In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [293]
My jealous curiosity as to what Albertine might have done was unbounded. I suborned any number of women from whom I learned nothing. If this curiosity was so tenacious, it was because people do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were travelling abroad. This is a thoroughly pagan survival. Conversely, when we have ceased to love, the curiosity which people arouse dies before they themselves are dead. Thus I would no longer have taken a single step to find out with whom Gilberte had been strolling on a certain evening in the Champs-Elysées. Now, I was well aware that these two forms of curiosity were absolutely identical, had no value in themselves, were incapable of lasting. But I continued to sacrifice everything to the cruel satisfaction of this transient curiosity, although I knew in advance that my enforced separation from Albertine, by the fact of her death, would lead me to the same indifference as had resulted from my voluntary separation from Gilberte.
If she could have known what was going to happen, she would have stayed with me. But this simply amounted to saying that, once she saw herself dead, she would have preferred to remain alive with me. Because of the very contradiction that it implied, such a supposition was absurd. But it was not innocuous, for in imagining how glad Albertine would be, if she could know, if she could retrospectively understand, to come back to me, I saw her before me, I wanted to kiss her, and alas, it was impossible, she would never come back, she was dead.
My imagination sought for her in the sky, at nightfall when, still together, we had gazed at it; beyond that moonlight which she loved, I tried to raise up to her my tenderness so that it might be a consolation to her for being no longer alive, and this love for a being who was now so remote was like a religion; my thoughts rose towards her like prayers. Desire is powerful indeed: it engenders belief; I had believed that Albertine would not leave me because I desired that she should not do so. Because I desired it, I began to believe that she was not dead; I took to reading books about table-turning; I began to believe in the possibility of the immortality of the soul. But that did not suffice me. I required that, after my own death, I should find her again in her body, as though eternity were like life. Life, did I say? I say?I was more exacting still. I should have liked not to be for ever deprived by death of the pleasures of which in any case it is not alone in robbing us. For without it they would eventually have lost their edge; indeed they had already begun to do so through the effect of long-established habit, of fresh curiosities. Besides, had she been alive, Albertine, even physically, would gradually have changed; day by day I would have adapted myself to that change. But my memory, calling up only detached moments of her life, demanded to see her again as she would already have ceased to be had she lived; what it wanted was a miracle that would satisfy the natural and arbitrary limitations of memory, which cannot escape from the past. And yet, with the naivety of the old theologians, I imagined this living creature vouchsafing me not simply the explanations which she might possibly have given me but, by a final contradiction, those that she had always refused me during her life. And thus, her death being a sort of dream, my love would seem to her an unlooked-for happiness; all I retained of death was the comfort and the optimism of a denouement which simplifies, which settles everything.
Sometimes it was not so far off, it was not in another world, that I imagined our reunion. Just as, in the past, when I knew Gilberte only from playing with her in the Champs-Elysées, at home in the evening I used