In Search of Lost Time, Volume II_ Within a Budding Grove - Marcel Proust [297]
I tried to induce Elstir (but without mentioning to anyone else that I had asked him) to speak to her about me and to bring us together. He promised to introduce me to her, though he seemed greatly surprised at my wishing it, for he regarded her as a contemptible woman, a born intriguer, as uninteresting as she was self-interested. Reflecting that if I did see Mme Bontemps, Andrée would be sure to hear of it sooner or later, I thought it best to warn her in advance. “The things one tries hardest to avoid are those one finds one cannot escape,” I told her. “Nothing in the world could bore me so much as meeting Mme Bontemps again, and yet I can’t get out of it. Elstir has arranged to invite us together.” “I’ve never doubted it for a single instant,” exclaimed Andrée in a bitter tone, while her eyes, enlarged and altered by her annoyance, focused themselves upon some invisible object. These words of Andrée’s were not the most reasoned statement of a thought which might be expressed thus: “I know that you’re in love with Albertine, and that you’re moving heaven and earth to get to know her family.” But they were the shapeless fragments, capable of reconstitution, of that thought which I had caused to explode, by striking it, against Andrée’s will. Like her “happen to,” these words had no meaning save at one remove, that is to say they were words of the sort which (rather than direct assertions) inspire in us respect or distrust for another person, and lead to a rupture.
If Andrée had not believed me when I told her that Albertine’s family left me indifferent, it was because she thought that I was in love with Albertine. And probably she was none too happy in the thought.
She was generally present as a third party at my meetings with her friend. There were however days when I was to see Albertine by herself, days to which I looked forward with feverish impatience, which passed without bringing me any decisive result, without any of them having been that cardinal day whose role I immediately entrusted to the following day, which would prove no more apt to play it; thus there rose and toppled one after another, like waves, those peaks at once replaced by others.
About a month after the day on which we had played “ferret” together, I learned that Albertine was going away next morning to spend a couple of days with Mme Bontemps, and, since she would have to take an early train, was coming to spend the night at the Grand Hotel, from which, by taking the omnibus, she would be able, without disturbing the friends with whom she was staying, to catch the first train in the morning. I mentioned this to Andrée. “I don’t believe a word of it,” she replied with a look of annoyance. “Anyhow it won’t help you at all, for I’m quite sure Albertine won’t want to see you if she goes to the hotel by herself. It would be against ‘protocol,’ ” she added, employing an expression which had recently come into favour with her, in the sense of “what is done.” “I tell you this because I understand Albertine. What difference do you suppose it makes to me whether you see her or not? Not the slightest, I can assure you!”
We were joined by Octave who had no hesitation in telling Andrée the number of strokes he had gone round in, the day before, at golf, then by Albertine, who came along swinging her diabolo like a nun