Sometimes indeed the human voice was added to that music. Albertine would murmur a few words. How I longed to catch their meaning! It would happen that the name of a person of whom we had been speaking and who had aroused my jealousy would come to her lips, but without making me unhappy, for the memory that it brought with it seemed to be only that of the conversations that she had had with me on the subject. One evening, however, when with her eyes still shut she half awoke, she said tenderly, addressing me: ‘Andrée.’ I concealed my emotion. ‘You’re dreaming, I’m not Andrée,’ I said to her, smiling. She smiled also: ‘Of course not, I wanted to ask you what Andrée said to you this evening.’ ‘I assumed that you used to lie beside her like that.’ ‘Oh no, never,’ she said. But, before making this reply, she had hidden her face for a moment in her hands. So her silences were merely screens, her surface affection merely kept beneath the surface a thousand memories which would have rent my heart, her life was full of those incidents the good-natured, bantering account of which forms one’s daily gossip at the expense of other people, people who do not matter, but which, so long as a woman remains buried in the depths of one’s heart, seem to us so precious a revelation of her life that, for the privilege of exploring that underlying world, we would gladly sacrifice our own. Then her sleep would seem to me a marvellous and magic world in which at certain moments there rises from the depths of the barely translucent element the avowal of a secret which we shall not understand. But as a rule, when Albertine was asleep, she seemed to have recaptured her innocence. In the attitude which I had imposed upon her, but which in her sleep she had speedily made her own, she seemed to trust herself to me. Her face had lost any expression of cunning or vulgarity, and between herself and me, towards whom she raised her arm, on whom she rested her hand, there seemed to be an absolute surrender, an indissoluble attachment. Her sleep moreover did not separate her from me and allowed her to retain the consciousness of our affection; its effect was rather to abolish everything else; I would kiss her, tell her that I was going to take a turn outside, and she would half-open her eyes and say to me with a look of surprise—for the hour was indeed late—‘But where are you off to, my darling——’(calling me by my Christian name), and at once fall asleep again. Her sleep was no more than a sort of blotting out of the rest of her life, an even silence over which from time to time familiar words of tenderness would pass in their flight. By putting these words together, one might have arrived at the unalloyed conversation, the secret intimacy of a pure love. This calm slumber delighted me, as a mother, reckoning it a virtue, is delighted by her child’s sound sleep. And her sleep was indeed that of a child. Her awakening also, so natural and so loving, before she even knew where she was, that I sometimes asked myself with dread whether she had been in the habit, before coming to live with me, of not sleeping alone but of finding, when she opened her eyes, someone lying by her side. But her childlike grace was more striking. Like a mother again, I marvelled that she should always awake in such a good humour. After a few moments she would recover consciousness, would utter charming words, unconnected with one another, mere twitterings. By a sort of reversal of roles, her throat, which as a rule one seldom remarked, now almost startlingly beautiful, had acquired the immense importance which her eyes, by being closed in sleep, had lost, her eyes, my regular interlocutors to which I could no longer address myself after the lids had closed over them. Just as the closed lids impart an innocent, grave beauty to the face by suppressing all that the eyes express only too plainly, there was in the words, not devoid of meaning but interrupted by moments of silence, which Albertine uttered as she awoke, a pure beauty of a kind that is not constantly tarnished, as is conversation, by habits of speech, stale repetitions, traces of familiar defects. Moreover, when I had decided to wake Albertine, I would have been able to do so without fear, knowing that her awakening would bear no relation to the evening that we had passed together, but would emerge from her sleep as morning emerges from night. As soon as she had begun to open her eyes with a smile, she would have offered me her lips, and before she had even said a word, I would have savoured their freshness, as soothing as that of a garden still silent before the break of day.