Time passes, and gradually everything that we have said in falsehood becomes true; I had learned this only too well with Gilberte; the indifference that I had feigned when I could never restrain my tears had ended by becoming real; gradually life, as I told Gilberte in a lying formula which retrospectively had become true, life had driven us apart. I recalled this, I said to myself: “If Albertine allows an interval to elapse, my lies will become the truth. And now that the worst moments are over, ought I not to hope that she will allow this month to pass without returning? If she returns, I shall have to renounce the true life which certainly I am not in a fit state to enjoy as yet, but which as time goes on may begin to offer me attractions while my memory of Albertine grows fainter.”
I have said that oblivion was beginning to perform its task. But one of the effects of oblivion was precisely—since it meant that many of Albertine’s less pleasing aspects, of the boring hours that I had spent with her, no longer figured in my memory, ceased therefore to be reasons for my desiring that she should not be with me as I used to wish when she was still in the house—that it gave me a curtailed impression of her, enhanced by all the love that I had ever felt for other women. In this novel aspect of her, oblivion which nevertheless was engaged upon making me accustomed to our separation, made me, by shewing me a more attractive Albertine, long all the more for her return.
Since her departure, very often, when I was confident that I shewed no trace of tears, I would ring for Françoise and say to her: “We must make sure that Mademoiselle Albertine hasn’t left anything behind her. Don’t forget to do her room, it must be ready for her when she comes.” Or merely: “Only the other day Mademoiselle Albertine said to me, let me think now, it was the day before she left….” I was anxious to diminish Françoise’s abominable pleasure at Albertine’s departure by letting her see that it was not to be prolonged. I was anxious also to let Françoise see that I was not afraid to speak of this departure, to proclaim it—like certain generals who describe a forced retreat as a strategic withdrawal in conformity with a prearranged plan—as intended by myself, as constituting an episode the true meaning of which I concealed for the moment, but in no way implying the end of my friendship with Albertine. By repeating her name incessantly I sought in short to introduce, like a breath of air, something of herself into that room in which her departure had left a vacuum, in which I could no longer breathe. Then, moreover, we seek to reduce the dimensions of our grief by making it enter into our everyday speech between ordering a suit of clothes and ordering dinner.
While she was doing Albertine’s room, Françoise, out of curiosity, opened the drawer of a little rosewood table in which my mistress used to put away the ornaments which she discarded when she went to bed. “Oh! Monsieur, Mademoiselle Albertine has forgotten to take her rings, she has left them in the drawer.” My first impulse was to say: “We must send them after her.” But this would make me appear uncertain of her return. “Very well,” I replied after a moment of silence, “it is hardly worth while sending them to her as she is coming back so soon. Give them to me, I shall think about it.” Françoise handed me the rings with a distinct misgiving.
She loathed Albertine, but, regarding me in her own image, supposed that one could not hand me a letter in the handwriting of my mistress without the risk of my opening it. I took the rings. “Monsieur must take care not to lose them,” said Françoise, “such beauties as they are! I don’t know who gave them to her, if it was Monsieur or some one else, but I can see that it was some one rich, who had good taste!” “It was not I,” I assured her, “besides, they don’t both come from the same person, one was given her by her aunt and the other she bought for herself.” “Not from the same person!” Françoise exclaimed, “Monsieur must be joking, they are just alike, except that one of them has had a ruby added to it, there’s the same eagle on both, the same initials inside….” I do not know whether Françoise was conscious of the pain that she was causing me, but she began at this point to curve her lips in a smile which never left them.
“What, the same eagle? You are talking nonsense. It is true that the one without the ruby has an eagle upon it, but on the other it is a sort of man’s head.” “A man’s head, where did Monsieur discover that? I had only to put on my spectacles to see at once that it was one of the eagle’s wings; if Monsieur will take his magnifying glass, he will see the other wing on the other side, the head and the beak in the middle. You can count the feathers. Oh, it’s a fine piece of work.” My intense anxiety to know whether Albertine had lied to me made me forget that I ought to maintain a certain dignity in Françoise’s presence and deny her the wicked pleasure that she felt, if not in torturing me, at least in disparaging my mistress.
I remained breathless while Françoise went to fetch my magnifying glass, I took it from her, asked her to shew me the eagle upon the ring with the ruby, she had no difficulty in making me see the wings, conventionalised in the same way as upon the other ring, the feathers, cut separately in relief, the head. She pointed out to me also the similar inscriptions, to which, it is true, others were added upon the ring with the ruby.
And on the inside of both was Albertine’s monogram. “But I’m surprised that it should need all this to make Monsieur see that the rings are the same,” said Françoise. “Even without examining them, you can see that it is the same style, the same way of turning the gold, the same form. As soon as I looked at them I could have sworn that they came from the same place. You can tell it as you can tell the dishes of a good cook.” And indeed, to the curiosity of a servant, whetted by hatred and trained to observe details with a startling precision, there had been added, to assist her in this expert criticism, the taste that she had, that same taste in fact which she shewed in her cookery and which was intensified perhaps, as I had noticed when we left Paris for Balbec, in her attire, by the coquetry of a woman who was once good-looking, who has studied the jewels and dresses of other women.
I might have taken the wrong box of medicine and, instead of swallowing a few capsules of veronal on a day when I felt that I had drunk too many cups of tea, might have swallowed as many capsules of caffeine; my heart would not have throbbed more violently. I asked Françoise to leave the room. I would have liked to see Albertine immediately. To my horror at her falsehood, to my jealousy of the unknown donor, was added grief that she should have allowed herself to accept such presents. I made her even more presents, it is true, but a woman whom we are keeping does not seem to us to be a kept woman so long as we do not know that she is being kept by other men. And yet since I had continued
