In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [9]
I questioned her point-blank: “Oh, by the way, Albertine, am I dreaming, or did you tell me that you knew Gilberte Swann?” “Yes; that’s to say that she spoke to me once in class, because she had a set of the French history notes. In fact she was very nice and lent them to me, and I gave them back to her when I next saw her.” “Is she the kind of woman that I object to?” “Oh, not at all, quite the opposite.”
But, rather than indulge in this sort of interrogation, I would often devote to imagining Albertine’s excursions the energy that I did not employ in sharing them, and would speak to her with the enthusiasm which unfulfilled designs can keep intact. I expressed so keen a longing to see once again some window in the Sainte-Chapelle, so keen a regret that I was not able to go there with her alone, that she said to me lovingly: “Why, my sweet, since you seem so keen about it, make a little effort, come with us. We’ll wait as long as you like, until you’re ready. And if you’d rather be alone with me, I’ll just send Andrée home, she can come another time.” But these very entreaties to me to go out added to the calm which enabled me to yield to my desire to remain indoors.
It did not occur to me that the apathy reflected in my thus delegating to Andrée or the chauffeur the task of soothing my agitation, by leaving them to keep watch on Albertine, was paralysing and deadening in me all those imaginative impulses of the mind, all those inspirations of the will, which enable us to guess and to forestall what a person is going to do. It was all the more dangerous because by nature I have always been more open to the world of potentiality than to the world of contingent reality. This helps one to understand the human heart, but one is apt to be taken in by individuals. Productive of suffering, my jealousy was born of mental images, not based on probability. Now there may occur in the lives of men and of nations (and there was to occur in mine) a moment when we need to have within us a chief of police, a clear-sighted diplomat, a master-detective, who instead of pondering over the possible contingencies that extend to all the points of the compass, reasons soundly and says to himself: “If Germany announces this, it means that she intends to do something else, not just ‘something’ in the abstract but precisely this or that or the other, which she may perhaps have already begun to do,” or “If so-and-so has fled, it is not in the direction a or b or d, but to the point c, and the place to which we must direct our search for him is c.” Alas, I allowed this faculty, which was not highly developed in me, to grow numb, to lose strength, to disappear, by letting myself be lulled as soon as others were engaged in keeping watch on my behalf.
As for the reason for my desire to remain at home, I should have been very reluctant to explain it to Albertine. I told her that the doctor had ordered me to stay in bed. This was not true. And if it had been true, his instructions would have been powerless to prevent me from accompanying my mistress. I asked her to excuse me from going out with herself and Andrée. I shall mention only one of my reasons, which was dictated by prudence. Whenever I went out with Albertine, if she left my side for a moment I became anxious, began to imagine that she had spoken to or simply looked at somebody. If she was not in the best of tempers, I thought that I must be causing her to miss or to postpone some appointment. Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far. It is better not to know, to think as little as possible, not to feed one’s jealousy with the slightest concrete detail. Unfortunately, in the absence of an outer life, incidents are created by the inner life too; in the