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I have said that Albertine had not seemed to me that day to be the same as on previous days, and that each time I saw her she was to appear different. But I felt at that moment that certain modifications in the appearance, the importance, the stature of a person may also be due to the variability of certain states of consciousness interposed between that person and ourselves. One of those that play the most considerable part in this respect is belief (that evening my belief, then the vanishing of my belief, that I was about to know Albertine had, with a few seconds’ interval only, rendered her almost insignificant, then infinitely precious, in my eyes; some years later, the belief, then the disappearance of the belief, that Albertine was faithful to me, brought about similar changes).

Of course, long ago at Combray, I had seen how, according to the time of day, according to whether I was entering one or the other of the two dominant moods that governed my sensibility in turn, my grief at not being with my mother would lessen or grow, as imperceptible all afternoon as is the moon’s light when the sun is shining, and then, when night had come, reigning alone in my anxious heart in place of recent memories now obliterated. But on that day at Balbec, when I saw that Elstir was leaving the girls without having called me, I learned for the first time that the variations in the importance which a pleasure or a sorrow has in our eyes may depend not merely on this alternation of two moods, but on the displacement of invisible beliefs, such, for example, as make death seem to us of no account because they bathe it in a glow of unreality, and thus enable us to attach importance to our attending a musical evening which would lose much of its charm if, on the announcement that we were sentenced to be guillotined, the belief that had bathed the evening in its warm glow suddenly evaporated. It is true that something in me was aware of this role that beliefs play: namely, my will; but its knowledge is vain if one’s intelligence and one’s sensibility continue in ignorance; these last are sincere when they believe that we are anxious to forsake a mistress to whom our will alone knows that we are still attached. This is because they are clouded by the belief that we shall see her again at any moment. But let this belief be shattered, let them suddenly become aware that this mistress has gone from us for ever, and our intelligence and sensibility, having lost their focus, run mad, the most infinitesimal pleasure becomes infinitely great.

Variation of a belief, annulment also of love, which, pre-existent and mobile, comes to rest on the image of a woman simply because that woman will be almost impossible of attainment. Thenceforward we think not so much of the woman, whom we have difficulty in picturing to ourselves, as of the means of getting to know her. A whole series of agonies develops and is sufficient to fix our love definitely upon her who is its almost unknown object. Our love becomes immense, and we never dream how small a place in it the real woman occupies. And if suddenly, as at the moment when I had seen Elstir stop to talk to the girls, we cease to be uneasy, to suffer anguish, since it is this anguish that is the whole of our love, it seems to us as though our love had abruptly vanished at the moment when at length we grasp the prey to whose value we had not given enough thought before. What did I know of Albertine? One or two glimpses of a profile against the sea, less beautiful, assuredly, than those of Veronese’s women whom I ought, had I been guided by purely aesthetic reasons, to have preferred to her. By what other reasons could I be guided, since, my anxiety having subsided, I could recapture only those mute profiles, possessing nothing else? Since my first sight of Albertine I had thought about her endlessly, I had carried on with what I called by her name an interminable inner dialogue in which I made her question and answer, think and act, and in the infinite series of imaginary