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I gave the letter back to Françoise and asked her to go out at once and post it. As soon as it had gone, I began once more to think of Albertine’s return as imminent. The thought did not fail to introduce into my mind certain pleasing images which neutralised to some extent the dangers I foresaw in her return. The pleasure, so long lost, of having her with me was intoxicating.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true; I had learned this only too well with Gilberte; the indifference I had feigned while never ceasing to weep had eventually become a fact; gradually life, as I told Gilberte in a lying formula which retrospectively had come true, life had driven us apart. I remembered this, saying to myself: “If Albertine allows a few months to go by, my lies will become the truth. And now that the worst moments are over, isn’t it to be wished that she will allow this month to elapse? If she returns, I shall have to renounce the true life which certainly I am not in a fit state to enjoy as yet, but which as time goes on may begin to offer me attractions while my memory of Albertine grows fainter.”

I do not say that the process of forgetting was not beginning to operate. But one of the effects of forgetting was precisely—since it meant that many of Albertine’s less pleasing aspects, of the boring hours that I had spent with her, no longer figured in my memory, ceased therefore to be reasons for my wanting her not to be there as I used to when she was—that it gave me a more concise impression of her enhanced by all the love that I had ever felt for other women. In this particular form, forgetfulness, although it was working towards inuring me to separation from her, nevertheless, by showing me a sweeter and more beautiful Albertine, made me long all the more for her return.

Often, since her departure, when I was confident that I showed no trace of tears, I had rung for Françoise and said to her: “We must make sure that Mademoiselle Albertine hasn’t forgotten anything. See that you do her room so that it’s nice and tidy for her when she comes.” Or simply: “Only the other day Mademoiselle Albertine was saying to me, let me think now, it was the day before she left …” I wanted to diminish Françoise’s detestable pleasure at Albertine’s departure by giving her the impression that it was not to be prolonged. I wanted, too, to show Françoise that I was not afraid to speak of this departure, to proclaim it—like certain generals who describe a forced retreat as a strategic withdrawal in conformity with a prearranged plan—as deliberate, as constituting an episode the true meaning of which I was concealing for the moment, but in no way implying the end of my friendship with Albertine. I wanted, finally, by repeating her name incessantly, to introduce, like a breath of air, something of her into that room in which her departure had left a vacuum, in which I could no longer breathe. Besides, one seeks to reduce the dimensions of one’s grief by fitting it into one’s everyday talk between ordering a suit of clothes and ordering dinner.

While she was doing Albertine’s room, Françoise, out of curiosity, opened the drawer of a little rosewood table in which my mistress used to put away the ornaments which she discarded when she went to bed. “Oh! Monsieur, Mademoiselle Albertine has forgotten to take her rings, they’re still in the drawer.”

My first impulse was to say: “We must send them after her.” But this would make me appear uncertain of her return. “Oh well,” I replied after a moment’s silence, “it’s hardly worth while sending them to her as she’s coming back so soon. Give them to me, I shall see about them.”

Françoise handed me the rings with some misgiving. She loathed Albertine, but, judging me by her own standards, she reckoned that one could not give me a letter in my mistress’s handwriting without the risk of my opening it. I took the rings.

“Monsieur must take care not to lose them,” said Françoise. “They’re real beauties, they are!