Albertines who followed one after the other in my fancy hour by hour, the real Albertine, glimpsed on the beach, figured only at the head, just as the actress who “creates” a role, the star, appears, out of a long series of performances, in the few first alone. That Albertine was scarcely more than a silhouette, all that had been superimposed upon her being of my own invention, to such an extent when we love does the contribution that we ourselves make outweigh—even in terms of quantity alone—those that come to us from the beloved object. And this is true of loves that have been realised in actuality. There are loves that can not only develop but survive on very little—and this even among those that have achieved their carnal fulfilment. An old drawing-master who had taught my grandmother had been presented by some obscure mistress with a daughter. The mother died shortly after the birth of the child, and the drawing-master was so broken-hearted that he did not long survive her. In the last months of his life my grandmother and some of the Combray ladies, who had never liked to make any allusion in his presence to the woman with whom in any case he had not officially lived and had had comparatively sparse relations, took it into their heads to ensure the little girl’s future by clubbing together to provide her with an annuity. It was my grandmother who suggested this; several of her friends jibbed; after all, was the child really such a very interesting case? Was she even the child of her reputed father? With women like that, one could never be sure. Finally, everything was settled. The child came to thank the ladies. She was plain, and so absurdly like the old drawing-master as to remove every shadow of doubt. Since her hair was the only nice thing about her, one of the ladies said to her father, who had brought her: “What pretty hair she has.” And thinking that now, the guilty woman being dead and the old man only half alive, a discreet allusion to that past of which they had always pretended to know nothing could do no harm, my grandmother added: “It must run in the family. Did her mother have pretty hair like that?” “I don’t know,” was the old man’s quaint answer, “I never saw her except with a hat on.”
Before rejoining Elstir, I caught sight of myself in a glass. To add to the disaster of my not having been introduced to the girls, I noticed that my tie was all crooked, and my hat left long wisps of hair showing, which did not become me; but it was a piece of luck, all the same, that they should have seen me, even thus attired, in Elstir’s company, and so could not forget me; also that I should have put on that morning, at my grandmother’s suggestion, my smart waistcoat, when I might so easily have been wearing one that was simply hideous, and that I was carrying my best stick. For while an event for which we are longing never happens quite in the way we have been expecting, failing the advantages on which we supposed that we might count, others present themselves for which we never hoped, and make up for our disappointment; and we have been so dreading the worst that in the end we are inclined to feel that, taking one thing with another, chance has, on the whole, been rather kind to us.
“I did so much want to know them,” I said as I rejoined Elstir. “Then why did you stand a mile away?” These were his actual words, uttered not because they expressed what was really in his mind, since, if his desire had been to gratify mine, he could quite easily have called me, but perhaps because he had heard phrases of this sort, in familiar use among vulgar people when they are caught in the wrong, and because even great men are in certain respects much the same as vulgar people, and take their everyday excuses from the same common stock just as they get their daily bread from the same baker; or it may be that such remarks (which ought, one might almost say, to be read backwards, since their literal meaning is the opposite of the truth) are the instantaneous effect, the negative exposure of a reflex action. “They were in a hurry.