The Prisoner

From early morning, with my face still turned to the wall and before I had seen, above the tall window curtains, the color of the line of morning light, I already knew what kind of day it was. I could tell from the first street noises, whether they reached me muffled and distorted by dampness or twanging like arrows in the empty, resonant space of a wide-open morning, icy and pure. The rumbling of the first tram told me whether it was huddled against the rain or forging gaily toward a blue horizon. And maybe even those sounds had been preceded by some swifter, more penetrating emanation which had slid into my sleep and suffused it with a sadness foretelling snow, or had found there a certain little intermittent figure which it set to singing so many rousing hymns in praise of the sun that, though still asleep, I would begin to smile, my closed eyes preparing to be dazzled, until a crash of music finally brought me awake. It was, in fact, mainly from my bedroom that I perceived the world around me at this period. I know Bloch spread the story that when he came to see me in the evening, he would hear the sound of conversation; since my mother was at Combray and he never found anyone in my room, he concluded that I was talking to myself. When, much later, he found out that Albertine had been living with me then and realized that I had been hiding her from everyone, he declared that he understood at last why, at that time in my life, I never wanted to go out. He was wrong. Very understandably so, since reality, even if it is inevitable, is not completely predictable; those who learn some correct detail about the life of another promptly jump from it to quite incorrect conclusions and see in the newly discovered fact the explanation for things which in truth are completely unrelated to it.

When I think now of how my friend had left Balbec with me and come back to Paris to live under the same roof, giving up her idea of going on a cruise; of how she slept twenty paces from my bedroom, at the end of the corridor, in my father's little room with the tapestries, and how every evening, very late, before leaving me to sleep, she would slip her tongue into my mouth like my daily bread, like a nourishing food having the almost sacred character of all flesh on which suffering—the suffering that we have endured for its sake—has conferred a kind of spiritual sweetness, then the analogy which springs to my mind is not the night which Captain de Borodino allowed me to spend at the barracks-a favor which, after all, cured a mere passing malaise—but that other night when my father sent Mama to sleep in the little bed next to mine. So true is it that life, if it decides once more to spare us a trial which seems inevitable, does so in a different manner—such a contradictory manner, sometimes, that it appears almost sacrilegious to recognize that the grace granted to us is the same!

Once Albertine had learned from Françoise that, in the darkness of my room with its still-closed curtains, I was not sleeping, she did not bother to avoid making a small amount of noise as she washed in her bathroom. So then I would often go into another bathroom adjoining hers, which was a pleasant place. In former times a theatrical producer would spend hundreds of thousands of francs to stud with real emeralds the throne from which the diva would play the part of an empress. The Russian Ballet has taught us that simple, well-directed lighting effects can flood the stage with jewels just as sumptuous and more varied. This new décor, already more immaterial, is still not so charming as the one which the eight o'clock sun produces in place of what we were accustomed to see when we did not rise until midday. The windows of our two bathrooms were not clear but, so that we could not be seen from outside, were all puckered into an old-fashioned, artificial frost effect. The sun suddenly turned this net of glass to yellow, gilded it and, gently uncovering in me a young man of former times who had been long hidden by habit, intoxicated me with memories, as if I had been in the open air looking at gilded foliage in which not even the presence of a bird was wanting. For I could hear Albertine endlessly whistling:

Sorrows are crazy
And listening to them is crazier still.

I was too fond of her not to smile happily at her bad musical taste. Mme Bontemps, I may say, had had a passion for that song the previous summer, until she heard that it was a silly thing, whereupon, instead of asking Albertine to sing it when people called, she began to ask for:

A farewell song rises from troubled springs

which in turn became "that old thing of Massenet's that the child is always trotting out." A cloud would pass, hiding the sun, and I would see the modest foliage of the glass curtain turn dull and lapse into a grisaille.

Albertine's bathroom was just like mine but, since there was another at the other end of the apartment, Mama had never used this one for fear of disturbing me with noise. The walls separating the two were so thin that we could chat to each other as we washed, carrying on a conversation interrupted only by the sound of the water, in the kind of intimacy which is often produced in hotels by the cramped space and nearness of the rooms, but which in Paris is so rare. At other times, I stayed in bed, dreaming for as long as I liked, for the orders were never to come into my room until I had rung. Because of the inconvenient way in which the bell-push had been hung over my bed, reaching it took so long that sometimes, tiring of the effort to grasp it and enjoying being alone, I almost went back to sleep. Not that I was completely indifferent to Albertine's presence in the family apartment. By separating her from her friends I had succeeded in sparing my heart further suffering. I had placed it in a position of rest, of near immobility which would help it to heal. But the state of calm which my friend's presence produced in me was an alleviation of suffering rather than actual joy. Not that it did not allow me to enjoy many pleasures from which my previous, acute pain had closed me off, but far from owing these pleasures to Albertine, whom I hardly even found pretty any more, in whose company I was bored and whom I had a clear sense of no longer loving, I experienced them, on the contrary, when she was not with me. So I would begin the morning by not having her called at once, especially if the weather were fine. For a few moments, knowing that his company made me happier than hers, I remained in private colloquy with the little inner figure, singer of salutations to the sun, whom I mentioned a moment ago. Of all the persons who make up our individual selves, the most apparent are not the most essential. When illness has eliminated them one by one, there will survive in me a final two or three, the hardest to kill off, and notably one, a philosopher who is happy only when he has discovered, between two works of art or between two sensations, a common factor. But I have sometimes wondered if the last of all will not be the little man very like another little man that the Combray optician kept in his shop window, who took his hood off whenever the sun shone and put it back on again if it was going to rain. I know that little man, with all his egoism; I can be suffering an asthma attack which only the coming of rain would relieve, he does not care and, at the first drops that I have been so longing for, he scowls and crossly pulls up his hood. On the other hand, I feel sure that on my deathbed, when all my other "I's" are already gone, if there is a blink of sun, while I am drawing my last breaths, the little barometer man will be delighted and will take his hood off and sing, "Ah! The sun at last!"

I rang for Françoise. I opened the Figaro. I looked for, and once more did not find, an article or something calling itself an article which I had sent to that newspaper and which was nothing but a slightly rearranged version of the recently rediscovered page which I had written in Dr. Percepied's carriage while looking at the steeples of Martinville. Then I read Mama's latest letter. She found it strange, shocking, that an unmarried girl should be living alone with me. It may be that on the first day, when we were leaving Balbec, when she saw me looking so unhappy and was worried about leaving me alone, she had been pleased to hear that Albertine was coming with us and to see loaded on to the train, next to our luggage (the luggage I had spent the night weeping over in the hotel in Balbec), Albertine's narrow black boxes, which had seemed to me to have the shape of coffins, so that I did not know whether they would bring life into our house, or death. But I did not even think about Mama's feelings, being entirely caught up in the joy of that radiant morning and the thought that, after all my fear of staying in Balbec, I was taking Albertine home with me. Mama may not have been hostile to the scheme at first (she spoke kindly to my friend, as a mother does whose son has been seriously wounded and who is grateful to the young mistress who is devotedly nursing him), but she became so as it was too thoroughly carried out, and as the young woman's stay in our house—in our house in the absence of my parents—became prolonged. I cannot say, however, that she ever made her hostility plain to me. Just as before, when she felt she could no longer reproach me with my nervous disposition, my laziness, now she was afraid—something I perhaps did not entirely understand at the time or did not wish to understand—that by expressing any reservations about the girl to whom I said I was going to become engaged, she might cast a shadow over my future life, make me less committed to my wife, perhaps lead me to reproach myself, once she was gone, for having hurt her by marrying Albertine. Mama preferred to seem to endorse a choice that she felt she would not be able to make me reconsider. But everyone who saw her at that time told me that her sorrow at having lost her own mother was aggravated by a look of perpetual worry. This mental strain, this constant argument with herself, made Mama's temples over-heat, and she was constantly opening windows to try to cool down. But she could not take a decision for fear of "influencing" me in the wrong direction and spoiling what she thought was my happiness. She could not even make up her mind to stop me having Albertine in the apartment in the meantime. She did not want to appear more strict than Mme Bontemps, whose place it was, if anyone's, to act, and who did not find the arrangement unsuitable, much to my mother's surprise. In any case she was sorry to have been obliged to leave the two of us together by having to set off just then for Combray, where she saw she might have to stay (and did indeed stay) for many months, during which time my great-aunt needed her by her day and night. Everything there was made easy for her by the kindness, the devotion of Legrandin, for whom nothing was too much trouble, who put off from week to week his return to Paris, simply because my aunt, whom he did not know particularly well, had been a friend of his mother's, and because he realized that the dying woman valued his attentions and could not do without him. Snobbery is a serious malady of the soul, but a localized one which does not affect it overall. I, on the other hand, was delighted by Mama's absence in Combray, for it meant that Albertine (whom I could not ask to conceal it) would not be able to mention to her her friendship with Mlle Vinteuil. This relationship would, in my mother's eyes, have utterly precluded not only a marriage, which she had in any case asked me not to discuss in too definite terms with my friend and which furthermore was coming to seem intolerable to me, but even a stay in our house by Albertine as a guest. Failing such a serious reason, of which she was not aware, Mama, under the double effect of her mother's edifying and liberating example on the one hand (Grandmother, that admirer of George Sand, who defined virtue as nobility of heart) and on the other my own corrupting influence, now showed tolerance for women of whose conduct she would once have been severely critical and whom she would have condemned even now if they had been middle-class friends of hers from Paris or Combray, but whose great souls I praised to her and whom she forgave much because they were fond of me. In spite of everything, and even setting aside the question of propriety, I think Albertine would have exhausted Mama's patience, for Mama had learned at Combray, from Aunt LŽonie and from all her female relations, habits of order of which my friend had not the slightest inkling. She would no more have closed a door nor, on the other hand, hesitated to enter a room where the door was open than would a dog or a cat. Her somewhat inconvenient charm consisted in being in the house not in the manner of a young girl but of a domestic animal which comes into a room, goes out, turns up in the place you least expect it, jumps on to the bed-I found this deeply restful-lies down beside one, makes a place for itself and lies there without moving, without annoying one as a person would. However, she finally adapted herself to my sleeping hours and learned, not just not to try to come into my room, but even not to make any noise until I rang. It was Franoise who set these rules for her. Françoise was one of those Combray servants who know their master's importance, and that the least they can do is to make everyone show him the respect they think is his due. When a visitor from outside gave Françoise a tip to be shared with the kitchen-maid, the donor hardly had time to hand over his coin before Françoise, with equal speed, discretion and energy, had primed the girl to appear and thank him, not under her breath but loudly and clearly, as Françoise had told her was the right way to do. The curé of Combray was not a genius, but he too knew how things should be done. Under his instruction, the daughter of some Protestant cousins of Mme Sazerat's had been converted to Catholicism, and the family had shown him all due appreciation. There was a question of her marrying a nobleman from Méséglise. The young man's parents wrote asking for information about her, a rather disdainful letter in which they showed contempt for her Protestant birth. The priest replied in such terms that the nobleman had to swallow his pride and write a very different letter, begging as the most precious favor to be allowed to form an alliance with the young lady.