Marcel Proust -The Sweet Cheat Gone by Marcel Proust

Author:Marcel Proust [Proust, Marcel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Classics, Fiction
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

longer said to myself with rage:

“Albertine loved her,” but on the contrary,

so as to explain my desire to myself, in a

tone of affection: “Albertine loved her

dearly.” I could now understand the

widowers whom we suppose to have

found consolation and who prove on the

contrary that they are inconsolable

because they marry their deceased wife’s

sister. Thus the decline of my love seemed

to make fresh loves possible for me, and

Albertine like those women long loved for

themselves who, later, feeling their

lover’s desire grow feeble, maintain their

power by confining themselves to the

office of panders, provided me, as the

Pompadour provided Louis XV, with

fresh damsels. Even in the past, my time

had been divided into periods in which I

desired this woman or that. When the

violent pleasures afforded by one had

grown dull, I longed for the other who

would give me an almost pure affection

until the need of more sophisticated

caresses brought back my desire for the

first. Now these alternations had come to

an end, or at least one of the periods was

being indefinitely prolonged. What I

would have liked was that the newcomer

should take up her abode in my house, and

should give me at night, before leaving

me, a friendly, sisterly kiss. In order that I

might have believed—had I not had

experience of the intolerable presence of

another person—that I regretted a kiss

more than a certain pair of lips, a pleasure

more than a love, a habit more than a

person, I would have liked also that the

newcomers should be able to play

Vinteuil’s music to me like Albertine, to

talk to me as she had talked about Elstir.

AH this was impossible. Their love

would not be equivalent to hers, I thought,

whether because a love to which were

annexed all those episodes, visits to

picture galleries, evenings spent at

concerts, the whole of a complicated

existence which allows correspondences,

conversations, a flirtation preliminary to

the more intimate relations, a serious

friendship afterwards, possesses more

resources than love for a woman who can

only offer herself, as an orchestra

possesses more resources than a piano, or

because, more profoundly, my need of the

same sort of affection that Albertine used

to give me, the affection of a girl of a

certain culture who would at the same

time be a sister to me, was—like my need

of women of the same class as Albertine

—merely a recrudescence of my memory

of Albertine, of my memory of my love for

her. And once again, I discovered, first of

all that memory has no power of

invention, that it is powerless to desire

anything else, even anything better than

what we have already possessed,

secondly that it is spiritual in the sense

that reality cannot furnish it with the state

which it seeks, lastly that, when applied to

a person who is dead, the resurrection that

it incarnates is not so much that of the

need to love in which it makes us believe

as that of the need of the absent person. So

that the resemblance to Albertine of the

woman whom I had chosen, the

resemblance of her affection even, if I

succeeded in winning it, to Albertine’s,

made me all the more conscious of the

absence of what I had been unconsciously

seeking, of what was indispensable to the

revival of my happiness, that is to say

Albertine herself, the time during which

we had lived together, the past in quest of

which I had unconsciously gone.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.