The Captive
The CaptiveCHAPTER ICHAPTER IICHAPTER II (continued)CHAPTER IIICopyright
The Captive
Marcel Proust
CHAPTER I
Life with Albertine
At daybreak, my face still turned to the wall, and before
I had seen above the big inner curtains what tone the first streaks
of light assumed, I could already tell what sort of day it was. The
first sounds from the street had told me, according to whether they
came to my ears dulled and distorted by the moisture of the
atmosphere or quivering like arrows in the resonant and empty area
of a spacious, crisply frozen, pure morning; as soon as I heard the
rumble of the first tramcar, I could tell whether it was sodden
with rain or setting forth into the blue. And perhaps these sounds
had themselves been forestalled by some swifter and more pervasive
emanation which, stealing into my slumber, diffused in it a
melancholy that seemed to presage snow, or gave utterance (through
the lips of a little person who occasionally reappeared there) to
so many hymns to the glory of the sun that, having first of all
begun to smile in my sleep, having prepared my eyes, behind their
shut lids, to be dazzled, I awoke finally amid deafening strains of
music. It was, moreover, principally from my bedroom that I took in
the life of the outer world during this period. I know that Bloch
reported that, when he called to see me in the evenings, he could
hear the sound of conversation; as my mother was at Combray and he
never found anybody in my room, he concluded that I was talking to
myself. When, much later, he learned that Albertine had been
staying with me at the time, and realised that I had concealed her
presence from all my friends, he declared that he saw at last the
reason why, during that episode in my life, I had always refused to
go out of doors. He was wrong. His mistake was, however, quite
pardonable, for the truth, even if it is inevitable, is not always
conceivable as a whole. People who learn some accurate detail of
another person's life at once deduce consequences which are not
accurate, and see in the newly discovered fact an explanation of
things that have no connexion with it whatsoever.
When I reflect now that my mistress had come, on our return from
Balbec, to live in Paris under the same roof as myself, that she
had abandoned the idea of going on a cruise, that she was installed
in a bedroom within twenty paces of my own, at the end of the
corridor, in my father's tapestried study, and that late every
night, before leaving me, she used to slide her tongue between my
lips like a portion of daily bread, a nourishing food that had the
almost sacred character of all flesh upon which the sufferings that
we have endured on its account have come in time to confer a sort
of spiritual grace, what I at once call to mind in comparison is
not the night that Captain de Borodino allowed me to spend in
barracks, a favour which cured what was after all only a passing
distemper, but the night on which my father sent Mamma to sleep in
the little bed by the side of my own. So it is that life, if it is
once again to deliver us from an anguish that has seemed
inevitable, does so in conditions that are different, so
diametrically opposed at times that it is almost an open sacrilege
to assert the identity of the grace bestowed upon us.
When Albertine had heard from Françoise that, in the darkness of my
still curtained room, I was not asleep, she had no scruple about
making a noise as she took her bath, in her own dressing-room.
Then, frequently, instead of waiting until later in the day, I
would repair to a bathroom adjoining hers, which had a certain
charm of its own. Time was, when a stage manager would spend
hundreds of thousands of francs to begem with real emeralds the
throne upon which a great actress would play the part of an
empress. The Russian ballet has taught us that simple arrangements
of light will create, if trained upon the right spot, jewels as
gorgeous and more varied. This decoration, itself immaterial, is
not so graceful, however, as that which, at eight o'clock in the
morning, the sun substitutes for what we were accustomed to see
when we did not arise before noon. The windows of our respective
bathrooms, so that their occupants might not be visible from
without, were not of clear glass but clouded with an artificial and
old-fashioned kind of frost. All of a sudden, the sun would colour
this drapery of glass, gild it, and discovering in myself an
earlier young man whom habit had long concealed, would intoxicate
me with memories, as though I were out in the open country gazing
at a hedge of golden leaves in which even a bird was not lacking.
For I could hear Albertine ceaselessly humming:
For melancholy
Is but folly,
And he who heeds it is a fool.
I loved her so well that I could spare a joyous smile for her bad
taste in music. This song had, as it happened, during the past
summer, delighted Mme. Bontemps, who presently heard people say
that it was silly, with the result that, instead of asking
Albertine to sing it, when she had a party, she would
substitute:
A song of farewell rises from troubled springs,
which in its turn became 'an old jingle of Massenet's, the child is
always dinning into our ears.'
A cloud passed, blotting out the sun; I saw extinguished and
replaced by a grey monochrome the modest, screening foliage of the
glass.
The partition that divided our two dressing-rooms (Albertine's,
identical with my own, was a bathroom which Mamma, who had another
at the other end of the flat, had never used for fear of disturbing
my rest) was so slender that we could talk to each other as we
washed in double privacy, carrying on a conversation that was
interrupted only by the sound of the water, in that intimacy which,
in hotels, is so. often permitted by the smallness and proximity of
the rooms, but which, in private houses in Paris, is so rare.
On other mornings, I would remain in bed, drowsing for as long as I
chose, for orders had been given that no one was to enter my room
until I had rung the bell, an act which, owing to the awkward
position in which the electric bulb had been hung above my bed,
took such a time that often, tired of feeling for it and glad to be
left alone, I would lie back for some moments and almost fall
asleep again. It was not that I was wholly indifferent to
Albertine's presence in the house. Her separation from her girl
friends had the effect of sparing my heart any fresh anguish. She
kept it in a state of repose, in a semi-immobility which would help
it to recover. But after all, this calm which my mistress was
procuring for me was a release from suffering rather than a
positive joy. Not that it did not permit me to taste many joys,
from which too keen a grief had debarred me, but these joys, so far
from my owing them to Albertine, in whom for that matter I could no
longer see any beauty and who was beginning to bore me, with whom I
was now clearly conscious that I was not in love, I tasted on the
contrary when Albertine was not with me. And so, to begin the
morning, I did not send for her at once, especially if it was a
fine day. For some moments, knowing that he would make me happier
than Albertine, I remained closeted with the little person inside
me, hymning the rising sun, of whom I have already spoken. Of those
elements which compose our personality, it is not the most obvious
that are most essential. In myself, when ill health has succeeded
in uprooting them one after another, there will still remain two or
three, endowed with a hardier constitution than the rest, notably a
certain philosopher who is happy only when he has discovered in two
works of art, in two sensations, a common element. But the last of
all, I have sometimes asked myself whether it would not be this
little mannikin, very similar to another whom the optician at
Combray used to set up in his shop window to forecast the weather,
and who, doffing his hood when the sun shone, would put it on again
if it was going to rain. This little mannikin, I know his egoism; I
may be suffering from a choking fit which the mere threat of rain
would calm; he pays no heed, and, at the first drops so impatiently
awaited, losing his gaiety, sullenly pulls down his hood.
Conversely, I dare say that in my last agony, when all my other
'selves' are dead, if a ray of sunshine steals into the room, while
I am drawing my last breath, the little fellow of the barometer
will feel a great relief, and will throw back his hood to sing:
"Ah! Fine weather at last!"
I rang for Françoise. I opened the Figaro. I scanned its
columns and made sure that it did not contain an article, or
so-called article, which I had sent to the editor, and which was no
more than a slightly revised version of the page that had recently
come to light, written long ago in Dr. Percepied's carriage, as I
gazed at the spires of Martinville. Then I read Mamma's letter. She
felt it to be odd, in fact shocking, that a girl should be staying
in the house alone with me. On the first day, at the moment of
leaving Balbec, when she saw how wretched I was, and was distressed
by the prospect of leaving me by myself, my mother had perhaps been
glad when she heard that Albertine was travelling with us, and saw
that, side by side with our own boxes (those boxes among which I
had passed a night in tears in the Balbec hotel), there had been
hoisted into the 'Twister' Albertine's boxes also, narrow and
black, which had seemed to me to have the appearance of coffins,
and as to which I knew not whether they were bringing to my house
life or death. But I had never even asked myself the question,
being all overjoyed, in the radiant morning, after the fear of
having to remain at Balbec, that I was taking Albertine with me.
But to this proposal, if at the start my mother had not been
hostile (speaking kindly to my friend like a mother whose son has
been seriously wounded and who is grateful to the young mistress
who is nursing him with loving care), she had acquired hostility
now that it had been too completely realised, and the girl was
prolonging her sojourn in our house, and moreover in the absence of
my parents. I cannot, however, say that my mother ever made this
hostility apparent. As in the past, when she had ceased to dare to
reproach me with my nervous instability, my laziness, now she felt
a hesitation—which I perhaps did not altogether perceive at the
moment or refused to perceive—to run the risk, by offering any
criticism of the girl to whom I had told her that I intended to
make an offer of marriage, of bringing a shadow into my life,
making me in time to come less devoted to my wife, of sowing
perhaps for a season when she herself would no longer be there, the
seeds of remorse at having grieved her by marrying Albertine. Mamma
preferred to seem to be approving a choice which she felt herself
powerless to make me reconsider. But people who came in contact
with her at this time have since told me that in addition to her
grief at having lost her mother she had an air of constant
preoccupation. This mental strife, this inward debate, had the
effect of overheating my mother's brow, and she was always opening
the windows to let in the fresh air. But she did not succeed in
coming to any decision, for fear of influencing me in the wrong
direction and so spoiling what she believed to be my happiness. She
could not even bring herself to forbid me to keep Albertine for the
time being in our house. She did not wish to appear more strict
than Mme. Bontemps, who was the person principally concerned, and
who saw no harm in the arrangement, which greatly surprised my
mother. All the same, she regretted that she had been obliged to
leave us together, by departing at that very time for Combray where
she might have to remain (and did in fact remain) for months on
end, during which my great-aunt required her incessant attention by
day and night. Everything was made easy for her down there, thanks
to the kindness, the devotion of Legrandin who, gladly undertaking
any trouble that was required, kept putting off his return to Paris
from week to week, not that he knew my aunt at all well, but
simply, first of all, because she had been his mother's friend, and
also because he knew that the invalid, condemned to die, valued his
attentions and could not get on without him. Snobbishness is a
serious malady of the spirit, but one that is localised and does
not taint it as a whole. I, on the other hand, unlike Mamma, was
extremely glad of her absence at Combray, but for which I should
have been afraid (being unable to warn Albertine not to mention it)
of her learning of the girl's friendship with Mlle. Vinteuil. This
would have been to my mother an insurmountable obstacle, not merely
to a marriage as to which she had, for that matter, begged me to
say nothing definite as yet to Albertine, and the thought of which
was becoming more and more intolerable to myself, but even to the
latter's being allowed to stay for any length of time in the house.
Apart from so grave a reason, which in this case did not apply,
Mamma, under the dual influence of my grandmother's liberating and
edifying example, according to whom, in her admiration of George
Sand, virtue consisted in nobility of heart, and of my own
corruption, was now indulgent towards women whose conduct she would
have condemned in the past, or even now, had they been any of her
own middle-class friends in Paris or at Combray, but whose lofty
natures I extolled to her and to whom she pardoned much because of
their affection for myself. But when all is said, and apart from
any question of propriety, I doubt whether Albertine could have put
up with Mamma who had acquired from Combray, from my aunt Léonie,
from all her kindred, habits of punctuality and order of which my
mistress had not the remotest conception.
She would never think of shutting a door and, on the other hand,
would no more hesitate to enter a room if the door stood open than
would a dog or a cat. Her somewhat disturbing charm was, in fact,
that of taking the place in the household not so much of a girl as
of a domestic animal which comes into a room, goes out, is to be
found wherever one does not expect to find it and (in her case)
would—bringing me a profound sense of repose—come and lie down on
my bed by my side, make a place for herself from which she never
stirred, without being in my way as a person would have been. She
ended, however, by conforming to my hours of sleep, and not only
never attempted to enter my room but would take care not to make a
sound until I had rung my bell. It was Françoise who impressed
these rules of conduct upon her.
She was one of those Combray servants, conscious of their master's
place in the world, and that the least that they can do is to see
that he is treated with all the respect to which they consider him
entitled. When a stranger on leaving after a visit gave Françoise a
gratuity to be shared with the kitchenmaid, he had barely slipped
his coin into her hand before Françoise, with an equal display of
speed, discretion and energy, had passed the word to the
kitchenmaid who came forward to thank him, not in a whisper, but
openly and aloud, as Françoise had told her that she must do. The
parish priest of Combray was no genius, but he also knew what was
due him. Under his instruction, the daughter of some Protestant
cousins of Mme. Sazerat had been received into the Church, and her
family had been most grateful to him: it was a question of her
marriage to a young nobleman of Méséglise. The young man's
relatives wrote to inquire about her in a somewhat arrogant letter,
in which they expressed their dislike of her Protestant origin. The
Combray priest replied in such a tone that the Méséglise nobleman,
crushed and prostrate, wrote a very different letter in which he
begged as the most precious favour the award of the girl's hand in
marriage.
Françoise deserved no special credit for making Albertine respect
my slumbers. She was imbued with tradition. From her studied
silence, or the peremptory response that she made to a proposal to
enter my room, or to send in some message to me, which Albertine
had expressed in all innocence, the latter realised with
astonishment that she was now living in an alien world, where
strange customs prevailed, governed by rules of conduct which one
must never dream of infringing. She had already had a foreboding of
this at Balbec, but, in Paris, made no attempt to resist, and would
wait patiently every morning for the sound of my bell before
venturing to make any noise.
The training that Françoise gave her was of value also to our old
servant herself, for it gradually stilled the lamentations which,
ever since our return from Balbec, she had not ceased to utter.
For, just as we were boarding the tram, she remembered that she had
forgotten to say good-bye to the housekeeper of the Hotel, a
whiskered dame who looked after the bedroom floors, barely knew
Françoise by sight, but had been comparatively civil to her.
Françoise positively insisted upon getting out of the tram, going
back to the Hotel, saying good-bye properly to the housekeeper, and
not leaving for Paris until the following day. Common sense,
coupled with my sudden horror of Balbec, restrained me from
granting her this concession, but my refusal had infected her with
a feverish distemper which the change of air had not sufficed to
cure and which lingered on in Paris. For, according to Françoise's
code, as it is illustrated in the carvings of
Saint-André-des-Champs, to wish for the death of an enemy, even to
inflict it is not forbidden, but it is a horrible sin not to do
what is expected of you, not to return a civility, to refrain, like
a regular churl, from saying good-bye to the housekeeper before
leaving a hotel. Throughout the journey, the continually recurring
memory of her not having taken leave of this woman had dyed
Françoise's cheeks with a scarlet flush that was quite alarming.
And if she refused to taste bite or sup until we reached Paris, it
was perhaps because this memory heaped a 'regular load' upon her
stomach (every class of society has a pathology of its own) even
more than with the intention of punishing us.
Among the reasons which led Mamma to write me a daily letter, and a
letter which never failed to include some quotation from Mme. de
Sévigné, there was the memory of my grandmother. Mamma would write
to me: "Mme. Sazerat gave us one of those little luncheons of which
she possesses the secret and which, as your poor grandmother would
have said, quoting Mme. de Sévigné, deprive us of solitude without
affording us company." In one of my own earlier letters I was so
inept as to write to Mamma: "By those quotations, your mother would
recognise you at once." Which brought me, three days later, the
reproof: "My poor boy, if it was only to speak to me of my
mother, your reference to Mme. de Sévigné was most inappropriate.
She would have answered you as she answered Mme. de Grignan: 'So
she was nothing to you? I had supposed that you were
related.'"
By this time, I could hear my mistress leaving or returning to her
room. I rang the bell, for it was time now for Andrée to arrive
with the chauffeur, Morel's friend, lent me by the Verdurins, to
take Albertine out. I had spoken to the last-named of the remote
possibility of our marriage; but I had never made her any formal
promise; she herself, from discretion, when I said to her: "I can't
tell, but it might perhaps be possible," had shaken her head with a
melancholy sigh, as much as to say: "Oh, no, never," in other
words: "I am too poor." And so, while I continued to say: "It is
quite indefinite," when speaking of future projects, at the moment
I was doing everything in my power to amuse her, to make life
pleasant to her, with perhaps the unconscious design of thereby
making her wish to marry me. She herself laughed at my lavish
generosity. "Andrée's mother would be in a fine state if she saw me
turn into a rich lady like herself, what she calls a lady who has
her own 'horses, carriages, pictures.' What? Did I never tell you
that she says that. Oh, she's a character! What surprises me is
that she seems to think pictures just as important as horses and
carriages." We shall see in due course that, notwithstanding the
foolish ways of speaking that she had not outgrown, Albertine had
developed to an astonishing extent, which left me unmoved, the
intellectual superiority of a woman friend having always interested
me so little that if I have ever complimented any of my friends
upon her own, it was purely out of politeness. Alone, the curious
genius of Céleste might perhaps appeal to me. In spite of myself, I
would continue to smile for some moments, when, for instance,
having discovered that Françoise was not in my room, she accosted
me with: "Heavenly deity reclining on a bed!" "But why, Céleste," I
would say, "why deity?" "Oh, if you suppose that you have anything
in common with the mortals who make their pilgrimage on our vile
earth, you are greatly mistaken!" "But why 'reclining' on a bed,
can't you see that I'm lying in bed?" "You never lie. Who ever saw
anybody lie like that? You have just alighted there. With your
white pyjamas, and the way you twist your neck, you look for all
the world like a dove."
Albertine, even in the discussion of the most trivial matters,
expressed herself very differently from the little girl that she
had been only a few years earlier at Balbec. She went so far as to
declare, with regard to a political incident of which she
disapproved: "I consider that ominous." And I am not sure that it
was not about this time that she learned to say, when she meant
that she felt a book to be written in a bad style: "It is
interesting, but really, it might have been written by a
pig."
The rule that she must not enter my room until I had rung amused
her greatly. As she had adopted our family habit of quotation, and
in following it drew upon the plays in which she had acted at her
convent and for which I had expressed admiration, she always
compared me to Assuérus:
And death is the reward of whoso dares
To venture in his presence
unawares. . . . .
None is exempt; nor is there any whom
Or rank or sex can save from such a doom;
Even I myself. . . .
Like all the rest, I by this law am bound;
And, to address him, I must first be found
By him, or he must call me to his side.
Physically, too, she had altered. Her blue, almond-shaped eyes,
grown longer, had not kept their form; they were indeed of the same
colour, but seemed to have passed into a liquid state. So much so
that, when she shut them it was as though a pair of curtains had
been drawn to shut out a view of the sea. It was no doubt this one
of her features that I remembered most vividly each night after we
had parted. For, on the contrary, every morning the ripple of her
hair continued to give me the same surprise, as though it were some
novelty that I had never seen before. And yet, above the smiling
eyes of a girl, what could be more beautiful than that clustering
coronet of black violets? The smile offers greater friendship; but
the little gleaming tips of blossoming hair, more akin to the
flesh, of which they seem to be a transposition into tiny waves,
are more provocative of desire.
As soon as she entered my room, she sprang upon my bed and
sometimes would expatiate upon my type of intellect, would vow in a
transport of sincerity that she would sooner die than leave me:
this was on mornings when I had shaved before sending for her. She
was one of those women who can never distinguish the cause of their
sensations. The pleasure that they derive from a smooth cheek they
explain to themselves by the moral qualities of the man who seems
to offer them a possibility of future happiness, which is capable,
however, of diminishing and becoming less necessary the longer he
refrains from shaving.
I inquired where she was thinking of going.
"I believe Andrée wants to take me to the Buttes-Chaumont; I have
never been there."
Of course it was impossible for me to discern among so many other
words whether beneath these a falsehood lay concealed. Besides, I
could trust Andrée to tell me of all the places that she visited
with Albertine.
At Balbec, when I felt that I was utterly tired of Albertine, I had
made up my mind to say, untruthfully, to Andrée: "My little Andrée,
if only I had met you again sooner! It is you that I would have
loved. But now my heart is pledged in another quarter. All the
same, we can see a great deal of each other, for my love for
another is causing me great anxiety, and you will help me to find
consolation." And lo, these identical lying words had become true
within the space of three weeks. Perhaps, Andrée had believed in
Paris that it was indeed a lie and that I was in love with her, as
she would doubtless have believed at Balbec. For the truth is so
variable for each of us, that other people have difficulty in
recognising themselves in it. And as I knew that she would tell me
everything that she and Albertine had done, I had asked her, and
she had agreed to come and call for Albertine almost every day. In
this way I might without anxiety remain at home.
Also, Andrée's privileged position as one of the girls of the
little band gave me confidence that she would obtain everything
that I might require from Albertine. Truly, I could have said to
her now in all sincerity that she would be capable of setting my
mind at rest.
At the same time, my choice of Andrée (who happened to be staying
in Paris, having given up her plan of returning to Balbec) as guide
and companion to my mistress was prompted by what Albertine had
told me of the affection that her friend had felt for me at Balbec,
at a time when, on the contrary, I had supposed that I was boring
her; indeed, if I had known this at the time, it is perhaps with
Andrée that I would have fallen in love.
"What, you never knew," said Albertine, "but we were always joking
about it. Do you mean to say you never noticed how she used to copy
all your ways of talking and arguing? When she had just been with
you, it was too obvious. She had no need to tell us whether she had
seen you. As soon as she joined us, we could tell at once. We used
to look at one another, and laugh. She was like a coalheaver who
tries to pretend that he isn't one. He is black all over. A miller
has no need to say that he is a miller, you can see the flour all
over his clothes; and the mark of the sacks he has carried on his
shoulder. Andrée was just the same, she would knit her eyebrows the
way you do, and stretch out her long neck, and I don't know what
all. When I take up a book that has been in your room, even if I'm
reading it out of doors, I can tell at once that it belongs to you
because it still reeks of your beastly fumigations. It's only a
trifle, still it's rather a nice trifle, don't you know. Whenever
anybody spoke nicely about you, seemed to think a lot of you,
Andrée was in ecstasies."
Notwithstanding all this, in case there might have been some secret
plan made behind my back, I advised her to give up the
Buttes-Chaumont for that day and to go instead to Saint-Cloud or
somewhere else.
It was certainly not, as I was well aware, because I was the least
bit in love with Albertine. Love is nothing more perhaps than the
stimulation of those eddies which, in the wake of an emotion, stir
the soul. Certain such eddies had indeed stirred my soul through
and through when Albertine spoke to me at Balbec about Mlle.
Vinteuil, but these were now stilled. I was no longer in love with
Albertine, for I no longer felt anything of the suffering, now
healed, which I had felt in the tram at Balbec, upon learning how
Albertine had spent her girlhood, with visits perhaps to
Montjouvain. All this, I had too long taken for granted, was
healed. But, now and again, certain expressions used by Albertine
made me suppose—why, I cannot say—that she must in the course of
her life, short as it had been, have received declarations of
affection, and have received them with pleasure, that is to say
with sensuality. Thus, she would say, in any connexion: "Is that
true? Is it really true?" Certainly, if she had said, like an
Odette: "Is it really true, that thumping lie?" I should not have
been disturbed, for the absurdity of the formula would have
explained itself as a stupid inanity of feminine wit. But her
questioning air: "Is that true?" gave on the one hand the strange
impression of a creature incapable of judging things by herself,
who appeals to you for your testimony, as though she were not
endowed with the same faculties as yourself (if you said to her:
"Why, we've been out for a whole hour," or "It is raining," she
would ask: "Is that true?"). Unfortunately, on the other hand, this
want of facility in judging external phenomena for herself could
not be the real origin of her "Is that true? Is it really true?" It
seemed rather that these words had been, from the dawn of her
precocious adolescence, replies to: "You know, I never saw anybody
as pretty as you." "You know I am madly in love with you, I am most
terribly excited."—affirmations that were answered, with a
coquettishly consenting modesty, by these repetitions of: "Is that
true? Is it really true?" which no longer served Albertine, when in
my company, save to reply by a question to some such affirmation
as: "You have been asleep for more than an hour." "Is that
true?"
Without feeling that I was the least bit in the world in love with
Albertine, without including in the list of my pleasures the
moments that we spent together, I was still preoccupied with the
way in which she disposed of her time; had I not, indeed, fled from
Balbec in order to make certain that she could no longer meet this
or that person with whom I was so afraid of her misbehaving, simply
as a joke (a joke at my expense, perhaps), that I had adroitly
planned to sever, at one and the same time, by my departure, all
her dangerous entanglements? And Albertine was so entirely passive,
had so complete a faculty of forgetting things and submitting to
pressure, that these relations had indeed been severed and I myself
relieved of my haunting dread. But that dread is capable of
assuming as many forms as the undefined evil that is its cause. So
long as my jealousy was not reincarnate in fresh people, I had
enjoyed after the passing of my anguish an interval of calm. But
with a chronic malady, the slightest pretext serves to revive it,
as also with the vice of the person who is the cause of our
jealousy the slightest opportunity may serve her to practise it
anew (after a lull of chastity) with different people. I had
managed to separate Albertine from her accomplices, and, by so
doing, to exorcise my hallucinations; even if it was possible to
make her forget people, to cut short her attachments, her sensual
inclination was, itself also, chronic and was perhaps only waiting
for an opportunity to afford itself an outlet. Now Paris provided
just as many opportunities as Balbec.
In any town whatsoever, she had no need to seek, for the evil
existed not in Albertine alone, but in others to whom any
opportunity for enjoyment is good. A glance from one, understood at
once by the other, brings the two famished souls in contact. And it
is easy for a clever woman to appear not to have seen, then five
minutes later to join the person who has read her glance and is
waiting for her in a side street, and, in a few words, to make an
appointment. Who will ever know? And it was so simple for Albertine
to tell me, in order that she might continue these practices, that
she was anxious to see again some place on the outskirts of Paris
that she had liked. And so it was enough that she should return
later than usual, that her expedition should have taken an
unaccountable time, although it was perfectly easy perhaps to
account for it without introducing any sensual reason, for my
malady to break out afresh, attached this time to mental pictures
which were not of Balbec, and which I would set to work, as with
their predecessors, to destroy, as though the destruction of an
ephemeral cause could put an end to a congenital malady. I did not
take into account the fact that in these acts of destruction, in
which I had as an accomplice, in Albertine, her faculty of
changing, her ability to forget, almost to hate the recent object
of her love, I was sometimes causing a profound grief to one or
other of those persons unknown with whom in turn she had taken her
pleasure, and that this grief I was causing them in vain, for they
would be abandoned, replaced, and, parallel to the path strewn with
all the derelicts of her light-hearted infidelities, there would
open for me another, pitiless path broken only by an occasional
brief respite; so that my suffering could end only with Albertine's
life or with my own. Even in the first days after our return to
Paris, not satisfied by the information that Andrée and the
chauffeur had given me as to their expeditions with my mistress, I
had felt the neighbourhood of Paris to be as tormenting as that of
Balbec, and had gone off for a few days in the country with
Albertine. But everywhere my uncertainty as to what she might be
doing was the same; the possibility that it was something wrong as
abundant, vigilance even more difficult, with the result that I
returned with her to Paris. In leaving Balbec, I had imagined that
I was leaving Gomorrah, plucking Albertine from it; in reality,
alas, Gomorrah was dispersed to all the ends of the earth. And
partly out of jealousy, partly out of ignorance of such joys (a
case which is rare indeed), I had arranged unawares this game of
hide and seek in which Albertine was always to escape me.
I questioned her point-blank: "Oh, by the way, Albertine, am I
dreaming, or did you tell me that you knew Gilberte Swann?" "Yes;
that is to say, she used to talk to me at our classes, because she
had a set of the French history notes, in fact she was very nice
about it, and let me borrow them, and I gave them back the next
time I saw her." "Is she the kind of woman that I object to?" "Oh,
not at all, quite the opposite." But, rather than indulge in this
sort of criminal investigation, I would often devote to imagining
Albertine's excursion the energy that I did not employ in sharing
it, and would speak to my mistress with that ardour which remains
intact in our unfulfilled designs. I expressed so keen a longing to
see once again some window in the Sainte-Chapelle, so keen a regret
that I was not able to go there with her alone, that she said to me
lovingly: "Why, my dear boy, since you seem so keen about it, make
a little effort, come with us. We can start as late as you like,
whenever you're ready. And if you'd rather be alone with me, I have
only to send Andrée home, she can come another time." But these
very entreaties to me to go out added to the calm which allowed me
to yield to my desire to remain indoors.
It did not occur to me that the apathy that was indicated by my
delegating thus to Andrée or the chauffeur the task of soothing my
agitation by leaving them to keep watch over Albertine, was
paralysing in me, rendering inert all those imaginative impulses of
the mind, all those inspirations of the will, which enable us to
guess, to forestall, what some one else is about to do; indeed the
world of possibilities has always been more open to me than that of
real events. This helps us to understand the human heart, but we
are apt to be taken in by individuals. My jealousy was born of
mental images, a form of self torment not based upon probability.
Now there may occur in the lives of men and of nations (and there
was to occur, one day, in my own life) a moment when we need to
have within us a superintendent of police, a clear-sighted
diplomat, a master-detective, who instead of pondering over the
concealed possibilities that extend to all the points of the
compass, reasons accurately, says to himself: "If Germany announces
this, it means that she intends to do something else, not just
'something' in the abstract but precisely this or that or the
other, which she may perhaps have begun already to do." "If
So-and-So has fled, it is not in the
direction a or b or d, but to the
point c, and the place to which we must direct our search for
him is c." Alas, this faculty which was not highly developed
in me, I allowed to grow slack, to lose its power, to vanish, by
acquiring the habit of growing calm the moment that other people
were engaged in keeping watch on my behalf.
As for the reason for my reluctance to leave the house, I should
not have liked to explain it to Albertine. I told her that the
doctor had ordered me to stay in bed. This was not true. And if it
had been true, his prescription would have been powerless to
prevent me from accompanying my mistress. I asked her to excuse me
from going out with herself and Andrée. I shall mention only one of
my reasons, which was dictated by prudence. Whenever I went out
with Albertine, if she left my side for a moment, I became anxious,
began to imagine that she had spoken to, or simply cast a glance at
somebody. If she was not in the best of tempers, I thought that I
was causing her to miss or to postpone some appointment. Reality is
never more than an allurement to an unknown element in quest of
which we can never progress very far. It is better not to know, to
think as little as possible, not to feed our jealousy with the
slightest concrete detail. Unfortunately, even when we eliminate
the outward life, incidents are created by the inward life also;
though I held aloof from Albertine's expeditions, the random course
of my solitary reflexions furnished me at times with those tiny
fragments of the truth which attract to themselves, like a magnet,
an inkling of the unknown, which, from that moment, becomes
painful. Even if we live in a hermetically sealed compartment,
associations of ideas, memories continue to act upon us. But these
internal shocks did not occur immediately; no sooner had Albertine
started on her drive than I was revivified, were it only for a few
moments, by the stimulating virtues of solitude.
I took my share of the pleasures of the new day; the arbitrary
desire—the capricious and purely spontaneous inclination to taste
them would not have sufficed to place them within my reach, had not
the peculiar state of the weather not merely reminded me of their
images in the past but affirmed their reality in the present,
immediately accessible to all men whom a contingent and
consequently negligible circumstance did not compel to remain at
home. On certain fine days the weather was so cold, one was in such
full communication with the street that it seemed as though a
breach had been made in the outer walls of the house, and, whenever
a tramcar passed, the sound of its bell throbbed like that of a
silver knife striking a wall of glass. But it was most of all in
myself that I heard, with intoxication, a new sound rendered by the
hidden violin. Its strings are tightened or relaxed by mere changes
of temperature, of light, in the world outside. In our person, an
instrument which the uniformity of habit has rendered silent, song
is born of these digressions, these variations, the source of all
music: the change of climate on certain days makes us pass at once
from one note to another. We recapture the forgotten air the
mathematical inevitability of which we might have deduced, and
which for the first few moments we sing without recognising it. By
themselves these modifications (which, albeit coming from without,
were internal) refashioned for me the world outside. Communicating
doors, long barred, opened themselves in my brain. The life of
certain towns, the gaiety of certain expeditions resumed their
place in my consciousness. All athrob in harmony with the vibrating
string, I would have sacrificed my dull life in the past, and all
my life to come, erased with the india-rubber of habit, for one of
these special, unique moments.
If I had not gone out with Albertine on her long drive, my mind
would stray all the farther afield, and, because I had refused to
savour with my senses this particular morning, I enjoyed in
imagination all the similar mornings, past or possible, or more
precisely a certain type of morning of which all those of the same
kind were but the intermittent apparition which I had at once
recognised; for the keen air blew the book open of its own accord
at the right page, and I found clearly set out before my eyes, so
that I might follow it from my bed, the Gospel for the day. This
ideal morning filled my mind full of a permanent reality, identical
with all similar mornings, and infected me with a cheerfulness
which my physical ill-health did not diminish: for, inasmuch as our
sense of well-being is caused not so much by our sound health as by
the unemployed surplus of our strength, we can attain to it, just
as much as by increasing our strength, by diminishing our activity.
The activity with which I was overflowing and which I kept
constantly charged as I lay in bed, made me spring from side to
side, with a leaping heart, like a machine which, prevented from
moving in space, rotates on its own axis.
Françoise came in to light the fire, and to make it draw, threw
upon it a handful of twigs, the scent of which, forgotten for a
year past, traced round the fireplace a magic circle within which,
perceiving myself poring over a book, now at Combray, now at
Doncières, I was as joyful, while remaining in my bedroom in Paris,
as if I had been on the point of starting for a walk along the
Méséglise way, or of going to join Saint-Loup and his friends on
the training-ground. It often happens that the pleasure which
everyone takes in turning over the keepsakes that his memory has
collected is keenest in those whom the tyranny of bodily ill-health
and the daily hope of recovery prevent, on the one hand, from going
out to seek in nature scenes that resemble those memories, and, on
the other hand, leave so convinced that they will shortly be able
to do so that they can remain gazing at them in a state of desire,
of appetite, and not regard them merely as memories, as pictures.
But, even if they were never to be anything more than memories to
me, even if I, as I recalled them, saw merely pictures, immediately
they recreated in me, of me as a whole, by virtue of an identical
sensation, the boy, the youth who had first seen them. There had
been not merely a change in the weather outside, or, inside the
room, the introduction of a fresh scent, there had been in myself a
difference of age, the substitution of another person. The scent,
in the frosty air, of the twigs of brushwood, was like a fragment
of the past, an invisible floe broken off from the ice of an old
winter that stole into my room, often variegated moreover with this
perfume or that light, as though with a sequence of different
years, in which I found myself plunged, overwhelmed, even before I
had identified them, by the eagerness of hopes long since
abandoned. The sun's rays fell upon my bed and passed through the
transparent shell of my attenuated body, warmed me, made me as hot
as a sheet of scorching crystal. Whereupon, a famished convalescent
who has already begun to batten upon all the dishes that are still
forbidden him, I asked myself whether marriage with Albertine would
not spoil my life, as well by making me assume the burden, too
heavy for my shoulders, of consecrating myself to another person,
as by forcing me to live in absence from myself because of her
continual presence and depriving me, forever, of the delights of
solitude.
And not of these alone. Even when we ask of the day nothing but
desires, there are some—those that are excited not by things but by
people—whose character it is to be unlike any other. If, on rising
from my bed, I went to the window and drew the curtain aside for a
moment, it was not merely, as a pianist for a moment turns back the
lid of his instrument, to ascertain whether, on the balcony and in
the street, the sunlight was tuned to exactly the same pitch as in
my memory, it was also to catch a glimpse of some laundress
carrying her linen-basket, a bread-seller in her blue apron, a
dairymaid in her tucker and sleeves of white linen, carrying the
yoke from which her jugs of milk are suspended, some haughty
golden-haired miss escorted by her governess, a composite image, in
short, which the differences of outline, numerically perhaps
insignificant, were enough to make as different from any other as,
in a phrase of music, the difference between two notes, an image
but for the vision of which I should have impoverished my day of
the objects which it might have to offer to my desires of
happiness. But, if the surfeit of joy, brought me by the spectacle
of women whom it was impossible to imagine a priori, made more
desirable, more deserving of exploration, the street, the town, the
world, it set me longing, for that very reason, to recover my
health, to go out of doors and, without Albertine, to be a free
man. How often, at the moment when the unknown woman who was to
haunt my dreams passed beneath the window, now on foot, now at the
full speed of her motor-car, was I made wretched that my body could
not follow my gaze which kept pace with her, and falling upon her
as though shot from the embrasure of my window by an arquebus,
arrest the flight of the face that held out for me the offer of a
happiness which, cloistered thus, I should never know.
Of Albertine, on the other hand, I had nothing more to learn. Every
day, she seemed to me less attractive. Only, the desire that she
aroused in other people, when, upon hearing of it, I began to
suffer afresh and was impelled to challenge their possession of
her, raised her in my sight to a lofty pinnacle. Pain, she was
capable of causing me; joy, never. Pain alone kept my tedious
attachment alive. As soon as my pain vanished, and with it the need
to soothe it, requiring all my attention, like some agonising
distraction, I felt that she meant absolutely nothing to me, that I
must mean absolutely nothing to her. It made me wretched that this
state should persist, and, at certain moments, I longed to hear of
something terrible that she had done, something that would be
capable of keeping us at arms-length until I was cured, so that we
might then be able to be reconciled, to refashion in a different
and more flexible form the chain that bound us.
In the meantime, I was employing a thousand circumstances, a
thousand pleasures to procure for her in my society the illusion of
that happiness which I did not feel myself capable of giving her. I
should have liked, as soon as I was cured, to set off for Venice,
but how was I to manage it, if I married Albertine, I, who was so
jealous of her that even in Paris whenever I decided to stir from
my room it was to go out with her? Even when I stayed in the house
all the afternoon, my thoughts accompanied her on her drive, traced
a remote, blue horizon, created round the centre that was myself a
fluctuating zone of vague uncertainty. "How completely," I said to
myself, "would Albertine spare me the anguish of separation if, in
the course of one of these drives, seeing that I no longer say
anything to her about marriage, she decided not to come back, and
went off to her aunt's, without my having to bid her good-bye!" My
heart, now that its scar had begun to heal, was ceasing to adhere
to the heart of my mistress; I could by imagination shift her,
separate her from myself without pain. No doubt, failing myself,
some other man would be her husband, and in her freedom she would
meet perhaps with those adventures which filled me with horror. But
the day was so fine, I was so certain that she would return in the
evening, that even if the idea of possible misbehaviour did enter
my mind, I could, by an exercise of free will, imprison it in a
part of my brain in which it had no more importance than would have
had in my real life the vices of an imaginary person; bringing into
play the supple hinges of my thought, I had, with an energy which I
felt in my head to be at once physical and mental, as it were a
muscular movement and a spiritual impulse, broken away from the
state of perpetual preoccupation in which I had until then been
confined, and was beginning to move in a free atmosphere, in which
the idea of sacrificing everything in order to prevent Albertine
from marrying some one else and to put an obstacle in the way of
her fondness for women seemed as unreasonable to my own mind as to
that of a person who had never known her.
However, jealousy is one of those intermittent maladies, the cause
of which is capricious, imperative, always identical in the same
patient, sometimes entirely different in another. There are
asthmatic persons who can soothe their crises only by opening the
windows, inhaling the full blast of the wind, the pure air of the
mountains, others by taking refuge in the heart of the city, in a
room heavy with smoke. Rare indeed is the jealous man whose
jealousy does not allow certain concessions. One will consent to
infidelity, provided that he is told of it, another provided that
it is concealed from him, wherein they appear to be equally absurd,
since if the latter is more literally deceived inasmuch as the
truth is not disclosed to him, the other demands in that truth the
food, the extension, the renewal of his sufferings.
What is more, these two parallel manias of jealousy extend often
beyond words, whether they implore or reject confidences. We see a
jealous lover who is jealous only of the women with whom his
mistress has relations in his absence, but allows her to give
herself to another man, if it is done with his authorisation, near
at hand, and, if not actually before his eyes, under his roof. This
case is not at all uncommon among elderly men who are in love with
young women. Such a man feels the difficulty of winning her favour,
sometimes his inability to satisfy her, and, rather than be
betrayed, prefers to admit to his house, to an adjoining room, some
man whom he considers incapable of giving her bad advice, but not
incapable of giving her pleasure. With another man it is just the
opposite; never allowing his mistress to go out by herself for a
single minute in a town that he knows, he keeps her in a state of
bondage, but allows her to go for a month to a place which he does
not know, where he cannot form any mental picture of what she may
be doing. I had with regard to Albertine both these sorts of
sedative mania. I should not have been jealous if she had enjoyed
her pleasures in my company, with my encouragement, pleasures over
the whole of which I could have kept watch, thus avoiding any fear
of falsehood; I might perhaps not have been jealous either if she
had removed to a place so unfamiliar and remote that I could not
imagine nor find any possibility, feel any temptation to know the
manner of her life. In either alternative, my uncertainty would
have been killed by a knowledge or an ignorance equally
complete.
The decline of day plunging me back by an act of memory in a cool
atmosphere of long ago, I breathed it with the same delight with
which Orpheus inhaled the subtle air, unknown upon this earth, of
the Elysian Fields.
But already the day was ending and I was overpowered by the
desolation of the evening. Looking mechanically at the clock to see
how many hours must elapse before Albertine's return, I saw that I
had still time to dress and go downstairs to ask my landlady, Mme.
de Guermantes, for particulars of various becoming garments which I
was anxious to procure for my mistress. Sometimes I met the Duchess
in the courtyard, going out for a walk, even if the weather was
bad, in a close-fitting hat and furs. I knew quite well that, to
many people of intelligence, she was merely a lady like any other,
the name Duchesse de Guermantes signifying nothing, now that there
are no longer any sovereign Duchies or Principalities, but I had
adopted a different point of view in my method of enjoying people
and places. All the castles of the territories of which she was
Duchess, Princess, Viscountess, this lady in furs defying the
weather teemed to me to be carrying them on her person, as a figure
carved over the lintel of a church door holds in his hand the
cathedral that he has built or the city that he has defended. But
these castles, these forests, my mind's eye alone could discern
them in the left hand of the lady in furs, whom the King called
cousin. My bodily eyes distinguished in it only, on days when the
sky was threatening, an umbrella with which the Duchess was not
afraid to arm herself. "One can never be certain, it is wiser, I
may find myself miles from home, with a cabman demanding a
fare beyond my means." The words 'too dear' and 'beyond my
means' kept recurring all the time in the Duchess's conversation,
as did also: 'I am too poor'—without its being possible to decide
whether she spoke thus because she thought it amusing to say that
she was poor, being so rich, or because she thought it smart, being
so aristocratic, in spite of her affectation of peasant ways, not
to attach to riches the importance that people give them who are
merely rich and nothing else, and who look down upon the poor.
Perhaps it was, rather, a habit contracted at a time in her life
when, already rich, but not rich enough to satisfy her needs,
considering the expense of keeping up all those properties, she
felt a certain shortage of money which she did not wish to appear
to be concealing. The things about which we most often jest are
generally, on the contrary, the things that embarrass us, but we do
not wish to appear to be embarrassed by them, and feel perhaps a
secret hope of the further advantage that the person to whom we are
talking, hearing us treat the matter as a joke, will conclude that
it is not true.
But upon most evenings, at this hour, I could count upon finding
the Duchess at home, and I was glad of this, for it was more
convenient for me to ask her in detail for the information that
Albertine required. And down I went almost without thinking how
extraordinary it was that I should be calling upon that mysterious
Mme. de Guermantes of my boyhood, simply in order to make use of
her for a practical purpose, as one makes use of the telephone, a
supernatural instrument before whose miracles we used to stand
amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to
summon our tailor or to order ices for a party.
Albertine delighted in any sort of finery. I could not deny myself
the pleasure of giving her some new trifle every day. And whenever
she had spoken to me with rapture of a scarf, a stole, a sunshade
which, from the window or as they passed one another in the
courtyard, her eyes that so quickly distinguished anything smart,
had seen round the throat, over the shoulders, in the hand of Mme.
de Guermantes, knowing how the girl's naturally fastidious taste
(refined still further by the lessons in elegance of attire which
Elstir's conversation had been to her) would not be at all
satisfied by any mere substitute, even of a pretty thing, such as
fills its place in the eyes of the common herd, but differs from it
entirely, I went in secret to make the Duchess explain to me where,
how, from what model the article had been created that had taken
Albertine's fancy, how I should set about to obtain one exactly
similar, in what the creator's secret, the charm (what Albertine
called the 'chic' the 'style') of his manner, the precise name—the
beauty of the material being of importance also—and quality of the
stuffs that I was to insist upon their using.
When I mentioned to Albertine, on our return from Balbec, that the
Duchesse de Guermantes lived opposite to us, in the same mansion,
she had assumed, on hearing the proud title and great name, that
air more than indifferent, hostile, contemptuous, which is the sign
of an impotent desire in proud and passionate natures. Splendid as
Albertine's nature might be, the fine qualities which it contained
were free to develop only amid those hindrances which are our
personal tastes, or that lamentation for those of our tastes which
we have been obliged to relinquish—in Albertine's case
snobbishness—which is called antipathy. Albertine's antipathy to
people in society occupied, for that matter, but a very small part
in her nature, and appealed to me as an aspect of the revolutionary
spirit—that is to say an embittered love of the nobility—engraved
upon the opposite side of the French character to that which
displays the aristocratic manner of Mme. de Guermantes. To this
aristocratic manner Albertine, in view of the impossibility of her
acquiring it, would perhaps not have given a thought, but
remembering that Elstir had spoken to her of the Duchess as the
best dressed woman in Paris, her republican contempt for a Duchess
gave place in my mistress to a keen interest in a fashionable
woman. She was always asking me to tell her about Mme. de
Guermantes, and was glad that I should go to the Duchess to obtain
advice as to her own attire. No doubt I might have got this from
Mme. Swann and indeed I did once write to her with this intention.
But Mme. de Guermantes seemed to me to carry to an even higher
pitch the art of dressing. If, on going down for a moment to call
upon her, after making sure that she had not gone out and leaving
word that I was to be told as soon as Albertine returned, I found
the Duchess swathed in the mist of a garment of grey crêpe de
chine, I accepted this aspect of her which I felt to be due to
complex causes and to be quite inevitable, I let myself be
overpowered by the atmosphere which it exhaled, like that of
certain late afternoons cushioned in pearly grey by a vaporous fog;
if, on the other hand, her indoor gown was Chinese with red and
yellow flames, I gazed at it as at a glowing sunset; these garments
were not a casual decoration alterable at her pleasure, but a
definite and poetical reality like that of the weather, or the
light peculiar to a certain hour of the day.
Of all the outdoor and indoor gowns that Mme. de Guermantes wore,
those which seemed most to respond to a definite intention, to be
endowed with a special significance, were the garments made by
Fortuny from old Venetian models. Is it their historical character,
is it rather the fact that each one of them is unique that gives
them so special a significance that the pose of the woman who is
wearing one while she waits for you to appear or while she talks to
you assumes an exceptional importance, as though the costume had
been the fruit of a long deliberation and your conversation was
detached from the current of everyday life like a scene in a novel?
In the novels of Balzac, we see his heroines purposely put on one
or another dress on the day on which they are expecting some
particular visitor. The dresses of to-day have less character,
always excepting the creations of Fortuny. There is no room for
vagueness in the novelist's description, since the gown does really
exist, and the merest sketch of it is as naturally preordained as a
copy of a work of art. Before putting on one or another of them,
the woman has had to make a choice between two garments, not more
or less alike but each one profoundly individual, and answering to
its name. But the dress did not prevent me from thinking of the
woman.
Indeed, Mme. de Guermantes seemed to me at this time more
attractive than in the days when I was still in love with her.
Expecting less of her (whom I no longer went to visit for her own
sake), it was almost with the ease and comfort of a man in a room
by himself, with his feet on the fender, that I listened to her as
though I were reading a book written in the speech of long ago. My
mind was sufficiently detached to enjoy in what she said that pure
charm of the French language which we no longer find either in the
speech or in the literature of the present day. I listened to her
conversation as to a folk song deliciously and purely French, I
realised that I would have allowed her to belittle Maeterlinck
(whom for that matter she now admired, from a feminine weakness of
intellect, influenced by those literary fashions whose rays spread
slowly), as I realised that Mérimée had belittled Baudelaire,
Stendhal Balzac, Paul-Louis Courier Victor Hugo, Meilhac Mallarmé.
I realised that the critic had a far more restricted outlook than
his victim, but also a purer vocabulary. That of Mme. de
Guermantes, almost as much as that of Saint-Loup's mother, was
purified to an enchanting degree. It is not in the bloodless
formulas of the writers of to-day, who say: au fait(for 'in
reality'), singulièrement (for 'in
particular'), étonné (for 'struck with amazement'), and
the like, that we recapture the old speech and the true
pronunciation of words, but in conversing with a Mme. de Guermantes
or a Françoise; I had learned from the latter, when I was five
years old, that one did not say 'the Tarn' but 'the Tar'; not
'Bearn' but 'Bear.' The effect of which was that at twenty, when I
began to go into society, I had no need to be taught there that one
ought not to say, like Mme. Bontemps: 'Madame de Bearn.'
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