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By Root 1753 0

a rational and analytical expression of the truth; the words themselves did not enlighten me unless they were interpreted in the same way as a rush of blood to the cheeks of a person who is embarrassed, or as a sudden silence. Such and such an adverb (for instance that used by M. de Cambremer when he understood that I was “literary” and, not having yet spoken to me, as he was describing a visit he had paid to the Verdurins, turned to me with: “Incidentally, Borelli was there!”) bursting into flames through the involuntary, sometimes perilous contact of two ideas which the speaker has not expressed but which, by applying the appropriate methods of analysis or electrolysis, I was able to extract from it, told me more than a long speech. Albertine sometimes let fall in her conversation one or other of these precious amalgams which I made haste to “treat” so as to transform them into lucid ideas.

It is in fact one of the most terrible things for the lover that whereas particular details—which only experiment or espionage, among so many possible realisations, would ever make known to him—are so difficult to discover, the truth on the other hand is so easy to detect or merely to sense. Often, at Balbec, I had seen her fasten on girls who came past us a sudden lingering stare, like a physical contact, after which, if I knew the girls, she would say to me: “Suppose we asked them to join us? I should so enjoy insulting them.” And now, for some time past, doubtless since she had succeeded in reading my mind, no request to me to invite anyone, not a word, not even a sidelong glance from her eyes, which had become objectless and mute, and, with the abstracted, vacant expression that accompanied them, as revealing as had been their magnetic swerve before. Yet it was impossible for me to reproach her, or to ply her with questions about things which she would have declared to be so petty, so trivial, stored up by me simply for the pleasure of “nitpicking.” It is hard enough to say: “Why did you stare at that girl who went past?” but a great deal harder to say: “Why did you not stare at her?” And yet I knew quite well—or at least I should have known if I had not chosen instead to believe those affirmations of hers—what Albertine’s demeanour comprehended and proved, like such and such a contradiction in the course of conversation which often I did not perceive until long after I had left her, which kept me in anguish all night long, which I never dared mention to her again, but which nevertheless continued to honour my memory from time to time with its periodical visits. Even in the case of these furtive or sidelong glances on the beach at Balbec or in the streets of Paris, I might sometimes wonder whether the person who provoked them was not only an object of desire at the moment when she passed, but an old acquaintance, or else some girl who had simply been mentioned to her and whom, when I heard about it, I was astonished that anybody could have mentioned to her, so remote was she from what one would have guessed Albertine’s range of acquaintance to be. But the Gomorrah of today is a jigsaw puzzle made up of pieces that come from places where one least expected to find them. Thus I once saw at Rive-belle a big dinner-party of ten women, all of whom I happened to know, at least by name, and who, though as dissimilar as could be, were none the less perfectly united, so much so that I never saw a party so homogeneous, albeit so composite.

To return to the girls whom we passed in the street, never would Albertine stare at an old person, man or woman, with such fixity, or on the other hand with such reserve and as though she saw nothing. Cuckolded husbands who know nothing in fact know perfectly well. But it requires more accurate and abundant evidence to create a scene of jealousy. Besides, if jealousy helps us to discover a certain tendency to falsehood in the woman we love, it multiplies this tendency a hundredfold when the woman has discovered that we are jealous. She lies (to an extent to which she has never lied to us before), whether