“Besides, why should you need to go back to Paris so soon, if the lady has gone?” “Because I shall feel more at my ease in a place where I have known her than at Balbec, which she has never seen and which I have begun to loathe.” Did Albertine realise later on that this other woman had never existed, and that if that night I had really longed for death, it was because she had stupidly revealed to me that she had been on intimate terms with

Mlle.