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By Root 1775 0

I knew that Morel was an utter coward, I decided that it was unnecessary to add my forces to those of Jupien and his friend, who in another moment would have entered the shop, and retired upstairs again to avoid Morel, who, for all his having pretended (probably in order to frighten and subjugate the girl by a piece of blackmail based perhaps on nothing at all) to be so anxious that Jupien should be fetched, made haste to depart as soon as he heard him in the courtyard. The words I have set down here are nothing, and would not explain why my heart was beating as I went upstairs. These scenes which we witness from time to time in our lives acquire an incalculable element of potency from what soldiers call, in speaking of a military offensive, the advantage of surprise, and however agreeably I might be soothed by the knowledge that Albertine, instead of remaining at the Trocadéro, was coming home to me, I still heard ringing in my ears those words ten times repeated: “Grand pied de grue, grand pied de grue,” which had so upset me.

Gradually my agitation subsided. Albertine was on her way home. I would hear her ring the bell in a moment. I felt that my life was no longer even what it could have been, and that to have a woman in the house like this with whom quite naturally, when she returned home, I would go out, to the adornment of whose person the energy and activity of my being were to be more and more diverted, made of me as it were a bough that has blossomed, but is weighed down by the abundant fruit into which all its reserves of strength have passed. In contrast to the anxiety that I had been feeling only an hour earlier, the calm induced in me by the prospect of Albertine’s return was even vaster than that which I had felt in the morning before she left the house. Anticipating the future, of which my mistress’s docility made me to all intents and purposes master, more resistant, as though it were filled and stabilised by the imminent, importunate, inevitable, gentle presence, it was the calm (dispensing us from the obligation to seek our happiness in ourselves) that is born of family feeling and domestic bliss. Familial and domestic: such was again, no less than the feeling which had brought me such peace while I was waiting for Albertine, that which I experienced later when I drove out with her. She took off her glove for a moment, either to touch my hand, or to dazzle me by letting me see on her little finger, next to the ring that Mme Bontemps had given her, another upon which was displayed the large and liquid surface of a bright sheet of ruby.

“What, another new ring, Albertine! Your aunt is generous!”

“No, I didn’t get this from my aunt,” she said with a laugh. “I bought it myself, since thanks to you I can save up ever so much money. I don’t even know whose it was before. A visitor who was short of money left it with the proprietor of a hotel where I stayed at Le Mans. He didn’t know what to do with it, and would have sold it for much less than it was worth. But it was still far too dear for me. Now that, thanks to you, I’m becoming a smart lady, I wrote to ask him if he still had it. And here it is.”

“That makes a great many rings, Albertine. Where will you put the one that I am going to give you? Anyhow, this one’s very pretty. I can’t quite make out what that is carved round the ruby, it looks like a man’s grinning face. But my eyesight isn’t good enough.”

“Even if it was better than it is it wouldn’t get you very far. I can’t make it out either.”

In the past it had often happened to me, on reading a book of memoirs or a novel in which a man is always going out with a woman, or having tea with her, to long to be able to do likewise. I had thought sometimes that I had succeeded in doing so, as for instance when I took Saint-Loup’s mistress out, to go to dine with her. But however much I summoned to my assistance the idea that I was at that moment actually impersonating the character I had envied in the novel, this idea assured me that I ought to find pleasure in Rachel’s company and yet afforded me none.