In Search of Lost Time, Volume V_ The Captive, the Fugitive - Marcel Proust [94]
If my life with Albertine was to prevent me from going to Venice, from travelling, at least I might this afternoon, had I been alone, have been making the acquaintance of the young midinettes scattered about in the sunlight of this fine Sunday, in the sum total of whose beauty I gave a considerable place to the unknown life that animated them. Are they not, those eyes one sees, shot through with a look behind which we do not know what images, memories, expectations, disdains lie concealed, and from which we cannot separate them? Will not that life, which is that of the woman passing by, impart a different value, according to what it is, to the frown on that forehead, the dilating of those nostrils? Albertine’s presence debarred me from approaching them, and perhaps thus ceasing to desire them. The man who would maintain in himself the desire to go on living and a belief in something more delicious than the things of daily life, must go out driving; for the streets, the avenues, are full of goddesses. But the goddesses do not allow us to approach them. Here and there, among the trees, at the entrance to some cafe, a waitress was watching like a nymph on the edge of a sacred grove, while beyond her three girls were seated by the sweeping arc of their bicycles that were stacked beside them, like three immortals leaning against the clouds or the fabulous coursers upon which they perform their mythological journeys. I noticed that, whenever Albertine looked for a moment at these girls with deep attentiveness, she at once turned round towards me. But I was not unduly troubled, either by the intensity of this contemplation, or by its brevity which was compensated by that intensity; indeed, as to the latter, it often happened that Albertine, whether from exhaustion, or because it was an attentive person’s way of looking at other people, would gaze thus in a sort of brown study either at my father or at Françoise; and as for the rapidity with which she turned to look at me, it might be due to the fact that Albertine, knowing my suspicions, might wish, even if they were unjustified, to avoid laying herself open to them. This attention, moreover, which would have seemed to me criminal on Albertine’s part (and quite as much so if it had been directed at young men), I myself fastened upon all the midinettes without thinking it reprehensible for a moment, almost deciding indeed that it was reprehensible of Albertine to prevent me, by her presence, from stopping the car and going to join them. We consider it innocent to desire, and heinous that the other person should do so. And this contrast between what concerns oneself on the one hand, and on the other the person one loves, is not confined only to desire, but extends also to lying. What is more usual than a lie, whether it is a question of masking the daily weaknesses of a constitution which we wish to be thought strong, of concealing a vice, or of going off, without offending other people, to the thing that we prefer? It is the most necessary means of self-preservation, and the one that is most widely used. Yet this is the thing that we actually propose to banish from the life of the person we love; we watch for it, scent it, detest it everywhere. It distresses us, it is sufficient to bring about a rupture, it seems to us to conceal the gravest misdemeanours, except when it conceals them so effectively that we do not suspect their existence. A strange state, this, in which we are so inordinately sensitive to a pathogenic agent whose universal proliferation makes it inoffensive to other people and so baneful to the wretch who finds that he is no longer immune to it!
The life of these pretty girls (since, because of my long periods of reclusion, I so rarely met any) appeared to me, as to everyone in whom ease of fulfilment has not deadened the power of imagining, a thing as different from anything that I knew, and as desirable, as the most marvellous cities that