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“You say: ‘She hadn’t heard,’ because you were here in Paris, but, I repeat, if you’d been present at our conversation, there wasn’t a sound to interrupt us, I said it quite plainly, it’s not possible that she failed to understand.”

“But anyhow she’s quite convinced that I’ve always wished to marry her niece?”

“No, as to that, if you want my opinion, she didn’t believe that you had any intention of marrying the girl. She told me that you yourself had informed her niece that you wished to leave her. I’m not really sure that she’s convinced even now that you want to marry.”

This reassured me slightly by showing me that I was in a less humiliating position, and therefore more capable of being still loved, more free to take some decisive action. Nevertheless I was tormented.

“I’m sorry, because I can see you’re not pleased,” Saint-Loup went on.

“Well, I’m touched by your kindness, and I’m grateful to you, but it seems to me that you might have …”

“I did my best. No one else could have done more or even as much. Try sending someone else.”

“No, no, as a matter of fact, if I had known I wouldn’t have sent you, but the failure of your attempt prevents me from making another.”

I heaped reproaches on him: he had tried to do me a service and had not succeeded.

On leaving the Bontemps’ house he had met some girls arriving. I had already conjectured often enough that Albertine knew other girls in the neighbourhood; but this was the first time that I felt the pain of that conjecture. It would seem that nature has endowed the mind with the means of secreting a natural antidote which destroys the suppositions that we form unremittingly but without danger to ourselves; but nothing could immunise me against these girls whom Saint-Loup had met. But were not all these details precisely what I had sought to learn from everyone with regard to Albertine? Was it not I who, in order to learn them more fully, had begged Saint-Loup, summoned back to Paris by his colonel, to come and see me at all costs? Was it not I, therefore, who had desired them, or rather my famished grief, longing to feed and to wax fat upon them? Finally Saint-Loup told me that he had had the pleasant surprise of meeting down there—the only familiar face that had reminded him of the past—a former friend of Rachel, a pretty actress who was taking a holiday in the neighbourhood. And the name of this actress was enough to make me say to myself: “Perhaps it’s with her;” was enough to make me see, in the very arms of a woman whom I did not know, Albertine smiling and flushed with pleasure. And, after all, why should this not have been so? Had I myself refrained from thinking of other women since I had known Albertine? On the evening of my first visit to the Princesse de Guermantes, when I returned home, had I not been thinking far less of her than of the girl of whom Saint-Loup had told me, who frequented houses of assignation, and of Mme Putbus’s maid? Was it not for the latter that I had returned to Balbec? More recently, had I not longed to go to Venice? Why then might Albertine not have longed to go to Touraine? Only, when it came to the point, as I now realised, I would not have left her, I would not have gone to Venice. Indeed, in my heart of hearts, when I said to myself: “I shall leave her soon,” I knew that I would never leave her, just as I knew that I would never settle down to work, or live a healthy life, or do any of the things which, day after day, I vowed to do on the morrow. Only, whatever I might feel in my heart, I had thought it more adroit to let her live under the perpetual threat of a separation. And no doubt, thanks to my detestable adroitness, I had convinced her only too well. In any case, things could not now go on like this; I could not leave her in Touraine with those girls, with that actress; I could not endure the thought of that life which eluded me. I would await her reply to my letter: if she was doing wrong, alas! a day more or less made no