In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [109]
I had no wish to remain there by myself. It was barely four o’clock. I asked Françoise to go and find Albertine, so that she might spend the evening with me.
It would be untrue, I think, to say that there were already symptoms of that painful and perpetual mistrust which Albertine was to inspire in me, not to mention the special character, emphatically Gomorrhan, which that mistrust was to assume. Certainly, even that afternoon—but not for the first time—I waited a little anxiously. Françoise, once she had started, stayed away so long that I began to despair. I had not lighted the lamp. The daylight had almost gone. The flag over the Casino flapped in the wind. And, feebler still in the silence of the beach over which the tide was rising, and like a voice expressing and intensifying the jarring emptiness of this restless, unnatural hour, a little barrel-organ that had stopped outside the hotel was playing Viennese waltzes. At length Françoise arrived, but unaccompanied. “I’ve been as quick as I could but she wouldn’t come because she didn’t think she was looking smart enough. If she was five minutes painting herself and powdering herself, she was a good hour by the clock. It’ll be a regular scentshop in here. She’s coming, she stayed behind to tidy herself at the mirror. I thought I should find her here.” There was still a long time to wait before Albertine appeared. But the gaiety and the charm that she showed on this occasion dispelled my gloom. She informed me (contrary to what she had said the other day) that she would be staying for the whole season and asked me whether we could not arrange, as in the former year, to meet daily. I told her that at the moment I was too sad and that I would rather send for her from time to time at the last moment, as I did in Paris. “If ever you’re feeling gloomy or if you’re in the mood, don’t hesitate,” she told me, “just send for me and I shall come at once, and if you’re not afraid of its creating a scandal in the hotel, I shall stay as long as you like.” Françoise, in bringing her to me, had assumed the joyous air she wore whenever she had gone to some trouble on my behalf and had succeeded in giving me pleasure. But her joy had nothing to do with Albertine herself, and the very next day she was to greet me with these penetrating words: “Monsieur ought not to see that young lady. I know quite well the sort she is, she’ll make you unhappy.” As I escorted Albertine to the door I saw in the lighted dining-room the Princesse de Parme. I merely gave her a glance, taking care not to be seen. But I must confess that I found a certain grandeur in the royal politeness which had made me smile at the Guermantes’s. It is a fundamental rule that sovereign princes are at home wherever they are, and this rule is conventionally expressed in obsolete and useless customs such as that which requires the host to carry his hat in his hand in his own house to show that he is not in his own home but in the Prince’s. Now the Princesse de Parme may not have formulated this idea to herself, but she was so imbued with it that all her actions, spontaneously invented to suit the circumstances, expressed it. When she rose from table she handed a lavish tip to Aimé, as though he had been there solely for her and she were rewarding, before leaving a country house, a butler who had been detailed to wait upon her. Nor did she stop at the tip, but with a gracious smile bestowed on him a few friendly, flattering words, with a store of which her mother had provided her. She all but told him that, just as the hotel was perfectly managed, so Normandy was a garden of roses and that she preferred France to any other country in the world. Another coin slipped from the Princess’s fingers for the wine waiter whom she had sent for and to whom she insisted on expressing her satisfaction like a general after an inspection. The lift-boy had come up at