In Search of Lost Time, Volume IV_ Sodom and Gomorrah - Marcel Proust [309]
“But come,” my mother was saying, “you said nothing unpleasant about her, you told me that she bored you a little, that you were glad you had given up the idea of marrying her. That’s no reason for you to cry like that. Remember that your Mamma is going away today and couldn’t bear to leave her big pet in such a state. Especially, my poor child, as I haven’t time to comfort you. Even if my things are packed, one never has any time on the morning of a journey.”
“It’s not that.”
And then, calculating the future, weighing up my desires, realising that such an affection on Albertine’s part for Mlle Vinteuil’s friend, and one of such long standing, could not have been innocent, that Albertine had been initiated, and, as every one of her instinctive actions made plain to me, had moreover been born with a predisposition towards that vice which my anxiety had all too often sensed in her, in which she must never have ceased to indulge (in which she was indulging perhaps at that moment, taking advantage of an instant in which I was not present), I said to my mother, knowing the pain that I was causing her, which she did not reveal and which betrayed itself only by that air of serious preoccupation which she wore when she was comparing the gravity of making me unhappy or making me ill, that air which she had worn at Combray for the first time when she had resigned herself to spending the night in my room, that air which at this moment was extraordinarily like my grandmother’s when she had allowed me to drink brandy, I said to my mother: “I know how unhappy I’m going to make you. First of all, instead of remaining here as you wished, I want to leave at the same time as you. But that too is nothing. I don’t feel well here, I’d rather go home. But listen to me, don’t be too distressed. This is it. I was deceiving myself, I deceived you in good faith yesterday, I’ve been thinking it over all night. I absolutely must—and let’s settle the matter at once, because I’m quite clear about it now, because I won’t change my mind again, because I couldn’t live without it—I absolutely must marry Albertine.”
NOTES · ADDENDA · SYNOPSIS
Addenda
The manuscript has a longer version of M. de Charlus’s reply:
“Good heavens, what a fate for that unfortunate canvas to be a prisoner in the house of such a person! To go there once by chance is in itself an error of taste; but to spend one’s life there, especially if one is a thing of beauty, is so painful as to be quite unpardonable. There are certain forms of disgrace which it’s a crime to resign oneself to . . . [As a good Catholic, I honour St Euverte: crossed out] and I can remember very well from the Lives of the Saints what this confessor’s qualifications for canonisation were; and indeed, if you like, as a no less good pagan, I respect Diana and admire her crescent, especially when it is placed in your hair by Elstir. But as for the contradictory monster, or even the monster pure and simple, whom you call Diane de Saint-Euverte, I confess I do not take the desire for a union of the churches as far as that. The name recalls the time when altars used to be raised to St Apollo. It is a very distant time—a time from which the person you speak of must incidentally date, judging by her face, which has strangely survived exhumation. And yet, in spite of everything, she is a person with whom one has certain things in common; she has always manifested a singular love of beauty.” This observation would have appeared incomprehensible to the Marquise if for some minutes past, having ceased to understand, she had not given up listening. The love of beauty which caused M. de Charlus to cherish, together with a great deal of social contempt, a more deep-rooted respect for Mme de Saint-Euverte, was deduced from the fact that she always had as footmen a numerous and carefully selected pack of irreproachably vigorous