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By Root 1732 0

there’s no need to seek out all these explanations,” Andrée went on. “Heaven knows I was fond of Albertine, and she was a really nice creature, but, especially after she had typhoid (a year before you first met us all), she was an absolute madcap. All of a sudden she would get sick of what she was doing, all her plans would have to be changed that very minute, and she herself probably couldn’t say why. You remember the year when you first came to Balbec, the year when you met us all? One fine day she got somebody to send her a telegram calling her back to Paris; she barely had time to pack her trunks. But there was absolutely no reason for her to go. All the pretexts she gave were false. Paris would be a deadly bore at that moment. We were all of us still at Balbec. The golf club wasn’t closed, indeed the heats for the cup which she was so keen on winning weren’t finished. She’d certainly have won it. It only meant staying on for another week. Well, off she went at a gallop. I often spoke to her about it later. She said herself that she didn’t know why she had left, that she felt homesick (the home being Paris, you can imagine how likely that was), that she didn’t feel happy at Balbec, that she thought there were people there who sneered at her.”

And I told myself there was this much truth in what Andrée said: that if differences between minds account for the different impressions produced upon one person and another by the same work, and differences of feeling account for the impossibility of captivating a person who does not love you, there are also differences between characters, peculiarities in a single character, which are also motives for action. Then I ceased to think about this explanation and said to myself how difficult it is to know the truth in this world.

I had indeed noticed Albertine’s desire to go to Mme Verdurin’s and her concealment of it: I had not been mistaken on that point. But then even if we do thus manage to grasp one fact, all the others, which we perceive only in their outward appearance, escape us, and we see only a succession of flat silhouettes of which we say to ourselves: it is this, it is that, it is because of her, or it is because of someone else. The revelation that Mlle Vinteuil was expected had seemed to me the true explanation, all the more so because Albertine, forestalling me, had spoken to me about it. And subsequently had she not refused to swear to me that Mlle Vinteuil’s presence gave her no pleasure? And here, with regard to this young man, I remembered a point which I had forgotten. A short time before, while Albertine was living with me, I had met him, and he had been—in contrast to his attitude at Balbec—extremely friendly, even affectionate towards me, had begged me to allow him to call on me, a request which I had refused for a number of reasons. And now I realised that it was quite simply because, knowing that Albertine was living in my house, he had wanted to be on good terms with me so as to have every facility for seeing her and for carrying her off from me, and I concluded that he was a scoundrel. Some time later, when I attended the first performances of this young man’s work, although I continued to think that if he had been so anxious to call on me, it was for Albertine’s sake, and although I felt this to be reprehensible, I remembered that in the past, if I had gone down to Doncières to see Saint-Loup, it was really because I was in love with Mme de Guermantes. It is true that the two cases were not quite the same: Saint-Loup not being in love with Mme de Guermantes, there was in my display of affection for him a trace of duplicity perhaps, but no treason. But I reflected afterwards that this affection which one feels for the person who possesses the object of one’s desire is something that one feels equally even if he himself also loves that object. No doubt, one ought in that case to resist a friendship which will lead one straight to betrayal. And I think that this is what I have always done. But in the case of those who lack the strength to resist, we cannot