In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [127]
carry inside us that little organ which we call the heart, which is subject to certain maladies in the course of which it is infinitely impressionable as regards everything that concerns the life of a certain person, so that a lie—that most harmless of things, in the midst of which we live so unconcernedly, whether the lie be told by ourselves or by others—coming from that person, causes that little heart, which we ought to be able to have surgically removed, intolerable spasms. Let us not speak of the brain, for our mind may go on reasoning interminably in the course of these spasms, but it does no more to mitigate them than by taking thought we can soothe an aching tooth. It is true that this person is blameworthy for having lied to us, for she had sworn to us that she would always tell us the truth. But we know, from our own shortcomings towards other people, how little such vows are worth. And we wanted to give credence to them when they came from her, the very person in whose interest it has always been to lie to us, and whom, moreover, we did not choose for her virtues. It is true that, later on, she would almost cease to have any need to lie to us—precisely when our heart will have grown indifferent to her lying—because then we shall no longer take an interest in her life. We know this, and, notwithstanding, we deliberately sacrifice our own life, either by killing ourselves for her sake, or by getting ourselves sentenced to death for having murdered her, or simply by spending our whole fortune on her in a few years and then being obliged to commit suicide because we have nothing left in the world. Moreover, however easy in one’s mind one may imagine oneself to be when one loves, one always has love in one’s heart in a state of precarious balance. The smallest thing is enough to place it in the position of happiness; one glows with it, one smothers with affection not her whom we love but those who have raised one in her esteem, who have protected her from every evil temptation; one feels easy in one’s mind, and a single word is enough—“Gilberte is not coming,” “Mademoiselle Vinteuil is expected”—for all the preconceived happiness towards which we were reaching out to collapse, for the sun to hide its face, for the compass card to revolve and let loose the inner tempest which one day we shall be incapable of resisting. On that day, the day on which the heart has become so fragile, friends who admire us will grieve that such trifles, that certain persons, can so affect us, can bring us to death’s door. But what can they do? If a poet is dying of septic pneumonia, can one imagine his friends explaining to the pneumococcus that the poet is a man of talent and that it ought to let him recover? My doubt, in so far as it referred to Mlle Vinteuil, was not entirely new. But even to that extent, my jealousy of the afternoon, inspired by Lea and her friends, had abolished it. The danger of the Trocadéro once removed, I had felt, I had believed that I had recaptured for ever complete peace of mind. But what was entirely new to me was a certain excursion as to which Andrée had told me: “We went to this place and that, and we didn’t meet anyone,” but during which, on the contrary, Mlle Vinteuil had evidently arranged to meet Albertine at Mme Verdurin’s. At this moment I would gladly have allowed Albertine to go out by herself, to go wherever she might choose, provided that I might lock up Mlle Vinteuil and her friend somewhere and be certain that Albertine would not meet them. The fact is that jealousy is as a rule partial, intermittent and localised, whether because it is the painful extension of an anxiety which is provoked now by one person, now by another of whom one’s mistress may be enamoured, or because of the exiguity of one’s thought which is able to realise only what it can represent to itself and leaves everything else in a vague penumbra from which one can suffer relatively little.
Just as we were about to enter the courtyard we were overtaken by Saniette, who had not at first recognised us. “And yet I contemplated