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By Root 1781 0

to Balbec, that I had learned the truth either from Mlle Vinteuil, if she had been at the Verdurins’, or simply from Mme Verdurin herself, who might have mentioned her to Mlle Vinteuil, did not allow me the chance to speak but made a confession, precisely contrary to what I should have imagined, which nevertheless, by showing me that she had never ceased to lie to me, caused me perhaps just as much pain (especially since I was no longer, as I said a moment ago, jealous of Mlle Vinteuil). Taking the initiative, she spoke as follows: “You mean that you found out this evening that I lied to you when I pretended that I had been more or less brought up by Mlle Vinteuil’s friend. It’s true that I did lie to you a little. But I felt so looked down on by you, and I saw that you were so keen on that man Vinteuil’s music, that as one of my schoolfriends—this is true, I swear to you—had been a friend of Mlle Vinteuil’s friend, I stupidly thought that I might make myself seem interesting to you by inventing the story that I had known the girls quite well. I felt that I bored you, that you thought me a goose; I thought that if I told you that those people used to see a lot of me, that I could easily tell you all sorts of things about Vinteuil’s work, you’d think more highly of me, that it would bring us closer together. When I lie to you, it’s always out of affection for you. And it needed this fatal Verdurin party to open your eyes to the truth, which perhaps they exaggerated a bit, incidentally. I bet Mlle Vinteuil’s friend told you that she didn’t know me. She met me at least twice at my friend’s house. But of course, I’m not smart enough for people who’ve become so famous. They prefer to say that they’ve never met me.”

Poor Albertine, when she had thought that to tell me that she had been on such intimate terms with Mlle Vinteuil’s friend would postpone her being “ditched,” would bring her closer to me, she had, as so often happens, reached the truth by a different road from that which she had intended to take. Her showing herself better informed about music than I had supposed would never have prevented me from breaking with her that evening in the little train; and yet it was indeed that speech, which she had made with that object, that had immediately brought about far more than the impossibility of a rupture. Only she made an error of interpretation, not about the effect which that speech was to have, but about the cause by virtue of which it was to produce that effect—that cause being my discovery not of her musical culture but of her disreputable associations. What had abruptly drawn me closer to her—far more, fused indissolubly with her—was not the expectation of a pleasure—and pleasure is too strong a word, a mildly agreeable interest—but the grip of an agonising pain.

Once again I had to be careful not to keep too long a silence which might have led her to suppose that I was surprised. And so, touched by the discovery that she was so modest and had thought herself despised in the Verdurin circle, I said to her tenderly: “But, my darling, I’d gladly give you several hundred francs to let you go and play the fashionable lady wherever you please and invite M. and Mme Verdurin to a grand dinner.”

Alas! Albertine was several persons in one. The most mysterious, most simple, most loathsome of these revealed herself in the answer which she made me with an air of disgust, and the exact words of which, to tell the truth, I could not quite make out (even the opening words, for she did not finish her sentence). I did not succeed in reconstituting them until some time later when I had guessed what was in her mind. We hear things retrospectively when we have understood them.

“Thank you for nothing! Spend money on them! I’d a great deal rather you left me free for once in a way to go and get myself b … (me faire casser) …”

At once her face flushed crimson, she looked appalled, and she put her hand over her mouth as though she could have thrust back the words which she had just uttered and which I had quite failed to catch.

“What