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By Root 1868 0

a swan, and she seems more alone, just as one discovers on the telephone the inflexions of a voice which one fails to perceive so long as it is not dissociated from a face in which one objectivises its expression. In this sketch, the pleasure, instead of reaching out to the woman who inspires it and who is absent, replaced by an inert swan, is concentrated in her who feels it. At moments the contact between my heart and my memory was interrupted. What Albertine had done with the laundry-girl was indicated to me now only by quasi-algebraic abbreviations which no longer meant anything to me; but a hundred times an hour the interrupted current was restored, and my heart was pitilessly scorched by a fire from hell, while I saw Albertine, resurrected by my jealousy, really alive, stiffen beneath the caresses of the young laundry-girl to whom she was saying: “Oh, it’s too heavenly.”

As she was alive at the moment when she committed her misdeed, that is to say at the moment at which I myself found myself placed, it was not enough for me to know of the misdeed, I wanted her to know that I knew. Hence, if at those moments I thought with regret that I should never see her again, this regret bore the stamp of my jealousy, and, very different from the lacerating regret of the moments when I loved her, was only regret at not being able to say to her: “You thought I’d never know what you did after you left me. Well, I know everything—the laundry-girl on the bank of the Loire, and your saying to her ‘Oh, it’s too heavenly,’ and I’ve seen the bite.” Of course I said to myself: “Why torment yourself? She who took her pleasure with the laundry-girl no longer exists, and consequently was not a person whose actions retain any importance. She isn’t telling herself that you know. But neither is she telling herself that you don’t know, since she isn’t telling herself anything.” But this line of reasoning convinced me less than the visual image of her pleasure which brought me back to the moment in which she had experienced it. What we feel is the only thing that exists for us, and we project it into the past, or into the future, without letting ourselves be stopped by the fictitious barriers of death. If my regret that she was dead was subjected at such moments to the influence of my jealousy and assumed such a peculiar form, that influence naturally extended to my thoughts about occultism and immortality, which were no more than an effort to realise what I desired. Hence, at those moments, if I could have succeeded in evoking her by table-turning as Bergotte had at one time thought possible, or in meeting her in the other life as the abbé X thought, I would have wished to do so only in order to say to her: “I know about the laundry-girl. You said to her: ‘Oh, it’s too heavenly,’ and I’ve seen the bite.”

What came to my rescue against this image of the laundry-girl—certainly when it had lasted for some time—was that image itself, because we only truly know what is new, what suddenly introduces into our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, what habit has not yet replaced with its colourless facsimiles. But it was above all that fragmentation of Albertine into many parts, into many Albertines, that was her sole mode of existence in me. Moments recurred in which she had simply been kind, or intelligent, or serious, or even loving sport above all else. And was it not right, after all, that this fragmentation should soothe me? For if it was not in itself something real, if it arose from the continuously changing shape of the hours in which she had appeared to me, a shape which remained that of my memory as the curve of the projections of my magic lantern depended on the curve of the coloured slides, did it not in its own way represent a truly objective truth, this one, namely that none of us is single, that each of us contains many persons who do not all have the same moral value, and that if a vicious Albertine had existed, it did not mean that there had not been others, the Albertine who enjoyed talking to me about Saint-Simon in her