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By Root 1656 0

Champs-Elysées was a different Gilberte from the one I found within me when I was alone again, suddenly in the real Albertine, the one I saw every day, whom I supposed to be stuffed with middle-class prejudices and entirely frank with her aunt, the imaginary Albertine had just been embodied, she whom, when I did not yet know her, I had suspected of casting furtive glances at me on the front, she who had worn an air of being reluctant to go home when she saw me making off in the other direction.

I went into dinner with my grandmother. I felt within me a secret which she could never guess. Similarly with Albertine; tomorrow her friends would be with her, not knowing what new experience she and I had in common; and when she kissed her niece on the forehead Mme Bontemps would never imagine that I stood between them, in the shape of that hair arrangement which had for its object, concealed from all the world, to give pleasure to me, to me who had until then so greatly envied Mme Bontemps because, being related to the same people as her niece, she had the same occasions to put on mourning, the same family visits to pay; and now I found myself being more to Albertine than was the aunt herself. When she was with her aunt, it was of me that she would be thinking. What was going to happen that evening, I scarcely knew. In any event, the Grand Hotel and the evening no longer seemed empty to me; they contained my happiness. I rang for the lift-boy to take me up to the room which Albertine had engaged, a room that looked over the valley. The slightest movements, such as that of sitting down on the bench in the lift, were sweet to me, because they were in direct relation to my heart; I saw in the ropes that drew the cage upwards, in the few stairs that I had still to climb, only the machinery, the materialised stages of my joy. I now had only two or three steps to take along the corridor before coming to that room in which was enshrined the precious substance of that rosy form—that room which, even if there were to be done in it delicious things, would keep that air of changelessness, of being, to a chance visitor who knew nothing of its history, just like any other room, which makes of inanimate things the obstinately mute witnesses, the scrupulous confidants, the inviolable depositaries of our pleasure. Those few steps from the landing to Albertine’s door, those few steps which no one could stop, I took with rapture but with prudence, as though plunged in a new and strange element, as if in going forward I had been gently displacing a liquid stream of happiness, and at the same time with a strange feeling of omnipotence, and of entering at last into an inheritance which had belonged to me from time immemorial. Then suddenly I reflected that I was wrong to be in any doubt; she had told me to come when she was in bed. It was as clear as daylight; I pranced for joy, I nearly knocked over Françoise who was standing in my way, and I ran, with sparkling eyes, towards my beloved’s room.

I found Albertine in bed. Leaving her throat bare, her white nightdress altered the proportions of her face, which, flushed by being in bed or by her cold or by dinner, seemed pinker; I thought of the colours I had had beside me a few hours earlier on the front, the savour of which I was now at last to taste; her cheek was traversed by one of those long, dark, curling tresses which, to please me, she had undone altogether. She looked at me and smiled. Beyond her, through the window, the valley lay bright beneath the moon. The sight of Albertine’s bare throat, of those flushed cheeks, had so intoxicated me (that is to say had so shifted the reality of the world for me away from nature into the torrent of my sensations which I could scarcely contain), that it had destroyed the equilibrium between the immense and indestructible life which circulated in my being and the life of the universe, so puny in comparison. The sea, which was visible through the window as well as the valley, the swelling breasts of the first of the Maineville cliffs, the sky in which the