Albertine disparue
Esquisse IV
(Cahier 54, 52r-55r, 66r-70r)
IV.1
There were several letters, among them one from a messenger I had sent to Balbec, another from a messenger I had sent into Touraine. I felt my breathing getting faster. The first letter said: I haven't heard anything new about the shower rooms. And in any case the shower attendant seemed to me like a complete liar. (I took a deep breath, what joy!) But I pushed my enquiries a bit further and I found some things out which will definitely be of interest to you. I made the acquaintance of some fisherwomen who knew Mlle Albertine very well. They told me that Mlle Alb. had said that nothing was more amusing than looking up at ladies' underwear (I felt my breath heaving in my chest once more) and she had dug some holes in the sand with them, when her young friends were not around, under the boards where people walked, and in which she hid with the fisherwomen. And when some pretty young ladies went by, and they saw their underwear from up their skirts, she couldn't stop herself from violently squeezing the hand of the fisherwoman who was next to her and even pinching her hard on the leg. They told me that she had never done anything else to them but I will see them again and try to draw them out further, especially since I learned that before returning in the evening, Mlle Alb. often went walking alone very far beyond that remote part of the beach where she was living and where there was a whole community of fishermen and fisherwomen who frequently prowled around under the cliffs. Oh! if only on the first day back then when I had wanted so much to see the charms of Balbec, if the first time I had noticed Albertine in front of the sea I had hoped for her to be wanton and I had had the curiosity to discover that she too embodied the same charms as the girls I encountered on the roads, like at Pinçonville, that she took part in all those fishing games, all those mysteries of the night and the beach, oh! with what fresh anguish did I feel that Balbec was cursed, and what ever greater peculiarities did I now find in it. How I would have liked to fathom all those fishing games, all those mysteries of the night and the beach, and know that Albertine was not mixed up in them. But there was no doubt that she was. And if I felt terrible pain about it it was because Albertine had not just embodied for me the charm of Balbec and the charm of the unknown life of a woman, but that I had been foolish enough, being used to a tranquil family life, to combine all that with the tenderness that I had felt for my grandmother in the past, the need for kisses on the sides of my neck at night time which had created for me in the expectancy of a kiss from Albertine something of the expectancy of a kiss from my mother in Combray, and which now left me heartbroken to imagine her behaving viciously and with others. And yet there was no longer the slightest doubt.
IV.2
No, there was not a single day that through a new friend sent somewhere or other where Albertine had lived, I did not prepare myself for a fresh pain, so mad was I with jealousy, not over the actions of the dead person which I did not know, but of the living person who was still smiling inside me. And when Aimé had returned from Balbec, because he had had to go back for his wife's latest confinement, I sent him into Touraine. He went and stayed next to the country house that belonged to Albertine's aunt; he quickly got to know a chambermaid, a director of a car hire company where Albertine often went to take one for the day. At first he could discover nothing. Then a laundress from the town told him that Albertine had a particular way of squeezing her arm when she came to bring back her linen. Upon reading this letter I felt a strange pang in my heart. It was a new fragment of Albertine's life come out of nowhere, a sort of creation, not made by God but by the Devil, of everything that could torment me most. The moment I read it I felt a strange pang in my heart. I could not breathe and I struggled to rid myself of the suspicion that I had caused myself so much hurt by trying to acquire such information. And by sending money to Aimé, who was paying for his stay in Touraine, all the trouble that he was going through, all the hurt that he was bringing back to me, I persuaded myself that such a gesture signified nothing on its own, that it was a familiarity that the young girls, who had no such vicious tastes, would have been able to accept. Yet that was linked in those distant times and places to the ways of the fisherwomen of Hocheville, with the ladies or the shower attendant at Balbec. But the latter could already be eliminated because she was very unreliable. And as for the fisherwomen and the laundress, they did not know each other, well and good, but they had all had the same interrogator, Aimé, who had not perhaps told them the truth, maybe so as not to come back empty-handed, to earn his money, to please me (because naturally I had not told Aimé that after Albertine's death what I hoped for with all my heart was some version where she was innocent, that while she was alive I had never said I was jealous about her). I had a visit from Albertine's aunt. She told me that in Touraine Albertine never left her side, she restored my calm, I recalled the solemn oaths that Albertine had made to me, I saw now that all the rest was nothing but lies and attached no more importance to the incoherent words of the laundress, I now saw an image of Albertine that was not contradicted by any other ones, that when she was out of my sight she was just the same as I had known her beside my bed in the evenings, making my regret over her death more profound but also more sweet. We wept together, Albertine's aunt and I, she sitting in her long black veils at the foot of my bed, when I was brought a telegram.
AFTER MUCH EFFORT AM FINALLY SURE. HAVE JUST LEARNED SOME VERY INTERESTING THINGS. FIVE HUNDRED FRANCS RECEIVED WITH THANKS.
I thought that it had all been true after all. Albertine had always
deceived me. I could no longer feel her sweet presence inside me, I felt a
terrible emptiness. It took me a few minutes before I could catch my
breath, with my hand against my heart. If the surveillance I had placed
Albertine under during her life had detached her from me, and had
indirectly led to her death, the surveillance I undertook retrospectively
ended up by detaching what was left of her from me, and it was my death,
through these successive blows to my heart, that she was preparing and
which was thus an indirect consequence of hers, certainly one that I had
not foreseen, one which neither Swann nor Saint-Loup had escaped when they
had hoped that their mistress would perish in an accident.
The hurt that this telegram had caused me was beginning to subside a
little when the letter arrived.
The young laundress wouldn't tell me anything for a few days, she assured me that Mlle Alb. had done nothing more than pinch her arm. But to get her to talk I took her out to dinner, I gave her a little to drink. At which point she told me that Mlle Alb. often met her on the banks of the Loire, when she went to bathe; she had suggested that she have her photograph taken; the young laundress confessed to me that she very much liked to amuse herself with her friends and that, seeing the way that Mlle Alb. always rubbed up against her in her swimming costume, she had given her some caresses with her tongue down her neck and down her arms. She did not tell me anything more that evening. But determined to follow your orders and wanting to do whatever it took to please you I took the young laundress to bed with me. She asked me if I wanted her to do what she had done with Mlle Albertine after she had taken off her swimming costume. Then she performed the same caresses with her mouth over the whole of my body, and when she continued with them all the way down my legs she said: "Oh if you could have seen the way she wriggled when I did that", and she even showed me a bite on her arm that Mlle A. had given her, so steamed up had she become.
In my despair I remembered that A. often made a motion as if to bite me, and that made it all sound true to me. But I could not put up with so much suffering. In order to calm myself down I told myself that perhaps the laundress had invented it all just to have some interesting story for Aimé, or even, since he seemed to be taking so much interest in Albertine, to make up the things she had done to Albertine so she could do them to Aimé. I wrote back to him straight away to thank him, to tell him how much pleasure his letter had given me, to beg him to ask the laundress if at such moments Albertine had had a particular laugh, or a cry or said any particular words. He replied no but that she had said to him: "You're taking me up with the angels." Well Albertine had often asked me if she was not taking me into seventh heaven. Perhaps it was that and she had got the words wrong.
Created 08.02.21