In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [259]
In a fit of fury, I telegraphed to Saint-Loup to return as quickly as possible to Paris, in order to avoid at least the appearance of an aggravating persistence in a mission which I had been so anxious to keep secret. But even before he had returned in obedience to my instructions, it was from Albertine herself that I received the following message:
“My dear, you have sent your friend Saint-Loup to my aunt, which was foolish. My dearest, if you needed me, why did you not write to me direct? I should have been only too delighted to come back. Do not let us have any more of these absurd approaches.”
“I should have been only too delighted to come back”! If she said this, it must mean that she regretted her departure, and was only waiting for an excuse to return. I had only to do what she said, to write to her that I needed her, and she would return. So I was going to see her again, her, the Albertine of Balbec (for since her departure this was what she had once more become for me; like a sea-shell to which one ceases to pay any attention when it is always there on one’s chest of drawers, and once one has parted with it, either by giving it away or by losing it, one begins to think about again, she recalled to me all the joyous beauty of the blue mountains of the sea). And it was not only she that had become a creature of the imagination, that is to say desirable, but life with her had become an imaginary life, that is to say a life freed from all difficulties, so that I said to myself: “How happy we are going to be!” But, now that I was assured of her return, I must not appear to be seeking to hasten it, but must on the contrary efface the bad impression left by Saint-Loup’s intervention, which I could always disavow later on by saying that he had acted on his own initiative, because he had always been in favour of our marriage.
Meanwhile, I read her letter again, and was after all disappointed to be reminded of how little there is of a person in a letter. Doubtless the characters traced on the paper express our thoughts, as do also our features; it is still a thought of some kind that we are confronted with. But even so, in the person, the thought is not apparent to us until it has been diffused through the corolla of the face opened up like a water lily. This modifies it considerably, after all. And it is perhaps one of the causes of our perpetual disappointments in love, this perpetual displacement whereby, in response to our expectation of the ideal person whom we love, each meeting provides us with a person in flesh and blood who yet contains so little trace of our dream. And then, when we demand something of this person, we receive from her a letter in which even of the person very little remains, as in the letters of an algebraical formula there no longer remains the precise value of the arithmetical figures, which themselves do not contain the qualities of the fruit or flowers that they enumerate. And yet “love,” the “beloved,” her letters, are perhaps nevertheless translations (unsatisfying though it may be to pass from one to the other) of the same reality, since the letter seems to us inadequate only while we are reading it, but we sweat blood until its arrival, and it is sufficient to calm our anguish, if not to appease, with its tiny black symbols, our desire which knows that it contains after all only the equivalent of a word, a smile, a kiss, not those things themselves.
I wrote to Albertine:
“Dear friend, I was just about to write to you. Thank you for saying that if I had been in need of you you would have