In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove (A Modern Library E-Book)

by Marcel Proust

“Now, young ladies, I forbid you to look at what I write.” After carefully tracing each letter, supporting the paper on her knee, she passed it to me, saying: “Take care no one sees.” Whereupon I unfolded it and read her message, which was: “I like you.”

You have given us a tragedy in which love is not the keynote, and on this I must offer you my sincerest compliments.

She was one of those women with whom shaking hands affords so much pleasure that one feels grateful to civilisation for having made of the handclasp a lawful act between boys and girls when they meet.

And yet, as Gilberte had been my first love among girls, so these had been my first love among flowers.

Of the countless refinements of affectionate kindness which Andrée showed, Albertine would have been incapable, and yet I was not certain of the underlying goodness of the former as I was to be later of the latter’s.

All our lives, we go on patiently modifying the surroundings in which we live; and gradually, as habit dispenses us from feeling them, we suppress the noxious elements of colour, shape and smell which objectified our uneasiness.

In the week that followed I scarcely attempted to see Albertine. I made a show of preferring Andrée. Love is born; we wish to remain, for the one we love, the unknown person whom she may love in turn, but we need her, we need to make contact not so much with her body as with her attention, her heart.

I arranged in this way to have her entirely to myself every evening, not with the intention of making Albertine jealous, but of enhancing my prestige in her eyes, or at any rate not imperilling it by letting Albertine know that it was herself and not Andrée that I loved.

Death might have struck me down in that moment and it would have seemed to me a trivial, or rather an impossible thing, for life was not outside me but in me; I should have smiled pityingly had a philosopher then expressed the idea that some day, even some distant day, I should have to die,

before the age of love and much more still after it is reached, more is asked than they themselves ask, more even than they are able to give.

might have left her doubtful and uneasy as to the importance of her own social position had she not been able to reassure herself, to return safely to the “realities of life,” by saying to the butler: “Please tell the chef that his peas aren’t soft enough.” She then recovered her serenity.

If this sort of popularity to which Albertine had attained did not seem likely to lead to any practical result, it had stamped Andrée’s friend with the distinctive characteristic of people who, being always sought after, have never any need to offer themselves, a characteristic (to be found also, and for analogous reasons, at the other end of the social scale, among the smartest women) which consists in their not making any display of the successes they have scored, but rather keeping them to themselves.

She would never say of anyone: “So-and-so is anxious to meet me,” would speak of everyone with the greatest good nature, and as if it was she who ran after, who sought to know other people.

Indeed it quite annoyed her to be so attractive to people, since it obliged her to disappoint them, whereas her natural instinct was always to give pleasure.

Only, there was this awkward consequence: she now felt so keenly the pleasure of friendship which she pretended to have been her motive in coming, that she was afraid of making the lady suspect the genuineness of sentiments which were actually quite sincere if she now asked her to do the favour for her friend.

Pleasing people more easily than she wished, and having no need to trumpet her conquests abroad, Albertine kept silent about the scene she had had with me by her bedside, which a plain girl would have wished the whole world to know.

To such an extent are those who do the minimum, and might easily do nothing, driven by conscience to do something!

I told Albertine that in giving me this pencil she was giving me great pleasure, and yet not so great as I should have felt if, on the night she had spent at the hotel, she had permitted me to kiss her: “It would have made me so happy! What possible harm could it have done you? I’m amazed that you should have refused me.” “What amazes me,” she retorted, “is that you should find it amazing. I wonder what sort of girls you must know if my behaviour surprised you.”

Why, if it’s my friendship you’re after, you’ve nothing to complain of; I must be jolly fond of you to forgive you. But I’m sure you don’t care two hoots about me, really. Own up now, it’s Andrée you’re in love with. Besides, you’re quite right; she’s ever so much nicer than I am, and absolutely ravishing! Oh, you men!”

But Andrée was too intellectual, too neurotic, too sickly, too like myself for me really to love her. If Albertine now seemed to me to be void of substance, Andrée was filled with something which I knew only too well.

To the outward appearance, affectation, imitation, the longing to be admired, whether by the good or by the wicked, add misleading similarities of speech and gesture.

so her flaunting of vice leads us to surmise a Messalina in a respectable girl with middle-class prejudices.

but gives us a certain tranquillity with which to spend what remains of life, and also—since it enables us to regret nothing, by assuring us that we have attained to the best, and that the best was nothing out of the ordinary—with which to resign ourselves to death.