In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [265]
“It wasn’t me,” I assured her, “and besides, they don’t both come from the same person. One was given her by her aunt and the other she bought for herself.”
“Not from the same person!” Françoise exclaimed. “Monsieur must be joking, they’re exactly the same, except for the ruby that’s been added to one of them, there’s the same eagle on both, the same initials inside …”
I do not know whether Françoise was conscious of the pain she was causing me, but a smile began to flicker across her lips and thereafter never left them.
“What do you mean, the same eagle? You’re talking nonsense. It’s true that the one without the ruby has an eagle on it, but the other has a sort of man’s head carved on it.”
“A man’s head? Where did Monsieur see that? I had only to put on my specs to see at once that it was one of the eagle’s wings. If Monsieur takes his magnifying glass, he’ll see the other wing on the other side, and the head and the beak in the middle. You can count every feather. Oh, it’s a fine piece of work.”
My intense anxiety to know whether Albertine had lied to me made me forget that I ought to maintain a certain dignity in Françoise’s presence and deny her the wicked pleasure that she felt, if not in torturing me, at least in harming Albertine. I almost gasped for breath as Françoise went to fetch my magnifying glass. I took it from her, and asked her to show me the eagle on the ring with the ruby. She had no difficulty in making me pick out the wings, stylised in the same way as on the other ring, the relief of the feathers, the head. She also pointed out to me the similar inscriptions, to which, it is true, others were added on the ring with the ruby. And on the inside of both was Albertine’s monogram.
“But I’m surprised that it should need all this to make Monsieur see that the rings are the same,” said Françoise. “Even without examining them, you can see that it’s the same style, the same way of turning the gold, the same shape. As soon as I looked at them I could have sworn they came from the same place. You can tell straight away, just as you can tell the dishes of a good cook.”
And indeed, to the curiosity of a servant fanned by hatred and trained to observe details with terrifying precision, there had been added, to assist her in this expert criticism, her natural taste, that same taste, in fact, which she showed in her cookery and which was sharpened perhaps, as I had noticed on the way to Balbec in the way she dressed, by the coquetry of a woman who has once been pretty and has studied the jewellery and dresses of other women. I might have picked up the wrong bottle of pills and, instead of swallowing a few veronal tablets on a day when I felt that I had drunk too many cups of tea, might have swallowed as many caffeine tablets, and my heart would not have pounded more violently. I asked Françoise to leave the room. I would have liked to see Albertine immediately. My horror at her lie, my jealousy of the unknown donor, was combined with pain at the thought that she should have allowed herself to accept presents. I gave her even more, it is true, but a woman whom we are keeping does not seem to us to be a kept woman as long as we are unaware that she is being kept by other men. And yet, since I had never ceased to spend a great deal of money on her, I had taken her in spite of this moral baseness; I had encouraged this baseness of hers, I had perhaps increased, perhaps even created it. Then, just as we have the faculty of making up stories to soothe our anguish, just as we manage, when we are dying of hunger, to persuade ourselves that a stranger is going to leave us a fortune of a hundred million, I imagined Albertine in my arms, explaining to me without the slightest hesitation that it was because of the similarity of its workmanship that she had bought the second ring, that it was she who had had her initials engraved on it. But this explanation was still fragile, it had not yet