In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [251]
which may now be seen by the indifferent onlooker. (What would have happened if, instead of the photograph of one who was still a girl, Robert had seen the photograph of an elderly mistress?) And indeed, in order to feel this astonishment, we have no need to see for the first time the woman who has caused such ravages. Often we know her already, as my great-uncle knew Odette. So the difference in optics extends not only to people’s physical appearance but to their character, and to their individual importance. It is more likely than not that the woman who is causing the man who loves her to suffer has always behaved good-naturedly towards someone who was indifferent to her, as Odette, who was so cruel to Swann, had been the kind, attentive “lady in pink” to my great-uncle, or indeed that the person whose every decision is computed in advance by the man who loves her, with as much dread as that of a deity, appears as a person of no consequence, only too glad to do anything he asks, in the eyes of the man who does not love her, as Saint-Loup’s mistress had appeared to me who saw in her merely that “Rachel when from the Lord” who had so repeatedly been offered to me. I recalled my own amazement, the first time I met her with Saint-Loup, at the thought that anybody could be tormented by not knowing what such a woman had been doing one evening, what she might have whispered to someone, why she had desired a rupture. And I felt that all this past existence—but, in this case, Albertine’s—towards which every fibre of my heart, of my life, was directed with a throbbing and importunate pain, must appear just as insignificant to Saint-Loup, and would one day, perhaps, appear so to me; I felt that I might gradually pass, so far as the insignificance or gravity of Albertine’s past was concerned, from the state of mind in which I was at the moment to that of Saint-Loup, for I was under no illusion as to what Saint-Loup might be thinking, as to what anyone else than the lover himself may think. And I was not unduly distressed. Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination. I recalled that tragic explanation of so many lives which is furnished by an inspired but not lifelike portrait such as Elstir’s portrait of Odette, which is a portrait not so much of a mistress as of the distortions of love. All that it lacked was—what so many portraits have—the fact of coming at once from a great painter and from a lover (and even then it was said that Elstir had been Odette’s). The whole life of a lover, of a lover whose folly nobody understands—the whole life of a Swann—goes to prove this disparity. But let the lover be embodied in a painter like Elstir and then we have the clue to the enigma, we have at last before our eyes those lips which the common herd have never perceived, that nose which nobody has ever seen, that unsuspected carriage. The portrait says: “What I have loved, what has made me suffer, what I have never ceased to behold, is this.” By an inverse gymnastic, I who had made a mental effort to add to Rachel all that Saint-Loup had added to her of himself, I now attempted to subtract the contribution of my heart and mind from the composition of Albertine and to picture her to myself as she must appear to Saint-Loup, as Rachel had appeared to me. But how much importance does all this have? Would we give credence to these differences, even if we could see them ourselves? When, in the summer at Balbec, Albertine used to wait for me beneath the arcades of Incarville and jump into my carriage, not only had she not yet “thickened,” but, as a result of too much exercise, she had lost weight; thin, made plainer by an ugly hat which left visible only the tip of an ugly nose and, at a side-view, pale cheeks like white slugs, there was very little of her that I recognised, enough, however, to know, when she sprang into the carriage, that it was she, that she had been punctual in keeping our appointment and had not gone somewhere else; and this was enough; what we love is too much in the past, consists too much in the time that we have wasted