Notwithstanding all this, in case there might have been some secret plan made behind my back, I advised her to give up the Buttes-Chaumont for that day and to go instead to Saint-Cloud or somewhere else.
It was certainly not, as I was well aware, because I was the least bit
in love with Albertine. Love is nothing more perhaps than the
stimulation of those eddies which, in the wake of an emotion, stir the
soul. Certain such eddies had indeed stirred my soul through and
through when Albertine spoke to me at Balbec about Mlle. Vinteuil, but
these were now stilled. I was no longer in love with Albertine, for I
no longer felt anything of the suffering, now healed, which I had felt
in the tram at Balbec, upon learning how Albertine had spent her
girlhood, with visits perhaps to Montjouvain. All this, I had too
long taken for granted, was healed. But, now and again, certain
expressions used by Albertine made me suppose—why, I cannot say—that
she must in the course of her life, short as it had been, have
received declarations of affection, and have received them with
pleasure, that is to say with sensuality. Thus, she would say, in any
connexion: “Is that true? Is it really true?” Certainly, if she had
said, like an Odette: “Is it really true, that thumping lie?” I should
not have been disturbed, for the absurdity of the formula would have
explained itself as a stupid inanity of feminine wit. But her
questioning air: “Is that true?” gave on the one hand the strange
impression of a creature incapable of judging things by herself, who
appeals to you for your testimony, as though she were not endowed with
the same faculties as yourself (if you said to her: “Why, we’ve been
out for a whole hour,” or “It is raining,” she would ask: “Is that
true?”). Unfortunately, on the other hand, this want of facility in
judging external phenomena for herself could not be the real origin of
her “Is that true? Is it really true?” It seemed rather that these
words had been, from the dawn of her precocious adolescence, replies
to: “You know, I never saw anybody as pretty as you.” “You know I am
madly in love with you, I am most terribly excited.”—affirmations
that were answered, with a coquettishly consenting modesty, by these
repetitions of: “Is that true? Is it really true?” which no longer
served Albertine, when in my company, save to reply by a question to
some such affirmation as: “You have been asleep for more than an
hour.” “Is that true?”
Without feeling that I was the least bit in the world in love with Albertine, without including in the list of my pleasures the moments that we spent together, I was still preoccupied with the way in which she disposed of her time; had I not, indeed, fled from Balbec in order to make certain that she could no longer meet this or that person with whom I was so afraid of her misbehaving, simply as a joke (a joke at my expense, perhaps), that I had adroitly planned to sever, at one and the same time, by my departure, all her dangerous entanglements? And Albertine was so entirely passive, had so complete a faculty of forgetting things and submitting to pressure, that these relations had indeed been severed and I myself relieved of my haunting dread. But that dread is capable of assuming as many forms as the undefined evil that is its cause. So long as my jealousy was not reincarnate in fresh people, I had enjoyed after the passing of my anguish an interval of calm. But with a chronic malady, the slightest pretext serves to revive it, as also with the vice of the person who is the cause of our jealousy the slightest opportunity may serve her to practise it anew (after a lull of chastity) with different people. I had managed to separate Albertine from her accomplices, and, by so doing, to exorcise my hallucinations; even if it was possible to make her forget people, to cut short her attachments, her sensual inclination was, itself also, chronic and was perhaps only waiting for an opportunity to afford itself an outlet. Now Paris provided just as many opportunities as Balbec.
In any town whatsoever, she had no need to seek, for the evil existed not in Albertine alone, but in others to whom any opportunity for enjoyment is good. A glance from one, understood at once by the other, brings the two famished souls in contact. And it is easy for a clever woman to appear not to have seen, then five minutes later to join the person who has read her glance and is waiting for her in a side street, and, in a few words, to make an appointment. Who will ever know? And it was so simple for Albertine to tell me, in order that she might continue these practices, that she was anxious to see again some place on the outskirts of Paris that she had liked. And so it was enough that she should return later than usual, that her expedition should have taken an unaccountable time, although it was perfectly easy perhaps to account for it without introducing any sensual reason, for my malady to break out afresh, attached this time to mental pictures which were not of Balbec, and which I would set to work, as with their predecessors, to destroy, as though the destruction of an ephemeral cause could put an end to a congenital malady. I did not take into account the fact that in these acts of destruction, in which I had as an accomplice, in Albertine, her faculty of changing, her ability to forget, almost to hate the recent object of her love, I was sometimes causing a profound grief to one or other of those persons unknown with whom in turn she had taken her pleasure, and that this grief I was causing them in vain, for they would be abandoned, replaced, and, parallel to the path strewn with all the derelicts of her light-hearted infidelities, there would open for me another, pitiless path broken only by an occasional brief respite; so that my suffering could end only with Albertine’s life or with my own. Even in the first days after our return to Paris, not satisfied by the information that Andrée and the chauffeur had given me as to their expeditions with my mistress, I had felt the neighbourhood of Paris to be as tormenting as that of Balbec, and had gone off for a few days in the country with Albertine. But everywhere my uncertainty as to what she might be doing was the same; the possibility that it was something wrong as abundant, vigilance even more difficult, with the result that I returned with her to Paris. In leaving Balbec, I had imagined that I was leaving Gomorrah, plucking Albertine from it; in reality, alas, Gomorrah was dispersed to all the ends of the earth. And partly out of jealousy, partly out of ignorance of such joys (a case which is rare indeed), I had arranged unawares this game of hide and seek in which Albertine was always to escape me.
I questioned her point-blank: “Oh, by the way, Albertine, am I dreaming, or did you tell me that you knew Gilberte Swann?” “Yes; that is to say, she used to talk to me at our classes, because she had a set of the French history notes, in fact she was very nice about it, and let me borrow them, and I gave them back the next time I saw her.” “Is she the kind of woman that I object to?” “Oh, not at all, quite the opposite.” But, rather than indulge in this sort of criminal investigation, I would often devote to imagining Albertine’s excursion the energy that I did not employ in sharing it, and would speak to my mistress with that ardour which remains intact in our unfulfilled designs. I expressed so keen a longing to see once again some window in the Sainte-Chapelle, so keen a regret that I was not able to go there with her alone, that she said to me lovingly: “Why, my dear boy, since you seem so keen about it, make a little effort, come with us. We can start as late as you like, whenever you’re ready. And if you’d rather be alone with me, I have only to send Andrée home, she can come another time.” But these very entreaties to me to go out added to the calm which allowed me to yield to my desire to remain indoors.
It did not occur
