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By Root 1823 0

not my suspicions antennae pointing in the direction of the truth, since if she had given up the Verdurins for my sake in order to go to the Trocadéro, nevertheless at the Verdurins’ Mlle Vinteuil had been expected, and at the Trocadéro, which she had moreover given up in order to go for a drive with me, there had been this Lea, who seemed to me to be disturbing me without cause and yet whom, in a remark which I had not extracted from her, she admitted having known on a larger scale than my fears had ever envisaged, in circumstances that were indeed dubious: for what could have induced her to go behind like that to her dressing-room? If I ceased to suffer on account of Mlle Vinteuil when I suffered because of Lea, those two tormentors of my day, it was either because of the inability of my mind to picture too many scenes at one time, or because of the intrusion of my nervous emotions of which my jealousy was but the echo. I could deduce from them only that she had no more belonged to Lea than to Mlle Vinteuil and that I believed in the Lea hypothesis only because she was now uppermost in my mind. But the fact that my jealousies subsided—to revive from time to time one after another—did not mean, either, that they did not correspond each to some truth of which I had had a foreboding, that of these various women I must not say to myself none, but all. I say a foreboding, for I could not project myself to all the points of time and space which I should have had to occupy; and besides, what instinct would have given me the sequence and the co-ordinates to enable me to surprise Albertine at such and such a time with Lea, or with the Balbec girls, or with that friend of Mme Bontemps whom she had brushed against, or with the girl on the tennis-court who had nudged her with her elbow, or with Mlle Vinteuil?

“My little Albertine,” I replied, “it is very good of you to make me this promise. Anyhow, for the first few years at least, I shall avoid the places where I might meet you. You don’t know whether you’ll be going to Balbec this summer? Because in that case I should arrange not to go there myself.” Now, if I went on in this way, anticipating the future in my lying inventions, it was less with the object of frightening Albertine than that of distressing myself. As a man who at first has had no serious reason for losing his temper becomes completely intoxicated by the sound of his own voice and lets himself be carried away by a fury engendered not by his grievance but by his anger itself as it steadily grows, so I was sliding faster and faster down the slope of my wretchedness, towards an ever more profound despair, with the inertia of a man who feels the cold grip him, makes no effort to struggle against it, and even finds a sort of pleasure in shivering. And if, presently, I had the strength at last to pull myself together, to react, to go into reverse, as I had every intention of doing, it was not so much for the pain that Albertine had caused me by greeting me with such hostility on my return, as for the pain I had felt in imagining, in order to pretend to be settling them, the formalities of an imaginary separation, in foreseeing its consequences, that Albertine’s kiss, when the time came for her to bid me good-night, would have to console me now. In any case, it was important that this leave-taking should not come of its own accord from her, for that would have made more difficult the reversal whereby I would propose to her to abandon the idea of our parting. I therefore continued to remind her that the time to say good-night had long since come and gone, and this, by leaving the initiative to me, enabled me to put it off for a moment longer. And thus I interspersed the questions which I continued to put to Albertine with allusions to our exhaustion and the lateness of the hour.

“I don’t know where I shall be going,” she replied to the last of these questions with a preoccupied air. “Perhaps I shall go to Touraine, to my aunt’s.” And this first plan that she suggested froze me as though it were beginning actually to put