may understand what is occurring in her, to reduce by analysis to its intellectual elements. The approximate equation of that unknown quantity which Albertine’s thoughts were to me had given me, more or less, the following: “I knew his suspicions, I was sure that he would attempt to verify them, and so that I might not hinder him, he has worked out his little plan in secret.” But if this was the state of mind (which she had never expressed to me) in which Albertine was living, must she not regard with horror, no longer have the strength to lead, might she not at any moment decide to terminate, a life in which, if she was, in desire at any rate, guilty, she must feel herself suspected, hunted, prevented from ever yielding to her desires, without thereby disarming my jealousy, and in which, if she was innocent in intention and fact, she had had every right, for some time past, to feel discouraged, seeing that, ever since Balbec, where she had shown so much perseverance in avoiding the risk of ever being alone with Andrée, until this very day when she had given up the idea of going to the Verdures’ and of staying at the Trocadéro, she had not succeeded in regaining my trust? All the more so because I could not say that her behaviour was not exemplary. If at Balbec, when anyone mentioned girls who behaved scandalously, she used often to copy their laughter, their wrigglings, their general manner, which was a torture to me because of what I supposed it must mean to her girlfriends, now that she knew my opinion on the subject she ceased, as soon as anyone made an allusion to things of that sort, to take part in the conversation, not only orally but with her facial expression. Whether it was in order not to contribute her share to the slanders that were being uttered about some woman or other, or for a quite different reason, the only thing that was noticeable then, upon those so mobile features, was that as soon as the topic was broached they had made their inattention evident, while preserving exactly the same expression as they had worn a moment earlier. And this immobility of even a light expression was as heavy as a silence. It would have been impossible to say whether she blamed, whether she approved, whether she knew or did not know about these things. Her features no longer bore any relation to anything except one another. Her nose, her mouth, her eyes formed a perfect harmony, isolated from everything else; she looked like a pastel, and seemed to have no more heard what had just been said than if it had been uttered in front of a portrait by La Tour.
My servitude, which had again been brought home to me when, as I gave the driver Brichot’s address, I had seen her lighted window, had ceased to weigh upon me shortly afterwards, when I saw that Albertine appeared so cruelly conscious of her own. And in order that it might seem to her less burdensome, that she might not decide to break her bonds of her own accord, I had felt that the most effective plan was to give her the impression that it would not be permanent and that I myself was looking forward to its termination. Seeing that my feint had proved successful, I might well have felt happy, in the first place because what I had so dreaded, Albertine’s supposed wish to leave me, seemed to be ruled out, and secondly because, quite apart from the object that I had had in mind, the very success of my feint, by proving that I was something more to Albertine than a scorned lover, whose jealousy is flouted, all of his ruses detected in advance, restored to our love a sort of virginity, revived for it the days in which she could still, at Balbec, so readily believe that I was in love with another woman. Doubtless she would no longer have believed that, but she gave credence to my feigned determination to part from her now and for ever.
She appeared to suspect that the cause of it might lie at the Verdurins’. I told her that I had seen a dramatist (Bloch), who was a great friend of Lea’s and to whom Lea had said some strange things (I hoped by telling her this to make her think