The Fugitive

by Marcel Proust

  Albertine’s state of mind when she left was no doubt similar in part to that of those peoples who use a display of armed force to prepare the ground for their diplomacy. She must have left me only to obtain from me better terms, greater freedom, more luxury. In that case, I would have emerged victorious, if I had had the strength to hold out, and wait for the moment when, seeing that she had won nothing, she would return of her own accord. But while in cards and in war, where winning alone matters, we can call someone’s bluff, the situation created by love and jealousy, not to mention suffering, is not the same. If I were to let Albertine remain far away from me for several hours, perhaps for several weeks, in order to wait, to “hold out,” I would ruin what had been my goal for more than a year, which was never to leave her alone even for an hour. All my precautions became pointless if I gave her the time and the opportunity to deceive me at her leisure; and if in the end she did surrender, I would never be able to forget the time when she had been alone, and even if finally victorious, I would have suffered defeat in the past, that is to say irrevocably.

  As for the means of bringing Albertine back, they were all the more likely to succeed if the hypothesis that she had left only in the hope of being recalled on more favorable terms appeared to be the most plausible. And doubtless for those who did not believe in Albertine’s sincerity, certainly for Françoise for example, this was the case. But, as far as my reason was concerned, the only explanation for some of her bad moods and attitudes had seemed to be, even before I knew anything, that she was planning her final departure; it was difficult to believe, now that this departure had occurred, that it was only a pretense. I say for my reason, not for my self. I found the hypothesis of a pretense all the more necessary for being improbable and that it gained in strength what it lost in verisimilitude. When we see ourselves on the brink of the precipice and it seems that God has abandoned us, we no longer hesitate to ask him for a miracle. I acknowledge that in all that I was the most lax and yet the most vulnerable of policemen. But Albertine’s flight had not restored to me the powers which the habit of having her watched by others had taken away from me. I could think of only one thing: entrusting someone else with the inquiry. This someone else was Saint-Loup, who agreed. Passing on the anxiety that had haunted me for so many days to someone else made me tremble with joy, as I felt certain of success, and my hands turned suddenly dry as they had been before becoming bathed in the sweat provoked by Françoise when she announced: “Mademoiselle Albertine has left.” We should remember that when I resolved to live with Albertine and even marry her, I had done so in order to hold her, to know what she was doing, to prevent her from returning to her old habits with Mlle Vinteuil. Even while reeling from the savage blow caused by her revelation at Balbec, which she presented as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and even though my grief was greater than any I had ever experienced before, I did manage to find quite natural the one thing that in my worst imaginings I would never have dared suppose. (It is astonishing how jealousy, which spends its time inventing so many petty but false suppositions, lacks imagination when it comes to discovering the truth.) Yet my love, born above all of the need to prevent Albertine from doing wrong, had subsequently retained the mark of its origins. Being with her was not important, as long as I could prevent my “runaway” from wandering here and there at will. In order to prevent her I had used as witnesses those who accompanied her, and, as long as their evening reports, however short, were safely reassuring, my worries would dissolve into a feeling of good humor.

  Once I had convinced myself that, whatever I might need to do, Albertine would be back home that very evening, this eased the suffering that Françoise had unleashed when she told me that Albertine had left (since at the time I was taken unawares and believed for the moment that her departure was irrevocable). But after a while, when the initial pain welled up again spontaneously inside me, throbbing with its own independent life, it was still as terrible as ever, because it preceded the soothing promise that I had made myself to bring Albertine back that very evening. My suffering heart was unaware of this declared intention, which ought to have assuaged it. In order to deploy the means necessary to ensure her return, I was condemned to act once more as if I were not in love with her and were not suffering from her departure, I was condemned to continue lying to her—not that I had ever been very successful with this course of action, but because I had always adopted it since I had been in love with Albertine. I could be all the more energetic in finding ways to get her to return, in so far as I was the one who appeared to have renounced her. I decided to write Albertine a farewell letter in which I would assume her departure to be final, while I would send Saint-Loup to exert the most brutal pressure on Mme Bontemps, as if I were unaware of it, in order to get Albertine back as soon as possible. Doubtless, I had learned with Gilberte the danger of writing letters whose indifference, at first feigned, finally becomes true. And this experience should have prevented me from sending Albertine letters of the same type that I had written to Gilberte. But what we call experience is only the revelation to our own eyes of one of our own character traits, which recurs naturally, and recurs all the more powerfully if we have already on some previous occasion brought it up into the clear light of consciousness, so that the spontaneous reaction which had guided us the first time becomes reinforced by all the suggestions of memory. The kind of plagiarism which it is most difficult for any human individual to avoid (and even for whole nations, who persist in reproducing their faults and aggravate them in so doing) is self-plagiarism.

  I had commandeered Saint-Loup immediately, knowing him to be in Paris; he rushed to my side, as swiftly and effectively as previously at Doncières, and agreed to leave straight away for Touraine. I suggested the following stratagem. He would stop at Châtellerault, ask for directions to Mme Bontemps’s house, and wait until Albertine had gone out, to avoid meeting her. “But does this mean that the young lady you mention knows me?” he asked. I told him that I did not think so. The prospect of his action filled me with unbounded joy. And yet it was in total contradiction with what I had promised myself at the outset: which was to find a way to avoid appearing to send anyone to look for Albertine; now this would inevitably seem to be the case; but it had an inestimable advantage over “what I should have done,” in that it allowed me to say to myself that someone sent by me would see Albertine, and doubtless bring her back. And if I had been able to see clearly into my heart at the outset, it would have been this solution, which lay lurking in the shadows, but which I found deplorable, that I might have guessed would take precedence over the prudent course of action which I had decided to adopt, from lack of will power. Since Saint-Loup had already seemed slightly surprised that I had had a young lady living with me over the winter without telling him anything about it, and since in addition he had often asked after the young lady from Balbec and I had never replied, “But she lives here,” he could have been offended by my lack of confidence in him. It was true that Mme Bontemps might talk to him about Balbec. But I waited too impatiently on his departure and his arrival to be willing or able to consider the possible consequences of his journey. As for whether he would recognize Albertine (whom he had in any case systematically avoided looking at when he had met her at Doncières), everyone agreed that she had changed so much and put on so much weight that it was hardly likely. He asked me whether I might not have a portrait of Albertine. At first I said not, so that my photograph, taken at about the time we had met in Balbec, would not give him the opportunity to recognize Albertine, even though he had barely glimpsed her in the railway carriage. But I reflected that in her most recent photograph she would be as different from the Balbec Albertine as the living Albertine was now and that he would no more recognize her in the photograph than in real life. While I looked it out for him, he smoothed my brow gently with his hand, trying to console me. I was moved by the sorrow that he felt on imagining my suffering. In the first place, although he
was separated from Rachel, what he had felt at the time was not so far in the past that he did not feel a particular sympathy and pity for this kind of suffering, as we feel closer to someone who has the same kind of illness as us. And then again, he felt such affection for me that he found the thought of my suffering unbearable. Thus for the woman who caused it he felt a mixture of resentment and admiration. He saw me as such a superior being that for me to be so subservient to another, she must be an absolutely extraordinary creature. I imagined that he would find Albertine’s photograph pretty, but even so I did not think that it would have the same impact on him as Helen on the old men of Troy,1 so while I kept searching for it, I said modestly: “Oh, you mustn’t expect too much, you know, in the first place it’s not a good photo, and anyway she’s not very striking, she’s no great beauty, but she is very sweet.” “Oh, no, she must be marvelous,” he said with sincere and naïve enthusiasm, while trying to picture the person who could throw me into such a state of agitation and despair. “I blame her for hurting you, but of course it was very likely to happen to someone like you, artistic to your fingertips, loving beauty in all things, and so passionately, you were bound to suffer more than others when you found it in a woman.” At last I found the photograph. “She must be marvelous,” Robert continued, without realizing that I was holding out the photograph. Suddenly he noticed it and held it for a moment in his hands. His face registered a surprise that bordered on stupefaction. “Is this the girl that you love?” he said finally, in a voice whose astonishment was muted by the fear of offending me. He made no comment, but had taken on the judicious, prudent and inevitably slightly condescending air that we adopt in the face of an invalid—even if the patient has previously been a remarkable man, or even your friend—who is no longer recognizable, for he is stricken with raving madness and is talking to you of a celestial being who has appeared to him and whom he continues to see exactly where you, the normal man, see only his eiderdown. I immediately understood Robert’s astonishment, which was the same as that which had engulfed me when I had caught sight of his mistress, with the only difference that I had found her to be a woman whom I already knew, whereas he believed that he had never seen Albertine. But doubtless in each case the difference between what each of us saw in the same person was just as great. It had been so long since I had tentatively started at Balbec to add the sensations of taste, smell and touch to the visual experience of watching Albertine. Since then, deeper, sweeter and less definable sensations had been added, and then painful feelings. In short Albertine, like a stone covered in snow, was no more than the core of an immense construction elaborated by my heart. All these layers of sensations were invisible to Robert, who grasped only the residue, which my system on the contrary prevented me from perceiving. What had disturbed Robert when he had seen Albertine’s photograph was not the excitement of the old men of Troy saying, as they saw Helen pass:

  Notre mal ne vaut pas un seul de ses regards,2

  but exactly the opposite reaction, making him feel, “But is this what has given you so much heartache, so much sorrow, led you into such folly?” We have to admit that this kind of reaction to the sight of the person who has wounded and disturbed the life, and sometimes caused the death, of someone we love is infinitely more common than that of the old men of Troy, and, we must admit, is the norm. This is not only because love is individual, nor because, when we do not feel it, we find it natural to judge it avoidable and comment upon the folly of others. No, it is also because when love has reached the stage when it causes such misery, the network of sensations interwoven between the face of the woman and the eyes of the lover, the fragile cocoon which protects and hides it, much as a layer of snow cloaks a fountain, has already grown so far that the point where the lover’s eyes focus, the point where he confronts his pleasure and his pains, are as far from the point where others see them as is the real sun from the point where its condensed light makes us perceive it in the sky. And moreover during this time, beneath the chrysalis of pain and tenderness which renders the worst metamorphoses of the beloved invisible for the lover, her face has had time to age and change. With the result that, if the face which the lover saw for the first time is far removed from the one that he has seen since he has been in love and suffering, so, conversely, it is equally removed from the one that the indifferent spectator is able now to see. (What if, instead of the photograph of a young woman, Robert had seen that of an aging mistress?) And we do not even have to see the woman who has caused so much distress for the first time in order to experience this astonishment. Often we knew her already, as my great-uncle knew Odette. In this case the difference of perspective affects not only someone’s physical appearance but also their character and their individual impact. It is perfectly likely that the woman who makes her lover suffer has always been very friendly to someone who was not interested in her, as Odette, so cruel to Swann, had been the kind-hearted “lady in pink” for my great-uncle; or likely perhaps that the person whose every move is anxiously anticipated by her lover, with all the awe that would be due to a deity, appears as an inconsequential person, only too pleased to do anything required, in the eyes of a man who does not love her, as did Saint-Loup’s mistress for me, since I saw in her no more than “Rachel, when of the Lord,” who had so often been offered up to me. I remembered my stupefaction the first time that I had seen her with Saint-Loup, at the thought that one could feel tormented by not knowing what some woman had done one evening, what she might have said under her breath to someone, why she might have wanted to leave. Now I felt that this familiar story, although now that of Albertine, toward whom every cord of my heart and my life was straining in a frantic and chaotic process of suffering, must appear just as trivial to Saint-Loup, and that one day it must appear so to me; that gradually, in my feelings about the gravity or the insignificance of Albertine’s past, I might pass from my state of mind at this moment to that of Saint-Loup, for I had no illusions as to what Saint-Loup must think, as to what anyone apart from the lover himself must think. And I was not too worried. Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination. I remembered the tragic account of so many lives provided by a brilliant but an unrealistic portrait such as that of Odette by Elstir, which is, however, less the portrait of a woman in love than a portrait of love and how it disfigures. All that was missing was—an attribute present in so many portraits—that he should be not only a great painter but also her lover (and even then there were people who said that Elstir had been Odette’s lover). This disparity is proved by the whole life of a lover, a lover like Swann, whose follies nobody understands. But if the lover is also a painter like Elstir, then the answer to the riddle is at hand, we at last have before our eyes the lips which common mortals have never perceived in this woman, the nose which nobody realized she had, that unsuspected allure. The portrait says: “What I have loved, what has made me suffer, what I have always seen, is this.” By an inverse operation from the one where I had tried to invest Rachel in my mind with everything that Saint-Loup had added to her of himself, I tried to subtract my emotional and intellectual accretions from my composition of Albertine and to picture her just as she must appear to Saint-Loup, as Rachel had appeared to me. And even if we were to notice such differences ourselves, what importance would we ascribe to them? And when in former times at Balbec Albertine waited for me under the arcades of Incarville and leaped into my car, not only had she not yet “filled out,” but as a result of too much exercise she had rather melted away; she was so thin, and disfigured by an unattractive hat, which allowed only a glimpse of an unappealing part of her nose and a sidelong glance at cheeks as white as maggots, I recognized very little of her, yet enough for me to know as she leaped into my car that it was Albertine, that she had kept the appointment on time and had not gone elsewhere; and this was enough; what we love lives too deep in the past, consists too much in the time we wasted together for us to need the whole woman; we want to be sure only that she is the one, not
to mistake her identity, which is far more important for the lover than her beauty; her cheeks may shrink, her body wither, even in the eyes of those who seemed to others at first most proud to possess a beauty, and yet her sharp little nose, that feature epitomizing her enduring personality, that algebraic remainder, that constant factor, is enough to prevent a man who frequents the highest social circles, if he is in love with her, from enjoying a single evening’s peace, because he spends hour after hour, until bedtime, combing and uncombing the hair of the woman he loves, or simply staying at her side, to be with her, or to be sure that she is with him, or even simply to prevent her from being with anyone else.

  “Are you sure,” Robert asked, “that I can just come right out and offer this woman thirty thousand francs for her husband’s electoral committee? Is she so dishonest? If you are right, three thousand francs would be enough.” “No, I beg of you, don’t try to save money on something which I hold so dear. What you must say, and there is some truth to it, is this: ‘My friend had asked one of his relatives for these thirty thousand francs for a committee run by his fiancée’s uncle. It’s because of his engagement that they gave him the money. And he asked me to give it to you so that Albertine would know nothing about it. And now Albertine is leaving him. He does not know what to do. He is obliged to return the thirty thousand francs if he does not marry Albertine. And if he does marry her, she ought to return straight away, if only for the sake of appearances, because it would look really bad if she stayed on the run for too long.’ Does that sound as if I made it up?” “No, not at all.” Saint-Loup replied, from kindness and from tact, and also because he knew that circumstances are often much more bizarre than we think. After all, there was no reason why there should not be, as I told him, a considerable element of truth in this thirty-thousand-franc story. It was possible, but it was not true, and it was precisely the most truthful element that was the lie. But Robert and I did lie to each other, as happens in any conversation when one friend sincerely wishes to help another who is suffering from despair in his love life. The friend who offers counsel, support and consolation can sympathize with the other’s distress, but not feel it, and the more he tries to help, the more he lies. And his friend confesses all that he needs in order to be helped, but, precisely in order to be helped, may keep many things hidden. And it is the helper who is happy, whatever pains he takes, however long his journey, for he accomplishes his mission and feels no inner suffering. At this moment I was in the same position as Robert had been at Doncières when he thought that Rachel had left him. “Very well, as you wish; if I encounter opposition I’ll face it willingly, for your sake. And although I find it rather odd to set up such a blatant deal, I know well enough that even in our own circles there are duchesses, even the most strait-laced, who would do more embarrassing things for thirty thousand francs than tell their nieces not to stay in Touraine. But in any case, it doubles my pleasure to do you this favor, if that is what it takes for you to agree to see me. If I get married,” he added, “might we not see more of each other, might you not come to feel as much at home in my house as yours?” He stopped suddenly, having thought, I presumed, that if I too were to marry, Albertine could not become a close friend of his wife. And I remembered what the Cambremers had told me about his likely marriage with the daughter of the Prince de Guermantes.