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By Root 1834 0

and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying. And I should have been so afraid of being robbed (had anyone been capable of so robbing me) of this need of her, this love for her, that I convinced myself that it was a precious necessity in my life. To be able to hear, without being charmed and pained by them, the names of the stations through which the train passed on its way to Touraine would have seemed to me a diminution of myself (for no other reason really than that it would have proved that I was becoming indifferent to Albertine). It was right, I told myself, that by incessantly asking myself what she could be doing, thinking, wishing, at every moment, whether she intended, whether she was going to return, I should keep open that communicating door which love had opened up in me, and feel another person’s life flooding through open sluices to fill the reservoir which must not again become stagnant.

Presently, as Saint-Loup’s silence persisted, a subordinate anxiety—my expectation of a further telegram or a telephone call from him—masked the first, my uncertainty as to the result, whether Albertine was going to return. Listening for every sound in expectation of the telegram became so intolerable that I felt that, whatever its contents might be, the arrival of the telegram, which was the only thing I could think of at the moment, would put an end to my sufferings. But when at last I received a telegram from Robert in which he informed me that he had seen Mme Bontemps but that in spite of all his precautions Albertine had seen him, and that this had upset everything, I burst out in a torrent of fury and despair, for this was what I had wanted at all costs to avoid. Once it came to Albertine’s knowledge, Saint-Loup’s mission gave me an appearance of needing her which could only dissuade her from returning and my horror of which was moreover all that I had retained of the pride that my love had boasted in Gilberte’s day and had since lost. I cursed Robert, then told myself that, if this scheme had failed, I would try another. Since man is capable of influencing the external world, how could I fail, by bringing into play cunning, intelligence, money, affection, to abolish this terrible fact: Albertine’s absence? We believe that we can change the things around us in accordance with our desires—we believe it because otherwise we can see no favourable outcome. We do not think of the outcome which generally comes to pass and is also favourable: we do not succeed in changing things in accordance with our desires, but gradually our desires change. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant to us. We have failed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us beyond it, and then if we turn round to gaze into the distance of the past, we can barely see it, so imperceptible has it become.

From the floor above I could hear one of the neighbours playing some tunes from Manon. I applied their words, which I knew, to Albertine and myself, and was stirred so deeply that I began to cry. The words were:

Alas, most often at night

The bird that flees from what it felt was bondage

Returns to beat at the glass in desperate flight,

and the death of Manon:

Then, Manon, answer me!—The one love of my soul,

Never till now did I know the goodness of your heart.

Since Manon returned to Des Grieux, it seemed to me that I was to Albertine the one and only love of her life. Alas, it is probable that, if she had been listening at that moment to the same tune, it would not have been me that she cherished under the name of Des Grieux, and, even if the idea had occurred to her at all, the memory of me would have prevented her from being moved by this music which, though subtler and better-written, was very much of the kind that she admired. As for