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By Root 2004 0

expecting a friend, and the person I spoke to knew what that meant. This person could not give me any other details as she did not remember very well, which is easy to understand after such a long time.’ Besides, this person did not try to find out, because she is very discreet and it was to her advantage because (Mlle A.) brought her in a lot of money. She was quite sincerely touched to hear that she was dead. It is true that so young it is a great calamity for her and for her family. I await Monsieur’s orders to know whether I may leave Balbec where I do not think that I can learn anything more. I thank Monsieur again for the little holiday that he has procured me, and which has been very pleasant especially as the weather is as fine as could be. The season promises well for this year. Everyone hopes that Monsieur will come and put in a little apparition.

“I can think of nothing else to say that will interest Monsieur,” etc.

To understand how deeply these words penetrated my being, it must be remembered that the questions which I had been asking myself with regard to Albertine were not secondary, insignificant questions, questions of detail, the only questions in fact that one asks about anyone who is not oneself, whereby one is enabled to carry on, wrapped in the imperviousness of one’s thoughts, through the midst of suffering, falsehood, vice and death. No, in Albertine’s case they were essential questions: In her heart of hearts what was she? What were her thoughts? What were her loves? Did she lie to me? Had my life with her been as lamentable as Swann’s life with Odette? Hence Aimé’s reply, although it was not a general but a particular reply—indeed precisely because of that—struck home, in Albertine and in myself, to the very depths.

At last I saw before my eyes, in that arrival of Albertine at the baths along the narrow lane with the lady in grey, a fragment of that past which seemed to me no less mysterious, no less horrifying than I had feared when I imagined it enclosed in the memory, in the look in the eyes of Albertine. No doubt anyone but myself might have dismissed as insignificant these details on which, now that Albertine was dead, my inability to secure a denial of them from her conferred the equivalent of a sort of probability. It is indeed probable that for Albertine, even if they had been true, even if she had admitted them, her own misdeeds (whether her conscience had thought them innocent or reprehensible, whether her sensuality had found them exquisite or somewhat insipid) would not have been accompanied by that inexpressible sense of horror from which I was unable to detach them. I myself, with the help of my own love of women, and although they could not have meant the same thing to Albertine, could imagine a little of what she felt. And indeed there was already an initial pain in my picturing her to myself desiring as I had so often desired, lying to me as I had so often lied to her, preoccupied with this or that girl, putting herself out for her, as I had done for Mlle de Stermaria and so many others, for the peasant girls I met on country roads. Yes, all my own desires helped me to a certain extent to understand hers; it was by this time an immense anguish in which all desires were transformed into torments that were all the more cruel the more intense they had been; as though in this algebra of sensibility they reappeared with the same coefficient but with a minus instead of a plus sign. To Albertine, so far as I was capable of judging her by my own standard, her misdeeds—however anxious she might have been to conceal them from me (which made me suppose that she considered herself guilty or was afraid of hurting me)—because she had planned them to suit her own taste in the clear light of the imagination in which desire operates, must after all have appeared as things of the same kind as the rest of life, pleasures for herself which she had not had the strength to deny herself, griefs for me which she had sought to avoid causing me by concealing them from me, but pleasures and griefs which