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

by Marcel Proust

  And yet how often we had expressed them, those painful, those ineluctable truths which dominated us and to which we were blind, the truth of our feelings, the truth of our destiny, how often we had expressed them without knowing it, without meaning it, in words which doubtless we ourselves thought mendacious but the prophetic force of which had been established by subsequent events. I remembered many words that each of us had uttered without knowing at the time the truth that they contained, which indeed we had said thinking that we were play-acting and yet the falseness of which was very slight, very uninteresting, wholly confined within our pitiable insincerity, compared with what they contained unbeknown to us—lies and errors falling short of the profound reality which neither of us perceived, truth extending beyond it, the truth of our natures, the essential laws of which escape us and require Time before they reveal themselves, the truth of our destinies also. I had believed myself to be lying when I said to her at Balbec: “The more I see you, the more I shall love you” (and yet it was that constant intimacy which, through the medium of jealousy, had attached me so strongly to her), “I feel that I could be of use to you intellectually;” and in Paris: “Do be careful. Remember that if you met with an accident, it would break my heart” (and she: “But I may meet with an accident”); in Paris too, on the evening when I had pretended that I wished to leave her: “Let me look at you once again since presently I shall not be seeing you again, and it will be for ever!” and she, when that same evening she had looked round the room: “To think that I shall never see this room again, those books, that pianola, the whole house, I cannot believe it and yet it’s true.” In her last letters again, when she had written (probably saying to herself that it was eyewash): “I leave you the best of myself” (and was it not now indeed to the fidelity, to the strength—also too frail, alas—of my memory that her intelligence, her kindness, her beauty were entrusted?) and: “That moment of double twilight, since night was falling and we were about to part, will be effaced from my thoughts only when the darkness is complete” (that sentence written on the eve of the day when her mind had indeed been plunged into complete darkness, and when, in those last brief glimmers which the anguish of the moment subdivides ad infinitum, she had indeed perhaps recalled our last drive together and in that instant when everything forsakes us and we create a faith for ourselves, as atheists turn Christian on the battlefield, she had perhaps summoned to her aid the friend whom she had so often cursed but had so deeply respected, who himself—for all religions are alike—was cruel enough to hope that she had also had time to see herself as she was, to give her last thought to him, to confess her sins at length to him, to die in him).

  But to what purpose, since even if, at that moment, she had had time to see herself as she was, we had both of us understood where our happiness lay, what we ought to do, only when, only because, that happiness was no longer possible, when and because we could no longer do it—whether it is that, so long as things are possible, we postpone them, or that they cannot assume that force of attraction, that apparent ease of realisation except when, projected on to the ideal void of the imagination, they are removed from their deadening and degrading submersion in physical being. The idea that one will die is more painful than dying, but less painful than the idea that another person is dead, that, becoming once more a still, plane surface after having engulfed a person, a reality extends, without even a ripple at the point of disappearance, from which that person is excluded, in which there no longer exists any will, any knowledge, and from which it is as difficult to reascend to the idea that that person has lived as, from the still recent memory of his life, it is to think that he is comparable with the insubstantial images, the memories, left us by the characters in a novel we have been reading.

  At any rate I was glad that before she died she had written me that letter, and above all had sent me that final message which proved to me that she would have returned had she lived. It seemed to me that it was not merely more soothing, but more beautiful also, that the event would have been incomplete without that message, would not have had so markedly the form of art and destiny. In reality it would have been just as markedly so had it been different; for every event is like a mould of a particular shape, and, whatever it may be, it imposes, upon the series of incidents which it has interrupted and seems to conclude, a pattern which we believe to be the only possible one, because we do not know the other which might have been substituted for it.

  Why, I repeated to myself, had she not said to me: “I have those tastes”? I would have yielded, would have allowed her to gratify them; at this moment I would be kissing her still. How sad it was to have to remind myself that she had lied to me thus when she swore to me, three days before she left me, that she had never had with Mlle Vinteuil’s friend those relations which at the moment when she swore it her blush had confessed! Poor child, she had at least had the honesty to be reluctant to swear that the pleasure of seeing Mlle Vinteuil again had no part in her desire to go that day to the Verdurins’. Why had she not made her admission complete? Perhaps, however, it was partly my fault that she had never, despite all my entreaties which were powerless against her denial, been willing to say to me: “I have those tastes.” It was perhaps partly my fault because at Balbec, on the day when, after Mme de Cambremer’s visit, I had had things out with Albertine for the first time, and when I was so far from imagining that she could possibly have had anything more than a rather too passionate friendship with Andrée, I had expressed with undue violence my disgust at those proclivities, had condemned them too categorically. I could not recall whether Albertine had blushed when I had naively expressed my horror of that sort of thing, for it is often only long afterwards that we long to know what attitude a person adopted at a moment when we were paying no attention to it, an attitude which, later on, when we think again of our conversation, would elucidate an agonising problem. But in our memory there is a blank, there is no trace of it. And very often we have not paid sufficient attention, at the actual moment, to the things which might even then have seemed to us important, we have not properly heard a sentence, have not noticed a gesture, or else we have forgotten them. And when later on, eager to discover a truth, we work back from deduction to deduction, leafing through our memory like a sheaf of written evidence, when we arrive at that sentence, at that gesture, we find it impossible to remember, and we repeat the process a score of times, in vain: the road goes no further. Had she blushed? I do not know whether she had blushed, but she could not have failed to hear, and the memory of my words had pulled her up later on when perhaps she had been on the point of confessing to me. And now she no longer existed anywhere; I could have scoured the earth from pole to pole without finding Albertine; the reality which had closed over her was once more unbroken, had obliterated every trace of the being who had sunk without trace. She was now no more than a name, like that Mme de Charlus of whom people who had known her said with indifference: “She was charming.” But I could not conceive for more than an instant the existence of this reality of which Albertine had no knowledge, for in me she existed only too vividly, in me whose every feeling, every thought, related to her life. Perhaps, if she had known, she would have been touched to see that her lover had not forgotten her, now that her own life was finished, and would have been sensitive to things which in the past had left her indifferent. But as we would choose to abstain from infidelities, however secret, so fearful are we that she whom we love is not abstaining from them, I was terrified by the thought that if the dead do exist somewhere, my grandmother was as well aware of my forgetfulness as Albertine of my remembrance. And when all is said, even in the case of a single dead person, can we be sure that the joy we should feel in learning that she knows certain things would compensate for our alarm at the thought that she knows them all; and, however agonising the sacrifice, would we not sometimes forbear to keep those we have loved as friends after their death, for fear of having them also as judges?

  My jealous cu
riosity as to what Albertine might have done was unbounded. I suborned any number of women from whom I learned nothing. If this curiosity was so tenacious, it was because people do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were travelling abroad. This is a thoroughly pagan survival. Conversely, when we have ceased to love, the curiosity which people arouse dies before they themselves are dead. Thus I would no longer have taken a single step to find out with whom Gilberte had been strolling on a certain evening in the Champs-Elysées. Now, I was well aware that these two forms of curiosity were absolutely identical, had no value in themselves, were incapable of lasting. But I continued to sacrifice everything to the cruel satisfaction of this transient curiosity, although I knew in advance that my enforced separation from Albertine, by the fact of her death, would lead me to the same indifference as had resulted from my voluntary separation from Gilberte.

  If she could have known what was going to happen, she would have stayed with me. But this simply amounted to saying that, once she saw herself dead, she would have preferred to remain alive with me. Because of the very contradiction that it implied, such a supposition was absurd. But it was not innocuous, for in imagining how glad Albertine would be, if she could know, if she could retrospectively understand, to come back to me, I saw her before me, I wanted to kiss her, and alas, it was impossible, she would never come back, she was dead.

  My imagination sought for her in the sky, at nightfall when, still together, we had gazed at it; beyond that moonlight which she loved, I tried to raise up to her my tenderness so that it might be a consolation to her for being no longer alive, and this love for a being who was now so remote was like a religion; my thoughts rose towards her like prayers. Desire is powerful indeed: it engenders belief; I had believed that Albertine would not leave me because I desired that she should not do so. Because I desired it, I began to believe that she was not dead; I took to reading books about table-turning; I began to believe in the possibility of the immortality of the soul. But that did not suffice me. I required that, after my own death, I should find her again in her body, as though eternity were like life. Life, did I say? I say?I was more exacting still. I should have liked not to be for ever deprived by death of the pleasures of which in any case it is not alone in robbing us. For without it they would eventually have lost their edge; indeed they had already begun to do so through the effect of long-established habit, of fresh curiosities. Besides, had she been alive, Albertine, even physically, would gradually have changed; day by day I would have adapted myself to that change. But my memory, calling up only detached moments of her life, demanded to see her again as she would already have ceased to be had she lived; what it wanted was a miracle that would satisfy the natural and arbitrary limitations of memory, which cannot escape from the past. And yet, with the naivety of the old theologians, I imagined this living creature vouchsafing me not simply the explanations which she might possibly have given me but, by a final contradiction, those that she had always refused me during her life. And thus, her death being a sort of dream, my love would seem to her an unlooked-for happiness; all I retained of death was the comfort and the optimism of a denouement which simplifies, which settles everything.

  Sometimes it was not so far off, it was not in another world, that I imagined our reunion. Just as, in the past, when I knew Gilberte only from playing with her in the Champs-Elysées, at home in the evening I used to imagine that I was about to receive a letter from her in which she would confess her love for me, that she was about to come into the room, so a similar force of desire, no more troubled by the laws of nature which inhibited it than on the former occasion, in the case of Gilberte (when after all it had not been mistaken since it had had the last word), made me think now that I was about to receive a message from Albertine, informing me that she had indeed had a riding accident but that for romantic reasons (and as, after all, has sometimes happened with people whom we have long believed to be dead) she had not wished me to hear of her recovery and now, repentant, asked to be allowed to come and live with me for ever. And—giving me an insight into the nature of certain mild lunacies in people who otherwise appear sane—I felt co-existing in me the certainty that she was dead and the constant hope that I might see her come into the room.

  I had not yet received news from Aimé, although he must by now have reached Balbec. No doubt my inquiry turned upon a secondary point, and one quite arbitrarily chosen. If Albertine’s life had been really culpable, it must have contained many other things of far greater importance, which chance had not allowed me to consider as it had in the case of the conversation about the bathing-wrap and Albertine’s blushes. But those things precisely did not exist for me since I had not seen them. But it was quite arbitrarily that I had hit upon that particular day and, several years later, was trying to reconstruct it. If Albertine had been a lover of women, there were thousands of other days in her life which I did not know how she had spent and about which it might be just as interesting for me to learn; I might have sent Aimé to many other places in Balbec, to many other towns besides Balbec. But these other days, precisely because I did not know how she had spent them, did not present themselves to my imagination, had no existence for it. Things and people did not begin to exist for me until they assumed in my imagination an individual existence. If there were thousands of others like them, they became for me representative of all the rest. If I had long felt a desire to know, in the matter of my suspicions with regard to Albertine, what exactly had happened in the baths, it was in the same manner in which, in the matter of my desires for women, and although I knew that there were any number of young girls and lady’s-maids who could satisfy them and whom chance might just as easily have brought to my notice, I wished to know—since it was they whom Saint-Loup had mentioned to me, they who existed individually for me—the girl who frequented houses of ill fame and Mme Putbus’s maid. The difficulties which my health, my indecision, my “procrastination,” as M. de Charlus called it, placed in the way of my carrying anything through, had made me put off from day to day, from month to month, from year to year, the elucidation of certain suspicions as well as the accomplishment of certain desires. But I retained them in my memory, promising myself that I would not forget to learn the truth of them, because they alone obsessed me (since the others had no form in my eyes, did not exist), and also because the very accident that had chosen them out of the surrounding reality gave me a guarantee that it was indeed in them that I should come in contact with a trace of the reality, of the true and coveted life. Besides, is not a single small fact, if it is well chosen, sufficient to enable the experimenter to deduce a general law which will reveal the truth about thousands of analogous facts? Although Albertine might exist in my memory only as she had successively appeared to me in the course of her life, that is, subdivided in accordance with a series of fractions of time, my mind, reestablishing unity in her, made her a single person, and it was on this person that I wished to arrive at a general judgment, to know whether she had lied to me, whether she loved women, whether it was in order to associate with them freely that she had left me. What the woman in the baths would have to say might perhaps put an end for ever to my doubts as to Albertine’s proclivities.

  My doubts! Alas, I had supposed that it would be immaterial to me, even agreeable, not to see Albertine again, until her departure had revealed to me my error. Similarly her death had shown me how greatly I had been mistaken in believing that I sometimes wished for her death and supposed that it would be my deliverance. So it was that, when I received Aimé’s letter, I realised that if I had not until then suffered too painfully from my doubts as to Albertine’s virtue it was because in reality they were not doubts at all. My happiness, my life required that Albertine should be virtuous; they had laid it down once and for all that she was. Armed with this se
lf-protective belief, I could with impunity allow my mind to play sadly with suppositions to which it gave a form but lent no credence. I said to myself, “She is perhaps a woman-lover,” as we say “I may die tonight;” we say it, but we do not believe it, we make plans for the following day. This explains why, believing mistakenly that I was uncertain whether Albertine did or did not love women, and believing in consequence that a proof of Albertine’s guilt would not tell me anything that I had not often envisaged, I experienced, in the face of the images, insignificant to anyone else, which Aimé’s letter evoked for me, an unexpected anguish, the most painful that I had ever yet felt, and one that formed with those images, with the image, alas! of Albertine herself, a sort of precipitate, as they say in chemistry, in which everything was indivisible and of which the text of Aimé’s letter, which I isolate in a purely conventional fashion, can give no idea whatsoever, since each of the words that compose it was immediately transformed, coloured for ever by the suffering it had just aroused.