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By Root 1792 0

a trip to Balbec. He simply put me down at Auteuil, at the house of a girlfriend of mine in the Rue de l’Assomption, where I spent the three days bored to tears. You see it’s not very serious, no great harm done. I did begin to think that you perhaps knew all about it, when I saw how you laughed when the postcards began to arrive, a week late. I quite see that it was absurd, and that it would have been better not to send any cards at all. But that wasn’t my fault. I’d bought them in advance and given them to the driver before he dropped me at Auteuil, and then the fathead put them in his pocket and forgot about them instead of sending them on in an envelope to a friend of his near Balbec who was to forward them to you. I kept on imagining they were about to arrive. He only remembered them after five days, and instead of telling me, the idiot sent them on at once to Balbec. When he did tell me, I really let him have it, I can tell you! To go and worry you unnecessarily, the great fool, as a reward for my shutting myself up for three whole days, so that he could go and look after his family affairs! I didn’t even venture out into Auteuil for fear of being seen. The only time I did go out, I was dressed as a man, just for a joke, really. And it was just my luck that the first person I came across was your Yid friend Bloch. But I don’t believe it was from him that you learned that my trip to Balbec never existed except in my imagination, for he seemed not to recognise me.”

I did not know what to say, not wishing to appear surprised, and shattered by all these lies. A feeling of horror, which gave me no desire to turn Albertine out of the house, far from it, was combined with a strong inclination to burst into tears. This last was caused not by the lie itself and by the annihilation of everything that I had so firmly believed to be true that I felt as though I were in a town that had been razed to the ground, where not a house remained standing, where the bare soil was merely heaped with rubble—but by the melancholy thought that, during those three days when she had been bored to tears in her friend’s house at Auteuil, Albertine had never once felt the desire, that the idea had perhaps not even occurred to her, to come and pay me a visit one day on the quiet, or to send a message asking me to go and see her at Auteuil. But I had no time to give myself up to these reflexions. Whatever happened, I did not wish to appear surprised. I smiled with the air of man who knows far more than he is prepared to say: “But that’s only one thing out of hundreds. For instance, only this evening, at the Verdurins’, I learned that what you had told me about Mlle Vinteuil …”

Albertine gazed at me fixedly with a tormented air, seeking to read in my eyes how much I knew. Now, what I knew and what I was about to tell her was the truth about Mlle Vinteuil. It is true that it was not at the Verdurins’ that I had learned it, but at Montjouvain long ago. But since I had always refrained, deliberately, from mentioning it to Albertine, I could now appear to have learned it only this evening. And I had a feeling almost of joy—after having felt such anguish in the little train—at possessing this memory of Montjouvain, which I would postdate, but which would nevertheless be the unanswerable proof, a crushing blow to Albertine. This time at least, I had no need to “seem to know” and to “make Albertine talk”: I knew, I had seen through the lighted window at Montjouvain. It had been all very well for Albertine to tell me that her relations with Mlle Vinteuil and her friend had been perfectly pure, but how could she, when I swore to her (and swore without lying) that I knew the habits of these two women, how could she maintain any longer that, having lived in daily intimacy with them, calling them “my big sisters,” she had not been the object of approaches on their part which would have made her break with them, if on the contrary she had not acquiesced in them? But I had no time to tell her what I knew. Albertine, imagining, as in the case of the pretended excursion