In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [81]
I suddenly realised that the young dairymaid was still in the room. I told her that the place was undoubtedly a long way off, and that I did not need her. Whereupon she also decided that it would be too much trouble: “There’s a fine match this afternoon, and I don’t want to miss it.” I felt that she must already be in the habit of saying “Sport’s the thing,” and that in a few years’ time she would be talking about “living her own life.” I told her that I certainly did not need her any longer, and gave her five francs. Immediately, having little expected this largesse, and telling herself that if she got five francs for doing nothing she would get a great deal more for doing my errand, she began to find that her match was of no importance. “I could easily have taken your message. I can always find time.” But I pushed her towards the door, for I needed to be alone: I must at all costs prevent Albertine from meeting Lea’s girlfriends at the Trocadéro. It was essential that I should succeed in doing so, but I did not yet know how, and during these first few moments I opened my hands, gazed at them, cracked my knuckles, whether because the mind, when it cannot find what it is seeking, in a fit of laziness decides to halt for an instant during which it is vividly aware of the most insignificant things, like the blades of grass on a railway embankment which we see from the carriage window trembling in the wind, when the train stops in the open country—an immobility that is not always more fruitful than that of a captured animal which, paralysed by fear or mesmerised, gazes without moving a muscle—or because I was holding my body in readiness—with my mind at work inside it and, in my mind, the means of action against this or that person—as though it were simply a weapon from which would be fired the shot that would separate Albertine from Lea and her two friends. It is true that, earlier that morning, when Françoise had come in to tell me that Albertine was going to the Trocadéro, I had said to myself: “Albertine is at liberty to do as she pleases,” and had supposed that in this radiant weather her actions would remain without any perceptible importance to me until the evening. But it was not only the morning sun, as I had thought, that had made me so carefree; it was because, having obliged Albertine to abandon the plans that she might perhaps have initiated or even realised at the Verdurins’, and having reduced her to attending a matinee which I myself had chosen and with a view to which she could not have planned anything, I knew that whatever she did would of necessity be innocent. Similarly, if Albertine had said a few moments later: “I don’t really care if I kill myself,” it was because she was certain that she would not kill herself. Surrounding both myself and Albertine there had been this morning (far more than the sunny day) that environment which itself is invisible but through the translucent and changing medium of which we saw, I her actions, she the importance of her own life—that is to say those beliefs which we do not perceive but which are no more assimilable to a pure vacuum than is the air that surrounds us; composing round about us a variable atmosphere, sometimes excellent, often unbreathable, they deserve to be studied and recorded as carefully as the temperature, the barometric pressure, the season, for our days have their own singularity, physical and moral. The belief, which I had failed to notice this morning but in which nevertheless I had been joyously enveloped until the moment when I had looked a second time at the Figaro, that Albertine would do nothing that was not blameless—that belief had vanished. I was no longer living in the fine sunny day, but in another day carved out of it by my anxiety lest Albertine might renew her acquaintance