La Tentation de loubli (ROMAN) (French Edition)
Contents:
Bertrand Degott et Marie Miguet-Ollagnier dir. Claude Leroy, Nathalie Mauriac-Dyer dir. Presses Universitaires Toulouse-Le Mirail, , p. Lunar Park de Bret Easton Ellis: Tran; Avril , pp. A propos de La vie sexuelle de Catherine M. Frankreichs Beitrag zur Methodik der Literaturwissenschaft , Berlin: The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Handbuch der literarischen Gattungen , hrsg. May Plouzeau, dans Revue des langues romanes , 99, , p.
Tania Van Hemelryck, dans Scriptorium , Rothwell, dans French Studies , Olivier Collet, dans Revue critique de philologie romane , , , p. Fragment de vers; voir N. Geirnaert, Het archief van de familie Adornes en de Jeruzalemstichting te Brugge , Neue verbesserte Textausgabe mit Einleitung und Glossar herausgegeben von W.
Klein, dans The Modern Language Journal , Gaston Paris, dans Romania , 26, , p. Wolfgang Golther, dans Studien zur vgl. Litteraturgeschichte , 4, , p. Nitze, dans Modern Language Notes , Benkov, dans Dalhousie French Studies , 78, , p. Gaston Paris, dans Romania , 7, , p. Dubois, dans Romance Philology , 7, , p. Krause, The Medieval Review , Barber, Richard, The Holy Grail: Lacy, dans The French Review , Keith Busby, dans French Studies , Antonella Sciancalepore, dans Revue critique de philologie romane , 17, , p.
Alexandra Barratt, dans Parergon , Burgess, dans French Studies , Holden, dans The Modern Language Review , Talarico, dans The French Review , Em Angevaare , Susana G. A Critical Study, with Transcription , Ph.
French Studies: Literature, 2000 To The Present Day
Owen, London, Dent, New York, Everyman's Library, Kibler, London, Penguin Books, Leur perspective proverbiale et gnomique , Paris, Nizet, Symposiums , , p. Jacques Chocheyras, Bern, Lang, , p. Bezzola, Reto, Le sens de l'aventure et de l'amour: Paris, Champion, ; Bonnie Wheeler, Cambridge, Brewer, , p.
Smith et Joseph T. Snow, Athens, University of Georgia Press, , p. Kenneth Varty, Glasgow, University of Glasgow, , p. Peter Rolfe Monks et D. Marie de France contrefaite? Petit de Julleville, Paris, Colin, , t. Deist, Rosemarie, Gender and Power: Franco Simone, Torino, Unione tipografico-editrice torinese, , t. Bezirke, , 60 p. Fromme , , p. And even if it does seem a bit queer to make such an open bargain, I know that in our own set there are plenty of duchesses, even the most stuffy of them, who if you offered them thirty thousand francs Would do things far more difficult than telling their nieces not to stay in Touraine.
Anyhow I am doubly glad to be doing you a service, since that is the only reason that will make you consent to see me. And I remembered what the Cambremers had said to me as to the probability of his marrying a niece of the Prince de Guermantes. He consulted the time-table, and found that he could not leave Paris until the evening. She too had her alternative hypotheses.
Her nostrils expanded, she could scent the quarrel, she must have felt it in the air for a long time past. And if she was not absolutely sure of it, this was perhaps because, like myself, she would hesitate to believe unconditionally what would have given her too much pleasure. Now the burden of the affair rested no longer upon my overwrought mind, but upon Saint-Loup. I became quite light-hearted because I had made a decision, because I could say to myself: He had met me recently with Albertine whom he had known at Balbec on a day when she was in bad humour.
I heaped every imaginable reproach upon Bloch, telling him that I had never authorised him to do anything of the sort and that, besides, the whole thing was nonsense. Bloch, from that moment, continued to smile, less, I imagine, from joy than from self-consciousness at having made me angry. He laughingly expressed his surprise at having provoked such anger. Perhaps he said this hoping to minimise in my mind the importance of his indiscreet intervention, perhaps it Was because he was of a cowardly nature, and lived gaily and idly in an atmosphere of falsehood, as jelly-fish float upon the surface of the sea, perhaps because, even if he had not been of a different race, as other people can never place themselves at our point of view, they do not realise the magnitude of the injury that words uttered at random can do us.
The parents of the little girl whom I had brought into the house for an hour had decided to lodge a complaint against me for corruption of a child under the age of consent. There are moments in life when a sort of beauty is created by the multiplicity of the troubles that assail us, intertwined like Wagnerian leitmotiv, from the idea also, which then emerges, that events are not situated in the content of the reflexions portrayed in the wretched little mirror which the mind holds in front of it and which is called the future, that they are somewhere outside, and spring up as suddenly as a person who comes to accuse us of a crime.
Content Metrics
Even when left to itself, an event becomes modified, whether frustration amplifies it for us or satisfaction reduces it. But it is rarely unaccompanied. My innocence of the alleged crime was never taken into consideration, for that was the sole hypothesis which nobody was willing to accept for an instant. Nevertheless the difficulty of a conviction enabled me to escape with an extremely violent reprimand, while the parents were in the room.
Anyhow, you can find dozens of girls better than that one, and far cheaper. It was a perfectly ridiculous amount to pay. Every passer-by, until I was safely at home, seemed to me an inspector appointed to spy upon my behaviour. And this took its place once more, but in an almost joyous tone now that Saint-Loup had started. Now that he had undertaken to go and see Mme. Bontemps, my sufferings had been dispelled. I believed that this was because I had taken action, I believed it sincerely, for we never know what we conceal in our heart of hearts.
What really made me happy was not, as I supposed, that I had transferred my load of indecisions to Saint-Loup. I was not, for that matter, entirely wrong; the specific remedy for an unfortunate event and three events out of four are unfortunate is a decision; for its effect is that, by a sudden reversal of our thoughts, it interrupts the flow of those that come from the past event and prolong its vibration, and breaks that flow with a contrary flow of contrary thoughts, come from without, from the future.
But these new thoughts are most of all beneficial to us when and this was the case with the thoughts that assailed me at this moment , from the heart of that future, it is a hope that they bring us. It is in reality our anticipation, our hope of happy events that fills us with a joy which we ascribe to other causes and which ceases, letting us relapse into misery, if we are no longer so assured that what we desire will come to pass.
It is always this invisible belief that sustains the edifice of our world of sensation, deprived of which it rocks from its foundations. We have seen that it created for us the merit or unimportance of other people, our excitement or boredom at seeing them. It creates similarly the possibility of enduring a grief which seems to us trivial, simply because we are convinced that it will presently be brought to an end, or its sudden enlargement until the presence of a certain person matters as much as, possibly more than our life itself.
One thing however succeeded in making my heartache as keen as it had been at the first moment and I am bound to admit no longer was. It is all very well our loving people, the pain of losing them, when in our isolation we are confronted with it alone, to which our mind gives, to a certain extent, whatever form it chooses, this pain is endurable and different from that other pain less human, less our own, as unforeseen and unusual as an accident in the moral world and in the region of our heart, which is caused not so much by the people themselves as by the manner in which we have learned that we are not to see them again.
Albertine, I might think of her with gentle tears, accepting the fact that I should not be able to see her again this evening as I had seen her last night, but when I read over again: There is in inanimate objects, in events, in farewell letters a special danger which amplifies and even alters the nature of the grief that people are capable of causing us.
But this pain did not last long. Nevertheless, I rejoiced at the thought. In future it would be impossible for me ever to bring a little girl into the house to console me in my grief, without the risk of being put to shame in her eyes by the sudden intrusion of an inspector, and of her regarding me as a criminal. And at the same instant I realised how far more we live for certain ideas than we suppose, for this impossibility of my ever taking a little girl on my knee again seemed to me to destroy all the value of my life, but what was more I understood how comprehensible it is that people will readily refuse wealth and risk their lives, whereas we imagine that pecuniary interest and the fear of death rule the world.
For if I had thought that even a little girl who was a complete stranger might by the arrival of a policeman, be given a bad impression of myself, how much more readily would I have committed suicide. And yet there was no possible comparison between the two degrees of suffering. Now in everyday life we never bear in mind that the people to whom we offer money, whom we threaten to kill, may have mistresses or merely friends, to whose esteem they attach importance, not to mention their own self-respect. But, all of a sudden, by a confusion of which I was not aware I did not in fact remember that Albertine, being of full age, was free to live under my roof and even to be my mistress , it seemed to me that the charge of corrupting minors might include Albertine also.
Thereupon my life appeared to me to be hedged in on every side. And when I thought that I had not lived chastely with her, I found in the punishment that had been inflicted upon me for having forced an unknown little girl to accept money, that relation which almost always exists in human sanctions, the effect of which is that there is hardly ever either a fair sentence or a judicial error, but a sort of compromise between the false idea that the judge forms of an innocent action and the culpable deeds of which he is unaware.
I would have liked to telegraph to her not to come back. And immediately, drowning everything else, the passionate desire for her return overwhelmed me. The fact was that having for an instant considered the possibility of telling her not to return and of living without her, all of a sudden, I felt myself on the contrary ready to abandon all travel, all pleasure, all work, if only Albertine might return! Ah, how my love for Albertine, the course of which I had supposed that I could foretell, on the analogy of my previous love for Gilberte, had developed in an entirely opposite direction!
How impossible it was for me to live without seeing her! Then the competition of other forms of life thrust this latest grief into the background, and, during those days which were the first days of spring, I even found, as I waited until Saint-Loup should have seen Mme. Bontemps, in imagining Venice and beautiful, unknown women, a few moments of pleasing calm. As soon as I was conscious of this, I felt in myself a panic terror. This calm which I had just enjoyed was the first apparition of that great occasional force which was to wage war in me against grief, against love, and would in the end prove victorious.
This state of which I had just had a foretaste and had received the warning, was, for a moment only, what would in time to come be my permanent state, a life in which I should no longer be able to suffer on account of Albertine, in which I should no longer be in love with her. And my love, which had just seen and recognised the one enemy by whom it could be conquered, forgetfulness, began to tremble, like a lion which in the cage in which it has been confined has suddenly caught sight of the python that is about to devour it.
From time to time I succeeded, by letting some current or other of ideas flow through my grief, in refreshing, in aerating to some slight extent the vitiated atmosphere of my heart, but at night, if I succeeded in going to sleep, then it was as though the memory of Albertine had been the drug that had procured my sleep, whereas the cessation of its influence would awaken me. I thought all the time of Albertine while I was asleep.
It was a special sleep of her own that she gave me, and one in which, moreover, I should no longer have been at liberty, as when awake, to think of other things. Sleep and the memory of her were the two substances which I must mix together and take at one draught in order to put myself to sleep. When I was awake, moreover, my suffering went on increasing day by day instead of diminishing, not that oblivion was not performing its task, but because by the very fact of its doing so it favoured the idealisation of the regretted image and thereby the assimilation of my initial suffering to other analogous sufferings which intensified it.
Still this image was endurable. But if all of a sudden I thought of her room, of her room in which the bed stood empty, of her piano, her motor-car, I lost all my strength, I shut my eyes, let my head droop upon my shoulder like a person who is about to faint. The sound of doors being opened hurt me almost as much because it was not she that was opening them.
When it was possible that a telegram might have come from Saint-Loup, Idared not ask: But the fact that my heart had already performed this daily task four times proved that it was now capable of continuing to perform it. I shall say nothing of the letter conveying a declaration of affection which I received at this time from a niece of Mme. Such incidents which might prove gratifying to our self-esteem are too painful when we are in love. We feel a desire, but shrink from the indelicacy of communicating them to her who has a less flattering opinion of us, nor would that opinion be altered by the knowledge that we are able to inspire one that is very different.
From the moment of waking, when I picked my grief up again at the point which I had reached when I fell asleep, like a book which had been shut for a while but which I would keep before my eyes until night, it could be only with some thought relating to Albertine that all my sensation would be brought into harmony, whether it came to me from without or from within. If I felt myself in better health, not too miserable, I was no longer jealous, I no longer had any grievance against her, I would have liked to see her at once, to kiss her, to live happily with her ever after.
The act of telegraphing to her: If I was in a sombre mood, all my anger with her revived, I no longer felt any desire to kiss her, I felt how impossible it was that she could ever make me happy, I sought only to do her harm and to prevent her from belonging to other people. But these two opposite moods had an identical result: And yet, however keen my joy at the moment of her return, I felt that very soon the same difficulties would crop up again and that to seek happiness in the satisfaction of a moral desire was as fatuous as to attempt to reach the horizon by walking straight ahead. The farther the desire advances, the farther does true possession withdraw.
So that if happiness or at least freedom from suffering can be found it is not the satisfaction, but the gradual reduction, the eventual extinction of our desire that we must seek. We attempt to see the person whom we love, we ought to attempt not to see her, oblivion alone brings about an ultimate extinction of desire. And I imagine that if an author were to publish truths of this sort he would dedicate the book that contained them to a woman to whom he would thus take pleasure in returning, saying to her: The bonds that unite another person to ourselves exist only in our mind.
Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying. Presently, as Saint-Loup remained silent, a subordinate anxiety — my expectation of a further telegram, of a telephone call from him — masked the other, my uncertainty as to the result, whether Albertine was going to return.
La redécouverte d'un roman inoubliable de la reine de la saga, ou l'histoire bouleversante d'une amitié mise à l'épreuve de la passion, du mensonge et du. La Tentation de L'Oubli - www.farmersmarketmusic.com (French Edition) [Belva Plain, Rebecca Satz] on La Tentation de l'oubli (ROMAN) (French Edition) and millions of other books.
Listening for every sound in expectation of the telegram became so intolerable that I felt that, whatever might be its contents, the arrival of the telegram, which was the only thing of which I could think at the moment, would put an end to my sufferings. But when at length I had received a telegram from Robert in which he informed me that he had seen Mme. Bontemps, but that, notwithstanding all his precautions, Albertine had seen him, and that this had upset everything, I burst out in a torrent of fury and despair, for this was what I would have done anything in the world to prevent.
Then I told myself that, if this attempt had failed, I would try another.
Since man is able to influence the outer world, how, if I brought into play cunning, intelligence, pecuniary advantage, affection, should I fail to succeed in destroying this appalling fact: We believe that according to our desire we are able to change the things around about us, we believe this because otherwise we can see no favourable solution.
We forget the solution that generally comes to pass and is also favourable: The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant. We have not managed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us past it, and then if we turn round to gaze at the remote past, we can barely catch sight of it, so imperceptible has it become.
In the flat above ours, one of the neighbours was strumming songs. I applied their words, which I knew, to Albertine and myself, and was stirred by so profound a sentiment that I began to cry. Since Manon returned to Des Grieux, it seemed to me that I was to Albertine the one and only love of her life. Alas, it is probable that, if she had been listening at that moment to the same air, it would not have been myself that she would have cherished under the name of Des Grieux, and, even if the idea had occurred to her, the memory of myself would have checked her emotion on hearing this music, albeit it was, although better and more distinguished, just the sort of music that she admired.
But be the ending as happy as it may, our love has not advanced an inch and, when we have shut the book, she whom we love and who has come to us at last in its pages, loves us no better in real life. In a fit of fury, I telegraphed to Saint-Loup to return as quickly as possible to Paris, so as to avoid at least the appearance of an aggravating insistence upon a mission which I had been so anxious to keep secret. But even before he had returned in obedience to my instructions it was from Albertine herself that I received the following letter:.
My dear boy, if you needed me why did you not write to me myself, I should have been only too delighted to come back, do not let us have any more of these absurd complications. So that I had merely to do what she said, to write to her that I needed her, and she would return. I was going, then, to see her again, her, the Albertine of Balbec for since her departure this was what she had once more become to me; like a sea-shell to which we cease to pay any attention while we have it on the chest of drawers in our room, once we have parted with it, either by giving it away or by losing it, and begin to think about it, a thing which we had ceased to do, she recalled to me all the joyous beauty of the blue mountains of the sea.
And it was not only she that had become a creature of the imagination, that is to say desirable, life with her had become an imaginary life, that is to a life set free from all difficulties, so that I said to myself: Meanwhile, I read her letter again, and was nevertheless disappointed when I saw how little there is of a person in a letter.
Doubtless the characters traced on the paper express our thoughts, as do also our features: But all the same, in the person, the thought is not apparent to us until it has been diffused through the expanded water-lily of her face. This modifies it considerably. And it is perhaps one of the causes of our perpetual disappointments in love, this perpetual deviation which brings it about that, in response to our expectation of the ideal person with whom we are in love, each meeting provides us with a person in flesh and blood in whom there is already so little trace of our dream.
And then when we demand something of this person, we receive from her a letter in which even of the person very little remains, as in the letters of an algebraical formula there no longer remains the precise value of the arithmetical ciphers, which themselves do not contain the qualities of the fruit or flowers that they enumerate.
And yet love, the beloved object, her letters, are perhaps nevertheless translations unsatisfying as it may be to pass from one to the other of the same reality, since the letter seems to us inadequate only while we are reading it, but we have been sweating blood until its arrival, and it is sufficient to calm our anguish, if not to appease, with its tiny black symbols, our desire which knows that it contains after all only the equivalent of a word, a smile, a kiss, not the things themselves.
But no, I did not ask and I shall not ask you to return; our meeting — for a long time to come — might not be painful, perhaps, to you, a heartless girl. To me whom at times you have thought so cold, it would be most painful. Life has driven us apart. I would have told you this when I awoke, when I received her letter at the same moment as yours. Perhaps you would have been afraid of distressing me by leaving immediately after that. And we should perhaps have united our lives in what would have been for us who knows?
If this is what was in store for us, then I bless you for your wisdom. We should lose all the fruit of it were we to meet again. This is not to say that I should not find it a temptation. But I claim no great credit for resisting it. You know what an inconstant person I am and how quickly I forget. You have told me often, I am first and foremost a man of habit. The habits which I am beginning to form in your absence are not as yet very strong. Naturally, at this moment, the habits that I had when you were with me, habits which your departure has upset, are still the stronger.
They will not remain so for very long. As I never expected that my mother would approve, as on the other hand I desired that we should each of us enjoy all that liberty of which you had too generously and abundantly made a sacrifice which might be admissible had we been living together for a few weeks, but would have become as hateful to you as to myself now that we were to spend the rest of our lives together it almost hurts me to think as I write to you that this nearly happened, that the news came only a moment too late , I had thought of organising our existence in the most independent manner possible, and, to begin with, I wished you to have that yacht in which you could go cruising while I, not being well enough to accompany you, would wait for you at the port I had written to Elstir to ask for his advice, since you admire his taste , and on land I wished you to have a motor-car to yourself, for your very own, in which you could go out, could travel wherever you chose.
The yacht was almost ready; it is named, after a wish that you expressed at Balbec, le Cygne. And remembering that your favourite make of car was the Rolls, I had ordered one. But now that we are never to meet again, as I have no hope of persuading you to accept either the vessel or the car to me they would be quite useless , I had thought — as I had ordered them through an agent, but in your name — that you might perhaps by countermanding them, yourself, save me the expense of the yacht and the car which are no longer required. But this, and many other matters, would need to be discussed.
Well, I find that so long as I am capable of falling in love with you again, which will not be for long, it would be madness, for the sake of a sailing-vessel and a Rolls-Royce, to meet again and to risk the happiness of your life since you have decided that it lies in your living apart from myself. No, I prefer to keep the Rolls and even the yacht. Alas, to-day is no longer either virginal or fair. As for the Rolls, it would deserve rather those other lines of the same poet which you said you could not understand:. I retain a very pleasant memory of it.
I make no reference to what you tell me of the alleged suggestions which Saint-Loup whom I do not for a moment believe to be in Touraine may have made to your aunt. It is just like a Sherlock Holmes story. For what do you take me? No doubt, just as I had said in the past to Albertine: Then, having foreseen the possibility of a reply in the negative, I ought also to have foreseen that this reply would at once revive in its fullest intensity my love for Albertine.
And, no doubt, this would have been, after three enormous blunders, the worst of all, after which there would be nothing left but to take my life in front of her house. But the disastrous manner in which the psychopathic universe is constructed has decreed that the clumsy action, the action which we ought most carefully to have avoided, should be precisely the action that will calm us, the action that, opening before us, until we learn its result, fresh avenues of hope, relieves us for the moment of the intolerable pain which a refusal has aroused in us.
With the result that, when the pain is too keen, we dash headlong into the blunder that consists in writing, sending somebody to intercede, going in person, proving that we cannot get on without the woman we love. But I foresaw nothing of all this. The probable result of my letter seemed to me on the contrary to be that of making Albertine return to me at once.
And so, as I thought of this result, I greatly enjoyed writing the letter. But at the same time I had not ceased, while writing it, from shedding tears; partly, at first, in the same way as upon the day when I had acted a pretence of separation, because, as the words represented for me the idea which they expressed to me, albeit they were aimed in the opposite direction uttered mendaciously because my pride forbade me to admit that I was in love , they carried their own load of sorrow.
But also because I felt that the idea contained a grain of truth. As this letter seemed to me to be certain of its effect, I began to regret that I had sent it. For as I pictured to myself the return so natural, after all , of Albertine, immediately all the reasons which made our marriage a thing disastrous to myself returned in their fullest force.
I hoped that she would refuse to come back. She was not certain how many stamps it required. I opened the newspaper; it announced a performance by Berma. It seemed to me that what I had so often repeated to myself, and had heard recited in the theatre, was the statement of the laws of which I must make experience in my life. There are in our soul things to which we do not realise how strongly we are attached. Or else, if we live without them, it is because we put off from day to day, from fear of failure, or of being made to suffer, entering into possession of them. This was what had happened to me in the case of Gilberte when I thought that I had given her up.
If before the moment in which we are entirely detached from these things — a moment long subsequent to that in which we suppose ourselves to have been detached from them — the girl with whom we are in love becomes, for instance, engaged to some one else, we are mad, we can no longer endure the life which appeared to us to be so sorrowfully calm. Or else, if we are in control of the situation, we feel that she is a burden, we would gladly be rid of her.
Which was what had happened to me in the case of Albertine.
La tentation de l'oubli | KFPL Catalogue
But let a sudden departure remove the unloved creature from us, we are unable to survive. Hippolyte is about to leave. She comes to him to confess her love, and this was the scene which I had so often repeated to myself:. And there is nothing, not even the harshness with which, as I had been told, Swann had treated Odette, or I myself had treated Albertine, a harshness which substituted for the original love a new love composed of pity, emotion, of the need of effusion, which is only a variant of the former love, that is not to be found also in this scene:. So it is that jealousy, which in love is equivalent to the loss of all happiness, outweighs any loss of reputation.
And no doubt we are wrong when we suppose that the accomplishment of our desire is a small matter, since as soon as we believe that it cannot be realised we become intent upon it once again, and decide that it was not worth our while to pursue it only when we are quite certain that our attempt will not fail. And yet we are right also. For if this accomplishment, if our happiness appear of small account only in the light of certainty, nevertheless they are an unstable element from which only trouble can arise.
And our trouble will be all the greater the more completely our desire will have been accomplished, all the more impossible to endure when our happiness has been, in defiance of the law of nature, prolonged for a certain period, when it has received the consecration of habit.
Je me le rappelais, je me disais: And after all why should not this have been true? It was necessary to escape from this situation, to cut matters short, and I had the following idea. Dans un hangar on peut se coucher avec une amie. Our heart still beats; and besides, the woman who has gone is no longer the same as the woman who was with us. The woman says to herself: But it is rarely unaccompanied.
In another sense as well, these two tendencies, by which I mean that which made me anxious that my letter should be posted, and, when I thought that it had gone, my regret that I had written it, have each of them a certain element of truth. In the case of the first, it is easily comprehensible that we should go in pursuit of our happiness — or misery — and that at the same time we should hope to keep before us, by this latest action which is about to involve us in its consequences, a state of expectancy which does not leave us in absolute despair, in a word that we should seek to convert into other forms, which, we imagine, must be less painful to us, the malady from which we are suffering.
But the other tendency is no less important, for, born of our belief in the success of our enterprise, it is simply an anticipation of the disappointment which we should very soon feel in the presence of a satisfied desire, our regret at having fixed for ourselves, at the expense of other forms which are necessarily excluded, this form of happiness. It did not fail to introduce into my mind certain pleasing images which neutralised somewhat by their attractions the dangers that I foresaw in her return. The pleasure, so long lost, of having her with me was intoxicating.
Time passes, and gradually everything that we have said in falsehood becomes true; I had learned this only too well with Gilberte; the indifference that I had feigned when I could never restrain my tears had ended by becoming real; gradually life, as I told Gilberte in a lying formula which retrospectively had become true, life had driven us apart. I recalled this, I said to myself: And now that the worst moments are over, ought I not to hope that she will allow this month to pass without returning?
If she returns, I shall have to renounce the true life which certainly I am not in a fit state to enjoy as yet, but which as time goes on may begin to offer me attractions while my memory of Albertine grows fainter.
- Premier Menuet pour piano!
- Un cas d’indépendance réussie : la littérature africaine.
- Doubler Son Potentiel : 50 outils performants pour enfin y arriver (French Edition).
- Chrétien de Troyes | Arlima - Archives de littérature du Moyen Âge.
I have said that oblivion was beginning to perform its task. In this novel aspect of her, oblivion which nevertheless was engaged upon making me accustomed to our separation, made me, by shewing me a more attractive Albertine, long all the more for her return. Je pris les bagues. On voit chaque plume. Je lui en faisais plus, il est vrai, mais une femme que nous entretenons ne nous semble pas une femme entretenue tant que nous ne savons pas qu'elle l'est par d'autres. Parce qu'elle avait dit, surtout les derniers temps, ne pas les aimer: Jamais elle ne m'avait dit une fois: Ne croyez-vous pas que j'aie raison?
Sans doute c'est ce prestige qui se fait encore sentir. Pourtant cette douleur cessa de le demeurer et devint atroce quand Saint-Loup arriva. Cet incident consista en ceci. Ce n'est pas difficile. Vous aurez en plus le plaisir d'avoir un souffre-douleur. Il me dit d'abord: Dans un hangar on peut se coucher avec une amie. Mais tu n'es pas juste, j'ai fait ce que j'ai pu. Donc ou elle n'avait pas entendu, et il fallait recommencer, ou vous pouviez continuer sur ce sujet.
Et le nom de cette actrice suffit pour que je me dise: La suppression de la souffrance? Ai-je pu vraiment le croire? La suppression de la douleur! Elle ne revint jamais. Tous nos efforts n'ont pu la ranimer. Ce sont deux lettres de mademoiselle Albertine. Elle ne contenait que ces mots: Mais qu'est-ce que j'y gagnais? Mais les grandes plaines me seraient-elles moins cruelles? Sans doute ces nuits si courtes durent peu. By repeating her name incessantly I sought in short to introduce, like a breath of air, something of herself into that room in which her departure had left a vacuum, in which I could no longer breathe.
Then, moreover, we seek to reduce the dimensions of our grief by making it enter into our everyday speech between ordering a suit of clothes and ordering dinner. Monsieur, Mademoiselle Albertine has forgotten to take her rings, she has left them in the drawer. Give them to me, I shall think about it. She loathed Albertine, but, regarding me in her own image, supposed that one could not hand me a letter in the handwriting of my mistress without the risk of my opening it. I took the rings. You are talking nonsense. You can count the feathers.
Availability
She pointed out to me also the similar inscriptions, to which, it is true, others were added upon the ring with the ruby. As soon as I looked at them I could have sworn that they came from the same place. You can tell it as you can tell the dishes of a good cook. I might have taken the wrong box of medicine and, instead of swallowing a few capsules of veronal on a day when I felt that I had drunk too many cups of tea, might have swallowed as many capsules of caffeine; my heart would not have throbbed more violently.
I would have liked to see Albertine immediately. To my horror at her falsehood, to my jealousy of the unknown donor, was added grief that she should have allowed herself to accept such presents. I made her even more presents, it is true, but a woman whom we are keeping does not seem to us to be a kept woman so long as we do not know that she is being kept by other men. And yet since I had continued to spend so much money upon her, I had taken her notwithstanding this moral baseness; this baseness I had maintained in her, I had perhaps increased, perhaps created it.
Then, just as we have the faculty of inventing fairy tales to soothe our grief, just as we manage, when we are dying of hunger, to persuade ourselves that a stranger is going to leave us a fortune of a hundred millions, I imagined Albertine in my arms, explaining to me in a few words that it was because of the similarity of its workmanship that she had bought the second ring, that it was she who had had her initials engraved on it. But this explanation was still feeble, it had not yet had time to thrust into my mind its beneficent roots, and my grief could not be so quickly soothed.
And I reflected that many men who tell their friends that their mistresses are very kind to them must suffer similar torments. Thus it is that they lie to others and to themselves.