There was nothing I didn’t do for Mme. Verdurin at Balbec, and I’ve been finely rewarded. If she summoned me to her deathbed, I wouldn’t go. There are some things which it is impossible to forgive. As for you, it’s the first time you’ve treated me badly. When Françoise told me that you had gone out (she enjoyed telling me that, I don’t think), you might have knocked me down with a feather. I tried not to shew any sign, but never in my life have I been so insulted.” While she was speaking, there continued in myself, in the thoroughly alive and creative sleep of the unconscious (a sleep in which the things that barely touch us succeed in carving an impression, in which our hands take hold of the key that turns the lock, the key for which we have sought in vain), the quest of what it was that she had meant by that interrupted speech the end of which I was so anxious to know. And all of a sudden an appalling word, of which I had never dreamed, burst upon me: ‘pot.’ I cannot say that it came to me in a single flash, as when, in a long passive submission to an incomplete memory, while we try gently, cautiously, to draw it out, we remain fastened, glued to it. No, in contrast to the ordinary process of my memory, there were, I think, two parallel quests; the first took into account not merely Albertine’s words, but her look of extreme annoyance when I had offered her a sum of money with which to give a grand dinner, a look which seemed to say: “Thank you, the idea of spending money upon things that bore me, when without money I could do things that I enjoy doing!” And it was perhaps the memory of this look that she had given me which made me alter my method in discovering the end of her unfinished sentence. Until then I had been hypnotised by her last word: ‘break,’ she had meant to say break what? Break wood? No. Sugar? No. Break, break, break. And all at once the look that she had given me at the moment of my suggestion that she should give a dinner-party, turned me back to the words that had preceded. And immediately I saw that she had not said ‘break’ but ‘get some one to break.’ Horror!
It was this that she would have preferred. Twofold horror! For even the vilest of prostitutes, who consents to that sort of thing, or desires it, does not employ to the man who yields to her desires that appalling expression. She would feel the degradation too great. To a woman alone, if she loves women, she says this, as an excuse for giving herself presently to a man. Albertine had not been lying when she told me that she was speaking in a dream. Distracted, impulsive, not realising that she was with me, she had, with a shrug of her shoulders, begun to speak as she would have spoken to one of those women, to one, perhaps, of my young budding girls. And abruptly recalled to reality, crimson with shame, thrusting back between her lips what she was going to say, plunged in despair, she had refused to utter another word. I had not a moment to lose if I was not to let her see how desperate I was. But already, after my sudden burst of rage, the tears came to my eyes. As at Balbec, on the night that followed her revelation of her friendship with the Vinteuil pair, I must immediately invent a plausible excuse for my grief, and one that was at the same time capable of creating so profound an effect upon Albertine as to give me a few days’ respite before I came to a decision. And so, at the moment when she told me that she had never received such an insult as that which I had inflicted upon her by going out, that she would rather have died than hear Françoise tell her of my departure, when, as though irritated by her absurd susceptibility, I was on the point of telling her that what I had done was nothing, that there was nothing that could offend her in my going out—as, during these moments, moving on a parallel course, my unconscious quest for what she had meant to say after the word ‘break’ had proved successful, and the despair into which my discovery flung me could not be completely hidden, instead of defending, I accused myself.
“My little Albertine,” I said to her in a gentle voice which was drowned in my first tears, “I might tell you that you are mistaken, that what I did this evening is nothing, but I should be lying; it is you that are right, you have realised the truth, my poor child, which is that six months ago, three months ago, when I was still so fond of you, never would I have done such a thing. It is a mere nothing, and it is enormous, because of the immense change in my heart of which it is the sign. And since you have detected this change which I hoped to conceal from you, that leads me on to tell you this:
My little Albertine” (and here I addressed her with a profound gentleness and melancholy), “don’t you see, the life that you are leading here is boring to you, it is better that we should part, and as the best partings are those that are ended at once, I ask you, to cut short the great sorrow that I am bound to feel, to bid me good-bye to-night and to leave in the morning without my seeing you again, while I am asleep.” She appeared stupefied, still incredulous and already disconsolate: “To-morrow?
You really mean it?” And notwithstanding the anguish that I felt in speaking of our parting as though it were already in the past—partly perhaps because of that very anguish—I began to give Albertine the most precise instructions as to certain things which she would have to do after she left the house. And passing from one request to another, I soon found myself entering into the minutest details. “Be so kind,” I said, with infinite melancholy, “as to send me back that book of Bergotte’s which is at your aunt’s. There is no hurry about it, in three days, in a week, whenever you like, but remember that I don’t want to have to write and ask you for it, that would be too painful.
We have been happy together, we feel now that we should be unhappy.” “Don’t say that we feel that we should be unhappy,” Albertine interrupted me, “don’t say ‘we,’ it is only you who feel that.” “Yes, very well, you or I, as you like, for one reason or another. But it is absurdly late, you must go to bed—we have decided to part to-night.” “Pardon me, you have decided, and I obey you because I do not wish to cause you any trouble.” “Very well, it is I who have decided, but that makes it none the less painful for me. I do not say that it will be painful for long, you know that I have not the faculty of remembering things for long, but for the first few days I shall be so miserable without you. And so I feel that it will be useless to revive the memory with letters, we must end everything at once.” “Yes, you are right,” she said to me with a crushed air, which was enhanced by the strain of fatigue upon her features due to the lateness of the hour; “rather than have one finger chopped off, then another, I prefer to lay my head on the block at once.” “Heavens, I am appalled when I think how late I am keeping you out of bed, it is madness. However, it’s the last night! You will have plenty of time to sleep for the rest of your life.”
And as I suggested to her thus that it was time to say good night I sought to postpone the moment when she would have said it. “Would you like me, as a distraction during the first few days, to tell Bloch to send his cousin Esther to the place where you will be staying, he will do that for me.” “I don’t know why you say that” (I had said it in an endeavour to wrest a confession from Albertine);
“there is only one person for whom I care, which is yourself,” Albertine said to me, and her words filled me with comfort. But, the next moment, what a blow she dealt me!”I remember, of course, that I did give Esther my photograph because she kept on asking me for it and I saw that she would like to have it, but as for feeling any liking for her or wishing ever to see her again….”
And yet Albertine was of so frivolous a nature that she went on: “If she wants to see me, it is all the same to me, she is very nice, but I don’t care in the least either way.” And so when I had spoken to her of the photograph of Esther which Bloch had sent me (and which
