element was painfully endeavouring to combine. This terrible need of a person was something I had learned to know at Combray in the case of my mother, to the point of wanting to die if she sent word to me by Françoise that she could not come upstairs. This effort on the part of the old feeling to combine and form a single element with the other, more recent, which had for its voluptuous object only the coloured surface, the flesh-pink bloom of a flower of the sea-shore, was one that often results simply in creating (in the chemical sense) a new body, which may last only a few moments. That evening, at any rate, and for long afterwards, the two elements remained apart. But already, from the last words that had reached me over the telephone, I was beginning to understand that Albertine’s life was situated (not in a physical sense, of course) at so great a distance from mine that I should always have to make exhausting explorations in order to seize hold of it, and moreover was organised like a system of earthworks which, for greater security, were of the kind that at a later period we learned to call “camouflaged.” Albertine, in fact, belonged, although at a slightly higher social level, to that type of person to whom the concierge promises your messenger that she will deliver your letter when she comes in—until the day when you realise that it is precisely she, the person you have met in a public place and to whom you have ventured to write, who is the concierge, so she does indeed live—though in the lodge only—at the address she has given you (which moreover is a private brothel of which the concierge is the madame). Or else she gives as her address an apartment house, where she is known to accomplices who will not reveal her secret to you, from which your letters will be forwarded, but where she doesn’t live, where at the very most she has left some belongings. Lives entrenched behind five or six lines of defence, so that when you try to see this woman, or to find out about her, you invariably aim too far to the right, or to the left, or too far in front, or too far behind, and can remain in total ignorance for months, even years. In the case of Albertine, I felt that I should never discover anything, that, out of that tangled mass of details of fact and falsehood, I should never unravel the truth: and that it would always be so, unless I were to shut her up in prison (but prisoners escape) until the end. That evening, this conviction gave me only a vague anxiety, in which however I could detect a shuddering anticipation of prolonged suffering to come.
“No,” I replied, “I told you a moment ago that I wouldn’t be free for the next three weeks—tomorrow no more than any other day.” “Very well, in that case . . . I shall come this very instant . . . It’s a nuisance, because I’m at a friend’s house, and she . . .” I sensed that she had not believed that I would accept her offer to come, which therefore was not sincere, and I decided to force her hand. “What do you suppose I care about your friend? Either come or don’t, it’s for you to decide. I’m not asking you to come, it was you who suggested it.” “Don’t be angry. I’ll jump into a cab now and I’ll be with you in ten minutes.”
Thus, from that nocturnal Paris out of whose depths the invisible message had already wafted into my very room, delimiting the field of action of a faraway person, what was now about to materialise, after this preliminary annunciation, was the Albertine whom I had known long ago beneath the sky of Balbec, when the waiters of the Grand Hotel, as they laid the tables, were blinded by the glow of the setting sun, when, the glass panels having been drawn wide open, the faintest evening breeze passed freely from the beach, where the last strolling couples still lingered, into the vast dining-room in which the first diners had not yet taken their places, and when, in the mirror placed behind the cashier’s desk, there passed the red reflexion of the hull and, lingering long, the grey reflexion of the smoke of the last steamer for Rivebelle. I had ceased to