The Fugitive

by Marcel Proust

  Yes, she took the tissue paper the day before, but it was not just the day before that she knew that she was going to leave! For it was not sorrow that caused her to leave, but the decision that she had already taken to leave, to renounce the life of which she had dreamed, which gave her that sorrowful air. Sorrowful, almost solemnly cold with me, except the last evening, when, after staying with me longer than she wanted—which astonished me on her part since she usually wanted to stay as long as possible—she stopped at the door and said, “Farewell, my dear, farewell, my dear.” But I paid no attention at the time. Françoise told me that the following morning, when Albertine told her that she was leaving, she was still so sad, and so much more stiff, so much more unbending than the previous days (but this is however also explicable through fatigue, for she had not undressed and had spent all night packing, except for those possessions that were not in her room or her dressing-room), that Françoise nearly fell over when she heard her say, “Farewell, Françoise.” When we hear of such things, we understand that the woman who has come to please us so much less than all those who are so easy to meet on the most casual occasion, the woman we resent for making us sacrifice them for her, is on the contrary the one that we would now prefer a thousand times over. For we are no longer asked to choose between a certain pleasure—which custom and perhaps the mediocrity of its object have rendered almost null and void—and other more tempting and seductive pleasures, but between these pleasures and something even stronger, compassion for her suffering.

  In promising myself that Albertine would return home by the evening, I had risen to the emergency and applied an emotional sticking plaster to the wound opened up by tearing away my old belief. But however swift my instinct for self-preservation had been, I had, when Françoise spoke, remained helpless for a moment, and even though I now knew that Albertine would be back that very evening, the pain I had felt during the instant when I had not yet convinced myself of this return (the instant that had followed the words, “Miss Albertine asked for her trunk, Miss Albertine has left”), surged up again spontaneously within me exactly as before, that is, as if I were still unaware of the imminent return of Albertine. In any case, she must return, but of her own accord. Whichever hypothesis was right, if I seemed to plead with her or engineer her return, it would be counter-productive. There was no doubt that I did not have the strength to renounce her that I had had in the case of Gilberte. Even more than to see Albertine again, what I wanted was to put an end to the physical anguish that my heart, in a worse state than usual, could no longer bear. And then again, from the sheer habit of avoiding any effort of will-power, whether for work or for other things, I had become more of a coward. But above all my anguish was incomparably stronger this time, for many reasons, of which the most important was not perhaps that I had never tasted sensual pleasure with Mme de Guermantes or with Gilberte, but that since I did not see them every hour of every day and had no opportunity, and consequently experienced no need, to do so, my love for them lacked the all-powerful element of Habit. Perhaps, now that my heart, unable to exercise its will and unable to withstand suffering willingly, felt that there was only one possible solution, Albertine’s return at all costs, or perhaps the contrary remedy (deliberate renunciation, gradual resignation), would have struck me as the ending of a novel, implausible in real life, if I had not already opted for this solution myself in the case of Gilberte. I knew therefore that this other solution could also be accepted, and by one and the same man, for I was still more or less the same person. Yet time had played its part, time which had aged me, time which had also placed Albertine perpetually by my side while we were sharing our lives together. But at least, while not renouncing Albertine, what remained for me of what I had felt for Gilberte was the pride of not wanting Albertine to see me as a pathetic puppet if I asked her to return. I did want her to return, but did not want to be seen to care. I got up, so as to waste no time, but suffering stopped me in my tracks: this was the first time that I had got up since Albertine’s departure. And yet I must dress quickly in order to ask her concierge if there was any news.

  Suffering, as the aftermath of an unwelcome moral shock, aspires to change form: we hope to dispel it by making plans, by seeking information; we want it to pass through its countless metamorphoses, for this requires less courage than keeping the suffering raw; we lie with our suffering as in a bed too narrow, too hard, and too cold. So I stood up again; I made my way around the room, but with infinite caution, I took up positions where I would not catch sight of Albertine’s chair, the pianola whose pedals had felt the pressure of her golden slippers, or any of the objects which she had used, and which all, in the private language that my memory had taught them, seemed to offer me a new translation, another draft, announcing the news of her departure a second time. But even without looking I saw them; my strength drained away, I slumped down into one of those blue satin chairs whose sheen, in the chiaroscuro of the room anesthetized by a single shaft of daylight, had an hour earlier invoked in me passionately nurtured dreams, which now seemed utterly remote. Alas! Before this moment I had never sat in one except in Albertine’s presence. So I could not stay seated, I got back on to my feet; and thus at every moment, I had to meet one of those countless, humble selves that compose us who had not yet learned of Albertine’s departure and inform them of it—this task was all more cruel than if they had been strangers, and had not borrowed my sensitivity in order to suffer—to announce the impending misfortune to all of these people, all of these selves who did not yet know it; each one of them in turn needed to hear these words for the first time “Albertine asked for her trunk”—that coffin-shaped trunk which I had seen loaded into the carriage at Balbec along with my mother’s luggage—“Albertine has left.” I had to inform every one of them of my sorrow, that sorrow which is not at all a pessimistic conclusion freely drawn from a collection of sinister circumstances, but the intermittent and involuntary revival of a specific impression, externally provoked rather than chosen by us. Some of these selves I had not seen for quite a while. For instance (I had not realized that it was the day for the barber to call) the self that I was when I had my hair cut. I had forgotten that self, his arrival made me burst out sobbing as would the arrival at a funeral of an old, retired servant who knew the lady who has just died. Then all of a sudden I remembered that over the last week I had been seized from time to time by panic attacks, which I had not admitted to myself. At those moments I had however argued with myself, saying, “Surely there is no point in entertaining the hypothesis that she might suddenly leave. It is absurd. If I had submitted this hypothesis to a sensible and intelligent man (and I would have done, in order to gain peace of mind, if jealousy had not prevented me from taking anyone into my confidence), he would surely have replied: ‘But you are mad. It’s impossible.’ And indeed during those last days we had not had a single quarrel. People leave for a reason. They tell you what it is. They offer the right of reply. They do not just leave. No, that is childish. That is the only absurd hypothesis.” And yet every day, when I found her still there when I rang for her in the morning, I had breathed an enormous sigh of relief. And when Françoise had handed me Albertine’s letter, I had immediately felt sure that it was about the one unthinkable event, a departure somehow sensed several days in advance, despite my logical reasons for being reassured. I had told myself this in my despair with almost self-satisfied perspicacity, like a murderer who knows that he cannot be found out but who is afraid and suddenly sees the name of his victim written at the head of a file on the desk of the examining magistrate who has summoned him to appear. My only hope was that Albertine had gone to see her aunt in Touraine, where she would in fact be quite closely supervised, and could not get up to much harm before I collected her. My worst fear was that she might have stayed in Paris or left for Amsterdam or Montjouvain, that is, that she might have escaped to indulge in some intrigue whose preparations had escaped my attention. But in fact as I thought of P
aris, Amsterdam, Montjouvain, that is, a variety of places, I was thinking of places which were no more than possible; so when Albertine’s concierge replied that she had left for Touraine, the location which I had thought I preferred seemed to me the most awful of all, because it was real and because for the first time, tortured by the certainty of the present and the uncertainty of the future, I could visualize Albertine starting a life intentionally separate from me, perhaps for some time, perhaps for ever, and a life where she would attain that unknown which had formerly so often disturbed me, even though I was lucky enough to possess and to caress what lay outside, her sweet, captive, impenetrable face. It was this unknown which lay at the heart of my love.

  Outside Albertine’s door I found a little poor girl who looked at me wide-eyed and who appeared so kind that I asked her if she wouldn’t like to come home with me, as I might have invited a dog with a faithful look. She seemed pleased. Once at home, I rocked her for a while on my knees, but soon her presence, which made me feel Albertine’s absence too keenly, became intolerable. And I asked her to leave, after giving her a five-hundred-franc note. And yet, soon after, the thought of having some other little girl by my side, of never being alone without the succor of an innocent presence, was the only dream that made me able to bear the idea that Albertine might stay away for some time before she returned. As for Albertine herself, she hardly existed for me as more than a name which, apart from some rare moments of respite on waking, kept inscribing itself into my brain over and over again. If I had thought aloud, I would have repeated it endlessly, and my verbiage would have been as monotonous and limited as if I had been transformed into a bird, like the one in the legend whose call repeats endlessly the name of the woman that he loved when he was a man. You say it to yourself, but as you do not say it out loud, it seems as if you are writing it inside yourself, and it leaves its trace in the brain, which must finally, like a wall on which someone has enjoyed scribbling, be entirely covered by the name of the beloved, rewritten a thousand times. We write it over and over again in our minds as long as we are happy, even more when we are unhappy. And we feel the constantly renewed need to repeat this name which tells us no more than what we already knew, but, in the long run, we also feel fatigue. At this moment I did not even think of carnal pleasure; I did not even see in my mind’s eye the image of that Albertine, although she had been the cause of such a revolution in my being, nor did I perceive her body, and if I had wanted to isolate the idea—for there always is one—that connected it with my suffering, it would have been in alternation, on the one hand, wondering about her state of mind on leaving, whether she hoped to return or not, on the other hand, wondering how to bring her back. Perhaps there is a symbolic truth in the infinitely small place taken up in our anxious feelings by the loved one to whom they relate. For her person itself has little to do with it; it is almost entirely concerned with the sequence of emotions and anxieties which chance made us feel for her at some time or other in the past, and which habit has attached to her. What proves this clearly (even more than the tedium that we find in the midst of happiness) is how indifferent we will feel at seeing or not seeing this same person, being esteemed by her or not, having her at our disposal or not, once we no longer need ask the question only in relation to this person alone (a question so superfluous that we will no longer bother to ask it),—once this sequence of emotions and anxieties is forgotten, at least in so far as they attach to her, for they may have reappeared, but attached to somebody else. Before that, when these emotions and anxieties were still attached to her, we believed that our happiness depended upon her person: but it depended only on ending our anxiety. At that time, therefore, our unconscious was more clear-sighted than we were, reducing the beloved figure to such a small size, a figure which we ourselves had perhaps forgotten, which we might have known imperfectly and believed mediocre, in the terrible drama we enacted where our very lives might have depended on tracking her down in order to cease waiting for her. This scaling-down of the figure of the woman is a logical and necessary effect of the way in which love develops, a clear allegory of the subjective nature of this love.