In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [297]
No doubt it was because in that silent and deliberate arrival of Albertine with the woman in grey I read the assignation they had made, that convention of going to make love in a shower-cabin, which implied an experience of corruption, the well-concealed organisation of a double life, it was because these images brought me the terrible tidings of Albertine’s guilt, that they had immediately caused me a physical grief from which they would never be detached. But at once my grief had reacted upon them: an objective fact, an image, differs according to the internal state in which we approach it. And grief is as powerful a modifier of reality as intoxication. Combined with these images, my suffering had at once made of them something absolutely different from what might be for anyone else a lady in grey, a tip, a shower, the street where the purposeful arrival of Albertine with the lady in grey had taken place. All those images—a vista of a life of lies and iniquities such as I had never conceived—my suffering had immediately altered them in their very essence; I did not see them in the light that illuminates earthly spectacles, they were a fragment of another world, of an unknown and accursed planet, a glimpse of Hell. My Hell was the whole region of Balbec, all those neighbouring villages from which, according to Aimé’s letter, she frequently collected girls younger than herself whom she took to the baths. That mystery which I had long ago imagined in the country around Balbec and which had been dispelled after I had lived there, which I had then hoped to grasp again when I knew Albertine because, when I saw her pass by on the beach, when I was mad enough to hope that she was not virtuous, I thought that she must be its incarnation—how fearfully now everything that related to Balbec was impregnated with it! The names of those watering-places, Toutainville, Epreville, Incarville, that had become so familiar, so soothing, when I heard them shouted at night as I returned from the Verdurins’, now that I thought how Albertine had been staying at one, had gone from there to another, must often have ridden on her bicycle to a third, aroused in me an anxiety more cruel than on the first occasion, when I had observed them with such misgivings from the little local train with my grandmother before arriving at a Balbec which I did not yet know.
It is one of the faculties of jealousy to reveal to us the extent to which the reality of external facts and the sentiments of the heart are an unknown element which lends itself to endless suppositions. We imagine that we know exactly what things are and what people think, for the simple reason that we do not care about them. But as soon as we have a desire to know, as the jealous man has, then it becomes a dizzy kaleidoscope in which we can no longer distinguish anything. Had Albertine been unfaithful to me? With whom? In what house? On what day? On the day when she had said this or that to me, when I remembered that I had in the course of it said this or that? I could not tell. Nor did I know what her feelings were for me, whether they were inspired by self-interest or by affection. And all of a sudden I remembered some trivial incident, for instance that Albertine had wished to go to Saint-Mars-le-Vetu, saying that the name interested her, and perhaps simply because she had made the acquaintance of some peasant girl who lived there. But it was useless that Aimé should have informed me of what he had learned from the woman at the baths, since Albertine must remain eternally unaware that he had informed me, the need to know having always been exceeded, in my love for Albertine, by the need to show her that I knew; for this broke down the partition of different illusions that stood between