led to believe it of Germany. On the other hand, if Germany desired peace, to have provoked in the French Government the idea that she was anxious for war was a questionable and dangerous trick. True, my conduct had been adroit enough, if it was the thought that I would never make up my mind to break with her that provoked in Albertine sudden longings for independence. And was it not difficult to believe that she did not have such longings, to shut one’s eyes to a whole secret existence, directed towards the satisfaction of her vice, simply on the strength of the anger with which, on learning that I had gone to see the Verdurins, she had exclaimed: “I thought as much,” and then gone on to reveal everything by saying: “Wasn’t Mlle Vinteuil to be there?” All this was corroborated by Albertine’s meeting with Mme Verdurin of which Andrée had informed me. And yet, perhaps, I told myself, when I tried to go against my own instinct, these sudden longings for independence were caused—supposing them to exist—or would eventually be caused by the opposite theory, to wit, that I had never had any intention of marrying her, that it was when I made, as though involuntarily, an allusion to our approaching separation that I was telling the truth, that I would leave her sooner or later whatever happened—belief which the scene I had fabricated that night could then only have reinforced and which might end by engendering in her the resolution: “If it’s bound to happen sooner or later, we might as well get it over with at once.” Preparations for war, which are recommended by the most misleading of adages as the best way of ensuring peace, on the contrary create first of all the belief in each of the adversaries that the other desires a rupture, a belief which brings the rupture about, and then, when it has occurred, the further belief in each of the two that it is the other that has sought it. Even if the threat was not sincere, its success encourages a repetition. But the exact point up to which a bluff may succeed is difficult to determine; if one party goes too far, the other, which has yielded hitherto, advances in its turn; the first party, no longer capable of changing its methods, accustomed to the idea that to seem not to fear a rupture is the best way of avoiding one (which is what I had done that night with Albertine), and moreover driven by pride to prefer death to surrender, perseveres in its threat until the moment when neither can draw back. The bluff may also be blended with sincerity, may alternate with it, and what was yesterday a game may become a reality tomorrow. Finally it may also happen that one of the adversaries is really determined upon war—that Albertine, for instance, had the intention of sooner or later not continuing this life any longer, or on the contrary that the idea had never even entered her head and that my imagination had invented the whole thing from start to finish.
Such were the different hypotheses which I considered while she lay asleep that morning. And yet as to the last I can say that never, in the period that followed, did I threaten to leave Albertine unless in response to a hankering for a baleful freedom on her part, a hankering which she did not express to me, but which seemed to me to be implied by certain mysterious dissatisfactions, certain words, certain gestures, for which it could be the only possible explanation and for which she refused to give me any other. Even then, quite often, I noted them without making any allusion to a possible separation, hoping that they were the result of a bad mood which would end that same day. But sometimes that mood would continue without remission for weeks on end, during which Albertine seemed anxious to provoke a conflict, as though she knew of pleasures which were available at that moment in some more or less remote place and which would continue to influence her until they came to an end, like those atmospheric changes which, right by our own fireside, affect our nerves even when they are occurring as far away as the Balearic islands.
That morning,