In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [65]
What insolent mortal comes to meet his doom?”
And she laughed that laugh which I always found so disturbing.
I replied in the same jesting vein:
Was it for you this stern decree was made?
And, lest she should ever venture to infringe it, added: “Although I’d be furious if you did wake me.”
“I know, I know, don’t be frightened,” said Albertine.
To show that I was mollified, I added, still enacting the scene from Esther with her, while in the street below the cries continued, drowned by our conversation:
In you alone a certain grace I see
That always charms and never wearies me
(and to myself I thought: “Yes, she does weary me very often”). And remembering what she had said to me the night before, as I thanked her extravagantly for having given up the Verdurins, so that another time she would obey me similarly with regard to something else, I said: “Albertine, you distrust me although I love you and you place your trust in people who don’t love you” (as though it were not natural to distrust the people who love you and who alone have an interest in lying to you in order to find out things, to thwart you), and added these lying words: “It’s funny, you don’t really believe that I love you. As a matter of fact, I don’t adore you.” She lied in her turn when she told me that she trusted nobody but myself and then became sincere when she assured me that she knew quite well that I loved her. But this affirmation did not seem to imply that she did not believe me to be a liar who spied on her. And she seemed to forgive me as though she saw these defects as the agonising consequence of a great love or as though she herself did not feel entirely guiltless.
“I beg of you, my darling girl, no more of that trick riding you were practising the other day. Just think, Albertine, if you were to have an accident?”*
Of course I did not wish her any harm. But how delighted I should have been if, with her horses, she had taken it into her head to ride off somewhere, wherever she chose, and never come back to my house again! How it would have simplified everything, that she should go and live happily somewhere else, I did not even wish to know where!
“Oh! I know you wouldn’t survive me for forty-eight hours. You’d kill yourself.”*
Thus did we exchange lying speeches. But a truth more profound than that which we would utter were we sincere may sometimes be expressed and announced by another channel than that of sincerity.
“You don’t mind all that noise outside?” she asked me. “Personally I love it. But you’re such a light sleeper.”
I was on the contrary often an extremely heavy sleeper (as I have already said, but am compelled to repeat in view of what follows), especially when I only fell asleep in the morning. As this kind of sleep is—on an average—four times as refreshing, it seems to the awakened sleeper to have lasted four times as long, when it has really been four times as short. A splendid, sixteenfold error in multiplication which gives so much beauty to our awakening and gives life a veritable new dimension, like those drastic changes of rhythm which, in music, mean that in an andante a quaver has the same duration as a minim in a prestissimo, and which are unknown in our waking state. There, life is almost always the same, whence the disappointments of travel. Yet it would seem that our dreams are sometimes made of the coarsest stuff of life, but that stuff is as it were treated, kneaded so thoroughly—with a protraction due to the fact that none of the temporal limitations of the waking state is there to prevent it from tapering off into unbelievable heights—that we fail to recognise it. On the mornings after this good fortune had befallen me, after the sponge of sleep had wiped from my brain the signs of everyday occupations that are traced upon it as on a blackboard, I was obliged to bring my memory back to life; by an exercise of will we can recapture what the amnesia of sleep