In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [33]
She was not, moreover, frivolous, read a great deal when she was alone, and read aloud to me when we were together. She had become extremely intelligent. She would say, quite falsely in fact: “I’m appalled when I think that but for you I should still be quite ignorant. Don’t contradict. You have opened up a world of ideas to me which I never suspected, and whatever I may have become I owe entirely to you.”
It will be remembered that she had spoken in similar terms of my influence over Andrée. Had either of them a real feeling for me? And, in themselves, what were Albertine and Andrée? To know the answer, I should have to immobilise you, to cease to live in that perpetual state of expectancy ending always in a different presentment of you, I should have to cease to love you in order to fix your image, cease to be conscious of your interminable and always disconcerting arrival, O girls, O successive rays in the swirling vortex wherein we throb with emotion on seeing you reappear while barely recognising you, in the dizzy velocity of light. We might perhaps remain unaware of that velocity, and everything would seem to us motionless, did not a sexual attraction set us in pursuit of you, O drops of gold, always dissimilar and always surpassing our expectation! Each time, a girl so little resembles what she was the time before (shattering, as soon as we catch sight of her, the memory that we had retained of her and the desire that we had proposed to gratify), that the stability of nature which we ascribe to her is purely fictitious and a convention of speech. We have been told that some pretty girl is tender, loving, full of the most delicate feelings. Our imagination accepts this assurance, and when we behold for the first time, beneath the woven girdle of her golden hair, the rosy disc of her face, we are almost afraid that this too virtuous sister, cooling our ardour by her very virtue, can never be to us the lover for whom we have been longing. What secrets, however, we confide to her from the first moment, on the strength of that nobility of heart, what plans we make together! But a few days later, we regret that we were so confiding, for the rosy-cheeked girl, at our second meeting, addresses us in the language of a lascivious Fury. As for the successive facets which after pulsating for some days the roseate light, now eclipsed, presents to us, it is not even certain that a momentum external to these girls has not modified their aspect, and this might well have happened with my band of girls at Balbec. People extol to us the gentleness, the purity of a virgin. But afterwards they feel that something more spicy would please us better, and recommend her to show more boldness. In herself was she one more than the other? Perhaps not, but capable of yielding to any number of different possibilities in the headlong current of life. With another, whose whole attraction lay in a certain ruthlessness (which we counted upon subduing to our own will), as, for instance, with the fearsome jumping girl at Balbec who grazed in her leaps the bald pates of startled old gentlemen, what a disappointment when, a new facet of her personality being presented to us, just as we are making tender declarations fired by the memory of her cruelty to others, we hear her telling us, by way of an opening gambit, that she is shy, that she can never say anything intelligent to anyone at a first introduction, so frightened is she, and that it is only after a fortnight or so that she will be able to talk to us at her ease. The steel has turned to cotton wool, and there is nothing left for us to attempt to break down, since of her own accord she has shed her hard integument. Of her own accord, but through our fault perhaps, for the tender words which we addressed to Harshness had perhaps, even without any deliberate calculation on her part, suggested to her that she ought to be