to appear upon Albertine’s face. I remembered her when, at Balbec, she was eyed with undue intensity by the two girls or by women of that sort; I remembered the distress that I felt when I saw her face subjected to an active scrutiny, like that of a painter preparing to make a sketch, entirely enveloped in it, and, doubtless on account of my presence, submitting to this contact without appearing to notice it, with a passivity that was perhaps clandestinely voluptuous. And before she pulled herself together and spoke to me, there was an instant during which Albertine did not move, smiled into the empty air, with the same air of feigned spontaneity and secret pleasure as if she were posing for somebody to take her photograph, or even seeking to assume before the camera a more dashing pose—the one she had adopted at Doncières when we were walking with Saint-Loup, and, laughing and passing her tongue over her lips, she pretended to be teasing a dog. Certainly at such moments she was not at all the same as when it was she who was interested in little girls who passed by. Then, on the contrary, her intense and velvety gaze fastened itself, glued itself to the passer-by, so adhesive, so corrosive, that you felt that, in withdrawing, it must tear away the skin. But that look, which did at least give her a certain gravity, almost as though she were ill, seemed to me a pleasant relief after the vacant, blissful look she had worn in the presence of the two girls, and I should have preferred the sombre expression of the desire that she may perhaps have felt at times to the beaming expression caused by the desire which she aroused. However much she tried to conceal her awareness of it, it bathed her, enveloped her, vaporous, voluptuous, made her whole face glow. But who knows whether, once my back was turned, Albertine would continue to suppress everything that at such moments she held in suspension within herself, that radiated around her and gave me such anguish, whether, now that I was no longer there, she would not respond boldly to the advances of the two girls? Certainly these memories caused me great pain; they were like a complete admission of Albertine’s proclivities, a general confession of infidelity, against which the specific pledges that she gave me and that I wanted to believe, the negative results of my incomplete inquiries, the assurances of Andrée, given perhaps with Albertine’s connivance, were powerless to prevail. Albertine might deny specific betrayals; but by words that she let fall, more potent than her declarations to the contrary, by those looks alone, she had confessed to what she would have wished to hide far more than any specific facts, to what she would have let herself be killed sooner than admit: her natural tendency. For there is no one who will willingly deliver up his soul.

  In spite of the pain that these memories caused me, could I have denied that it was the programme of the matinee at the Trocadéro that had revived my need of Albertine? She was one of those women whose very failings can sometimes take the place of absent charms, and, no less than their failings, the tenderness that follows upon them and brings us that assuagement which, like an invalid who is never well for two days in succession, we are incessantly obliged to recapture in their company. Besides, even more than their faults while we are in love with them, there are their faults before we knew them, and first and foremost their nature. For what makes this sort of love painful is the fact that there pre-exists it a sort of original sin of Woman, a sin which makes us love them, so that, when we forget it, we feel less need of them, and to begin to love again we must begin to suffer again. At this moment, the thought that she must not meet the two girls again and the question whether or not she knew Lea were what was chiefly occupying my mind, in spite of the rule that one ought not to take an interest in particular facts except in relation to their general significance, and notwithstanding the childishness, as great as that of longing to travel or to make friends with women, of splintering one’s curiosity against such elements from the invisible torrent of painful realities, which will always remain unknown to one, as have fortuitously crystallised in one’s mind. Moreover, even if one succeeded in destroying those element
s, they would at once be replaced by others. Yesterday I was afraid lest Albertine should go to see Mme Verdurin. Now my only thought was of Lea. Jealousy, which is blindfold, is not merely powerless to discover anything in the darkness that enshrouds it; it is also one of those tortures where the task must be incessantly repeated, like that of the Danaides, or of Ixion. Even if the two girls were not there, what impression might not Lea make on her, beautified by her stage attire, haloed with success, what thoughts might she not leave in Albertine’s mind, what desires, which, even if she repressed them in my company, would give her an aversion for a life in which she was unable to gratify them!

  Besides, how could I be certain that she did not already know Lea, and would not pay her a visit in her dressing-room? And even if Lea did not know her, who could assure me that, having certainly seen her at Balbec, she would not recognise her and make a signal to her from the stage that would enable Albertine to gain admission back-stage? A danger seems perfectly avoidable when it has been averted. This one was not yet averted, and because I was afraid that it might never be, it seemed to me all the more terrible. And yet this love for Albertine, which I felt almost vanish when I attempted to realise it, seemed somehow at this moment to acquire a proof of its existence from the intensity of my anguish. I no longer cared about anything else, I thought only of how to prevent her from remaining at the Trocadéro, I would have offered any sum in the world to Lea to persuade her not to go there. If then we prove our predilection by the action that we perform rather than by the idea that we form, I must have been in love with Albertine. But this renewal of my suffering gave no greater consistency to the image of Albertine that I retained within me. She caused my ills like a deity who remains invisible. Making endless conjectures, I sought to ward off my suffering without thereby realising my love.

  First of all, I must make certain that Lea was really going to perform at the Trocadéro. After dismissing the dairymaid, I telephoned to Bloch, whom I knew to be on friendly terms with Lea, in order to ask him. He knew nothing about it and seemed surprised that it could be of any interest to me. I decided that I must act quickly, remembered that Françoise was dressed and ready to go out and that I was not, and while I got up and dressed I told her to take a motor-car and go to the Trocadéro, buy a seat, search the auditorium for Albertine and give her a note from me. In this note I told Albertine that I was greatly upset by a letter which I had just received from that same lady on whose account she would remember that I had been so wretched one night at Balbec. I reminded her that, on the following day, she had reproached me for not having sent for her. And so I was taking the liberty, I told her, of asking her to sacrifice her matinee and to join me at home so that we might take the air together, which might help me to recover from the shock. But since it would be some time before I was dressed and ready, she would oblige me, seeing that she had Françoise as an escort, by calling at the Trois-Quartiers (this shop, being smaller, seemed to me less dangerous than the Bon Marché) to buy the white tulle bodice that she required.

  My note was probably not superfluous. To tell the truth, I knew nothing that Albertine had done since I had come to know her, or even before. But in her conversation (she might, had I mentioned it to her, have replied that I had misunderstood her) there were certain contradictions, certain embellishments which seemed to me as decisive as catching her red-handed, but less usable against Albertine who, often caught out like a child, had invariably, by dint of sudden, strategic changes of front, stultified my cruel attacks and retrieved the situation. Cruel, most of all, to myself. She employed, not by way of stylistic refinement, but in order to correct her imprudences, abrupt breaches of syntax not unlike that figure which the grammarians call anacoluthon or some such name. Having allowed herself, while discussing women, to say: “I remember, the other day, I …,” she would suddenly, after a “semiquaver rest,” change the “I” to “she”: it was something that she had witnessed as an innocent spectator, not a thing that she herself had done. It was not she who was the subject of the action. I should have liked to recall exactly how the sentence had begun, in order to decide for myself, since she had broken off in the middle, what the conclusion would have been. But since I had been awaiting that conclusion, I found it hard to remember the beginning, from which perhaps my air of interest had made her deviate, and was left still anxious to know her real thoughts, the actual truth of her recollection. Unfortunately the beginnings of a lie on the part of one’s mistress are like the beginnings of one’s own love, or of a vocation. They take shape, accumulate, pass unnoticed by oneself. When one wants to remember in what manner one began to love a woman, one is already in love with her; day-dreaming about her beforehand, one did not say to oneself: “This is the prelude to love; be careful!”—and one’s day-dreams advanced unobtrusively, scarcely noticed by oneself. In the same way, save in a few comparatively rare cases, it is only for narrative convenience that I have frequently in these pages confronted one of Albertine’s false statements with her previous assertion on the same subject. This previous assertion, as often as not, since I could not read the future and did not at the time guess what contradictory affirmation was to form a pendant to it, had slipped past unperceived, heard it is true by my ears, but without my isolating it from the continuous flow of Albertine’s speech. Later on, faced with the self-evident lie, or seized by an anxious doubt, I would endeavour to recall it; but in vain; my memory had not been warned in time; it had thought it unnecessary to keep a copy.

  I instructed Françoise to let me know by telephone when she had got Albertine out of the theatre, and to bring her home whether she was willing or not.

  “It really would be the last straw if she wasn’t willing to come and see Monsieur,” replied Françoise.

  “But I don’t know that she’s as fond of seeing me as all that.”

  “Then she must be an ungrateful wretch,” went on Françoise, in whom Albertine was renewing after all these years the same torment of envy that Eulalie used at one time to cause her in my aunt’s sickroom. Unaware that Albertine’s position in my household was not of her own seeking but had been willed by me (a fact which, from motives of self-esteem and to infuriate Françoise, I preferred to conceal from her), she was amazed and incensed by the girl’s cunning, called her when she spoke of her to the other servants a “play-actress,” a “wily customer” who could twist me round her little finger. She dared not yet declare open war on her, showed her a smiling face and sought to acquire merit in my eyes by the services she did her in her relations with me, deciding that it was useless to say anything to me and that she would gain nothing by doing so, but always on the look-out for an opportunity, so that if ever she discovered a crack in Albertine’s armour, she was determined to enlarge it, and to separate us for good and all.

  “Ungrateful? No, Françoise, I think it’s I who am ungrateful. You don’t know how good she is to me.” (It was so comforting to me to appear to be loved!) “Off you go,”

  “All right, I’ll hop it, double quick.”

  Her daughter’s influence was beginning to contaminate Françoise’s vocabulary. So it is that all languages lose their purity by the addition of new words. For this decadence of Françoise’s speech, which I had known in its golden period, I was in fact myself indirectly responsible. Françoise’s daughter would not have made her mother’s classic language degenerate into the vilest slang if she had stuck to conversing with her in dialect. She had never hesitated to do so, and if they had anything private to say to each other when they were both with me, instead of shutting themselves up in the kitchen they provided themselves, right in the middle of my room, with a protective screen more impenetrable than the most carefully closed door, by conversing in dialect. I supposed merely that the mother and daughter were not always on the best of terms, if I was to judge by the frequency with which they employed the only word that I could make out: m’esasperate (unless it was myself who was the object of their exasperation). Unfortunately the most u
nfamiliar tongue becomes intelligible in time when we are always hearing it spoken. I was sorry that it was dialect, for I succeeded in picking it up, and should have been no less successful had Françoise been in the habit of expressing herself in Persian. In vain did Françoise, when she became aware of my progress, accelerate the speed of her delivery, and her daughter likewise; there was nothing to be done. The mother was greatly put out that I understood their dialect, then delighted to hear me speak it. I am bound to admit that her delight was a mocking delight, for although I came in time to pronounce the words more or less as she herself did, she found a gulf between our two pronunciations which gave her infinite joy, and she began to regret that she no longer saw people to whom she had not given a thought for years but who, it appeared, would have rocked with laughter which it would have done her good to hear if they could have listened to me speaking their dialect so badly. The mere idea of it filled her with gaiety and nostalgia, and she enumerated various peasants who would have laughed until they cried. However, no amount of joy could mitigate her sorrow at the fact that, however badly I might pronounce it, I understood it perfectly well. Keys become useless when the person whom we seek to prevent from entering can avail himself of a skeleton key or a jemmy. Dialect having become useless as a means of defence, she took to conversing with her daughter in a French which rapidly became that of the most debased epochs.