In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [323]
so closely with what had attracted me on the day when I first saw Albertine and her friends that I hastened in pursuit of them and, when they stopped a carriage, looked frantically in every direction for another. I found one, but it was too late. I failed to overtake them. A few days later, however, on coming home, I saw emerging from the portico of our house the three girls whom I had followed in the Bois. They were absolutely typical, the two dark ones especially, except that they were slightly older, of those wellborn girls who so often, seen from my window or encountered in the street, had made me form countless plans, had given me a taste for life, but whom I had never succeeded in getting to know. The fair one had a rather more delicate, almost an invalid air, which appealed to me less. It was she, nevertheless, who was responsible for my not contenting myself with gazing at them for a moment, having stopped dead, with one of those looks which, by their fixed absorption, their application as to a problem, seem to be concerned with something far beyond what meets the eye. I should doubtless have allowed them to disappear, as I had allowed so many others, if, as they walked past me, the fair-haired one—was it because I was scrutinising them so closely?—had not darted a furtive glance at me and then, turning round after having passed me, a second one that set me aflame. However, as she ceased to pay attention to me and resumed her conversation with her friends, my ardour would doubtless have subsided, had it not been increased a hundredfold by the following discovery. When I asked the concierge who they were, “They asked for Mme la Duchesse,” he informed me. “I think only one of them knows her and the others were simply accompanying her as far as the door. Here’s the name, I don’t know whether I’ve taken it down properly.” And I read: “Mlle Déporcheville,” which it was easy to correct to “d’Eporcheville,” that is to say the name, more or less, so far as I could remember, of the girl of excellent family, vaguely connected with the Guermantes, whom Robert had told me that he had met in a disorderly house and with whom he had had relations. I now understood the meaning of her glance, why she had turned round without letting her companions see. How often I had thought about her, trying to visualise her from the name that Robert had given me! And here I had just seen her, in no way different from her friends, but for that clandestine glance which established between herself and me a secret entry into the parts of her life which were evidently hidden from her friends and which made her appear more accessible—already almost half mine—and more soft-hearted than girls of the aristocracy usually are. In the mind of this girl, she and I now had in common the hours that we might have spent together if she was free to make an assignation with me. Was it not this that her glance had sought to express to me with an eloquence that was intelligible to me alone? My heart beat wildly. I could not have given an exact description of Mlle d’Eporcheville’s appearance, I could only picture vaguely a fair-skinned face viewed from the side; but I was madly in love with her. All of a sudden I realised that I was reasoning as though, of the three girls, Mlle d’Eporcheville must be the fair one who had turned round and looked at me twice. But the concierge had not told me this. I returned to his lodge and questioned him again. He told me that he could not enlighten me on the subject, because they had come today for the first time and while he was not there. But he would ask his wife who had seen them once before. She was busy at the moment scrubbing the service stairs. Which of us has not experienced in the course of his life exquisite uncertainties more or less similar to this? A charitable friend, to whom one describes a girl one has seen at a ball, concludes from the description that she must be one of his friends and invites one to meet her. But among so many others, and on the basis of a mere verbal portrait, is there not a possibility of error?