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By Root 1979 0

next door I could hear, rich and mellow in the silence like a harmonium in church, the modulation of an unknown bird which, in the Lydian mode, was already chanting matins, and into the midst of my darkness flung the rich dazzling note of the sun that it could see. Soon the nights grew shorter still, and before what had been the hour of daybreak, I could see already stealing above my window-curtains the daily increasing whiteness of the dawn. If I resigned myself to allowing Albertine to continue to lead this life in which, notwithstanding her denials, I felt that she had the impression of being a prisoner, it was only because each day I was sure that on the morrow I should be able to set to work from time to time, to get up, to go out, to prepare our departure for some country place which we should buy and where Albertine would be able to lead, more freely and without anxiety on my account, the open-air life of the country or the seaside, of boating or hunting, which appealed to her.

Only, the next day, from that past which I loved and detested by turns in Albertine (since, when it is the present, everyone, from calculation, or politeness, or pity, sets to work to weave, between himself and us, a curtain of falsehood which we mistake for the truth) it would happen that, retrospectively, one of the hours which composed it, even of those which I thought I knew, presented to me all of a sudden an aspect which she no longer made any attempt to conceal from me and which was then quite different from the aspect in which it had previously appeared to me. Behind some look in her eyes, in place of the benign thought which I had formerly supposed that I could read in it, a hitherto unsuspected desire would reveal itself, alienating from me a fresh region of Albertine’s heart which I had believed to be assimilated to my own. For instance, when Andrée had left Balbec in the month of July, Albertine had never told me that she was to see her again shortly, and I imagined that she had seen her even sooner than she expected since, because of the great unhappiness that I had suffered at Balbec, on that night of the fourteenth of September, she had made me the sacrifice of not remaining there and of returning at once to Paris. When she had arrived there on the fifteenth, I had asked her to go and see Andrée and had said to her: “Was she pleased to see you again?” Now one day Mme Bontemps called round to bring something for Albertine. I saw her for a moment and told her that Albertine had gone out with Andrée: “They’ve gone for a drive in the country.”

“Yes,” replied Mme Bontemps, “Albertine is always ready to go to the country. Three years ago, for instance, she simply had to go every day to the Buttes-Chaumont.” At the name Buttes-Chaumont, a place where Albertine had told me that she had never been, my breath stopped for a moment. The truth is the most cunning of enemies. It delivers its attacks at the point in one’s heart where one was least expecting them and where one has prepared no defence. Had Albertine been lying, to her aunt then, when she said that she went every day to the Buttes-Chaumont, or to myself since, when she told me that she did not know the place? “Fortunately,” Mme Bontemps went on, “that poor Andrée will soon be leaving for a more bracing countryside, for the real countryside. She needs it badly, she’s not looking at all well. It’s true that she didn’t get all the fresh air she needs last summer. You see, she left Balbec at the end of July, expecting to go back there in September, and then her brother put his knee out, and she was unable to go back.”

So Albertine was expecting her at Balbec and had concealed this from me! It is true that it was all the more kind of her to have offered to return to Paris with me. Unless …

“Yes, I remember Albertine’s mentioning it to me” (this was untrue). “When did the accident occur, again? I’m a bit muddled about it all.”

“Actually, in a way it happened just at the right moment, because a day later the lease of the villa would have begun, and Andrée’s grandmother would have