In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [72]
“But she told me not to bother to meet her before six o’clock in the Place d’Armes. I wasn’t to call for her after lunch.”
“Ah!” I said, making an effort to conceal my dismay. And I returned upstairs. So it was for more than seven hours on end that Albertine had been alone, left to her own devices. I could reassure myself, it is true, that the cab had not been merely an expedient whereby to escape from the chauffeur’s supervision. In town, Albertine preferred dawdling in a cab, saying that one had a better view, that the air was milder. Nevertheless, she had spent seven hours about which I should never know anything. And I dared not think of the manner in which she must have spent them. I felt that the driver had been extremely maladroit, but my confidence in him was henceforth absolute. For if he had been to the slightest extent in league with Albertine, he would never have admitted that he had left her unguarded from eleven o’clock in the morning until six in the evening. There could be but one other explanation (and it was absurd) of the chauffeur’s admission. This was that some quarrel between Albertine and himself had prompted him, by making a minor disclosure to me, to show her that he was not the sort of man who could be silenced, and that if, after this first gentle warning, she did not toe the line with him, he would simply spill the beans. But this explanation was absurd; it first of all presupposed a non-existent quarrel between him and Albertine, and then meant attributing the character of a blackmailer to this handsome chauffeur who had always shown himself so affable and obliging. In fact, two days later I saw that he was more capable than in my suspicious frenzy I had for a moment supposed of exercising over Albertine a discreet and perspicacious vigilance. Having managed to take him aside and talk to him of what he had told me about Versailles, I said to him in a casual, friendly tone: “That drive to Versailles you told me about the other day was everything that it should have been, you behaved perfectly as you always do. But if I may give you just a little hint, nothing of any great consequence, I feel such a responsibility now that Mme Bontemps has placed her niece in my charge, I’m so afraid of accidents, I feel so guilty about not accompanying her, that I’d be happier if it were you alone, you who are so safe, so wonderfully skilful, to whom no accident can possibly happen, who drove Mlle Albertine everywhere. Then I need fear nothing.”
The charming apostolic motorist smiled a subtle smile, his hand resting upon the consecration-cross of his wheel.5 Then he answered me in the following words which (banishing all the anxiety from my heart and filling it instead with joy) made me want to fling my arms round his neck.
“Never fear,” he said to me. “Nothing can happen to her, for when my wheel isn’t guiding her, my eye follows her everywhere. At Versailles, I went quietly along and visited the town with her, as you might say. From the Reservoirs she went to the Château, from the Château to the two Trianons, with me following her all the time without appearing to see her, and the amazing thing is that she never saw me. Oh, even if she had it wouldn’t have been such a calamity. It was only natural, since I had the whole day before me with nothing to do, that I should visit the Château too. All the more so because Mademoiselle certainly can’t have failed to notice that I’ve read a bit myself and take an interest in all those old curiosities.” (This was true; indeed I should have been surprised if I had learned that he was a friend of Morel’s, so far did he surpass the violinist in taste and sensitivity.) “Anyhow, she didn’t see me.”
“She must have met some of her friends, of course, for she has several at Versailles.”
“No, she was alone all the time.”
“Then