You have shewn us that the religious sentiment in which your choruses

are steeped is no less capable of moving us. The general public may have

been puzzled at first, but those who are best qualified to judge must

give you your due. I have felt myself impelled to offer you all my

congratulations, to which I would add, my dear brother poet, an

expression of my very highest esteem." Albertine's eyes, while she was

reading this to us, had not ceased to sparkle. "Really, you'ld think she

must have cribbed it somewhere!" she exclaimed, as she reached the end.

"I should never have believed that Gisèle could hatch out anything like

as good! And the poetry she brings in! Where on earth can she have got

that from?" Albertine's admiration, with a change, it is true, of

object, but with no loss—an increase, rather—of intensity, combined with

the closest attention to what was being said, continued to make her eyes

"start from her head" all the time that Andrée (consulted as being the

biggest of the band and more knowledgeable than the others) first of all

spoke of Gisèle's essay with a certain irony, then with a levity of

tone which failed to conceal her underlying seriousness proceeded to

reconstruct the letter in her own way. "It is not badly done," she told

Albertine, "but if I were you and had the same subject set me, which is

quite likely, as they do very often set that, I shouldn't do it in that

way. This is how I would tackle it. Well, first of all, if I had been

Gisèle, I should not have let myself get tied up, I should have begun

by making a rough sketch of what I was going to write on a separate

piece of paper. On the top line I should state the question and give an

account of the subject, then the general ideas to be worked into the

development. After that, appreciation, style, conclusion. In that way,

with a summary to refer to, you know where you are. But at the very

start, where she begins her account of the subject, or, if you like,

Titine, since it's a letter we're speaking of, where she comes to the

matter, Gisèle has gone off the rails altogether. Writing to a person

of the seventeenth century, Sophocles ought never to have said, 'My dear

friend,'" "Why, of course, she ought to have said, 'My dear Racine,'"

came impetuously from Albertine. "That would have been much better."

"No," replied Andrée, with a trace of mockery in her tone, "She ought

to have put 'Sir.' In the same way, to end up, she ought to have thought

of something like, 'Suffer me, Sir,' (at the very most, 'Dear Sir') to

inform you of the sense of high esteem with which I have the honour to

be your servant.' Then again, Gisèle says that the choruses in

_Athalie_ are a novelty. She is forgetting _Esther_, and two tragedies

that are not much read now but happen to have been analysed this year by

the Professor himself, so that you need only mention them, since he's

got them on the brain, and you're bound to pass. I mean _Les Juives_, by

Robert Garnier, and Montchrestien's _L'Aman._" Andrée quoted these

titles without managing quite to conceal a secret sense of benevolent

superiority, which found expression in a smile, quite a delightful

smile, for that matter. Albertine could contain herself no longer.

"Andrée, you really are a perfect marvel," she cried. "You must write

down those names for me. Just fancy, what luck it would be if I got on

to that, even in the oral, I should bring them in at once and make a

colossal impression." But in the days that followed, every time that

Albertine begged Andrée just to tell her again the names of those two

plays so that she might write them down, her blue-stocking friend seemed

most unfortunately to have forgotten them, and left her none the wiser.

"And another thing," Andrée went on with the faintest note in her voice

of scorn for companions so much younger than herself, though she

relished their admiration and attached to the manner in which she

herself would have composed the essay a greater importance than she

wanted us to think, "Sophocles in the Shades must be kept well-informed

of all that goes on. He must know, therefore, that it was not before the

general public but before the King's Majesty and a few privileged

courtiers that _Athalie_ was first played. What Gisèle says in this

connexion of the esteem of qualified judges is not at all bad, but she

might have gone a little farther. Sophocles, now that he is immortal,

might quite well have the gift of prophecy and announce that, according

to Voltaire, _Athalie_ is to be the supreme achievement not of Racine

merely but of the human mind." Albertine was drinking in every word. Her

eyes blazed. And it was with the utmost indignation that she rejected

Rosemonde's suggestion that they should begin to play. "And so," Andrée

concluded, in the same easy, detached tone, blending a faint sneer with

a certain warmth of conviction, "if Gisèle had noted down properly,

first of all, the general ideas that she was going to develop, it might

perhaps have occurred to her to do what I myself should have done, point

out what a difference there is between the religious inspiration of

Sophocles's choruses and Racine's. I should have made Sophocles remark

that if Racine's choruses are instinct with religious feeling like those

of the Greek Tragedians, the gods are not the same. The God of Joad has

nothing in common with the god of Sophocles. And that brings us quite

naturally, when we have finished developing the subject, to our

conclusion: What does it matter if their beliefs are different?

Sophocles would hesitate to insist upon such a point. He would be afraid

of wounding Racine's convictions, and so, slipping in a few appropriate

words on his masters at Port-Royal, he prefers to congratulate his

disciple on the loftiness of his poetic genius."

Admiration and attention had so heated Albertine that great drops were

rolling down her cheeks. Andrée preserved the unruffled calm of a

female dandy. "It would not be a bad thing either to quote some of the

opinions of famous critics," she added, before they began their game.

"Yes," put in Albertine, "so I've been told. The best ones to quote, on

the whole, are Sainte-Beuve and Merlet, aren't they?" "Well, you're not

absolutely wrong," Andrée told her, "Merlet and Sainte-Beuve are by no

means bad. But you certainly ought to mention Deltour and

Gascq-Desfossés." She refused, however, despite Albertine's entreaties,

to write down these two unfamiliar names.

Meanwhile I had been thinking of the little page torn from a scribbling

block which Albertine had handed me. "I love you," she had written. And

an hour later, as I scrambled down the paths which led back, a little

too vertically for my liking, to Balbec, I said to myself that it was

with her that I would have my romance.

The state of being indicated by the presence of all the signs by which

we are accustomed to recognise that we are in love, such as the orders

which I left in the hotel not to awaken me whoever might ask to see me,

unless it were one or other of the girls, the beating of my heart while

I waited for her (whichever of them it might be that I was expecting)

and on those mornings my fury if I had not succeeded in finding a barber

to shave me, and must appear with the disfigurement of a hairy chin

before Albertine, Rosemonde or Andrée, no doubt this state, recurring

indifferently at the thought of one or another, was as different from

what we call love as is from human life the life of the zoophytes, where

an existence, an individuality, if we may so term it, is divided up

among several organisms. But natural history teaches us that such an

organization of animal life is indeed to be observed, and that our own

life, provided only that we have outgrown the first phase, is no less

positive as to the reality of states hitherto unsuspected by us, through

which we have to pass, and can then abandon them altogether. Such was

for me this state of love divided among several girls at once.

Divided--say rather undivided, for more often than not what was so

delicious to me, different from the rest of the world, what was

beginning to become so precious to me that the hope of finding it again

on the morrow was the greatest happiness in my life, was rather the

whole of the group of girls, taken as they were all together on those

afternoons on the cliffs, during those lifeless hours, upon that strip

of grass on which were laid those forms, so exciting to my imagination,

of Albertine, Rosemonde, Andrée; and that without my being able to say

which of them it was that made those scenes so precious to me, which of

them I was most anxious to love. At the start of a new love as at its

ending, we are not exclusively attached to the object of that love, but

rather the desire to be loving from which it will presently emerge (and,

later on, the memory which it leaves behind) wanders voluptuously

through a zone of interchangeable charms--simply natural charms, it may

be, gratification of appetite, enjoyment of one's surroundings--which

are so far harmonised among themselves that it does not in the presence

of any one of them feel itself out of place. Besides, as my perception

of them was not yet dulled by familiarity, I had still the faculty of

seeing them, that is to say of feeling a profound astonishment every

time that I found myself in their presence. No doubt this astonishment

is to some extent due to the fact that the other person on such

occasions presents himself in a fresh aspect; but so great is the

multiformity of each of us, so abundant the wealth of lines of face and

body, lines so few of which leave any trace, once we have parted from

the other person, on the arbitrary simplicity of our memory. As our mind

has selected some peculiarity that had struck us, has isolated it,

exaggerated it, making of a woman who has appeared to us tall, a sketch

in which her figure is absurdly elongated, or of a woman who has seemed

to be pink-cheeked and golden-haired a pure 'Harmony in pink and gold',

so, the moment that woman is once again standing before us, all the

other forgotten qualities which restore the balance of that one

remembered feature at once assail us, in their confused complexity,

diminishing her height, paling her cheeks, and substituting for what we

have come to her solely to seek other peculiarities which we remember

now that we did notice the first time, and fail to understand how we can

so far have forgotten to look out for again. We thought we remembered;

it was a peahen, surely; we go to see it and find a peony. And this

inevitable astonishment is not the only one; for, side by side with it

comes another, born of the difference, not now between the stereotyped

forms of memory and reality, but between the person whom we saw last

time and him who appears to us to-day from another angle and shews us

another aspect. The human face is indeed, like the face of the God of

some Oriental theogony, a whole cluster of faces, crowded together but

on different surfaces so that one does not see them all at once.

But to a great extent our astonishment springs from the other person's

presenting to us also a face that is the same as before. It would

require so immense an effort to reconstruct everything that has been

imparted to us by things other than ourself--were it only the taste of a

fruit--that no sooner is the impression received than we begin

imperceptibly to descend the slope of memory and, without noticing

anything, in a very short time, we have come a long way from what we

actually felt. So that every fresh encounter is a sort of rectification,

which brings us back to what we really did see. We have no longer any

recollection of this, to such an extent does what we call remembering a

person consist really in forgetting him. But so long as we can still see

at the moment when the forgotten aspect appears, we recognise it, we are

obliged to correct the straying line; thus the perpetual and fruitful

surprise which made so salutary and invigorating for me these daily

outings with the charming damsels of the sea shore, consisted fully as

much in recognition as in discovery. When there is added to this the

agitation aroused by what these girls were to me, which was never quite

what I had supposed, and meant that my expectancy of our next meeting

resembled not so much my expectancy the time before as the still

throbbing memory of our latest conversation, it will be realised that

each of our excursions made a violent interruption in the course of my

thoughts and moved them clean out of the direction which, in the

solitude of my own room, I had been able to trace for them at my

leisure. That plotted course was forgotten, had ceased to exist, when I

returned home buzzing like a hive of bees with remarks which had

disquieted me when I heard them and were still echoing in my brain. The

other person is destroyed when we cease to see him; after which his next

appearance means a fresh creation of him, different from that which

immediately preceded it, if not from them all. For the minimum variation

that is to be found in these creations is duality. If we have in mind a

strong and searching glance, a bold manner, it is inevitably, next time,

by a half-languid profile, a sort of dreamy gentleness, overlooked by us

in our previous impression, that we shall be, on meeting him again,

astonished, that is to say almost solely struck. In confronting our

memory with the new reality it is this that will mark the extent of our

disappointment or surprise, will appear to us like the revised version

of an earlier reality warning us that we had not remembered it

correctly. In its turn, the facial aspect neglected the time before, and

for that very reason the most striking this time, the most real, the

most documentary, will become a matter for dreams and memories. It is a

languorous and rounded profile, a gentle, dreamy expression which we

shall now desire to see again. And then, next time, such resolution,

such strength of character as there may be in the piercing eyes, the

pointed nose, the tight lips, will come to correct the discrepancy

between our desire and the object to which it has supposed itself to

correspond. It is understood, of course, that this loyalty to the first

and purely physical impressions which I formed afresh at each encounter

with my friends did not involve only their facial appearance, since the

reader has seen that I was sensible also of their voices, more

disquieting still, perhaps (for not only does a voice offer the same

strange and sensuous surfaces as a face, it issues from that unknown,

inaccessible region the mere thought of which sets the mind swimming

with unattainable kisses), their voices each like the unique sound of a

little instrument into which the player put all her artistry and which

was found only in her possession. Traced by a casual inflexion, a sudden

deep chord in one of their voices would astonish me when I recognised

after having forgotten it. So much so that the corrections which after

every fresh meeting I was obliged to make so as to ensure absolute

accuracy were as much those of a tuner or singing-master as a

draughtsman's.

As for the harmonious cohesion in which had been neutralised for some

time, by the resistance that each brought to bear against the expansion

of the others, the several waves of sentiment set in motion in me by

these girls, it was broken in Albertine's favour one afternoon when we

were playing the game of "ferret". It was in a little wood on the cliff.

Stationed between two girls, strangers to the little band, whom the band

had brought in its train because we wanted that day to have a bigger

party than usual, I gazed enviously at Albertine's neighbour, a young

man, saying to myself that if I had been in his place I could have been

touching my friend's hands all those miraculous moments which might

perhaps never recur, and that this would have been but the first stage

in a great advance. Already, by itself, and even without the

consequences which it would probably have involved, the contact of

Albertine's hands would have been delicious to me. Not that I had never

seen prettier hands than hers. Even in the group of her friends, those

of Andrée, slender hands and much finelier modelled, had as it were a

private life of their own, obedient to the commands of their mistress,

but independent, and used often to strain out before her like a leash of

thoroughbred greyhounds, with lazy pauses, long dreams, sudden

stretchings of a joint, seeing which Elstir had made a number of studies

of these hands. And in one of them, in which you saw Andrée warming her

hands at the fire, they had, with the light behind them, the gilded

transparency of two autumn leaves. But, plumper than these, the hands of

Albertine would yield for a moment, then resist the pressure of the hand

that clasped them, giving a sensation that was quite peculiar to

themselves. The act of pressing Albertine's hand had a sensual sweetness

which was in keeping somehow with the rosy, almost mauve colouring of

her skin. That pressure seemed to allow you to penetrate into the girl's

being, to plumb the depths of her senses, like the ringing sound of her

laughter, indecent as may be the cooing of doves or certain animal

cries. She was the sort of woman with whom shaking hands affords so much

pleasure that one feels grateful to civilisation for having made of the

handclasp a lawful act between young men and girls when they meet. If

the arbitrary code of good manners had replaced the clasp of hands by

some other gesture, I should have gazed, day after day, at the

unattainable hands of Albertine with a curiosity to know the feel of

them as ardent as was my curiosity to learn the savour of her cheeks.

But in the pleasure of holding her hand unrestrictedly in mine, had I

been next to her at "ferret" I did not envisage that pleasure alone;

what avowals, declarations silenced hitherto by my bashfulness, I could

have conveyed by certain pressures of hand on hand; on her side, how

easy it would have been for her, in responding by other pressures, to

shew me that she accepted; what complicity, what a vista of happiness

stood open! My love would be able to make more advance in a few minutes

spent thus by her side than it had yet made in all the time that I had

known her. Feeling that they would last but a short time, were rapidly

nearing their end, since presumably we were not going on much longer

with this game, and that once it was over I should be too late, I could

not keep in my place for another moment. I let myself deliberately be

caught with the ring, and, having gone into the middle, when the ring

passed I pretended not to see it but followed its course with my eyes,

waiting for the moment when it should come into the hands of the young

man next to Albertine, who herself, pealing with helpless laughter, and

in the excitement and pleasure of the game, was blushing like a rose.

"Why, we really are in the Fairy Wood!" said Andrée to me, pointing to

the trees that grew all round, with a smile in her eyes which was meant

only for me and seemed to pass over the heads of the other players, as

though we two alone were clever enough to double our parts, and make, in

connexion with the game we were playing, a remark of a poetic nature.

She even carried the delicacy of her fancy so far as to sing

half-unconsciously: "The Ferret of the Wood has passed this way, Sweet

Ladies; he has passed by this way, the Ferret of Fairy Wood!" like those

people who cannot visit Trianon without getting up a party in Louis XVI

costume, or think it effective to have a song sung to its original

setting. I should no doubt have been sorry that I could see no charm in

this piece of mimicry, had I had time to think of it. But my thoughts

were all elsewhere. The players began to shew surprise at my stupidity

in never getting the ring. I was looking at Albertine, so pretty, so

indifferent, so gay, who, though she little knew it, was to be my

neighbour when at last I should catch the ring in the right hands,

thanks to a stratagem which she did not suspect, and would certainly

have resented if she had. In the heat of the game her long hair had

become loosened, and fell in curling locks over her cheeks on which it

served to intensify, by its dry brownness, the carnation pink. "You have

the tresses of Laura Dianti, of Eleanor of Guyenne, and of her

descendant so beloved of Chateaubriand. You ought always to wear your

hair half down like that," I murmured in her ear as an excuse for

drawing close to her. Suddenly the ring passed to her neighbour. I

sprang upon him at once, forced open his hands and seized it; he was

obliged now to take my place inside the circle, while I took his beside

Albertine. A few minutes earlier I had been envying this young man, when

I saw that his hands as they slipped over the cord were constantly

brushing against hers. Now that my turn was come, too shy to seek, too

much moved to enjoy this contact, I no longer felt anything save the

rapid and painful beating of my heart. At one moment Albertine leaned

towards me, with an air of connivance, her round and rosy face, making a

show of having the ring, so as to deceive the ferret, and keep him from

looking in the direction in which she was just going to pass it. I

realised at once that this was the sole object of Albertine's

mysterious, confidential gaze, but I was a little shocked to see thus

kindle in her eyes the image--purely fictitious, invented to serve the

needs of the game--of a secret, an understanding between her and myself

which did not exist, but which from that moment seemed to me to be

possible and would have been divinely sweet. While I was still being

swept aloft by this thought, I felt a slight pressure of Albertine's

hand against mine, and her caressing finger slip under my finger along

the cord, and I saw her, at the same moment, give me a wink which she

tried to make pass unperceived by the others. At once, a mass of hopes,

invisible hitherto by myself, crystallised within me. "She is taking

advantage of the game to let me feel that she really does love me," I

thought to myself, in an acme of joy, from which no sooner had I reached

it than I fell, on hearing Albertine mutter furiously: "Why can't you

take it? I've been shoving it at you for the last hour." Stunned with

grief, I let go the cord, the ferret saw the ring and swooped down on

it, and I had to go back into the middle, where I stood helpless, in

despair, looking at the unbridled rout which continued to circle round

me, stung by the jeering shouts of all the players, obliged, in reply,

to laugh when I had so little mind for laughter, while Albertine kept on

repeating: "People can't play if they don't pay attention, and spoil the

game for the others. He shan't be asked again when we're going to play,

Andrée; if he is, I don't come." Andrée, with a mind above the game,

still chanting her "Fairy Wood" which, in a spirit of imitation,

Rosemonde had taken up too, but without conviction, sought to make a

diversion from Albertine's reproaches by saying to me: "We're quite

close to those old Creuniers you wanted so much to see. Look, I'll take

you there by a dear little path, and we'll leave these silly idiots to

go on playing like babies in the nursery." As Andrée was extremely nice

to me, as we went along I said to her everything about Albertine that

seemed calculated to make me attractive to the latter. Andrée replied

that she too was very fond of Albertine, thought her charming; in spite

of which the compliments that I was paying to her friend did not seem

altogether to please her. Suddenly, in the little sunken path, I stopped

short, touched to the heart by an exquisite memory of my childhood. I

had just recognised, by the fretted and glossy leaves which it thrust

out towards me, a hawthorn-bush, flowerless, alas, now that spring was

over. Around me floated the atmosphere of far off Months of Mary, of

Sunday afternoons, of beliefs, or errors long ago forgotten. I wanted to

stay it in its passage. I stood still for a moment, and Andrée, with a

charming divination of what was in my mind, left me to converse with the

leaves of the bush. I asked them for news of the flowers, those hawthorn

flowers that were like merry little girls headstrong, provocative,

pious. "The young ladies have been gone from here for a long time now,"

the leaves told me. And perhaps they thought that, for the great friend

of those young ladies that I pretended to be, I seemed to have

singularly little knowledge of their habits. A great friend, but one who

had never been to see them again for all these years, despite his

promises. And yet, as Gilberte had been my first love among girls, so

these had been my first love among flowers. "Yes, I know all that, they

leave about the middle of June," I answered, "but I am so delighted to

see the place where they stayed when they were here. They came to see

me, too, at Combray, in my room; my mother brought them when I was ill

in bed. And we used to meet on Saturday evenings, too, at the Month of

Mary devotions. Can they get to them from here?" "Oh, of course! Why,

they make a special point of having our young ladies at Saint-Denis du

Désert, the church near here." "Then, if I want to see them now?" "Oh,

not before May, next year." "But I can be sure that they will be here?"

"They come regularly every year." "Only I don't know whether it will be

easy to find the place." "Oh, dear, yes! They are so gay, the young

ladies, they stop laughing only to sing hymns together, so that you

can't possibly miss them, you can tell by the scent from the other end

of the path."

I caught up Andrée, and began again to sing Albertine's praises. It was

inconceivable to me that she would not repeat what I said to her friend,

seeing the emphasis that I put into it. And yet I never heard that

Albertine had been told. Andrée had, nevertheless, a far greater

understanding of the things of the heart, a refinement of nice

behaviour; finding the look, the word, the action that could most

ingeniously give pleasure, keeping to herself a remark that might

possibly cause pain, making a sacrifice (and making it as though it were

no sacrifice at all) of an afternoon's play, or it might be an "at home"

or a garden-party in order to stay beside a friend who was feeling sad,

and thus shew him or her that she preferred the simple company of a

friend to frivolous pleasures; these were her habitual delicacies. But

when one knew her a little better one would have said that it was with

her as with those heroic cravens who wish not to be afraid, and whose

bravery is especially meritorious, one would have said that in her true

character there was none of that generosity which she displayed at every

moment out of moral distinction, or sensibility, or a noble desire to

shew herself a true friend. When I listened to all the charming things

she was saying to me about a possible affection between Albertine and

myself it seemed as though she were bound to do everything in her power

to bring it to pass. Whereas, by mere chance perhaps, not even of the

least of the various minor opportunities which were at her disposal and

might have proved effective in uniting me to Albertine did she ever make

any use, and I would not swear that my effort to make myself loved by

Albertine did not--if not provoke in her friend secret stratagems

destined to bring it to nought--at any rate arouse in her an anger which

however she took good care to hide and against which even, in her

delicacy of feeling, she may herself have fought. Of the countless

refinements of goodness which Andrée shewed Albertine would have been

incapable, and yet I was not certain of the underlying goodness of the

former as I was to be, later on, of the latter's. Shewing herself always

tenderly indulgent to the exuberant frivolity of Albertine, Andrée

would greet her with speeches, with smiles which were those of a friend,

better still, she always acted towards her as a friend. I have seen her,

day after day, in order to give the benefit of her own wealth, to bring

some happiness to this penniless friend take, without any possibility of

advantage to herself, more pains than a courtier would take who sought

to win his sovereign's favour. She was charmingly gentle always,

charming in her choice of sweet, pathetic expressions, when you said to

her what a pity it was that Albertine was so poor, and took infinitely

more trouble on her behalf than she would have taken for a wealthy

friend. But if anyone were to hint that Albertine was perhaps not quite

so poor as people made out, a just discernible cloud would veil the

light of Andrée's eyes and brow; she seemed out of temper. And if you

went on to say that after all Albertine might perhaps be less difficult

to marry off than people supposed, she would vehemently contradict you,

repeating almost angrily: "Oh dear, no; she will never get married! I am

quite certain of it; it is a dreadful worry to me!" In so far as I

myself was concerned, Andrée was the only one of the girls who would

never have repeated to me anything not very pleasant that might have

been said about me by a third person; more than that, if it were I who

told her what had been said she would make a pretence of not believing

it, or would furnish some explanation which made the remark inoffensive;

it is the aggregate of these qualities that goes by the name of tact.

Tact is the attribute of those people who, if we have called a man out

in a duel, congratulate us and add that there was no necessity, really;

so as to enhance still further in our own eyes the courage of which we

have given proof without having been forced to do so. They are the

opposite of the people who, in similar circumstances, say: "It must have

been a horrid nuisance for you, fighting a duel, but on the other hand

you couldn't possibly swallow an insult like that, there was nothing

else to be done." But as there is always something to be said on both

sides, if the pleasure, or at least the indifference shewn by our

friends in repeating something offensive that they have heard said about

us, proves that they do not exactly put themselves in our skin at the

moment of speaking, but thrust in the pin-point, turn the knife-blade as

though it were gold-beater's skin and not human, the art of always

keeping hidden from us what might be disagreeable to us in what they

have heard said about our actions, or in the opinion which those actions

have led the speakers themselves to form of us, proves that there is in

the other kind of friends, in the friends who are so full of tact, a

strong vein of dissimulation. It does no harm if indeed they are

incapable of thinking evil, and if what is said by other people only

makes them suffer as it would make us. I supposed this to be the case

with Andrée, without, however, being absolutely sure.

We had left the little wood and had followed a network of overgrown

paths through which Andrée managed to find her way with great skill.

Suddenly, "Look now," she said to me, "there are your famous Creuniers,

and, I say, you are in luck, it's just the time of day, and the light is

the same as when Elstir painted them." But I was still too wretched at

having fallen, during the game of "ferret", from such a pinnacle of

hopes. And so it was not with the pleasure which otherwise I should

doubtless have felt that I caught sight, almost below my feet, crouching

among the rocks, where they had gone for protection from the heat, of

marine goddesses for whom Elstir had lain in wait and surprised them

there, beneath a dark glaze as lovely as Leonardo would have painted,

the marvellous Shadows, sheltered and furtive, nimble and voiceless,

ready at the first glimmer of light to slip behind the stone, to hide in

a cranny, and prompt, once the menacing ray had passed, to return to

rock or seaweed beneath the sun that crumbled the cliffs and the

odourless ocean, over whose slumbers they seemed to be watching,

motionless lightfoot guardians letting appear on the waters surface

their viscous bodies and the attentive gaze of their deep blue eyes.

We went back to the wood to pick up the other girls and go home

together. I knew now that I was in love with Albertine; but, alas! I had

no thought of letting her know it. This was because, since the days of

our games in the Champs-Elysées, my conception of love had become

different, even if the persons to whom my love was successively assigned

remained practically the same. For one thing, the avowal, the

declaration of my passion to her whom I loved no longer seemed to me one

of the vital and necessary incidents of love, nor love itself an

external reality, but simply a subjective pleasure. And as for this

pleasure, I felt that Albertine would do everything necessary to furnish

it, all the more since she would not know that I was enjoying it.

As we walked home the image of Albertine, bathed in the light that

streamed from the other girls, was not the only one that existed for me.

But as the moon, which is no more than a tiny white cloud of a more

definite and fixed shape than other clouds during the day, assumes her

full power as soon as daylight dies, so when I was once more in the

hotel it was Albertine's sole image that rose from my heart and began to

shine. My room seemed to me to have become suddenly a new place. Of

course, for a long time past, it had not been the hostile room of my

first night in it. All our lives, we go on patiently modifying the

surroundings in which we dwell; and gradually, as habit dispenses us

from feeling them, we suppress the noxious elements of colour, shape and

smell which were at the root of our discomfort. Nor was it any longer

the room, still potent enough over my sensibility, not certainly to make

me suffer, but to give me joy, the fount of summer days, like a marble

basin in which, half-way up its polished sides, they mirrored an azure

surface steeped in light over which glided for an instant, impalpable

and white as a wave of heat, a shadowy and fleeting cloud; not the room,

wholly aesthetic, of the pictorial evening hours; it was the room in

which I had been now for so many days that I no longer saw it. And now I

was just beginning again to open my eyes to it, but this time from the

selfish angle which is that of love. I liked to feel that the fine big

mirror across one corner, the handsome bookcases with their fronts of

glass would give Albertine, if she came to see me, a good impression of

myself. Instead of a place of transit in which I would stay for a few

minutes before escaping to the beach or to Rivebelle, my room became

real and dear to me, fashioned itself anew, for I looked at and

appreciated each article of its furniture with the eyes of Albertine.

A few days after the game of "ferret", when having allowed ourselves to

wander rather too far afield, we had been fortunate in finding at

Maineville a couple of little "tubs" with two seats in each which would

enable us to be back in time for dinner, the keenness, already intense,

of my love for Albertine, had the following effect, first of all, that

it was Rosemonde and Andrée in turn that I invited to be my companion,

and never once Albertine, after which, in spite of my manifest

preference for Andrée or Rosemonde, I led everybody, by secondary

considerations of time and distance, cloaks and so forth, to decide, as

though against my wishes, that the most practical policy was that I

should take Albertine, to whose company I pretended to resign myself for

good or ill. Unfortunately, since love tends to the complete

assimilation of another person, while other people are not comestible by

way of conversation alone, Albertine might be (and indeed was) as

friendly as possible to me on our way home; when I had deposited her at

her own door she left me happy but more famished for her even than I had

been at the start, and reckoning the moments that we had spent together

as only a prelude, of little importance in itself, to those that were

still to come. And yet this prelude had that initial charm which is not

to be found again. I had not yet asked anything of Albertine. She could

imagine what I wanted, but, not being certain of it, would suppose that

I was tending only towards relations without any definite purpose, in

which my friend would find that delicious vagueness, rich in surprising

fulfilments of expectations, which is true romance.

In the week that followed I scarcely attempted to see Albertine. I made

a show of preferring Andrée. Love is born; one would like to remain,

for her whom one loves, the unknown whom she may love in turn, but one

has need of her, one requires contact not so much with her body as with

her attention, her heart. One slips into a letter some spiteful

expression which will force the indifferent reader to ask for some

little kindness in compensation, and love, following an unvarying

procedure, sets going with an alternating movement the machinery in

which one can no longer either refrain from loving or be loved. I gave

to Andrée the hours spent by the others at a party which I knew that

she would sacrifice for my sake, with pleasure, and would have

sacrificed even with reluctance, from a moral nicety, so as not to let

either the others or herself think that she attached any importance to a

relatively frivolous amusement. I arranged in this way to have her

entirely to myself every evening, meaning not to make Albertine jealous,

but to improve my position in her eyes, or at any rate not to imperil it

by letting Albertine know that it was herself and not Andrée that I

loved. Nor did I confide this to Andrée either, lest she should repeat

it to her friend. When I spoke of Albertine to Andrée I affected a

coldness by which she was perhaps less deceived than I by her apparent

credulity. She made a show of believing in my indifference to Albertine,

of desiring the closest possible union between Albertine and myself. It

is probable that, on the contrary, she neither believed in the one nor

wished for the other. While I was saying to her that I did not care very

greatly for her friend, I was thinking of one thing only, how to become

acquainted with Mme. Bontemps, who was staying for a few days near

Balbec, and to whom Albertine was going presently on a short visit.

Naturally I did not let Andrée become aware of this desire, and when I

spoke to her of Albertine's people, it was in the most careless manner

possible. Andrée's direct answers did not appear to throw any doubt on

my sincerity. Why then did she blurt out suddenly, about that time: "Oh,

guess who' I've just seen--Albertine's aunt!" It is true that she had

not said in so many words: "I could see through your casual remarks all

right that the one thing you were really thinking of was how you could

make friends with Albertine's aunt." But it was clearly to the presence

in Andrée's mind of some such idea which she felt it more becoming to

keep from me that the word "just" seemed to point. It was of a kind with

certain glances, certain gestures which, for all that they have not a

form that is logical, rational, deliberately calculated to match the

listener's intelligence, reach him nevertheless in their true

significance, just as human speech, converted into electricity in the

telephone, is turned into speech again when it strikes the ear. In order

to remove from Andrée's mind the idea that I was interested in Mme.

Bontemps, I spoke of her from that time onwards not only carelessly but

with downright malice, saying that I had once met that idiot of a woman,

and trusted I should never have that experience again. Whereas I was

seeking by every means in my power to meet her.

I tried to induce Elstir (but without mentioning to anyone else that I

had asked him) to speak to her about me and to bring us together. He

promised to introduce me to her, though he seemed greatly surprised at

my wishing it, for he regarded her as a contemptible woman, a born

intriguer, as little interesting as she was disinterested. Reflecting

that if I did see Mme. Bontemps, Andrée would be sure to hear of it

sooner or later, I thought it best to warn her in advance. "The things

one tries hardest to avoid are what one finds one cannot escape," I told

her. "Nothing in the world could bore me so much as meeting Mme.

Bontemps again, and yet I can't get out of it, Elstir has arranged to

invite us together." "I have never doubted it for a single instant,"

exclaimed Andrée in a bitter tone, while her eyes, enlarged and altered

by her annoyance, focussed themselves upon some invisible object. These

words of Andrée's were not the most reasoned statement of a thought

which might be expressed thus: "I know that you are in love with

Albertine, and that you are working day and night to get in touch with

her people." But they were the shapeless fragments, easily pieced

together again by me, of some such thought which I had exploded by

striking it, through the shield of Andrée's self-control. Like her

"just", these words had no meaning save in the second degree, that is to

say they were words of the sort which (rather than direct affirmatives)

inspires in us respect or distrust for another person, and leads to a

rupture.

If Andrée had not believed me when I told her that Albertine's

relatives left me indifferent, that was because she thought that I was

in love with Albertine. And probably she was none too happy in the

thought.

She was generally present as a third party at my meetings with her

friend. And yet there were days when I was to see Albertine by herself,

days to which I looked forward with feverish impatience, which passed

without bringing me any decisive result, without having, any of them,

been that cardinal day whose part I immediately entrusted to the day

that was to follow, which would prove no more apt to play it; thus there

crumbled and collapsed, one after another, like waves of the sea, those

peaks at once replaced by others.

About a month after the day on which we had played "ferret" together, I

learned that Albertine was going away next morning to spend a couple of

days with Mme. Bontemps, and, since she would have to start early, was

coming to sleep that night at the Grand Hotel, from which, by taking the

omnibus, she would be able, without disturbing the friends with whom she

was staying, to catch the first train in the morning. I mentioned this

to Andrée. "I don't believe a word of it," she replied, with a look of

annoyance. "Anyhow it won't help you at all, for I'm quite sure

Albertine won't want to see you if she goes to the hotel by herself. It

wouldn't be 'regulation'," she added, employing an epithet which had

recently come into favour with her, in the sense of "what is done". "I

tell you this because I understand Albertine. What difference do you

suppose it makes to me whether you see her or not? Not the slightest, I

can assure you!"

We were joined by Octave who had no hesitation in telling Andrée the

number of strokes he had gone round in, the day before, at golf, then by

Albertine, counting her diabolo as she walked along, like a nun telling

her beads. Thanks to this pastime she could be left alone for hours on

end without growing bored. As soon as she joined us I became conscious

of the obstinate tip of her nose, which I had omitted from my mental

pictures of her during the last few days; beneath her dark hair the

vertical front of her brow controverted--and not for the first time--the

indefinite image that I had preserved of her, while its whiteness made a

vivid splash in my field of vision; emerging from the dust of memory,

Albertine was built up afresh before my eyes. Golf gives one a taste for

solitary pleasures. The pleasure to be derived from diabolo is

undoubtedly one of these. And yet, after she had joined us, Albertine

continued to toss up and catch her missile, just as a lady on whom

friends have come to call does not on their account stop working at her

crochet. "I hear that Mme. de Villeparisis," she remarked to Octave,

"has been complaining to your father." I could hear, underlying the

word, one of those notes that were peculiar to Albertine; always, just

as I had made certain that I had forgotten them, I would be reminded of

a glimpse caught through them before of Albertine's determined and

typically Gallic mien. I might have been blind, and yet have detected

certain of her qualities, alert and slightly provincial, from those

notes, just as plainly as from the tip of her nose. These were

equivalent and might have, been substituted for one another, and her

voice was like, what we are promised in the photo-telephone of the

future; the visual image was clearly outlined in the sound. "She's not

written only to your father, either, she wrote to the Mayor of Balbec at

the same time, to say that we must stop playing diabolo on the 'front'

as somebody hit her in the face with one." "Yes, I was hearing about

that. It's too silly. There's little enough to do here as it is."

Andrée did not join in the conversation; she was not acquainted, any

more than was Albertine or Octave, with Mme. de Villeparisis. She did,

however, remark: "I can't think why this lady should make such a song

about it. Old Mme. de Cambremer got hit in the face, and she never

complained." "I will explain the difference," replied Octave gravely,

striking a match as he spoke. "It's my belief that Mme. de Cambremer is

a woman of the world, and Mme. de Villeparisis is just an upstart. Are

you playing golf this afternoon?" and he left us, followed by Andrée.

I was alone now with Albertine. "Do you see," she began, "I'm wearing my

hair now the way you like--look at my ringlet. They all laugh at me and

nobody knows who' I'm doing it for. My aunt will laugh at me too. But I

shan't tell her why, either." I had a sidelong view of Albertine's

cheeks, which often appeared pale, but, seen thus, were flushed with a

coursing stream of blood which lighted them up, gave them that dazzling

dearness which certain winter mornings have when the stones sparkling in

the sun seem blocks of pink granite and radiate joy. The joy that I was

drawing at this moment from the sight of Albertine's cheeks was equally

keen, but led to another desire on my part, which was not to walk with

her but to take her in my arms. I asked her if the report of her plans

which I had heard were correct. "Yes," she told me, "I shall be sleeping

at your hotel to-night, and in fact as I've got rather a chill, I shall

be going to bed before dinner. You can come and sit by my bed and watch

me eat, if you like, and afterwards we'll play at anything you choose. I

should have liked you to come to the station to-morrow morning, but I'm

afraid it might look rather odd, I don't say to Andrée, who is a

sensible person, but to the others who will be there; if my aunt got to

know, I should never hear the last of it. But we can spend the evening

together, at any rate. My aunt will know nothing about that. I must go

and say good-bye to Andrée. So long, then. Come early, so that we can

have a nice long time together," she added, smiling. At these words I

was swept back past the days in which I loved Gilberte to those in which

love seemed to me not only an external entity but one that could be

realised as a whole. Whereas the Gilberte whom I used to see in the

Champs-Elysées was a different Gilberte from the one whom I found

waiting inside myself when I was alone again, suddenly in the real

Albertine, her whom I saw every day, whom I supposed to be stuffed with

middle class prejudices and entirely open with her aunt, there was

incarnate the imaginary Albertine, she whom, when I still did not know

her, I had suspected of casting furtive glances at myself on the

"front", she who had worn an air of being reluctant to go indoors when

she saw me making off in the other direction.

I went in to dinner with my grandmother. I felt within me a secret which

she could never guess. Similarly with Albertine; to-morrow her friends

would be with her, not knowing what novel experience she and I had in

common; and when she kissed her niece on the brow Mme. Bontemps would

never imagine that I stood between them, in that arrangement of

Albertine's hair which had for its object, concealed from all the world,

to give me pleasure, me who had until then so greatly envied Mme.

Bontemps because, being related to the same people as her niece, she had

the same occasions to don mourning, the same family visits to pay; and

now I found myself meaning more to Albertine than did the aunt herself.

When she was with her aunt, it was of me that she would be thinking.

What was going to happen that evening, I scarcely knew. In any event,

the Grand Hotel, the evening would no longer seem empty to me; they

contained my happiness. I rang for the lift-boy to take me up to the

room which Albertine had engaged, a room that looked over the valley.

The slightest movements, such as that of sitting down on the bench in

the lift, were satisfying, because they were in direct relation to my

heart; I saw in the ropes that drew the cage upwards, in the few steps

that I had still to climb, only a materialisation of the machinery, the

stages of my joy. I had only two or three steps to take now along the

corridor before coming to that room in which was enshrined the precious

substance of that rosy form--that room which, even if there were to be

done in it delicious things, would keep that air of permanence, of

being, to a chance visitor who knew nothing of its history, just like

any other room, which makes of inanimate things the obstinately mute

witnesses, the scrupulous confidants, the inviolable depositaries of our

pleasure. Those few steps from the landing to Albertine's door, those

few steps which no one now could prevent my taking, I took with delight,

with prudence, as though plunged into a new and strange element, as if

in going forward I had been gently displacing the liquid stream of

happiness, and at the same time with a strange feeling of absolute

power, and of entering at length into an inheritance which had belonged

to me from all time. Then suddenly I reflected that it was wrong to be

in any doubt; she had told me to come when she was in bed. It was as

clear as daylight; I pranced for joy, I nearly knocked over Françoise

who was standing in my way, I ran, with glowing eyes, towards my

friend's room. I found Albertine in bed. Leaving her throat bare, her

white nightgown altered the proportions of her face, which, flushed by

being in bed or by her cold or by dinner, seemed pinker than before; I

thought of the colours which I had had, a few hours earlier, displayed

beside me, on the "front", the savour of which I was now at last to

taste; her cheek was crossed obliquely by one of those long, dark,

curling tresses, which, to please me, she had undone altogether. She

looked at me and smiled. Beyond her, through the window, the valley lay

bright beneath the moon. The sight of Albertine's bare throat, of those

strangely vivid cheeks, had so intoxicated me (that is to say had placed

the reality of the world for me no longer in nature, but in the torrent

of my sensations which it was all I could do to keep within bounds), as

to have destroyed the balance between the life, immense and

indestructible, which circulated in my being, and the life of the

universe, so puny in comparison. The sea, which was visible through the

window as well as the valley, the swelling breasts of the first of the

Maineville cliffs, the sky in which the moon had not yet climbed to the

zenith, all of these seemed less than a featherweight on my eyeballs,

which between their lids I could feel dilated, resisting, ready to bear

very different burdens, all the mountains of the world upon their

fragile surface. Their orbit no longer found even the sphere of the

horizon adequate to fill it. And everything that nature could have

brought me of life would have seemed wretchedly meagre, the sigh of the

waves far too short a sound to express the enormous aspiration that was

surging in my breast. I bent over Albertine to kiss her. Death might

have struck me down in that moment; it would have seemed to me a

trivial, or rather an impossible thing, for life was not outside, it was

in me; I should have smiled pityingly had a philosopher then expressed

the idea that some day, even some distant day, I should have to die,

that the external forces of nature would survive me, the forces of that

nature beneath whose god-like feet I was no more than a grain of dust;

that, after me, there would still remain those rounded, swelling cliffs,

that sea, that moonlight and that sky! How was that possible; how could

the world last longer than myself, since it was it that was enclosed in

me, in me whom it went a long way short of filling, in me, where,

feeling that there was room to store so many other treasures, I flung

contemptuously into a corner sky, sea and cliffs. "Stop that, or I'll

ring the bell!" cried Albertine, seeing that I was flinging myself upon

her to kiss her. But I reminded myself that it was not for no purpose

that a girl made a young man come to her room in secret, arranging that

her aunt should not know--that boldness, moreover, rewards those who

know how to seize their opportunities; in the state of exaltation in

which I was, the round face of Albertine, lighted by an inner flame,

like the glass bowl of a lamp, started into such prominence that,

copying the rotation of a burning sphere, it seemed to me to be turning,

like those faces of Michael Angelo which are being swept past in the

arrested headlong flight of a whirlwind. I was going to learn the

fragrance, the flavour which this strange pink fruit concealed. I heard

a sound, precipitous, prolonged, shrill. Albertine had pulled the bell

with all her might.

*

* *

I had supposed that the love which I felt for Albertine was not based on

the hope of carnal possession. And yet, when the lesson to be drawn from

my experience that evening was, apparently, that such possession was

impossible; when, after having had not the least doubt, that first day,

on the beach, of Albertine's being unchaste, and having then passed

through various intermediate assumptions, I seemed to have quite

definitely reached the conclusion that she was absolutely virtuous;

when, on her return from her aunt's, a week later, she greeted me coldly

with: "I forgive you; in fact I'm sorry to have upset you, but you must

never do it again,"--then, in contrast to what I had felt on learning

from Bloch that one could always have all the women one liked, and as

if, in place of a real girl, I had known a wax doll, it came to pass

that gradually there detached itself from her my desire to penetrate

into her life, to follow her through the places in which she had spent

her childhood, to be initiated by her into the athletic life; my

intellectual curiosity to know what were her thoughts on this subject or

that did not survive my belief that I might take her in my arms if I

chose. My dreams abandoned her, once they had ceased to be nourished by

the hope of a possession of which I had supposed them to be independent.

Thenceforward they found themselves once more at liberty to transmit

themselves, according to the attraction that I had found in her on any

particular day, above all according to the chances that I seemed to

detect of my being, possibly, one day, loved by her--to one or another

of Albertine's friends, and to Andrée first of all. And yet, if

Albertine had not existed, perhaps I should not have had the pleasure

which I began to feel more and more strongly during the days that

followed in the kindness that was shewn me by Andrée. Albertine told no

one of the check which I had received at her hands. She was one of those

pretty girls who, from their earliest youth, by their beauty, but

especially by an attraction, a charm which remains somewhat mysterious

and has its source perhaps in reserves of vitality to which others less

favoured by nature come to quench their thirst, have always--in their

home circle, among their friends, in society--proved more attractive

than other more beautiful and richer girls; she was one of those people

from whom, before the age of love and ever so much more after it is

reached, one asks more than they ask in return, more even than they are

able to give. From her childhood Albertine had always had round her in

an adoring circle four or five little girl friends, among them Andrée

who was so far her superior and knew it (and perhaps this attraction

which Albertine exerted quite involuntarily had been the origin, had

laid the foundations of the little band). This attraction was still

potent even at a great social distance, in circles quite brilliant in

comparison, where if there was a pavane to be danced, they would send

for Albertine rather than have it danced by another girl of better

family. The consequence was that, not having a penny to her name, living

a hard enough life, moreover, on the hands of M. Bontemps, who was said

to be "on the rocks", and was anyhow anxious to be rid of her, she was

nevertheless invited, not only to dine but to stay, by people who, in

Saint-Loup's sight, might not have had any distinction, but to

Rosemonde's mother or Andrée's, women who though very rich themselves

did not know these other and richer people, represented something quite

incalculable. Thus Albertine spent a few weeks every year with the

family of one of the Governors of the Bank of France, who was also

Chairman of the Board of Directors of a great Railway Company. The wife

of this financier entertained people of importance, and had never

mentioned her "day" to Andrée's mother, who thought her wanting in

politeness, but was nevertheless prodigiously interested in everything

that went on in her house. Accordingly she encouraged Andrée every year

to invite Albertine down to their villa, because, as she said, it was a

real charity to offer a holiday by the sea to a girl who had not herself

the means to travel and whose aunt did so little for her; Andrée's

mother was probably not prompted by the thought that the banker and his

wife, learning that Albertine was made much of by her and her daughter,

would form a high opinion of them both; still less did she hope that

Albertine, good and clever as she was, would manage to get her invited,

or at least to get Andrée invited to the financier's garden-parties.

But every evening at the dinner-table, while she assumed an air of

indifference slightly tinged with contempt, she was fascinated by

Albertine's accounts of everything that had happened at the big house

while she was staying there, and the names of the other guests, almost

all of them people whom she knew by sight or by name. True, the thought

that she knew them only in this indirect fashion, that is to say did not

know them at all (she called this kind of acquaintance knowing people

"all my life"), gave Andrée's mother a touch of melancholy while she

plied Albertine with questions about them in a lofty and distant tone,

speaking with closed lips, and might have left her doubtful and uneasy

as to the importance of her own social position had she not been able to

reassure herself, to return safely to the "realities of life", by saying

to the butler: "Please tell the chef that he has not made the peas soft

enough." She then recovered her serenity. And she was quite determined

that Andrée was to marry nobody but a man--of the best family, of

course--but rich enough for her too to be able to keep a chef and a

couple of coachmen. This was the proof positive, the practical

indication of "position". But the fact that Albertine had dined at the

banker's house in the country with this or that great lady, and that the

said great lady had invited the girl to stay with her next winter, did

not invalidate a sort of special consideration which Albertine shewed

towards Andrée's mother, which went very well with the pity, and even

repulsion, excited by the tale of her misfortunes, a repulsion increased

by the fact that M. Bontemps had proved a traitor to the cause (he was

even, people said, vaguely Panamist) and had rallied to the Government.

Not that this deterred Andrée's mother, in her passion for abstract

truth, from withering with her scorn the people who appeared to believe

that Albertine was of humble origin. "What's that you say? Why, they're

one of the best families in the country. Simonet with a single 'n', you

know!" Certainly, in view of the class of society in which all this went

on, in which money plays so important a part, and mere charm makes

people ask you out but not marry you, a "comfortable" marriage did not

appear to be for Albertine a practical outcome of the so distinguished

patronage which she enjoyed but which would not have been held to

compensate for her poverty. But even by themselves, and with no prospect

of any matrimonial consequence, Albertine's "successes" in society

excited the envy of certain spiteful mothers, furious at seeing her

received like one of the family by the banker's wife, even by Andrée's

mother, neither of whom they themselves really knew. They therefore went

about telling common friends of those ladies and their own that both

ladies would be very angry if they knew the facts, which were that

Albertine repeated to each of them everything that the intimacy to which

she was rashly admitted enabled her to spy out in the household of the

other, a thousand little secrets which it must be infinitely unpleasant

to the interested party to have made public. These envious women said

this so that it might be repeated and might get Albertine into trouble

with her patrons. But, as often happens, their machinations met with no

success. The spite that prompted them was too apparent, and their only

result was to make the women who had planned them appear rather more

contemptible than before. Andrée's mother was too firm in her opinion

of Albertine to change her mind about her now. She looked upon her as a

"poor wretch", but the best-natured girl living, and one who would do

anything in the world to give pleasure.

If this sort of select popularity to which Albertine had attained did

not seem likely to lead to any practical result, it had stamped

Andrée's friend with the distinctive marks of people who, being always

sought after, have never any need to offer themselves, marks (to be

found also, and for analogous reasons, at the other end of the social

scale among the leaders of fashion) which consist in their not making

any display of the successes they have scored, but rather keeping them

to themselves. She would never say to anyone: "So-and-so is anxious to

meet me," would speak of everyone with the greatest good nature, and as

if it had been she who ran after, who sought to know other people, and

not they. If you spoke of a young man who, a few minutes earlier, had

been, in private conversation with her, heaping the bitterest reproaches

upon her because she had refused him an assignation, so far from

proclaiming this in public, or betraying any resentment she would stand

up for him: "He is such a nice boy!" Indeed it quite annoyed her when

she attracted people, because that compelled her to disappoint them,

whereas her natural instinct was always to give pleasure. So much did

she enjoy giving pleasure that she had come to employ a particular kind

of falsehood, found among utilitarians and men who have "arrived".

Existing besides in an embryonic state in a vast number of people, this

form of insincerity consists in not being able to confine the pleasure

arising out of a single act of politeness to a single person. For

instance, if Albertine's aunt wished her niece to accompany her to a

party which was not very lively, Albertine might have found it

sufficient to extract from the incident the moral profit of having given

pleasure to her aunt. But being courteously welcomed by her host and

hostess, she thought it better to say to them that she had been wanting

to see them for so long that she had finally seized this opportunity and

begged her aunt to take her to their party. Even this was not enough: at

the same party there happened to be one of Albertine's friends who was

in great distress. "I did not like the idea of your being here by

yourself. I thought it might do you good to have me with you. If you

would rather come away from here, go somewhere else, I am ready to do

anything you like; all I want is to see you look not so sad."--Which, as

it happened, was true also. Sometimes it happened however that the

fictitious object destroyed the real. Thus, Albertine, having a favour

to ask on behalf of one of her friends, went on purpose to see a certain

lady who could help her. But on arriving at the house of this lady--a

kind and sympathetic soul--the girl, unconsciously following the

principle of utilising a single action in a number of ways, felt it to

be more ingratiating to appear to have come there solely on account of

the pleasure she knew she would derive from seeing the lady again. The

lady was deeply touched that Albertine should have taken a long journey

purely out of friendship for herself. Seeing her almost overcome by

emotion, Albertine began to like the lady still better. Only, there was

this awkward consequence: she now felt so keenly the pleasure of

friendship which she pretended to have been her motive in coming, that

she was afraid of making the lady suspect the genuineness of sentiments

which were actually quite sincere if she now asked her to do the favour,

whatever it may have been, for her friend. The lady would think that

Albertine had come for that purpose, which was true, but would conclude

also that Albertine had no disinterested pleasure in seeing her, which

was not. With the result that she came away without having asked the

favour, like a man sometimes who has been so good to a woman, in the

hope of winning her, that he refrains from declaring his passion in

order to preserve for his goodness an air of nobility. In other

instances it would be wrong to say that the true object was sacrificed

to the subordinate and subsequently conceived idea, but the two were so

far incompatible that if the person to whom Albertine endeared herself

by stating the second had known of the existence of the first, his

pleasure would at once have been turned into the deepest annoyance. At a

much later point in this story, we shall have occasion to see this kind

of incompatibility expressed in clearer terms. Let us say for the

present, borrowing an example of a completely different order, that they

occur very frequently in the most divergent situations that life has to

offer. A husband has established his mistress in the town where he is

quartered with his regiment. His wife, left by herself in Paris, and

with an inkling of the truth, grows more and more miserable, and writes

her husband, letters embittered by jealousy. Very well; the mistress is

obliged to go up to Paris for the day. The husband cannot resist her

entreaties that he will go with her, and applies for short leave, which

is granted. But as he is a good-natured fellow, and hates to make his

wife unhappy, he goes to her and tells her, shedding a few quite genuine

tears, that, driven to desperation by her letters, he has found the

means of getting away from his duties to come to her, to console her in

his arms. He has thus contrived by a single journey to furnish wife and

mistress alike with proofs of his affection. But if the wife were to

learn the reason for which he has come to Paris, her joy would doubtless

be turned into grief, unless her pleasure in seeing the faithless wretch

outweighed, in spite of everything, the pain that his infidelities had

caused her. Among the men who have struck me as practising with most

perseverance this system of what might be called killing any number of

birds with one stone, must be included M. de Norpois. He would now and

then agree to act as intermediary between two of his friends who had

quarrelled, which led to his being called the most obliging of men. But

it was not sufficient for him to appear to be doing a service to the

friend who had come to him to demand it; he would represent to the other

the steps which he was taking to effect a reconciliation as undertaken

not at the request of the first friend but in the interest of the

second, an attitude of the sincerity of which he had never any

difficulty in convincing a listener already influenced by the idea that

he saw before him the "most serviceable of men". In this fashion,

playing in two scenes turn about, what in stage parlance is called

"doubling" two parts, he never allowed his influence to be in the

slightest degree imperilled, and the services which he rendered

constituted not an expenditure of capital but a dividend upon some part

of his credit. At the same time every service, seemingly rendered twice

over, correspondingly enhanced his reputation as an obliging friend,

and, better still, a friend whose interventions were efficacious, one

who did not draw bows at a venture, whose efforts were always justified

by success, as was shewn by the gratitude of both parties. This

duplicity in rendering services was--allowing for disappointments such

as are the lot of every human being--an important element of M. de

Norpois's character. And often at the Ministry he would make use of my

father, who was a simple soul, while making him believe that it was he,

M. de Norpois, who was being useful to my father.

Attracting people more easily than she wished, and having no need to

proclaim her conquests abroad, Albertine kept silence with regard to the

scene with myself by her bedside, which a plain girl would have wished

the whole world to know. And yet of her attitude during that scene I

could not arrive at any satisfactory explanation. Taking first of all

the supposition that she was absolutely chaste (a supposition with which

I had originally accounted for the violence with which Albertine had

refused to let herself be taken in my arms and kissed, though it was by

no means essential to my conception of the goodness, the fundamentally

honourable character of my friend), I could not accept it without a

copious revision of its terms. It ran so entirely counter to the

hypothesis which I had constructed that day when I saw Albertine for the

first time. Then ever so many different acts, all acts of kindness

towards myself (a kindness that was caressing, at times uneasy, alarmed,

jealous of my predilection for Andrée) came up on all sides to

challenge the brutal gesture with which, to escape from me, she had

pulled the bell. Why then had she invited me to come and spend the

evening by her bedside? Why had she spoken all the time in the language

of affection? What object is there in your desire to see a friend, in

your fear that he is fonder of another of your friends than of you; why

seek to give him pleasure, why tell him, so romantically, that the

others will never know that he has spent the evening in your room, if

you refuse him so simple a pleasure and if to you it is no pleasure at

all? I could not believe, all the same, that Albertine's chastity was

carried to such a pitch as that, and I had begun to ask myself whether

her violence might not have been due to some reason of coquetry, a

disagreeable odour, for instance, which she suspected of lingering about

her person, and by which she was afraid that I might be disgusted, or

else of cowardice, if for instance she imagined, in her ignorance of the

facts of love, that my state of nervous exhaustion was due to something

contagious, communicable to her in a kiss.

She was genuinely distressed by her failure to afford me pleasure, and

gave me a little gold pencil-case, with that virtuous perversity which

people shew who, moved by your supplications and yet not consenting to

grant you what those supplications demand, are anxious all the same to

bestow on you some mark of their affection; the critic, an article from

whose pen would so gratify the novelist, asks him instead to dinner;

the duchess does not take the snob with her to the theatre but lends him

her box on an evening when she will not be using it herself. So far are

those who do least for us, and might easily do nothing, driven by

conscience to do something. I told Albertine that in giving me this

pencil-case she was affording me great pleasure, and yet not so great as

I should have felt if, on the night she had spent at the hotel, she had

permitted me to embrace her. "It would have made me so happy; what

possible harm could it have done you? I was simply astounded at your

refusing to let me do it." "What astounds me," she retorted, "is that

you should have thought it astounding. Funny sort of girls you must know

if my behaviour surprises you." "I am extremely sorry if I annoyed you,

but even now I cannot say that I think I was in the wrong. What I feel

is that all that sort of thing is of no importance, really, and I can't

understand a girl who could so easily give pleasure not consenting to do

so. Let us be quite clear about it," I went on, throwing a sop of sorts

to her moral scruples, as I recalled how she and her friends had

scarified the girl who went about with the actress Léa, "I don't mean

to say for a moment that a girl can behave exactly as she likes, or that

there's no such thing as immorality. Take, let me see now, yes, what you

were saying the other day about a girl who is staying at Balbec and her

relations with an actress; I call that degrading, so degrading that I

feel must all have been made up by the girl's enemies, and that there

can't be any truth in the story. It strikes me as improbable,

impossible. But to let a friend kiss you, and go farther than that

even--since you say that I am your friend . . ." "So you are, but I have

had friends before now, I have known lots of young men who were every

bit as friendly, I can assure you. There wasn't one of them would ever

have dared to do a thing like that. They knew they'ld get their ears

boxed if they tried it on. Besides, they never dreamed of trying, we

would shake hands in an open, friendly sort of way, like good pals, but

there was never a word said about kissing, and yet we weren't any the

less friends for that. Why, if it's my friendship you are after, you've

nothing to complain of; I must be jolly fond of you to forgive you. But

I'm sure you don't care two straws about me, really. Own up now, it's

Andrée you're in love with. After all, you're quite right; she is ever

so much prettier than I am, and perfectly charming! Oh! You men!"

Despite my recent disappointment, these words so frankly uttered, by

giving me a great respect for Albertine, made a very pleasant impression

on me. And perhaps this impression was to have serious and vexatious

consequences for me later on, for it was round it that there began to

form that feeling almost of brotherly intimacy, that moral core which

was always to remain at the heart of my love for Albertine. A feeling of

this sort may be the cause of the keenest pain. For in order really to

suffer at the hands of a woman one must have believed in her completely.

For the moment, that embryo of moral esteem, of friendship, was left

embedded in me like a stepping-stone in a stream. It could have availed

nothing, by itself, against my happiness if it had remained there

without growing, in an inertia which it was to retain the following

year, and still more during the final weeks of this first visit to

Balbec. It dwelt in me like one of those foreign bodies which it would

be wiser when all is said to expel, but which we leave where they are

without disturbing them, so harmless for the present does their

weakness, their isolation amid a strange environment render them.

My dreams were now once more at liberty to concentrate on one or another

of Albertine's friends, and returned first of all to Andrée, whose

kindnesses might perhaps have appealed to me less strongly had I not

been certain that they would come to Albertine's ears. Undoubtedly the

preference that I had long been pretending to feel for Andrée had

furnished me--in the habit of conversation with her, of declaring my

affection--with, so to speak, the material, prepared and ready, for a

love of her which had hitherto lacked only the complement of a genuine

sentiment, and this my heart being once more free was now in a position

to supply. But for me really to love Andrée, she was too intellectual,

too neurotic, too sickly, too much like myself. If Albertine now seemed

to me to be void of substance, Andrée was filled with something which I

knew only too well. I had thought, that first day, that what I saw on

the beach there was the mistress of some racing cyclist, passionately

athletic; and now Andrée told me that if she had taken up athletic

pastimes, it was under orders from her doctor, to cure her neurasthenia,

her digestive troubles, but that her happiest hours were those which she

spent in translating one of George Eliot's novels. The misunderstanding,

due to an initial mistake as to what Andrée was, had not, as a matter

of fact, the slightest importance. But my mistake was one of the kind

which, if they allow love to be born, and are not recognised as mistakes

until it has ceased to be under control, become a cause of suffering.

Such mistakes--which may be quite different from mine with regard to

Andrée, and even its exact opposite,--are frequently due (and this was

especially the case here) to our paying too much attention to the

aspect, the manners of what a person is not but would like to be, in

forming our first impression of that person. To the outward appearance

affectation, imitation, the longing to be admired, whether by the good

or by the wicked, add misleading similarities of speech and gesture.

There are cynicisms and cruelties which, when put to the test, prove no

more genuine than certain apparent virtues and generosities. Just as we

often discover a vain miser beneath the cloak of a man famed for his

bountiful charity, so her flaunting of vice leads us to suppose a

Messalina a respectable girl with middle class prejudices. I had thought

to find in Andrée a healthy, primitive creature, whereas she was merely

a person in search of health, as were doubtless many of those in whom

she herself had thought to find it, and who were in reality no more

healthy than a burly arthritic with a red face and in white flannels is

necessarily a Hercules. Now there are circumstances in which it is not

immaterial to our happiness that the person whom we have loved because

of what appeared to be so healthy about her is in reality only one of

those invalids who receive such health as they possess from others, as

the planets borrow their light, as certain bodies are only conductors of

electricity.

No matter, Andrée, like Rosemonde and Gisèle, indeed more than they,

was, when all was said, a friend of Albertine, sharing her life,

imitating her conduct, so closely that, the first day, I had not at once

distinguished them one from another. Over these girls, flowering sprays

of roses whose principal charm was that they outlined themselves against

the sea, the same undivided partnership prevailed as at the time when I

did not know them, when the appearance of no matter which of them had

caused me such violent emotion by its announcement that the little band

was not far off. And even now the sight of one of them filled me with a

pleasure into which there entered, to an extent which I should not have

found it easy to define, the thought of seeing the others follow her in

due course, and even if they did not come that day, speaking about them,

and knowing that they would be told that I had been on the beach.

It was no longer simply the attraction of those firsts days, it was a

regular love-longing which hesitated among them all, so far was each the

natural substitute for the others. My bitterest grief would not have

been to be thrown over by whichever of the girls I liked best, but I

should at once have liked best, because I should have fastened on to her

the whole of the melancholy dream which had been floating vaguely among

them all, her who had thrown me over. It would, moreover, in that event,

be the loss of all her friends, in whose eyes I should speedily have

forfeited whatever advantage I might possess, that I should, in losing

her, have unconsciously regretted, having vowed to them that sort of

collective love which the politician and the actor feel for the public

for whose desertion of them after they have enjoyed all its favours they

can never be consoled. Even those favours which I had failed to win from

Albertine I would hope suddenly to receive from one or other who had

parted from me in the evening with a word or glance of ambiguous

meaning, thanks to which it was to her that, for the next day or so, my

desire would turn.

It strayed among them all the more voluptuously in that upon those

volatile faces a comparative fixation of features had now begun, and had

been carried far enough for the eye to distinguish--even if it were to

change yet further--each malleable and floating effigy. To the

differences that existed among them there was doubtless very little that

corresponded in the no less marked differences in the length and breadth

of those features, any of which might, perhaps, dissimilar as the girls

appeared, almost have been lifted bodily from one face and imposed at

random upon any other. But our knowledge of faces is not mathematical.

In the first place, it does not begin with the measurement of the parts,

it takes as its starting-point an expression, a combination of the

whole. In Andrée, for instance, the fineness of her gentle eyes seemed

to go with the thinness of her nose, as slender as a mere curve which

one could imagine as having been traced in order to produce along a

single line the idea of delicacy divided higher up between the dual

smile of her twin gaze. A line equally fine was engraved in her hair,

pliant and deep as the line with which the wind furrows the sand. And in

her it must have been hereditary; for the snow white hair of Andrée's

mother was driven in the same way, forming here a swelling, there a

depression like a snowdrift that rises or sinks according to the

irregularities of the soil. Certainly, when compared with the fine

delineation of Andrée's, Rosemonde's nose seemed to present broad

surfaces, like a high tower raised upon massive foundations. Albeit

expression suffices to make us believe in enormous differences between

things that are separated by infinitely little--albeit that infinitely

little may by itself create an expression that is absolutely unique, an

individuality--it was not only the infinitely little of its lines and

the originality of its expression that made each of these faces appear

irreducible to terms of any other. Between my friends' faces their

colouring established a separation wider still, not so much by the

varied beauty of the tones with which it provided them, so contrasted

that I felt when I looked at Rosemonde--flooded with a sulphurous rose

colour, with the further contrast of the greenish light in her eyes--and

then at Andrée--whose white cheeks received such an austere distinction

from her black hair--the same kind of pleasure as if I had been looking

alternately at a geranium growing by a sunlit sea and a camellia in the

night; but principally because the infinitely little differences of

their lines were enlarged out of all proportion, the relations between

one and another surface entirely changed by this new element of colour

which, in addition to being a dispenser of tints, is great at restoring,

or rather at altering dimensions. So that faces which were perhaps

constructed on not dissimilar lines, according as they were lighted by

the flaming torch of an auburn poll or high complexion, or by the white

glimmer of a dull pallor, grew sharper or broader, became something

else, like those properties used in the Russian ballet, consisting

sometimes, when they are seen in the light of day, of a mere disc of

paper, out of which the genius of a Bakst, according to the blood-red or

moonlit effect in which he plunges his stage, makes a hard incrustation,

like a turquoise on a palace wall, or a swooning softness, as of a

Bengal rose in an eastern garden. And so when acquiring a knowledge of

faces we take careful measurements, but as painters, not as surveyors.

So it was with Albertine as with her friends. On certain days, slim,

with grey cheeks, a sullen air, a violet transparency falling obliquely

from her such as we notice sometimes on the sea, she seemed to be

feeling the sorrows of exile. On other days her face, more sleek, caught

and glued my desires to its varnished surface and prevented them from

going any farther; unless I caught a sudden glimpse of her from the

side, for her dull cheeks, like white wax on the surface, were visibly

pink beneath, which made me anxious to kiss them, to reach that

different tint which thus avoided my touch. At other times happiness

bathed her cheeks with a clarity so mobile that the skin, grown fluid

and vague, gave passage to a sort of stealthy and subcutaneous gaze,

which made it appear to be of another colour but not of another

substance than her eyes; sometimes, instinctively, when one looked at

her face punctuated with tiny brown marks among which floated what were

simply two larger, bluer stains, it was like looking at the egg of a

goldfinch--or often like an opalescent agate cut and polished in two

places only, where, from the heart of the brown stone, shone like the

transparent wings of a sky-blue butterfly her eyes, those features in

which the flesh becomes a mirror and gives us the illusion that it

allows us, more than through the other parts of the body, to approach

the soul. But most often of all she shewed more colour, and was then

more animated; sometimes the only pink thing in her white face was the

tip of her nose, as finely pointed as that of a mischievous kitten with

which one would have liked to stop and play; sometimes her cheeks were

so glossy that one's glance slipped, as over the surface of a miniature,

over their pink enamel, which was made to appear still more delicate,

more private, by the enclosing though half-opened case of her black

hair; or it might happen that the tint of her cheeks had deepened to the

violet shade of the red cyclamen, and, at times, even, when she was

flushed or feverish, with a suggestion of unhealthiness which lowered my

desire to something more sensual and made her glance expressive of

something more perverse and unwholesome, to the deep purple of certain

roses, a red that was almost black; and each of these Albertines was

different, as in every fresh appearance of the dancer whose colours,

form, character, are transmuted according to the innumerably varied play

of a projected limelight. It was perhaps because they were so different,

the persons whom I used to contemplate in her at this period, that later

on I became myself a different person, corresponding to the particular

Albertine to whom my thoughts had turned; a jealous, an indifferent, a

voluptuous, a melancholy, a frenzied person, created anew not merely by

the accident of what memory had risen to the surface, but in proportion

also to the strength of the belief that was lent to the support of one

and the same memory by the varying manner in which I appreciated it. For

this is the point to which we must always return, to these beliefs with

which most of the time we are quite unconsciously filled, but which for

all that are of more importance to our happiness than is the average

person whom we see, for it is through them that we see him, it is they

that impart his momentary greatness to the person seen. To be quite

accurate I ought to give a different name to each of the 'me's' who were

to think about Albertine in time to come; I ought still more to give a

different name to each of the Albertines who appeared before me, never

the same, like--called by me simply and for the sake of convenience "the

sea"--those seas that succeeded one another on the beach, in front of

which, a nymph likewise, she stood apart. But above all, in the same way

as, in telling a story (though to far greater purpose here), one

mentions what the weather was like on such and such a day, I ought

always to give its name to the belief that, on any given day on which I

saw Albertine, was reigning in my soul, creating its atmosphere, the

appearance of people like that of seas being dependent on those clouds,

themselves barely visible, which change the colour of everything by

their concentration, their mobility, their dissemination, their

flight--like that cloud which Elstir had rent one evening by not

introducing me to these girls, with whom he had stopped to talk,

whereupon their forms, as they moved away, had suddenly increased in

beauty--a cloud that had formed again a few days later when I did get to

know the girls, veiling their brightness, interposing itself frequently

between my eyes and them, opaque and soft, like Virgil's Leucothea.

No doubt, all their faces had assumed quite new meanings for me since

the manner in which they were to be read had been to some extent

indicated to me by their talk, talk to which I could ascribe a value all

the greater in that, by questioning them, I could prompt it whenever I

chose, could vary it like an experimenter who seeks by corroborative

proofs to establish the truth of his theory. And it is, after all, as

good a way as any of solving the problem of existence to approach near

enough to the things that have appeared to us from a distance to be

beautiful and mysterious, to be able to satisfy ourselves that they have

neither mystery nor beauty. It is one of the systems of hygiene among

which we are at liberty to choose our own, a system which is perhaps not

to be recommended too strongly, but it gives us a certain tranquillity

with which to spend what remains of life, and also--since it enables us

to regret nothing, by assuring us that we have attained to the best, and

that the best was nothing out of the common--with which to resign

ourselves to death.

I had now substituted, in the brains of these girls, for their supposed

contempt for chastity, their memories of daily "incidents", honest

principles, liable, it might be, to relaxation, but principles which had

hitherto kept unscathed the children who had acquired them in their own

respectable homes. And yet, when one has been mistaken from the start,

even in trifling details, when an error of assumption or recollection

makes one seek for the author of a malicious slander, or for the place

where one has lost something, in the wrong direction, it frequently

happens that one discovers one's error only to substitute for it not the

truth but a fresh error. I drew, so far as their manner of life and the

proper way to behave with them went, all the possible conclusions from

the word "Innocence" which I had read, in talking familiarly with them,

upon their faces. But perhaps I had been reading carelessly, with the

inaccuracy born of a too rapid deciphering, and it was no more written

there than was the name of Jules Ferry on the programme of the

performance at which I had heard Berma for the first time, an omission

which had not prevented me from maintaining to M. de Norpois that Jules

Ferry, beyond any possibility of doubt, was a person who wrote

curtain-raisers.

No matter which it might be of my friends of the little band, was not

inevitably the face that I had last seen the only face that I could

recall, since, of our memories with respect to a person, the mind

eliminates everything that does not agree with our immediate purpose of

our daily relations (especially if those relations are quickened with an

element of love which, ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that

is about to come)? That purpose allows the chain of spent days to slip

away, holding on only to the very end of it, often of a quite different

metal from the links that, have vanished in the night, and in the

journey which we make through life, counts as real only in the place in

which we at any given moment are. But all those earliest impressions,

already so remote, could not find, against the blunting process that

assailed them day after day, any remedy in my memory; during the long

hours which I spent in talking, eating, playing with these girls, I did

not remember even that they were the same ruthless, sensual virgins whom

I had seen, as in a fresco, file past between me and the sea.

Geographers, archaeologists may conduct us over Calypso's island, may

excavate the Palace of Minos. Only Calypso becomes then nothing more

than a woman, Minos than a king with no semblance of divinity. Even the

good and bad qualities which history teaches us to have been the

attributes of those quite real personages, often differ widely from

those which we had ascribed to the fabulous beings who bore the same

names as they. Thus had there faded and vanished all the lovely

mythology of Ocean which I had composed in those first days. But it is

not altogether immaterial that we do succeed, at any rate now and then,

in spending our time in familiar intercourse with what we have thought

to be unattainable and have longed to possess. In our later dealings

with people whom at first we found disagreeable there persists always,

even among the artificial pleasure which we have come at length to enjoy

in their society, the lingering taint of the defects which they have

succeeded in hiding. But, in relations such as I was now having with

Albertine and her friends, the genuine pleasure which was there at the

start leaves that fragrance which no amount of skill can impart to

hot-house fruits, to grapes that have not ripened in the sun. The

supernatural creatures which for a little time they had been to me still

introduced, even without any intention on my part, a miraculous element

into the most common-place dealings that I might have with them, or

rather prevented such dealings from ever becoming common-place at all.

My desire had sought so ardently to learn the significance of the eyes

which now knew and smiled to see me, but whose glances on the first day

had crossed mine like rays from another universe; it had distributed so

generously, so carefully, so minutely, colour and fragrance over the

carnation surfaces of these girls who now, outstretched on the

cliff-top, were simply offering me sandwiches or guessing riddles, that

often, in the afternoon, while I lay there among them, like those

painters who seek to match the grandeurs of antiquity in modern life,

give to a woman cutting her toe-nail the nobility of the _Spinario_, or,

like Rubens, make goddesses out of women whom they know, to people some

mythological scene; at those lovely forms, dark and fair, so dissimilar

in type, scattered around me in the grass, I would gaze without emptying

them, perhaps, of all the mediocre contents with which my every day

experience had filled them, and at the same time without expressly

recalling their heavenly origin, as if, like young Hercules or young

Telemachus, I had been set to play amid a band of nymphs.

Then the concerts ended, the bad weather began, my friends left Balbec;

not all at once, like the swallows, but all in the same week. Albertine

was the first to go, abruptly, without any of her friends understanding,

then or afterwards, why she had returned suddenly to Paris whither

neither her work nor any amusement summoned her. "She said neither why

nor wherefore, and with that she left!" muttered Françoise, who, for

that matter, would have liked us to leave as well. We were, she thought,

inconsiderate towards the staff, now greatly reduced in number, but

retained on account of the few visitors who were still staying on, and

towards the manager who was "just eating up money." It was true that the

hotel, which would very soon be closed for the winter, had long since

seen most of its patrons depart, but never had it been so attractive.

This view was not shared by the manager; from end to end of the rooms in

which we sat shivering, and at the doors of which no page now stood on

guard, he paced the corridors, wearing a new frock coat, so well tended

by the hairdresser that his insipid face appeared to be made of some

composition in which, for one part of flesh, there were three of

cosmetics, incessantly changing his neckties. (These refinements cost

less than having the place heated and keeping on the staff, just as a

man who is no longer able to subscribe ten thousand francs to a charity

can still parade his generosity without inconvenience to himself by

tipping the boy who brings him a telegram with five.) He appeared to be

inspecting the empty air, to be seeking to give, by the smartness of his

personal appearance, a provisional splendour to the desolation that

could now be felt in this hotel where the season had not been good, and

walked like the ghost of a monarch who returns to haunt the ruins of

what was once his palace. He was particularly annoyed when the little

local railway company, finding the supply of passengers inadequate,

discontinued its trains until the following spring. "What is lacking

here," said the manager, "is the means of commotion." In spite of the

deficit which his books shewed, he was making plans for the future on a

lavish scale. And as he was, after all, capable of retaining an exact

memory of fine language when it was directly applicable to the

hotel-keeping industry and had the effect of enhancing its importance:

"I was not adequately supported, although in the dining-room I had an

efficient squad," he explained; "but the pages left something to be

desired. You will see, next year, what a phalanx I shall collect." In

the meantime the suspension of the services of the B. C. B. obliged him

to send for letters and occasionally to dispatch visitors in a light

cart. I would often ask leave to sit by the driver, and in this way I

managed to be out in all weathers, as in the winter that I had spent at

Combray.

Sometimes, however, the driving rain kept my grandmother and me, the

Casino being closed, in rooms almost completely deserted, as in the

lowest hold of a ship when a storm is raging; and there, day by day, as

in the course of a sea-voyage, a new person from among those in whose

company we had spent three months without getting to know them, the

chief magistrate from Caen, the leader of the Cherbourg bar, an American

lady and her daughters, came up to us, started conversation, discovered

some way of making the time pass less slowly, revealed some social

accomplishment, taught us a new game, invited us to drink tea or to

listen to music, to meet them at a certain hour, to plan together some

of those diversions which contain the true secret of pleasure-giving,

which is to aim not at giving pleasure but simply at helping us to pass

the time of our boredom, in a word, formed with us, at the end of our

stay at Balbec, ties of friendship which, in a day or two, their

successive departures from the place would sever. I even made the

acquaintance of the rich young man, of one of his pair of aristocratic

friends and of the actress, who had reappeared for a few days; but their

little society was composed now of three persons only, the other friend

having returned to Paris. They asked me to come out to dinner with them

at their restaurant. I think, they were just as well pleased that I did

not accept. But they had given the invitation in the most friendly way

imaginable, and albeit it came actually from the rich young man, since

the others were only his guests, as the friend who was staying with him,

the Marquis Maurice de Vaudémont, came of a very good family indeed,

instinctively the actress, in asking me whether I would not come, said,

to flatter my vanity: "Maurice will be so pleased."

And when in the hall of the hotel I met them all three together, it was

M. de Vaudémont (the rich young man effacing himself) who said to me:

"Won't you give us the pleasure of dining with us?"

On the whole I had derived very little benefit from Balbec, but this

only strengthened my desire to return there. It seemed to me that I had

not stayed there long enough. This was not what my friends at home were

thinking, who wrote to ask whether I meant to stay there for the rest of

my life. And when I saw that it was the name "Balbec" which they were

obliged to put on the envelope--just as my window looked out not over a

landscape or a street but on to the plains of the sea, as I heard

through the night its murmur to which I had before going to sleep

entrusted my ship of dreams, I had the illusion that this life of

promiscuity with the waves must effectively, without my knowledge,

pervade me with the notion of their charm, like those lessons which one

learns by heart while one is asleep.

The manager offered to reserve better rooms for me next year, but I had

now become attached to mine, into which I went without ever noticing the

scent of flowering grasses, while my mind, which had once found such

difficulty in rising to fill its space had come now to take its

measurements so exactly that I was obliged to submit it to a reverse

process when I had to sleep in Paris, in my own room, the ceiling of

which was low.

It was high time, indeed, to leave Balbec, for the cold and damp had

become too penetrating for us to stay any longer in a hotel which had

neither fireplaces in the rooms nor a central furnace. Moreover, I

forgot almost immediately these last weeks of our stay. What my mind's

eye did almost invariably see when I thought of Balbec were the hours

which, every morning during the fine weather, as I was going out in the

afternoon with Albertine and her friends, my grandmother, following the

doctor's orders, insisted on my spending lying down, with the room

darkened. The manager gave instructions that no noise was to be made on

my landing, and came up himself to see that they were obeyed. Because

the light outside was so strong, I kept drawn for as long as possible

the big violet curtains which had adopted so hostile an attitude towards

me the first evening. But as, in spite of the pins with which, so that

the light should not enter, Françoise fastened them every night, pins

which she alone knew how to unfasten; as in spite of the rugs, the red

cretonne table-cover, the various fabrics collected here and there which

she fitted in to her defensive scheme, she never succeeded in making

them meet exactly, the darkness was not complete, and they allowed to

spill over the carpet as it were a scarlet shower of anemone-petals,

among which I could not resist the temptation to plunge my bare feet for

a moment. And on the wall which faced the window and so was partially

lighted, a cylinder of gold with no visible support was placed

vertically and moved slowly along like the pillar of fire which went

before the Hebrews in the desert. I went back to bed; obliged to taste

without moving, in imagination only, and all at once, the pleasures of

games, bathing, walks which the morning prompted, joy made my heart beat

thunderingly like a machine set going at full speed but fixed to the

ground, which can spend its energy only by turning upon its own axis.

I knew that my friends were on the "front", but I did not see them as

they passed before the links of the sea's uneven chain, far at the back

of which, and nestling amid its bluish peaks like an Italian citadel,

one could occasionally, in a clear moment, make out the little town of

Rivebelle, drawn in minutest detail by the sun. I did not see my

friends, but (while there mounted to my belvedere the shout of the

newsboy, the "journalists" as Françoise used to call them, the shouts

of the bathers and of children at play, punctuating like the cries of

sea-birds the sound of the gently breaking waves) I guessed their

presence, I heard their laughter enveloped like the laughter of the

Nereids in the smooth tide of sound that rose to my ears. "We looked

up," said Albertine in the evening, "to see if you were coming down. But

your shutters were still closed when the concert began." At ten o'clock,

sure enough, it broke out beneath my windows. In the intervals in the

blare of the instruments, if the tide were high, would begin again,

slurred and continuous, the gliding surge of a wave which seemed to

enfold the notes of the violin in its crystal spirals and to be spraying

its foam over echoes of a submarine music. I grew impatient because no

one had yet come with my things, so that I might rise and dress. Twelve

o'clock struck, Françoise arrived at last. And for months on end, in

this Balbec to which I had so looked forward because I imagined it only

as battered by the storm and buried in fogs, the weather had been so

dazzling and so unchanging that when she came to open the window I could

always, without once being wrong, expect to see the same patch of

sunlight folded in the corner of the outer wall, of an unalterable

colour which was less moving as a sign of summer than depressing as the

colour of a lifeless and composed enamel. And after Françoise had

removed her pins from the mouldings of the window-frame, taken down her

various cloths, and drawn back the curtains, the summer day which she

disclosed seemed as dead, as immemorially ancient as would have been a

sumptuously attired dynastic mummy from which our old servant had done

no more than precautionally unwind the linen wrappings before displaying

it to my gaze, embalmed in its vesture of gold.

THE END