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By Root 1670 0

whether she thought my visitor was male or (as was not often the case) female, she whose eyes used at one time to sparkle so brightly whenever I mentioned a girl: “You must try and get her to come here. I’d be amused to meet her.” “But she’s what you call a bad type.” “Precisely, that’ll make it all the more fun.” At that moment, I might perhaps have learned all that there was to know. And even when, in the little Casino, she had withdrawn her breasts from Andrée’s, I believe that this was due not to my presence but to that of Cottard, who was capable, she doubtless thought, of giving her a bad reputation. And yet, even then, she had already begun to “freeze,” confiding words no longer issued from her lips, her gestures became guarded. Then she had rid herself of everything that might have disturbed me. To those parts of her life of which I knew nothing she ascribed a character the inoffensiveness of which my ignorance conspired to accentuate. And now the transformation was completed; she went straight to her room if I was not alone, not merely from fear of disturbing me, but in order to show me that she was not interested in other people. There was one thing alone that she would never again do for me, that she would have done only in the days when it would have left me indifferent, that she would then have done without hesitation for that very reason, namely, confess. I should be for ever reduced, like a judge, to drawing uncertain conclusions from verbal indiscretions that were perhaps explicable without postulating guilt. And always she would feel that I was jealous, and judging her.

Our engagement was assuming the aspect of a criminal trial, and gave her the timorousness of a guilty party. Now she changed the conversation whenever it turned on people, men or women, who were not of mature years. It was when she had not yet suspected that I was jealous of her that I should have asked her to tell me what I wanted to know. One ought always to take advantage of that period. It is then that one’s mistress tells one about her pleasures and even the means by which she conceals them from other people. She would no longer have admitted to me now as she had admitted at Balbec, partly because it was true, partly by way of apology for not making her affection for me more evident, for I had already begun to weary her even then, and she had gathered from my kindness to her that she need not show as much affection to me as to others in order to obtain more from me than from them—she would no longer have admitted to me now as she had admitted then: “I think it stupid to let people see who one loves. I’m just the opposite: as soon as a person attracts me, I pretend not to take any notice. In that way, nobody knows anything about it.”

What, it was the same Albertine of today, with her pretensions to frankness and indifference to everyone, who had told me that! She would never have expressed such a rule of conduct to me now! She contented herself, when she was chatting to me, with applying it by saying of some girl or other who might cause me anxiety: “Oh, I don’t know, I didn’t even look at her, she’s too insignificant.” And from time to time, to anticipate discoveries which I might make, she would proffer the sort of confessions whose very tone, before one knows the reality which they are intended to distort, to exculpate, already betrays them as lies.

As I listened to Albertine’s footsteps with the consoling pleasure of thinking that she would not be going out again that evening, I marvelled at the thought that, for this girl whom at one time I had supposed that I could never possibly succeed in knowing, returning home every day actually meant returning to my home. The fugitive and fragmentary pleasure, compounded of mystery and sensuality, which I had felt at Balbec, on the night when she had come to sleep at the hotel, had been completed and stabilised, filling my hitherto empty dwelling with a permanent store of domestic, almost conjugal, ease that radiated even into the passages and upon which all my senses, either actively or,