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A few days after the game of “ferret,” when, having allowed ourselves to wander rather too far afield, we had been fortunate in finding at Maineville a couple of little “governess-carts” with two seats in each which would enable us to be back in time for dinner, the intensity, already considerable, of my love for Albertine had the effect of making me suggest successively that Andrée and Rosemonde should come with me, and never once Albertine, and then, while still inviting Andrée or Rosemonde for preference, of bringing everyone round, in virtue of secondary considerations connected with time, route, coats and so forth, to decide, as though against my wishes, that the most practical policy after all was that I should take Albertine, to whose company I pretended to resign myself willy-nilly. Unfortunately, since love tends to the complete assimilation of a person, and none is comestible by way of conversation alone, for all that Albertine was as nice as possible on our way home, when I had deposited her at her own door she left me happy but more famished for her even than I had been at the start, and reckoning the moments that we had just spent together as only a prelude, of little importance in itself, to those that were still to come. Nevertheless it had that initial charm which is not to be found again. I had not yet asked anything of Albertine. She could imagine what I wanted, but, not being certain of it, surmise that I was aiming only at relations with no precise objective, in which my beloved would find that delicious vagueness, rich in expected surprises, which is romance.

In the week that followed I scarcely attempted to see Albertine. I made a show of preferring Andrée. Love is born; we wish to remain, for the one we love, the unknown person whom she may love in turn, but we need her, we need to make contact not so much with her body as with her attention, her heart. We slip into a letter some unkind remark which will force the indifferent one to ask for some little kindness in compensation, and love, following an infallible technique, tightens up with an alternating movement the cog-wheels in which we can no longer not love or be loved. I gave to Andrée the hours spent by the others at a party which I knew that she would sacrifice for my sake with pleasure, and would have sacrificed even with reluctance, from moral nicety, in order not to give either the others or herself the idea that she attached any importance to a relatively frivolous amusement. I arranged in this way to have her entirely to myself every evening, not with the intention of making Albertine jealous, but of enhancing my prestige in her eyes, or at any rate not imperilling it by letting Albertine know that it was herself and not Andrée that I loved. Nor did I confide this to Andrée either, lest she should repeat it to her friend. When I spoke of Albertine to Andrée I affected a coldness by which she was perhaps less deceived than I, from her apparent credulity. She made a show of believing in my indifference to Albertine, and of desiring the closest possible union between Albertine and myself. It is probable that, on the contrary, she neither believed in the one nor wished for the other. While I was saying to her that I did not care very greatly for her friend, I was thinking of one thing only, how to become acquainted with Mme Bontemps, who was staying for a few days near Balbec, and whom Albertine was shortly to visit for a few days. Naturally I did not disclose this desire to Andrée, and when I spoke to her of Albertine’s family, it was in the most careless manner possible. Andrée’s direct answers did not appear to throw any doubt on my sincerity. Why then did she blurt out suddenly one day: “Oh, by the way, I happen to have seen Albertine’s aunt”? It is true that she had not said in so many words: “I could see through your casual remarks all right that the one thing you were really thinking of was how you could get to know Albertine’s aunt.” But it was clearly to the presence in Andrée’s mind of some such idea