In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [199]
I may say that what had seemed to me most serious and had struck me most forcibly as a symptom of the fact that she anticipated my accusation was that she had said to me: “I believe Mlle Vinteuil was to be there,” to which I had replied in the cruellest possible way: “You didn’t tell me you’d met her.” As soon as I found Albertine less than nice, instead of telling her I was sad, I became nasty.
Analysing my feelings on the basis of this, on the basis of the unvarying system of ripostes expressing the opposite of what I felt, I can be quite certain that if, that night, I told her that I was going to leave her, it was because—even before I had realised it—I was afraid that she might desire some freedom (I should have been hard put to it to say what this freedom was that made me tremble, but anyhow a freedom which might have given her an opportunity of being unfaithful to me, or at least which was such that I should no longer have been able to be certain that she was not) and because I wanted to show her, from pride and from cunning, that I was very far from fearing anything of the sort, as I had already shown at Balbec, when I was anxious that she should have a good opinion of me, and later on, when I was anxious that she should not have time to feel bored with me.
Finally, the objection that might be offered to this second, unformulated hypothesis, that everything that Albertine said to me indicated on the contrary that the life which she preferred was the life she led in my house, rest, quiet, reading, solitude, a loathing for Sapphic loves, and so forth, need not be considered seriously. For if on her part Albertine had wanted to gauge what I felt from what I said to her, she would have learned the exact opposite of the truth, since I never expressed a desire to part from her except when I was unable to do without her, and at Balbec I had twice confessed to her that I was in love with another woman, first Andrée, then a mysterious stranger, on the two occasions when jealousy had revived my love for her. My words, therefore, did not in the least reflect my feelings. If the reader has no more than a faint impression of these, that is because, as narrator, I expose my feelings to him at the same time as I repeat my words. But if I concealed the former and he were acquainted only with the latter, my actions, so little in keeping with them, would so often give him the impression of strange reversals that he would think me more or less mad. A procedure which would not, for that matter, be much more false than the one I adopted, for the images which prompted me to action, so opposed to those which were portrayed in my words, were at that moment extremely obscure; I was but imperfectly aware of the nature which guided my actions; today, I have a clear conception of its subjective truth. As for its objective truth, that is to say whether the intuitions of that nature grasped more exactly than my reason Albertine’s true intentions, whether I was right to trust to that nature or whether on the contrary it did not alter Albertine’s intentions instead of making them plain—that I find difficult to say.
That vague fear which I had felt at the Verdurins’ that Albertine might leave me had at first subsided. When I returned home, it had been with the feeling that I myself was a captive, not with that of finding a captive in the house. But the fear that had subsided had gripped me even more violently when, as soon as I informed Albertine that I had been to the Verdurins’, I saw her face veiled with a look of enigmatic irritation which moreover was not making itself visible for the first time. I knew perfectly well that it was only the crystallisation in the flesh of reasoned grievances, of ideas clear to the person who forms but does not express them, a synthesis rendered visible but not therefore rational, which he who gathers its precious residue from the face of the beloved endeavours in his turn, so that he