Why had she not made her admission complete, why had she then invented that inconceivable tale? Perhaps however it was partly my fault that she had never, despite all my entreaties which were powerless against her denial, been willing to say to me: “I have those tastes.” It was perhaps partly my fault because at Balbec, on the day when, after Mme. de Cambremer’s call, I had had my first explanation with Albertine, and when I was so far from imagining that she could have had, in any case, anything more than an unduly passionate friendship with Andrée, I had expressed with undue violence my disgust at that kind of moral lapse, had condemned it in too categorical a fashion. I could not recall whether Albertine had blushed when I had innocently expressed my horror of that sort of thing, I could not recall it, for it is often only long afterwards that we would give anything to know what attitude a person adopted at a moment when we were paying no attention to it, an attitude which, later on, when we think again of our conversation, would elucidate a poignant difficulty.
But in our memory there is a blank, there is no trace of it. And very often we have not paid sufficient attention, at the actual moment, to the things which might even then have seemed to us important, we have not properly heard a sentence, have not noticed a gesture, or else we have forgotten them. And when later on, eager to discover a truth, we reascend from deduction to deduction, turning over our memory like a sheaf of written evidence, when we arrive at that sentence, at that gesture, which it is impossible to recall, we begin again a score of times the same process, but in vain: the road goes no farther. Had she blushed? I did not know whether she had blushed, but she could not have failed to hear, and the memory of my speech had brought her to a halt later on when perhaps she had been on the point of making her confession to me. And now she no longer existed anywhere, I might scour the earth from pole to pole without finding Albertine. The reality which had closed over her was once more unbroken, had obliterated every trace of the creature who had sunk into its depths.
She was no more now than a name, like that Mme. de Charlus of whom the people who had known her said with indifference: “She was charming.” But I was unable to conceive for more than an instant the existence of this reality of which Albertine had no knowledge, for in myself my mistress existed too vividly, in myself in whom every sentiment, every thought bore some reference to her life. Perhaps if she had known, she would have been touched to see that her lover had not forgotten her, now that her own life was finished, and would have been moved by things which in the past had left her indifferent. But as we would choose to refrain from infidelities, however secret they might be, so fearful are we that she whom we love is not refraining from them, I was alarmed by the thought that if the dead do exist anywhere, my grandmother was as well aware of my oblivion as Albertine of my remembrance. And when all is said, even in the case of a single dead person, can we be sure that the joy which we should feel in learning that she knows certain things would compensate for our alarm at the thought that she knows all; and, however agonising the sacrifice, would we not sometimes abstain from keeping after their death as friends those whom we have loved, from the fear of having them also as judges?
My jealous curiosity as to what Albertine might have done was unbounded. I suborned any number of women from whom I learned nothing. If this curiosity was so keen, it was because people do not die at once for us, they remain bathed in a sort of aura of life in which there is no true immortality but which means that they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were travelling abroad. This is a thoroughly pagan survival. Conversely, when we have ceased to love her, the curiosity which the person arouses dies before she herself is dead. Thus I would no longer have taken any step to find out with whom Gilberte had been strolling on a certain evening in the Champs-Elysées. Now I felt that these curiosities were absolutely alike, had no value in themselves, were incapable of lasting, but I continued to sacrifice everything to the cruel satisfaction of this transient curiosity, albeit I knew in advance that my enforced separation from Albertine, by the fact of her death, would lead me to the same indifference as had resulted from my deliberate separation from Gilberte.
If she could have known what was about to happen, she would have
stayed with me. But this meant no more than that, once she saw herself
dead, she would have preferred, in my company, to remain alive. Simply
in view of the contradiction that it implied, such a supposition was
absurd. But it was not innocuous, for in imagining how glad Albertine
would be, if she could know, if she could retrospectively understand,
to come back to me, I saw her before me, I wanted to kiss her; and
alas, it was impossible, she would never come back, she was dead. My
imagination sought for her in the sky, through the nights on which we
had gazed at it when still together; beyond that moonlight which she
loved, I tried to raise up to her my affection so that it might be a
consolation to her for being no longer alive, and this love for a
being so remote was like a religion, my thoughts rose towards her like
prayers. Desire is very powerful, it engenders belief; I had believed
that Albertine would not leave me because I desired that she might
not. Because I desired it, I began to believe that she was not dead; I
took to reading books upon table-turning, I began to believe in the
possibility of the immortality of the soul. But that did not suffice
me. I required that, after my own death, I should find her again in
her body, as though eternity were like life. Life, did I say! I was
more exacting still. I would have wished not to be deprived for ever
by death of the pleasures of which however it is not alone in robbing
us. For without her death they would eventually have grown faint, they
had begun already to do so by the action of long-established habit, of
fresh curiosities. Besides, had she been alive, Albertine, even
physically, would gradually have changed, day by day I should have
adapted myself to that change. But my memory, calling up only detached
moments of her life, asked to see her again as she would already have
ceased to be, had she lived; what it required was a miracle which
would satisfy the natural and arbitrary limitations of memory which
cannot emerge from the past. With the simplicity of the old
theologians, I imagined her furnishing me not indeed with the
explanations which she might possibly have given me but, by a final
contradiction, with those that she had always refused me during her
life. And thus, her death being a sort of dream, my love would seem
to her an unlooked-for happiness; I saw in death only the convenience
and optimism of a solution which simplifies, which arranges
everything. Sometimes it was not so far off, it was not in another
world that I imagined our reunion. Just as in the past, when I knew
Gilberte only from playing with her in the Champs-Elysées, at home in
the evening I used to imagine that I was going to receive a letter
from her in which she would confess her love for me, that she was
coming into the room, so a similar force of desire, no more
embarrassed by the laws of nature which ran counter to it than on the
former occasion in the case of Gilberte, when after all it had not
been mistaken since it had had the last word, made me think now that I
was going to receive a message from Albertine, informing me that she
had indeed met with an accident while riding, but that for romantic
reasons (and as, after all, has sometimes happened with people whom we
have long believed to be dead) she had not wished me to hear of her
recovery and now, repentant, asked to be allowed to come and live with
me for ever. And, making quite clear to myself the nature of certain
harmless manias in people who otherwise appear sane, I felt coexisting
in myself the certainty that she was dead and the incessant hope that
I might see her come into the room,
I had not yet received any news from Aimé, albeit he must by now have reached Balbec.
No doubt my inquiry turned upon a secondary point, and one quite arbitrarily selected. If Albertine’s life had been really culpable, it must have contained many other things of far greater importance, which chance had not allowed me to touch, as it had allowed me that conversation about the wrapper, thanks to Albertine’s blushes. It was quite arbitrarily that I had been presented with that particular day, which many years later I was seeking to reconstruct. If Albertine had been a lover of women, there were thousands
