imagined, and with reason, every one of these women as a possible or indeed a probable object of her desire, of her pleasure. They would have appeared to me like dancers in a diabolical ballet, representing the Temptations to one person, and shooting their darts into the heart of another. Midinettes, schoolgirls, actresses, how I should have hated them all! Objects of horror, for me they would have been excluded from the beauty of the universe. Albertine’s servitude, by releasing me from suffering on their account, restored them to the beauty of the world. Now that they were harmless, having lost the sting that stabs the heart with jealousy, I was free to admire them, to caress them with my eyes, another day more intimately perhaps. By shutting Albertine away, I had at the same time restored to the universe all those glittering wings that flutter in public gardens, ballrooms, theatres, and which became tempting once more to me because she could no longer succumb to their temptation. They composed the beauty of the world. They had at one time composed that of Albertine. It was because I had seen her first as a mysterious bird, then as a great actress of the beach, desired, perhaps won, that I had thought her wonderful. As soon as she was a captive in my house, the bird that I had seen one afternoon advancing with measured tread along the front, surrounded by a congregation of other girls like seagulls alighted from who knew where, Albertine had lost all her colours, together with all the opportunities that other people had of securing her for themselves. Gradually she had lost her beauty. It required excursions like this, in which I imagined her, but for my presence, accosted by some woman or by some young man, to make me see her again amid the splendour of the beach, although my jealousy was on a different plane from the decline of the pleasures of my imagination. But in spite of these abrupt reversions in which, desired by other people, she once more became beautiful in my eyes, I might very well have divided her stay with me into two periods, in the first of which she was still, although less so every day, the glittering actress of the beach, and in the second of which, become the grey captive, reduced to her drab self, she needed these flashes in which I remembered the past to restore her colour to her.
Sometimes, in the hours in which I felt most indifferent towards her, there came back to me the memory of a far-off moment on the beach, before I yet knew her, when, not far from a lady with whom I was on bad terms and with whom I was almost certain now that she had had relations, she burst out laughing, staring me in the face in an insolent fashion. All round her hissed the blue and polished sea. In the sunshine of the beach, Albertine, in the midst of her friends, was the most beautiful of them all. It was this magnificent girl, who, in her familiar setting of boundless waters—she, a precious object in the eyes of the admiring lady—had inflicted this insult on me. It was definitive, for the lady had returned perhaps to Balbec, had registered perhaps, on the luminous and echoing beach, the absence of Albertine; but she was unaware that the girl was living with me, was wholly mine. The vast expanse of blue water, her obliviousness of the predilection she had had for this particular girl and had now diverted to others, had closed over the insult that Albertine had offered me, enshrining it in a glittering and unbreakable casket. Then hatred of that woman gnawed my heart; of Albertine too, but a hatred mingled with admiration of the beautiful, adulated girl, with her marvellous hair, whose laughter upon the beach had been an affront. Shame, jealousy, the memory of my first desires and of the brilliant setting, had restored to Albertine her former beauty and worth. And thus there alternated with the somewhat oppressive boredom that I felt in her company a throbbing desire, full of resplendent images and of regrets, according to whether she was by my side in my room or I set her free again in my memory, on the sea-front,