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By Root 1641 0

from pity, or from fear, or because she instinctively shies away in a flight that is symmetrical with our investigations. True, there are love affairs in which from the start a woman of easy virtue has posed as virtue incarnate in the eyes of the man who is in love with her. But how many others consist of two diametrically opposite periods! In the first, the woman speaks almost freely, with slight modifications, of her zest for pleasure and of the amorous life which it has made her lead, all of which she will deny later on with the utmost vigour to the same man when she senses that he is jealous of her and spying on her. He comes to regret the days of those first confidences, the memory of which torments him nevertheless. If the woman continued to make them, she would furnish him almost unaided with the secret of her conduct which he has been vainly pursuing day after day. And besides, what abandon those early confidences proved, what trust, what friendship! If she cannot live without being unfaithful to him, at least she would be doing so as a friend, telling him of her pleasures, associating him with them. And he thinks with regret of the sort of life which the early stages of their love seemed to promise, which the sequel has rendered impossible, turning that love into something agonisingly painful, which will make a final parting, according to circumstances, either inevitable or impossible.

Sometimes the script from which I deciphered Albertine’s lies, without being ideographic, needed simply to be read backwards; thus this evening she had tossed at me casually the message, intended to pass almost unnoticed: “I may go and see the Verdurins tomorrow. I don’t really know whether I will go, I don’t particularly want to.” A childish anagram of the admission: “I shall go to the Verdurins’ tomorrow, it’s absolutely certain, I attach the utmost importance to it.” This apparent hesitation indicated a firm resolution and was intended to diminish the importance of the visit while informing me of it. Albertine always adopted a dubitative tone for irrevocable decisions. Mine was no less irrevocable: I would see that this visit to Mme Verdurin did not take place. Jealousy is often only an anxious need to be tyrannical applied to matters of love. I had doubtless inherited from my father this abrupt, arbitrary desire to threaten the people I loved best in the hopes with which they were lulling themselves with a sense of security which I wanted to expose to them as false; when I saw that Albertine had planned without my knowledge, behind my back, an expedition which I would have done everything in the world to make easier and more pleasant for her had she taken me into her confidence, I said casually, in order to make her tremble, that I expected to go out the next day myself.

I began to suggest to Albertine other expeditions in directions which would have made the visit to the Verdurins impossible, in words stamped with a feigned indifference beneath which I strove to conceal my agitation. But she had detected it. It encountered in her the electric power of a contrary will which violently repulsed it; I could see the sparks flash from Albertine’s pupils. What use was it, though, to pay attention to what her eyes were saying at that moment? How had I failed to observe long ago that Albertine’s eyes belonged to the category which even in a quite ordinary person seems to be composed of a number of fragments because of all the places in which the person wishes to be—and to conceal the desire to be—on that particular day? Eyes mendaciously kept always immobile and passive, but none the less dynamic, measurable in the yards or miles to be traversed before they reach the desired, the implacably desired meeting-place, eyes that are not so much smiling at the pleasure which tempts them as shadowed with melancholy and discouragement because there may be a difficulty in their getting there. Even when you hold them in your hands, such persons are fugitives. To understand the emotions which they arouse, and which others, even better-looking,