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By Root 1712 0

must make it for her.” I hoped that she would return any day and did not wish Françoise to suppose that there could be any doubt of this. Albertine’s departure must appear to have been agreed between ourselves, and not in any way to imply that she loved me less than before. But Françoise looked at me with an air, if not of incredulity, at any rate of doubt. She too had her alternative hypotheses. Her nostrils flared, she scented a quarrel, she must have felt it in the air for a long time past. And if she was not absolutely sure of it, this was perhaps only because, like myself, she hesitated to believe unconditionally what would have given her too much pleasure. Now the weight of the affair no longer rested on my overtaxed mind but on Saint-Loup. I was buoyed up with gladness because I had made a decision, because I told myself: “I have answered quick as a flash.”

Saint-Loup could scarcely have been in the train when I ran into Bloch in my hall. I had not heard his ring, and was obliged to let him stay with me for a while. He had met me recently with Albertine (whom he had known at Balbec) on a day when she was in a bad mood. “I met M. Bontemps at dinner,” he told me, “and as I have a certain influence over him, I told him that I was grieved that his niece was not nicer to you, and that he ought to have a word with her about it.” I choked with rage; these remonstrations and complaints would destroy the whole effect of Saint-Loup’s intervention and involve me directly in the eyes of Albertine, whom I now seemed to be imploring to return. To make matters worse, Françoise, who was lingering in the hall, could hear every word. I heaped every imaginable reproach upon Bloch, telling him that I had never authorised him to do anything of the sort and that, besides, the whole thing was nonsense. From then on, Bloch never left off smiling, less, I think, from joy than from embarrassment at having annoyed me. He laughingly expressed his surprise at having provoked such anger. Perhaps he said this in the hope of minimising in my eyes the importance of his indiscreet intervention, perhaps because he was of a cowardly nature and lived gaily and idly in an atmosphere of falsehood, as jellyfish float upon the surface of the sea, perhaps because, even if he had been a man of a different kind, other people can never see things from our point of view and therefore do not realise the magnitude of the injury that words uttered at random can do us. I had barely shown him out, unable to think of any remedy for the mischief he had done, when the bell rang again and Françoise brought me a summons from the head of the Sûreté. The parents of the little girl whom I had brought into the house for an hour had decided to bring a charge against me for abduction of a minor. There are moments in life when a sort of beauty is born of the multiplicity of the troubles that assail us, intertwined like Wagnerian leitmotifs, and also from the notion, which then emerges, that events are not situated in the sum of the reflexions portrayed in the wretched little mirror which the mind holds in front of it and which it calls the future, that they are somewhere outside and spring up as suddenly as a person who comes to catch us in the act. Even when left to itself, an event becomes modified, whether frustration amplifies it for us or satisfaction reduces it. But it is rarely unaccompanied. The feelings aroused by each one of them contradict one another, and fear, to a certain extent, as I felt on my way to see the head of the Sûreté, is an at least temporary and fairly efficacious counter-irritant for sentimental miseries.

At the Sûreté, I found the girl’s parents, who insulted me and with the words “We’d rather starve” handed me back the five hundred francs which I did not want to take, and the head of the Sûreté who, setting himself the inimitable example of the judicial facility in repartee, seized upon a word in each sentence that I uttered for the purpose of concocting a witty and crushing retort. My innocence of the alleged crime was never taken into consideration,