In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [264]
When Elstir asked me to come with him so that he might introduce me to Albertine, who was sitting a little further down the room, I first of all finished eating a coffee éclair and, with a show of keen interest, asked an old gentleman whose acquaintance I had just made (and to whom I thought that I might offer the rose in my buttonhole which he had admired) to tell me more about the old Norman fairs. This is not to say that the introduction which followed did not give me any pleasure and did not assume a certain solemnity in my eyes. But so far as the pleasure was concerned, I was naturally not conscious of it until some time later, when, back at the hotel, and in my room alone, I had become myself again. Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative, which we develop later, when we are back at home, and have once again found at our disposal that inner dark-room the entrance to which is barred to us so long as we are with other people.
If my consciousness of the pleasure it had brought me was thus retarded by a few hours, the gravity of this introduction made itself felt at once. At the moment of introduction, for all that we feel ourselves to have been suddenly rewarded, to have been furnished with a pass that will admit us henceforward to pleasures which we have been pursuing for weeks past, we realise only too clearly that this acquisition puts an end for us not merely to hours of toilsome search—a relief that can only fill us with joy—but also to the existence of a certain person, the person whom our imagination had wildly distorted, whom our anxious fear that we might never become known to her had magnified. At the moment when our name rings out on the lips of the introducer, especially if the latter amplifies it, as Elstir now did, with a flattering commentary—that sacramental moment, as when in a fairy tale the magician commands a person suddenly to become someone else—she to whose presence we have been longing to attain vanishes: indeed, how could she remain the same when—by reason of the attention which she is obliged to pay to the announcement of our name and the sight of our person—in the eyes that only yesterday were situated at an infinite distance (where we supposed that ours, wandering, unsteady, desperate, divergent, would never succeed in meeting them) the conscious gaze, the incommunicable thought which we were seeking have just been miraculously and quite simply replaced by our own image painted in them as in a smiling mirror? If this incarnation of ourselves in the person who seemed to differ most from us is what does most to modify the appearance of the person to whom we have just been introduced, the form of that person still remains quite vague; and we may wonder whether it will turn out to be a god, a table or a basin. But, as nimble as the wax-modellers who will fashion a bust before our eyes in five minutes, the few words which the stranger is now going to say to us will substantiate that form and give it something positive and final that will exclude all the hypotheses in which our desire and our imagination had been indulging. Doubtless, even before coming to this party, Albertine had ceased to be for me simply that phantom fit to haunt the rest of our lives which a passing stranger of whom we know nothing and have caught but the barest glimpse remains. Her relationship to Mme Bontemps had already restricted the scope of those marvellous hypotheses, by stopping one of the channels along which they might have spread. As I drew closer to the girl and began to know her better, this knowledge developed by a process of subtraction, each constituent of imagination and desire giving place to a notion which was worth infinitely less, a notion to which, it is true, there was added presently a sort of equivalent, in the domain of real life,