In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [191]
“Annoyed? What difference does it make to me? I couldn’t care less. Wasn’t Mlle Vinteuil to be there?”
Beside myself at these words, “You never told me you’d met her the other day,” I said to her, to show her that I was better informed than she knew.
Believing that the person whom I reproached her for having met without telling me was Mme Verdurin and not, as I meant to imply, Mlle Vinteuil, “Did I meet her?” she inquired with a pensive air, addressing both herself, as though she were seeking to collect her fugitive memories, and me, as though it was I who could have enlightened her; and no doubt in order that I might indeed say what I knew, and perhaps also in order to gain time before making a difficult reply. But I was far less preoccupied with the thought of Mlle Vinteuil than with a fear which had already crossed my mind but which now gripped me more forcibly. Indeed I imagined that Mme Verdurin had purely and simply invented the story of having expected Mlle Vinteuil and her friend, in order to enhance her own prestige, so that I was quite calm on arriving home. Only Albertine, by saying: “Wasn’t Mlle Vinteuil to be there?” had shown me that I had not been mistaken in my original suspicion; but anyhow my mind was at rest in that quarter as far as the future was concerned, since by giving up her plan of visiting the Verdurins’ Albertine had sacrificed Mlle Vinteuil for my sake.
“Besides,” I said to her angrily, “there are plenty of other things which you hide from me, even the most trivial things, such as for instance when you went for three days to Balbec—I mention it by the way.” I had added the words “I mention it by the way” as a complement to “even the most trivial things” so that if Albertine said to me “What was there wrong about my trip to Balbec?” I might be able to answer: “Why, I’ve quite forgotten. The things people tell me get muddled up in my mind, I attach so little importance to them.” And indeed if I referred to that three-day excursion she had made with the chauffeur to Balbec, from where her postcards had reached me after so long a delay, I did so purely at random, and regretted that I had chosen so bad an example, for in fact, as they had barely had time to go there and return, it was certainly the one excursion in which there had not even been time for the interpolation of a meeting that was at all protracted with anybody. But Albertine supposed, from what I had just said, that I knew the real truth and had merely concealed my knowledge from her. She had in any case been convinced, for some time past, that in one way or another, by having her followed, or in some such fashion, I was, as she had said the week before to Andrée, better informed about her life than she was herself. And so she interrupted me with a wholly unnecessary admission, for certainly I suspected nothing of what she now told me, and I was on the other hand shattered by it, so vast can the disparity be between the truth which a liar has travestied and the idea which, from her lies, the man who is in love with the said liar has formed of that truth. Scarcely had I uttered the words: “When you went for three days to Balbec, I mention it by the way,” than Albertine, cutting me short, declared to me as something quite natural: “You mean I never went to Balbec at all? Of course I didn’t! And I’ve always wondered why you pretended to believe that I did. All the same, there was no harm in it. The driver had some business of his own for three days. He didn’t dare to mention it to you. And so out of kindness to him (it’s typical of me, and I’m the one who always gets the blame), I invented