“Ah! If I had three hundred thousand francs a year!” or even if she expressed a bad but very transient thought, she could not have attached herself to it any longer than to the idea of going to Les Rochers, of which she had seen an engraving in my grandmother’s edition of Mme. de Sévigné, of meeting an old friend from the golf course, of going up in an aeroplane, of going to spend Christmas with her aunt, or of taking up painting again.
We returned home very late one evening while, here and there, by the roadside, a pair of red breeches pressed against a skirt revealed an amorous couple. Our carriage passed in through the Porte Maillot. For the monuments of Paris had been substituted, pure, linear, without depth, a drawing of the monuments of Paris, as though in an attempt to recall the appearance of a city that had been destroyed. But, round about this picture, there stood out so delicately the pale-blue mounting in which it was framed that one’s greedy eyes sought everywhere for a further trace of that delicious shade which was too sparingly measured out to them: the moon was shining. Albertine admired the moonlight. I dared not tell her that I would have admired it more if I had been alone, or in quest of a strange woman. I repeated to her poetry or passages of prose about moonlight, pointing out to her how from ‘silvery’ which it had been at one time, it had turned ‘blue’ in Chateaubriand, in the Victor Hugo of Eviradnus and La Fête chez Thérèse, to become in turn yellow and metallic in Baudelaire and Leconte de Lisle. Then, reminding her of the image that is used for the crescent moon at the end of Booz endormi, I repeated the whole of that poem to her. And so we came to the house. The fine weather that night made a leap forwards as the mercury in the thermometer darts upward. In the early-rising mornings of spring that followed, I could hear the tram-cars moving, through a cloud of perfumes, in an air with which the prevailing warmth became more and more blended until it reached the solidification and density of noon.
When the unctuous air had succeeded in varnishing with it and
isolating in it the scent of the wash-stand, the scent of the
wardrobe, the scent of the sofa, simply by the sharpness with which,
vertical and erect, they stood out in adjacent but distinct slices, in
a pearly chiaroscuro which added a softer glaze to the shimmer of the
curtains and the blue satin armchairs, I saw myself, not by a mere
caprice of my imagination, but because it was physically possible,
following in some new quarter of the suburbs, like that in which
Bloch’s house at Balbec was situated, the streets blinded by the sun,
and finding in them not the dull butchers’ shops and the white
freestone facings, but the country dining-room which I could reach in
no time, and the scents that I would find there on my arrival, that of
the bowl of cherries and apricots, the scent of cider, that of gruyère
cheese, held in suspense in the luminous congelation of shadow which
they delicately vein like the heart of an agate, while the knife-rests
of prismatic glass scatter rainbows athwart the room or paint the
waxcloth here and there with peacock-eyes. Like a wind that swells in
a regular progression, I heard with joy a motor-car beneath the
window. I smelt its odour of petrol. It may seem regrettable to the
over-sensitive (who are always materialists) for whom it spoils the
country, and to certain thinkers (materialists after their own fashion
also) who, believing in the importance of facts, imagine that man
would be happier, capable of higher flights of poetry, if his eyes
were able to perceive more colours, his nostrils to distinguish more
scents, a philosophical adaptation of the simple thought of those who
believe that life was finer when men wore, instead of the black coats
of to-day, sumptuous costumes. But to me (just as an aroma, unpleasant
perhaps in itself, of naphthaline and flowering grasses would have
thrilled me by giving me back the blue purity of the sea on the day of
my arrival at Balbec), this smell of petrol which, with the smoke from
the exhaust of the car, had so often melted into the pale azure, on
those scorching days when I used to drive from Saint-Jean de la Haise
to Gourville, as it had accompanied me on my excursions during those
summer afternoons when I had left Albertine painting, called into
blossom now on either side of me, for all that I was lying in my
darkened bedroom, cornflowers, poppies and red clover, intoxicated me
like a country scent, not circumscribed and fixed, like that which is
spread before the hawthorns and, retained in its unctuous and dense
elements, floats with a certain stability before the hedge, but like a
scent before which the roads took flight, the sun’s face changed,
castles came hurrying to meet me, the sky turned pale, force was
increased tenfold, a scent which was like a symbol of elastic motion
and power, and which revived the desire that I had felt at Balbec, to
enter the cage of steel and crystal, but this time not to go any
longer on visits to familiar houses with a woman whom I knew too well,
but to make love in new places with a woman unknown. A scent that was
accompanied at every moment by the horns of passing motors, which I
set to words like a military call: “Parisian, get up, get up, come out
and picnic in the country, and take a boat on the river, under the
trees, with a pretty girl; get up, get up!” And all these musings were
so agreeable that I congratulated myself upon the ‘stern decree’ which
prescribed that until I should have rung my bell, no ‘timid mortal,’
whether Françoise or Albertine, should dream of coming in to disturb
me ‘within this palace’ where
“… a terrible Majesty makes me all invisible To my subjects.”
But all of a sudden the scene changed; it was the memory, no longer of old impressions, but of an old desire, quite recently reawakened by the Fortuny gown in blue and gold, that spread itself before me, another spring, a spring not leafy at all but suddenly stripped, on the contrary, of its trees and flowers by the name that I had just uttered to myself: ‘Venice,’ a decanted spring, which is reduced to its essential qualities, and expresses the lengthening, the warming, the gradual maturing of its days by the progressive fermentation, not (this time) of an impure soil, but of a blue and virgin water, springlike without bud or blossom, which could answer the call of May only by gleaming facets, carved by that month, harmonising exactly with it in the radiant, unaltering nakedness of its dusky sapphire. And so, no more than the seasons to its unflowering inlets of the sea, do modern years bring any change to the gothic city; I knew it, I could not imagine it, but this was what I longed to contemplate with the same desire which long ago, when I was a boy, in the very ardour of my departure had shattered the strength necessary for the journey;
I wished to find myself face to face with my Venetian imaginings, to behold how that divided sea enclosed in its meanderings, like the streams of Ocean, an urbane and refined civilisation, but one that, isolated by their azure belt, had developed by itself, had had its own schools of painting and architecture, to admire that fabulous garden of fruits and birds in coloured stone, flowering in the midst of the sea which kept it refreshed, splashed with its tide against the base of the columns and, on the bold relief of the capitals, like a dark blue eye watching in the shadows, laid patches, which it kept perpetually moving, of light.
Yes, I must go, the time had come. Now that Albertine no longer appeared to be cross with me, the possession of her no longer seemed to me a treasure in exchange for which we are prepared to sacrifice every other. For we should have done so only to rid ourselves of a grief, an anxiety which were now appeased. We have succeeded in jumping through the calico hoop through which we thought for a moment that we should never be able to pass. We have lightened the storm, brought back the serenity of the smile. The agonising mystery of a hatred without any known cause, and perhaps without end, is dispelled. Henceforward we find ourselves once more face to face with the problem, momentarily thrust aside, of a happiness which we know to be impossible. Now that life with Albertine had become possible once again, I felt that I could derive nothing from it but misery, since she did not love me; better to part from her in the pleasant moment of her consent which I should prolong in memory.
Yes, this was the moment; I must make quite certain of the date on which Andrée was leaving Paris, use all my influence with Mme. Bon temps to make sure that at that moment Albertine should not be able to go either to Holland or to Montjouvain. It would fall to our lot, were we better able to analyse our loves, to see that often women rise in our estimation only because of the dead weight of men with whom we have to compete for them, although we can hardly bear the thought of that competition; the counterpoise removed, the charm of the woman declines. We have a painful and salutary example of this in
