In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [304]
room, the Albertine who on the night when I had told her that we must part had said so sadly: “This pianola, this room, to think that I shall never see any of these things again” and, when she saw the distress which I had finally communicated to myself by my lie, had exclaimed with sincere pity: “Oh, no, anything rather than make you unhappy, I promise that I shall never try to see you again.” Then I was no longer alone; I felt the barrier that separated us vanish. As soon as this good Albertine had returned, I had found once more the only person who could provide me with the antidote to the sufferings which Albertine was causing me. True, I still wanted to speak to her about the story of the laundry-girl, but no longer in order to score a cruel triumph and to show her maliciously how much I knew. I asked her tenderly, as I should have asked her had she been alive, whether the story about the laundry-girl was true. She swore to me that it was not, that Aimé was not very truthful and that, wishing to appear to have earned the money I had given him, he had not liked to return empty-handed, and had made the girl tell him what he wished to hear. No doubt Albertine had never ceased to lie to me. And yet, in the ebb and flow of her contradictions, I felt that there had been a certain progression due to myself. That she had not, indeed, confided some of her secrets to me at the beginning (perhaps, it is true, involuntarily, in a remark that escaped her lips) I would not have sworn. I no longer remembered. And besides, she had such odd ways of naming certain things that they could be interpreted one way or the other. But the impression she had received of my jealousy had led her afterwards to retract with horror what at first she had complacently admitted. In any case, Albertine had no need to tell me this. To be convinced of her innocence it was enough for me to embrace her, and I could do so now that the barrier that separated us was down, that impalpable but hermetic barrier which rises between two lovers after a quarrel and against which kisses would be shattered. No, she had no need to tell me anything. Whatever she might have done, whatever she might have wished to do, the poor child, there were sentiments in which, over the barrier that divided us, we could be united. If the story was true, and if Albertine had concealed her tastes from me, it was in order not to make me unhappy. I had the comfort of hearing this Albertine say so. Besides, had I ever known any other? The two chief causes of error in one’s relations with another person are, having oneself a kind heart, or else being in love with that other person. We fall in love for a smile, a look, a shoulder. That is enough; then, in the long hours of hope or sorrow, we fabricate a person, we compose a character. And when later on we see much of the beloved being, we can no more, whatever the cruel reality that confronts us, divest the woman with that look, that shoulder, of the sweet nature and loving character with which we have endowed her than we can, when she has grown old, eliminate her youthful face from a person whom we have known since her girlhood. I recalled the kind and compassionate look in the eyes of that Albertine, her plump cheeks, the grainy texture of her neck. It was the image of a dead woman, but, as this dead woman was alive, it was easy for me to do immediately what I should inevitably have done if she had been by my side in her living body (what I should do were I ever to meet her again in another life), I forgave her.
The moments which I had lived through with this Albertine were so precious to me that I did not want to let any of them escape me. And occasionally, as one recovers the remnants of a squandered fortune, I recaptured some of them which I had thought to be lost: for instance, tying a scarf behind my neck instead of in front, I remembered a drive which I had never thought of since, during which, in order that the cold air might not reach my throat, Albertine had arranged my scarf for me in this way after first kissing me. That simple