In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [82]
with Lea, and more easily still with the two girls if, as seemed to me probable, they went to applaud the actress at the Trocadéro where it would not be difficult for them to meet Albertine during one of the intervals. I no longer gave a thought to Mlle Vinteuil; the name of Lea had brought back to my mind, to make me jealous, the image of Albertine in the Casino watching the two girls. For I possessed in my memory only a series of Albertines, separate from one another, incomplete, a collection of profiles or snapshots, and so my jealousy was restricted to a discontinuous expression, at once fugitive and fixed, and to the people who had caused that expression to appear upon Albertine’s face. I remembered her when, at Balbec, she was eyed with undue intensity by the two girls or by women of that sort; I remembered the distress that I felt when I saw her face subjected to an active scrutiny, like that of a painter preparing to make a sketch, entirely enveloped in it, and, doubtless on account of my presence, submitting to this contact without appearing to notice it, with a passivity that was perhaps clandestinely voluptuous. And before she pulled herself together and spoke to me, there was an instant during which Albertine did not move, smiled into the empty air, with the same air of feigned spontaneity and secret pleasure as if she were posing for somebody to take her photograph, or even seeking to assume before the camera a more dashing pose—the one she had adopted at Doncières when we were walking with Saint-Loup, and, laughing and passing her tongue over her lips, she pretended to be teasing a dog. Certainly at such moments she was not at all the same as when it was she who was interested in little girls who passed by. Then, on the contrary, her intense and velvety gaze fastened itself, glued itself to the passer-by, so adhesive, so corrosive, that you felt that, in withdrawing, it must tear away the skin. But that look, which did at least give her a certain gravity, almost as though she were ill, seemed to me a pleasant relief after the vacant, blissful look she had worn in the presence of the two girls, and I should have preferred the sombre expression of the desire that she may perhaps have felt at times to the beaming expression caused by the desire which she aroused. However much she tried to conceal her awareness of it, it bathed her, enveloped her, vaporous, voluptuous, made her whole face glow. But who knows whether, once my back was turned, Albertine would continue to suppress everything that at such moments she held in suspension within herself, that radiated around her and gave me such anguish, whether, now that I was no longer there, she would not respond boldly to the advances of the two girls? Certainly these memories caused me great pain; they were like a complete admission of Albertine’s proclivities, a general confession of infidelity, against which the specific pledges that she gave me and that I wanted to believe, the negative results of my incomplete inquiries, the assurances of Andrée, given perhaps with Albertine’s connivance, were powerless to prevail. Albertine might deny specific betrayals; but by words that she let fall, more potent than her declarations to the contrary, by those looks alone, she had confessed to what she would have wished to hide far more than any specific facts, to what she would have let herself be killed sooner than admit: her natural tendency. For there is no one who will willingly deliver up his soul.
In spite of the pain that these memories caused me, could I have denied that it was the programme of the matinee at the Trocadéro that had revived my need of Albertine? She was one of those women whose very failings can sometimes take the place of absent charms, and, no less than their failings, the tenderness that follows upon them and brings us that assuagement which, like an invalid who is never well for two days in succession, we are incessantly obliged to recapture in their company. Besides, even more than their faults while we are in love with them, there are their faults