In Search of Lost Time, Volume III_ The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust [223]
But to this island, where even in summer there was often a mist, how much more gladly would I have brought Mme de Stermaria now that the cold season, the end of autumn had come! If the weather that had prevailed since Sunday had not in itself rendered grey and maritime the scenes in which my imagination was living—as other seasons made them balmy, luminous, Italian—the hope of making Mme de Stermaria mine in a few days’ time would have been quite enough to raise, twenty times in an hour, a curtain of mist in my monotonously yearning imagination. In any event the fog which since yesterday had risen even in Paris not only made me think incessantly of the native province of the young woman whom I had invited, but since it was probable that it must after sunset invade the Bois, and especially the shores of the lake, far more thickly than the streets of the town, I felt that for me it would give the Isle of Swans a hint of that Breton island whose marine and misty atmosphere had always enveloped in my mind like a garment the pale silhouette of Mme de Stermaria. Of course when we are young, at the age I had reached at the time of my walks along the Méséglise way, our desires, our beliefs confer on a woman’s clothing an individual personality, an irreducible essence. We pursue the reality. But by dint of allowing it to escape we end by noticing that, after all those vain endeavours which have led to nothing, something solid subsists, which is what we have been seeking. We begin to isolate, to identify what we love, we try to procure it for ourselves, if only by a stratagem. Then, in the absence of our vanished faith, costume fills the gap, by means of a deliberate illusion. I knew quite well that within half an hour of home I should not find myself in Brittany. But in walking arm in arm with Mme de Stermaria in the dusk of the island, by the water’s edge, I should be acting like other men who, unable to penetrate the walls of a convent, do at least, before enjoying a woman, clothe her in the habit of a nun.
I could even look forward to hearing with her a lapping of waves, for, on the day before our dinner, a storm broke over Paris. I was beginning to shave before going to the island to engage the room (although at this time of year the island was empty and the restaurant deserted) and order the food for our dinner next day when Françoise came in to announce the arrival of Albertine. I had her shown in at once, indifferent to her finding me disfigured by a bristling chin, although at Balbec I had never felt smart enough for her and she had cost me as much agitation and distress as Mme de Stermaria did now. The latter, I was determined, must go away with the best possible impression from our evening together. Accordingly I asked Albertine to come with me there and then to the island to choose the menu. She to whom one gives everything is so quickly replaced by another that one is surprised to find oneself giving all that one has afresh at every moment, without any hope of future reward. At my suggestion the smiling rosy face beneath Albertine’s flat toque, which came down very low, over her eyebrows, seemed to hesitate. She had probably other plans; if so she sacrificed them willingly, to my great satisfaction, for I attached the utmost importance to having with me a young housewife who would know a great deal more than me about ordering dinner.
It is certain that she had represented something utterly different for me at Balbec. But our intimacy with a woman with whom we are in love, even when we do not consider it close enough at the time, creates between her and us, in spite of the shortcomings that pain us while our love lasts, social ties which outlast our love and even the memory of our love. Then, in the woman who is now no more to us than a means of approach, an avenue towards others,