reaching my heart. The reason for this charm seemed to me to be that I still loved Albertine as much as ever, whereas the true reason was on the contrary that oblivion was continuing to make such headway in me that the memory of Albertine was no longer painful to me, that is to say had changed; but however clearly we may discern our impressions, as I then thought that I could discern the reason for my melancholy, we are unable to trace them back to their more distant meaning. Like those symptoms which the doctor hears his patient describe to him and with the help of which he works back to a deeper cause of which the patient is unaware, similarly our impressions, our ideas, have only a symptomatic value. My jealousy being kept in abeyance by the impression of charm and sweet sadness which I was feeling, my senses reawakened. Once again, as when I had ceased to see Gilberte, the love of women arose in me, relieved of any exclusive association with a particular woman already loved, and floated like those essences that have been liberated by previous destructions and stray suspended in the springtime air, asking only to be reunited with a new creature. Nowhere do so many flowers, “forget-me-nots” though they be styled, germinate as in a cemetery. I looked at the girls with whom this fine day was so multitudinously aflower, as I would have looked at them long ago from Mme de Villeparisis’s carriage or from the carriage in which, on a similar Sunday, I had come there with Albertine. At once, the glance which I now gave one or other of them was matched immediately by the curious, furtive, speculative glance, reflecting unimaginable thoughts, which Albertine would surreptitiously have cast at them and which, duplicating my own with a mysterious, swift, steel-blue wing, wafted along these paths, so natural until then, the tremor of an unknown life with which my own desire would not have sufficed to animate them had it remained alone, for it, to me, contained nothing that was unfamiliar. At times the reading of a novel that was at all sad carried me suddenly back, for certain novels are like great but temporary bereavements, abolishing habit, bringing us back into contact with the reality of life, but for a few hours only, like a nightmare, since the force of habit, the oblivion it creates, the gaiety it restores through the powerlessness of the brain to fight against it and to re-create the truth, infinitely outweigh the almost hypnotic suggestion of a good book which, like all such influences, has very transient effects.
At Balbec, when I had first longed to know Albertine, was it not because she had seemed to me representative of those girls the sight of whom had so often brought me to a standstill in the streets of towns or on country roads, and because she might epitomise their life for me? And was it not natural that now the waning star of my love in which they had been condensed should disperse once again in this scattered dust of nebulae? All of them seemed to me Albertines—the image that I carried inside me making me find her everywhere—and indeed, at the bend of an avenue, a girl getting into a motor-car recalled her so strongly, was so exactly of the same build, that I wondered for an instant whether it was not her that I had just seen, whether people had not been deceiving me when they sent me the report of her death. I recalled her thus at the corner of an avenue, perhaps at Balbec, getting into a car in the same way, at a time when she was so full of confidence in life. And I did not merely record with my eyes, as one of those superficial phenomena which occur so often in the course of a walk, this other girl’s action in climbing into the car: become a sort of sustained action, it seemed to me to extend also into the past by virtue of the memory which had been superimposed upon it and which pressed so voluptuously, so sadly against my heart. But by this time the girl had vanished.
A little further on I saw a group of three girls, slightly older, young women perhaps, whose elegant and energetic appearance corresponded