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By Root 1743 0

I stopped for a moment to tell the chauffeur to call for me later, but my eyes enveloped her still as she passed ahead of me under the arch, and it was still the same inert, domestic calm that I felt as I saw her thus, solid, flushed, opulent and captive, returning home quite naturally with me, like a woman who belonged to me, and, protected by its walls, disappearing into our house. Unfortunately she seemed to feel herself in prison there, and—judging by her mournful, weary look that evening as we dined together in her room—to share the opinion of that Mme de La Rochefoucauld who, when asked whether she was not glad to live in so beautiful a home as Liancourt, replied: “There is no such thing as a beautiful prison.” I did not notice it at first; and it was I who bemoaned the thought that, had it not been for Albertine (for with her I should have suffered too acutely from jealousy in a hotel where all day long she would have been exposed to contact with so many people), I might at that moment be dining in Venice in one of those little low-ceilinged restaurants like a ship’s saloon, from which one looks out on the Grand Canal through little curved windows encircled with Moorish mouldings.

I ought to add that Albertine greatly admired a big bronze I had by Barbedienne which with ample justification Bloch considered extremely ugly. He had perhaps less reason to be surprised at my having kept it. I had never sought, like him, to furnish for aesthetic effect, to arrange rooms artistically. I was too lazy for that, too indifferent to the things that I was in the habit of seeing every day. Since my taste was not involved, I had a right not to modulate my interiors. I might perhaps, in spite of this, have discarded the bronze. But ugly and expensive things are extremely useful, for they possess, in the eyes of people who do not understand us, who do not share our taste and with whom we may be in love, a glamour which a fine object that does not reveal its beauty may lack. Now the people who do not understand us are precisely the people with regard to whom it may be useful to us to take advantage of a prestige which our intellect is enough to ensure for us among superior people. Although Albertine was beginning to show some taste, she still had a certain respect for the bronze, and this was reflected back upon me in an esteem which, coming from Albertine, mattered infinitely more to me than the question of keeping a bronze which was a trifle degrading, since I loved Albertine.

But the thought of my bondage ceased of a sudden to weigh upon me and I looked forward to prolonging it still further, because I seemed to perceive that Albertine was sorely conscious of her own. True, whenever I had asked her whether she was unhappy in my house, she had always replied that she did not know where it would be possible for her to be happier. But often these words were contradicted by an air of nostalgia and edginess. Certainly if she had the tastes with which I had credited her, this prevention from ever satisfying them must have been as frustrating to her as it was calming to myself, calming to such an extent that I should have decided that the hypothesis of my having accused her unjustly was the most probable, had it not been so difficult to fit into this hypothesis the extraordinary pains that Albertine took never to be alone, never to be free to go out with anyone, never to stop for a moment outside the front door when she came in, always to insist on being ostentatiously accompanied, whenever she went to the telephone, by someone who would be able to repeat to me what she had said—by Françoise or Andrée—always to leave me alone with the latter (without appearing to be doing so on purpose) after they had been out together, so that I might obtain a detailed report of their outing. Contrasted with this marvellous docility were occasional gestures of impatience, quickly repressed, which made me wonder whether Albertine might not be planning to shake off her chains.

Certain incidental circumstances seemed to corroborate my supposition. Thus,