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

by Marcel Proust

  She appeared stunned, incredulous and desolate: “Tomorrow? You really mean it?”

  And in spite of the anguish that I felt in speaking of our parting as though it were already in the past—partly perhaps because of that very anguish—I began to give Albertine the most precise instructions as to certain things which she would have to do after she left the house. And passing from one request to another, I soon found myself entering into the minutest details.

  “Be so kind,” I said with infinite sadness, “as to send me back that book of Bergotte’s which is at your aunt’s. There’s no hurry about it, in three days, in a week, whenever you like, but remember that I don’t want to have to write and ask you for it: that would be too painful. We have been happy together, but now we feel that we should be unhappy.”

  “Don’t say that we feel that we’d be unhappy,” Albertine interrupted me, “don’t say ‘we,’ it’s only you who feel that.”

  “Yes, very well, you or I, as you like, for one reason or another. But it’s absurdly late, you must go to bed—we’ve decided to part tonight.”

  “Excuse me, you’ve decided, and I obey you because I don’t want to upset you.”

  “Very well, it’s I who have decided, but that doesn’t make it any less painful for me. I don’t say that it will be painful for long, you know that I’m not capable of remembering things for long, but for the first few days I shall be so miserable without you. And so I feel that it’s no use stirring up the memory with letters, we must end everything at once.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” she said to me with a crushed air, which was enhanced by the signs of fatigue on her features due to the lateness of the hour, “rather than have one finger chopped off and then another, I prefer to lay my head on the block at once.”

  “Heavens, I’m appalled when I think how late I’m keeping you out of bed, it’s madness. However, it’s the last night! You’ll have plenty of time to sleep for the rest of your life.”

  And thus while telling her that it was time to say good-night I sought to postpone the moment when she would have said it: “Would you like me, in order to take your mind off things during the first few days, to ask Bloch to send his cousin Esther to the place where you’ll be staying? He’ll do that for me.”

  “I don’t know why you say that” (I had said it in an attempt to wrest a confession from Albertine), “there’s only one person I care about, and that’s you,” Albertine said to me, and her words were infinitely sweet to me. But, the next moment, what a blow she dealt me! “I remember, of course, that I did give this Esther my photograph because she kept on asking me for it and I saw that it would give her pleasure, but as for having any great liking for her or wanting to see her again, never!” And yet Albertine was of so frivolous a nature that she went on: “If she wants to see me, it’s all the same to me. She’s very nice, but I don’t care in the least either way.”

  Thus, when I had spoken to her of the photograph of Esther which Bloch had sent me (and which I had not even received when I mentioned it to her) Albertine had gathered that Bloch had shown me a photograph of herself which she had given to Esther. In my worst suppositions, I had never imagined that any such intimacy could have existed between Albertine and Esther. Albertine had been at a loss for words when I mentioned the photograph. And now, wrongly, supposing me to be in the know, she thought it advisable to confess. I was shattered.

  “And, Albertine, let me ask you to do me one more favour: never attempt to see me again. If at any time, as may happen in a year, in two years, in three years, we should find ourselves in the same town, avoid me.” And seeing that she did not answer my request in the affirmative, I went on: “My Albertine, don’t do it, don’t ever see me again in this life. It would hurt me too much. For I was really fond of you, you know. Of course, when I told you the other day that I wanted to see the friend I mentioned to you at Balbec again, you thought it was all settled. Not at all, I assure you, it was quite immaterial to me. You’re convinced that I had long made up my mind to leave you, that my affection was all make-believe.”

  “Not at all, you’re crazy, I never thought so,” she said sadly.

  “You’re right, you must never think so, I did genuinely feel for you, not love perhaps, but a great, a very great affection, more than you can imagine.”

  “Of course I can imagine. And do you suppose that I don’t love you!”

  “It hurts me terribly to have to leave you.”

  “It hurts me a thousand times more,” replied Albertine.

  Already for some little time I had felt that I could no longer hold back the tears that came welling up in my eyes. And these tears did not spring from at all the same sort of misery which I had felt long ago when I said to Gilberte: “It is better that we should not see one another again; life is dividing us.” No doubt when I wrote this to Gilberte, I said to myself that when I was in love not with her but with another, the excess of my love would diminish that which I might perhaps have been able to inspire, as though two people must inevitably have only a certain quantity of love at their disposal, of which the surplus taken by one is subtracted from the other, and that from her too, as from Gilberte, I should be doomed to part. But the situation was entirely different for several reasons, the first of which (and it had, in its turn, given rise to the others) was that the lack of will-power which my grandmother and my mother had observed in me with alarm, at Combray, and before which each of them, so great is the energy with which an invalid imposes his weakness upon others, had capitulated in turn, this lack of will-power had gone on increasing at an ever accelerated pace. When I felt that my presence bored Gilberte, I had still enough strength left to give her up; I had no longer the same strength when I had made a similar discovery with regard to Albertine, and could think only of keeping her by force. With the result that, whereas I wrote to Gilberte saying that I would not see her again and really meant it, I said this to Albertine quite untruthfully and in the hope of bringing about a reconciliation. Thus we presented each to the other an appearance which was very different from the reality. And no doubt it is always so when two people are face to face, since each of them is ignorant of a part of what exists in the other (even what he knows, he can understand only in part) and both of them reveal what is least personal to them, either because they have themselves not properly untangled and regard as negligible what is most personal or because insignificant advantages which do not belong to them particularly seem more important and more flattering to themselves, and at the same time they pretend not to care about certain things they admire, in order not to be despised for not having them, and these are precisely the things that they appear to scorn above all else and even to abhor. But in love this misunderstanding is carried to its supreme pitch because, except perhaps in childhood, we try to see to it that the appearance we assume, instead of reflecting exactly what is in our thoughts, is what is best calculated to enable us to obtain what we desire, and this, in my case, since I had come in, was to be able to keep Albertine as docile as she had been in the past, and to ensure that she did not in her irritation ask me for greater freedom, which I wanted to grant her some day but which at this moment, when I was afraid of her hankerings after independence, would have made me too jealous. After a certain age, from self-esteem and from sagacity, it is to the things we most desire that we pretend to attach no importance. But in love, mere sagacity—which in any case is probably not true wisdom—drives us all too quickly to this kind of duplicity. What I had dreamed of, as a child, as being the sweetest thing in love, what had seemed to me to be the very essence of love, was to pour out freely, to the one I loved, my tenderness, my gratitude for her kindness, my longing for an everlasting life together. But I had become only too well aware, from my own experience and from that of my friends, that the expression of such sentiments is far from being contagious. The case of an affected old woman like M. de Charlus who, as a result of seeing in his mind’s eye only a handsome young man, thinks he himself
has become a handsome young man, and betrays more and more effeminacy in his risible affectations of virility—such a case falls under a law which applies far more widely than to the Charluses alone, a law so generalised that not even love itself exhausts it entirely; we do not see our bodies, though others do, and we “follow” our thoughts, the object that is in front of us, invisible to others (made visible at times in a work of art, whence the frequent disillusionment of its admirers when they are admitted into the presence of the artist, whose inner beauty is so imperfectly reflected in his face). Once one has noticed this, one no longer “lets oneself go;” I had taken good care that afternoon not to tell Albertine how grateful I was to her that she had not remained at the Trocadéro. And tonight, having been afraid that she might leave me, I had feigned a desire to leave her, a pretence which moreover, as we shall see presently, had not been dictated solely by the experience I believed myself to have gained from my former loves and was seeking to turn to the profit of this one.

  The fear that Albertine was perhaps going to say to me: “I want to be allowed to go out by myself at certain hours, I want to be able to stay away for twenty-four hours,” or some such request for freedom which I did not attempt to define, but which alarmed me, this fear had crossed my mind for a moment during the Verdurin reception. But it had been dispelled, contradicted moreover by the memory of Albertine’s constant assurances of how happy she was with me. The intention to leave me, if it existed in Albertine, manifested itself only in an obscure fashion, in certain mournful glances, certain gestures of impatience, remarks which meant nothing of the sort but which, if one analysed them (and there was not even any need for analysis, for one understands at once this language of passion, even the most uneducated understand these remarks which can be explained only by vanity, rancour, jealousy, unexpressed as it happens, but detectable at once by the interlocutor through an intuitive faculty which, like the “good sense” of which Descartes speaks, is “the most evenly distributed thing in the world”), could only be explained by the presence in her of a sentiment which she concealed and which might lead her to form plans for another life without me. Just as this intention did not express itself in her speech in a logical fashion, so the presentiment of this intention, which I had felt tonight, remained just as vague in me. I continued to live by the hypothesis which accepted as true everything that Albertine told me. But it may be that during this time a wholly contrary hypothesis, of which I refused to think, never left me; this is all the more probable since otherwise I should not have felt uncomfortable about telling Albertine that I had been to the Verdurins’, and my lack of astonishment at her anger would not have been comprehensible. So that what probably existed in me was an idea of Albertine entirely contrary to that which my reason formed of her, and also to that which her own words suggested, an Albertine who was none the less not wholly invented, since she was like an internal mirror of certain impulses that occurred in her, such as her ill-humour at my having gone to the Verdurins’. Besides, for a long time past, my constant anxieties, my fear of telling Albertine that I loved her, all this corresponded to another hypothesis which explained far more things and had also this to be said for it, that if one adopted the first hypothesis the second became more probable, for by allowing myself to give way to effusions of tenderness for Albertine, I obtained from her nothing but irritation (to which moreover she assigned a different cause).

  I may say that what had seemed to me most serious and had struck me most forcibly as a symptom of the fact that she anticipated my accusation was that she had said to me: “I believe Mlle Vinteuil was to be there,” to which I had replied in the cruellest possible way: “You didn’t tell me you’d met her.” As soon as I found Albertine less than nice, instead of telling her I was sad, I became nasty.

  Analysing my feelings on the basis of this, on the basis of the unvarying system of ripostes expressing the opposite of what I felt, I can be quite certain that if, that night, I told her that I was going to leave her, it was because—even before I had realised it—I was afraid that she might desire some freedom (I should have been hard put to it to say what this freedom was that made me tremble, but anyhow a freedom which might have given her an opportunity of being unfaithful to me, or at least which was such that I should no longer have been able to be certain that she was not) and because I wanted to show her, from pride and from cunning, that I was very far from fearing anything of the sort, as I had already shown at Balbec, when I was anxious that she should have a good opinion of me, and later on, when I was anxious that she should not have time to feel bored with me.

  Finally, the objection that might be offered to this second, unformulated hypothesis, that everything that Albertine said to me indicated on the contrary that the life which she preferred was the life she led in my house, rest, quiet, reading, solitude, a loathing for Sapphic loves, and so forth, need not be considered seriously. For if on her part Albertine had wanted to gauge what I felt from what I said to her, she would have learned the exact opposite of the truth, since I never expressed a desire to part from her except when I was unable to do without her, and at Balbec I had twice confessed to her that I was in love with another woman, first Andrée, then a mysterious stranger, on the two occasions when jealousy had revived my love for her. My words, therefore, did not in the least reflect my feelings. If the reader has no more than a faint impression of these, that is because, as narrator, I expose my feelings to him at the same time as I repeat my words. But if I concealed the former and he were acquainted only with the latter, my actions, so little in keeping with them, would so often give him the impression of strange reversals that he would think me more or less mad. A procedure which would not, for that matter, be much more false than the one I adopted, for the images which prompted me to action, so opposed to those which were portrayed in my words, were at that moment extremely obscure; I was but imperfectly aware of the nature which guided my actions; today, I have a clear conception of its subjective truth. As for its objective truth, that is to say whether the intuitions of that nature grasped more exactly than my reason Albertine’s true intentions, whether I was right to trust to that nature or whether on the contrary it did not alter Albertine’s intentions instead of making them plain—that I find difficult to say.