The Modern Library In Search of Lost Time, Complete and Unabridged : 6-Book Bundle (377 page)

At the Sûreté, I found the girl’s parents, who insulted me and with the words “We’d rather starve” handed me back the five hundred francs which I did not want to take, and the head of the Sûreté who, setting himself the inimitable example of the judicial facility in repartee, seized upon a word in each sentence that I uttered for the purpose of concocting a witty and crushing retort. My innocence of the alleged crime was never taken into consideration, for that was the sole hypothesis which nobody was willing to accept for an instant. Nevertheless the difficulty of proving the charge enabled me to escape with this castigation, which was extremely violent for as long as the parents were in the room. But as soon as they had gone, the head of the Sûreté, who had a weakness for little girls, changed his tone and admonished me as man to man: “Next time, you must be more careful. Good God, you can’t pick them up as easily as that, or you’ll get into trouble. Anyhow, you’ll find dozens of little girls who are
better-looking than that one, and far cheaper. It was a perfectly ridiculous amount to pay.” I was so certain that he would fail to understand me if I attempted to tell him the truth that without saying a word I took advantage of his permission to withdraw. Every passer-by, until I was safely at home, seemed to me an inspector appointed to spy on my every movement. But this leitmotif, like that of my anger with Bloch, died away, leaving the field clear for that of Albertine’s departure.

The latter resumed on an almost joyous note now that Saint-Loup had set out. Since he had undertaken to go and see Mme Bontemps, my sufferings had been dispelled. I believed that this was because I had acted, and I believed it sincerely, for we never know what is concealed in our hearts of hearts. But what really made me happy was not, as I supposed, that I had unburdened my indecisions on to Saint-Loup. I was not in fact entirely mistaken; the specific for curing an unfortunate event (and three events out of four are unfortunate) is a decision; for it has the effect, by a sudden reversal of our thoughts, of interrupting the flow of those that come from the past event and prolong its vibration, and breaking it with a counter-flow of thoughts from the outside, from the future. But these new thoughts are most of all beneficial to us (and this was the case with the thoughts that assailed me at this moment) when from the depths of that future it is a hope that they bring us. What really made me so happy was the secret certainty that Saint-Loup’s mission could not fail and that Albertine was bound to return. I realised this; for not having received any word from Saint-Loup on the following day, I began to suffer anew. My decision, my transference to him of plenipotentiary powers,
was not, therefore, the cause of my joy, which in that case would have persisted; its cause was rather the “Success is certain” which had been in my mind when I said “Come what may.” And the thought, aroused by his delay, that after all his mission might not prove successful, was so hateful to me that all my gaiety evaporated. It is in reality our anticipation, our hope of happy events that fills us with a joy which we ascribe to other causes and which ceases, plunging us once more into misery, if we are no longer so certain that what we desire will come to pass. It is always an invisible belief that sustains the edifice of our sensory world and deprived of which it totters. We have seen that it created for us the merit or the nullity of other people, our excitement or boredom at seeing them. It similarly creates the possibility of enduring a grief which seems to us trivial simply because we are convinced that it will presently be brought to an end, or its sudden intensification to the point where a person’s presence matters to us as much as, sometimes even more than, life itself.

One thing finally succeeded in making my heartache as acute as it had been in the first instant and (I am bound to admit) no longer was. This was when I re-read a sentence in Albertine’s letter. However much we love people, the pain of losing them—when in our isolation we are confronted with it alone, to which our mind to a certain extent gives whatever form it chooses—is endurable and different from that other pain, less human, less our own—as unforeseen and unusual as an accident in the moral world and in the region of the heart—which is caused not so much by the people themselves as by the manner in which we have learned that we will never see them again. I could think of Albertine while weeping gently
and accepting the fact that I should not be seeing her tonight any more than I had yesterday; but to re-read “my decision is irrevocable” was another matter; it was like taking a dangerous drug which had given me a heart attack from which I might never recover. There is in inanimate objects, in events, in farewell letters, a special danger which amplifies and alters the very nature of the grief that people are capable of causing us. But this pain did not last long. I was, when all was said, so sure of Saint-Loup’s skill, of his eventual success, Albertine’s return seemed to me so certain, that I wondered whether I had been right to wish for it. Nevertheless, I rejoiced at the thought. Unfortunately, although I had assumed that the business with the Sûreté was over and done with, Françoise came in to tell me that an inspector had called to inquire whether I was in the habit of having girls in the house, that the concierge, supposing him to be referring to Albertine, had replied in the affirmative, and that since then it seemed as though the house was being watched. Henceforth it would be impossible for me ever to bring a little girl into the house to console me in my grief, without risking the shame of an inspector suddenly appearing and of her taking me for a criminal. And in the same instant I realised how much more important certain longings are to us than we suppose, for this impossibility of my ever taking a little girl on my knee again seemed to me to strip life of all its value but what was more, I realised how understandable it is that people will readily refuse wealth and risk death, whereas we imagine that pecuniary interest and the fear of dying rule the world. For, rather than think that even an unknown little girl might be given a bad impression of me by the arrival of a policeman,
I should have preferred to kill myself! Indeed there was no possible comparison between the two degrees of suffering. Yet in everyday life people never bear in mind that those to whom they offer money, or whom they threaten to kill, may have mistresses, or merely friends, whose respect they value even if they do not value their own. But all of a sudden, by a confusion of which I was not aware (for it did not occur to me that Albertine, being of age, was free to live under my roof and even to be my mistress), it seemed to me that the charge of corrupting minors might apply to Albertine also. Thereupon my life appeared to me to be hedged in on every side. And reflecting that I had not lived chastely with her, I saw, in the punishment that had been inflicted upon me for having dandled an unknown little girl on my knee, that relation which almost always exists in human sanctions, whereby there is hardly ever either a just sentence or a judicial error, but a sort of compromise between the false idea that the judge forms of an innocent act and the culpable deeds of which he is unaware. But then when I thought that Albertine’s return might involve me in an ignominious charge which would degrade me in her eyes and might perhaps even do her some damage for which she would not forgive me, I ceased to look forward to her return, it terrified me. I wanted to cable her to tell her not to come back. And immediately, a passionate desire for her return overwhelmed me, drowning everything else. The fact was that, having envisaged for a moment the possibility of telling her not to return and of living without her, all of a sudden I felt on the contrary ready to abandon all travel, all pleasure, all work, if only Albertine would return!

Ah, how my love for Albertine, the course of which I had imagined that I could foretell on the basis of my love for Gilberte, had developed differently from the latter, indeed in perfect contrast with it! How impossible it was for me to live without seeing her! And with each of my actions, even the most trivial, since they had all been steeped beforehand in the blissful atmosphere which was Albertine’s presence, I was obliged time after time, at renewed cost, with the same pain, to relive the first experience of separation. Then the competition of other forms of life thrust this new pain into the background, and during those days which were the first days of spring, as I waited until Saint-Loup had managed to see Mme Bontemps, I even enjoyed a few moments of agreeable calm in imagining Venice and beautiful, unknown women. As soon as I was conscious of this, I felt within me a panic terror. This calm which I had just enjoyed was the first apparition of that great intermittent force which was to wage war in me against grief, against love, and would ultimately get the better of them. This state of which I had just had a foretaste and had received the warning was for a moment only what would in time to come be my permanent state, a life in which I should no longer be able to suffer on account of Albertine, in which I should no longer love her. And my love, which had just seen and recognised the one enemy by whom it could be conquered, forgetfulness, began to tremble, like a lion which in the cage in which it has been confined has suddenly caught sight of the python that will devour it.

I thought of Albertine all the time, and Françoise, when she came into my room, never said to me “There are no letters” quickly enough to curtail my anguish.
From time to time I succeeded, by letting some current or other of ideas flow through my grief, in freshening, in airing to some slight extent the vitiated atmosphere of my heart; but at night, if I succeeded in going to sleep, then it was as though the memory of Albertine had been the drug that had procured my sleep and the cessation of whose influence would awaken me. I thought all the time of Albertine while I was asleep. It was a special sleep of her own that she gave me, and one in which, moreover, I was no longer at liberty, as when awake, to think of other things. Sleep and the memory of her were like two substances which one must mix together and take at one draught in order to sleep. When I was awake, meanwhile, my suffering went on increasing day by day instead of diminishing. Not that oblivion was not performing its task, but by that very fact it encouraged the idealisation of the lamented image and thereby the assimilation of my initial suffering to other analogous sufferings which intensified it. At least that image was endurable. But if all of a sudden I thought of her room, of her room in which the bed stood empty, of her piano, of her motor-car, all my strength left me, I shut my eyes and let my head droop on my shoulder like someone who is about to faint. The sound of doors being opened hurt me almost as much because it was not she that was opening them. When it was possible that a telegram might have come from Saint-Loup, I dared not ask: “Is there a telegram?” At length one did come, but brought with it only a postponement, with the message: “The ladies have gone away for three days.”

No doubt, if I had endured the four days that had already elapsed since her departure, it was because I said to
myself: “It’s only a matter of time. By the end of the week she will be here.” But this consideration did not alter the fact that for my heart, for my body, the action to be performed was the same: living without her, returning home and not finding her in the house, passing the door of her room (as for opening it, I did not yet have the courage to do that) knowing that she was not inside, going to bed without having said good-night to her—such were the tasks that my heart had been obliged to perform in their terrible entirety, and for all the world as though I was not going to see Albertine again. But the fact that my heart had already performed this daily task four times proved that it was now capable of continuing to perform it. And soon, perhaps, the consideration that was helping me thus to go on living—the prospect of Albertine’s return—would cease to be necessary to me; I should be able to say to myself: “She will never come back,” and go on living all the same as I had already done for the last four days, like a cripple who has recovered the use of his legs and can dispense with his crutches. No doubt when I came home at night I still found, taking my breath away, suffocating me in the vacuum of solitude, the memories, placed end to end in an interminable series, of all the evenings on which Albertine had been waiting for me; but already I also found the memory of last night, of the night before and of the two previous nights, that is to say the memory of the four nights that had passed since Albertine’s departure, during which I had remained without her, alone, through which none the less I had lived, four nights already forming a strip of memories which was very slender compared with the other, but which would be filled out, perhaps, by every day that went by.

I shall say nothing of the letter conveying a declaration of affection which I received at this time from a niece of Mme de Guermantes who was considered to be the prettiest girl in Paris, or of the overtures made to me by the Duc de Guermantes on behalf of her parents, resigned, in their anxiety to secure their daughter’s happiness, to the inequality of the match, to an apparent misalliance. Such incidents which might prove gratifying to one’s self-esteem are too painful when one is in love. One might have the desire but not the indelicacy to communicate them to her who has a less flattering opinion of one, an opinion which moreover would not be modified by the knowledge that one is capable of inspiring a quite different one. What the Duke’s niece wrote to me could only have irritated Albertine.

From the moment of waking, when I picked up my grief again at the point where I had left it before going to sleep, like a book which had been shut for a while but which I would keep before my eyes until night, it was invariably to some thought concerning Albertine that I related every sensation, whether it came to me from without or from within. The bell would ring: it must be a letter from her, or she herself perhaps! If I felt well and not too miserable, I was no longer jealous, I no longer had any grievance against her, I wanted to see her at once, to kiss her, to live happily with her ever after. The act of telegraphing to her “Come at once” seemed to me to have become a perfectly simple thing, as though my new mood had changed not merely my attitude, but things external to myself, had made them easier. If I was in a sombre mood, all my anger with her revived, I no longer felt any desire to kiss her, I felt how impossible it was that she
could ever make me happy, I sought only to harm her and to prevent her from belonging to other people. But the outcome of these two opposite moods was identical: it was essential that she should return as soon as possible. And yet, whatever joy I might feel at the moment of her return, I sensed that very soon the same difficulties would recur and that to seek happiness in the satisfaction of a desire of the mind was as naive as to attempt to reach the horizon by walking straight ahead. The further the desire advances, the further does real possession recede. So that if happiness, or at least the absence of suffering, can be found, it is not the satisfaction, but the gradual reduction and the eventual extinction of desire that one should seek. One seeks to see the beloved object, but one ought to seek not to: forgetfulness alone brings about the ultimate extinction of desire. And I imagine that if an author were to publish truths of this sort he would dedicate the book that contained them to a woman with whom he would thus take pleasure in striking up a relationship, saying to her: “This book is yours.” And thus, while telling the truth in his book, he would be lying in his dedication, for he will attach to the book’s being hers only the importance that he attaches to the stone which came to him from her and which will remain precious to him only so long as he is in love with her. The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying. And I
should have been so afraid of being robbed (had anyone been capable of so robbing me) of this need of her, this love for her, that I convinced myself that it was a precious necessity in my life. To be able to hear, without being charmed and pained by them, the names of the stations through which the train passed on its way to Touraine would have seemed to me a diminution of myself (for no other reason really than that it would have proved that I was becoming indifferent to Albertine). It was right, I told myself, that by incessantly asking myself what she could be doing, thinking, wishing, at every moment, whether she intended, whether she was going to return, I should keep open that communicating door which love had opened up in me, and feel another person’s life flooding through open sluices to fill the reservoir which must not again become stagnant.