In any case, even if there had not been the romantic attraction of this disclosure of a greater wealth of planes revealed one after another by life (an attraction the opposite of that which Saint-Loup had felt during our dinners at Rivebelle on recognising, beneath the masks which life had superimposed on a calm face, features to which his lips had once been pressed), the knowledge that to kiss Albertine’s cheeks was a possible thing was a pleasure perhaps greater even than that of kissing them. What a difference there is between possessing a woman to whom one applies one’s body alone, because she is no more than a piece of flesh, and possessing the girl whom one used to see on the beach with her friends on certain days without even knowing why one saw her on those days and not on others, so that one trembled at the thought that one might not see her again! Life had obligingly revealed to one in its whole extent the novel of this little girl’s life, had lent one, for the study of her, first one optical instrument, then another, and had added to carnal desire the accompaniment, which multiplies and diversifies it, of those other desires, more spiritual and less easily assuaged, which do not emerge from their torpor but leave it to carry on alone when it aims only at the conquest of a piece of flesh, but which, to gain possession of a whole tract of memories from which they have felt nostalgically exiled, come surging round it, enlarge and extend it, are unable to follow it to the fulfilment, to the assimilation, impossible in the form in which it is looked for, of an immaterial reality, but wait for this desire half-way and at the moment of return, provide it once more with their escort; to kiss, instead of the cheeks of the first comer, anonymous, without mystery or glamour, however cool and fresh they may be, those of which I had so long been dreaming, would be to know the taste, the savour, of a colour on which I had endlessly gazed. One has seen a woman, a mere image in the decorative setting of life, like Albertine silhouetted against the sea, and then one has been able to take that image, to detach it, to bring it close to oneself, gradually to discern its volume, its colours, as though one had placed it behind the lens of a stereoscope. It is for this reason that women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, of whom one does not indeed know at first whether one will ever possess them, are alone interesting. For to know them, to approach them, to conquer them, is to make the human image vary in shape, in dimension, in relief, is a lesson in relativity in the appreciation of a woman’s body, a woman’s life, so delightful to see afresh when it has resumed the slender proportions of a silhouette against the back-drop of life. The women one meets first of all in a brothel are of no interest because they remain invariable.
At the same time, Albertine preserved, inseparably attached to her, all my impressions of a series of seascapes of which I was particularly fond. I felt that in kissing her cheeks I should be kissing the whole of Balbec beach.
“If you really don’t mind my kissing you, I’d rather put it off for a while and choose a good moment. Only you mustn’t forget that you’ve said I may. I want a voucher: ‘Valid for one kiss.’ ”
“Do I have to sign it?”
“But if I took it now, should I be entitled to another later on?”
“You do make me laugh with your vouchers: I shall issue a new one every now and then.”
“Tell me, just one thing more. You know, at Balbec, before I got to know you, you used often to have a hard, calculating look. You couldn’t tell me what you were thinking about when you looked like that?”
“No, I don’t remember at all.”
“Wait, this may remind you: one day your friend Gisèle jumped with her feet together over the chair an old gentleman was sitting in. Try to remember what was in your mind at that moment.”
“Gisèle was the one we saw least of. She did belong to the group, I suppose, but not properly. I expect I thought that she was very ill-bred and common.”
“Oh, is that