In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [295]
My doubts! Alas, I had supposed that it would be immaterial to me, even agreeable, not to see Albertine again, until her departure had revealed to me my error. Similarly her death had shown me how greatly I had been mistaken in believing that I sometimes wished for her death and supposed that it would be my deliverance. So it was that, when I received Aimé’s letter, I realised that if I had not until then suffered too painfully from my doubts as to Albertine’s virtue it was because in reality they were not doubts at all. My happiness, my life required that Albertine should be virtuous; they had laid it down once and for all that she was. Armed with this self-protective belief, I could with impunity allow my mind to play sadly with suppositions to which it gave a form but lent no credence. I said to myself, “She is perhaps a woman-lover,” as we say “I may die tonight;” we say it, but we do not believe it, we make plans for the following day. This explains why, believing mistakenly that I was uncertain whether Albertine did or did not love women, and believing in consequence that a proof of Albertine’s guilt would not tell me anything that I had not often envisaged, I experienced, in the face of the images, insignificant to anyone else, which Aimé’s letter evoked for me, an unexpected anguish, the most painful that I had ever yet felt, and one that formed with those images, with the image, alas! of Albertine herself, a sort of precipitate, as they say in chemistry, in which everything was indivisible and of which the text of Aimé’s letter, which I isolate in a purely conventional fashion, can give no idea whatsoever, since each of the words that compose it was immediately transformed, coloured for ever by the suffering it had just aroused.
“MONSIEUR,
Monsieur will kindly forgive me for not having written sooner to Monsieur. The person whom Monsieur instructed me to see had gone away for a few days, and, anxious to justify the confidence which Monsieur had placed in me, I did not wish to return empty-handed. I have just spoken at last to this person who remembers (Mlle A.) very well.” (Aimé, who possessed certain rudiments of culture, meant to put “Mlle A.” in italics or between inverted commas. But when he meant to put inverted commas he put brackets, and when he meant to put something in brackets he put it between inverted commas. In the same way Françoise would say that someone stayed in my street meaning that he dwelt there, and that one could dwell for a few minutes, meaning stay, the mistakes of popular speech consisting merely, as often as not, in interchanging—as for that matter the French language has done—terms which in the course of centuries have replaced one another.) “According to her the thing that Monsieur supposed is absolutely certain. For one thing, it was she who looked after (Mlle A.) whenever she came to the baths. (Mlle A.) came very often to take her shower with a tall woman older than herself, always dressed in grey, whom the shower-attendant without knowing her name recognised from having often seen her going after girls. But she took no notice of any of them after she met (Mlle A.). She and (Mlle A.) always shut themselves up in the cabin, remained there a very long time, and the lady in grey used to give at least 10 francs as a tip to the person I spoke to. As this person said to me, you can imagine that if they were just stringing beads they wouldn’t have given a ten-franc tip. (Mlle A.) also used to come sometimes with a woman with a very dark skin and a lorgnette. But (Mlle A.) came most often with girls younger than herself, especially one with very red hair. Apart from the lady in grey, the people (Mlle A.) was in the habit of bringing were not from Balbec and must even quite often have come from quite a distance. They never went in together, but (Mlle A.) would come in, and ask for the door of her cabin to be left unlocked—as she was