In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [34]
I do not say that a day will not come when, even to these luminous girls, we shall assign sharply defined characters, but that will be because they will have ceased to interest us, because their entry upon the scene will no longer be, for our heart, the apparition which it expected to be different and which, each time, leaves it overwhelmed by fresh incarnations. Their immobility will come from our indifference to them, which will deliver them up to the judgment of our intelligence. The latter’s conclusions will not in fact be very much more categorical, for after deciding that some defect, predominant in the one, was happily absent from the other, it will see that this defect was offset by some precious quality. So that, from the false judgment of our intelligence, which comes into play only when we have lost interest, there will emerge well-defined, stable characters of girls, which will enlighten us no more than did the surprising faces that used to appear every day when, in the bewildering speed of our expectation, they presented themselves daily, weekly, too different to allow us, since their course was never arrested, to classify them, to award degrees of merit. As for our sentiments, we have said so too often to repeat it here, as often as not love is no more than the association of the image of a girl (whom otherwise we should soon have found intolerable) with the heartbeats inseparable from an endless wait in vain and her failure to turn up at the end of it. All this is true not only of impressionable young men in the face of changeable girls. At the stage that our narrative has now reached, it appears, as I later learned, that Jupien’s niece had altered her opinion of Morel and M. de Charlus. My chauffeur, to reinforce her love for Morel, had extolled to her, as existing in the violinist, boundless refinements of delicacy in which she was all too ready to believe. And at the same time Morel never ceased to complain to her of the despotic treatment that he received from M. de Charlus, which she ascribed to malevolence, never imagining that it could be due to love. She was moreover forced to acknowledge that M. de Charlus was a tyrannical presence at all their meetings. And in corroboration of this, she had heard society women speak of the Baron’s atrocious spitefulness. Lately, however, her judgment had been completely reversed. She had discovered in Morel (without ceasing for that reason to love him) depths of malevolence and perfidy, compensated it was true by frequent gentleness and genuine sensitivity, and in M. de Charlus an immense and unsuspected kindness mixed with incomprehensible asperities. And so she had been no more able to arrive at a definite judgment of what, each in himself, the violinist and his protector really were, than I was able to form of Andrée, whom nevertheless I saw every day, or of Albertine who was living with me.
On the evenings when the latter did not read aloud to me, she would play me some music or begin a game of draughts, or a conversation, which I would interrupt with kisses. Our relations had a simplicity that made them soothing. The very emptiness of her life gave Albertine a sort of eagerness to comply with the few demands I made on her. Behind this girl, as behind the purple light that used to filter beneath the curtains of my room at Balbec, while outside the concert blared, there shone the blue-green undulations of the sea. Was she not, after all (she in whose being there now existed an idea of me so habitual and familiar that, next to her aunt, I was perhaps the person whom she distinguished least from herself), the girl whom I had seen the first time at Balbec, beneath her flat cap, with her insistent laughing eyes, a stranger still, slender as a silhouette projected against the waves? These effigies preserved intact in our memory astonish us, when we recall them, by their