From the moment that I awoke and resumed my sorrows at the point where I had left off before falling asleep, like a book closed for an instant but which would haunt me all day until evening, it could only be with thoughts about Albertine that any feelings, whether arising from within or without, might be associated. The door-bell rang: it’s a letter from her, perhaps herself in person! If I was feeling well, and neither too unhappy nor too jealous, and had nothing to reproach her with, then I wished I could see her soon, embrace her, and spend the rest of my life in happiness by her side. To telegraph her saying, “Come quickly” seemed to me to have become an entirely simple thing to do, as if my new mood had changed not only my inner disposition but the external circumstances of our relationship and had made everything easier. If I was in somber mood, and all my anger against her returned, then I no longer wanted to embrace her, I felt that it would be impossible ever to attain happiness through her, and I wanted nothing but to harm her and prevent her from belonging to anyone else. But the result of these two contradictory moods was identical, she must return as soon as possible. And yet, however much joy her return might give me when it happened, I felt that the same difficulties would soon arise again and that seeking happiness through satisfying my inner desires was as naïve as undertaking to reach the horizon by simply walking forward in a straight line. The more desire advances, the more true possession recedes. So that if it is possible to obtain happiness, or at least freedom from suffering, what we should seek is not the satisfaction, but the gradual reduction and final elimination of desire. We try to see those we love, we should try not to see them, for only the process of forgetting leads finally to the extinction of desire. And I imagine that if an author wanted to express this kind of truth, he would seek to approach the woman concerned by dedicating his book to her, saying, “This is your book.” And thus, in telling the truth in the book he would be lying in the dedication, for he will want the book to be hers only in the same way that he takes possession of the gemstone that she gave him, which he will only consider precious as long as he still loves the woman. The links between another person and ourselves exist only in our minds. Memory weakens them as it fades, and despite the illusions which we hope will deceive us and with which, whether from love, friendship, politeness, human respect or from duty, we hope to deceive others, we exist on our own. Man is a being who cannot move beyond his own boundaries, who knows others only within himself, and if he alleges the contrary, he is lying. And I would have been so afraid that someone might take away my need for her and my love for her, had they been able to do so, that I convinced myself that these were essential for my life. To be able to hear the names of the stations on the railway line to Touraine without feeling pleasure or pain would have seemed to me a diminution of the self (simply because deep down this would have proved that I was becoming indifferent to Albertine). I told myself, while I could not stop wondering what she might be doing, thinking and hoping at every moment, wondering whether she intended to and was going to return, that it was in my interest to keep open the communicating door that love had unlocked within me and feel a different woman’s life burst through the floodgates and pour into the reservoir which would otherwise have dried up. Soon, as Saint-Loup’s silence continued, a secondary anxiety—waiting for a telegram or a telephone call from Saint-Loup—masked the first anxiety, worrying over the outcome, wondering whether Albertine would return. Listening out for every sound while expecting a telegram became so intolerable for me that the arrival of this telegram, whatever it might say, was the only thing that I could think of now that might put an end to my suffering. But when I did finally receive a telegram from Robert, where he told me that he had seen Mme Bontemps, but had been seen by Albertine despite all his precautions, which had ruined everything, I exploded with fury and despair, for this was what I had wanted to avoid above all. Now that Albertine had found out about it, Saint-Loup’s journey would make me appear to hold her dear in a way that could only prevent her from returning, and what is more, my horror of this was the last shred of pride surviving from my love for Gilberte, and now it was lost. I cursed Robert, then told myself that if these means had failed, I would use others. Since man can have an impact on the external world, how could I not manage, by exploiting cunning, intelligence, money and affection, to suppress this atrocious thing: the absence of Albertine? We believe that we may change things around us to suit our desires, we believe this because otherwise we can see no acceptable solution. We do not think of the solution which occurs most frequently and which is also acceptable: when we do not manage to change things to suit our desires, but our desires gradually change. We become indifferent to a situation which we had hoped to change when we found it unbearable. We were not able to overcome the obstacle, although this was our only desire, yet life led us round or beyond it, and afterward, if we turn back toward the past we can hardly catch sight of it in the distance, so imperceptible has it become. I heard some tunes from Manon3 played by one of our neighbors on the floor above ours. I applied their familiar words to Albertine and myself, and I was filled with such deep feelings that I began to weep. They were:
Hélas, l’oiseau qui fuit ce qu’il croit l’esclavage,
Le plus souvent, la nuit d’un vol désespéré revient battre au vitrage4
and the death of Manon:
Manon réponds-moi donc!—Seul amour de mon âme,
Je n’ai su qu’aujourd’hui la bonté de ton cœur.5
Since Manon did return to Des Grieux, it seemed to me that for Albertine I was the only love of her life. Alas, it is likely that if she had been able to listen to the same tune at that moment, it would not have been me that she would have cherished under the name of Des Grieux, and, if she had thought of it for even a moment, her memories of me would have prevented her from weakening as she listened to this music, which was however very much the kind of music that she liked, although better written and more subtle.
As for me, I was not brave enough to yield to the sweetness of thinking that Albertine used to call me her “soul’s only love” and had recognized that she had been mistaken over her “seeming slavery.” I knew that one cannot read a novel without lending its heroine the features of the woman that one loves. Yet even if the book does have a happy ending, our love has not progressed an inch, and when we have finished it, the woman whom we love and who has finally surrendered to us in the novel, does not in real life love us any more than she did before. I sent Saint-Loup a furious telegram demanding his immediate return to Paris, to avoid at least the appearance of aggravating through added persistence the intervention which I had so wanted to keep secret. But even before he had returned in accordance with my instructions, I had received the following telegram from Albertine herself:
my dear friend, you have sent your friend saint-loup to see my aunt, which was ridiculous. if you needed me, my dear, why did you not write directly to me? i would have been only too pleased to return: do not try any such absurd approach again. “I would have been only too pleased to return!” If she said this, it must mean that she regretted having left, and that she was looking only for an excuse to return. So I only had to do what she said, write and tell her that I needed her, and she would return. So I was going to see her again, my Balbec Albertine (for, since her departure, this is what she had become for me. Like a sea-shell which we no longer notice because it is always placed on top of the same chest of drawers, but which, despite having entirely forgotten it, we call to mind as soon it has disappeared, whether because we lost it or because we gave it away, she recalled for me all the joyous beauty of the blue hills of the sea). And it was not only because she had become an imaginary, that is, a desirable creature, but because my life with her had become an imaginary life, that is, a life liberated from all problems, that I said to myself, “How happy we shall be!” But as soon as I was assured of her return, I should not appear to precipitate things, but on the contrary erase the bad impression
created by Saint-Loup’s intervention, which I might always disclaim later by saying that he had acted on his own initiative because he had always been in favor of our marriage.
However, as I reread her words I was none the less a little disappointed to realize how little of our person remains in our correspondence. Of course the characters we trace express our thoughts, as do our features; it is always a process of thinking that confronts us. But even so, in a person, thought appears to us only after being filtered through the bloom of the face, flowering like a water-lily only on the surface. And this, it has to be said, does modify it considerably. And perhaps one of the causes of our perpetual disappointment in love is this perpetual slippage, which causes every anticipation of the ideal being whom we love to be confronted at each meeting by a flesh-and-blood person who already has little in common with our dream. And then, when we expect something from this person, what we receive from her is a letter where very little of the person herself remains, as in those letters used in algebraic formulae, where there remains none of the qualities characterized by the arithmetical numbers, which themselves already no longer encapsulated the properties of the fruit or the flowers that were being assessed. And yet love itself, the experience of being loved, or reading love letters, are perhaps none the less translations—however unsatisfactory it is to pass from one to the other—of the same reality, since the letter seems insufficient only while we are reading it, and yet we sweat blood and tears as long as we await its arrival, and it does suffice to calm our anguish, even if its little black marks do not entirely assuage our desire, which feels in spite of everything that these are no more than an approximation to speech, smiles and kisses rather than those things themselves.
I wrote to Albertine:
“My dear friend, I was in fact just about to write to you, and I am grateful to you for telling me that, had I needed you, you would have come with all speed; it is good of you to interpret in such noble fashion your duty to an old friend, and my esteem for you can only be enhanced. But, actually, no, I had not asked you to return and shall not ask you to; perhaps an unemotional young woman like you might not find it painful to meet again, at least in the distant future. But I, whom you have sometimes believed so indifferent, would find it much more so. Life has led us apart. You have taken a decision which seems to me very wise and is one which you have taken at the right moment, with remarkable foresight, for you left me the very day after I had just received my mother’s consent to ask for your hand. I would have told you on waking, when I received her letter (at the same time as yours!). Perhaps you would have feared upsetting me if you had left in those circumstances. And perhaps we might have united our lives for what might, who knows, have been our misfortune? If that were to be our fate, bless you for your wise decision. We would lose all the benefit of this were we to meet again. I do not say that I would not find this very tempting. But I have no great merit in resisting. You know how inconstant and forgetful I am. So I am not much to be pitied. You have often said yourself what a creature of habit I am. The habits which I am starting to form in your absence are not yet very strong. Obviously for the moment those which we had acquired together and which your departure has disturbed are still stronger. They will not remain so for much longer. I even thought, for this reason, that I would make the most of these last few days where meeting you would not yet be for me what in a fortnight, or earlier perhaps (excusing my frankness), it will become, that is, a nuisance,—I had thought that I would make the most of it, before we finally forget each other, to settle one or two minor material matters with you, whereby the generous and charming friend that I know you to be might do a favor to the man who for a few moments believed himself to be engaged to you. As I had no reason to doubt my mother’s approval, and as, on the other hand, I wished each of us to dispose of that freedom which you have too kindly and abundantly sacrificed on my behalf, which could be envisaged if we intended to spend even only a few weeks of our lives living together, but which would have become as odious to you as to me once we were due to spend the whole of our lives together (in writing this to you I feel almost hurt to think that we were only a few seconds away from bringing this to fruition), I had thought to organize our existence along the most independent lines possible and, to start with, I wanted you to have a yacht on which you might have sailed while I was too ill to do anything but wait for you in port; I had written to Elstir to ask for his advice, since you appreciate his taste. And back on dry land, I would have wished you to have a motor-car all to yourself, which you would use for your own visits and travel at your leisure. The yacht was already almost fitted out, it is called, in accordance with the wish that you expressed at Balbec, le Cygne.6 And remembering that you preferred the Rolls to all other cars, I had ordered one for you. Now however that we shall never meet again, since I cannot hope to persuade you to accept either the boat or the car (which are of no use to me) I had thought—since I had asked an agent to order them on my behalf but giving them your name—that you might perhaps, by taking it upon yourself to cancel the order, spare me the embarrassment of owning a useless yacht and a useless car. Yet for this, as for many other things, we would have had to speak together. But I feel that for as long as I might be likely to fall in love with you again, which will not be for much longer, it would be crazy, merely for the sake of a sailing-boat and a Rolls-Royce, to meet again and prejudice your lifelong happiness, since you have decided that this consists in living far from me. So I prefer to keep the Rolls and even the yacht. And as I shall use neither of them, and as they are likely to remain unrigged in the harbor and parked in the stables, I shall have inscribed on the——of the yacht (heavens, I dare not use the wrong technical term and commit a solecism which would shock you) these lines from Mallarmé which you used to love:
Un cygne d’autrefois se souvient que c’est lui
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre
Pour n’avoir pas chanté la région où vivre
Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l’ennui.7
Do you remember, it is from the poem whose first line is: Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui.8 Alas, today is no longer either virgin or beautiful. But those who, like me, know that they will soon turn it into a better ‘tomorrow’ for themselves, are themselves difficult to tolerate. As for the Rolls, it would have deserved rather the following lines from the same poet, which you claimed not to understand:
Dis si je ne suis pas joyeux
Tonnerre et rubis aux moyeux
De voir dans l’air que ce feu troue
Avec des royaumes épars
Comme mourir pourpre la roue
Du seul vespéral de mes chars.9
Farewell for ever, my sweet Albertine, and thank you once again for the pleasant trip that we enjoyed together the day before we parted. I shall remember it fondly.
PS—I shall not reply to what you tell me of the proposals allegedly made to your aunt by Saint-Loup (whom I do not believe to be anywhere near Touraine). It’s pure Sherlock Holmes. What can you think of me?”
No doubt, just as I had said to Albertine in the past “I do not love you,” in order to get her to love me, “I forget people when I no longer see them,” in order to get her to see me as often as possible, “I have decided to leave you,” in order to pre-empt any idea of separation, now it was because I desperately wanted her to return before a week had elapsed that I said “Farewell” to her, “for ever”; it was because I wanted to see her again that I told her: “I would find it dangerous to see you again”; it was because living apart from her seemed worse than death that I wrote to her saying, “You were right, we would be unhappy together.” Alas, this bogus letter, which I wrote so as to seem detached from her (the last shred of pride left over from my former love for Gilberte that survived in my love for Albertine) and also for the sweetness of saying certain things which could move only me, and not her, I ought to have guessed in advance that t
his might possibly provoke a negative response, that is, one confirming the truth of my words; that it was even quite probable that it would, for even had Albertine been less intelligent than she was, she would not have doubted for an instant that what I was saying was false. Even without lingering over my declared intentions in writing this letter, the simple fact that I was writing it, even if it had not followed Saint-Loup’s intervention, was sufficient to prove to her that I wanted her to return and to imply that she should allow me to swallow the hook even deeper, then, having foreseen the possibility of a negative response, I should always have foreseen that this response would renew my love for Albertine more intensely than ever. And, even before sending my letter, I should have stopped to wonder whether, if Albertine were to answer in the same spirit and did not wish to return, I would be able to master my pain enough to force myself to stay silent, rather than telegraph her to say, “Return” or send her yet another emissary, which, after writing to say that we would not see each other again, would be to give her detailed proof that I was unable to do without her and might lead her to refuse all the more strenuously to meet, which would then lead me, driven by my inability to contain my anguish, to go out to see her, without her even greeting me, as like as not. And no doubt, following three enormous blunders, this would have been the worst of all, after which my last resort would have been to kill myself on her doorstep. But the disastrous way in which the psychopathological universe is constructed implies that the clumsy act, the act which we should avoid at all costs, is precisely the act which soothes us, the act which, until we discover its outcome, opens up new prospects of hope for us and momentarily relieves us of the intolerable pain that rejection gave birth to within us, thus it is that when the pain is too strong, we fall into the clumsy error of writing to the person whom we love, or begging someone else to do so, or going to see her, and proving that we cannot do without her.
The Fugitive Page 6