In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [86]
“The lady asks me to say that she wasn’t at all angry, quite the contrary, in fact; anyhow, if she wasn’t pleased, she didn’t show it. They’re now going to go to the Trois-Quartiers, and will be home by two o’clock.”
I gathered that two o’clock meant three, for it was already past two. But Françoise suffered from one of those peculiar, permanent, incurable defects which we call diseases: she was never able either to read or to express the time correctly. When, after consulting her watch at two o’clock, she said “It’s one o’clock” or “It’s three o’clock,” I was never able to understand whether the phenomenon that occurred was situated in her vision or in her mind or in her speech; the one thing certain is that the phenomenon never failed to occur. Humanity is a very old institution. Heredity and cross-breeding have given insuperable strength to bad habits, faulty reflexes. One person sneezes and gasps because he is passing a rosebush, another breaks out in a rash at the smell of wet paint; others get violent stomach-aches if they have to set out on a journey, and grandchildren of thieves who are themselves rich and generous cannot resist the temptation to rob you of fifty francs. As for discovering the cause of Françoise’s incapacity to tell the time correctly, she herself never threw any light upon the problem. For, notwithstanding the fury that her inaccurate replies regularly provoked in me, Françoise never attempted either to apologise for her mistake or to explain it. She remained silent, seeming not to hear, and thereby making me lose my temper altogether. I should have liked to hear a few words of justification, if only to be able to demolish them; but not a word, an indifferent silence. However, as far as today was concerned there could be no doubt; Albertine was coming home with Françoise at three o’clock, Albertine would not be meeting Lea or her friends. Whereupon, the danger of her renewing relations with them having been averted, it at once began to lose its importance in my eyes and I was amazed, seeing with what ease it had been averted, that I should have supposed that I would not succeed in averting it. I felt a keen impulse of gratitude towards Albertine, who, I could see, had not gone to the Trocadéro to meet Léa’s friends, and who showed me, by leaving the matinee and coming home at a word from me, that she belonged to me, even for the future, more than I had imagined. My gratitude was even greater when a cyclist brought me a note from her bidding me be patient, and full of the charming expressions that she was in the habit of using. “My darling dear Marcel, I return less quickly than this cyclist, whose bike I should like to borrow in order to be with you sooner. How could you imagine that I might be angry or that I could enjoy anything better than to be with you? It will be nice to go out, just the two of us together; it would be nicer still if we never went out except together. The ideas you get into your head! What a Marcel! What a Marcel! Always and ever your Albertine.”
The dresses that I bought for her, the yacht of which I had spoken to her, the Fortuny gowns—all these things, having in this obedience on Albertine’s part not their recompense but their complement, appeared to me now as so many privileges that I exercised; for the duties and expenses of a master are part of his dominion, and define it, prove it, fully as much as his rights. And these rights which she acknowledged were precisely what gave my expenditure its true character: I had a woman of my own, who, at the first word that I sent her out of the blue, informed me deferentially by telephone that she was coming, that she was allowing herself to be brought home, at once. I was more of a master than I had supposed. More of a master, in other words more of a slave. I no longer felt the slightest impatience to see Albertine. The certainty that she was at this moment engaged in shopping with Françoise, that she would return with her at an approaching moment which I would willingly have postponed, lit up like a calm and radiant star