In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [270]
At these words, shed, passage, drawing-room, and before he had even finished uttering them, my heart was convulsed more instantaneously than by an electric current, for the force that circles the earth most times in a second is not electricity but pain. How I repeated to myself these words, shed, passage, drawing-room, renewing the shock at will, after Saint-Loup had left me! In a shed one girl can hide with another. And in that drawing-room, who knew what Albertine did when her aunt was not there? Had I then imagined the house in which she was living as incapable of possessing either a shed or a drawing-room? No, I had not imagined it at all, except as a vague dwelling. I had suffered first of all when the place where Albertine was had acquired a geographical identity, when I had learned that, instead of being in two or three possible places, she was in Touraine; those words uttered by her concierge had marked in my heart as upon a map the place where I must suffer. But once I had grown accustomed to the idea that she was in a house in Touraine, I had still not seen the house; never had there occurred to my imagination this appalling idea of a drawing-room, a shed, a passage, which struck me now, facing me in the retina of Saint-Loup’s eyes which had seen them, as the rooms in which Albertine came and went, lived her life, as those rooms in particular and not an infinity of possible rooms which had cancelled one another out. With the words shed, passage, drawing-room, I became aware of my folly in having left Albertine for a week in that accursed place whose existence (instead of its mere possibility) had just been revealed to me. Alas! when Saint-Loup told me also that in this drawing-room he had heard someone singing at the top of her voice in an adjoining room and that it was Albertine who was singing, I realised with despair that, rid of me at last, she was happy! She had regained her freedom. And I had been thinking that she would come to take the place of Andrée! My grief turned to anger with Saint-Loup.
“That’s the one thing in the world I asked you to avoid, that she should know of your coming.”
“Do you think it was easy! They assured me that she wasn’t in the house. Oh, I know very well that you’re not pleased with me, I could tell that from your telegrams. But you’re not being fair; I did what I could.”
Set free once more, released from the cage in which, here at home, I used to leave her for days on end without letting her come to my room, Albertine had regained all her attraction in my eyes; she had become once more the girl whom everyone pursued, the marvellous bird of the earliest days.
“Anyhow, to sum up—as regards the money, I don’t know what to say to you. I found myself addressing a woman who seemed to me to be so scrupulous that I was afraid of offending her. However, she didn’t say a word when I mentioned the money. In fact, a little later she told me that she was touched to find that we understood one another so well. And yet everything that she said afterwards was so delicate, so refined, that it seemed to me impossible that she could have been referring to my offer of money when she said: ‘We understand one another so well,’ for after all I was behaving like a cad.”
“But perhaps she didn’t understand what you meant, perhaps she didn’t hear. You ought to have repeated the offer, because then it would certainly have worked.”
“But how could she possibly not have heard? I spoke to her as I’m speaking to you, and she’s neither deaf nor mad.”
“And she made no comment?”
“None.”
“You ought to have repeated the offer.”
“How do you mean, repeat it? As soon as we met I saw what sort of person she was. I said to myself that you’d been mistaken, that you were making me commit the most awful gaffe, and that it would be terribly difficult to offer her the money like that. I did it, however, to oblige you, convinced that she’d turn me out of the house.”
“But she didn’t. Therefore, either