Jealousy and suspicion

Jealousy and suspicion are not simply reactions to Albertine’s conduct; they are an unstable way of knowing her, through which the narrator turns partial observations into competing stories of concealed desire. Beginning with Cottard’s remark about Albertine and Andrée dancing together at the casino at Incarville, suspicion recurs through missed visits, social appointments, glances, remembered gestures, and the narrator’s own changing desires. Each apparent reassurance can ease his fear, but none supplies the certainty he seeks.

The casino and the delayed force of suspicion

At the little casino, the narrator is about to leave with Cottard when Albertine’s laugh makes him decide to stay. A stranger sits at the piano, and Andrée invites Albertine to waltz. Cottard, looking at the dancers through a doctor’s professional outlook, comments on their closeness and interprets their posture as evidence of arousal. The narrator does not share that opinion as an established fact, but the remark changes the scene for him: after Albertine laughs again in response to Andrée, he imagines her sharing a secret pleasure. What had been a dance becomes an image he cannot later recall innocently.

The narrator says that Cottard’s words did not wound him fully at once. Their effects arrive later, like a poison that takes time to act. This delay makes the episode more than a moment of immediate jealousy: it introduces a suspicion that can lie dormant and then reorganize what he sees. At the time, he leaves the casino absorbed in conversation with Cottard, but the image of Albertine and Andrée remains available to return as a source of pain.

Absence, explanation, and the making of love

That night, Albertine does not come, although the lift-boy has said she would. The narrator reflects that a refusal or unavailability can produce love more readily than a person’s attractions: the meaning of the absence becomes clear only afterward, as though the mind develops an image that had been latent. At first, he finds unexpected calm in accepting that she will not arrive. He then imagines that he will see her another day, and the thought comforts him. His feeling is therefore not a steady response to Albertine but a changing interpretation of distance, expectation, and the pain of waiting.

The next day, Albertine writes that she has only just returned to Epreville and did not receive his note in time. She says she may come that evening. The narrator reads behind her explanation the possibility of people and pleasures she preferred to him. Desire briefly seems ready to bind him to her, but the feeling subsides without becoming secure attachment. He generalizes from this uncertainty that love itself rests on mistaken interpretations: an explanation may be read as a cover, while the resulting pain is taken as proof of love.

A widening field of clues

During the second visit to Balbec, the narrator begins to doubt his earlier belief that Albertine’s departures were merely frivolous choices among garden parties, rides, and picnics. Her stated obligations become uncertain in his eyes. When she says she must call on a woman at home in Infreville, then explains that other girls will be there and that she may bring them back in her trap, the narrator hears successive explanations as signs that he has caught her out. Yet he acknowledges that his view is from his side of an opaque barrier: he cannot determine what reality lies behind Albertine’s account. The gap between observed speech and unknowable circumstance is the condition in which his suspicions grow.

Other women’s conduct becomes part of this field of interpretation. At the casino, the narrator sees a handsome young woman repeatedly direct her gaze toward Albertine and imagines that the looks may signal a meeting, perhaps continuing an earlier attachment. Albertine remains still and gives no visible confirmation. The narrator’s account moves from what he sees to a possible history that the sight cannot prove. He also watches Albertine’s cool, conspicuously ordinary answers about tennis and bathing, and her quick departures on her bicycle. What could be reserve or routine seems to him an effort to prevent suspicion, or a means of arranging a meeting already agreed upon privately.

Albertine sometimes volunteers information that appears to forestall doubt. She tells him that a woman known to her aunt is in Incarville and says she deliberately brushed against her on the beach to be rude. At first the narrator takes this as evidence of open hostility. Later, the remark changes meaning in his memory: he wonders whether the contact was deliberate for a different reason and whether Albertine had mentioned it because she feared he might hear about it. A statement does not retain a stable significance in his mind. The narrator describes how words from the beloved can become altered by reflection, until an apparently harmless detail seems to disclose a hidden motive.

Memory as a source of evidence—and of distortion

The narrator’s suspicions do not depend only on new encounters. A gesture by Andrée, such as resting her head on Albertine’s shoulder and kissing her neck, can renew the fear that he had temporarily managed to dismiss. A glance or a report that the two women went bathing together can have the same effect. Even without seeing Albertine or hearing fresh news, he may recall an earlier scene with Gisèle that once seemed innocent and now disturbs his peace. He describes himself as supplying his own toxin: memory preserves and reactivates the clues, so suspicion no longer needs an external prompt.

His interpretation is also shaped by what he has heard about Odette and Swann. He recalls accounts of Swann’s love and deception, and uses the image of Odette’s character to imagine that Albertine might share a capacity for deceit. The narrator does not establish that they are alike; rather, he recognizes that inherited stories and an existing idea of Odette help him construct a painful account of Albertine. The feared character emerges partly from analogy, and every unobserved interval offers room for that analogy to expand.

Reassurance, reversal, and the limits of certainty

When the narrator eventually confronts Albertine with what he has heard about her relations with women, he explains that Cottard’s observation of her dancing with Andrée first made that possibility vivid to him. Albertine expresses anger and concern at the accusation, asks to know who has spread it, and denies that she and Andrée have such relations. The narrator recognizes that her denial is unsupported by proof, yet it calms him. In his account, jealousy can make a lover distrustful and credulous at once: suspicion attends more readily to the beloved than to anyone else, but an emphatic reassurance can be accepted because it relieves the pain. The exchange does not resolve the underlying uncertainty; it shows how urgently he wants relief from it.

His fear also changes direction. When Albertine behaves warmly toward Saint-Loup at Doncières, giving him her attention while barely responding to the narrator, the narrator experiences a new jealousy. Afterward, the earlier fear that Albertine desires women seems, for a time, less possible. He admits the error in assuming that one desire excludes another. The episodes show how quickly a new rival or fresh slight can displace the previous object of suspicion without disproving it.

In retrospect, the narrator describes his perception of Albertine as having changed after the casino encounter: he speaks harshly about her, then alternates between resentment and temporary goodwill. A visit to Elstir’s studio, where he finds Andrée but not Albertine, briefly makes him think Cottard may have been mistaken; later gestures and reports revive his fears. Jealousy thus operates as a cycle of accusation, reprieve, and renewed accusation. Its decisive significance lies in that cycle: the narrator’s need to know Albertine’s private life continually converts incomplete evidence into an emotionally convincing account, while the possibility of another interpretation remains open.