In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [249]
Knowing that Saint-Loup was in Paris, I summoned him there and then; he hastened round at once, swift and efficient as he had been long ago at Doncières, and agreed to set off at once for Touraine. I suggested to him the following arrangement. He was to take the train to Châtellerault, find out where Mme Bontemps lived, and wait until Albertine had left the house, since there was a risk of her recognising him. “But does the girl in question know me, then?” he asked. I told him that I did not think so. This plan of action filled me with indescribable joy. It was nevertheless diametrically opposed to my original intention: to arrange things so that I should not appear to be seeking Albertine’s return; whereas by so acting I must inevitably appear to be seeking it. But this plan had the inestimable advantage over “the proper thing to do” that it enabled me to say to myself that someone sent by me was going to see Albertine, and would doubtless bring her back with him. And if I had been able to see clearly into my own heart at the outset, I might have foreseen that it was this solution, which was hidden in the shadows and which I thought deplorable, that would ultimately prevail over the alternative course of patience which I had decided to adopt, from lack of will-power. As Saint-Loup already appeared slightly surprised to learn that a girl had been living with me through the whole winter without my having said a word to him about her, as moreover he had often spoken to me of the girl he had seen at Balbec and I had never said in reply: “But she’s living here,” he might have been offended by my lack of trust. It was true that Mme Bontemps might talk to him about Balbec. But I was too impatient for his departure, and for his arrival at the other end, to be willing or able to think of the possible consequences of his journey. As for the risk of his recognising Albertine (whom in any case he had resolutely refrained from looking at when he had met her at Doncières), she had, everyone said, so changed and put on weight that it was hardly likely. He asked me whether I had a picture of Albertine. I replied at first that I had not, so that he might not have a chance of recognising Albertine from her photograph, taken at about the time of our stay at Balbec, though he had had no more than a glimpse of her in the railway carriage. But then I realised that in the photograph she would be already as different from the Albertine of Balbec as the living Albertine now was, and that he would recognise her no better from her photograph than in the flesh. While I was looking for it, he laid his hand gently on my forehead, by way of consoling me. I was touched by the distress which the grief that he guessed me to be feeling was causing him. In the first place, however final his breach with Rachel, what he had felt at that time was not yet so remote for him not to have a special sympathy, a special pity for sufferings of that kind, as one feels closer to a person who is afflicted with the same illness as oneself. Besides, he had so strong an affection for me that the thought of my suffering was intolerable to him. Hence he conceived a mixture of rancour and admiration for the girl who was the cause of it. He regarded me as so superior a being that he felt that for me to be in thrall to another creature she must be quite out of the ordinary. I quite expected that he would think Albertine pretty in her photograph, but since at the same time I did not imagine that it would produce upon him the impression that Helen made upon the Trojan elders, as I continued to look for it I said modestly: “Oh, you know, you mustn’t get ideas into your head. For one thing it’s a bad photograph, and besides there’s nothing startling about her, she’s not a beauty, she’s merely very nice.”
“Oh, but she must be wonderful,” he said with a naive, sincere enthusiasm as he sought to form