In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [344]
It is true that I was not there when she came; she was waiting for me, and I was about to go through my small sitting-room to join her when I realised, on hearing a voice, that I had another visitor. Impatient to see Andrée, and not knowing who the other person was (who evidently did not know her since he had been put in another room), I listened for a moment at the door of the small sitting-room; for my visitor was not alone, he was speaking to a woman. “Oh, my darling, it is in my heart!” he warbled to her, quoting the verses of Armand Silvestre. “Yes, you will always remain my darling in spite of everything you’ve done to me:
The dead are sleeping peacefully beneath earth’s crust.
And so must sleep the feelings time effaces.
Those relics of the heart, they also have their dust;
Do not lay hands upon their sacred traces.29
It’s a bit outmoded, but how pretty it is! And also what I might have said to you from the first:
You will make them weep, child beloved and lovely …
What, you don’t know it?
… All those urchins, men of the future,
Already they hang their youthful reverie
Upon your eyelashes caressing and pure.
Ah! for a moment I thought I could say to myself:
The very first night that he came here
I had for my pride no further fear.
I told him: ‘You will love me, dear,
For just as long as you are able.’
In his arms I slept like an angel.”
Curious to see the woman to whom this deluge of poems was addressed, even though it meant postponing for a moment my urgent meeting with Andrée, I opened the door. They were being recited by M. de Charlus to a young soldier whom I soon recognised as Morel, and who was about to set off for his fortnight’s training. He was no longer on friendly terms with M. de Charlus, but saw him from time to time to ask some favour of him. M. de Charlus, who usually gave a more masculine style to his love-making, also had his tender moments. Moreover, during his childhood, in order to be able to feel and understand the words of the poets, he had been obliged to imagine them as being addressed not to faithless beauties but to young men. I left them as soon as I could, although I sensed that paying visits with Morel was an immense satisfaction to M. de Charlus, to whom it gave the momentary illusion of having married again. And besides, he combined in his person the snobbery of queens with the snobbery of servants.
The memory of Albertine had become so fragmentary that it no longer caused me any sadness and was no more now than a transition to fresh desires, like a chord which announces a change of key. And indeed, any idea of a passing sensual whim being ruled out, in so far as I was still faithful to Albertine’s memory, I was happier at having Andrée in my company than I would have been at having an Albertine miraculously restored. For Andrée could tell me more things about Albertine than Albertine herself had ever told me. Now the problems concerning Albertine still remained in my mind although my tenderness for her, both physically and emotionally, had already vanished. And my desire to know about her life, because it had diminished less, was now relatively greater than my need of her presence. Moreover, the idea that a woman had perhaps had relations with Albertine no longer aroused in me anything save the desire to have relations with that woman myself. I told Andrée this, caressing her as I spoke. Then, without making the slightest effort to make her words consistent with those of a few months earlier, Andrée said to me with a lurking smile: “Ah! yes, but you’re a man. And so we can’t do quite the same things as I used to do with Albertine.” And whether because she felt that it would increase my desire (in the hope of extracting confidences, I had told her that I would like to have relations with a woman who had had them with Albertine) or my grief,