In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [201]
She gazed fixedly into space before replying: “Yes … that’s to say no. I was wrong to tell you that Andrée was greatly taken with Bloch. We never met him.”
“Then why did you say so?”
“Because I was afraid that you believed other stories about her.”
“That’s all?”
She stared once again into space and then said: “I ought not to have kept from you a three weeks’ trip I went on with Lea. But I knew you so slightly in those days!”
“It was before Balbec?”
“Before the second time, yes.”
And that very morning, she had told me that she did not know Lea! I watched a tongue of flame seize and devour in an instant a novel which I had spent millions of minutes in writing. To what end? To what end? Of course I realised that Albertine had revealed these two facts to me because she thought that I had learned them indirectly from Lea; and that there was no reason why a hundred similar facts should not exist. I realised too that Albertine’s words, when one interrogated her, never contained an atom of truth, that the truth was something she let slip only in spite of herself, as a result of a sudden mixing together in her mind of the facts which she had previously been determined to conceal with the belief that one had got wind of them.
“But two things are nothing,” I said to Albertine, “let’s have as many as four, so that you may leave me with some memories. What other revelations have you got for me?”
Once again she stared into space. To what belief in a future life was she adapting her falsehood, with what gods less accommodating than she had supposed was she seeking to make a deal? It cannot have been an easy matter, for her silence and the fixity of her gaze continued for some time.
“No, nothing else,” she said at length. And, notwithstanding my persistence, she adhered, easily now, to “nothing else.” And what a lie! For, from the moment she had acquired those tastes until the day when she had been shut up in my house, how many times, in how many places, on how many excursions must she have gratified them! The daughters of Gomorrah are at once rare enough and numerous enough for one not to pass unnoticed by another in any given crowd. Thenceforward, a rendezvous is an easy matter.
I remembered with horror an evening which at the time had struck me as merely absurd. One of my friends had invited me to dine at a restaurant with his mistress and another of his friends who had also brought his. The two women were not long in coming to an understanding, but were so impatient to enjoy one another that already at the soup stage their feet were searching for one another, often finding mine. Presently their legs were intertwined. My two friends noticed nothing; I was in agonies. One of the women, who could contain herself no longer, stooped under the table, saying that she had dropped something. Then one of them complained of a headache and asked to go upstairs to the lavatory. The other remembered that it was time for her to go and meet a woman friend at the theatre. Finally I was left alone with my two friends, who suspected nothing. The lady with the headache reappeared, but begged to be allowed to go home by herself to wait for her lover at his house, so that she might take a febrifuge. The two women became great friends and used to go about together, one of them, dressed as a man, picking up little girls and taking them home to the other to be initiated. This other had a little boy with whom she would pretend to be displeased and would hand him over for correction to her friend, who went to it with a will. One may say that there was no place, however public, in which they did not do what is most secret.
“But Lea behaved perfectly properly with me throughout the trip,” Albertine told me. “In fact she was a great deal more reserved than plenty of society women.”
“Are there any society women who have shown