In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [358]
The affection of this sort which Albertine’s pseudofiancé had manifested for me that day had yet another excuse, being more complex than a simple by-product of his love for Albertine. It was only a short time since he had known himself to be, confessed himself to be, been anxious to be proclaimed an intellectual. For the first time, values other than sporting or hedonistic existed for him. The fact that I enjoyed the esteem of Elstir and Bergotte, that Albertine had perhaps told him of the way I talked about writers, which had led her to imagine that I might myself be able to write, meant that all of a sudden I had become to him (to the new man whom he at last realised himself to be) an interesting person whose friendship he would have liked to cultivate, to whom he would have liked to confide his plans, whom he might perhaps have asked for an introduction to Elstir. So that he was in fact sincere when he asked if he might call on me, expressing a regard for me to which intellectual reasons as well as a reflexion of Albertine imparted a certain veracity. No doubt it was not for that that he was so anxious to come and see me and would have dropped everything in order to do so. But of this last reason, which did little more than raise to a sort of impassioned paroxysm the two other reasons, he was perhaps unaware himself, and the other two existed really, as might really have existed in Albertine, when she had been anxious to go to Mme Verdurin’s on the afternoon of the rehearsal, the perfectly respectable pleasure that she would feel in meeting again friends of her childhood who in her eyes were no more depraved than she was in theirs, in talking to them, in showing them, by the mere fact of her presence at the Verdurins’, that the poor little girl whom they had known was now invited to a noted salon, the pleasure also that she might perhaps have felt in listening to Vinteuil’s music. If all this was true, the blush that had risen to Albertine’s cheeks when I had mentioned Mlle Vinteuil was due to the fact that I had done so in the context of that afternoon party which she had tried to keep secret from me because of the marriage proposal of which I was not to know. Albertine’s refusal to swear to me that she would have felt no pleasure in meeting Mlle Vinteuil again at that party had at the moment intensified my torment, strengthened my suspicions, but proved to me in retrospect that she had wanted to be sincere, even over an innocent matter, perhaps simply because it was an innocent matter. There nevertheless remained what Andrée had told me about her relations with Albertine. Perhaps, however, even without going so far as to believe that Andrée had invented them solely that I should not be happy, or able to feel superior to her, I could still suppose that she had slightly exaggerated her account of what she used to do with Albertine, and that Albertine, by a mental reservation, also minimised slightly what she had done with Andrée, making use Jesuitically of certain definitions which I had stupidly formulated on the subject, judging that her relations with Andrée did not fall into the category of what she was obliged to confess to me and that she could deny them without lying. But why should I believe that it was she rather than Andrée who was lying? Truth and life are very difficult to fathom, and I retained of them, without really having got to know them,