In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV of 4 by Marcel Proust

  My life with Albertine, a life devoid of keen pleasures—that is to say of keen pleasures that I could feel—that life which I intended to change at any moment, choosing a moment of calm, became suddenly necessary to me once more when, by these words of Mamma’s, it seemed to be threatened. I told my mother that her words would delay for perhaps two months the decision for which they asked, which otherwise I would have reached before the end of that week. In order not to sadden me, Mamma laughed at this instantaneous effect of her advice, and promised not to raise the subject again so as not to prevent the rebirth of my good intention. But, since my grandmother’s death, whenever Mamma gave way to mirth, the incipient laugh would be cut short and would end in an almost heartbroken expression of sorrow, whether from remorse at having been able for an instant to forget, or else from the recrudescence which this brief moment of forgetfulness had brought to her painful obsession. But to the thoughts aroused in her by the memory of my grandmother, a memory that was rooted in my mother’s mind, I felt that on this occasion there were added others relating to myself, to what my mother dreaded as the sequel of my intimacy with Albertine; an intimacy which she dared not, however, hinder in view of what I had just told her. But she did not appear convinced that I was not mistaken. She remembered all the years in which my grandmother and she had refrained from speaking to me about my work and the need for a healthier way of life which, I used to say, the agitation into which their exhortations threw me alone prevented me from beginning, and which, notwithstanding their obedient silence, I had failed to pursue.

  After dinner the car would bring Albertine back; there was still a glimmer of daylight; the air was less warm, but after a scorching day we both dreamed of delicious coolness; then to our fevered eyes the narrow slip of moon would appear at first (as on the evening when I had gone to the Princesse de Guermantes’s and Albertine had telephoned me) like the delicate rind, then like the cool section of a fruit which an invisible knife was beginning to peel in the sky. Sometimes it was I who would go to fetch my beloved, a little later in that case; she would be waiting for me under the arcade of the market at Maineville. At first I could not make her out; I would begin to fear that she might not be coming, that she had misunderstood me. Then I would see her, in her white blouse with blue spots, spring into the car by my side with the light bound of a young animal rather than a girl. And it was like a dog too that she would begin to caress me interminably. When night had completely fallen and, as the manager of the hotel remarked to me, the sky was all “studied” with stars, if we did not go for a drive in the forest with a bottle of champagne, then, heedless of the late strollers on the faintly lighted esplanade, who in any case could not have seen anything a yard away on the dark sand, we would stretch out in the shelter of the dunes; that same body whose suppleness contained all the feminine, marine and sportive grace of the girls whom I had seen that first time against the horizon of the waves, I held pressed against my own, beneath the same rug, by the edge of the motionless sea divided by a tremulous path of light; and we listened to it with the same untiring pleasure, whether it held back its breath, suspended for so long that one thought the reflux would never come, or whether at last it gasped out at our feet the long-awaited murmur. Finally I would take Albertine back to Parville. When we reached her house, we were obliged to break off our kisses for fear that someone might see us; not wishing to go to bed, she would return with me to Balbec, from whence I would take her back for the last time to Parville; the chauffeurs of those early days of the motor-car were people who went to bed at all hours. And indeed I would return to Balbec only with the first dews of morning, alone this time, but still surrounded with the presence of my beloved, gorged with an inexhaustible provision of kisses. On my table I would find a telegram or a postcard. Albertine again! She had written them at Quetteholme when I had gone off by myself in the car, to tell me that she was thinking of me. I would re-read them as I got into bed. Then, above the curtains, I would glimpse the bright streak of the daylight and would say to myself that we must be in love with one another after all, since we had spent the night in one another’s arms. When, next morning, I caught sight of Albertine on the front, I was so afraid of her telling me that she was not free that day, and could not accede to my request that we should go out together, that I would delay it for as long as possible. I would be all the more uneasy since she had a cold, preoccupied air; people were passing whom she knew; doubtless she had made plans for the afternoon from which I was excluded. I would gaze at her, I would gaze at that rosy face of Albertine’s, tantalising me with the enigma of her intentions, the unknown decision which was to create the happiness or misery of my afternoon. It was a whole state of soul, a whole future existence that had assumed before my eyes the allegorical and fateful form of a girl. And when at last I made up my mind, when, with the most indifferent air that I could muster, I asked: “Are we going out together now, and again this evening?” and she replied: “With the greatest pleasure,” then the sudden replacement, in the rosy face, of my long uneasiness by a delicious sense of ease would make even more precious to me those forms to which I was perpetually indebted for the sense of well-being and relief that we feel after a storm has broken. I repeated to myself: “How sweet she is, what an adorable creature!” in an excitement less fertile than that caused by intoxication, scarcely more profound than that of friendship, but far superior to that of social life. We would cancel our order for the car only on the days when there was a dinner-party at the Verdurins’ and on those when, Albertine not being free to go out with me, I took the opportunity to inform anybody who wished to see me that I should be remaining at Balbec. I gave Saint-Loup permission to come on these days, but on these days only. For on one occasion when he had arrived unexpectedly, I had preferred to forgo the pleasure of seeing Albertine rather than run the risk of his meeting her, than endanger the state of happy calm in which I had dwelt for some time and see my jealousy revive. And my mind had not been set at rest until after Saint-Loup had gone. Therefore he made it a rule, regretfully but scrupulously observed, never to come to Balbec unless summoned there by me. In the past, when I thought with longing of the hours that Mme de Guermantes spent in his company, how I had valued the privilege of seeing him! People never cease to change place in relation to ourselves. In the imperceptible but eternal march of the world, we regard them as motionless, in a moment of vision too brief for us to perceive the motion that is sweeping them on. But we have only to select in our memory two pictures taken of them at different moments, close enough together however for them not to have altered in themselves—perceptibly, that is to say—and the difference between the two pictures is a measure of the displacement that they have undergone in relation to us. Robert alarmed me dreadfully by speaking to me of the Verdurins, for I was afraid that he might ask me to take him there, which would have been enough, because of the jealousy I should constantly feel, to spoil all the pleasure that I found in going there with Albertine. But fortunately he assured me that, on the contrary, the one thing he desired above all others was not to know them. “No,” he said to me, “I find that sort of clerical atmosphere maddening.” I did not at first understand the application of the adjective “clerical” to the Verdurins, but the sequel to his remark clarified his meaning, betraying his concessions to those fashions in words which one is often astonished to see adopted by intelligent men. “I mean the sort of circles,” he said, “where people form a tribe, a religious order, a chapel. You aren’t going to tell me that they’re not a little sect; they’re all honey to the people who belong, no words bad enough for those who don’t. The question is not, as for Hamlet, to be or not to be, but to belong or not to belong. You belong, my uncle Charlus belongs. But I can’t help it, I’ve never gone in for that sort of thing, it isn’t my fault.”

  I need hardly say that the rule I had imposed upon Saint-Loup, never to come and see me unless I had expressly invited him, I promulgated no less strictly in the case of the various pe
rsons with whom I had gradually made friends at La Raspelière, Féterne, Montsurvent, and elsewhere; and when I saw from the hotel the smoke of the three o’clock train which, in the anfractuosity of the cliffs of Parville, left a stationary plume which long remained clinging to the flank of the green slopes, I had no doubts as to the identity of the visitor who was coming to tea with me and was still, like a classical deity, concealed from me beneath that little cloud. I am obliged to confess that this person whose visit I had authorised in advance was hardly ever Saniette, and I have often reproached myself for this omission. But Saniette’s own consciousness of being a bore (even more so, naturally, when he came to pay a call than when he told a story) had the effect that, although he was more learned, more intelligent and better than most people, it seemed impossible to feel in his company, not only any pleasure, but anything save an almost intolerable irritation which spoiled one’s whole afternoon. Probably, if Saniette had frankly admitted this boredom which he was afraid of causing, one would not have dreaded his visits. Boredom is one of the least of the evils that we have to endure, and his boringness existed perhaps only in the imagination of other people, or had been inoculated into him by some process of suggestion which had taken hold on his agreeable modesty. But he was so anxious not to let it be seen that he was not sought after that he dared not propose himself. Certainly he was right not to behave like the people who are so glad to be able to raise their hats in a public place that, not having seen you for years and catching sight of you in a box at the theatre with smart people whom they do not know, they give you a furtive but resounding good-evening on the pretext of the pleasure and delight they have felt on seeing you, on realising that you are going about again, that you are looking well, etc. But Saniette went to the other extreme. He might, at Mme Verdurin’s or in the little train, have told me that he would have great pleasure in coming to see me at Balbec were he not afraid of disturbing me. Such a suggestion would not have alarmed me. On the contrary, he offered nothing, but, with a tortured expression on his face and a stare as indestructible as a fired enamel, into the composition of which, however, there entered, together with a passionate desire to see one—unless he found someone else who was more entertaining—the determination not to let this desire be manifest, would say to me with a casual air: “You don’t happen to know what you will be doing in the next few days, because I shall probably be somewhere in the neighbourhood of Balbec? Not that it makes the slightest difference, I just thought I’d ask.” This casual air deceived nobody, and the reverse signs whereby we express our feelings by their opposites are so clearly legible that one asks oneself how there can still be people who say, for instance: “I have so many invitations that I don’t know which way to turn” to conceal the fact that they have been invited nowhere. But what was more, this casual air, probably on account of the dubious elements that had gone to form it, gave you, what the fear of boredom or a frank admission of the desire to see you would never have done, the sort of discomfort, of repulsion, which in the category of relations of simple social courtesy is the equivalent of what, in amatory relations, is provoked by the lover’s disguised offer, to a lady who does not return his love, to see her next day, while protesting that he does not greatly care—or not even that offer but an attitude of sham coldness. There emanated at once from Saniette’s person an indefinable aura which made you answer him in the tenderest of tones: “No, unfortunately, this week, I must explain to you . . .” And I allowed to call upon me instead people who were a long way his inferiors but whose eyes were not filled with melancholy or their mouths twisted with bitter regret as his were at the thought of all the visits which he longed, while saying nothing about them, to pay to various people. Unfortunately, Saniette rarely failed to meet in the “crawler” the guest who was coming to see me, if indeed the latter had not said to me at the Verdurins’: “Don’t forget I’m coming to see you on Thursday,” the very day on which I had just told Saniette that I should not be at home. So that he came in the end to imagine life as filled with entertainments arranged behind his back, if not actually at his expense. On the other hand, as none of us is ever all of a piece, this most discreet of men was morbidly tactless and indiscreet. On the one occasion on which he happened to come and see me uninvited, a letter, I forget from whom, had been left lying on my table. After the first few minutes, I saw that he was paying only the vaguest attention to what I was saying. The letter, of whose provenance he knew absolutely nothing, fascinated him and at any moment I expected his glittering eyeballs to detach themselves from their sockets and fly to the letter, insignificant in itself, which his curiosity had magnetised. He was like a bird irresistibly drawn towards a snake. Finally he could restrain himself no longer. He began by altering its position, as though he were tidying up my room; then, this not sufficing him, he picked it up, turned it over, turned it back again, as though mechanically. Another form of his tactlessness was that once he had fastened himself on to you he could not tear himself away. As I was feeling unwell that day, I asked him to go back by the next train, in half an hour’s time. He did not doubt that I was feeling unwell, but replied: “I shall stay for an hour and a quarter, and then I shall go.” Since then I have regretted that I did not tell him to come and see me whenever I was free. Who knows? Possibly I might have exorcised his ill fate, and other people would have invited him for whom he would immediately have deserted me, so that my invitations would have had the twofold advantage of restoring him to happiness and ridding me of his company.

  On the days following those on which I had been “at home,” I naturally did not expect any visitors and the motor-car would come again to fetch Albertine and me. And when we returned, Aimé, on the lowest step of the hotel, could not help looking, with passionate, curious, greedy eyes, to see what tip I was giving the chauffeur. However tightly I enclosed my coin or note in my clenched fist, Aimé’s gaze tore my fingers apart. He would turn his head away a moment later, for he was discreet and well-mannered, and indeed was himself content with relatively modest remuneration. But the money that another person received aroused in him an irrepressible curiosity and made his mouth water. During these brief moments, he had the attentive, feverish air of a boy reading a Jules Verne novel, or of a diner seated at a neighbouring table in a restaurant who, seeing the waiter carving you a pheasant to which he himself either cannot or will not treat himself, abandons for an instant his serious thoughts to fasten upon the bird eyes lit with a smile of love and longing.

  Thus, day after day, these excursions in the motor-car followed one another. But once, as I was going up to my room, the lift-boy said to me: “That gentleman has been, he gave me a message for you.” The lift-boy uttered these words in a hoarse croak, coughing and expectorating in my face. “I haven’t half got a cold!” he went on, as though I were incapable of perceiving this for myself. “The doctor says it’s whooping-cough,” and he began once more to cough and expectorate over me. “Don’t tire yourself trying to talk,” I said to him with an air of kindly concern, which was feigned. I was afraid of catching the whooping-cough which, with my tendency to choking spasms, would have been a serious matter for me. But he made it a point of honour, like a virtuoso who refuses to go sick, to go on talking and spitting all the time. “No, it doesn’t matter,” he said (“Perhaps not to you,” I thought, “but to me it does”). “Besides, I shall be returning to Paris soon” (“So much the better, provided he doesn’t give it to me first”). “They say Paris is very superb,” he went on. “It must be even more superb than here or Monte-Carlo, although some of the pages and some of the guests, in fact even head waiters who’ve been to Monte-Carlo for the season have often told me that Paris was not so superb as Monte-Carlo. Perhaps they were being stupid, you’ve got to have your wits about you to be a head waiter—taking all the orders, reserving tables, you need quite a brain. I’ve heard it said that it’s even tougher than writing plays and books.”