In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [248]
I realise that in all this I was the most apathetic, albeit the most anxious of detectives. But Albertine’s flight had not restored to me the faculties of which the habit of having her watched by other people had deprived me. I could think of one thing only: employing another person to search for her. This other person was Saint-Loup, who agreed. The transference of the anxiety of so many days to another person filled me with joy and I jigged about, certain of success, my hands becoming suddenly dry again as in the past, and no longer moist with the sweat in which Françoise had soaked me when she said: “Mademoiselle Albertine has gone.”
It will be remembered that when I decided to live with Albertine, and even to marry her, it was in order to guard her, to know what she was doing, to prevent her from returning to her old habits with Mlle Vinteuil. It had been in the appalling anguish caused by her revelation at Balbec, when she had told me, as a thing which was quite natural, and which I succeeded, although it was the greatest sorrow I had ever experienced in my life, in appearing to find quite natural, the thing which in my worst suppositions I should never have been bold enough to imagine. (It is astonishing what a want of imagination jealousy, which spends its time making petty suppositions that are false, shows when it comes to discovering what is true.) Now this love, born first and foremost of a need to prevent Albertine from doing wrong, this love had thereafter preserved the traces of its origin. Being with her mattered little to me so long as I could prevent the fugitive creature from going to this place or to that. In order to prevent her, I had had recourse to the vigilance, to the company, of the people who escorted her, and they had only to give me at the end of the day a report that was fairly reassuring for my anxieties to dissolve into good humour.
Having given myself the assurance that, whatever steps I might have to take, Albertine would be back in the house that same evening, I had granted a respite to the pain which Françoise had caused me when she told me that Albertine had gone (because at that moment my mind, caught unawares, had believed for an instant that her departure was final). But after an interruption, when under the momentum of its own independent life the initial pain revived spontaneously in me, it was just as agonising as before, because it pre-existed the consoling promise that I had given myself to bring Albertine back that evening. My suffering was oblivious of this promise which would have calmed it. To set in motion the means of bringing about her return, once again I was condemned—not that such an attitude had ever proved very successful, but because I had always adopted it since I had been in love with Albertine—to behave as though I did not love her, as though I was not hurt by her departure; I was condemned to continue to lie to her. I could be all the more energetic in my efforts to bring her back in that personally I should appear to have given her up for good. I proposed to write Albertine a farewell letter in which I would regard her departure as final, while at the same time I would send Saint-Loup down, as though without my knowledge, to put the most brutal pressure on Mme Bontemps to make Albertine return as soon as possible. No doubt I had had experience with Gilberte of the danger of letters expressing an indifference which, feigned at first, ends by becoming genuine. And this experience ought to have restrained me from writing to Albertine letters of the same sort as those I had written to Gilberte. But what we call experience is merely the revelation to our own eyes of a trait in our character which naturally reappears, and reappears all the more markedly because we have already once brought it to light, so that the spontaneous impulse which guided us on the first occasion finds itself reinforced by all the suggestions