The Fugitive

by Marcel Proust

  “I can’t think of anything else of interest to tell Monsieur, etc.”

  To understand how deeply the words struck home, one should remember that the questions I had to put to myself about Albertine were not peripheral, unimportant questions, those questions of detail which are the only kind that we really ask ourselves concerning any person other than ourselves, thereby allowing ourselves, clad in waterproof thought, to wade through suffering, lies, vice and death. No, as regards Albertine, it was a question of essence: who was she deep down, what were her thoughts, whom did she love, had she lied to me, had my life with her been as lamentable as that of Swann with Odette? Thus the target struck by Aimé’s reply, although it responded not in general but in specific terms—and precisely for that reason—was indeed the inner self, both Albertine’s and my own.

  At last, in Albertine walking with the lady in gray down the little street that led to the bath-house, I saw before my eyes a fragment of that past which seemed to me no less mysterious and terrifying than I had feared when I imagined it enclosed within Albertine’s eyes and within her memories. Of course anyone other than I might have found those details, which, since Albertine’s death, made it impossible for me to have her refute them, thus endowing them with what amounted to a likelihood of probability, quite insignificant. It is even probable that in Albertine’s eyes, her own misdeeds, even if they were true, and if she had admitted them—whether in her conscience she found them innocent or blameworthy, whether in her sensual being she found them delightful or bland—would have been divested of that ineffable impression of horror of which I was unable to rid them.

  Helped by my own love of women, and notwithstanding the fact that they were unlikely to have meant the same to Albertine, I was able to imagine something of what she had felt. And it was certainly already enough to trigger my suffering to imagine her desiring as I had so often desired, lying to me as I had so often lied to her, preoccupied with this girl or that, and incurring expenses on her behalf, as I had for Mlle de Stermaria and so many other young ladies, or for the village girls whom I met in the country. Of course, all my desires helped me to some extent to understand hers; it already caused me great suffering to have all my desires turned into torments, and the more intense the former, the more cruel the latter, as if in the algebra of the senses they reappeared with the same coefficient, but governed by a minus instead of a plus sign. But in Albertine’s eyes, as far as I could judge for myself, however hard she had tried to hide her own misdeeds from me—which led me to believe that she felt that she was guilty or was afraid of hurting me—because she had nurtured them to suit her taste in the spotlight of the imagination where desire takes shape, they seemed to her none the less to be things of the same nature as the rest of life, pleasures for her, which she had felt unable to deny herself, pains for me, but which she had tried to prevent from hurting me by hiding them, yet pains and pleasures which could take their place among life’s other pains and pleasures. But in my case it was from outside, without warning, without being able to elaborate the images myself, it was from Aimé’s letter that I had received these images of Albertine going into the showers and preparing her tip.

  It was obviously because I interpreted Albertine’s calculated and silent encounter with the lady in gray as a meeting which they had planned, a convention of going to make love in a shower cabin, which indicated an experience of corruption and the carefully dissimulated organization of a whole double life, it was because these images brought me the terrible news of Albertine’s guilt that they had immediately caused me a physical pain which would accompany them for evermore. But these images had immediately been affected by my pain; an objective fact or an image is different according to the state of mind in which one approaches it. And pain is as powerful a modifier of reality as is intoxication. Combining with these images, my suffering had immediately turned them into something absolutely different from what for any other person would be a lady in gray, a tip, a shower, or the street which Albertine and the lady in gray used for their calculated encounter—a glimpse of a life of lies and misdeeds of a kind that I had never envisaged—; my suffering had immediately eaten into their very substance, I no longer saw them in the light which illuminates earthly visions, it was a fragment of another world, an unknown planet of the damned, a vision of Hell. This Hell comprised the whole of Balbec and all its neighboring villages where, according to Aimé’s letter, she often found younger girls to take into the showers. How everything connected with Balbec now became fearfully permeated with that mystery which I had formerly imagined in and around Balbec, but which had dissolved while I was living there, which I had tried to grasp on a later occasion when I got to know Albertine because, as I saw her pass by on the beach, being mad enough to hope that she was not virtuous, I thought that she must be the embodiment of this mystery! The names of those stations, Toutainville, Épreville, Incarville . . . , which had become so familiar, so reassuring, when I heard them in the evening on my return from the Verdurins’, but, now that I thought that Albertine had lived in one, walked to another and ridden her bicycle to a third, aroused an anxiety in me more cruel than the first time, when I had felt so disturbed on seeing them from the small local railway with my grandmother, before we arrived in Balbec, which I had yet to get to know.

  One of the effects of jealousy is to make us discover how far the reality of external events and the sentiments of the soul are levied in unknown quantities which lend themselves to thousands of different interpretations. We think that we have an accurate knowledge of what things are in the world outside and what people think within themselves, for the simple reason that we are not directly concerned. But as soon as we acquire the urge to know, as the jealous person does, then they become a vertiginous kaleidoscope where we cannot recognize a thing. Had Albertine deceived me? With whom? In whose house? On which day? The day when she had made such and such a remark, and when I remembered having made some reply or other during the day? I had no idea. I had no better idea of what her feelings were for me, whether they were inspired by self-interest or affection. And suddenly I recalled a trivial incident, for instance that Albertine had wanted to go to Saint-Martin-le-Vêtu, saying that she found the name interesting, but perhaps quite simply because she had met up with some girl from the village. But what Aimé had learned from the bath-house girl was of little importance, since Albertine would for evermore be unaware that he had told me about it and since, during the period of my love for Albertine, my need to know was always surpassed by the need to show her that I knew; for this broke down between us the barrier raised by our separate illusions, without ever resulting in making her love me more, on the contrary. Yet now that she was dead, the second of these requirements had in fact become fused with the effects of the first: to imagine the conversation in which I would have tried to let her know what I had learned, as vividly as the conversation in which I would have asked her to tell me what I did not know; that is, I needed to see her by my side and to hear her answering kindly, to see her cheeks fill out, her eyes lose their mischief and fill with sadness, that is, to love her still and forget my jealous rage in the despair of my solitude. The painful mystery of the impossibility of ever letting her know what I had learned and of establishing a new relationship based on the truth which I had only just discovered (and which I might perhaps have been able to discover only because she was dead) substituted its sadness for the more painful mystery of her conduct. How ever could I have wished so much that Albertine should know what I had heard about the shower room, when Albertine no longer existed! This was yet another of the consequences of our finding it impossible, when we have to analyze death, to imagine it in terms other than those of life. Albertine no longer existed; but for me she was the person who had hidden the fact that she had made assignations with women at Balbec, who thought she had managed to prevent me from finding out. When we try to figure out what will happen after our death, are we not mistakenly still projecting the i
mage of our living selves which we have at that moment? And in the end is it much more ridiculous to regret that a woman who no longer exists is unaware that we have found out what she was doing six years earlier, than to wish that the public should still speak well of us in a century’s time, when we ourselves are dead? If there is more real foundation to the latter case than the former, the regrets of my retrospective jealousy proceeded none the less from the very same perspectival error as in other men the desire for posthumous fame. And yet, if this impression of the solemn and definitive side of my separation from Albertine had been substituted momentarily for the notion of her misdeeds, it only aggravated these by conferring an irremediable character on them. I saw myself lost in life as if I were alone, on a boundless shore where, whichever direction I took, I would never meet her. Luckily I came across something extremely apposite in my memory—as there are always all kinds of things, some dangerous, others salutary, in this dark cupboard where memories can only be brought to light one by one—I discovered, like a workman finding the right tool for his job, one of my grandmother’s sayings. Commenting on an incredible story that the bath-house girl had told to Mme de Villeparisis, she had said to me, “That woman must have caught lying sickness.” This memory was a great comfort to me. How much credit could I give to what the bath-house girl had told Aimé? Especially since in fact she had never seen anything. A girl can go to take a shower with her friends without having bad intentions. Perhaps the bath-house girl was exaggerating the amount of her tip in order to show off. After all I had once heard Françoise argue that Aunt Léonie said in her presence that she had “a million a month to burn,” which was quite absurd; another time she had seen my aunt Léonie give Eulalie four thousand-franc notes, when a fifty-franc note folded in four seemed to me already implausible enough. And thus I sought to discard, and gradually succeeded in discarding, the hurtful knowledge that I had taken so much trouble to acquire, buffeted as I was between the desire to know and the fear of suffering. Then my affections were able to revive, but so too, instantly accompanying these affections, was a sadness at being separated from Albertine, which perhaps made me even more unhappy than I had been during those recent hours when it had been jealousy that was torturing me. But this latter feeling itself did suddenly revive when I thought of Balbec, because of an image (which until then had never made me suffer and even seemed to be one of the most innocuous in my memory) which I suddenly revisualized, that of the dining-room in the evening, where, on the other side of the glass, Balbec crowded its whole population into the twilight, as if they were watching strange, glowing creatures moving past the illuminated glass of an aquarium, and (although I had never thought of it in these terms before) brought a whole medley of fisher-girls, working-girls and middle-class girls into close contact with each other, through their envy for this new luxury, a luxury which at least thrift and conservatism, if not wealth, prohibited their parents from enjoying, and among these middle-class girls almost every evening one could surely find Albertine, whom I had not yet met and who would no doubt pick up some little girl there and go to join her a few minutes later in the dark, on the sand or in an empty bathing cabin at the foot of the cliffs. Then my sadness revived, as I had just heard the lift, sounding like a sentence of exile as it continued to rise instead of stopping at my floor. Yet the only person whose visit I could have wished for would never again return, since she was dead. And despite that, when the lift did stop at my floor my heart fluttered, for a moment I thought, “What if all this were only a dream! Perhaps she is here, she’s going to ring, she has come home, Françoise will come in to say, more in fear than in anger, for she is even more superstitious than she is vindictive, and would be less afraid of the living woman than a woman she might perhaps believe to be a ghost, ‘Monsieur will never guess who is here.’” I tried to think of nothing, to pick up the newspaper. But I found it insufferable to read all those articles written by people who felt no real pain. One said of a trivial song: “It brings tears to the eyes” whereas I myself would have listened to it so joyfully if Albertine had been alive. Another, for all that he was a well-known writer, said that he had received unforgettable tokens of esteem, because he had been applauded as he got off a train, whereas I myself, if I had been so applauded, would not have given it a moment’s thought. And a third argued that, without its tedious politics, life in Paris would be “absolutely delicious,” whereas I knew that even without politics life could only be odious for me, but would have seemed delicious, even with the politics, if I had Albertine back. The field sports correspondent (it was the month of May) said, “This season is truly miserable, not to say calamitous, for the real hunter, since there is nothing, absolutely nothing, worth potting” and the Salon critic: “Faced with this manner of arranging an exhibition one feels seized by deep discouragement, by infinite sadness.” If the strength of my own feelings made the expressions of those who felt neither real happiness nor real misfortunes seem mendacious and bland, on the other hand, the most insignificant lines which could be related however tenuously to Normandy, or Touraine,24 or hydrotherapy, or la Berma, or the Princesse de Guermantes, or love, or absence, or infidelity, abruptly placed the image of Albertine before my eyes without leaving me time to turn away, and would start me weeping again. Besides, more often than not, I could not even read the newspapers, for the simple act of turning the pages reminded me both that I had performed the same action while Albertine was alive and that she was no longer alive; I dropped them back down again without having the strength to unfold all the pages. Each impression evoked an identical, but damaged, impression, in that Albertine’s existence had been torn away from it, so that I never felt brave enough to live to the full these mutilated moments which lay bleeding in my heart. Even when she gradually ceased to be present in my thoughts and all-powerful in my heart, I felt a sudden pang if I had to go into her room, light a lamp and sit down beside the pianola as I used to do when she had been there. Divided into diverse divinities of hearth and home, she long inhabited a candle flame, a doorknob, or the back of a chair, and other less material domains, such as a sleepless night, or the emotions evoked by the first visit of some woman who had attracted me. In spite of this, the few sentences that my eyes read during a day, or that my thoughts remembered having read, often excited cruel jealousy within me. In order to do this, they needed less to provide me with evidence proving the immorality of women than to bring back impressions formerly linked to Albertine’s life. As they were then transported into a forgotten moment whose force had not been blunted by the habit of thinking about it, a moment where Albertine still lived on, her misdeeds assumed a more intimate, agonizing and tragic character. Then I started once again to wonder whether I could be sure that the bath-house girl’s allegations were false. A good way to find out would be to send Aimé to Touraine, to spend a few days in the neighborhood of Mme Bontemps’s villa. If Albertine liked the kind of pleasures that women enjoy together, the reason that she had left me would have been in order to be deprived of them no longer, and the minute that she was free she must have sought to indulge in them, and succeeded, in a neighborhood that she knew and where she would not have decided to return if she had not thought that she would find more opportunities there than she would have if she had continued to live here with me. I do not claim that there was anything extraordinary in the fact that Albertine’s death had changed so few of my preoccupations. While our mistresses are alive, a large number of the thoughts which go to make up what we call our love come to us at times when they are not by our sides. Thus we get into the habit of focusing our day-dreams on an absent object, and even if she is absent only for a few hours, she is during those hours no more than a memory. Thus death changes very little. When Aimé had returned, I asked him to leave for Châtellerault, and thus it was not only through my thoughts, my sadness and the emotion that I felt on encountering any name linked however tenuously with a certain person, but again through all my actions, through all the enquiries I u
ndertook, through the use that I made of my money, devoting it entirely to learning of Albertine’s activities, I can say that during that whole year my life continued to be filled with love, with a real relationship. But the object of this relationship was dead. People sometimes say that something of a person may live on after their death, if that person was an artist and placed something of himself in his work. It is perhaps in this way that a kind of cutting taken from a person and grafted on to another person’s heart continues to live on when the person from whom it has been detached has perished.