In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [354]
“But, my dear Andrée, you’re lying again. Remember—you admitted it to me yourself when I telephoned to you the evening before, don’t you remember?—that Albertine had been so anxious, and kept it from me as though it was something that I mustn’t know about, to go to the afternoon party at the Verdurins’ at which Mlle Vinteuil was expected.”
“Yes, but Albertine hadn’t the slightest idea that Mlle Vinteuil was to be there.”
“What? You yourself told me that she’d met Mme Verdurin a few days earlier. Besides, Andrée, there’s no point in our trying to deceive one another. I found a note one morning in Albertine’s room, a note from Mme Verdurin urging her to come that afternoon.”
And I showed her this note which, as a matter of fact, Françoise had taken care to bring to my notice by placing it on top of Albertine’s belongings a few days before her departure, and, I regret to say, leaving it there to make Albertine suppose that I had been rummaging among her things, to let her know in any case that I had seen it. And I had often wondered whether Françoise’s ruse had not been largely responsible for the departure of Albertine, who saw that she could no longer conceal anything from me, and felt disheartened, defeated. I showed Andrée the note: I feel no compunction, on the strength of this genuine family feeling … “You know very well, Andrée, that Albertine used always to say that Mlle Vinteuil’s friend was indeed a mother, an elder sister to her.”
“But you’ve misinterpreted this note. The person Mme Verdurin wished Albertine to meet that afternoon wasn’t Mlle Vinteuil’s friend at all, it was the young man you call ‘I’m a wash-out,’ and the family feeling is what Mme Verdurin felt for the brute, who is after all her nephew. However, I think Albertine did hear afterwards that Mlle Vinteuil was to be there—Mme Verdurin may have let her know incidentally. And of course the thought of seeing her friend again gave her pleasure, reminded her of happy times in the past, just as you’d be glad, if you were going somewhere, to know that Elstir would be there, but no more than that, not even as much. No, if Albertine was unwilling to say why she wanted to go to Mme Verdurin’s, it was because it was a rehearsal to which Mme Verdurin had invited a very small party, including that nephew of hers whom you met at Balbec, to whom Mme Bontemps was hoping to marry Albertine off and to whom Albertine wanted to talk. He was a real blackguard …”
And so Albertine, contrary to what Andrée’s mother used to think, had had after all the prospect of a wealthy marriage. And when she had wanted to visit Mme Verdurin, when she had spoken to her in secret, when she had been so annoyed that I should have gone there that evening without warning her, the intrigue between her and Mme Verdurin had had as its object her meeting not Mlle Vinteuil but the nephew who loved Albertine and for whom Mme Verdurin, with that satisfaction of working towards the realisation of one of those marriages which surprise one in some families into whose state of mind one does not enter completely, did not desire a rich bride. Now I had never given another thought to this nephew who had perhaps been the initiator thanks to whom I had received Albertine’s first kiss. And for the whole structure of Albertine’s anxieties which I had built up, I must now substitute another, or rather superimpose it, for perhaps it did not exclude the other, a taste for women not being incompatible with marriage. Was this marriage really the reason for