In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [79]
thus appeared to consider the job I wanted her to do for me somewhat arduous, she began to feel that it would be a nuisance to her: “The only thing is, I’m supposed to be going for a ride on my bike this afternoon. You see, Sunday’s the only day we’ve got.” “But won’t you catch cold, going bare-headed like that?” “Oh, I shan’t be bare-headed, I’ll have my cap, and I could get on without it with all the hair I have.” I raised my eyes to those flavescent, frizzy locks and felt myself caught in their swirl and swept away, with a throbbing heart, amid the lightning and the blasts of a hurricane of beauty. I continued to study the newspaper, but although it was only to keep myself in countenance and to gain time, while only pretending to read I nevertheless took in the meaning of the words that were before my eyes, and my attention was caught by the following: “To the programme already announced for this afternoon in the great hall of the Trocadéro must be added the name of Mlle Lea who has consented to appear in Les Fourberies de Nérine. She will of course take the part of Nérine, which she plays with dazzling verve and bewitching gaiety.” It was as though an invisible hand had brutally torn from my heart the bandage beneath which its wound had begun to heal since my return from Balbec. The flood of my anguish came pouring out in torrents. Lea was the actress friend of the two girls at Balbec whom Albertine, without appearing to see them, had watched in the mirror, one afternoon at the Casino. It was true that at Balbec Albertine, at the name of Lea, had adopted a particular tone of solemnity in order to say to me, almost shocked that anyone could suspect such a pattern of virtue: “Oh no, she isn’t in the least that sort of woman. She’s a very nice person.” Unfortunately for me, when Albertine made an assertion of this kind, it was invariably a first stage in a series of different assertions. Shortly after the first would come this second one: “I don’t know her.” In the third phase, after Albertine had spoken to me of somebody who was “above suspicion” and whom (in the second place) she did not know, she would gradually forget first of all that she had said that she did not know the person and then, unwittingly contradicting herself, would inform me that she did. This first lapse of memory having occurred, and the new assertion been made, a second lapse of memory would begin, concerning the person’s being above suspicion. “Isn’t so and so,” I would ask, “one of those women?” “Why, of course, everybody knows that!” Immediately the note of solemnity was sounded afresh in an assertion which was a vague echo, greatly reduced, of the first assertion of all. “I’m bound to say that she has always behaved perfectly properly with me. Of course, she knows that I’d soon send her about her business if she tried it on. But that’s neither here nor there. I’m obliged to give her credit for the genuine respect she has always shown me. It’s easy to see she knew the sort of person she had to deal with.” We remember the truth because it has a name, is rooted in the past, but a makeshift lie is quickly forgotten. Albertine would forget this latest lie, her fourth, and, one day when she was anxious to gain my confidence by confiding in me, would open up to me with regard to the same person who at the outset had been so respectable and whom she did not know: “She took quite a fancy to me at one time. Three or four times she asked me to walk home with her and to come up and see her. I saw no harm in walking home with her, in front of lots of people, in broad daylight, in the open air. But when we reached her front door I always made some excuse and I never went upstairs.” Shortly after this, Albertine would make some remark about the beautiful things that this lady had in her house. By proceeding from one approximation to another one would doubtless have succeeded in getting her to tell the truth, a truth which was perhaps less serious than I was inclined to believe, for, though susceptible to women, she perhaps preferred a male lover, and, now that