It was indeed undesirable that the lady should be enabled thus to learn, indirectly, Albertine’s address. But I felt that it would be a waste of time to turn back for so small a matter, and that I should appear to be attaching too great an importance to it in the eyes of the idiotic and untruthful waitress. I decided, finally, that I should have to return there, in a week’s time, to make this request, and that it was a great bore, since one always forgot half the things that one had to say, to have to do even the simplest things in instalments. In this connexion, I cannot tell you how densely, now that I come to think of it, Albertine’s life was covered in a network of alternate, fugitive, often contradictory desires.
No doubt falsehood complicated this still further, for, as she retained no accurate memory of our conversations, when she had said to me: “Ah! That’s a pretty girl, if you like, and a good golfer,” and I had asked the girl’s name, she had answered with that detached, universal, superior air of which no doubt there is always enough and to spare, for every liar of this category borrows it for a moment when he does not wish to answer a question, and it never fails him: “Ah! That I don’t know” (with regret at her inability to enlighten me). “I never knew her name, I used to see her on the golf course, but I didn’t know what she was called”;–if, a month later, I said to her: “Albertine, you remember that pretty girl you mentioned to me, who plays golf so well.” “Ah, yes,” she would answer without thinking: “Emilie Daltier, I don’t know what has become of her.” And the lie, like a line of earthworks, was carried back from the defence of the name, now captured, to the possibilities of meeting her again. “Oh, I can’t tell you, I never knew her address. I never see anybody who could tell you. Oh, no! Andrée never knew her. She wasn’t one of our little band, now so scattered.” At other times the lie took the form of a base admission: “Ah! If I had three hundred thousand francs a year….” She bit her lip. “Well? What would you do then?” “I should ask you,” she said, kissing me as she spoke, “to allow me to remain with you always. Where else could I be so happy?” But, even when one took her lies into account, it was incredible how spasmodic her life was, how fugitive her strongest desires.
She would be mad about a person whom, three days later, she would refuse to see. She could not wait for an hour while I sent out for canvas and colours, for she wished to start painting again. For two whole days she was impatient, almost shed the tears, quickly dried, of an infant that has just been weaned from its nurse. And this instability of her feelings with regard to people, things, occupations, arts, places, was in fact so universal that, if she did love money, which I do not believe, she cannot have loved it for longer than anything else. When she said:
“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
