In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [315]
“But I still can’t say things that aren’t true simply because you see no harm in them. I swear to you that I never did anything with Albertine, and I’m convinced that she detested that sort of thing. The people who told you that were lying to you, probably with some ulterior motive,” she said with a questioning, defiant air.
“Oh, very well then, since you won’t tell me,” I replied, pretending to appear to be unwilling to furnish a proof which in fact I did not possess. However, I mentioned vaguely and at random the Buttes-Chaumont.
“I may have gone to the Buttes-Chaumont with Albertine, but is it a place that has a particularly evil reputation?”
I asked her whether she could not raise the subject with Gisele who had at one time been on intimate terms with Albertine. But Andrée told me that because of a vile thing that Gisele had done to her recently, asking a favour of her was the one thing that she must absolutely decline to do for me. “If you see her,” she went on, “don’t tell her what I’ve said to you about her; there’s no point in making an enemy of her. She knows what I think of her, but I’ve always preferred to avoid having violent quarrels with her which only have to be patched up afterwards. And besides, she’s dangerous. But you must understand that when one has read the letter which I had in my hands a week ago, and in which she lied with such absolute treachery, nothing, not even the noblest actions in the world, can wipe out the memory of such a thing.”
On the whole I felt that if, in spite of the fact that Andrée had those tastes to the extent of making no pretence of concealing them, and the fact that Albertine had felt for her the great affection which she undoubtedly had felt, Andrée had none the less never had any carnal relations with Albertine and had never been aware that Albertine had those tastes, this meant that Albertine did not have them, and had never enjoyed with anyone those relations which, rather than with anyone else, she would have enjoyed with Andrée. And so when Andrée had left me, I realised that her categorical assertion had brought me some peace of mind. But perhaps it had been dictated by a sense of the obligation, which Andrée felt that she owed to the dead girl whose memory still survived in her, not to let me believe what Albertine, while she was alive, had doubtless begged her to deny.
Having thought for a moment, contemplating Andrée, that I could actually see these pleasures of Albertine’s which I had so often tried to imagine, on another occasion I received an intimation of them otherwise than through the eyes: I thought I heard them. I had had two young laundry-girls, from a district where Albertine had often gone, brought to a house of assignation. One of them, beneath the caresses of the other, suddenly began to utter sounds which at first I found difficult to identify; for one never understands precisely the meaning of an original sound expressive of a sensation which one does not experience oneself. Hearing it from a neighbouring room without being able to see, one may mistake for uncontrollable laughter the noise which is forced by pain from a patient being operated on without an anaesthetic; and as for the noise emitted by a mother who has just been told that her child has died, it can seem to us, if we are unaware of its origin, as difficult to translate into human terms as the noise emitted by an animal or by a harp. It takes us a little time to realise that those