Truly, I could have said to her now in all sincerity that she would be capable of setting my mind at rest.

At the same time, my choice of Andrée (who happened to be staying in Paris, having given up her plan of returning to Balbec) as guide and companion to my mistress was prompted by what Albertine had told me of the affection that her friend had felt for me at Balbec, at a time when, on the contrary, I was afraid that I bored her; indeed, if I had known this at the time, it is perhaps with Andrée that I would have fallen in love.

“What, you never knew?” said Albertine, “but we were always joking about it. Do you mean to say you never noticed how she used to copy all your ways of talking and arguing? Especially when she’d just been with you, it was really striking. She had no need to tell us whether she had seen you. As soon as she joined us, we could tell at once. We used to look at one another and laugh. She was like a coalheaver who tries to pretend that he isn’t one, although he’s black all over. A miller has no need to say that he’s a miller—you can see the flour all over his clothes, and the mark of the sacks he has carried on his shoulder. Andrée was just the same, she would twist her eyebrows the way you do, and stretch out her long neck, and I don’t know what all. When I pick up a book that has been in your room, even if I’m reading it out of doors, I can tell at once where it’s been because it still has a faint whiff of your beastly fumigations. It’s only the tiniest thing—I can’t really explain—but it’s rather a nice thing really. Anyhow whenever anybody spoke nicely about you, seemed to think a lot of you, Andrée was in ecstasies.”

Notwithstanding all this, in case there might have been some secret plan made behind my back, I would advise her to give up the Buttes-Chaumont for that day and to go instead to Saint-Cloud or somewhere else.

It was not of course, as I was well aware, that I was the least bit in love with Albertine. Love is no more perhaps than the diffusion of those eddies which, in the wake of an emotion, stir the soul. Certain such eddies had indeed stirred my soul through and through when Albertine spoke to me at Balbec about Mlle Vinteuil, but these were now stilled. I no longer loved Albertine, for I no longer felt anything of the pain I had felt in the train at Balbec on learning how Albertine had spent her adolescence, with visits perhaps to Montjouvain. I had thought about all this for long enough, and it was now healed. But from time to time certain expressions used by Albertine made me suppose—why, I cannot say—that she must in the course of her life, short as it had been, have received many compliments, many declarations, and received them with pleasure, that is to say with sensuality. Thus she would say in any connexion: “Is that true? Is it really true?” Of course, if she had said, like an Odette: “Is it really true, that thumping lie?” I should not have been disturbed, for the very absurdity of the formula would have explained itself as a stupid inanity of feminine wit. But her questioning air: “Is that true?” gave on the one hand the strange impression of a creature incapable of judging things by herself, who relies on your corroboration, as though she were not endowed with the same faculties as yourself (if you said to her: “We’ve been out for a whole hour,” or “It’s raining,” she would ask: “Is that true?”). Unfortunately, on the other hand, this want of facility in judging external phenomena for herself could not be the real origin of her “Is that true? Is it really true?” It seemed rather that these words had been, from the dawn of her precocious nubility, replies to: “You know, I never saw anybody as pretty as you,” or “You know I’m madly in love with you, you excite me terribly”—affirmations that were answered, with a coquettishly acquiescent modesty, by these repetitions of: “Is that true? Is it really true?” which no longer served Albertine, when in my company, save to reply by a question to some such affirmation as: “You’ve been asleep for more than an hour,” “Is that true?”

Without feeling to the slightest degree in love with Albertine, without including in the list of my pleasures the moments that we spent together, I had nevertheless remained preoccupied with the way in which she disposed of her time; had I not, indeed, fled from Balbec in order to make certain that she could no longer meet this or that person with whom I was so afraid of her doing wrong for fun (fun at my expense, perhaps), that I had adroitly planned to sever, by my departure, all her dangerous entanglements at one blow? And Albertine had such extraordinary passivity, such a powerful faculty for forgetting, and for complying with one’s wishes, that these relations had indeed been severed and the phobia that haunted me cured. But such a phobia is capable of assuming as many forms as the undefined evil that is its cause. So long as my jealousy had not been reincarnated in new people, I had enjoyed after the passing of my anguish an interval of calm. But the slightest pretext serves to revive a chronic disease, just as the slightest opportunity may enable the vice of the person who is the cause of our jealousy to be practised anew (after a lull of chastity) with different people. I had managed to separate Albertine from her accomplices, and, by so doing, to exorcise my hallucinations; if it was possible to make her forget people, to cut short her attachments, her taste for sensual pleasure was chronic too, and was perhaps only waiting for an opportunity to be given its head. Now Paris provided just as many opportunities as Balbec. In any town whatsoever, she had no need to seek, for the evil existed not in Albertine alone, but in others to whom any opportunity for pleasure is good. A glance from one, understood at once by the other, brings the two famished souls in contact. And it is easy for an astute woman to appear not to have seen, then five minutes later to join, the person who has read her glance and is waiting for her in a side street, and to make an assignation in a trice. Who will ever know? And it was so simple for Albertine to tell me, in order that she might continue these practices, that she was anxious to revisit some place on the outskirts of Paris that she had liked. And so it was enough that she should return later than usual, that her expedition should have taken an inexplicably long time, although it was perhaps perfectly easy to explain (without bringing in any sensual reason), for my malady to break out afresh, attached this time to mental pictures which were not of Balbec, and which I would set to work, as with their predecessors, to destroy, as though the destruction of an ephemeral cause could put an end to a congenital disease. I did not take into account the fact that in these acts of destruction in which I had as an accomplice, in Albertine, her faculty of changing, her ability to forget, almost to hate, the recent object of her love, I was sometimes causing great pain to one or other of those unknown persons with whom she had successively taken her pleasure, and that I was doing so in vain, for they would be abandoned but replaced, and, parallel to the path strewn with all the derelicts of her light-hearted infidelities, there would continue for me another, pitiless path interrupted only by an occasional brief respite; so that my suffering, had I thought about it, could end only with Albertine’s life or with my own.