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

by Marcel Proust

  Presently the sounds from the street would begin, enabling me to tell from the qualitative scale of their sonorities the degree of the steadily increasing heat in which they resounded. But in this heat which a few hours later would become saturated with the fragrance of cherries, what I found (as in a medicine which the substitution of one ingredient for another is sufficient to transform from the stimulant and tonic that it was into a depressant) was no longer the desire for women but the anguish of Albertine’s departure. Besides, the memory of all my desires was as much impregnated with her, and with suffering, as the memory of my pleasures. Venice, where I had thought that her company would be irksome (doubtless because I had felt in a confused way that it would be necessary to me), no longer attracted me now that Albertine was no more. Albertine had seemed to me to be an obstacle interposed between me and all other things, because she was for me their container, and it was from her alone, as from a vase, that I could receive them. Now that this vase was shattered, I no longer felt that I had the courage to grasp things, and there was not one of them from which I did not now turn away, despondent, 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 travelling and enjoying life had merely (as always happens) concealed from me other obstacles which reappeared intact now that this one had been removed. Likewise, in the past, when some friendly call had prevented me from working, if on the following day I was left undisturbed I did not work any better. Let an illness, a duel, a runaway horse make us see death face to face, and 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 we resume once more the same dull life in which none of those delights existed for us.

  No doubt these short summer nights last only for a brief season. Winter would at length return, when I should no longer have to dread the memory of drives with her until the too early dawn. But would not the first frosts bring back to me, preserved in their ice, 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 at the door, a sound for which I might now wait everlastingly in vain? Would they not bring back to me the germ of my first anxieties, when twice I thought she would not come? At that time I saw her only rarely, but even those intervals between her visits which made her suddenly appear, after many weeks, from the heart of an unknown life which I made no attempt 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. Soothing though they may have been at the time, in retrospect those intervals were stamped with pain since the unknown things she might have done in the course of them had ceased to be a matter of indifference to me, and especially now that no visit from her would ever occur again; so that those January evenings on which she used to come, and which for that reason had been so dear to me, would inject into me now with their biting winds an anxiety which was unknown to me then, and would bring back to me (but now grown pernicious) the first germ of my love. And when I thought how I would see the return of that cold season which, since the time of Gilberte and our games in the Champs-Elysées, had always seemed to me so melancholy, when I thought how evenings would come back like that snowy evening when I had waited in vain for Albertine far into the night, then, like an invalid—in his case physically, fearing for his chest, in my case mentally—what at such moments I still dreaded most, for my grief, for my heart, was the return of the intense cold, and I said to myself that what it would be hardest to live through was perhaps the winter.

  Linked as it was to each of the seasons, in order for me to discard the memory of Albertine I should have had to forget them all, even if it meant having to get to know them all over again, like an old man learning to read again after a stroke; I should have had to renounce the entire universe. Nothing, I told myself, but a veritable extinction of myself would be capable (but that is impossible) of consoling me for hers. It did not occur to me that the death of oneself is neither impossible nor extraordinary; it is effected without our knowledge, even against our will, every day of our lives. 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. Soon the date would return on which I had gone to Balbec, that last summer, and when my love, which was not yet inseparable from jealousy and did not concern itself with what Albertine was doing all day, was to undergo so many evolutions, before becoming that very different love of recent months, that this final year, in which Albertine’s destiny had begun to change and had come to an end, appeared to me as full, as diverse and as vast as a whole century. Then it would be the memory of days more dilatory but dating from still earlier years, the rainy Sundays on which nevertheless everyone else had gone out, in the emptiness of the afternoon, when the sound of wind and rain would in the past have bidden me stay at home, to “philosophise in my garret;” with what anxiety would I see the hour approach at which Albertine, so little expected, had come to visit me, had caressed me for the first time, breaking off when Françoise had brought in the lamp, in that time now doubly dead when it had been Albertine who was curious about me, when my tenderness for her could legitimately cherish so many hopes! And even, later in the season, those glorious evenings when offices and girls’ schools, half open like chapels, bathed in a golden dust, enable the street to crown itself with those demigoddesses who, conversing not far from us with others of their kind, fill us with a feverish longing to penetrate into their mythological existence, now reminded me only of the tenderness of Albertine, whose presence by my side had been an obstacle to my approaching them.

  Moreover, to the memory even of hours that were purely natural would inevitably be added the psychological background that makes each of them a thing apart. When, later on, I should hear the goatherd’s horn, on a first fine almost Italian morning, that same day would blend alternately with its sunshine the anxiety of knowing that Albertine was at the Trocadéro, possibly with Lea and the two girls, then the homely, familial sweetness, almost that of a wife who seemed to me then an embarrassment and whom Françoise was bringing home to me. That telephone message from Françoise which had conveyed to me the dutiful homage of an Albertine returning with her had seemed to me then to be a matter for pride. I was mistaken. If it had exhilarated me, it 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 at a sign from me. And thus that telephone message had been a fragment of sweetness, coming to me from afar, sent out from that Trocadéro district where there happened to be, for me, sources of happiness directing towards me molecules of comfort, healing balms, restoring to me at length so precious an equanimity of mind that I need do no more—surrendering myself without the slightest qualm or reservation to Wagner’s music—than await the certain arrival of Albertine, without anxiety, with an entire absence of impatience in which I had not had the perspicacity to recognise happiness. And the cause of this happiness at the knowledge of her returning home, of her obeying me and belonging to me, lay in love and not in pride. It would have been quite immaterial to me now to have at my behest fifty women returning, at a sign from me, not from the Trocadéro but from the Indies. But that day, thinking of Albertine coming dutifully home to me as I sat alone in my room making music, I had breathed in one of those substances, scattered like motes in a sunbeam, which, just as others are salutary to the body, do good to the soul. Then there had been, half an hour later, the arrival of Albertine, then the drive with Albertine, both of which had seemed to me boring because they were accompanied for me by certainty, but which, because of that very certainty, had, from the moment of Fr
ançoise’s telephoning to me that she was bringing Albertine home, poured a golden calm over the hours that followed, had made of them as it were a second day, wholly unlike the first, because it had a very different emotional basis, an emotional basis which made it a uniquely original day, one to be added to the variety of the days that I had previously known, a day which I should never have been able to imagine—any more than we could imagine the delicious idleness of a summer day if such days did not exist in the calendar of those through which we have lived—a day of which I could not say absolutely that I recalled it, for to this calm I added now an anguish which I had not felt at the time. But much later, when I went back gradually, in reverse order, over the times through which I had passed before I had come to love Albertine so much, when my healed heart could detach itself without suffering from Albertine dead, then I was able to recall at length without suffering that day on which Albertine had gone shopping with Françoise instead of remaining at the Trocadéro; I recalled it with pleasure as belonging to an emotional season which I had not known until then; I recalled it at last exactly, no longer injecting it with suffering, but rather, on the contrary, as we recall certain days in summer which we found too hot while they lasted, and from which only after they have passed do we extract their unalloyed essence of pure gold and indestructible azure.

  So that these few years imposed upon my memory of Albertine, which made them so painful, successive colourings, the different modulations, the embers, not only of their seasons or of their hours, from late afternoons in June to winter evenings, from moonlight on the sea to daybreak on the way home, from snow in Paris to fallen leaves at Saint-Cloud, but also of each of the particular ideas of Albertine that I successively formed, of the physical aspect in which I pictured her at each of those moments, the degree of frequency with which I had seen her during that season, which itself appeared consequently more or less dispersed or compact, the anxieties which she might have caused me by keeping me waiting, the desire which I had for her at such and such a moment, the hopes formed and then shattered—all this modified the character of my retrospective sadness fully as much as the impressions of light or of perfume which were associated with it, and complemented each of the solar years through which I had lived and which, simply with their springs, their autumns, their winters, were already so sad because of the inseparable memory of her, endowed it with a sort of sentimental counterpart in which the hours were defined not by the sun’s position, but by the time spent waiting for a rendezvous, in which the length of the days or the changes in the temperature were measured by the soaring of my hopes, the progress of our intimacy, the gradual transformation of her face, the journeys she had made, the frequency and style of the letters she had written me during her absence, her eagerness, greater or lesser, to see me on her return. And lastly, if these changes of weather, these variegated days, each brought me back a different Albertine, it was not only through the evocation of similar moments. It will be remembered that always, even before I began to love, each season had made me a different person, having other desires because he had other perceptions, a person who, having dreamed only of cliffs and storms overnight, if the indiscreet spring daybreak had insinuated a scent of roses through the gaps in the ill-fitting enclosure of his sleep, would wake up on the way to Italy. Even in the course of my love, had not the volatile state of my emotional climate, the varying pressure of my beliefs, had they not one day reduced the visibility of the love that I was feeling, and the next day indefinitely extended it, one day embellished it to a smile, another day condensed it to a storm? We exist only by virtue of what we possess, we possess only what is really present to us, and many of our memories, our moods, our ideas sail away on a voyage of their own until they are lost to sight! Then we can no longer take them into account in the total which is our personality. But they know of secret paths by which to return to us. And on certain nights, having gone to sleep almost without missing Albertine any more—we can only miss what we remember—on awakening I found a whole fleet of memories which had come to cruise upon the surface of my clearest consciousness and which I could distinguish perfectly. Then I wept over what I could see so plainly, though the night before it had been non-existent to me. In an instant, Albertine’s name, her death, had changed their meaning; her betrayals had suddenly resumed their old importance.

  How could she have seemed dead to me when now, in order to think of her, I had at my disposal only those same images one or other of which I used to recall when she was alive? Either swift-moving and bent over the mythological wheel of her bicycle, strapped on rainy days inside the warrior tunic of her waterproof which moulded her breasts, her head turbaned and dressed with snakes, when she spread terror through the streets of Balbec; or else on the evenings when we had taken champagne into the woods of Chantepie, her voice provocative and altered, her face suffused with warm pallor, reddened only on the cheekbones, and when, unable to make it out in the darkness of the carriage, I drew her into the moonlight in order to see it more clearly, the face I was now trying in vain to recapture, to see again in a darkness that would never end. A little statuette on the drive to the island in the Bois, a still and plump face with coarse-grained skin at the pianola, she was thus by turns rain-soaked and swift, provoking and diaphanous, motionless and smiling, an angel of music. In this way each one was attached to a moment, to the date of which I found myself carried back when I saw again that particular Albertine. And these moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future—towards a future which has itself become the past—drawing us along in their train. Never had I caressed the waterproofed Albertine of the rainy days; I wanted to ask her to take off that armour, in order to experience with her the love of the tented field, the fraternity of travel. But this was no longer possible, for she was dead. Neither, for fear of corrupting her, had I ever shown any sign of comprehension on the evenings when she seemed to be offering me pleasures which, but for my self-restraint, she might not perhaps have sought from others, and which aroused in me now a frantic desire. I should not have found them the same in any other woman, but I might scour the whole world now without encountering the woman who was prepared to give them to me, for Albertine was dead. It seemed that I had to choose between two facts, to decide which of them was true, to such an extent was the fact of Albertine’s death—arising for me from a reality which I had not known, her life in Touraine—in contradiction with all my thoughts of her, my desires, my regrets, my tenderness, my rage, my jealousy. So great a wealth of memories borrowed from the treasury of her life, such a profusion of feelings evoking, implicating her life, seemed to make it incredible that Albertine should be dead. Such a profusion of feelings, for my memory, in preserving my affection, left it all its variety. It was not Albertine alone who was a succession of moments, it was also myself. My love for her was not simple: to a curiosity about the unknown had been added a sensual desire, and to a feeling of almost conjugal sweetness, at one moment indifference, at another a furious jealousy. I was not one man only, but as it were the march-past of a composite army in which there were passionate men, indifferent men, jealous men—jealous men not one of whom was jealous of the same woman. And no doubt it would be from this that one day would come the cure for which I had no wish. In a composite mass, the elements may one by one, without our noticing it, be replaced by others, which others again eliminate, until in the end a change has been brought about which it would be impossible to conceive if we were a single person. The complexity of my love, of my person, multiplied and diversified my sufferings. And yet they could still be ranged in the two categories whose alternation had made up the whole life of my love for Albertine, swayed alternately by trust and by jealous suspicion.

  If I found it difficult to imagine that Albertine, so alive in me (wearing as I did the double harness of the present and the past), was dead, perhaps it was equally paradoxical in me that this suspicion of the misdeeds which Albertin
e, stripped now of the flesh that had enjoyed them, of the mind that had conceived the desire for them, was no longer either capable of or responsible for, should excite in me such suffering, which I should only have blessed could I have seen it as the token of the spiritual reality of a person materially non-existent, instead of the reflexion, destined itself to fade, of impressions that she had made on me in the past. A woman who could no longer experience pleasures with others ought no longer to have excited my jealousy, if only my tenderness had been able to come to the surface. But it was precisely this that was impossible, since it could not find its object, Albertine, except among memories in which she was still alive. Since, merely by thinking of her, I brought her back to life, her infidelities could never be those of a dead woman, the moment at which she had committed them becoming the present moment, not only for Albertine, but for that one of my various selves thus suddenly evoked who happened to be thinking of her. So that no anachronism could ever separate the indissoluble couple, in which each new culprit was immediately mated with a jealous lover, pitiable and always contemporaneous. I had, during the last months, kept her shut up in my own house. But in my imagination now, Albertine was free; she was abusing her freedom, was prostituting herself to this person or that. Formerly, I used constantly to think of the uncertainty of the future that stretched before us, and endeavour to read its message. And now, what lay ahead of me, like a counterpart of the future—as worrying as the future because it was equally uncertain, equally difficult to decipher, equally mysterious, and crueller still because I did not have, as with the future, the possibility, or the illusion, of influencing it, and also because it would go on unfolding throughout the whole length of my life without my companion’s being present to soothe the anguish that it caused me—was no longer Albertine’s future, it was her past. Her past? That is the wrong word, since for jealousy there can be neither past nor future, and what it imagines is invariably the present.