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

by Marcel Proust

  How she used to hasten to see me at Balbec when I sent for her, lingering only to sprinkle scent on her hair to please me! These images of Balbec and Paris which I loved thus to see again were the pages, still so recent, and so quickly turned, of her short life. All this, which for me was only memory, had been for her action, action speeding headlong, as in a tragedy, towards a swift death. For people develop in one way inside us, but in another way outside us (I had felt this strongly on those evenings when I remarked in Albertine an enrichment of qualities which was due not only to my memory), and these two ways inevitably react upon each other. Although, in seeking to know Albertine, then to possess her entirely, I had merely obeyed the need to reduce by experiment to elements meanly akin to those of our own ego the mystery of every being, I had been unable to do so without in my turn influencing Albertine’s life. Perhaps my wealth, the prospect of a brilliant marriage, had attracted her; my jealousy had kept her; her kindness, or her intelligence, or her sense of guilt, or her shrewd cunning, had made her accept, and had led me on to make harsher and harsher, a captivity in chains forged simply by the internal development of my mental toil, but which had none the less had repercussions on Albertine’s life, themselves destined, by a natural backlash, to pose new and ever more painful problems to my psychology, since from my prison she had escaped to go and kill herself on a horse which but for me she would not have owned, leaving me, even after she was dead, with suspicions the verification of which, if it was to come, would perhaps be more painful to me than the discovery at Balbec that Albertine had known Mlle Vinteuil, since Albertine would no longer be there to soothe me. So that the long plaint of the soul which thinks that it is living shut up within itself is a monologue in appearance only, since the echoes of reality alter its course, and a given life is like an essay in subjective psychology spontaneously pursued, but providing from a distance the “plot” for the purely realistic novel of another reality, another existence, the vicissitudes of which come in their turn to inflect the curve and change the direction of the psychological essay. How highly geared had been the mechanism, how rapid had been the evolution of our love, and, notwithstanding a few delays, interruptions and hesitations at the start, as in certain of Balzac’s tales or Schumann’s ballads, how sudden the denouement! It was in the course of this last year, as long as a century to me—so often had Albertine changed position in relation to my thoughts between Balbec and her departure from Paris, and also, independently of me and often without my knowing it, changed in herself—that I must place the whole of that happy life of tenderness which had lasted so short a while and which yet appeared to me with an amplitude, almost an immensity, which now was for ever impossible and yet was indispensable to me. Indispensable without perhaps having been in itself and at the outset something necessary, since I should not have known Albertine had I not read in an archaeological treatise a description of the church at Balbec, had not Swann, by telling me that this church was almost Persian, directed my taste to the Byzantine Norman, had not a financial syndicate, by erecting at Balbec a hygienic and comfortable hotel, made my parents decide to grant my wish and send me to Balbec. To be sure, in that Balbec so long desired, I had not found the Persian church of my dreams, nor the eternal mists. Even the famous 1.22 train had not corresponded to my mental picture of it. But in exchange for what our imagination leads us to expect and we give ourselves so much futile trouble trying to find, life gives us something which we were very far from imagining. Who would have told me at Combray, when I lay waiting for my mother’s good-night with so heavy a heart, that those anxieties would be healed, and would then break out again one day, not for my mother, but for a girl who would at first be no more, against the horizon of the sea, than a flower upon which my eyes would daily be invited to gaze, but a thinking flower in whose mind I was so childishly anxious to occupy a prominent place that I was distressed by her not being aware that I knew Mme de Villeparisis? Yes, it was for the good-night kiss of such an unknown girl that, in years to come, I was to suffer as intensely as I had suffered as a child when my mother did not come up to my room. And yet if Swann had not spoken to me of Balbec, I should never have known this Albertine who had become so necessary, of love for whom my soul was now almost exclusively composed. Her life would perhaps have been longer, mine would have been devoid of what was now making it a martyrdom. And thus it seemed to me that, by my entirely selfish love, I had allowed Albertine to die just as I had murdered my grandmother. Even later, even after I had already got to know her at Balbec, it is possible that I might not have loved her as I eventually did. For, when I gave up Gilberte and knew that I might love another woman some day, I hardly dared entertain a doubt as to whether, at any rate as regards the past, I could have loved anyone else but Gilberte. Whereas in the case of Albertine I no longer even had any doubt, I was sure that it might well not have been her that I loved, that it might have been someone else. It would have been enough that Mlle de Stermaria, on the evening when I was to dine with her on the island in the Bois, should not have cancelled the appointment. There was still time then, and it would have been upon Mlle de Stermaria that I would have directed that activity of the imagination which makes us extract from a woman so special a notion of individuality that she appears to us unique in herself and predestined and necessary for us. At the most, adopting an almost physiological point of view, I could say that I might have been able to feel that same exclusive love for another woman but not for any other woman. For Albertine, plump and dark, did not resemble Gilberte, slim and fair, and yet they were fashioned of the same healthy stuff, and above the same sensual cheeks there was a look in the eyes of both whose meaning was difficult to grasp. They were women of a sort that would not attract the attention of men who for their part would go mad about other women who “meant nothing” to me. A man has almost always the same way of catching cold, of falling ill; that is to say, he requires for it to happen a particular combination of circumstances; it is natural that when he falls in love he should love a certain type of woman, a type which for that matter is very widespread. The first glances from Albertine which had set me dreaming were not absolutely different from Gilberte’s first glances. I could almost believe that the obscure personality, the sensuality, the wilful, cunning nature of Gilberte had returned to tempt me, incarnate this time in Albertine’s body, a body quite different and yet not without analogies. In Albertine’s case, thanks to a wholly different life shared with me where no fissure of distraction or obliviousness had been able to penetrate a block of thoughts in which a painful preoccupation maintained a permanent cohesion, her living body had not, like Gilberte’s, ceased one day to be that in which I found what I subsequently recognised as being to me (what they would not have been to other men) the attributes of feminine charm. But she was dead. I would forget her. Who could say whether the same qualities of rich blood, of uneasy brooding would then return one day to create turmoil in me? But in what feminine form they would be embodied I could not foretell. The example of Gilberte would as little have enabled me to form an idea of Albertine and guess that I should fall in love with her, as the memory of Vinteuil’s sonata would have enabled me to imagine his septet. Indeed, what was more, the first few times I had seen Albertine, I had even managed to believe that it was others I would love. Moreover, she might even have appeared to me, had I met her a year earlier, as dull as a grey sky in which dawn has not yet broken. If I had changed in relation to her, she herself had changed too, and the girl who had come and sat on my bed on the day of my letter to Mlle de Stermaria was no longer the same girl I had known at Balbec, whether by virtue of the explosion of womanhood which occurs at the age of puberty, or as a result of circumstances which I was never able to discover. In any case, even if the woman I was one day to love must to a certain extent resemble her, that is to say if my choice of a woman was not entirely free, this nevertheless meant that, directed in a manner that was perhaps predetermined, it was directed towards something more considerab
le than an individual, towards a type of woman, and this removed all necessitude from my love for Albertine.

  We are well aware that the woman whose face we have before our eyes more constantly than light itself, since even with our eyes shut we never cease for an instant to adore her beautiful eyes, her beautiful nose, to arrange opportunities of seeing them again—that this woman who to us is unique might well have been another if we had been in a different town from the one in which we met her, if we had explored other quarters of the town, if we had frequented a different salon. Unique, we suppose? She is legion. And yet she is compact and indestructible in our loving eyes, irreplaceable for a long time to come by any other. The truth is that this woman has only raised to life by a sort of magic countless elements of tenderness existing in us already in a fragmentary state, which she has assembled, joined together, effacing every gap between them, and it is we ourselves who by giving her her features have supplied all the solid matter of the beloved object. Whence it arises that even if we are only one among a thousand to her and perhaps the last of them all, to us she is the only one, the one towards whom our whole life gravitates. It was, indeed, true that I had been quite well aware that this love was not inevitable, not only because it might have crystallised round Mlle de Stermaria, but even apart from that, through knowing the feeling itself, finding it to be only too like what it had been for others, and also sensing it to be vaster than Albertine, enveloping her, unconscious of her, like a tide swirling round a tiny rock. But gradually, by dint of living with Albertine, I was no longer able to fling off the chains which I myself had forged; the habit of associating Albertine’s person with the sentiment which she had not inspired made me none the less believe that it was peculiar to her, as habit gives to the mere association of ideas between two phenomena, according to a certain school of philosophy, the illusory force and necessity of a law of causation. I had thought that my connexions, my wealth, would dispense me from suffering, and only too effectively perhaps, since it seemed to dispense me from feeling, loving, imagining; I envied a poor country girl whom the absence of connexions, even by telegraph, allows to day-dream for months on end about a sorrow which she cannot artificially put to sleep. And now I began to realise that if, in the case of Mme de Guermantes, endowed with everything that must make the gulf between her and myself infinite, I had seen that gulf suddenly bridged by abstract opinion, for which social advantages are no more than inert and transmutable matter, so, in a similar albeit converse fashion, my social relations, my wealth, all the material means by which not only my own position but the civilisation of my age enabled me to profit, had done no more than postpone the day of reckoning in my hand-to-hand struggle against the contrary, inflexible will of Albertine, upon which no pressure had had any effect. True, I had been able to exchange telegrams and telephone messages with Saint-Loup, to remain in constant communication with the post office at Tours, but had not the delay in waiting for them proved useless, the result nil? And country girls without social advantages or connexions, or human beings in general before these improvements of civilisation—do they not suffer less, because one desires less, because one regrets less what one has always known to be inaccessible, what for that reason has continued to seem unreal? One desires more the woman who has yet to give herself to us; hope anticipates possession; regret is an amplifier of desire. Mlle de Stermaria’s refusal to come and dine with me on the island in the Bois was what had prevented her from becoming the object of my love. It might also have sufficed to make me love her if afterwards I had seen her again in time. As soon as I knew that she would not come, entertaining the improbable hypothesis—which had been proved correct—that perhaps she had a jealous lover who kept her away from other men and that therefore I should never see her again, I had suffered so intensely that I would have given anything in the world to see her, and it was one of the most desolating agonies that I had ever felt that Saint-Loup’s arrival had assuaged. But after we have reached a certain age our loves, our mistresses, are begotten of our anguish; our past, and the physical lesions in which it is recorded, determine our future. In the case of Albertine in particular, the fact that it was not necessarily she that I was predestined to love was inscribed, even without those circumambient loves, in the history of my love for her, that is to say for herself and her friends. For it was not even a love like my love for Gilberte, but was created by division among a number of girls. Conceivably it was because of her and because they appeared to me more or less similar to her that I had been attracted to her friends. The fact remains that for a long time it was possible for me to waver between them all, for my choice to stray from one to another, and when I thought that I preferred one, it was enough that another should keep me waiting, should refuse to see me, to make me feel the first premonitions of love for her. Often it might have happened that when Andrée was coming to see me at Balbec, a little before her visit, if Albertine had let me down, my heart would beat without ceasing, I felt that I would never see her again and that it was she whom I loved. And when Andrée came it was quite truthfully that I said to her (as I said to her in Paris after I had learned that Albertine had known Mlle Vinteuil) what she might suppose me to be saying with an ulterior motive, insincerely, what I would indeed have said and in the same words had I been happy with Albertine the day before: “Alas! if you had only come sooner, now I love someone else.” Even then, in this case of Andrée being replaced by Albertine after I learned that the latter had known Mlle Vinteuil, my love had alternated between them, so that after all there had been only one love at a time. But there had been previous cases where I had fallen out with two of the girls. The one who took the first step towards a reconciliation would restore my peace of mind, but it was the other that I would love if she remained hostile, which does not mean that it was not with the former that I would form a definitive tie, for she would console me—however ineffectually—for the harshness of the other, whom I would end by forgetting if she did not return to me. Now, it sometimes happened that, convinced though I was that one or the other at least would come back to me, for some time neither of them did so. My anguish was therefore twofold, and twofold my love; pending the likelihood of my ceasing to love the one who came back, in the meantime I continued to suffer on account of them both. It is our fate at a certain stage in life, which may come to us quite early, to be made less enamoured by a person than by a desertion, in which event we end by knowing one thing and one thing only about the person, her face being dim, her soul non-existent, our preference quite recent and unexplained: namely that what we need to make our suffering cease is a message from her: “May I come and see you?” My separation from Albertine on the day when Françoise had said to me: “Mademoiselle Albertine has gone” was like an allegory of countless other separations. For very often, in order that we may discover that we are in love, perhaps indeed in order that we may fall in love, the day of separation must first have come.

  In these cases, when it is an unkept appointment, a letter of refusal, that dictates one’s choice, one’s imagination, goaded by suffering, sets about its work so swiftly, fashions with so frenzied a rapidity a love that had scarcely begun and remained inchoate, destined, for months past, to remain a rough sketch, that there are times when one’s intelligence, which has been unable to keep pace with one’s heart, cries out in astonishment: “But you must be mad. What are these strange thoughts that are making you so miserable? None of this is real life.” And indeed at that moment, had one not been roused to action by the unfaithful one, a few healthy distractions that would calm one’s heart physically would be sufficient to nip one’s infatuation in the bud. In any case, if this life with Albertine was not in its essence necessary, it had become indispensable to me. I had trembled when I was in love with Mme de Guermantes because I said to myself that, with her too abundant means of seduction, not only beauty but position and wealth, she would be too much at liberty to belong to too many people, that I should have too little hold over her. Alberti
ne, being penniless and obscure, must have been anxious to marry me. And yet I had not been able to possess her exclusively. Whatever our social position, however wise our precautions, when the truth is confessed we have no hold over the life of another person. Why had she not said to me: “I have those tastes”? I would have yielded, would have allowed her to gratify them. In a novel I had read there was a woman whom no objurgation from the man who was in love with her could induce to speak. When I read the book, I had thought this situation absurd; had I been the hero, I assured myself, I would first of all have forced the woman to speak, then we could have come to an understanding. What was the good of all those futile miseries? But I saw now that we are not free to refrain from forging the chains of our own misery, and that however well we may know our own will, other people do not obey it.