In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [204]
to Racine. Here, however, Albertine was unable to follow me. She could not see what was stupid about it; her intelligence was opening up, but was not fully developed. There were other more attractive novelties in her; I sensed, in this same pretty girl who had just sat down by my bed, something that was different; and in those lines which, in the look and the features of the face, express a person’s habitual volition, a change of front, a partial conversion, as though something had happened to break down those resistances I had come up against in Balbec one long-ago evening when we had formed a couple symmetrical with but the converse of our present arrangement, for then it had been she who was lying down and I by her bedside. Wishing and not daring to ascertain whether she would now let herself be kissed, every time that she rose to go I asked her to stay a little longer. This was a concession not very easy to obtain, for although she had nothing to do (otherwise she would have rushed out of the house) she was a person methodical in her habits and moreover not very gracious towards me, seeming no longer to take pleasure in my company. Yet each time, after looking at her watch, she sat down again at my request until finally she had spent several hours with me without my having asked her for anything; the things I said to her were connected with those I had said during the preceding hours, and were totally unconnected with what I was thinking about, what I desired from her, remaining obstinately parallel thereto. There is nothing like desire for preventing the things one says from bearing any resemblance to what one has in one’s mind. Time presses, and yet it seems as though we were seeking to gain time by speaking of subjects absolutely alien to the one that preoccupies us. We go on chatting, whereas the sentence we should like to utter would have been accompanied by a gesture, if indeed we have not (to give ourselves the pleasure of immediate action and to gratify the curiosity we feel as to the reactions which will follow it, without saying a word, without a by-your-leave) already made this gesture. Certainly I was not in the least in love with Albertine; child of the mists outside, she could simply satisfy the fanciful desire which the change of weather had awakened in me and which was midway between the desires that are satisfied by the arts of the kitchen and of monumental sculpture respectively, for it made me dream simultaneously of mingling with my flesh a substance different and warm, and of attaching at some point to my recumbent body a divergent one, as the body of Eve barely holds by the feet to the side of Adam, to whose body hers is almost perpendicular, in those Romanesque bas-reliefs in the church at Balbec which represent in so noble and so reposeful a fashion, still almost like a classical frieze, the creation of woman; God in them is everywhere, followed, as by two ministers, by two little angels in whom one recognises—like those winged, swarming summer creatures which winter has caught by surprise and spared—cupids from Herculaneum still surviving well into the thirteenth century, and winging their last slow flight, weary but never failing in the grace that might be expected of them, over the whole front of the porch.
As for this pleasure which by accomplishing my desire would have released me from these musings and which I should have sought quite as readily from any other pretty woman, had I been asked upon what—in the course of this endless chatter throughout which I was at pains to keep from Albertine the one thing that was in my mind—my optimistic assumption with regard to her possible complaisances was based, I should perhaps have answered that this assumption was due (while the forgotten outlines of Albertine’s voice retraced for me the contour of her personality) to the advent of certain words which had not formed part of her vocabulary, or at least not in the acceptation which she now gave them. Thus, when she said to me that Elstir was stupid and I protested: “You don’t understand,” she replied,