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By Root 1780 0

all my anguish by proving that she knew of her coming. But doubtless in the meantime I had reasoned thus: “She knew of her coming, which gave her no pleasure in the least, but since she must have realised, after the event, that it was the revelation that she knew someone with such a bad reputation as Mlle Vinteuil that had distressed me at Balbec to the point of thinking of suicide, she didn’t want to mention it.” And now here she was being obliged to admit that the prospect of seeing Mlle Vinteuil gave her pleasure. Besides, the mystery in which she had cloaked her intention of going to see the Verdurins ought to have been a sufficient proof. But I had not given the matter enough thought. And so, while saying to myself now: “Why does she only half confess? It’s even more stupid than wicked and sad,” I was so crushed that I did not have the heart to pursue the question, as to which I was not in a strong position, having no damning evidence to produce, and to recover my ascendancy I hurriedly turned to the subject of Andrée which would enable me to put Albertine to rout by means of the overwhelming revelation of Andrée’s telegram. “Anyhow,” I said to her, “now I’m being tormented and persecuted again with reports of your relations, this time with Andrée.”

“With Andrée?” she cried. Her face was ablaze with fury. And astonishment or the desire to appear astonished made her open her eyes wide. “How charming! And may one know who has been telling you these pretty tales? May I be allowed to speak to these persons, to learn from them what basis they have for their slanders?”

“My little Albertine, I don’t know, the letters are anonymous, but from people whom you would perhaps have no difficulty in finding” (this to show her that I did not believe that she would try) “for they must know you quite well. The last one, I must admit (and I mention it because it deals with a trivial thing and there’s nothing at all unpleasant in it), made me furious all the same. It informed me that if, on the day when we left Balbec, you first of all wished to remain there and then decided to go, that was because in the meantime you had received a letter from Andrée telling you that she wasn’t coming.”

“I know quite well that Andrée wrote to tell me that she wasn’t coming, in fact she telegraphed; I can’t show you the telegram because I didn’t keep it, but it wasn’t that day. Besides, even if it had been that day, what difference do you suppose it could make to me whether Andrée came or not?”

The words “what difference do you suppose it could make to me” were a proof of anger and that it did make some difference, but were not necessarily a proof that Albertine had returned to Paris solely from a desire to see Andrée. Whenever Albertine saw one of the real or alleged motives of one of her actions discovered by a person to whom she had pleaded a different motive, she became angry, even if the person was someone for whose sake she had really performed the action. That Albertine believed that this information about what she had been doing did not come to me from anonymous letters which I had received willy-nilly but was eagerly solicited by me could never have been deduced from the words which she next uttered, in which she appeared to accept my story of the anonymous letters, but rather from her look of fury with me, a fury which appeared to be merely the explosion of her previous ill-humour, just as the espionage in which, on this hypothesis, she must suppose that I had been indulging would have been only the culmination of a surveillance of all her actions which she had suspected for a long time past. Her anger extended even to Andrée herself, and deciding no doubt that from now on I should no longer be unworried even when she went out with Andrée, she went on: “Besides, Andrée exasperates me. She’s a deadly bore. I never want to go anywhere with her again. You can tell that to the people who informed you that I came back to Paris for her sake. Suppose I were to tell you that after all the years I’ve known Andrée I couldn’t even describe her face