The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (362 page)

“I was thinking about asking the Verdurins to dinner, it’s very good of you.”

“No, I mean what you said just now.”

She gave me endless versions, none of which tallied in the least, not simply with her words which, having been interrupted, remained obscure to me, but with the interruption itself and the sudden flush that had accompanied it.

“Come, my darling, that’s not what you were going to say, otherwise why did you stop short?”

“Because I felt that my request was presumptuous.”

“What request?”

“To be allowed to give a dinner-party.”

“No, no, that’s not it, there’s no need for ceremony between you and me.”

“Indeed there is, we ought never to take advantage of the people we love. In any case, I swear to you that that was all.”

On the one hand it was still impossible for me to doubt her sworn word; on the other hand her explanations did not satisfy my reason. I continued to press her. “Anyhow, you might at least have the courage to finish what you were saying, you stopped short at
casser.
”

“No, leave me alone!”

“But why?”

“Because it’s dreadfully vulgar, I’d be ashamed to say such a thing in front of you. I don’t know what I was thinking of. The words—I don’t even know what they mean, I heard them used in the street one day by some very low people—just came into my head without rhyme or reason. It had nothing to do with me or anybody else, I was simply dreaming aloud.”

I felt that I would extract nothing more from Albertine. She had lied to me when she had sworn a moment ago that what had cut her short had been a social fear of being over-presumptuous, since it had now become the shame of using a vulgar expression in front of me. Now this was certainly another lie. For when we were alone together there was no expression too perverse, no word too coarse for us to utter during our embraces. However, it was useless to insist at that moment. But my memory remained obsessed by the word
casser
. Albertine often used expressions such as
casser du bois
or
casser du sucre
, meaning “to run someone down,” or would say
Ah! ce que je lui en ai cassé!
, meaning “I fairly gave it to him!” But she would say this quite freely in my presence, and if it was this that she had meant to say, why had she suddenly stopped short, why had she blushed so deeply, placed her hands over her mouth, tried to refashion her sentence,
and, when she saw that I had heard the word
casser
, offered a false explanation? Meanwhile, abandoning the pursuit of an interrogation from which I would get no response, the best thing to do was to appear to have lost interest in the matter, and, retracing my thoughts to Albertine’s reproaches to me for having gone to the Mistress’s, I said to her, somewhat clumsily, making indeed a sort of stupid excuse for my conduct: “Actually I’d been meaning to ask you to come to the Verdurins’ party this evening,” a remark that was doubly maladroit, for if I meant it, since I saw her all the time, why wouldn’t I have suggested it? Furious at my lie and emboldened by my timidity: “You could have gone on asking me for a thousand years,” she said, “and I’d never have consented. Those people have always been against me, they’ve done everything they could to mortify me. There was nothing I didn’t do for Mme Verdurin at Balbec, and look at the thanks I get. If she summoned me to her deathbed, I wouldn’t go. There are some things it’s impossible to forgive. As for you, it’s the first time you’ve behaved badly to me. When Françoise told me you’d gone out (and she enjoyed telling me all right), I’d sooner have had my skull split down the middle. I tried not to show any sign, but never in my life have I felt so grossly insulted.”

But while she was speaking there continued within me, in that curiously alive and creative sleep of the unconscious (a sleep in which the things that have barely touched us succeed in carving an impression, in which our sleeping hands take hold of the key that turns the lock, the key for which we have sought in vain), the quest for what it was that she had meant by that interrupted sentence,
the missing end of which I was so anxious to know. And all of a sudden an appalling word, of which I had never dreamed, burst upon me:
le pot
.
²²
I cannot say that it came to me in a single flash, as when, in a long passive submission to an incomplete recollection, while one tries gently and cautiously to unfold it, one remains ravelled in it, glued to it. No, in contrast to my habitual method of recall, there were, I think, two parallel lines of search: the first took into account not merely Albertine’s words, but her look of exasperation when I had offered her a sum of money with which to give a grand dinner, a look which seemed to say: “Thank you, the idea of spending money upon things that bore me, when without money I could do things that I enjoy doing!” And it was perhaps the memory of the look she had given me that made me alter my method in order to discover the end of her unfinished sentence. Until then I had been hypnotised by the last word,
casser
. What was it she meant by
break
?
Casser du bois?
No.
Du sucre?
No. Break, break, break. And all at once her look, and her shrug, when I had suggested that she should give a dinner-party sent me back to the words that had preceded. And immediately I saw that she had not simply said
casser
but
me faire casser
. Horror! It was this that she would have preferred. Twofold horror! For even the vilest of prostitutes, who consents to such a thing, or even desires it, does not use that hideous expression to the man who indulges in it. She would feel it too degrading. To a woman alone, if she loves women, she might say it, to excuse herself for giving herself presently to a man. Albertine had not been lying when she told me that she was half dreaming. Her mind elsewhere, forgetting
that she was with me, impulsively she had shrugged her shoulders and begun to speak as she would have spoken to one of those women, perhaps to one of my budding girls. And abruptly recalled to reality, crimson with shame, pushing back into her mouth what she was about to say, desperately ashamed, she had refused to utter another word. I had not a moment to lose if I was not to let her see the despair I was in. But already, after my first impulse of rage, the tears were coming to my eyes. As at Balbec, on the night that followed her revelation of her friendship with the Vinteuil pair, I must immediately invent a plausible reason for my grief, and one that was at the same time capable of having so profound an effect on Albertine as to give me a few days’ respite before coming to a decision. And so, just as she was telling me that she had never felt so affronted as when she had heard that I had gone out alone, that she would sooner have died than be told this by Françoise, and just as, irritated by her absurd susceptibility, I was on the point of telling her that what I had done was trivial, that there was nothing wounding to her in my having gone out, my unconscious parallel search for what she had meant to say had come to fruition, and the despair into which my discovery plunged me could not be completely hidden, so that instead of defending, I accused myself. “My little Albertine,” I said to her in a gentle voice which was drowned in my first tears, “I could tell you that you’re mistaken, that what I did this evening was nothing, but I should be lying; it’s you who are right, you have realised the truth, my poor sweet, which is that six months ago, three months ago, when I was still so fond of you, I should never have done such a
thing. It’s a mere nothing, and yet it’s enormous, because of the immense change in my heart of which it is the sign. And since you have detected this change which I hoped to conceal from you, I feel impelled to say this to you: My little Albertine” (I went on in a tone of profound gentleness and sorrow), “don’t you see that the life you’re leading here is boring for you. It is better that we should part, and as the best partings are those that are effected most swiftly, I ask you, to cut short the great sorrow that I am bound to feel, to say good-bye to me tonight and to leave in the morning without my seeing you again, while I’m asleep.”

She appeared stunned, incredulous and desolate: “Tomorrow? You really mean it?”

And in spite of the anguish that I felt in speaking of our parting as though it were already in the past—partly perhaps because of that very anguish—I began to give Albertine the most precise instructions as to certain things which she would have to do after she left the house. And passing from one request to another, I soon found myself entering into the minutest details.

“Be so kind,” I said with infinite sadness, “as to send me back that book of Bergotte’s which is at your aunt’s. There’s no hurry about it, in three days, in a week, whenever you like, but remember that I don’t want to have to write and ask you for it: that would be too painful. We have been happy together, but now we feel that we should be unhappy.”

“Don’t say that we feel that we’d be unhappy,” Albertine interrupted me, “don’t say ‘we,’ it’s only you who feel that.”

“Yes, very well, you or I, as you like, for one reason or another. But it’s absurdly late, you must go to bed—we’ve decided to part tonight.”

“Excuse me,
you’ve
decided, and I obey you because I don’t want to upset you.”

“Very well, it’s I who have decided, but that doesn’t make it any less painful for me. I don’t say that it will be painful for long, you know that I’m not capable of remembering things for long, but for the first few days I shall be so miserable without you. And so I feel that it’s no use stirring up the memory with letters, we must end everything at once.”

“Yes, you’re right,” she said to me with a crushed air, which was enhanced by the signs of fatigue on her features due to the lateness of the hour, “rather than have one finger chopped off and then another, I prefer to lay my head on the block at once.”

“Heavens, I’m appalled when I think how late I’m keeping you out of bed, it’s madness. However, it’s the last night! You’ll have plenty of time to sleep for the rest of your life.”

And thus while telling her that it was time to say good-night I sought to postpone the moment when she would have said it: “Would you like me, in order to take your mind off things during the first few days, to ask Bloch to send his cousin Esther to the place where you’ll be staying? He’ll do that for me.”

“I don’t know why you say that” (I had said it in an attempt to wrest a confession from Albertine), “there’s only one person I care about, and that’s you,” Albertine said to me, and her words were infinitely sweet to me. But, the next moment, what a blow she dealt me! “I remember,
of course, that I did give this Esther my photograph because she kept on asking me for it and I saw that it would give her pleasure, but as for having any great liking for her or wanting to see her again, never!” And yet Albertine was of so frivolous a nature that she went on: “If she wants to see me, it’s all the same to me. She’s very nice, but I don’t care in the least either way.”

Thus, when I had spoken to her of the photograph of Esther which Bloch had sent me (and which I had not even received when I mentioned it to her) Albertine had gathered that Bloch had shown me a photograph of herself which she had given to Esther. In my worst suppositions, I had never imagined that any such intimacy could have existed between Albertine and Esther. Albertine had been at a loss for words when I mentioned the photograph. And now, wrongly, supposing me to be in the know, she thought it advisable to confess. I was shattered.

“And, Albertine, let me ask you to do me one more favour: never attempt to see me again. If at any time, as may happen in a year, in two years, in three years, we should find ourselves in the same town, avoid me.” And seeing that she did not answer my request in the affirmative, I went on: “My Albertine, don’t do it, don’t ever see me again in this life. It would hurt me too much. For I was really fond of you, you know. Of course, when I told you the other day that I wanted to see the friend I mentioned to you at Balbec again, you thought it was all settled. Not at all, I assure you, it was quite immaterial to me. You’re convinced that I had long made up my mind to leave you, that my affection was all make-believe.”

“Not at all, you’re crazy, I never thought so,” she said sadly.

“You’re right, you must never think so, I did genuinely feel for you, not love perhaps, but a great, a very great affection, more than you can imagine.”

“Of course I can imagine. And do you suppose that I don’t love you!”

“It hurts me terribly to have to leave you.”

“It hurts me a thousand times more,” replied Albertine.

Already for some little time I had felt that I could no longer hold back the tears that came welling up in my eyes. And these tears did not spring from at all the same sort of misery which I had felt long ago when I said to Gilberte: “It is better that we should not see one another again; life is dividing us.” No doubt when I wrote this to Gilberte, I said to myself that when I was in love not with her but with another, the excess of my love would diminish that which I might perhaps have been able to inspire, as though two people must inevitably have only a certain quantity of love at their disposal, of which the surplus taken by one is subtracted from the other, and that from her too, as from Gilberte, I should be doomed to part. But the situation was entirely different for several reasons, the first of which (and it had, in its turn, given rise to the others) was that the lack of will-power which my grandmother and my mother had observed in me with alarm, at Combray, and before which each of them, so great is the energy with which an invalid imposes his weakness upon others, had capitulated in turn, this lack of will-power had gone on increasing at an ever accelerated pace. When I felt that my presence bored Gilberte, I had still enough strength left to give her up; I had no longer the same strength when I had made a similar discovery with regard
to Albertine, and could think only of keeping her by force. With the result that, whereas I wrote to Gilberte saying that I would not see her again and really meant it, I said this to Albertine quite untruthfully and in the hope of bringing about a reconciliation. Thus we presented each to the other an appearance which was very different from the reality. And no doubt it is always so when two people are face to face, since each of them is ignorant of a part of what exists in the other (even what he knows, he can understand only in part) and both of them reveal what is least personal to them, either because they have themselves not properly untangled and regard as negligible what is most personal or because insignificant advantages which do not belong to them particularly seem more important and more flattering to themselves, and at the same time they pretend not to care about certain things they admire, in order not to be despised for not having them, and these are precisely the things that they appear to scorn above all else and even to abhor. But in love this misunderstanding is carried to its supreme pitch because, except perhaps in childhood, we try to see to it that the appearance we assume, instead of reflecting exactly what is in our thoughts, is what is best calculated to enable us to obtain what we desire, and this, in my case, since I had come in, was to be able to keep Albertine as docile as she had been in the past, and to ensure that she did not in her irritation ask me for greater freedom, which I wanted to grant her some day but which at this moment, when I was afraid of her hankerings after independence, would have made me too jealous. After a certain age, from self-esteem and from sagacity, it is to the things we most desire that we pretend to attach no importance. But in love,
mere sagacity—which in any case is probably not true wisdom—drives us all too quickly to this kind of duplicity. What I had dreamed of, as a child, as being the sweetest thing in love, what had seemed to me to be the very essence of love, was to pour out freely, to the one I loved, my tenderness, my gratitude for her kindness, my longing for an everlasting life together. But I had become only too well aware, from my own experience and from that of my friends, that the expression of such sentiments is far from being contagious. The case of an affected old woman like M. de Charlus who, as a result of seeing in his mind’s eye only a handsome young man, thinks he himself has become a handsome young man, and betrays more and more effeminacy in his risible affectations of virility—such a case falls under a law which applies far more widely than to the Charluses alone, a law so generalised that not even love itself exhausts it entirely; we do not see our bodies, though others do, and we “follow” our thoughts, the object that is in front of us, invisible to others (made visible at times in a work of art, whence the frequent disillusionment of its admirers when they are admitted into the presence of the artist, whose inner beauty is so imperfectly reflected in his face). Once one has noticed this, one no longer “lets oneself go;” I had taken good care that afternoon not to tell Albertine how grateful I was to her that she had not remained at the Trocadéro. And tonight, having been afraid that she might leave me, I had feigned a desire to leave her, a pretence which moreover, as we shall see presently, had not been dictated solely by the experience I believed myself to have gained from my former loves and was seeking to turn to the profit of this one.