My jealous curiosity as to what Albertine might have done was unbounded. I suborned any number of women from whom I learned nothing. If this curiosity was so keen, it was because people do not die at once for us, they remain bathed in a sort of aura of life in which there is no true immortality but which means that they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were travelling abroad. This is a thoroughly pagan survival. Conversely, when we have ceased to love her, the curiosity which the person arouses dies before she herself is dead. Thus I would no longer have taken any step to find out with whom Gilberte had been strolling on a certain evening in the Champs-Elysées. Now I felt that these curiosities were absolutely alike, had no value in themselves, were incapable of lasting, but I continued to sacrifice everything to the cruel satisfaction of this transient curiosity, albeit I knew in advance that my enforced separation from Albertine, by the fact of her death, would lead me to the same indifference as had resulted from my deliberate separation from Gilberte.
If she could have known what was about to happen, she would have
stayed with me. But this meant no more than that, once she saw herself
dead, she would have preferred, in my company, to remain alive. Simply
in view of the contradiction that it implied, such a supposition was
absurd. But it was not innocuous, for in imagining how glad Albertine
would be, if she could know, if she could retrospectively understand,
to come back to me, I saw her before me, I wanted to kiss her; and
alas, it was impossible, she would never come back, she was dead. My
imagination sought for her in the sky, through the nights on which we
had gazed at it when still together; beyond that moonlight which she
loved, I tried to raise up to her my affection so that it might be a
consolation to her for being no longer alive, and this love for a
being so remote was like a religion, my thoughts rose towards her like
prayers. Desire is very powerful, it engenders belief; I had believed
that Albertine would not leave me because I desired that she might
not. Because I desired it, I began to believe that she was not dead; I
took to reading books upon table-turning, I began to believe in the
possibility of the immortality of the soul. But that did not suffice
me. I required that, after my own death, I should find her again in
her body, as though eternity were like life. Life, did I say! I was
more exacting still. I would have wished not to be deprived for ever
by death of the pleasures of which however it is not alone in robbing
us. For without her death they would eventually have grown faint, they
had begun already to do so by the action of long-established habit, of
fresh curiosities. Besides, had she been alive, Albertine, even
physically, would gradually have changed, day by day I should have
adapted myself to that change. But my memory, calling up only detached
moments of her life, asked to see her again as she would already have
ceased to be, had she lived; what it required was a miracle which
would satisfy the natural and arbitrary limitations of memory which
cannot emerge from the past. With the simplicity of the old
theologians, I imagined her furnishing me not indeed with the
explanations which she might possibly have given me but, by a final
contradiction, with those that she had always refused me during her
life. And thus, her death being a sort of dream, my love would seem
to her an unlooked-for happiness; I saw in death only the convenience
and optimism of a solution which simplifies, which arranges
everything. Sometimes it was not so far off, it was not in another
world that I imagined our reunion. Just as in the past, when I knew
Gilberte only from playing with her in the Champs-Elysées, at home in
the evening I used to imagine that I was going to receive a letter
from her in which she would confess her love for me, that she was
coming into the room, so a similar force of desire, no more
embarrassed by the laws of nature which ran counter to it than on the
former occasion in the case of Gilberte, when after all it had not
been mistaken since it had had the last word, made me think now that I
was going to receive a message from Albertine, informing me that she
had indeed met with an accident while riding, but that for romantic
reasons (and as, after all, has sometimes happened with people whom we
have long believed to be dead) she had not wished me to hear of her
recovery and now, repentant, asked to be allowed to come and live with
me for ever. And, making quite clear to myself the nature of certain
harmless manias in people who otherwise appear sane, I felt coexisting
in myself the certainty that she was dead and the incessant hope that
I might see her come into the room,
I had not yet received any news from Aimé, albeit he must by now have reached Balbec.
No doubt my inquiry turned upon a secondary point, and one quite arbitrarily selected. If Albertine’s life had been really culpable, it must have contained many other things of far greater importance, which chance had not allowed me to touch, as it had allowed me that conversation about the wrapper, thanks to Albertine’s blushes. It was quite arbitrarily that I had been presented with that particular day, which many years later I was seeking to reconstruct. If Albertine had been a lover of women, there were thousands of other days in her life her employment of which I did not know and about which it might be as interesting for me to learn; I might have sent Aimé to many other places in Balbec, to many other towns than Balbec.
But these other days, precisely because I did not know how she had spent them, did not represent themselves to my imagination. They had no existence. Things, people, did not begin to exist for me until they assumed in my imagination an individual existence. If there were thousands of others like them, they became for me representative of all the rest. If I had long felt a desire to know, in the matter of my suspicions with regard to Albertine, what exactly had happened in the baths, it was in the same manner in which, in the matter of my desires for women, and although I knew that there were any number of girls and lady’s-maids who could satisfy them and whom chance might just as easily have led me to hear mentioned, I wished to know—since it was of them that Saint-Loup had spoken to me—the girl who frequented houses of ill fame and Mme. Putbus’s maid. The difficulties which my health, my indecision, my ‘procrastination,’ as M. de Charlus called it, placed in the way of my carrying out any project, had made me put off from day to day, from month to month, from year to year, the elucidation of certain suspicions as also the accomplishment of certain desires. But I kept them in my memory promising myself that I would not forget to learn the truth of them, because they alone obsessed me (since the others had no form in my eyes, did not exist), and also because the very accident that had chosen them out of the surrounding reality gave me a guarantee that it was indeed in them that I should come in contact with a trace of reality, of the true and coveted life.
Besides, from a single fact, if it is certain, can we not, like a scientist making experiments, extract the truth as to all the orders of similar facts? Is not a single little fact, if it is well chosen, sufficient to enable the experimenter to deduce a general law which will make him know the truth as to thousands of analogous facts?
Albertine might indeed exist in my memory only in the state in which she had successively appeared to me in the course of her life, that is to say subdivided according to a series of fractions of time, my mind, reestablishing unity in her, made her a single person, and it was upon this person that I sought to bring a general judgment to bear, to know whether she had lied to me, whether she loved women, whether it was in order to be free to associate with them that she had left me. What the woman in the baths would have to say might perhaps put an end for ever to my doubts as to Albertine’s morals.
My doubts! Alas, I had supposed that it would be immaterial to me, even pleasant, not to see Albertine again, until her departure revealed to me my error. Similarly her death had shewn me how greatly I had been mistaken when I believed that I hoped at times for her death and supposed that it would be my deliverance. So it was that, when I received Aimé’s letter, I realised that, if I had not until then suffered too painfully from my doubts as to Albertine’s virtue, it was because in reality they were not doubts at all.
