against which I had hurled my strength in vain at Balbec, one evening, now remote in time, on which we formed a couple symmetrical with but the converse of our present arrangement, since then it had lieen she who was lying down and I who sat by her bedside. Wishing and not venturing to make certain whether now she would let herself be kissed, every time that she rose to go I asked her to stay beside me a little longer. This was a concession not very easy to obtain, for albeit she had nothing to do (otherwise she would have rushed from the house) she was a person methodical in her habits and moreover not very gracious towards me, scarcely to be at ease in my company, and yet each time, after looking at her watch, she sat down again at my request until finally she had spent several hours with me without my having asked her for anything; the things I was saying to her followed logically those that I had said during the hours before, and bore no relation to what I was thinking about, what I desired from her, remained indefinitely parallel. There is nothing like desire for preventing the thing one says from bearing any resemblance to what one has in one’s mind. Time presses, and yet it seems as though we were seeking to gain time by speaking of subjects absolutely alien to that by which we are obsessed. We then arrange that the sentence which we should like to utter shall be accompanied, or rather preluded, by a gesture, supposing that is to say that we have not to give ourselves the pleasure of an immediate demonstration and to gratify the curiosity we feel as to the reactions which will follow it, without a word said, without even a ‘By your leave,’ already made this gesture. Certainly I was not in the least in love with Albertine; child of the mists outside, she could merely content the imaginative desire which the change of weather had awakened in me and which was midway between the desires that are satisfied by the arts of the kitchen and of monumental sculpture respectively, for it made me dream simultaneously of mingling with my flesh a substance different and warm, and of attaching at some point to my outstretched body a body divergent, as the body of Eve barely holds by the feet to the side of Adam, to whose body hers is almost perpendicular, in those romanesque bas-reliefs on the church at Balbec which represent in so noble and so reposeful a fashion, still almost like a classical frieze, the Creation of Woman; God in them is everywhere followed, as by two ministers, by two little angels in whom the visitor recognises — like winged, swarming summer creatures which winter has surprised and spared — cupids from Herculaneum, still surviving well into the thirteenth century, and winging their last slow flight, weary but never failing in the grace that might be expected of them, over the whole front of the porch.
As for this pleasure which by accomplishing my desire would have set me free from these meditations and which I should have sought quite as readily from any other pretty woman, had I been asked upon what — in the course of this endless flow of talk throughout which I took care to keep from Albertine the one thing that was in my mind — was based my optimistic hypothesis with regard to her possible complaisances, I should perhaps have answered that this hypothesis was due (while the forgotten outlines of Albertine’s voice retraced for me the contour of her personality) to the apparition of certain words which did not form part of her vocabulary, or at least not in the acceptation which she now gave them. Thus she said to roe that Elstir was stupid, and, on my protesting:
“You don’t understand,” she replied, smiling, “I mean that it was stupid of him to behave like that; of course I know he’s quite a distinguished Person, really.”
Similarly, wishing to say of the Fontainebleau golf club that it was smart, she declared: “They are quite a selection.”
Speaking of a duel that I had fought, she said of my seconds: “What very choice seconds,” and looking at my face confessed that she would like to see me ‘wear a moustache.’ She even went so far (and my chance appeared then enormous) as to announce, in a phrase of which I would have sworn that she was ignorant a year earlier, that since she had last seen Gisèle there had passed a certain ‘lapse of time.’ This was not to say that Albertine had not already possessed, when I was at Balbec, a quite adequate assortment of those expressions which reveal at once that one’s people are in easy circumstances, and which, year by year, a mother passes on to her daughter just as she bestows on her, gradually, as the girl grows up, on important occasions, her own jewels. It was evident that Albertine had ceased to be a little girl when one day, to express her thanks for a present which a strange lady had given her, she had said: “I am quite confused.” Mme. Bontemps could not help looking across at her husband whose comment was:
“Gad, she’s old for fourteen.”
The approach of nubility had been more strongly marked still when Albertine, speaking of another girl whose tone was bad, said: “One can’t even tell whether she’s pretty, she paints her face a foot thick.” Finally, though still a schoolgirl, she already displayed the manner of a grown woman of her upbringing and station when she said, of some one whose face twitched: “I can’t look at him, because it makes me want to do the same,” or, if some one else were being imitated: “The absurd thing about it is that when you imitate her voice you look exactly like her.” All these are drawn from the social treasury. But it did not seem to me possible that Albertine’s natural environment could have supplied her with ‘distinguished,’ used in the sense in which my father would say of a colleague whom he had not actually met, but whose intellectual attainments he had heard praised: “It appears he’s quite a distinguished person.” ‘Selection,’ even when used of a golf club, seemed to me as incompatible with the Simonet family as it would be if preceded by the adjective ‘Natural,’ with a text published centuries before the researches of Darwin. ‘Lapse of time’ struck me as being of better augury still. Finally there appeared the evidence of certain upheavals, the nature of which was unknown to me, but sufficient to justify me in all my hopes when Albertine announced, with the satisfaction of a person whose opinion is by no means to be despised:
“To my mind, that is the best thing that could possibly happen. I regard it as the best solution, the stylish way out.”
This was so novel, so manifestly an alluvial deposit giving one to suspect such capricious wanderings over soil hitherto unknown to her, that on hearing the words ‘to my mind’ I drew Albertine towards me, and at ‘I regard’ made her sit on the side of my bed.
No doubt it does happen that women of moderate culture, on marrying well-read men, receive such expressions as part of their paraphernalia. And shortly after the metamorphosis which follows the wedding night, when they begin to pay calls, and talk shyly to the friends of their girlhood, one notices with surprise that they have turned into matrons if, in deciding that some person is intelligent, they sound both l’s in the word; but that is precisely the sign of a change of state, and I could see a difference when I thought of the vocabulary of the Albertine I had known of old — a vocabulary in which the most daring flights were to say of any unusual person: ‘He’s a type,’ or, if you suggested a game of cards to her: ‘I’ve no money to lose,’ or again, if any of her friends were to reproach her, in terms which she felt to be undeserved: ‘That really is magnificent!’ an expression dictated in such cases by a sort of middle-class tradition almost as old as the Magnificat itself, and one which a girl slightly out of temper and confident that she is in the right employs, as the saying is, ‘quite naturally,’ that is to say because she has learned the words from her mother, just as she has learned to say her prayers or to greet a friend. All these expressions Mme. Bontemps had imparted to her at the same time as her hatred of the Jews and her feeling for black, which was always suitable and becoming, indeed without any formal instruction, but as the piping of the parent goldfinches serves as a model for that of the young ones, recently hatched, so that they in turn grow into true goldfinches also. But when all was said, ‘selection’ appeared to me of alien growth and ‘I regard’ encouraging. Albertine was no longer the same; which meant that she would not perhaps act, would not react in the same way.
Not only did I no longer feel any love for her, but I had no longer to consider, as I should have had at Balbec, the risk of shattering in her an affection for myself, which no longer existed. There could be no doubt that she had long since become quite indifferent to me. I was