In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [206]
“It had to be; you were unhappy here.”
“No, I wasn’t at all unhappy, it’s now that I shall be unhappy.”
“No, I assure you, it’s better for you.”
“For you, perhaps!”
I began to stare into space as though, tormented by a great uncertainty, I was struggling with an idea that had just occurred to me. Then, all of a sudden: “Listen, Albertine, you say that you’re happier here, that you’re now going to be unhappy.”
“Why, of course.”
“That appals me. Would you like us to try to carry on for a few weeks? Who knows, week by week, we may perhaps go on for a long time. You know that there are temporary arrangements which end by becoming permanent.”
“Oh, it would be sweet of you!”
“Only in that case it’s ridiculous of us to have made ourselves wretched like this over nothing for hours on end. It’s like making all the preparations for a long journey and then staying at home. I’m absolutely dead beat.”
I sat her on my knee, took Bergotte’s manuscript which she so longed to have, and wrote on the cover: “To my little Albertine, in memory of a new lease of life.”
“Now,” I said to her, “go and sleep until tomorrow, my darling, for you must be worn out.”
“Most of all I’m very happy.”
“Do you love me a bit?”
“A hundred times more than ever.”
I should have been wrong to be pleased with this little piece of play-acting. Even if it had stopped short of the sort of full-scale production I had given it, even if we had done no more than simply discuss a separation, it would have been serious enough. In conversations of this sort, we imagine that we are speaking not just insincerely, which is true, but freely. Whereas they are generally the first faint murmur of an unsuspected storm, whispered to us without our knowing it. In reality, what we express at such times is the opposite of our desire (which is to live for ever with the one we love), but also the impossibility of living together which is the cause of our daily suffering, a suffering preferred by us to that of a separation, which will, however, end by separating us in spite of ourselves. But not, as a rule, at once. More often than not it happens—this was not, as we shall see, my case with Albertine—that, some time after the words in which we did not believe, we put into action a vague attempt at a deliberate separation, not painful, temporary. We ask the woman, so that afterwards she may be happier in our company, so that we at the same time may momentarily escape from continual bouts of gloom and exhaustion, to go away without us, or to let us go away without her, for a few days—the first that we have spent away from her for a long time past, and something that we should have thought inconceivable. Very soon she returns to take her place by our fireside. Only this separation, short but effectuated, is not so arbitrarily decided upon, not so certainly the only one that we have in mind. The same bouts of gloom begin again, the same difficulty in living together makes itself felt, only a parting is no longer so difficult as before; we have begun by talking about it, and have then put it into practice amicably. But these are only premonitory symptoms which we have failed to recognise. Presently, the temporary and benign separation will be succeeded by the terrible and final separation for which, without knowing it, we have paved the way.
“Come to my room in five minutes and let me see something of you, my darling one. It would so nice if you would. But afterwards I shall fall asleep at once, for I’m almost dead.”
It was indeed a dead woman that I saw when, presently, I entered her room. She had fallen asleep as soon as she lay down; her sheets, wrapped round her body like a shroud, had assumed, with their elegant folds, the rigidity of stone. It was as though, reminiscent of certain mediaeval