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The disappointment I had felt with the women I had known, or in the cities I had visited, did not prevent me from falling for the attraction of others or from believing in their reality. Hence, just as seeing Venice—Venice, for which this spring weather filled me also with longing, and which marriage with Albertine would prevent me from knowing—seeing Venice in a diorama which Ski would perhaps have declared to be more beautiful in tone than the place itself, would to me have been no substitute for the journey to Venice the length of which, determined without my having any hand in it, seemed to me an indispensable preliminary, so in the same way, however pretty she might be, the midinette whom a procuress had artificially provided for me could not possibly be a substitute for the gangling girl who was passing at this moment under the trees, laughing with a friend. Even if the girl I found in the house of assignation were prettier than this one, it could not be the same thing, because we do not look at the eyes of a girl we do not know as we would look at little chunks of opal or agate. We know that the little ray that colours them or the diamond dust that makes them sparkle is all that we can see of a mind, a will, a memory in which is contained the family home that we do not know, the intimate friends whom we envy. The enterprise of gaining possession of all this, of something so difficult, so recalcitrant, is what gives its attraction to that gaze far more than its merely physical beauty (which may serve to explain why the same young man can awaken a whole romance in the imagination of a woman who has heard somebody say that he is the Prince of Wales but pays no further attention to him after learning that she is mistaken). To find the midinette in the house of assignation is to find her emptied of that unknown life which permeates her and which we aspire to possess with her; it is to approach a pair of eyes that have indeed become mere precious stones, a nose whose wrinkling is as devoid of meaning as that of a flower. No, concerning the unknown midinette who was passing at that moment, it seemed to me as indispensable, if I wished to continue to believe in her reality, to face up to her resistance by adapting my mode of approach, challenging a rebuff, returning to the charge, obtaining an assignation, waiting for her outside her place of work, getting to know, episode by episode, everything that constituted the girl’s life, experiencing whatever was represented for her by the pleasure I was seeking, and traversing the distance which her different habits, her special mode of life, set between me and the attention, the favour I wished to reach and win over—all this seemed to me as indispensable as making a long journey by train if I wished to believe in the reality of Pisa and not see it simply as a panoramic show in a World Fair. But these very similarities between desire and travel made me vow to myself that one day I would grasp a little more closely the nature of this force, invisible but as powerful as any belief or, in the world of physics, as atmospheric pressure, which exalted cities and women to such a height so long as I did not know them, and, slipping away from beneath them as soon as I had approached them, made them at once collapse and fall flat on to the dead level of the most commonplace reality.

Further on, another little girl was kneeling beside her bicycle, which she was putting to rights. The repair finished, the young racer mounted her machine, but without straddling it as a man would have done. For a moment the bicycle swerved, and the young body seemed to have added to itself a sail, a huge wing; and presently we saw the young creature speed away, half-human, half-winged, angel or peri, pursuing her course.

This was what the presence of Albertine, this was what my life with Albertine, deprived me of. Deprived me, did I say? I say?Should I not have thought rather: what it presented to me? If Albertine had not been living with me, if she had been free, I should have