In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5: The Captive, the Fugitive

by Marcel Proust

  Further on, another little girl was kneeling beside her bicycle, which she was putting to rights. The repair finished, the young racer mounted her machine, but without straddling it as a man would have done. For a moment the bicycle swerved, and the young body seemed to have added to itself a sail, a huge wing; and presently we saw the young creature speed away, half-human, half-winged, angel or peri, pursuing her course.

  This was what the presence of Albertine, this was what my life with Albertine, deprived me of. Deprived me, did I say? I say?Should I not have thought rather: what it presented to me? If Albertine had not been living with me, if she had been free, I should have imagined, and with reason, every one of these women as a possible or indeed a probable object of her desire, of her pleasure. They would have appeared to me like dancers in a diabolical ballet, representing the Temptations to one person, and shooting their darts into the heart of another. Midinettes, schoolgirls, actresses, how I should have hated them all! Objects of horror, for me they would have been excluded from the beauty of the universe. Albertine’s servitude, by releasing me from suffering on their account, restored them to the beauty of the world. Now that they were harmless, having lost the sting that stabs the heart with jealousy, I was free to admire them, to caress them with my eyes, another day more intimately perhaps. By shutting Albertine away, I had at the same time restored to the universe all those glittering wings that flutter in public gardens, ballrooms, theatres, and which became tempting once more to me because she could no longer succumb to their temptation. They composed the beauty of the world. They had at one time composed that of Albertine. It was because I had seen her first as a mysterious bird, then as a great actress of the beach, desired, perhaps won, that I had thought her wonderful. As soon as she was a captive in my house, the bird that I had seen one afternoon advancing with measured tread along the front, surrounded by a congregation of other girls like seagulls alighted from who knew where, Albertine had lost all her colours, together with all the opportunities that other people had of securing her for themselves. Gradually she had lost her beauty. It required excursions like this, in which I imagined her, but for my presence, accosted by some woman or by some young man, to make me see her again amid the splendour of the beach, although my jealousy was on a different plane from the decline of the pleasures of my imagination. But in spite of these abrupt reversions in which, desired by other people, she once more became beautiful in my eyes, I might very well have divided her stay with me into two periods, in the first of which she was still, although less so every day, the glittering actress of the beach, and in the second of which, become the grey captive, reduced to her drab self, she needed these flashes in which I remembered the past to restore her colour to her.

  Sometimes, in the hours in which I felt most indifferent towards her, there came back to me the memory of a far-off moment on the beach, before I yet knew her, when, not far from a lady with whom I was on bad terms and with whom I was almost certain now that she had had relations, she burst out laughing, staring me in the face in an insolent fashion. All round her hissed the blue and polished sea. In the sunshine of the beach, Albertine, in the midst of her friends, was the most beautiful of them all. It was this magnificent girl, who, in her familiar setting of boundless waters—she, a precious object in the eyes of the admiring lady—had inflicted this insult on me. It was definitive, for the lady had returned perhaps to Balbec, had registered perhaps, on the luminous and echoing beach, the absence of Albertine; but she was unaware that the girl was living with me, was wholly mine. The vast expanse of blue water, her obliviousness of the predilection she had had for this particular girl and had now diverted to others, had closed over the insult that Albertine had offered me, enshrining it in a glittering and unbreakable casket. Then hatred of that woman gnawed my heart; of Albertine too, but a hatred mingled with admiration of the beautiful, adulated girl, with her marvellous hair, whose laughter upon the beach had been an affront. Shame, jealousy, the memory of my first desires and of the brilliant setting, had restored to Albertine her former beauty and worth. And thus there alternated with the somewhat oppressive boredom that I felt in her company a throbbing desire, full of resplendent images and of regrets, according to whether she was by my side in my room or I set her free again in my memory, on the sea-front, in her gay beach clothes, to the sound of the musical instruments of the sea—Albertine, now abstracted from that environment, possessed and of no great value, now plunged back into it, escaping from me into a past which I should never get to know, humiliating me before the lady who was her friend as much as the splashing of the waves or the dizzying heat of the sun—Albertine restored to the beach or brought back again to my room, in a sort of amphibious love.

  Elsewhere, a numerous band were playing ball. All these girls had come out to make the most of the sunshine, for these February days, even when they are as dazzling as this one, do not last long, and the splendour of their light does not postpone the hour of its decline. Before that hour drew near, we had a spell of chiaroscuro, because after we had driven as far as the Seine, where Albertine admired, and by her presence prevented me from admiring, the reflexions of red sails upon the wintry blue of the water, and a tiled house nestling in the distance like a single red poppy against the clear horizon of which Saint-Cloud seemed, further off still, to be the fragmentary, friable, ribbed petrifaction, we left our motor-car and walked a long way. For some moments I even gave her my arm, and it seemed to me that the ring which her arm formed round mine united our two persons in a single self and linked our destinies together.

  Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet. It seemed to me already wonderful enough, at home, that Albertine should be living with me, that it should be she who came and lay down on my bed. But it was the transportation of that marvel to the outside world, into the heart of nature, by the shore of the lake in the Bois which I loved so much, beneath the trees, that it should be precisely her shadow, the pure and simplified shadow of her leg, of her bust, that the sun delineated in monochrome by the side of mine upon the gravel of the path. And the fusion of our shadows had a charm for me that was doubtless more insubstantial, but no less intimate, than the contiguity, the fusion of our bodies. Then we returned to the car. And it chose, for our homeward journey, a succession of little winding lanes along which the wintry trees, clothed, like ruins, in ivy and brambles, seemed to be pointing the way to the dwelling of some magician. No sooner had we emerged from their shady cover than we found, leaving the Bois, the daylight still so bright that I thought I should still have time to do everything I wanted to do before dinner, when, only a few moments later, as the car approached the Arc de Triomphe, it was with a sudden start of surprise and dismay that I perceived, over Paris, the moon prematurely full, like the face of a clock that has stopped and makes us think that we are late for an engagement. We had told the driver to take us home. For Albertine, this also meant returning to my home. The presence of women, however dear to us, who are obliged to leave us to return home does not bestow that peace which I found in the presence of Albertine seated in the car by my side, a presence that was conveying us not to the emptiness of the hours when lovers are apart, but to an even more stable and more sheltered reunion in my home, which was also hers, the material symbol of my possession of her. True, in order to possess, one must first have desired. We do not possess a line, a surface, a mass unless it is occupied by our love. But Albertine had not been for me during our drive, as Rachel had once been, a meaningless dust of flesh and clothing. At Balbec, the imagination of my eyes, my lips, my hands had so solidly constructed, so tenderly polished her body that now, in this car, in order to touch that body, to contain it, I had no need to press my own body against Albertine, nor even to see her; it was enough for me to hear her, and, if she was silent, to know that she was by my side; my interwoven senses enveloped her completely and when, on our arrival at the house, she quite naturally alighted, I stopped for a
moment to tell the chauffeur to call for me later, but my eyes enveloped her still as she passed ahead of me under the arch, and it was still the same inert, domestic calm that I felt as I saw her thus, solid, flushed, opulent and captive, returning home quite naturally with me, like a woman who belonged to me, and, protected by its walls, disappearing into our house. Unfortunately she seemed to feel herself in prison there, and—judging by her mournful, weary look that evening as we dined together in her room—to share the opinion of that Mme de La Rochefoucauld who, when asked whether she was not glad to live in so beautiful a home as Liancourt, replied: “There is no such thing as a beautiful prison.” I did not notice it at first; and it was I who bemoaned the thought that, had it not been for Albertine (for with her I should have suffered too acutely from jealousy in a hotel where all day long she would have been exposed to contact with so many people), I might at that moment be dining in Venice in one of those little low-ceilinged restaurants like a ship’s saloon, from which one looks out on the Grand Canal through little curved windows encircled with Moorish mouldings.

  I ought to add that Albertine greatly admired a big bronze I had by Barbedienne which with ample justification Bloch considered extremely ugly. He had perhaps less reason to be surprised at my having kept it. I had never sought, like him, to furnish for aesthetic effect, to arrange rooms artistically. I was too lazy for that, too indifferent to the things that I was in the habit of seeing every day. Since my taste was not involved, I had a right not to modulate my interiors. I might perhaps, in spite of this, have discarded the bronze. But ugly and expensive things are extremely useful, for they possess, in the eyes of people who do not understand us, who do not share our taste and with whom we may be in love, a glamour which a fine object that does not reveal its beauty may lack. Now the people who do not understand us are precisely the people with regard to whom it may be useful to us to take advantage of a prestige which our intellect is enough to ensure for us among superior people. Although Albertine was beginning to show some taste, she still had a certain respect for the bronze, and this was reflected back upon me in an esteem which, coming from Albertine, mattered infinitely more to me than the question of keeping a bronze which was a trifle degrading, since I loved Albertine.

  But the thought of my bondage ceased of a sudden to weigh upon me and I looked forward to prolonging it still further, because I seemed to perceive that Albertine was sorely conscious of her own. True, whenever I had asked her whether she was unhappy in my house, she had always replied that she did not know where it would be possible for her to be happier. But often these words were contradicted by an air of nostalgia and edginess. Certainly if she had the tastes with which I had credited her, this prevention from ever satisfying them must have been as frustrating to her as it was calming to myself, calming to such an extent that I should have decided that the hypothesis of my having accused her unjustly was the most probable, had it not been so difficult to fit into this hypothesis the extraordinary pains that Albertine took never to be alone, never to be free to go out with anyone, never to stop for a moment outside the front door when she came in, always to insist on being ostentatiously accompanied, whenever she went to the telephone, by someone who would be able to repeat to me what she had said—by Françoise or Andrée—always to leave me alone with the latter (without appearing to be doing so on purpose) after they had been out together, so that I might obtain a detailed report of their outing. Contrasted with this marvellous docility were occasional gestures of impatience, quickly repressed, which made me wonder whether Albertine might not be planning to shake off her chains.

  Certain incidental circumstances seemed to corroborate my supposition. Thus, one day when I had gone out by myself, I ran into Gisele in the neighbourhood of Passy, and we chatted about this and that. Presently, not without pride at being able to do so, I informed her that I saw Albertine constantly. Gisele asked me where she could find her, since she happened to have something to say to her. “What is it?” “Something to do with some young friends of hers.” “What friends? I may perhaps be able to tell you, though that needn’t prevent you from seeing her.” “Oh, girls she knew years ago, I don’t remember their names,” Gisele replied vaguely, beating a retreat. She left me, supposing herself to have spoken with such prudence that I could not conceivably have suspected anything. But falsehood is so unexacting, needs so little help to make itself manifest! If it had been a question of friends of long ago, whose very names she no longer remembered, why did she “happen” to need to speak to Albertine about them? This “happen,” akin to an expression dear to Mme Cottard: “It couldn’t be better timed,” could be applicable only to something particular, opportune, perhaps urgent, relating to specific persons. Besides, simply the way she opened her mouth, as though about to yawn, with a vague expression, when she said to me (almost retreating bodily, as she went into reverse at this point in our conversation): “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t remember their names,” made her face, and in harmony with it her voice, as clear a picture of falsehood as the wholly different air, keen, animated, forthcoming, of her “I happen to have” was of truth. I did not cross-examine Gisele. Of what use would it have been to me? Of course she did not lie in the same way as Albertine. And of course Albertine’s lies pained me more. But they had obviously a point in common: the fact of the lie itself, which in certain cases is self-evident. Not evidence of the reality that the lie conceals. We know that each murderer, individually, imagines that he has arranged everything so cleverly that he will not be caught, but in general, murderers are almost always caught. Liars, on the contrary, are rarely caught, and, among liars, more particularly the woman with whom we are in love. We do not know where she has been, what she has been doing. But as soon as she opens her mouth to speak, to speak of something else beneath which lies hidden the thing that she does not mention, the lie is immediately perceived, and our jealousy increased, since we are conscious of the lie, and cannot succeed in discovering the truth. With Albertine, the impression that she was lying was conveyed by a number of characteristics which we have already observed in the course of this narrative, but especially by the fact that, when she was lying, her story erred either from inadequacy, omission, implausibility, or on the contrary from a surfeit of petty details intended to make it seem plausible. Plausibility, notwithstanding the idea that the liar holds of it, is by no means the same as truth. Whenever, while listening to something that is true, we hear something that is only plausible, that is perhaps more plausible than the truth, that is perhaps too plausible, an ear that is at all musical senses that it is not correct, as with a line that does not scan or a word read aloud in mistake for another. The ear senses it, and if we are in love, the heart takes alarm. Why do we not reflect at the time, when we change the whole course of our life because we do not know whether a woman went along the Rue de Berri or the Rue Washington, why do we not reflect that these few yards of difference, and the woman herself, will be reduced to the hundred millionth part of themselves (that is to say to dimensions far beneath our perception), if we only have the wisdom to remain for a few years without seeing the woman, and that she who has out-Gullivered Gulliver in our eyes will shrink to a Lilliputian whom no microscope—of the heart, at least, for that of the disinterested memory is more powerful and less fragile—can ever again discern! However that may be, if there was a point in common—mendacity itself—between Albertine’s lies and Gisele’s, still Gisele did not lie in the same way as Albertine, nor indeed in the same way as Andrée, but their respective lies dovetailed so neatly into one another, while presenting a great variety, that the little band had the impenetrable solidity of certain commercial houses, booksellers for example or newspaper publishers, where the wretched author will never succeed, notwithstanding the diversity of the persons employed in them, in discovering whether or not he is being swindled. The director of the newspaper or review lies with an attitude of sincerity all the more solemn in that he is frequently obliged to conceal the fact t
hat he himself does exactly the same things and indulges in the same commercial practices as he denounced in other newspaper or theatre directors, in other publishers, when he chose as his banner, when he raised against them the standard of Honesty. The fact of a man’s having proclaimed (as leader of a political party, or in any other capacity) that it is wicked to lie obliges him as a rule to lie more than other people, without on that account abandoning the solemn mask, doffing the august tiara of sincerity. The “honest” gentleman’s partner lies in a different and more ingenuous fashion. He deceives his author as he deceives his wife, with tricks from the vaudeville stage. The sub-editor, a crude, straightforward man, lies quite simply, like an architect who promises that your house will be ready at a date when it will not have been begun. The editor, an angelic soul, flutters from one to another of the three, and without knowing what the matter is, gives them, out of brotherly scruple and affectionate solidarity, the precious support of an unimpeachable word. These four persons live in a state of perpetual dissension to which the arrival of the author puts a stop. Over and above their private quarrels, each of them remembers the paramount military duty of rallying to the support of the threatened “corps.” Without realising it, I had long been playing the part of this author in relation to the little band. If Gisele had been thinking, when she used the word “happen,” of one of Albertine’s friends who was prepared to go away with her as soon as my mistress should have found some pretext or other for leaving me, and had meant to warn Albertine that the hour had now come or would shortly strike, she, Gisele, would have let herself be torn to pieces rather than tell me so; it was quite useless therefore to ply her with questions.