In Search of Lost Time, Volume II (66 page)

When Elstir asked me to come with him so that he might introduce me to Albertine, who was sitting a little further down the room, I first of all finished eating a coffee éclair and, with a show of keen interest, asked an old gentleman whose acquaintance I had just made (and to whom I thought that I might offer the rose in my buttonhole which he had admired) to tell me more about the old Norman fairs. This is not to say that the introduction which followed did not give me any pleasure and did not assume a certain solemnity in my eyes. But so far as the pleasure was concerned, I was naturally not conscious of it until some time later, when, back at the hotel, and in my room alone, I had become myself again. Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative, which we develop later, when we are back at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner dark-room the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people.

If my consciousness of the pleasure it had brought me was thus retarded by a few hours, the gravity of this introduction made itself felt at once. At the moment of introduction, for all that we feel ourselves to have been suddenly rewarded, to have been furnished with a pass that will admit us henceforward to pleasures which we have been pursuing for weeks past, we realise only too clearly that this acquisition puts an end for us not merely to hours of toilsome search—a relief that can only fill us with joy—but also to the existence of a certain person, the person whom our imagination had wildly distorted, whom our anxious fear that we might never become known to her had magnified. At the moment when our name rings out on the lips of the introducer, especially if the latter amplifies it, as Elstir now did, with a flattering commentary—that sacramental moment, as when in a fairy tale the magician commands a person suddenly to become someone else—she to whose presence we have been longing to attain vanishes: indeed, how could she remain the same when—by reason of the attention which she is obliged to pay to the announcement of our name and the sight of our person—in the eyes that only yesterday were situated at an infinite distance (where we supposed that ours, wandering, unsteady, desperate, divergent, would never succeed in meeting them) the conscious gaze, the incommunicable thought which we were seeking have just been miraculously and quite simply replaced by our own image painted in them as in a smiling mirror? If this incarnation of ourselves in the person who seemed to differ most from us is what does most to modify the appearance of the person to whom we have just been introduced, the form of that person still remains quite vague; and we may wonder whether it will turn out to be a god, a table or a basin. But, as nimble as the wax-modellers who will fashion a bust before our eyes in five minutes, the few words which the stranger is now going to say to us will substantiate that form and give it something positive and final that will exclude all the hypotheses in which our desire and our imagination had been indulging. Doubtless, even before coming to this party, Albertine had ceased to be for me simply that phantom fit to haunt the rest of our lives which a passing stranger of whom we know nothing and have caught but the barest glimpse remains. Her relationship to Mme Bontemps had already restricted the scope of those marvellous hypotheses, by stopping one of the channels along which they might have spread. As I drew closer to the girl and began to know her better, this knowledge developed by a process of subtraction, each constituent of imagination and desire giving place to a notion which was worth infinitely less, a notion to which, it is true, there was added presently a sort of equivalent, in the domain of real life, of what joint stock companies give one, after repaying one’s original investment, and call dividend shares. Her name, her family connections, had been the first limit set to my suppositions. Her friendly greeting as, standing close beside her, I once again saw the tiny mole on her cheek, below her eye, marked another stage; finally, I was surprised to hear her use the adverb “perfectly,” in place of “completely,” of two people whom she mentioned, saying of one, “She’s perfectly mad, but very nice all the same,” and of the other, “He’s perfectly common and perfectly boring.” However little to be commended this use of “perfectly” may be, it indicates a degree of civilisation and culture which I could never have imagined as having been attained by the bacchante with the bicycle, the orgiastic muse of the golf-course. Nor did it mean that after this first metamorphosis Albertine was not to change again for me, many times. The qualities and defects which a person presents to us, exposed to view on the surface of his or her face, rearrange themselves in a totally different order if we approach them from a new angle—just as, in a town, buildings that appear strung in extended order along a single line, from another viewpoint are disposed in depth and their relative heights altered. To begin with, Albertine struck me as somewhat shy instead of implacable; she seemed to me more proper than ill-bred, judging by the descriptions, “she has bad manners” or “she has peculiar manners,” which she applied to each in turn of the girls of whom I spoke to her; finally, she presented as a target for my line of vision a temple that was somewhat inflamed and by no means attractive to the eye, and no longer the curious look which I had always associated with her until then. But this was merely a second impression and there were doubtless others through which I would successively pass. Thus it can be only after one has recognised, not without some tentative stumblings, the optical errors of one’s first impression that one can arrive at an exact knowledge of another person, supposing such knowledge to be ever possible. But it is not; for while our original impression of him undergoes correction, the person himself, not being an inanimate object, changes for
his part too: we think that we have caught him, he shifts, and, when we imagine that at last we are seeing him clearly, it is only the old impressions which we had already formed of him that we have succeeded in clarifying, when they no longer represent him.

And yet, whatever the inevitable disappointments that it must bring in its train, this movement towards what we have only glimpsed, what we have been free to dwell upon and imagine at our leisure, this movement is the only one that is wholesome for the senses, that whets their appetite. How drearily monotonous must be the lives of people who, from indolence or timidity, drive in their carriages straight to the doors of friends whom they have got to know without having first dreamed of knowing them, without ever daring, on the way, to stop and examine what arouses their desire!

I returned home thinking of that party, of the coffee éclair which I had finished eating before I let Elstir take me up to Albertine, the rose which I had given the old gentleman, all the details selected unbeknown to us by the circumstances of the occasion, which compose for us, in a special and quite fortuitous order, the picture that we retain of a first meeting. But I had the impression that I was seeing this picture from another angle of vision, very far removed from myself, realising that it had not existed only for me, when some months later, to my great surprise, on my speaking to Albertine about the day on which I had first met her, she reminded me of the éclair, the flower that I had given away, all those things which I had supposed to have been, I cannot say of importance only to myself, but perceived only by myself, and which I now found thus transcribed, in a version of which I had
never suspected the existence, in the mind of Albertine. On this first day itself, when, on my return to the hotel, I was able to visualise the memory which I had brought away with me, I realised what a conjuring trick had been performed, and with what consummate sleight of hand, and how I had talked for a moment or two with a person who, thanks to the skill of the conjurer, without actually embodying anything of that other person whom I had for so long been following as she paced beside the sea, had been substituted for her. I might, for that matter, have guessed as much in advance, since the girl on the beach was a fabrication of my own. In spite of which, since I had, in my conversations with Elstir, identified her with Albertine, I felt myself in honour bound to fulfil to the real the promises of love made to the imagined Albertine. We betroth ourselves by proxy, and then feel obliged to marry the intermediary. Moreover, if there had disappeared from my life, provisionally at any rate, an anguish that the memory of polite manners, the expression “perfectly common” and an inflamed temple had sufficed to assuage, that memory awakened in me another kind of desire which, though placid and in no way painful, resembling a brotherly feeling, might in the long run become fully as dangerous by making me feel at every moment a compelling need to kiss this new person whose good manners, whose shyness, whose unexpected accessibility, arrested the futile course of my imagination but gave birth to a tender gratitude. And then, since memory begins at once to record photographs independent of one another, eliminates every link, any kind of sequence between the scenes portrayed in the collection which it exposes to our view, the most recent does not necessarily destroy or cancel those that came before. Confronted with the commonplace and touching Albertine to whom I had spoken that afternoon, I still saw the other mysterious Albertine outlined against the sea. These were now memories, that is to say pictures neither of which now seemed to me any truer than the other. Finally, to conclude this account of my first introduction to Albertine, when trying to recapture that little beauty spot on her cheek, just under the eye, I remembered that, looking from Elstir’s window when Albertine had gone by, I had seen it on her chin. In fact, when I saw her I noticed that she had a beauty spot, but my errant memory made it wander about her face, fixing it now in one place, now in another.

Whatever my disappointment in finding in Mlle Simonet a girl so little different from those that I knew already, just as my disillusionment when I saw Balbec church did not prevent me from wishing still to go to Quimperlé, Pont-Aven and Venice, I comforted myself with the thought that through Albertine at any rate, even if she herself was not all that I had hoped, I might make the acquaintance of her comrades of the little band.

I thought at first that I should fail in this. As she was to be staying (and I too) for a long time still at Balbec, I had decided that the best thing was not to make my efforts to meet her too apparent, but to wait for an accidental encounter. But even if this should occur every day it was greatly to be feared that she would confine herself to acknowledging my greeting from a distance, and such meetings, repeated day after day throughout the whole season, would benefit me not at all.

Shortly after this, one morning when it had been raining and was almost cold, I was accosted on the front by a girl wearing a little toque and carrying a muff, so different from the girl whom I had met at Elstir’s party that to recognise in her the same person seemed an operation beyond the power of the human mind; mine was, however, successful in performing it, but after a moment’s surprise which did not, I think, escape Albertine’s notice. On the other hand, remembering the “well-bred” manners which had so impressed me before, I now experienced a converse astonishment at her rude tone and manners typical of the “little band.” Moreover, her temple had ceased to be the reassuring optical centre of her face, either because I was now on her other side, or because her toque hid it, or else possibly because its inflammation was not a constant thing.

“What weather!” she began. “Really the perpetual summer of Balbec is all stuff and nonsense. Don’t you do anything here? We never see you playing golf, or dancing at the Casino. You don’t ride either. You must be bored stiff. You don’t find it too deadly, idling about on the beach all day? Ah, so you like basking in the sun like a lizard? You must have plenty of time on your hands. I can see you’re not like me; I simply adore all sports. You weren’t at the Sogne races? We went in the ‘tram,’ and I can quite understand that you wouldn’t see any fun in going in an old rattletrap like that. It took us two whole hours! I could have gone there and back three times on my bike.”

I who had admired Saint-Loup when, in the most natural manner in the world, he had called the little local train the “crawler,” because of the ceaseless windings of its line, was daunted by the glibness with which Albertine spoke of it as the “tram” and the “rattletrap.” I could sense her mastery of a mode of nomenclature in which I was afraid of her detecting and despising my inferiority. And the full wealth of the synonyms that the little band possessed to designate this railway had not yet been revealed to me. In speaking, Albertine kept her head motionless and her nostrils pinched, and scarcely moved her lips. The result of this was a drawling, nasal sound, into the composition of which there entered perhaps a provincial heredity, a juvenile affectation of British phlegm, the teaching of a foreign governess and a congestive hypertrophy of the mucus of the nose. This enunciation which, as it happened, soon disappeared when she knew people better, giving place to a natural girlish tone, might have been thought unpleasant. But to me it was peculiarly delightful. Whenever I had gone for several days without seeing her, I would refresh my spirit by repeating to myself: “We don’t ever see you playing golf,” with the nasal intonation in which she had uttered the words, point blank, without moving a muscle of her face. And I thought then that there was no one in the world so desirable.

We formed, that morning, one of those couples who dotted the front here and there with their conjunction, their stopping together just long enough to exchange a few words before breaking apart, each to resume separately his or her divergent stroll. I took advantage of this immobility to look again and discover once and for all where exactly the little mole was placed. Then, just as a phrase of Vinteuil which had delighted me in the sonata, and which my recollection allowed to wander from the andante to the finale, until the day when, having the score in my hands, I was able to find it and to fix it in my memory in its proper place, in the scherzo, so this mole, which I had visualised now on her cheek, now on her chin, came to rest for ever on her upper lip, just below her nose. In the same way, too, we are sometimes amazed to come upon lines that we know by heart in a play in which we never dreamed that they were to be found.

At that moment, as if in order that the rich decorative ensemble formed by the lovely train of maidens, at once pink and golden, baked by the sun and wind, might freely proliferate before the sea in all the variety of its forms, Albertine’s friends, with their shapely limbs, their supple figures, but so different one from another, came into sight in a cluster that spread out as it advanced in our direction, but closer to the sea, in a parallel line. I asked Albertine’s permission to walk for a little way with her. Unfortunately, all she did was to wave her hand to them in greeting. “But your friends will be disappointed if you don’t go with them,” I hinted, hoping that we might all walk together.