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By Root 1795 0

to us in the course of our various encounters, I had sought to contain them all in the space of a few seconds so as to reproduce experimentally the phenomenon which diversifies the individuality of a fellow-creature, and to draw out one from another, like a nest of boxes, all the possibilities that it contains—so now, during this brief journey of my lips towards her cheek, it was ten Albertines that I saw; this one girl being like a many-headed goddess, the head I had seen last, when I tried to approach it, gave way to another. At least so long as I had not touched that head, I could still see it, and a faint perfume came to me from it. But alas—for in this matter of kissing our nostrils and eyes are as ill-placed as our lips are ill-made—suddenly my eyes ceased to see, then my nose, crushed by the collision, no longer perceived any odour, and, without thereby gaining any clearer idea of the taste of the rose of my desire, I learned, from these obnoxious signs, that at last I was in the act of kissing Albertine’s cheek.

Was it because we were enacting (represented by the rotation of a solid body) the converse of our scene together at Balbec, because it was I who was lying in bed and she who was up, capable of evading a brutal attack and of controlling the course of events, that she allowed me to take so easily now what she had refused me on the former occasion with so forbidding a look? (No doubt from that earlier look the voluptuous expression which her face assumed now at the approach of my lips differed only by an infinitesimal deviation of its lines but one in which may be contained all the disparity that there is between the gesture of finishing off a wounded man and that of giving him succour, between a sublime and a hideous portrait.) Not knowing whether I had to give credit and thanks for this change of attitude to some unwitting benefactor who in these last months, in Paris or at Balbec, had been working on my behalf, I supposed that the respective positions in which we were now placed was the principal cause of it. It was quite another explanation, however, that Albertine offered me; precisely this: “Oh, well, you see, that time at Balbec I didn’t know you properly. For all I knew, you might have meant mischief.” This argument left me perplexed. Albertine was no doubt sincere in advancing it—so difficult is it for a woman to recognise in the movements of her limbs, in the sensations felt by her body, during a tête-à-tête with a male friend, the unknown sin into which she trembled to think that a stranger might be planning her fall!

In any case, whatever the modifications that had occurred recently in her life and that might perhaps have explained why it was that she now so readily accorded to my momentary and purely physical desire what at Balbec she had refused with horror to allow to my love, an even more surprising one manifested itself in Albertine that same evening as soon as her caresses had procured in me the satisfaction which she could not fail to notice and which, indeed, I had been afraid might provoke in her the instinctive movement of revulsion and offended modesty which Gilberte had made at a similar moment behind the laurel shrubbery in the Champs-Elysées.

The exact opposite happened. Already, when I had first made her lie on my bed and had begun to fondle her, Albertine had assumed an air which I did not remember in her, of docile good will, of an almost childish simplicity. Obliterating every trace of her customary preoccupations and pretensions, the moment preceding pleasure, similar in this respect to the moment that follows death, had restored to her rejuvenated features what seemed like the innocence of earliest childhood. And no doubt everyone whose special talent is suddenly brought into play becomes modest, diligent and charming; especially if by this talent such persons know that they are giving us a great pleasure, are themselves made happy by it, and want us to enjoy it to the full. But in this new expression on Albertine’s face there was more than disinterestedness and professional