the distance was so slight that at the moment when, from the platform, outside the waiting-room, their owners hailed us, we might almost have imagined that they were doing so from their own doorstep, from their bedroom window, as though the little departmental line had been merely a provincial street and the isolated country house an urban mansion; and even at the few stations where no “good evening” sounded, the silence had a nourishing and calming plenitude, because I knew that it was formed from the slumber of friends who had gone to bed early in the neighbouring manor, where my arrival would have been greeted with joy if I had been obliged to arouse them to ask for some hospitable service. Apart from the fact that habit so fills up our time that we have not, after a few months, a free moment in a town where on our first arrival the day offered us the absolute disposal of all its twelve hours, if one of these had by any chance fallen vacant it would no longer have occurred to me to devote it to visiting some church for the sake of which I had first come to Balbec, or even to compare a scene painted by Elstir with the sketch that I had seen of it in his studio, but rather to go and play one more game of chess with M. Féré. It was indeed the corrupting effect, as it was also the charm, of this country round Balbec, to have become for me a land of familiar acquaintances; if its territorial distribution, its extensive cultivation, along the entire length of the coast, with different forms of agriculture, gave of necessity to the visits which I paid to these different friends the aspect of a journey, they also reduced that journey to the agreeable proportions of a series of visits. The same place-names, so disturbing to me in the past that the mere Country House Directory, when I leafed through the section devoted to the Department of the Manche, caused me as much dismay as the railway time-table, had become so familiar to me that even in that time-table itself I could have consulted the page headed Balbec to Douville via Doncières with the same happy tranquillity as an address-book. In this too social valley, along the flanks of which I felt that there clung, whether visible or not, a numerous company of friends, the poetical cry of the evening was no longer that of the owl or the frog, but the “How goes it?” of M. de Criquetot or the “Khaire” of Brichot. Its atmosphere no longer aroused anguish, and, charged with purely human exhalations, was easily breathable, indeed almost too soothing. The benefit that I did at least derive from it was that of looking at things only from a practical point of view. The idea of marrying Albertine appeared to me to be madness.
Chapter Four
I was only waiting for an opportunity for a final rupture. And, one evening, as Mamma was setting out next day for Combray, where she was to attend the deathbed of one of her mother’s sisters, leaving me behind so that I might continue to benefit, as my grandmother would have wished, from the sea air, I had announced to her that I had irrevocably decided not to marry Albertine and would very soon stop seeing her. I was glad to have been able, by these words, to gratify my mother’s wishes on the eve of her departure. She had made no secret of the fact that she was indeed extremely gratified. I also had to have things out with Albertine. As I was on my way back with her from La Raspelière, the faithful having alighted, some at Saint-Mars-le-Vêtu, others at Saint-Pierre-des-Ifs, others again at Doncières, feeling particularly happy and detached from her, I had decided, now that there were only our two selves in the carriage, to broach the subject at last. Besides, the truth was that the member of the band of Balbec girls whom I loved, although she was absent at that moment, as were the rest of her friends, but was coming back there (I enjoyed being with them all, because each of them had for me, as on the day when I first saw them, something of the essence of all the rest, as though they belonged to a race apart), was Andrée. Since she was coming back