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“Nothing, I was half asleep and talking to myself.”

“Not a bit of it, you were wide awake.”

“I was thinking about asking the Verdurins to dinner, it’s very good of you.”

“No, I mean what you said just now.”

She gave me endless versions, none of which tallied in the least, not simply with her words which, having been interrupted, remained obscure to me, but with the interruption itself and the sudden flush that had accompanied it.

“Come, my darling, that’s not what you were going to say, otherwise why did you stop short?”

“Because I felt that my request was presumptuous.”

“What request?”

“To be allowed to give a dinner-party.”

“No, no, that’s not it, there’s no need for ceremony between you and me.”

“Indeed there is, we ought never to take advantage of the people we love. In any case, I swear to you that that was all.”

On the one hand it was still impossible for me to doubt her sworn word; on the other hand her explanations did not satisfy my reason. I continued to press her. “Anyhow, you might at least have the courage to finish what you were saying, you stopped short at casser.”

“No, leave me alone!”

“But why?”

“Because it’s dreadfully vulgar, I’d be ashamed to say such a thing in front of you. I don’t know what I was thinking of. The words—I don’t even know what they mean, I heard them used in the street one day by some very low people—just came into my head without rhyme or reason. It had nothing to do with me or anybody else, I was simply dreaming aloud.”

I felt that I would extract nothing more from Albertine. She had lied to me when she had sworn a moment ago that what had cut her short had been a social fear of being over-presumptuous, since it had now become the shame of using a vulgar expression in front of me. Now this was certainly another lie. For when we were alone together there was no expression too perverse, no word too coarse for us to utter during our embraces. However, it was useless to insist at that moment. But my memory remained obsessed by the word casser. Albertine often used expressions such as casser du bois or casser du sucre, meaning “to run someone down,” or would say Ah! ce que je lui en ai cassé!, meaning “I fairly gave it to him!” But she would say this quite freely in my presence, and if it was this that she had meant to say, why had she suddenly stopped short, why had she blushed so deeply, placed her hands over her mouth, tried to refashion her sentence, and, when she saw that I had heard the word casser, offered a false explanation? Meanwhile, abandoning the pursuit of an interrogation from which I would get no response, the best thing to do was to appear to have lost interest in the matter, and, retracing my thoughts to Albertine’s reproaches to me for having gone to the Mistress’s, I said to her, somewhat clumsily, making indeed a sort of stupid excuse for my conduct: “Actually I’d been meaning to ask you to come to the Verdurins’ party this evening,” a remark that was doubly maladroit, for if I meant it, since I saw her all the time, why wouldn’t I have suggested it? Furious at my lie and emboldened by my timidity: “You could have gone on asking me for a thousand years,” she said, “and I’d never have consented. Those people have always been against me, they’ve done everything they could to mortify me. There was nothing I didn’t do for Mme Verdurin at Balbec, and look at the thanks I get. If she summoned me to her deathbed, I wouldn’t go. There are some things it’s impossible to forgive. As for you, it’s the first time you’ve behaved badly to me. When Françoise told me you’d gone out (and she enjoyed telling me all right), I’d sooner have had my skull split down the middle. I tried not to show any sign, but never in my life have I felt so grossly insulted.”

But while she was speaking there continued within me, in that curiously alive and creative sleep of the unconscious (a sleep in which the things that have barely touched us succeed in carving an impression, in which our sleeping hands take hold of the key that turns the lock, the key for which