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“Oh! no, from the day Albertine came back from Balbec with you, except the time I told you about, she never did anything again with me. She wouldn’t even allow me to mention such things to her.”

“But my dear Andrée, why go on lying to me? By the merest chance, for I never try to find out anything, I’ve learned in the minutest detail things of that sort which Albertine did, I can tell you exactly, on the bank of a river with a laundry-girl, only a few days before her death.”

“Ah! perhaps after she’d left you, that I can’t say. She felt that she’d failed, that she’d never again be able to regain your trust.”

These last words shattered me. Then I thought again of the evening of the syringa, and remembered that about a fortnight later, as my jealousy kept changing its object, I had asked Albertine whether she had ever had relations with Andrée, and she had replied: “Oh! never! Of course, I adore Andrée; I have a deep affection for her, but as I might have for a sister, and even if I had the tastes which you seem to suppose, she’s the last person I should have thought of in that connexion. I can swear to you by anything you like, the honour of my aunt, the grave of my poor mother.” I had believed her. And yet even if my suspicions had not been aroused by the contradiction between her former partial admissions with regard to certain matters and the vehemence with which she had afterwards denied them as soon as she saw that I was not indifferent to them, I ought to have remembered Swann, convinced of the platonic nature of M. de Charlus’s friendships and assuring me of it on the evening of the very day I had seen the tailor and the Baron in the courtyard; I ought to have reflected that there are two worlds one behind the other, one consisting of the things that the best, the sincerest people say, and behind it the world composed of the sequence of what those same people do; so that when a married woman says to you of a young man: “Oh! it’s perfectly true that I have an immense affection for him, but it’s something quite innocent, quite pure, I could swear it on the memory of my parents,” one ought oneself, instead of feeling any hesitation, to swear to oneself that she has probably just come out of the bathroom into which, after every assignation she has with the young man in question, she rushes in order not to have a child. The spray of syringa made me profoundly sad, as did also the thought that Albertine could have believed, and said, that I was treacherous and hostile; and most of all perhaps, certain lies so unexpected that I had difficulty in grasping them. One day Albertine had told me that she had been to an aerodrome where one of the airmen was a friend of hers (this doubtless in order to divert my suspicions from women, thinking that I was less jealous of men), and that it had been amusing to see how dazzled Andrée was by the said airman, by all the compliments he paid Albertine, until finally Andrée had wanted to go up in his aeroplane with him. Now this was a complete fabrication; Andrée had never visited the aerodrome in question.

When Andrée left me, it was dinner-time. “You’ll never guess who has been to see me and stayed at least three hours,” said my mother. “I call it three hours, but it was perhaps longer. She arrived almost on the heels of my first visitor, who was Mme Cottard, sat still and watched everybody come and go—and I had more than thirty callers—and left me only a quarter of an hour ago. If you hadn’t had your friend Andrée with you, I’d have sent for you.”

“Well, who was it?”

“A person who never pays calls.”

“The Princesse de Parme?”

“Why, I have a cleverer son than I thought. It’s no fun making you guess a name; you hit on it at once.”

“Did she apologise for her coldness yesterday?”

“No, that would have been stupid. The visit itself was her apology. Your poor grandmother would have thought it admirable. It seems that about two o’clock she sent a footman to ask whether I had an ‘at home.’ She was told that this was the very day and so up she came.”

My first thought, which I did not dare