of what joint stock companies give one, after repaying one’s original investment, and call dividend shares. Her name, her family connections, had been the first limit set to my suppositions. Her friendly greeting as, standing close beside her, I once again saw the tiny mole on her cheek, below her eye, marked another stage; finally, I was surprised to hear her use the adverb “perfectly,” in place of “completely,” of two people whom she mentioned, saying of one, “She’s perfectly mad, but very nice all the same,” and of the other, “He’s perfectly common and perfectly boring.” However little to be commended this use of “perfectly” may be, it indicates a degree of civilisation and culture which I could never have imagined as having been attained by the bacchante with the bicycle, the orgiastic muse of the golf-course. Nor did it mean that after this first metamorphosis Albertine was not to change again for me, many times. The qualities and defects which a person presents to us, exposed to view on the surface of his or her face, rearrange themselves in a totally different order if we approach them from a new angle—just as, in a town, buildings that appear strung in extended order along a single line, from another viewpoint are disposed in depth and their relative heights altered. To begin with, Albertine struck me as somewhat shy instead of implacable; she seemed to me more proper than ill-bred, judging by the descriptions, “she has bad manners” or “she has peculiar manners,” which she applied to each in turn of the girls of whom I spoke to her; finally, she presented as a target for my line of vision a temple that was somewhat inflamed and by no means attractive to the eye, and no longer the curious look which I had always associated with her until then. But this was merely a second impression and there were doubtless others through which I would successively pass. Thus it can be only after one has recognised, not without some tentative stumblings, the optical errors of one’s first impression that one can arrive at an exact knowledge of another person, supposing such knowledge to be ever possible. But it is not; for while our original impression of him undergoes correction, the person himself, not being an inanimate object, changes for his part too: we think that we have caught him, he shifts, and, when we imagine that at last we are seeing him clearly, it is only the old impressions which we had already formed of him that we have succeeded in clarifying, when they no longer represent him.
And yet, whatever the inevitable disappointments that it must bring in its train, this movement towards what we have only glimpsed, what we have been free to dwell upon and imagine at our leisure, this movement is the only one that is wholesome for the senses, that whets their appetite. How drearily monotonous must be the lives of people who, from indolence or timidity, drive in their carriages straight to the doors of friends whom they have got to know without having first dreamed of knowing them, without ever daring, on the way, to stop and examine what arouses their desire!
I returned home thinking of that party, of the coffee éclair which I had finished eating before I let Elstir take me up to Albertine, the rose which I had given the old gentleman, all the details selected unbeknown to us by the circumstances of the occasion, which compose for us, in a special and quite fortuitous order, the picture that we retain of a first meeting. But I had the impression that I was seeing this picture from another angle of vision, very far removed from myself, realising that it had not existed only for me, when some months later, to my great surprise, on my speaking to Albertine about the day on which I had first met her, she reminded me of the éclair, the flower that I had given away, all those things which I had supposed to have been, I cannot say of importance only to myself, but perceived only by myself, and which I now found thus transcribed, in a version of which I had never suspected the existence, in the mind of Albertine. On this first