Albertine and Andrée’s relationship

Albertine and Andrée’s relationship becomes a focal point for the narrator’s jealousy because its visible intimacy can be read in more than one way. A dance at the Incarville casino, followed by later observations and denials, gives him a sequence of clues that he repeatedly turns into a theory about Albertine’s desires. The narrative never resolves that theory: the women’s closeness is clear, but its meaning remains disputed, and the narrator’s own suspicion shapes what he believes he sees.

The Incarville dance and the first suspicion

At a small casino in Incarville, the narrator is waiting with Cottard when Andrée comes across the floor. He has been on the point of going with the doctor to the Verdurins’ but decides to stay after hearing Albertine laugh. When a girl at the piano invites Albertine to dance, Andrée and Albertine waltz together. The narrator remarks to Cottard on how well they dance; Cottard instead comments on the close contact between them and suggests that the pair are strongly affected by it. The narrator sees that their bodies remain close as they dance, and that they draw slightly apart while continuing the waltz.

The dance changes the narrator’s perception even though Cottard’s interpretation is only a suggestion, not proof. Albertine laughs again after Andrée speaks to her, and the narrator reads the moment as a private pleasure shared between the two women. He leaves the casino with Cottard, but the scene does not leave him: it becomes the starting point for a distrust that gathers force as he revisits other encounters between Albertine and her friends.

Public denials and private signs

Some days later, in the ballroom at the casino in Balbec, the narrator sees Bloch’s sister and her cousin enter. He avoids greeting them because the cousin is known to be living with an actress. Andrée, referring to the scandal in a whisper, says that she and Albertine both loathe such relationships. Albertine also turns her back on the women and joins the narrator on a sofa. Yet he recalls that, before shifting position, she had watched them with unusual attentiveness; after turning back, her gaze still seemed distant and preoccupied.

The exchange that follows makes the limits of observation especially plain. Asked whether the fair-haired cousin was the girl who had won a prize in the flower procession, Albertine claims not to know which woman is fair and says the pair do not interest her. The narrator finds this ignorance implausible because the women are familiar figures on the seafront. He remarks that they did not seem to be looking at Albertine and Andrée either. Albertine immediately answers that they did nothing else. Since she had her back to them, the narrator challenges how she could know; she points to a large mirror in front of them, where she had been watching the women. The mirror supplies a concrete explanation for her knowledge, but it does not settle what her attention meant.

Jealousy turns signs into a pattern

After the Incarville encounter, the narrator says that Albertine seemed different to him and that seeing her began to make him angry. His attitude changes too: he speaks of her in hurtful terms, even when she might hear of it, and tries at times to prefer Andrée. His suspicion does not depend on one conclusive discovery. Rather, small details repeatedly revive it: Andrée resting her head on Albertine’s shoulder and kissing her neck, a look exchanged between them, or a report that they had gone down together to bathe.

The narrator also recalls Albertine with Gisèle in a pose that had seemed innocent when he first saw it. Now, in retrospect, the memory troubles him. If he has no new encounter to interpret, recollection itself can produce a fresh suspicion; he describes the effect as though he had supplied his own toxin. His account of Albertine’s relationship with Andrée thus grows not from a settled body of evidence but from an unstable cycle: an observation alarms him, distance or reassurance briefly restores his confidence, and another remembered or reported detail brings the doubt back.

The confrontation and Albertine’s account

When the narrator finally tells Albertine what he has heard about her life, he names Andrée as the person whose supposed involvement has hurt him. He says that the report struck him with particular force and that, before Cottard’s comment about the dance, it would not have occurred to him that Albertine might be in love with Andrée or take pleasure in caressing her. Cottard’s remark is therefore not merely one item in an existing case; it is the prompt that makes this possibility thinkable to him.

Albertine responds with anger and concern, wants to know who has spread the story, and says she would like to confront the unknown accuser. She denies the allegation and says that she and Andrée both loathe the kind of relationship the narrator means. Her assurance is categorical but, as the narrator observes, unsupported by proof. Nevertheless, it calms him. He reflects that jealousy can make a person both more suspicious of a beloved and more ready to believe her denial, especially when that denial relieves the pain. His temporary reassurance therefore reveals as much about his need to quiet his fears as it does about Albertine’s account.

An unresolved relationship

The evidence leaves the relationship between Albertine and Andrée open to competing readings. They dance closely, share familiar gestures, and appear attentive to one another; Albertine watches the women in the ballroom through a mirror and knows that they have been looking toward her and Andrée. At the same time, both women explicitly condemn the relationships that the narrator suspects and Albertine denies his accusation. None of these details, by itself, establishes what passes between them beyond friendship and closeness.

That uncertainty is central to the narrator’s experience of the bond. He cannot observe the whole of Albertine’s life, so he treats fragments—Cottard’s comment, a dance, a glance, a kiss on the neck, a remembered pose—as signs that may reveal what she conceals. But each sign remains vulnerable to another explanation, and Albertine’s denial offers relief without certainty. The relationship consequently matters not only as a question about Albertine and Andrée, but as a demonstration of how jealousy turns partial knowledge into an increasingly elaborate interpretation.