In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [84]
My note was probably not superfluous. To tell the truth, I knew nothing that Albertine had done since I had come to know her, or even before. But in her conversation (she might, had I mentioned it to her, have replied that I had misunderstood her) there were certain contradictions, certain embellishments which seemed to me as decisive as catching her red-handed, but less usable against Albertine who, often caught out like a child, had invariably, by dint of sudden, strategic changes of front, stultified my cruel attacks and retrieved the situation. Cruel, most of all, to myself. She employed, not by way of stylistic refinement, but in order to correct her imprudences, abrupt breaches of syntax not unlike that figure which the grammarians call anacoluthon or some such name. Having allowed herself, while discussing women, to say: “I remember, the other day, I …,” she would suddenly, after a “semiquaver rest,” change the “I” to “she”: it was something that she had witnessed as an innocent spectator, not a thing that she herself had done. It was not she who was the subject of the action. I should have liked to recall exactly how the sentence had begun, in order to decide for myself, since she had broken off in the middle, what the conclusion would have been. But since I had been awaiting that conclusion, I found it hard to remember the beginning, from which perhaps my air of interest had made her deviate, and was left still anxious to know her real thoughts, the actual truth of her recollection. Unfortunately the beginnings of a lie on the part of one’s mistress are like the beginnings of one’s own love, or of a vocation. They take shape, accumulate, pass unnoticed by oneself. When one wants to remember in what manner one began to love a woman, one is already in love with her; day-dreaming about her beforehand, one did not say to oneself: “This is the prelude to love; be careful!”—and one’s day-dreams advanced unobtrusively, scarcely noticed by oneself. In the same way, save in a few comparatively rare cases, it is only for narrative convenience that I have frequently in these pages confronted one of Albertine’s false statements with her previous assertion on the same subject. This previous assertion, as often as not, since I could not read the future and did not at the time guess what contradictory affirmation was to form a pendant to it, had slipped past unperceived, heard it is true by my ears, but without my isolating it from the continuous flow of Albertine’s speech. Later on, faced with the self-evident lie, or seized by an anxious doubt, I would endeavour to recall it; but in vain; my memory had not been warned in time; it had thought it unnecessary to keep a copy.
I instructed Françoise to let me know by telephone when she had got Albertine out of the theatre, and to bring her home whether she was willing or not.
“It really would be the last straw if she wasn’t willing to come and see Monsieur,” replied Françoise.
“But I don’t know that she’s as fond of seeing me as all that.”
“Then she must be an ungrateful wretch,” went on Françoise, in whom Albertine was renewing after all these years the same torment of envy that Eulalie used at one time to cause her in my aunt’s sickroom. Unaware that Albertine’s position in my household was not of her own seeking but had been willed by me (a fact which, from motives of self-esteem and to infuriate Françoise, I preferred to conceal from her), she was amazed and incensed by the girl’s cunning, called her when she spoke of her to the other servants a “play-actress,” a “wily customer” who could twist me round her little finger. She dared not yet declare open war on her, showed her a smiling face and sought to acquire merit in my eyes by the services she did her in her relations with me, deciding that it was useless to say anything to me and that she