The Fugitive

by Marcel Proust

  CHAPTER 2

  Mademoiselle de Forcheville

  this is not to say that I did not still love Albertine, but it was already not the same kind of love as I had felt in recent times; rather, it was more like that love of former times when everything connected with her, both places and people, inspired in me a curiosity containing more charm than suffering. And in fact I now realized that before I could forget her completely, and regain my initial indifference, I would need, like some traveler returning down the same route to his point of departure, to experience in reverse order all the emotions which I had felt on the way out toward my great love. But these stages, these moments of the past are not inert, they have retained the terrible force and blissful ignorance of a hope which reached out then toward a time that has now become the past, but which, in moments of hallucination, we retrospectively take for the future. As I was reading one of Albertine’s letters announcing her arrival for that very evening, I felt for a second the joy of expectation. In these journeys which return along the same track to a place where in reality we will never return, journeys where we recognize the names and the features of all the stations we stopped at on the outward journey, it sometimes happens that while we have halted at one or other of these stations, we experience for a moment the illusion that we have moved off, but in the direction of the place we have just left, as we did on the way out. The illusion swiftly dies, but for a second we felt ourselves driven forward once more: such is the cruelty of memory.

  And yet if, in order to regain the point of indifference from which we started out, we cannot dispense with the need to cover in reverse order the same stages that we had covered on our way to attaining love, the itinerary or tracks which we follow are not necessarily the same itinerary or tracks as the first time. They are equally indirect, since forgetting proceeds no more regularly than love, but they do not necessarily follow the same routes. And on my return journey, there were, when I had nearly arrived, four stages which I particularly remember, doubtless because I now saw in them things that had no part in my love for Albertine, or at least which were connected with it only in so far as everything which our souls contained before our great love affair becomes associated with it, whether by nourishing it, by resisting it, or by setting up contrasts and images for our intellect as it analyzes that love.

  The first of these stages set in at the beginning of winter, one fine All Saints’ Day when I had gone out. As I approached the Bois de Boulogne, I recalled with sadness Albertine’s return, when she had come to meet me at the Trocadéro, for it was the same day of the year, but without Albertine. With sadness, yet not without pleasure, for the repetition in the minor key, in a melancholy tone, of the same motif that had punctuated my day the first time, and the very absence of Françoise’s telephone call and of Albertine’s arrival, were not something negative but, as my memories failed to materialize in reality, their suppression gave the day a poignant note and made of it something more beautiful than a single, uniform day, for what was lost, what had been torn from it, remained imprinted there as if etched between the lines. As I walked through the Bois I hummed phrases from Vinteuil’s sonata. The thought that Albertine had played it for me so often no longer hurt me too much, for nearly all my memories of her had entered that second phase of their chemical reaction, where instead of oppressing the heart with anxiety, they soothe it. From time to time, as I reached the passages which she most frequently played and during which she would tend to reminisce, or pass some familiar remark that I found charming at the time, I thought, “Poor little girl,” yet I thereby infused the musical passage not with sadness but with more value, the value of history and curiosity, just as Van Dyck’s portrait of Charles I, already beautiful enough in its own right, gains even more in value from the fact that it entered the national collections through Mme du Barry’s desire to impress the king.1 When the little phrase, before entirely disappearing, disintegrates, and floats around for a moment as it dissolves into its various elements, it was not, as it had been for Swann, a messenger informing me of the disappearance of Albertine. The little phrase did not awaken quite the same association of ideas in me as it had in Swann. I had been particularly moved by the variations, experiments, repetitions and “promise” of the phrase, which played in the sonata a role like that played in the course of my life by my love. And now, as I came to realize how far, day by day, another element of my love was drifting away, my jealousy or other aspects of my love gradually returning in a vague memory as the piece quietly started, I thought I saw my love dispersed or even dissolved in the little phrase.

  As I followed the paths which ran through the shrubbery, veiled in a hazy foliage which became flimsier every day, I felt the memory of a drive beside Albertine in the car, when she was coming home with me and I had felt my whole life wrapped up in hers, swim up again around me amid the vague mist of darkening branches within which the setting sun lit up irregular horizontal layers of golden foliage, as if they were suspended in mid-air. Meanwhile I trembled at every moment, as does any man whose obsession turns any woman standing at the corner of a path into the possible likeness or identity of the woman he is thinking of. “It might be her!” We look round, but the carriage moves on, and we do not turn back. I was not content to contemplate this foliage merely with the eyes of memory. It interested and moved me as do those purely descriptive pages in whose midst an artist, in order to make them more complete, introduces something fictional or a whole novel; and thus this natural scene took on the only melancholy charm which could touch my heart. The reason for this charm seemed to me to be the fact that I was still just as much in love with Albertine, while the true reason was on the contrary that inside me the work of forgetting was continuing to evolve and that the memory of Albertine was becoming less painful, that is, that it had changed; but however clearly we identify our own impressions, as I then believed I saw clearly into my melancholia, we are unable to plumb their deeper meaning: as with those attacks of sickness that a doctor hears his patient describing, but which lead him to detect a deeper cause, unknown to the patient, so our impressions and ideas count only as symptoms. While my jealousy was held back by the impressions of charm and sweet sadness that I felt, my senses were reawakened. Once more, as when I had stopped seeing Gilberte, a love for women surged up within me, freed of any exclusive association with a particular woman once loved, and wafted like those essences liberated by death and decay and which float suspended in the spring breeze, asking only to be united with some new entity. Nowhere do flowers, even those called “forget-me-nots,” bloom more readily than in a cemetery. I watched the girls who so profusely decorated this fine new day, as I would have in former times from Mme de Villeparisis’s carriage or a carriage I had taken with Albertine on such a Sunday. As soon as I cast my eyes on one or other of them, they were given their focus by the curious, furtive, inviting looks, reflecting her elusive thoughts, which Albertine would have surreptitiously cast, and which, lending their mysteriously swift and blue-tinged wings to my own gaze, breathed into these hitherto entirely natural paths a shiver of the unknown, which my own desire, if left to its own devices, would not have been able to elicit, for my own desire held no secrets for me. And sometimes reading a rather sad novel carried me suddenly backward, for some novels are like a period of great mourning which abolishes habit and puts us once more in touch with the reality of life, but for a few hours only, as does a nightmare, for the force of habit, the oblivion that it procures and the gaiety that it restores as the brain is unable to resist them and reestablish the truth, are infinitely stronger than even the most hypnotic suggestions of a beautiful book, which, like all suggestions, have a very fleeting effect. Moreover in Balbec, when I had wanted to meet Albertine for the first time, was it not because she had seemed to me to stand for all the girls whose sight had so often rooted me to the spot in the street or on the road, and because she could provide me with the quintessence of their lives? And was it not natural now that the
waning star of my love in which they were condensed should be once again dispersed into this scattered stardust of the galaxies? They all looked to me like Albertine, the image which I bore within me made me see her everywhere, and even as I turned a corner in the road, the one I saw climbing back into a motor-car reminded me so much of her, and her figure was so similarly shaped, that I wondered for a moment if it wasn’t Albertine herself that I had seen and if I hadn’t been misled by the story of her death. I recalled her at just such a bend in the road, perhaps in Balbec, climbing back into the car in the same way, at a time when she had so much confidence in life. And as she climbed back into the car, the girl’s movements not only struck my eyes as do those superficial visions that we glimpse so fleetingly during a drive: it became a more durable kind of action and seemed to me also to reach backward into the past, through this newly acquired perspective which pressed so voluptuously and sadly upon my heart.

  But the girl had already vanished. A little further on I saw a group of three slightly older girls, whose smart and athletic demeanor so perfectly echoed what had seduced me on the first day that I had seen Albertine and her friends that I followed in the footsteps of these three new girls, and when they took a carriage, I looked desperately around me to find one myself, but when I did find one, it was too late. I was unable to catch up with them. Yet a few days later, as I was going home, I saw emerging from under the archway of our house the three girls whom I had followed in the Bois de Boulogne. Although they were just a little older, they corresponded exactly, especially as far as the two brunettes were concerned, to those young society ladies whom I had so often seen from my window or walked past in the street, causing me to make a thousand plans and fall in love with life, but whom I had never managed to meet. The blonde one looked more fragile, perhaps sickly even, and attracted me less. Yet she was the one who made me dissatisfied with a momentary glance, as I stopped in my tracks and my eyes took on a fixed stare, as impossible to distract as if they were concentrating on one of those problems where we knowingly strain to reach far beyond surface appearances. I would no doubt have let them disappear like so many others, but just as they passed by, the blonde girl—was it because I was studying her so attentively?—cast me a first, furtive look, then, when she had gone past, turned her head back toward me and cast a second that finally set me alight. However, since she then lost interest in me and started chatting with her friends again, my ardor would have finally dampened, had it not been multiplied a hundredfold by the following fact. When I asked the concierge who they were, he replied: “They asked for Mme la Duchesse. I think only one of them knows her and that the others only accompanied her to the door. Here is her name, I don’t know whether I have spelled it right.” And I read: Mlle Déporcheville, which I easily corrected to: d’Éporcheville, that is, more or less, as far as I could recall, the name of the very well-connected young lady, loosely related to the Guermantes, whom Robert had mentioned after meeting her in a house of ill-fame and having been intimate with her. I now understood the significance of the look in her eyes, why she had turned round and hidden from her companions. How often I had thought of her, picturing her in terms of the name mentioned by Robert! And now I had just seen her, no different from her friends, except for that furtive glance which opened up for me a secret path to parts of her life which were evidently hidden from her friends, and which made her seem more accessible to me—already almost half mine—and more pliant than the usual run of aristocratic young ladies. In her mind, she already anticipated the hours that we might have shared together, if she had been free to make an assignation. Was that not what her eyes had tried to express with an eloquence that only I could read? My heart beat furiously, I would have been incapable of saying exactly what Mlle d’Éporcheville looked like, I vaguely recalled a blonde head seen from the side, but I was madly in love with her. Suddenly I realized that I was reasoning as if of the three girls Mlle d’Éporcheville was definitely the blonde one who had turned her head and looked at me twice. Yet this was not what the concierge had said. I returned to his lodge to question him again, but he said that he was unable to answer my question because today was the first time they had called and it had been while he was out. But he would ask his wife, who had seen them once before. She was cleaning the servants’ staircase. Who has not had such delicious doubts during his life, more or less similar to these? A charitable friend to whom one describes a girl seen at a ball has deduced that she must be one of his friends and invites you to meet her. But among so many, and on the basis of a merely verbal portrait, will there not have been some mistake? Will the girl that you are about to see be different from the one whom you desire? Or will you on the contrary see the smiles and the outstretched hand of the girl that you wanted her to turn out to be? The latter good fortune is not infrequent and, without always being justified by arguments as decisive as mine concerning Mlle d’Éporcheville, results from a kind of intuition and also from the fair wind of fortune that may sometimes favor us, so that on seeing her we say, “She is the one.” I recalled that I had correctly guessed which one of the little gang of girls walking along the sea front was called Albertine Simonet. This memory provoked a sharp but brief pain, and while the concierge went to fetch his wife, my main thought—thinking of Mlle d’Éporcheville and, as in one of those moments of waiting where a name or a fact, which you have for some reason fitted to a face, finds itself momentarily free to float between several, and ready, if it adheres to a new one, to render retrospectively the original face which it had brought to your attention alien, innocent and elusive—was that the concierge was likely to reveal that Mlle d’Éporcheville was one of the two brunettes. In which case the being in whose existence I believed would disappear, the being whom I already loved, who filled me with the desire to possess her, the blonde and sultry Mlle d’Éporcheville, whom the dread wrong answer would fatally dissociate into two separate entities, which I had arbitrarily united as does a novelist who merges diverse entities borrowed from real life in order to create an imaginary character, but which taken separately—if the name fails to confirm what the eyes had intended—would lose all significance, would be dissociated into two separate elements by the fatal reply. In this case my arguments would come to naught, but no, on the contrary, how much more strongly they were vindicated, as the concierge returned to tell me that Mlle d’Éporcheville was indeed the blonde!

  From that moment on I could no longer believe that she was merely her namesake. The odds were too long against one of these three girls being called Mlle d’Éporcheville, and, in a first, limited corroboration of my supposition, being precisely the one who had looked at me in that almost smiling way and yet not being the one who frequented houses of ill-fame.

  Then started a day of wild excitement. Even before going out to buy every garment that would help me dress up to create the best impression the day after next, when I would be visiting Mme de Guermantes, in whose company I would find a young lady of easy virtue and would make an assignation with her (for I would certainly find a moment to speak with her in a corner of the drawing-room), in order to make doubly sure I went out to send a telegram to Robert asking him for the name and the exact description of the young lady, hoping to have his reply before the day after next when, according to the concierge, she would return to see Mme de Guermantes; and when (without thinking for a moment of anything else, even of Albertine), whatever might happen to me in the meantime, even if I was ill and had to be taken there in a wheelchair, I would visit the Duchesse at the same time. If I went to send a telegram to Saint-Loup, it was not that I had any remaining doubts as to the identity of the person or that I made any distinction between the girl I had seen and the one he had described. I had no doubt that they were one and the same. But in my impatience at waiting for two days, it was a pleasure for me, it was almost already for me a secret hold over her, to receive a telegram full of details concerning her. At the telegraph office, while drafting my telegram with all the ex
citement of a man burning with hope, I noted how much less helpless I was now than in my childhood and in relation to Mlle d’Éporcheville than to Gilberte. I need do no more than take the simple trouble to write my telegram, and the clerk had only to accept it, for the swiftest of electric communications networks to transmit it across the length and breadth of France, right down to the Mediterranean coast. Robert would bring his whole libertine past to bear on identifying the person whom I had just encountered, would place it at the disposal of the fiction that I was starting to sketch and which I need not even worry about any more, for the reply would be bound to bring my romance to a conclusion in one way or another before twenty-four hours had elapsed. Whereas formerly, brought back from the Champs-Elysées by Françoise and left to foment my impotent desires alone at home, unable to exploit the technology of modern civilization, I loved like a savage, or even like a flower, since I had no right to come and go. From this moment on I spent all my time in a state of fever; a forty-eight-hour trip that my father asked me to take with him and which would have made me miss my visit to the Duchesse sent me into such a state of rage and despair that my mother intervened and persuaded my father to leave me in Paris. But it took several hours for my anger to abate, while my desire for Mlle d’Éporcheville had increased a hundredfold because of the obstacle placed between us, and my momentary fear that these hours at Mme de Guermantes’, which I greeted as a well-deserved prize of which no one could deprive me, might not occur. Some philosophers argue that the external world does not exist and that it is only within ourselves that our lives evolve. Be that as it may, love, even in its humblest beginnings, is a striking example of how little reality means for us. If I had had to draw, describe or inventory the details of Mlle d’Éporcheville’s features from memory, or even to recognize her in the street, I would have found it impossible. I had caught sight of her in profile as she passed, she had seemed pretty, unaffected, tall and blonde, and I could not have said more. But all my reactions of desire, anxiety, of mortal shock inspired by the fear of not seeing her if my father took me with him, all these, associated with an image which I had in fact invented but which I needed only to believe attractive, already constituted love. At last the next morning, after a night of blissful insomnia, I received Saint-Loup’s telegram: “De l’Orgeville, de noble particle, orge barleycorn, as in rye, ville as in town, short, dark and dumpy, is presently in Switzerland.” It was not her!