The Fugitive

by Marcel Proust

On other occasions my sorrow took on so many forms that sometimes I did not recognize it; I wished I could have a great love, or I wanted to find someone to live with me, which seemed to me to be a sign that I was no longer in love with Albertine when it was a sign that I was still in love with her; for this need to experience a great love, just like my desire to kiss Albertine’s plump cheeks, was only a part of my regret. Only when I had forgotten her would I be able to realize that I would be wiser and happier living without love. Thus missing Albertine, because that was what gave rise within me to the need for a sister, made that need impossible to assuage. And as I came gradually to feel the lack of Albertine less acutely, this need for a sister, which was only an unconscious expression of my need for her, would make it less imperious. And yet these two remainders of my love did not diminish with equal speed. There were hours when the former suffered such a total eclipse, while the latter on the other hand so maintained its full strength, that I decided to get married. And on the other hand, later on, when my jealous memories had died down, from time to time a surge of affection for Albertine welled up suddenly in my heart, and then, thinking of my loves for other women, I told myself that she would have understood and shared them, and her vice became almost a source of love. Sometimes my jealousy revived in the moments when I no longer remembered Albertine, although she was then the cause of my jealousy. I thought that I was jealous of Andrée because I had just learned of an affair she had had. But Andrée for me was only an accommodation address, a relay, a socket wiring me directly into Albertine. Thus it is in our dreams that we lend a different face or name to someone whose identity we have none the less perfectly well grasped. In short, despite the ebb and flow contradicting this general law in these individual cases, the sentiments left in me by Albertine found it more difficult to die than did the sentiment of their original cause. Not only the sentiments, but the sensations. Differing in this from Swann, who, when he had started falling out of love with Odette, had not even been able to revive within himself the sensation of his love, I felt myself still reliving a past that was no more than another man’s story; as if my self were divided into two, while its upper half was already hard and cold, its lower half rekindled every time that a spark passed the old current back through it, even when my mind had long since ceased to think of Albertine. Since no image of her ever came to supplement the cruel palpitations that accompanied this phenomenon, or the tears brought to my eyes by a cold wind like the one which had blown through the prematurely pink apple trees at Balbec, I was led to wonder whether the rebirth of my pain was not due to entirely pathological causes and whether what I took to be the revival of a memory and the last phase of a love affair might not be rather the onset of a cardiac disease.

  In certain ailments there are secondary infections which the patient is only too tempted to confuse with the illness itself. When they cease he is astonished to find himself less far from being cured than he had thought. Such was the suffering caused—the “complication” induced—by Aimé’s letters about the bath-house girl and the laundry-maid. But if a spiritual doctor could have visited me, he would have found that in other respects my sorrow itself was on the mend. No doubt, as I was a man, one of those amphibious creatures plunged simultaneously in the past and in present reality, there was still a contradiction inside me between the living memory of Albertine and my knowledge of her death. But this contradiction was in a way the reverse of what it had been before. The thought that Albertine was dead—which at first struggled so furiously against the thought that she was still alive that I was forced to run away from it as children do from an oncoming wave—had finally, precisely because of these incessant assaults, won over the place inside me still occupied until recently by the thought that she was alive. Without my realizing it, it was now this thought of the death of Albertine—and no longer the present memory of her life—that made up the greater part of my unconscious day-dreams, so that if I suddenly interrupted them to reflect on myself, what provoked my astonishment was not, as it had been during the first few days, that the Albertine so alive within me could no longer exist on this earth and could be dead, but that the Albertine who no longer existed on earth, who was dead, could have stayed so alive within me. The black tunnel shored up by my series of interlocking memories, where my thoughts had been dreaming for so long that they did not even notice it, was abruptly flooded by a sunny spell, bathing it in the light of a distant, smiling blue universe where Albertine was nothing more than a charming memory that left me indifferent. Is that her, I wondered, is she the real one, or is it that person who seemed during my long trek through darkness to be the only reality? A sort of self-multiplication made the character that I had been until so recently, and who lived for nothing but the permanent expectation of the moment when Albertine would come to kiss him good-night, appear to me now as only a small part of myself which I had already almost shed, and I felt the youthful freshness of a bud starting to open and burst through its leaves into flower. It is also possible that these brief flashes of illumination made me become more aware of my love for Albertine, as happens with all ideas which are too fixed and which need to feel resistance in order to affirm themselves. Those who lived through the 1870 war,25 for instance, say that the idea of the war had gradually come to seem natural to them, not because they did not think enough about the war, but because they thought about it all the time. And to understand what a strange and momentous event a war is, something different was needed to shake them out of their constant obsession, to forget for a moment that war ruled their lives, and to find themselves as they had been when they had been at peace, until suddenly on to this temporarily blank screen the monstrous reality that they had so long ceased to see, since they saw nothing else, would at last be distinctly projected.

  If for the time being this retreat within me of different memories of Albertine had at least been executed not in staggered ranks but in this instantaneous rout, along the whole front line of my memory, with the memories of her betrayals moving away at the same time as those of her favors, forgetting would have brought me peace. It was not to be. As on a beach where the tide runs out unevenly, I was already gnawed by the pangs of one or other of my suspicions when the image of her sweet presence had already receded too far away from me to be able to act as a remedy. As for the acts of betrayal, they made me suffer because, however many years previously they had been committed, they were new for me; but I suffered less as they grew old, that is, as I imagined them less vividly, for the remoteness of an object is proportionate rather to the visual power of the memory observing it than to the real distance of the number of days which have passed, as the memory of a dream from the night before may appear to us so faded and imprecise that it seems more remote than an event dating from several years earlier. But although the thought of the death of Albertine was making progress inside me, the ebb tide of the feeling that she was alive, even if it did not arrest that progress, did none the less oppose it and hinder its regular advance. And now I realize that during this period (no doubt because I had forgotten the hours that she had been sequestered by me, which, since they dispelled within me the suffering caused by her misdeeds and left me almost indifferent because I knew that she was no longer committing them, had become so much evidence of her innocence), I suffered the martyrdom of living habitually with an idea just as new as the one that Albertine was dead (until then I had always started out from the idea that she was alive), an idea that I would have thought just as impossible to bear and which, without my realizing it, was gradually forming the basis of my conscious mind and substituting itself for the idea that Albertine was innocent: it was the idea that she was guilty. At times when I thought I doubted her, I did in fact on the contrary believe in her: likewise I took as the starting-point for my other ideas the certainty—often contradicted, as had been the opposite idea—of her guilt, while still imagining that I was still in doubt. I must have suffered greatly during that period, but I realize now that it had
to be thus. We may be cured of suffering only on condition that we experience that suffering to the full. By protecting Albertine from all contact, by forging the illusion that she was innocent, just as when later I took as the basis of my reasoning the thought that she was alive, all I was doing was postponing the moment of my cure, because I was postponing the long hours of preparation and the inevitable suffering that it would take. But when habit got to work on this idea of the guilt of Albertine, it would do so according to the same laws as those I had already experienced during the course of my life. Just as the name of Guermantes had lost the charm and significance of a road bordered with water lilies and of Gilbert le Mauvais’s stained-glass window, so Albertine’s presence had lost those of the blue valleys of the sea, the names of Swann, the liftboy, the Princesse de Guermantes and so many others, a charm and a significance each entrusted to a single word which they judged mature enough to live on its own, as someone who wants to train a servant will show him the ropes for a couple of weeks and then withdraw, so the painful power of Albertine’s guilt would be expelled outside me by habit. Besides, by that time, as when an army attacks simultaneously on two flanks, in this action mounted by habit, two allies would take up arms on each other’s behalf. It is because my idea of Albertine’s guilt would become a more plausible and familiar idea for me as it would become less painful. But at the same time, as it became less painful, the objections raised to the certainty of this guilt and which were suggested to my intellect only by my desire not to suffer too much, would fall away one by one; and each process would facilitate the other, I would move fairly swiftly from the certainty that Albertine was innocent to the certainty that she was guilty. I needed to live with the idea of the death of Albertine, with the idea of her misdeeds, for these ideas to become habitual, that is for me to be able to forget these ideas and finally forget Albertine herself.

  I had not yet reached this stage. Sometimes it was my memory, sharpened for instance by the intellectual excitement of reading, which renewed my sorrow; at other times it was, on the contrary, my sorrow, brought on for instance by the anguish induced by stormy weather, which dredged up some memory of our love and raised it nearer to the light. Moreover these revivals of my love for Albertine once she was dead might occur after an interval of indifference interspersed with other attractions, as when, after the long interval which had started with the kiss which had been denied me in Balbec, during which time I had been much more concerned with Mme de Guermantes, Andrée and Mlle de Stermaria, my love had revived once more when I had begun to see her frequently again. Yet even now different preoccupations could lead to a separation—from a dead woman this time—where I would become more indifferent to her. And all for the same reason, that she was still alive for me. And even later, when I loved her less, it nevertheless remained for me one of those desires which rapidly pall, but which rekindle when they have been left to rest for a while. I pursued one live woman, then another, then I returned to my dead one. Often it was in the darkest corners of my self, when I could no longer form a clear idea of Albertine, that a name would come by chance to excite painful reactions that I no longer believed possible, as in certain dying people whose brains have ceased to think but whose limbs may be made to contract when pierced by a needle. And for long periods, these stimuli were activated so rarely that I was led to seek out for myself a moment of sorrow or a fit of jealousy, to try to reconnect with the past and remember her better. For since missing a woman is no more than reviving a love that remains subject to the same laws as all love, the force of my regret was increased by the same causes which, while Albertine was alive, would have augmented my love for her and which had always given pride of place to jealousy and pain. But these occasions—for an illness, or a war, can last far longer than the most careful calculations had predicted—arose most often without my knowledge and caused me such violent shocks that I was much more concerned to protect myself from the suffering which they had caused than to appeal to them to yield me a memory.

  Moreover it did not always even need a word like Chaumont26 (even a syllable common to two different names could enable my memory—as an electrician can use the slightest conducting substance—to reestablish contact between Albertine and my heart) to refer directly to one of my suspicions in order to arouse it and to work as the password, the magic “open sesame” creating access to a past which we had ceased to notice because, in having tired of looking at it, we literally no longer possessed it; we had been diminished by its loss, thinking that through this subtraction our own personality had changed shape, like a geometrical figure which loses a side if it loses an angle; just as certain phrases, for instance, which included the name of a street or a road where Albertine might have walked, were sufficient to incarnate a non-existent but virtual jealousy in search of a body, a dwelling, any material anchorage or specific concrete form. Often it was quite simply during my sleep that these reprises, these da capos of a dream turning several pages of my memory and of the calendar, returned me, or rather made me regress to, a painful but distant impression, which had long ago given way to others, but which now became present again. Usually it arrived accompanied by a whole theatrical staging, clumsy but striking, which created the illusion of a visible and an audible reality, which I thereafter dated back to that night. Moreover in the story of a love and its struggles against the process of forgetting, does not dreaming hold an even greater place than waking, since dreams take no notice of infinitesimal divisions of time, suppress transitions, reject blatant contradictions, undo in an instant the web of consolation so slowly woven during the day and during the night arrange for us to meet the woman whom we would ultimately have forgotten as long as we never saw her again? For, whatever people may say, it is perfectly possible during a dream to have the impression that what is happening is real. And this could be judged impossible only by using arguments drawn from our waking experience, but these are hidden from us at the time. As a result, this implausible life seems true to us. Sometimes through a flaw in the internal lighting which treacherously made the room disappear, as my carefully staged memories gave me the illusion of real life, I thought that I had really arranged to meet Albertine and had really met her; but then I found myself unable to walk toward her, to utter the words which I wanted to speak, to relight my extinguished lamp in order to see her: impossibilities in my dream which were simply the immobility, the speechlessness and the blindness of the sleeper, just as we may suddenly see in a magic-lantern show a great shadow, which is that of the lantern itself, or its operator, which were meant to be hidden, blotting out the images of the characters which were meant to be projected. On other occasions Albertine was in my dream and wanted to leave me again, without her decision managing to move me. It was because a warning ray of light from my memory had managed to infiltrate the darkness of my sleep; and what lay hidden within Albertine, and what removed all import from her future actions and her intended departure, was the notion that she was dead. I chatted with her and, while I was talking, my grandmother was walking about at the other end of the room. Part of her chin had crumbled to pieces like fractured marble, but I found nothing extraordinary in that. I told Albertine that I would have questions to put to her concerning the bath-house at Balbec and a certain laundry-maid from Touraine, but that I was leaving it until later because we had plenty of time and there was no longer any hurry. She promised me that she had been doing nothing wrong and that all she had done was kiss Mlle Vinteuil on the lips the day before. “What? Is she here?—Yes, and what is more, it is time for me to leave, for I have to see her in a moment.” And because since her death I no longer held her prisoner at home as I had during the last phases of her life, her visit to Mlle Vinteuil perturbed me. But I did not want it to show. Albertine told me that she had done no more than kiss her, but she must be starting to lie again as in the days when she used to deny everything. In a moment she would probably no longer be content merely to kiss Mlle Vinteuil. Obviously from one point of vi
ew I was wrong to feel so worried, since, so we are led to believe, the dead can neither act nor feel. This is what people say, but it did not prevent my grandmother, who was dead, from living on for quite a few years and from walking around my room at that very moment. And doubtless, once I was awake, this notion of a dead woman living on would have become as impossible for me to comprehend as I find it to explain. But I had formulated it so many times, during these periods of temporary madness that we call dreams, that I had finally become used to it; our memories of dreams can become permanent if they are repeated often enough. And I imagine that even when cured and having recovered his reason, the man who must understand rather better than others what he wanted to say during an earlier period of his mental life, would be the man who had undertaken to explain to visitors to a mental hospital that he was not himself insane despite the doctor’s claims, lucidly analyzing the monstrous imaginings of each of the patients and concluding, “Take that man who looks quite normal, you wouldn’t think he was mad, and yet he thinks he is Jesus Christ, and that is impossible, because it is I who am Jesus Christ!” And a long time after the end of my dream, I remained tormented by the kiss which Albertine told me she had given, in words which I thought I could still hear. And they must in fact have passed very close to my ears since it was I myself who had uttered them. All day long I continued to converse with Albertine, I asked her questions, I forgave her, I made up for the things that I had always wanted to tell her but had forgotten to do during her lifetime. And suddenly I took fright as I realized that this person evoked by my memory, the person to whom all these remarks were addressed, no longer corresponded to anything in the real world, that her various facial features, given the unity of a person driven only by the continuous will to live, which was now annihilated, were destroyed. On other occasions, without having dreamed, I felt as soon as I awoke that my inner climate had changed, a cold wind was blowing relentlessly from another direction, from the depths of my past, bringing with it the chiming of far-off hours and the whistles of departures which I usually failed to hear. I tried to pick up a book. I opened a novel by Bergotte which I had particularly liked. I was very fond of its charming characters, and as I soon fell under the spell of the book once more, I started to take a personal interest in wanting to have the wicked woman punished; my eyes brimmed with tears when the happiness of the betrothed couple was safe at last. “But then,” I cried in despair, “I cannot conclude from the fact that I attach so much importance to what Albertine might have done, that her personality is something real which cannot be abolished, that I shall find her one day unchanged in heaven, if I desire so fervently, await so impatiently and welcome so tearfully the success of someone who has only ever existed in Bergotte’s imagination, someone whom I have never seen, whose face I am free to imagine however I wish!” There were moreover in this book attractive girls, amorous correspondence and deserted paths on which to meet, which reminded me that clandestine love affairs could exist, which reawakened my jealousy, as if Albertine had still been capable of going for a walk along a deserted path. It also included the story of a man who meets a woman whom he had loved in her youth, fifty years earlier, but fails to recognize her and is bored by her company. And this reminded me that love does not last for ever, and I felt overwhelmed, as if I were destined to be separated from Albertine and meet her with indifference in my old age. And if I came across a map of France my fearful eyes conspired to avoid encountering Touraine, to save me from being jealous, and, to save me from being unhappy, Normandy, where at least Balbec and Doncières would be marked, between which I could trace all the routes which we had so often traveled together. Amid other names of French towns or villages, even if only read or heard, the name of Tours, for instance, seemed differently composed, not now of immaterial images but of toxic substances which acted instantaneously on my heart, making it beat more rapidly and painfully. And if this power extended to certain names, which she had rendered so different from others, then why, if I moved closer to home and concentrated only on Albertine herself, should I be surprised to find that this irresistible force, which might well have been exerted on me by any other woman, should be the outcome of a tangled confrontation and interplay of dreams, desires, habits and affections, duly disturbed by the intrusion of alternating pains and pleasures? And this process continued after her death, since memory suffices to sustain real life, which is mental. I recalled Albertine alighting from the railway carriage, telling me that she would like to go to Saint-Martin-le-Vêtu, and I also saw her before, with her polo cap pulled down over her cheeks; I discovered fresh possibilities of happiness and reached out for them, thinking, “We could have gone to Infreville, or even Doncières.” There was not one resort near Balbec where I did not recognize her, so that this region, like some still-preserved mythological land, rendered the most ancient and charming legends of my love, however buried beneath later experience, alive and hurtful. Oh, how I would suffer if ever I had to sleep again in Balbec in that bed, around whose copper frame, as around a motionless pivot or fixed bars, my life had moved and evolved, winding around it in succession my cheerful conversations with my grandmother, the shock of her death, Albertine’s sweet caresses, the discovery of her vice and now a new life where I knew, as I glimpsed the glass-fronted book-cases which reflected the sea, that Albertine would never again appear! Did not this Balbec hotel resemble the unchanging domestic interior on the stage of some provincial theater, where year after year the most diverse plays are set, now for a comedy, now for one tragedy and then for a different one, and then again for a purely poetical drama, this hotel which already belonged to quite a remote period of my life? The fact that this single element, with its four walls, its book-case and its mirror, always remained the same during each new period of my life made me feel even more certain that overall it was everything else, that is, I myself, which had changed, thus giving me the impression that the mysteries of life, love and death (from which children optimistically believe themselves excluded) are not privileges reserved for others, but, as we realize later, proudly but painfully, have been part and parcel of our own lives and bodies throughout the passing years.