The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (374 page)

To be sure, the physical blow which such a parting administers to the heart, and which, because of that terrible capacity for registering things with which the body is endowed, makes the pain somehow contemporaneous with all the epochs in our life in which we have suffered—to be sure, this blow to the heart which—so little compunction do we feel for the sufferings of others—she who wishes to give the maximum intensity to the regret she causes, whether because, her departure being only a sham, she merely wants to demand better terms, or because, leaving us for ever—for ever!—she desires to wound us, or in order to avenge herself, or to continue to be loved, or (with an eye to the quality of the memory that she will leave behind her) to destroy the web of lassitude and indifference which she has felt being woven about her—to be sure, this blow to the heart is something we had vowed that we would avoid, assuring ourselves that we would part on good terms. But it is seldom indeed that one does part on good terms, because if one were on good terms one would not part. And then the woman to whom we show the utmost indifference nevertheless obscurely feels that in growing tired of her, by virtue of an identical force of habit, we have grown more and more attached to her, and she reflects that one of the essential elements in parting on good terms is to warn the other person before one goes. But she is afraid, by warning, of preventing. Every woman feels that the greater her power over a man, the
more impossible it is to leave him except by sudden flight: a fugitive precisely because a queen. True, there is an extraordinary discrepancy between the boredom which she inspired a moment ago and, because she has gone, this furious desire to have her back again. But for this—over and above those which have been given in the course of this work and others which will be given later on—there are reasons. For one thing, her departure occurs as often as not at the moment when her companion’s indifference—real or imagined—is greatest, at the extreme point of the swing of the pendulum. The woman says to herself: “No, this can’t go on any longer,” precisely because the man speaks of nothing but leaving her, or thinks of nothing else; and it is she who leaves him. Then, the pendulum swinging back to the other extreme, the distance is all the greater. In an instant it returns to this point; once more, apart from all the reasons that have been given, it is so natural! The heart still beats; and besides, the woman who has gone is no longer the same as the woman who was with us. Her life under our roof, all too well known, is suddenly enlarged by the addition of the lives with which she is inevitably to be associated, and it is perhaps to associate herself with them that she has left us. So that this new richness of the life of the woman who has gone retroacts upon the woman who was with us and was perhaps premeditating her departure. To the sequence of psychological facts which we are able to deduce and which form part of her life with us, our too evident boredom in her company, our jealousy too (and the effect of which is that men who have been left by a number of women have been left almost always in the same way because of their character and of certain always identical reactions
which can be calculated: everyone has his own way of being betrayed, as he has his own way of catching cold), to this sequence that is not too mysterious for us there doubtless corresponded a sequence of facts of which we were unaware. She must for some time past have been keeping up relations, written, or verbal, or through messengers, with some man, or some woman, have been awaiting some signal which we may perhaps have given her unwittingly ourselves when we said: “X called yesterday to see me,” if she had arranged with X that on the eve of the day when she was to join him he was to call on me. How many possible hypotheses! Possible only. I constructed the truth so well, but in the realm of possibility only, that, having one day opened by mistake a letter addressed to one of my mistresses, a letter written in a prearranged code which said: “Still awaiting signal to go to the Marquis de Saint-Loup’s; please inform tomorrow by telephone,” I reconstructed a sort of projected flight; the name of the Marquis de Saint-Loup was there only as a substitute for some other name, for my mistress did not know Saint-Loup, but had heard me speak of him, and moreover the signature was some sort of nickname, without any intelligible form. As it happened, the letter was addressed not to my mistress but to another person in the building who bore a different name which had been misread. The letter was written not in a code but in bad French because it was from an American woman, who was indeed a friend of Saint-Loup, as he himself told me. And the odd way in which this American woman formed certain letters had given the appearance of a nickname to a name which was quite genuine, only foreign. And so I had on that occasion been utterly mistaken in my suspicions.
But the intellectual structure which had linked these facts, all of them false, together in my mind was itself so strict and accurate a model of the truth that when, three months later, my mistress (who had at that time been meaning to spend the rest of her life with me) left me, it was in a fashion absolutely identical with that which I had imagined on the former occasion. A letter arrived, containing the same peculiarities which I had wrongly attributed to the former letter, but this time it was indeed meant as a signal.

The present calamity was the worst that I had experienced in my life. And yet the suffering that it caused me was perhaps even exceeded by my curiosity to learn the causes of this calamity: who Albertine had desired and gone to join. But the sources of great events are like those of rivers; in vain do we explore the earth’s surface, we can never find them. Had Albertine been planning her flight for a long time past? I have not mentioned the fact (because at the time it had seemed to me simply affectation and ill-humour, what in the case of Françoise we called “a fit of the sulks”) that, from the day when she had ceased to kiss me, she had gone about as though tormented by a devil, stiffly erect, unbending, saying the simplest things in a mournful voice, slow in her movements, never smiling. I cannot say that there was any concrete proof of conspiracy with the outer world. True, Françoise told me later that, having gone into Albertine’s room two days before her departure, she had found it empty, with the curtains drawn, but had sensed from the atmosphere of the room and from the noise that the window was open. And indeed she had found Albertine on the balcony. But it is difficult to see with whom she could have been communicating
from there, and moreover the drawn curtains screening the open window could doubtless be explained by the fact that she knew I was afraid of draughts, and that even if the curtains afforded me little protection they would prevent Françoise from seeing from the passage that the shutters had been opened so early. No, I can see nothing apart from one trifling fact which proves merely that on the day before her departure she knew that she was going. For during that day she took from my room without my noticing it a large quantity of wrapping paper and packing cloth which was kept there, and in which she spent the whole night packing her innumerable negligees and dressing-gowns so that she might leave the house in the morning. This is the only fact; that was all. I cannot attach any importance to her having repaid that evening, practically by force, a thousand francs which she owed me; there is nothing extraordinary in that, for she was extremely scrupulous about money.

Yes, she took the wrapping paper the night before, but it was not only then that she knew that she was going to leave me! For it was not resentment that made her leave but the decision, already taken, to leave me, to abandon the life of which she had dreamed, that gave her that air of resentment. A resentful air, almost solemnly cold towards myself, except on the last evening when, after staying in my room longer than she had intended, she said—a remark which surprised me, coming from her who had always sought to postpone the moment of parting—she said to me from the door: “Good-bye, little one, good-bye.” But I did not take any notice of this at the time. Françoise told me that next morning when Albertine informed her that she was going (but this may be explained
also by exhaustion, for she had not undressed and had spent the whole night packing everything except the things she had to ask Françoise for, as they were not in her bedroom or her dressing-room), she was still so sad, so much more erect, so much stiffer than during the previous days that Françoise thought, when Albertine said to her: “Good-bye, Françoise,” that she was about to fall. When one is told a thing like that one realises that the woman who appealed to us so much less than any of the women whom one meets so easily in the course of the briefest outing, the woman who makes us resent having to sacrifice them to her, is on the contrary the one we would a thousand times prefer. For the choice lies no longer between a certain pleasure—which has become by force of habit, and perhaps by the mediocrity of its object, almost null and void—and other pleasures which tempt and thrill us, but between these latter pleasures and something that is far stronger than they, compassion for suffering.

When I vowed to myself that Albertine would be back in the house before night, I had proceeded as quickly as possible to cover with a fresh belief the open wound from which I had torn the belief I had lived with until then. But swiftly though my instinct of self-preservation had acted, I had, when Françoise spoke to me, been left helpless for an instant, and for all that I now knew that Albertine would be back that same evening, the pain I had felt during the instant in which I had not yet assured myself of her return (the instant that had followed the words: “Mademoiselle Albertine has asked for her boxes; Mademoiselle Albertine has gone”), this pain reawoke in me of its own accord, as sharp as it had been before, that is to say as if I had still been unaware of Albertine’s imminent
return. However, it was essential that she should return, but of her own accord. On any assumption, to appear to be taking the first step, to be begging her to return, would be to defeat my own object. True, I lacked the strength to give her up as I had given up Gilberte. Even more than to see Albertine again, what I wanted was to put an end to the physical anguish which my heart, less robust than of old, could endure no longer. Then, by dint of accustoming myself not to use my will-power, whether it was a question of work or of anything else, I had become more cowardly. But above all, this anguish was incomparably more intense for a number of reasons of which the most important was perhaps not that I had never tasted any sensual pleasure with Mme de Guermantes or with Gilberte, but that, not seeing them every day, and at every hour of the day, having no opportunity and consequently no need to see them, there had been lacking, in my love for them, the immense force of Habit. Perhaps, now that my heart, incapable of willing and of voluntarily enduring suffering, could think of only one possible solution, that Albertine should return at all costs, perhaps the opposite solution (a deliberate renunciation, a gradual resignation) would have seemed to me a novelist’s solution, improbable in real life, had I not myself opted for it in the case of Gilberte. I knew therefore that this other solution might be accepted also, and by one and the same man, for I had remained more or less the same. But time had played its part, time which had aged me, time which moreover had kept Albertine perpetually in my company while we were living together. But at least, without giving her up, what survived in me of all that I had felt for Gilberte was the pride which made me
refuse to be to Albertine a despicable plaything by begging her to return; I wanted her to come back without my appearing to care whether she did or not. I got up, in order to lose no more time, but my anguish made me pause; this was the first time that I had got out of bed since Albertine had left me. Yet I must dress at once in order to go and make inquiries of Albertine’s concierge.

Suffering, the prolongation of a spiritual shock that has come from without, keeps aspiring to change its form; one hopes to be able to dispel it by making plans, by seeking information; one wants it to pass through its countless metamorphoses, for this requires less courage than keeping our suffering intact; the bed on which we lie down with our grief appears so narrow, hard and cold. I therefore put my feet to the ground, and I stepped across the room with infinite care, placing myself in such a way as not to see Albertine’s chair, the pianola on the pedals of which she used to press her golden slippers, or a single one of the things which she had used and all of which, in the secret language that my memories had taught them, seemed to be seeking to give me a translation, a different version, for a second time to tell me, of her departure. But even without looking at them I could see them: my strength left me; I sank down on one of those blue satin armchairs, the glossy surface of which an hour earlier, in the dimness of my bedroom anaesthetised by a ray of morning light, had made me dream dreams which then I had passionately caressed but which were infinitely remote from me now. Alas, I had never sat in one of them until this minute except when Albertine was still with me. And so I could not remain sitting there, and stood up again; and thus, at every moment, there was one more of those
innumerable and humble “selves” that compose our personality which was still unaware of Albertine’s departure and must be informed of it; I was obliged—and this was more cruel than if they had been strangers and did not share my susceptibility to suffering—to announce to all these beings, to all these “selves” who did not yet know of it, the calamity that had just occurred; each of them in turn must hear for the first time the words: “Albertine has asked for her boxes”—those coffin-shaped boxes which I had seen loaded on to the train at Balbec with my mother’s—“Albertine has gone.” Each of them had to be told of my grief, the grief which is in no way a pessimistic conclusion freely drawn from an accumulation of baneful circumstances, but is the intermittent and involuntary reviviscence of a specific impression that has come to us from without and was not chosen by us. There were some of these “selves” which I had not encountered for a long time past. For instance (I had not remembered that it was the day on which the barber called) the “self” that I was when I was having my hair cut. I had forgotten this “self,” and his arrival made me burst into tears, as, at a funeral, does the appearance of an old retired servant who has not forgotten the deceased. Then all of a sudden I remembered that, during the past week, I had from time to time been seized by panic fears which I had not confessed to myself. At those moments, however, I had debated the question, saying to myself: “No need, of course, to consider the hypothesis of her suddenly leaving me. It’s absurd. If I were to confide it to a sensible, intelligent man” (and I would have done so to set my mind at rest, had not jealousy prevented me from confiding in anyone) “he would be sure to say to me: ‘Why, you’re mad. It’s impossible.’
(And, as a matter of fact, during these last days we had not quarrelled once.) People leave you for a reason. They tell you the reason. They give you a chance to reply. They don’t run away like that. No, it’s perfectly childish. It’s the only really absurd hypothesis.” And yet, every day, on finding her still there in the morning when I rang my bell, I had heaved an immense sigh of relief. And when Françoise handed me Albertine’s letter, I had at once been certain that it referred to the one thing that could not happen, to this departure which I had somehow perceived several days in advance, in spite of the logical reasons for feeling reassured. I had told myself this, almost with self-satisfaction at my perspicacity in my despair, like a murderer who knows that he cannot be found out but is nevertheless afraid and all of a sudden sees his victim’s name written at the top of a document on the table of the examining magistrate who has sent for him.