La suppression de la souffrance? Ai-je pu vraiment le croire? La suppression de la douleur! Elle ne revint jamais. Tous nos efforts n'ont pu la ranimer. Ce sont deux lettres de mademoiselle Albertine. Elle ne contenait que ces mots: Mais qu'est-ce que j'y gagnais? Mais les grandes plaines me seraient-elles moins cruelles? Sans doute ces nuits si courtes durent peu. By repeating her name incessantly I sought in short to introduce, like a breath of air, something of herself into that room in which her departure had left a vacuum, in which I could no longer breathe.
Then, moreover, we seek to reduce the dimensions of our grief by making it enter into our everyday speech between ordering a suit of clothes and ordering dinner. Monsieur, Mademoiselle Albertine has forgotten to take her rings, she has left them in the drawer. Give them to me, I shall think about it. She loathed Albertine, but, regarding me in her own image, supposed that one could not hand me a letter in the handwriting of my mistress without the risk of my opening it.
I took the rings.
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You are talking nonsense. You can count the feathers. She pointed out to me also the similar inscriptions, to which, it is true, others were added upon the ring with the ruby. As soon as I looked at them I could have sworn that they came from the same place. You can tell it as you can tell the dishes of a good cook. I might have taken the wrong box of medicine and, instead of swallowing a few capsules of veronal on a day when I felt that I had drunk too many cups of tea, might have swallowed as many capsules of caffeine; my heart would not have throbbed more violently.
I would have liked to see Albertine immediately. To my horror at her falsehood, to my jealousy of the unknown donor, was added grief that she should have allowed herself to accept such presents. I made her even more presents, it is true, but a woman whom we are keeping does not seem to us to be a kept woman so long as we do not know that she is being kept by other men. And yet since I had continued to spend so much money upon her, I had taken her notwithstanding this moral baseness; this baseness I had maintained in her, I had perhaps increased, perhaps created it.
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Then, just as we have the faculty of inventing fairy tales to soothe our grief, just as we manage, when we are dying of hunger, to persuade ourselves that a stranger is going to leave us a fortune of a hundred millions, I imagined Albertine in my arms, explaining to me in a few words that it was because of the similarity of its workmanship that she had bought the second ring, that it was she who had had her initials engraved on it.
But this explanation was still feeble, it had not yet had time to thrust into my mind its beneficent roots, and my grief could not be so quickly soothed. And I reflected that many men who tell their friends that their mistresses are very kind to them must suffer similar torments. Thus it is that they lie to others and to themselves.
It is to such sufferings that we attach the pleasure of loving, of delighting in the most insignificant remarks of a woman, which we know to be insignificant, but which we perfume with her scent. At this moment I could no longer find any delight in inhaling, by an act of memory, the scent of Albertine. Thunderstruck, holding the two rings in my hand, I stared at that pitiless eagle whose beak was rending my heart, whose wings, chiselled in high relief, had borne away the confidence that I retained in my mistress, in whose claws my tortured mind was unable to escape for an instant from the incessantly recurring questions as to the stranger whose name the eagle doubtless symbolised, without however allowing me to decipher it, whom she had doubtless loved in the past, and whom she had doubtless seen again not so long ago, since it was upon that day so pleasant, so intimate, of our drive together through the Bois that I had seen, for the first time, the second ring, that upon which the eagle appeared to be dipping his beak in the bright blood of the ruby.
For another thing, what I myself called thinking of Albertine, was thinking of how I might bring her back, of how I might join her, might know what she was doing. Bontemps, of Saint-Loup stooping over the sloping desk of a telegraph office at which he was writing out a telegram for myself, never the picture of Albertine. Just as, throughout the whole course of our life, our egoism sees before it all the time the objects that are of interest to ourselves, but never takes in that Ego itself which is incessantly observing them, so the desire which directs our actions descends towards them, but does not reascend to itself, whether because, being unduly utilitarian, it plunges into the action and disdains all knowledge of it, or because we have been looking to the future to compensate for the disappointments of the past, or because the inertia of our mind urges it down the easy slope of imagination, rather than make it reascend the steep slope of introspection.
As a matter of fact, in those hours of crisis in which we would stake our whole life, in proportion as the person upon whom it depends reveals more clearly the immensity of the place that she occupies in our life, leaving nothing in the world which is not overthrown by her, so the image of that person diminishes until it is not longer perceptible. In everything we find the effect of her presence in the emotion that we feel; herself, the cause, we do not find anywhere.
I was during these days so incapable of forming any picture of Albertine that I could almost have believed that I was not in love with her, just as my mother, in the moments of desperation in which she was incapable of ever forming any picture of my grandmother save once in the chance encounter of a dream the importance of which she felt so intensely that she employed all the strength that remained to her in her sleep to make it last , might have accused and did in fact accuse herself of not regretting her mother, whose death had been a mortal blow to her but whose features escaped her memory.
Why should I have supposed that Albertine did not care for women? Because she had said, especially of late, that she did not care for them: Never once had she said to me: And to my silence as to the causes of her claustration, was it not comprehensible that she should correspond with a similar and constant silence as to her perpetual desires, her innumerable memories and hopes? And her belief seemed to be founded upon something more than that truth which generally guided our old housekeeper, that masters do not like to be humiliated in front of their servants, and allow them to know only so much of the truth as does not depart too far from a flattering fiction, calculated to maintain respect for themselves.
Bontemps, this alarm, hitherto quite vague, that Albertine might return, increased in her. You have only to let me know the name of your agent. You would let yourself be taken in by these people whose only thought is of selling things, and what would you do with a motorcar, you who never stir out of the house? I am deeply touched that you have kept a happy memory of our last drive together. You may be sure that for my part I shall never forget that drive in a twofold twilight since night was falling and we were about to part and that it will be effaced from my memory only when the darkness is complete.
I felt that this final phrase was merely a phrase and that Albertine could not possibly retain until her death any such pleasant memory of this drive from which she had certainly derived no pleasure since she had been impatient to leave me. But I was impressed also, when I thought of the bicyclist, the golfer of Balbec, who had read nothing but Esther before she made my acquaintance, to find how richly endowed she was and how right I had been in thinking that she had in my house enriched herself with fresh qualities which made her different and more complete.
And thus, the words that I had said to her at Balbec: Similarly, for that matter, when I said to her that I did not wish to see her for fear of falling in love with her, I had said this because on the contrary I knew that in frequent intercourse my love grew cold and that separation kindled it, but in reality our frequent intercourse had given rise to a need of her that was infinitely stronger than my love in the first weeks at Balbec. She spoke to me only of writing to my agent.
It was necessary to escape from this situation, to cut matters short, and I had the following idea. And at the same time I wrote to Albertine as though I had not yet received her letter: I have acquired, from having you staying so charmingly in the house with me, the bad habit of not being able to live alone. So that all this may not appear too sudden, I have spoken to her only of a short visit, but between ourselves I am pretty certain that this time it will be permanent. You know that your little group of girls at Balbec has always been the social unit that has exerted the greatest influence upon me, in which I have been most happy to be eventually included.
No doubt it is this influence which still makes itself felt. I told myself that probably she was making an improper use, down there, of her freedom, and no doubt this idea which I formed seemed to me sad but remained general, shewing me no special details, and, by the indefinite number of possible mistresses which it allowed me to imagine, prevented me from stopping to consider any one of them, drew my mind on in a sort of perpetual motion not free from pain but tinged with a pain which the absence of any concrete image rendered endurable.
It ceased however to be endurable and became atrocious when Saint-Loup arrived. Before I explain why the information that he gave me made me so unhappy, I ought to relate an incident which I place immediately before his visit and the memory of which so distressed me afterwards that it weakened, if not the painful impression that was made on me by my conversation with Saint-Loup, at any rate the practical effect of this conversation.
This incident was as follows. You need only hide the things that he has to take in. My aunt will be furious with him, and will say to you: Now I had always regarded him as so good, so tender-hearted a person that this speech had the same effect upon me as if he had been acting the part of Satan in a play: Anyhow, I can put a spoke in his wheel, I shall tell my aunt that I admire your patience in working with a great lout like that, and so dirty too.
And I asked myself whether a person who was capable of acting so cruelly towards a poor and defenceless man had not played the part of a traitor towards myself, on his mission to Mme. This reflexion was of most service in helping me not to regard his failure as a proof that I myself might not succeed, after he had left me. But so long as he was with me, it was nevertheless of the Saint-Loup of long ago and especially of the friend who had just come from Mme.
Bontemps that I thought. He began by saying: How I repeated them to myself, renewing the shock as I chose, these words, shed, passage, drawing-room, after Saint-Loup had left me! In a shed one girl can lie down with another. And in that drawing-room who could tell what Albertine used to do when her aunt was not there? Had I then imagined the house in which she was living as incapable of possessing either a shed or a drawing-room?
No, I had not imagined it at all, except as a vague place. I had suffered originally at the geographical identification of the place in which Albertine was. When I had learned that, instead of being in two or three possible places, she was in Touraine, those words uttered by her porter had marked in my heart as upon a map the place in which I must at length suffer.
But once I had grown accustomed to the idea that she was in a house in Touraine, I had not seen the house. With the words shed, passage, drawing-room, I became aware of my folly in having left Albertine for a week in this cursed place, the existence instead of the mere possibility of which had just been revealed to me. She had regained her freedom. My grief turned to anger with Saint-Loup.
They had assured me that she was not in the house. But you are not being fair to me, I did all that I could. In fact, a little later she told me that she was touched to find that we understood one another so well. And yet everything that she said after that was so delicate, so refined, that it seemed to me impossible that she could have been referring to my offer of money when she said: As soon as we met I saw what sort of person she was, I said to myself that you had made a mistake, that you were letting me in for the most awful blunder, and that it would be terribly difficult to offer her the money like that.
I did it, however, to oblige you, feeling certain that she would turn me out of the house. Therefore, either she had not heard you and you should have started afresh, or you could have developed the topic. She told me that you yourself had informed her niece that you wished to leave her. Nevertheless I was in torments. No one else could have done more or even as much. Try sending some one else. Saint-Loup as he left the house had met some girls coming in. I had already and often supposed that Albertine knew other girls in the country; but this was the first time that I felt the torture of that supposition.
We are really led to believe that nature has allowed our mind to secrete a natural antidote which destroys the suppositions that we form, at once without intermission and without danger. But there was nothing to render me immune from these girls whom Saint-Loup had met. All these details, were they not precisely what I had sought to learn from everyone with regard to Albertine, was it not I who, in order to learn them more fully, had begged Saint-Loup, summoned back to Paris by his colonel, to come and see me at all costs, was it not therefore I who had desired them, or rather my famished grief, longing to feed and to wax fat upon them?
Finally Saint-Loup told me that he had had the pleasant surprise of meeting, quite near the house, the only familiar face that had reminded him of the past, a former friend of Rachel, a pretty actress who was taking a holiday in the neighbourhood. And the name of this actress was enough to make me say to myself: And after all why should not this have been true?
Had I found fault with myself for thinking of other women since I had known Albertine? On the evening of my first visit to the Princesse de Guermantes, when I returned home, had I not been thinking far less of her than of the girl of whom Saint-Loup had told me who frequented disorderly houses and of Mme.
Was it not in the hope of meeting the latter of these that I had returned to Balbec, and, more recently, had been planning to go to Venice? Why should not Albertine have been planning to go to Touraine? Only, when it came to the point, as I now realised, I would not have left her, I would not have gone to Venice. Even in my own heart of hearts, when I said to myself: Only, whatever I might feel in my heart, I had thought it more adroit to let her live under the perpetual menace of a separation.
And no doubt, thanks to my detestable adroitness, I had convinced her only too well. In any case, now, things could not go on like this. I could not leave her in Touraine with those girls, with that actress, I could not endure the thought of that life which was escaping my control. I would await her reply to my letter: But as soon as I should have received her answer, if she was not coming back, I would go to fetch her; willy-nilly, I would tear her away from her women friends.
Besides, was it not better for me to go down in person, now that I had discovered the duplicity, hitherto unsuspected by me, of Saint-Loup; he might, for all I knew, have organised a plot to separate me from Albertine. And at the same time, how I should have been lying now had I written to her, as I used to say to her in Paris, that I hoped that no accident might befall her.
The suppression of suffering? The suppression of grief! As I glanced at the paragraphs in the newspapers, I regretted that I had not had the courage to form the same wish as Swann. If Albertine could have been the victim of an accident, were she alive I should have had a pretext for hastening to her bedside, were she dead I should have recovered, as Swann said, my freedom to live as I chose. Did I believe this? He had believed it, that subtlest of men who thought that he knew himself well.
How little do we know what we have in our heart. How clearly, a little later, had he been still alive, I could have proved to him that his wish was not only criminal but absurd, that the death of her whom he loved would have set him free from nothing. I forsook all pride with regard to Albertine, I sent her a despairing telegram begging her to return upon any conditions, telling her that she might do anything she liked, that I asked only to be allowed to take her in my arms for a minute three times a week, before she went to bed. And had she confined me to once a week, I would have accepted the restriction.
She did not, ever, return. My telegram had just gone to her when I myself received one.
It was from Mme. The world is not created once and for all time for each of us individually.
There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion. She was thrown by her horse against a tree while she was out riding. All our efforts to restore her to life were unavailing. If only I were dead in her place! And yet, had I not told myself, many times, that, quite possibly, she would not come back? I had indeed told myself so, but now I saw that never for a moment had I believed it. As I needed her presence, her kisses, to enable me to endure the pain that my suspicions wrought in me, I had formed, since our Balbec days, the habit of being always with her.
Even when she had gone out, when I was left alone, I was kissing her still. I had continued to do so since her departure for Touraine. I had less need of her fidelity than of her return. And if my reason might with impunity cast a doubt upon her now and again, my imagination never ceased for an instant to bring her before me. My life to come? I had not then thought at times of living it without Albertine?
All this time had I, then, been vowing to her service every minute of my life until my death? This future indissolubly blended with hers I had never had the vision to perceive, but now that it had just been shattered, I could feel the place that it occupied in my gaping heart. Here are two letters from Mademoiselle Albertine.
Welcome to the Schaeffler Group.
I was not even glad, nor was I incredulous. I was like a person who sees the same place in his room occupied by a sofa and by a grotto: I am sure that she will be delighted to accept, and I think that it will be a very good thing for her. With her talents, she will know how to make the most of the companionship of a man like yourself, and of the admirable influence which you manage to secure over other people. I feel that you have had an idea from which as much good may spring for her as for yourself. As a matter of fact, she must have written her two letters at an interval of a few minutes, possibly without any interval, and must have antedated the first.
For, all the time, I had been forming an absurd idea of her intentions, which had been only this: It contained only these words: I shall abide by your decision, but I beg you not to be long in letting me know it, you can imagine how impatiently I shall be waiting. If it is telling me to return, I shall take the train at once. With my whole heart, yours, Albertine. For the death of Albertine to be able to suppress my suffering, the shock of the fall would have had to kill her not only in Touraine but in myself. There, never had she been more alive. In order to enter into us, another person must first have assumed the form, have entered into the surroundings of the moment; appearing to us only in a succession of momentary flashes, he has never been able to furnish us with more than one aspect of himself at a time, to present us with more than a single photograph of himself.
A great weakness, no doubt, for a person to consist merely in a collection of moments; a great strength also: And moreover, this disintegration does not only make the dead man live, it multiplies him. To find consolation, it was not one, it was innumerable Albertines that I must first forget. When I had reached the stage of enduring the grief of losing this Albertine, I must begin afresh with another, with a hundred others. So, then, my life was entirely altered.
What had made it — and not owing to Albertine, concurrently with her, when I was alone — attractive, was precisely the perpetual resurgence, at the bidding of identical moments, of moments from the past. Summer was at hand, the days were long, the weather warm.
It was the season when, early in the morning, pupils and teachers resort to the public gardens to prepare for the final examinations under the trees, seeking to extract the sole drop of coolness that is let fall by a sky less ardent than in the midday heat but already as sterilely pure. From my darkened room, with a power of evocation equal to that of former days but capable now of evoking only pain, I felt that outside, in the heaviness of the atmosphere, the setting sun was plastering the vertical fronts of houses and churches with a tawny distemper.
Then I thought for the first time of the farm called Les Ecorres, and said to myself that on certain days when Albertine had told me, at Balbec, that she would not be free, that she was obliged to go somewhere with her aunt, she had perhaps been with one or another of her girl friends at some farm to which she knew that I was not in the habit of going, and, while I waited desperately for her at Marie-Antoinette, where they told me: But it continued to filter through, just as corrosive, into my memory.
At last, thank God, that oppressive heat would be lifted of which in the past I used to complain to Albertine, and which we so enjoyed. The day was drawing to its close. But what did that profit me? The cool evening air came in; it was the sun setting in my memory, at the end of a road which we had taken, she and I, on our way home, that I saw now, more remote than the farthest village, like some distant town not to be reached that evening, which we would spend at Balbec, still together.
Together then; now I must stop short on the brink of that same abyss; she was dead. It was not enough now to draw the curtains, I tried to stop the eyes and ears of my memory so as not to see that band of orange in the western sky, so as not to hear those invisible birds responding from one tree to the next on either side of me who was then so tenderly embraced by her that now was dead. I tried to avoid those sensations that are given us by the dampness of leaves in the evening air, the steep rise and fall of mule-tracks. But already those sensations had gripped me afresh, carried far enough back from the present moment so that it should have gathered all the recoil, all the resilience necessary to strike me afresh, this idea that Albertine was dead.
But would the broad plains be less cruel to me? How many times had I crossed, going in search of Albertine, how many times had I entered, on my return with her, the great plain of Cricqueville, now in foggy weather when the flooding mist gave us the illusion of being surrounded by a vast lake, now on limpid evenings when the moonlight, de-materialising the earth, making it appear, a yard away, celestial, as it is, in the daytime, on far horizons only, enshrined the fields, the woods, with the firmament to which it had assimilated them, in the moss-agate of a universal blue.
But the unwritten laws of her immemorial code and the tradition of the mediaeval peasant woman who weeps as in the romances of chivalry were older than her hatred of Albertine and even of Eulalie. And so, on one of these late afternoons, as I was not quick enough in concealing my distress, she caught sight of my tears, served by the instinct of a little old peasant woman which at one time had led her to catch and torture animals, to feel only amusement in wringing the necks of chickens and in boiling lobsters alive, and, when I was ill, in observing, as it might be the wounds that she had inflicted upon an owl, my suffering expression which she afterwards proclaimed in a sepulchral tone and as a presage of coming disaster.
Unfortunately I adopted a chilly air that cut short the effusions in which she was hoping to indulge and which might quite well, for that matter, have been sincere. And she went on: How slow the day is in dying on these interminable summer evenings. A pallid ghost of the house opposite continued indefinitely to sketch upon the sky its persistent whiteness. In the end, however, the darkness became complete, but then a glimpse of a star behind one of the trees in the courtyard was enough to remind me of how we used to set out in a carriage, after dinner, for the woods of Chantepie, carpeted with moonlight.
And even in the streets it would so happen that I could isolate upon the back of a seat, could gather there the natural purity of a moonbeam in the midst of the artificial lights of Paris, of that Paris over which it enthroned, by making the town return for a moment, in my imagination, to a state of nature, with the infinite silence of the suggested fields, the heartrending memory of the walks that I had taken in them with Albertine.
But at the first cool breath of dawn I shuddered, for it had revived in me the delight of that summer when, from Balbec to Incarville, from Incarville to Balbec, we had so many times escorted each other home until the break of day. I had now only one hope left for the future — a hope far more heartrending than any dread — which was that I might forget Albertine.
I knew that I should one day forget her; I had quite forgotten Gilberte, Mme. And it is our most fitting and most cruel punishment, for that so complete oblivion, as tranquil as the oblivion of the graveyard, by which we have detached ourself from those whom we no longer love, that we can see this same oblivion to be inevitable in the case of those whom we love still. To tell the truth, we know it to be a state not painful, a state of indifference. But not being able to think at the same time of what I was and of what I should one day be, I thought with despair of all that covering mantle of caresses, of kisses, of friendly slumber, of which I must presently let myself be divested for all time.
The rush of these tender memories sweeping on to break against the knowledge that Albertine was dead oppressed me by the incessant conflict of their baffled waves so that I could not keep still; I rose, but all of a sudden I stopped in consternation; the same faint daybreak that I used to see at the moment when I had just left Albertine, still radiant and warm with her kisses, had come into the room and bared, above the curtains, its blade now a sinister portent, whose whiteness, cold, implacable and compact, entered the room like a dagger thrust into my heart.
Presently the sounds from the streets would begin, enabling me to tell from the qualitative scale of their resonance the degree of the steadily increasing heat in which they were sounding. Besides, the memory of all my desires was as much impregnated with her, and with suffering, as the memory of my pleasures. That Venice where I had thought that her company would be a nuisance doubtless because I had felt in a confused way that it would be necessary to me , now that Albertine was no more, I preferred not to go there.
Albertine had seemed to me to be an obstacle interposed between me and everything else, because she was for me what contained everything, and it was from her as from an urn that I might receive things. Now that this urn was shattered, I no longer felt that I had the courage to grasp things; there was nothing now from which I did not turn away, spiritless, preferring not to taste it.
So that my separation from her did not in the least throw open to me the field of possible pleasures which I had imagined to be closed to me by her presence. Besides, the obstacle which her Presence had perhaps indeed been in the way of my traveling, of my enjoying life, had only as always happens been a mask for other obstacles which reappeared intact now that this first obstacle had been removed.
It had been in the same way that, in the past, when some friend had called to see me and had prevented me from working, if on the following day I was left undisturbed, I did not work any better.
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Let an illness, a duel, a runaway horse make us see death face to face, how richly we should have enjoyed the life of pleasure, the travels in unknown lands which are about to be snatched from us. And no sooner is the danger past than what we find once again before us is the same dull life in which none of those delights had any existence for us.
No doubt these nights that are so short continue for but a brief season. Winter would at length return, when I should no longer have to dread the memory of drives with her, protracted until the too early dawn. But would not the first frosts bring back to me, preserved in their cold storage, the germ of my first desires, when at midnight I used to send for her, when the time seemed so long until I heard her ring the bell: Would they not bring back to me the germ of my first uneasiness, when, upon two occasions, I thought that she was not coming?
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At that time I saw her but rarely, but even those intervals that there were between her visits which made her emerge, after many weeks, from the heart of an unknown life which I made no effort to possess, ensured my peace of mind by preventing the first inklings, constantly interrupted, of my jealousy from coagulating, from forming a solid mass in my heart.
So far as they had contrived to be soothing, at that earlier time, so far, in retrospect, were they stamped with the mark of suffering, since all the unaccountable things that she might, while those intervals lasted, have been doing had ceased to be immaterial to me, and especially now that no visit from her would ever fall to my lot again; so that those January evenings on which she used to come, and which, for that reason, had been so dear to me, would blow into me now with their biting winds an uneasiness which then I did not know, and would bring back to me but now grown pernicious the first germ of my love.
Bound up as it was with each of the seasons, in order for me to discard the memory of Albertine I should have had first to forget them all, prepared to begin again to learn to know them, as an old man after a stroke of paralysis learns again to read; I should have had first to forego the entire universe.
Nothing, I told myself, but an actual extinction of myself would be capable but that was impossible of consoling me for hers. I did not realise that the death of oneself is neither impossible nor extraordinary; it is effected without our knowledge, it may be against our will, every day of our life, and I should have to suffer from the recurrence of all sorts of days which not only nature but adventitious circumstances, a purely conventional order introduce into a season. Moreover, to the memory even of hours that were purely natural would inevitably be added the moral background that makes each of them a thing apart.
If it had exhilarated me, that was because it had made me feel that she whom I loved was really mine, lived only for me, and even at a distance, without my needing to occupy my mind with her, regarded me as her lord and master, returning home upon a sign from myself. And this happiness that she should return, that she should obey me and be mine, the cause of it lay in love and not in pride. But that day, conscious of Albertine who, while I sat alone in my room playing music, was coming dutifully to join me, I had breathed in, where it lay scattered like motes in a sunbeam, one of those substances which, just as others are salutary to the body, do good to the soul.
Mais ils ont des chemins secrets pour rentrer en nous. Mais depuis, j'avais voulu lui demander si elle pouvait se rappeler cette conversation et me dire pourquoi elle avait rougi. Elle vivante, je n'eusse sans doute pu rien apprendre. Une impression de l'amour est hors de proportion avec les autres impressions de la vie, mais ce n'est pas perdue au milieu d'elles qu'on peut s'en rendre compte.
Il est certain que j'avais connu des personnes d'intelligence plus grande. D'ailleurs notre tort n'est pas de priser l'intelligence, la gentillesse d'une femme que nous aimons, si petites que soient celles-ci. Jamais je ne retrouverais cette chose divine: Pourquoi ne m'avait-elle pas dit: And lastly if these changes of season, if these different days furnished me each with a fresh Albertine, it was not only by recalling to me similar moments. Retrouvez une partie de cet article sur notre site en anglais.
La brioche des rois conception: Vous retrouverez un article encore plus complet avec davantage de photos sur notre site [en anglais]. Ne pas se fier aux apparences: En revanche, la Saint-Nicolas dans la ville voisine de Metz est maintenue. Le lundi matin, le monument a rouvert ses portes aux visiteurs. Les gens prenaient des photos et des selfies en famille ou entre amis. Les ossements des Catacombes de Paris. Retrouvez plus de photos et cet article en anglais sur notre site web! De nombreux fans ont attendu cette nouvelle B. Elle lui donnera six enfants. La place offre une vue remarquable avec deux perspective: Photos de la crue de Paris The project will thus examine the role of the "Blue" police in mobilizing "bystanders" into direct action against the Jews.
The police, through its dense network of paid and unpaid informers and due to the many informal links with the local communities, and the local administration, was able to create a system of repression which, for the Jews in hiding, proved to be more deadly than its centralized, German counterpart. This research proposes to examine two closely linked phenomena. The first was the development of an illegal, criminal, network of labour brokers who were either Chinese or Vietnamese, and who, for a fee, would find labourers for the recruiters and for the plantation and mine owners.
The second, related, phenomenon pertains to the "criminalization" of workers on the plantations and in mines. Desperate for manpower much of the time, owners of these business ventures would at times "hold" workers against their will, even shooting some as they tried to escape. Activism Along the Global Fringe: By following activist lawyers and their defendants in the League of Nations mandate territories and the United Nations trust territories of Africa from the s to the s, this project will interconnect and make original contributions to the dynamic fields of international history, human rights history, legal history, and the history of Africa and the African diaspora.
It will examine the League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations, as networking hubs for Africans' politically and legally constructed rights claims that crossed imperial, racial and linguistic boundaries. Collaboration in Haitian Teacher Development: Cultivating Inclusive Action Research Practices.
Educational outcomes in Haiti are among the worst in the world, and a significant barrier to better outcomes is a lack of qualified teachers. Many local teachers and administrators are aware of the need for more progressive and student-centred teaching approaches, but do not have access to alternate models or professional training. In addition, educational materials are scarce and rarely portray or value local culture.
This project addresses these issues by creating a program of professional development PD for several hundred practicing teachers in Haiti which focuses on the co-creation of multilingual curricular content suitable for the teaching of English, French, and Creole, as well as social studies and science. To accomplish this, are developing a professional learning community PLC between 1 researchers at two Canadian postsecondary institutions who have been working with teachers in Haiti since ; 2 two Haitian schools who have established themselves as centres for professional development of teachers in their respective regions; and 3 a French non-profit organization which has been working for over 20 years on the ground with Haitian teachers.
In this inclusive project, local teachers are being trained as action researchers, working with the rest of the team to address the following questions: Products of this proposed research include printed and electronic curricular materials that are relevant to the Haitian context, as well as guidelines for effective professional development to be widely distributed to teachers, teacher preparation institutes, and Ministry of Education personnel.
Focus group and student assessment data will provide insight into teaching and community-building practices, as well as effectiveness of the new materials. This project of PLC development is a more sustainable and democratic PD model than occasional visits by external facilitators: Significant investments are made every year throughout Canada to encourage bilingual literacy i.
These investments reflect a recognition of the value of supporting multilingual literacy development in schools Cummins, as well as the cognitive, economic, and social advantages of French-English bilingualism in Canada Lazaruk, However, opportunities to develop advanced levels of biliteracy remain limited in Canada Commissariat aux langues officielles, Moreover, little research exists exploring how students can build on their public school investments to become bilingual when they transfer to university settings and develop the advanced literacy skills in particular writing seen as key to fully taking advantage of these investments in academic and professional settings.
This study will address this research gap by providing an empirically grounded account of university students' strategies for crosslingual or biliterate work e. This work aligns itself with recent calls to expand the scope of L2 writing studies to include a focus on second language writers' strategies for engaging in biliteracy events i. At present while it is recognized that second language writers in university settings frequently write in one language while simultaneously working with another for example writing a French report while drawing on ideas stemming from English sources , little is known about the strategies used by students to accomplish this work Dion, The proposed study will investigate the biliteracy development of university students as it occurs in naturalistic settings.
This project will draw on a longitudinal mixed-methods case study methodology triangulating multiple data sources collected over four years to capture the evolution of university students' texts, knowledge, and strategies as they learn to write in both of Canada's official languages. University undergraduate students committed to learning to write in French and English in the context of a large Canadian bilingual university will be recruited for the study. Questionnaires, language proficiency scores, interview data, and textual and process data will be collected to document language learners' engagement with texts while also adding to our understanding of the unique processes and strategies associated with the challenge of learning to write in more than one language.
This innovative methodology draws on quantitative and qualitative procedures and will make use of the latest advances and tools in corpus linguistics as well as online keyboard logging and screen capture technologies to produce rich empirical records of students' biliteracy development embedded within authentic literacy practices and activities. This project will contribute to scant and yet much-needed longitudinal educational research that sheds light on the varied contexts and events that promote or impede biliteracy development.
It will also result in a unique bilingual, longitudinal learner corpus of English and French academic writing that can guide policy development and the creation of materials to help learners achieve advanced levels of literacy in both French and English in Canada. Within this rich local context, and in a broader global environment where bilingualism and multilingualism are increasingly recognized as common rather than exceptional phenomena, this project will investigate language background profiling practices at publicly-funded elementary schools across Canada.
Such profiling is typically done through school registration forms upon entry into the educational system and involves millions of children nationwide. As such, a significant gap exists in both scholarly and societal knowledge in this domain. However, the findings also indicate a high degree of variability in number, type and combination patterns of the language background questions both within and across provincial boundaries; this raises some questions about the accuracy and reliability of profiling.
Such an analysis will be able to further identify monolingual norms and practices and recast them into the more fluid and flexible frameworks of bilingualism and multilingualism. I will advance a novel theoretical approach and examine the nation-wide data along a continuum of what he calls chronological-nativist and synchronic-functional orientations to language background profiling. In addition, I will offer recommendations for improved accuracy and reliability of profiling and create a freely available online corpus with the project data.
These outcomes will benefit other researchers, educational policy makers, and community stakeholders. Overall, this project will create new knowledge that will encourage a further shift away from monolingual norms and towards bilingual and multilingual paradigms, both in the scholarly community and in society in general. Such endeavours are at the forefront of newly emerging global trends in research and will have significant impacts in various fields, such as applied linguistics, education, political science, psychology, sociology and beyond.
In addition, this research will offer much needed tangible implications for policy makers and Canadian families. This aim of this project is the first-time publication in four volumes; in the original Russian of the entire extant correspondence between writer Leo Tolstoy and his wife, Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya, in chronological order, with annotations in English, including, not notably, hitherto unpublished letters from Tolstaya to Tolstoy, as well as her postscripts all un published to other people's letter addressed to him.
A comprehensive critical study in English of their personal and especially professional relationship, based on their correspondence, is planned as a fifth volume. The proposed project is highly interdisciplinary in nature, reaching far beyond strictly Tolstoy research - into history, sociology, culturology and gender studies. It will serve not only seasoned acdemics but also the next generation of yound scholars, in addition to members of the general public.
The project as envisioned, chronicling and examining imporant personal and professional exchanges between two significant Russian figure of the turn of the 20th century, will prove a landmark and referential publication for many years to come. How do civilizations respond to catastrophe?
They can heal, memorialize and commemorate. They also can salvage and rebuild, or build anew. Specifically, it examines how Canadian Jews have engaged with the Yiddish cultural heritage of Eastern Europe following the devastation of the Nazi Holocaust. The findings will offer new sites for exploring the role of culture as a collective response to experiences of loss. The heartland of a multifaceted diasporic Yiddish civilization, with its thousand year-old roots in Europe, was decimated in the Nazi Holocaust.
In contrast to a pre-War transnational network of Jewish cultural centres in which Yiddish served as lingua franca as well as vehicle of revitalization in forums ranging from the political arena to the arts, Yiddish after the Holocaust faced worldwide displacement. However, due to the particular dynamics of Jewish integration within a multicultural Canada, Yiddish has continued to offer a viable usable past as well as a strong basis for cultural innovation in the shift from immigrant to ethnic or heritage language, even as it faced decline as a spoken language within the Jewish mainstream.
Rather than jettison Yiddish as it faced attrition or relegate it to the realm of memorialization, purveyors of secular Yiddish culture across Canada voiced a deliberate commitment to the language and generated multiple ways to promote the language and its creative output within a community that increasingly did not speak it, notably through translation and performance. Further, Ultra Orthodox Haredi Jewish enclaves have revitalized Yiddish as a daily spoken language in their communities.
While a core component of the Canadian Jewish experience, Yiddish culture after the Holocaust has not been analyzed in any comprehensive fashion. This historical study offers a broad and nuanced analysis of Yiddish culture in Canada after the Holocaust in four areas: It considers different manifestations of Yiddish usage over a period of six decades across Canada, notably in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver, which have been the sites of innovative and varied developments in Yiddish cultural life. Artifacts of study will include the creative output of Canadian Yiddish writers, both native speakers and Canadian-born or raised; translation projects; the archives of communal organizations such as schools and community theatres; and oral histories with producers and consumers of Yiddish culture from multiple generations of the Jewish community, ranging from the secular through the Ultra Orthodox ends of the spectrum.
This data will be employed to discuss how Yiddish has been transmitted intergenerationally as well as cross-culturally, the ways which Yiddish culture offers a site of continuity as well as discontinuity, and the roles that Holocaust discourse has played in this transmission. The present study will explore two little known aspects of two disturbing chapters in 20th century European history: In both these episodes of mass wartime rape, the women who survived had to cope not only with mental and physical illness but also with unwanted pregnancies.
Our analysis seeks to highlight how, on the one hand, these mass rapes affected the mothering practices of the women who were impregnated; and, on the other hand, how the trauma was passed down to the next generation s influencing the social position, well-being and identity of the children in the German case, also possibly the grandchildren born following the rapes.
Collaborative appraisal practices and automated Records Classification: For the recordkeeping discipline, the process of determining whether a piece of information has value for an institution pertains to the appraisal function. Increased collaboration between the records managers and the records users is becoming critical to deal with the important volume, variety and speed of digital information created and received daily by organizations.
The research aims to examine the collaborative appraisal practices of recordkeeping experts and non-experts in order to assist the appraisal process with automatic classification. Through the study of email management in the Canadian Government, the research will investigate: Countries around the world, including Canada, consider academic program review to be a critical component of quality assurance QA in higher education.
Recently, however, leading public policy and higher education scholars and practitioners have questioned whether methods used to evaluate post-secondary education in Canada are as effective as they could be. One area where there is significant room for improvement is in regard to the contribution of academic librarians to program reviews. University libraries exist to improve the quality of studying and research, so academic librarians should play a key role in assuring the quality of academic programs and, by extension, in the program review process.
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Nevertheless, many librarians report that their participation in program reviews is often minimal, and they suggest that faculty practices and attitudes are major barriers to their involvement. Previous investigations into the contribution of academic librarians to the program review process have used indirect measures e. To gain a deeper understanding of the overall issue, this project seeks to cross-verify and complement these studies by conducting an empirical corpus-based investigation of a large number of program review materials prepared by faculty members.
Concretely, a more complete picture that is based on both direct and indirect measures, and which considers both librarian and faculty perspectives, would serve as a solid base from which to identify best practices and missed opportunities for librarian participation in the program review process. This is turn will lead to recommendations for ways to meaningfully involve academic librarians in program reviews with a view to enhancing academic program quality for the benefit of the entire university community and for society at large.
Anticipated benefits of this research project include more meaningful integration of university librarians in program reviews in all disciplines, which will in turn lead to a stronger overall relationships between librarians and faculty members, b raised awareness among faculty and students of the ways in which librarians can better support teaching and research, and c added assurance for universities and governments that there is a regular and systematic assessment of the university library's contribution to programs thus demonstrating that librarians are responsible stewards of library resources.
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Additionally, by improving the review process so that it encourages the integration of more accurate and comprehensive descriptions of library services and resources in program review materials, the resulting reviews will themselves be of a higher quality, which will in turn lead to improvements in all areas of the academic program where the library provides support, as well as reveal gaps or opportunities for the library to enhance services or resources.
Enhanced programs in every field of study will better serve the needs of Canada's students. Meanwhile, graduates of these programs will be better equipped to thrive in an evolving society and labour market, and to make a strong contribution as global citizens. The overarching objective of the proposed research is to understand how best to bring about the transition of published scholarly works to a knowledge commons.
One aspect of this research is a focus on the resources needed by small scholar-led journals to thrive in an open access future. This is unique and important; most of the attention, and revenue, goes to a small number of commercial publishers. The portion of the research devoted to modeling and analysis will assist direct and indirect funders of scholarly publishing university libraries and research funders to develop best practices for support. How we phrase what we say often conveys information about our perspectives and points of view on the content of our speech.
Human languages provide speakers with a broad range of grammatical strategies to express their perspective. Jane'll be in her room now. The possibility of coloring what we say with our own perspectives and points of view is a fundamental part of the toolkit that human language makes available to us as speakers and a characterizing feature of human communication.
This project investigates how the grammars of the languages we speak shape the perspectives we express by studying the construction of perspectival meanings across different languages. We characterize perspectival meanings broadly as those that add information centered on the speaker's knowledge, evidence or expectations. Our objectives include a better understanding of cross-linguistic diversity in terms of the grammatical categories that encode speaker-perspective, and a better understanding of how the different grammatical categories themselves shape and systematize the expression of speaker-perspective.
For half a century, most research about sound change has been conducted as part of the variationist framework and has focused on indexical social factors. While this line of research has been extremely successful, the past decade has seen renewed interest in understanding why and how sounds change from narrower phonetic and phonological perspectives, thanks to new techniques allowing more fine-grained phonetic studies and computational modelling of phonological systems.
This project will address the question of the initiation of sound change by investigating transphonologization, a type of process that happens when a secondary phonetic property of a phonological contrast becomes its primary property. For example, in French, vocal fold vibrations during the initial consonant i. These vibrations are called onset voicing.
Onset voicing is accompanied by redundant pitch variation on the vowel: In many languages, like Vietnamese and Chinese but even Afrikaans, a dialect of Dutch , onset voicing was abandoned altogether as the pitch difference on vowels was exaggerated and became the primary contrastive property: In short, onset voicing was transphonologized into a tone contrast on the vowel. Besides pitch, a number of other phonetic properties also tend to co-occur with onset voicing. However, no systematic acoustic study of these ancillary properties of voicing has yet been conducted in real languages.
This gap needs to be filled as many languages, especially in Southeast Asia, seem to have phonologized one or more of these properties into bundles of correlated acoustic properties known as registers. In register systems, the vowels that used to follow voiced onsets take on a higher quality, a low pitch and a breathy voice, whereas the vowels that followed voiceless onsets take on a lower quality, a high pitch and a modal voice.
While we know how register systems form, our understanding of why they develop is still very limited. Another question that has not properly been addressed is why register systems seem unstable and can evolve in a variety of phonetic directions, like simple tone systems or complex vowel inventories. Better descriptions of the ancillary phonetic properties of voicing will allow us to understand how and why it is transphonologized into different types of register.
The diverse register systems of Southeast Asia are thus an ideal testing ground to explore the factors that favor and constrain phonologization. In this project, production and perception studies of four languages that preserve an onset voicing contrast French, English, Chrau, Jarai will be conducted to better understand its phonetic properties. The production and perception of register in eight Southeast Asian languages that have transphonologized onset voicing in different ways will then be explored.
These results will be used to build computational models of the phonologization of voicing designed to address questions such as: Why do some languages transphonologize voicing while others preserve the original voicing contrast? Why do different languages transphonologize different ancillary properties of voicing? Why are some paths of change more common, while others are more rarely attested? The models will allow us to test hypotheses about the effect on sound change of bias factors such as phonetic salience, the structure of phonological systems and contact.
Learning to sound like a native speaker: The acquisition of sociolinguistic competence in English by Canadian Francophones. What does it take for a second language L2 learner to sound like a native speaker of a language? Traditional answers to this question range from the mastery of the core grammatical features of the language being learned to the ability to approximate native-like pronunciation. A third requirement, constituting a relatively new line of inquiry, involves the capacity to acquire sociolinguistic variation characteristic of the target language.
This variation, essentially involving different ways of 'saying the same thing,' is typically embedded in structured systems governed by implicit social and linguistic constraints. Because this variation is an integral component of native speaker sociolinguistic competence, it follows that for L2 speakers to 'sound native,' sociolinguistic variation must be acquired in the process of becoming proficient in the target language.
In Canada, much previous research addressing this issue has privileged the acquisition of French by Anglophones. Conversely, little systematic attention has been paid to the acquisition of English by Francophones, particularly in naturalistic contexts, where L2 speakers are exposed to the sociolinguistic norms of everyday colloquial English. How permeable are L2 speakers to these typically untaught norms? How proficient in English must L2 speakers be to acquire them? To what extent are these norms in completely acquired?
We address these questions by focusing on the L2 English used by Canadian Francophones in the Ottawa-Gatineau metropolitan area, the locus of extensive bilingualism and language contact. A major innovative component of the investigation is our use of extensive databases of spontaneous L2 speech, native colloquial English, and local vernacular French to analyze L2 acquisition from multiple perspectives.
We sub-divide our L2 population into two groups: Using a systematic comparative approach, we assess the role that differential L2 proficiency plays in the acquisition of a range of sociolinguistic variables, including ones involved in ongoing linguistic change in the target-language community. Our research design enables us to bring new findings to bear on L2 speakers' capacity to approximate local native-speaker norms, and to assess whether, and to what extent, L2 speakers participate in advancing linguistic change in the target-language community.
By factoring a corpus of local vernacular French into the analysis, we additionally examine how L2 speakers' native language, French, may affect their L2 usage via cross-linguistic transfer. We also explore the social dynamics of acquiring sociolinguistic proficiency in the target language by incorporating a range of extra-linguistic variables into our investigation e. These allow us to probe an array of social and attitudinal factors e. Our research has important real-world implications beyond the confines of sociolinguistics.
It is of potential interest to pedagogues and second language educators, as well as being directly pertinent to federal policy initiatives aimed at promoting Canada's emblematic linguistic duality. Ellipsis—the omission of words from sentences—is a ubiquitous phenomenon in human language. How is this possible, and how do such fragmentary expressions fit into our theories of syntax sentence structure and prosody sentence intonation?
Specific intonational and syntactic properties of French, for instance, pose significant challenges for current theories of sluicing, which are based almost exclusively on the study of Germanic languages. These challenges, which have not been addressed so far, generate research questions that are readily amenable to systematic empirical investigation. The proposed project will therefore probe, against the backdrop of current theories of sluicing and through a series of experiments in a controlled laboratory setting, how grammatical properties of questions in Canadian French affect the formation of sluicing constructions.
Natives peaker participants will perform a sentence completion task yielding oral responses that will be subjected to a computer based analysis and rate the perceived naturalness of sluicing sentences exemplifying different syntactic conditions in two related judgment studies. This research aims to advance theoretical understanding of ellipsis in natural language by investigating the phenomenon through the lens of French sluicing.
There exists a vast literature on sluicing in a wide variety of typologically diverse languages, however as of yet, French—in both its European and Canadian varieties—is notably absent from this otherwise impressive research record. The project will address this gap in our knowledge by systematically investigating key empirical properties of French sluicing and assessing their theoretical implications. By addressing these challenges and contributing to our knowledge of sluicing in French, the project will advance understanding of the grammatical mechanisms that govern ellipsis in language more generally.