The Fugitive

by Marcel Proust

  In order to console myself for Bloch’s silence, I reread Mme Goupil’s letter; but it lacked warmth, for if the aristocracy has certain formulae which erect fences, between the opening “Dear Sir” and the closing “Yours faithfully” exclamations of joy and admiration can spring up like flowers and let their sweet-scented sprays spill over the boundary fence. But bourgeois conventions enclose even the heart of the letter itself within a network of “your legitimate success” or at best “your fine success.” Sisters-in-law, mindful of their upbringing and restrained by the stays of decency, believe that they have overstepped the bounds of pathos or enthusiasm, if they have written “with kind regards.” “Mother joins me in sending her best wishes” is a superlative which is rarely lavished. I received another letter apart from Mme Goupil’s, but I did not recognize the name, Sautton. The writing was simple, the tone charming. I was very disappointed not be be able to discover who had written it.

  Two days later I was delighted to think that Bergotte must have greatly admired my article, which he could not have read without jealousy. Yet after a while my joy subsided. In fact Bergotte had not written me a word. I had simply wondered whether he would have liked the article, fearing that he had not. The question that I had asked myself was answered by Mme de Forcheville, who had replied that he admired it greatly, finding it worthy of a great writer. But she told me this while I was asleep: it was a dream. Almost all our dreams answer the questions that we have asked ourselves with complex affirmations and scenarios involving several characters, but they fade with the dawn.

  As for Mlle de Forcheville, I could not help feeling sorrowful when I thought of her. For all that she was Swann’s daughter, whom he would have so loved to see at the Guermantes’, they had refused to invite her, despite their great friendship for him, but then they had spontaneously sought her company after the passing of time, which, depending on what others have told you about them, renews the personality of those people whom we have not seen for a long time or invests them with another, since we too have shed our skins and acquired new tastes. But when on occasion Swann, holding his daughter in his arms and embracing her, said, “It’s nice, my love, to have a daughter like you; one day when I’m no longer here, if people still speak of your poor Papa, it will be to you alone and only because of you,” Swann, thus placing his timid and anxious hopes of survival after his death in his daughter, was as mistaken as some aging banker who, having made his will in favor of a very respectful little dancer who is kept by him, thinks that, although he is no more than an old friend to her, she will remain faithful to his memory. She was very respectful but under the table she played footsy with those of the old banker’s male friends whom she fancied, albeit with total discretion, preserving excellent appearances. She will wear mourning for the distinguished gentleman, will be greatly relieved, will benefit not only from the ready cash but from the properties and motor-cars that he has left her, but will everywhere erase the hallmarks of their previous owner, which cause her mild embarrassment, and she will never add to her enjoyment of the gift any regret for its donor. The illusions of paternal love are perhaps no less than those of the other kind; many daughters consider their father no more than the old man who will leave them his fortune. Gilberte’s presence in a drawing-room, instead of being an occasion for people still to speak sometimes of her father, was an obstacle preventing them from seizing those increasingly rare occasions when they might still have been able to do so. Even on the subject of the words he had spoken and the gifts he had offered, people acquired the habit of no longer mentioning his name, and she who should have renewed, if not perpetuated, his memory turned out to be precisely the one who hastened and consummated the process of dying and forgetting.

  And it was not only where Swann was concerned that Gilberte gradually consummated the process of forgetting: she had hastened this process within me in relation to Albertine. Under the impact of the desire, and consequently the desire for happiness, which Gilberte had aroused within me during those few hours when I had believed her to be somebody else, a certain number of painful sufferings and preoccupations, which until so recently had continued to obsess my thoughts, fell away from me, dragging away with them a whole block of memories, probably long since crumbling and precarious, connected with Albertine. For if many of the memories which were linked to her had at first helped to maintain within me a regret for her death, the regret itself had, in its turn, fixed the memories. So that the change in my emotional state, doubtless prepared obscurely day by day through the continual erosion caused by forgetting, but suddenly realized as a whole, gave me that impression of the void which I remember having experienced that day for the first time, that suppression within me of a whole section of the association of my ideas, as in a man whose worn-out cerebral artery ruptures and who finds a whole part of his memory erased or paralyzed. I no longer loved Albertine. At most there were occasional days which brought the kind of weather that, modifying and stimulating our sensitivity, restores our contact with reality, making me feel bitterly sad when I thought of her. I suffered from a love that no longer existed. Thus when the weather changes do amputees feel pain in the leg they have lost.

  The disappearance of my suffering and of everything that accompanied it left me diminished, as often does the cure of an illness which took up a great place in our lives. No doubt it is because memories do not remain true for ever, and because life is made up of the endless renewal of cells, that love is not eternal. But this renewal of memories is none the less delayed by our attention, which stops and fixes for a moment what is bound to change. And since sorrow, like desire for a woman, is magnified when we think of it, if we had more things to keep us busy, this would render forgetting, as it does chastity, all the easier.

  While it remains the case that it is time which progressively causes forgetting, it is forgetting in its turn which, through a different reaction (although for me it was a distraction—the desire for Mlle d’Éporcheville—which suddenly rendered forgetting effective and palpable), contributes to profoundly disturbing our notion of time. There are optical illusions in time as well as space. The persistence within me of traces of my old urge to work, to make up for lost time, to change my way of life, or rather to start to live, gave me the illusion that I was still as young as ever; yet the memory of all the events which had succeeded one another during my life—and also those which had succeeded in my heart, for, when we have changed a great deal, we are led to suppose that we have lived for longer—during those last months of Albertine’s existence, had made them seem to last much longer than a year, and this forgetting of so many things, separating me by empty spaces from quite recent events, which they made seem long gone because I had had what we call the “time” to forget them, with its fragmented and irregular interpolation in the midst of my memory—like a thick ocean mist which blots out all the objects that aid navigation—was what had upset and dislocated my sense of temporal distances, shrinking them here, stretching them there, and making me believe that I was sometimes much further from, sometimes much nearer to things than I really was. And since in the new, as yet undiscovered, spaces which lay before me, there would no more be traces of my love for Albertine than there had been in my recent experience of traversing periods of loss of love for my grandmother, offering a succession of periods during which, after a certain interval, nothing that had sustained the preceding period remained in the following one, my life appeared to me to be something as much lacking the support of an individual, identical and permanent self, something as useless in the future as protracted in the past, something as easy for death to terminate here or there without any kind of conclusion, as those school courses in French History which stop arbitrarily, depending on the whim of the syllabus or the teacher, at the 1830 or the 1848 Revolution or the end of the Second Empire.12

  Perhaps then the fatigue and sadness that I felt came less from having loved in vain than from the fact that I was already forgetting,
that I was starting to take pleasure in the company of new, living people, simple society acquaintances, mere friends of the Guermantes, almost entirely uninteresting in their own right. I consoled myself perhaps more easily for the fact that the girl I had loved was after a certain lapse of time no more than a faded memory than for the fact that I found myself once more pervaded by that vain activity which makes us waste time in brightening our lives with a lively but parasitical human flora, which will also return to the void when it dies, which is already alien to everything that we have experienced, but toward which in our melancholia we none the less direct all our reserves of verbiage and flattery, in a senile attempt at seduction. The new person who would be quite able to live without Albertine had appeared within me, since I had managed to mention her to Mme de Guermantes as if I were afflicted, but without actually suffering much. The possible arrival of these new selves, which should bear a name different from that of their predecessor because of their indifference to what I loved, had always terrified me: on a former occasion in the case of Gilberte, when her father told me that if I went to live in the South Seas I would never want to return, and on a more recent occasion when I had read with such a heavy heart the memoirs of a mediocre writer who, separated by life from a woman whom he had adored when he was young, met her again as an old man, but felt neither pleasure nor any desire to see her again. Yet, on the other hand, this much-feared but beneficial person brought me, at the same time as forgetfulness, an almost complete suppression of suffering and the prospect of recovery, for he was none other than one of those alternative selves which fate holds in reserve for us, and which in spite of ourselves—paying no more attention to our prayers than a clear-sighted and all the more authoritarian doctor—it substitutes for our sorely wounded self, in a carefully timed operation. Moreover, it effects this renewal as the need arises, as happens with the wear and repair of bodily cells, but we take no notice unless our old self was nursing some great wound, some painful foreign body, which we are astonished no longer to find, in our marveling at having become someone else, someone else for whom his predecessor’s suffering is no more than the suffering of a third party, a suffering which we can discuss compassionately because we do not feel it. And we are even quite unmoved at having passed through so much suffering, for we remember only vaguely having suffered. In the same way it may happen that we are terrified by a nightmare. But when we awake we are another person, who little cares that the person he replaces had to flee from murderers in his sleep.

  Doubtless this self still kept in touch with the old one, as someone unmoved by the bereavement of a friend nevertheless speaks to his guests with suitable sadness and returns from time to time to the room where his friend, the widower, who has asked him to greet the mourners on his behalf, continues to sob out loud. I was still sobbing when I became once more, if only for a moment, the person who used to be Albertine’s friend. But I was tending to move into an entirely new character. It is not because others have died that our affection for them weakens, it is because we ourselves are dying. Albertine had no reason to reproach her friend. He who usurped that name had merely inherited it. We can be faithful only to what we remember, we can remember only what we have known. My new self, while growing in the shadow of the old one, had often heard him speak; through him, through the stories he told of Albertine; he thought he knew her, he sympathized with her, he liked her: but his affection was only second-hand.

  Another person in whom the process of forgetting where Albertine was concerned probably evolved more rapidly at this time, and whose reaction allowed me to realize a little later how far this process had advanced within me (I now remember this as a second stage, before my final forgetting), was Andrée. Indeed I can hardly deny that forgetting Albertine was, if not the single or even the principal cause, at least the sufficient and necessary cause, of a conversation which Andrée held with me about six months after the one I have already recorded and where her words were so different from what she had told me that first time. I remember that it took place in my room because this was the period when I enjoyed a semi-carnal relationship with her, on account of the collective aspect that my love for the girls of the little gang had at first assumed, and had now resumed, long undifferentiated among them, and only briefly associated exclusively with the person of Albertine during the last months that had preceded and followed her death.

  We were in my room for another reason again which allows me to place this conversation quite precisely. This is because I was banned from the rest of the apartment since it was Mama’s at-home day. It was a day when Mama had gone to take luncheon with Mme Sazerat. As it was my mother’s open day, she had hesitated before accepting Mme Sazerat’s invitation. But since, as they do in Combray, Mme Sazerat always managed to invite you in company with boring people, Mama was sure not to enjoy herself and guessed that she would not miss out on any pleasures by leaving early. And in fact she had returned on time and with no regrets, since Mme Sazerat had invited nobody who was not deadly dull even before being frozen numb by her special society voice, which Mama called her Wednesday voice. Otherwise my mother liked her well enough and felt sorry for her lack of wealth—as a result of her father’s ruinous cavortings with the Duchesse de ***—a lack of wealth which compelled her to live almost the whole year round in Combray, apart from a few weeks with a female relative in Paris and a long “leisure excursion” once every ten years. I remember that my mother, after I had entreated her repeatedly for months, and because the Princess kept on requesting her to call, had gone the day before to call on the Princess of Parma, who never made visits herself and at whose house one usually simply left one’s card but who had insisted that my mother should pay her a visit, since protocol forbade her to visit us. My mother returned very discontented: “You made me put my foot in it,” she said, “the Princess of Parma hardly said good morning to me, she turned away to continue talking to the ladies with whom she had been conversing, taking no notice of me, and ten minutes later, since she hadn’t spoken a word to me, I left, and she didn’t even shake my hand. I was very embarrassed; and yet when I left her house I met the Duchesse de Guermantes, who was very pleasant and who talked of you a lot. What a strange idea you had in telling her about Albertine! She told me that you said that her death had caused you such sorrow.” (I had indeed said so to the Duchesse, but had not given it much emphasis and had forgotten it myself. Yet the most absentminded people often pay singular attention to words that we let slip, which seem quite natural to us but which excite their curiosity.) “I shall never return to see the Princess of Parma. You made me put my foot in it.”

  Now the following day, my mother’s at-home day, Andrée came to see me. She did not have much time, for she had to go and fetch Gisèle, with whom she wanted to go out to dinner. “I know her faults, but she’s still my best friend and the person for whom I feel the most affection,” she said. And she even seemed rather terrified that I might ask to come out to dinner with them. She had a thirst for people, so that a third party who knew her too well, as I did, by preventing her from letting herself go, would prevent her from fully enjoying their company.

  It is true that when she arrived I had not appeared; she waited for me to come, and I was on my way through my little sitting-room to go to meet her when I realized, from hearing a voice, that I had another visitor. I was in a hurry to see Andrée, who was waiting in my room, and since I did not know who the other person was, and he obviously did not know Andrée, since he had been asked to wait in a different room, I listened for a moment at the sitting-room door; for my visitor was speaking, he was not alone; he was talking to a woman: “Oh! ma chérie, c’est dans mon cœur!”13 he crooned, quoting the lines written by Armand Sylvestre. “Yes, you will always be my darling, whatever you have done to me”:

  “Les morts dorment en paix dans le sein de la terre.

  Ainsi doivent dormir nos sentiments éteints.

  Ces reliques du cœur ont aussi le
ur poussière;

  Sur leurs restes sacrés ne portons pas les mains.14

  “It’s rather old-fashioned, but isn’t it lovely! And also what I could have said to you on the very first day:

  “Tu les feras pleurer, enfant belle et chérie . . .