In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [401]
*The Pléiade editors have inserted here as a footnote an additional passage which Proust placed a few pages later (clearly in error):
I was going to buy, in addition to the motor-cars, the finest yacht which then existed. It was for sale, but at so high a price that no buyer could be found. Moreover, once bought, even if we confined ourselves to four-month cruises, it would cost two hundred thousand francs a year in upkeep. We should be living at the rate of half a million francs a year. Would I be able to sustain it for more than seven or eight years? But never mind; when I had only an income of fifty thousand francs left, I could leave it to Albertine and kill myself. This was the decision I made. It made me think of myself. Now, since one’s ego lives by thinking incessantly of all sorts of things, since it is no more than the thought of those things, if by chance, instead of being preoccupied with those things, it suddenly thinks of itself, it finds only an empty apparatus, something which it does not recognise and to which, in order to give it some reality, it adds the memory of a face seen in a mirror. That peculiar smile, that untidy moustache—they are what would disappear from the face of the earth. When I killed myself five years hence, I would no longer be able to think all those things which passed through my mind unceasingly, I would no longer exist on the face of the earth and would never come back to it; my thought would stop for ever. And my ego seemed to me even more null when I saw it as something that no longer exists. How could it be difficult to sacrifice, for the sake of the person to whom one’s thought is constantly straining (the person we love), that other person of whom we never think: ourselves? Accordingly, this thought of my death, like the notion of my ego, seemed to me most strange, but I did not find it at all disagreeable. Then suddenly it struck me as being terribly sad; this was because, reflecting that if I did not have more money at my disposal it was because my parents were still alive, I suddenly thought of my mother. And I could not bear the idea of what she would suffer after my death.
*Proust’s manuscript has a different version of the Norpois-Villeparisis episode which the Pléiade editors print as an appendix. Passages that have become illegible are indicated by square brackets:
Several of the palaces on the Grand Canal were transformed into hotels, and by way of a change from the one at which we were staying, we decided one evening to dine in another where the food was said to be better. While my mother was paying the gondolier, I entered a vast marble-pillared hall that had once been entirely covered with frescoes, […]
One of the waiters asked if the “old couple” […] were coming down […], that they never gave any warning, and that it was most tiresome. Then he saw the lady appear. It was in fact Mme de Villeparisis […] but bent towards the ground, with that air of dejection and bemusement produced by extreme fatigue and the weight of years. We happened by chance to be given a table immediately behind hers, up against the splendid marble walls of the palace, and fortunately, since my mother was tired and wanted to avoid introductions, we had our backs to the Marquise and could not be seen by her, and were moreover protected by the relief of a massive column with a […] capital. Meanwhile I was wondering which of her relations was being referred to as M. de Villeparisis, when a few minutes later I saw her old lover, M. de Norpois, even more bent than she, sit down at her table, having just come down from their room. They still loved each other, and, now that he had given up his functions at the Ministry, as soon as the relative incognito which one enjoys abroad permitted, they lived together completely. In order to allow his old mistress a degree of respectability,