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By Root 1970 0

made them shriek with laughter had you told them that she was more distinguished than one of the two cashiers of the hotel, who, devoured by eczema, ridiculously fat, seemed to them a fine-looking woman. Perhaps sexual desire alone, if it had been let loose in the wake of the alleged old trollop, and if the pages had suddenly begun to covet the young goddess, would have been capable of preventing their error from taking shape. But for reasons unknown, which were most probably of a social nature, this desire had not come into play. The point is however highly debatable. The universe is real for us all and dissimilar to each one of us. If we were not obliged, in the interests of narrative tidiness, to confine ourselves to frivolous reasons, how many more serious reasons would enable us to demonstrate the mendacious flimsiness of the opening pages of this volume in which, from my bed, I hear the world awake, now to one sort of weather, now to another! Yes, I have been forced to whittle down the facts, and to be a liar, but it is not one universe, but millions, almost as many as the number of human eyes and brains in existence, that awake every morning.

To return to Albertine, I have never known any woman more amply endowed than herself with the happy aptitude for a lie that is animated, coloured with the very hues of life, unless it be one of her friends—one of my blossoming girls also, rose-pink as Albertine, but one whose irregular profile, concave in one place, then convex again, was exactly like certain clusters of pink flowers the name of which I have forgotten, but which have long and sinuous recesses. This girl was, from the point of view of story-telling, superior to Albertine, for her narrative was never interspersed with those painful moments, those furious innuendoes, which were frequent with my mistress. The latter was however charming, as I have said, when she invented a story which left no room for doubt, for one saw then in front of one the thing—albeit imaginary—which she was describing, through the eyes, as it were, of her words. Verisimilitude alone inspired Albertine, never the desire to make me jealous. For Albertine, not perhaps from motives of self-interest, liked people to be nice to her. And if in the course of this work I have had and shall have many occasions to show how jealousy intensifies love, it is from the lover’s point of view that I write. But if that lover has a little pride, and even though he would die of a separation, he will not respond to a supposed betrayal with kind words or favours, but will turn away or, without withdrawing, will force himself to assume a mask of coldness. And so it is entirely to her own disadvantage that his mistress makes him suffer so acutely. If, on the contrary, she dispels with a tactful word, with loving caresses, the suspicions that have been torturing him for all his show of indifference, no doubt the lover does not feel that despairing increase of love to which jealousy drives him, but ceasing there and then to suffer, happy, mollified, relaxed as one is after a storm when the rain has stopped and one hears only at long intervals under the tall chestnut-trees the splash of the suspended raindrops which already the reappearing sun has dyed with colour, he does not know how to express his gratitude to her who has cured him. Albertine knew that I liked to reward her for being nice to me, and this perhaps explained why she used to invent, in order to exculpate herself, confessions as natural as these stories which I never doubted and one of which was her meeting with Bergotte when he was already dead. Previously I had never known any of Albertine’s lies save those, for instance, which Françoise used to report to me at Balbec and which I have omitted from these pages although they caused me so much pain: “As she didn’t want to come, she said to me: ‘Couldn’t you say to Monsieur that you couldn’t find me, that I had gone out?’” But “inferiors” who love us, as Françoise loved me, take pleasure in wounding us in our self-esteem.

After dinner, I told Albertine