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By Root 1584 0

reasons for that incapacity as though they had been peculiar to myself. But by explaining myself in this fashion, by dwelling upon the case of Gilberte, in regard to whom the argument had indeed been strictly true which was becoming so far from true when applied to Albertine, I was merely rendering my assertions as plausible as I pretended to believe that they were not. Sensing that Albertine appreciated what she believed to be my “plain speaking” and recognised my deductions as clearly self-evident, I apologised for the former by telling her that I knew that the truth was always unpleasant and in this instance must seem to her incomprehensible. She thanked me, on the contrary, for my sincerity and added that so far from being puzzled she understood perfectly a state of mind so frequent and so natural.

This avowal to Albertine of an imaginary sentiment for Andrée, and, towards herself, of an indifference which, so that it might appear altogether sincere and without exaggeration, I assured her incidentally, as though out of scrupulous politeness, must not be taken too literally, enabled me at length, without any danger that Albertine might interpret it as love, to speak to her with a tenderness which I had so long denied myself and which seemed to me exquisite. I almost caressed my confidante; as I spoke to her of her friend whom I loved, tears came to my eyes. But, coming at last to the point, I said to her that she knew what love was, its susceptibilities, its sufferings, and that perhaps, as the old friend that she now was, she might feel it in her heart to put an end to the distress she was causing me, not directly, since it was not herself that I loved, if I might venture to repeat that without offending her, but indirectly by wounding me in my love for Andrée. I broke off to admire and point out to Albertine a great, solitary, speeding bird which, far out in front of us, lashing the air with the regular beat of its wings, flew at full speed over the beach, which was stained here and there with gleaming reflexions like little torn scraps of red paper, and crossed it from end to end without slackening its pace, without diverting its attention, without deviating from its path, like an envoy carrying far afield an urgent and vital message. “It at least goes straight to the point!” said Albertine reproachfully. “You say that because you don’t know what I was going to tell you. But it’s so difficult that I prefer to leave it; I’m certain to make you angry; and then all that will have happened will be this: I shall in no way be better off with the girl I really love and I shall have lost a good friend.” “But I swear to you that I won’t be angry.” She looked so sweet, so wistfully docile, as though her whole happiness depended on me, that I could barely restrain myself from kissing—with almost the same kind of pleasure that I should have had in kissing my mother—this new face which no longer presented the lively, flushed mien of a cheeky and perverse kitten with its little pink tip-tilted nose, but seemed, in the plenitude of its prostrate sadness, to have melted, in broad, flattened and pendent planes, into pure goodness. Leaving aside my love as though it were a chronic mania that had no connexion with her, putting myself in her place, I was moved to pity at the sight of this sweet girl, accustomed to being treated in a friendly and loyal fashion, whom the good friend that she might have supposed me to be had been pursuing for weeks past with persecutions which had at last arrived at their culminating point. It was because I placed myself at a standpoint that was purely human, external to both of us, from which my jealous love had evaporated, that I felt for Albertine that profound pity, which would have been less profound if I had not loved her. However, in that rhythmical oscillation which leads from a declaration to a quarrel (the surest, the most effectively perilous way of forming by opposite and successive movements a knot which will not be loosened and which attaches us firmly to a person), in the midst of the movement