The Fugitive

by Marcel Proust

  To return to Andrée’s visit, after what she had just revealed to me about her relationship with Albertine, she added that Albertine’s main reason for leaving me was what the girls of the little gang, and others, might have thought if they saw her living with a young man to whom she was not married: “I know it was at your mother’s house. But that makes no difference. You can’t imagine what it’s like, this society of young women, what they hide from each other, how afraid they are of other people’s opinions. I have seen some who were terribly strict with their young men, simply because they knew their girl-friends and they were afraid that certain things might be repeated, and yet I have by chance seen the very same girls, much to their annoyance, on occasions when they were behaving very differently.” A few months earlier Andrée’s apparent knowledge of the motives that drove the girls of the little gang would have seemed priceless to me. Perhaps what she said was sufficient to explain the fact that Albertine, who was to yield to me later in Paris, had rejected me in Balbec, where I was constantly in touch with her friends, something which I had absurdly seen as a great advantage allowing me to be on better terms with her. Perhaps it was even the sight of some sign of my confiding in Andrée or the fact that I had rashly told Andrée that Albertine was coming round to sleep at the Grand Hotel which caused the latter, who an hour earlier might have been ready to grant me certain pleasures as the most natural thing in the world, to change her mind and threaten to ring for help. But in this case, she must have been more complaisant with many others. This idea revived my jealousy and I told Andrée that there was one thing I wanted to ask her. “Did you do that in your grandmother’s empty apartment?—Oh, no, never, someone might have disturbed us—And yet, I thought, it seemed to me . . .—Besides, Albertine used to prefer to do it when we were in the country—Whereabouts?—At first, when we did not have time to go very far, we used to go to the Buttes-Chaumont, there was a house she knew there, or even under the trees, there is never anyone there; or in the grotto at the Petit Trianon, too.—There you are, how do you expect me to believe you? You swore to me, less than a year ago, that you had never done anything at the Buttes-Chaumont.—I was afraid of hurting you.” As I have already mentioned, it was only much later that I thought that it was on the contrary with the second version of her confession that Andrée had tried to hurt me. And I would have guessed this immediately, while she was speaking, because I would have felt the need to do so, if I had still been as much in love with Albertine. But Andrée’s words did not hurt me enough for me to feel it indispensable to judge them immediately to be false. In short, if what Andrée said was true, and at first I did not doubt it, the real Albertine that I now discovered, after knowing so many and various apparent Albertines, was not very different from the orgiastic girl that I had sensed when she had loomed up, walking along the promenade at Balbec, and who had afterward offered me so many changing aspects, as when in approaching a town we see its buildings progressively modify their disposition until they smother and erase its principal monument, which was the only thing visible from a distance, but where finally, as we get to know it better and judge it more accurately, its true proportions turn out to be those indicated by the perspective of our first appraisal, the remainder of the buildings which we had passed being no more than the successive series of lines of defense that any person raises to block our vision and which must be crossed one after the other, whatever suffering it might cost, before reaching their heart. Moreover, just as I had not needed to believe absolutely in Albertine’s innocence because my suffering had diminished, I should admit that the converse was true, that if I did not suffer overmuch from this revelation it was because, for some time past, the belief in Albertine’s innocence that I had forged had been gradually and unwittingly replaced by a belief that had always been present within me, the belief in Albertine’s guilt. Now if I no longer believed in the innocence of Albertine, it was because I no longer felt the need or the passionate desire to do so. It is desire that engenders belief, and if we are not usually aware of this, it is because most of the desires which engender belief—unlike the one which had made me believe that Albertine was innocent—die only when we do. Rather than accept all the evidence which corroborated my original version, I had stupidly preferred to believe Albertine’s bald affirmations. Why had I believed her? Lying is essential to humanity. It plays perhaps as great a part as the search for pleasure and is in fact driven by this search. We lie to protect our pleasure or our honor, if to divulge this pleasure would be contrary to our honor. We lie all our lives, above all, or perhaps even only, to those who love us. For in fact they alone make us fear for our pleasure and desire their esteem. At first I had thought Albertine guilty and only my desire, enlisting all the forces of my intelligence in its enterprise of doubt, had led me astray. Perhaps we live surrounded by electric or seismic signals, which we have to interpret in good faith in order to know the truth about people’s characters. But I have to admit that, however sad Andrée’s words had made me, in spite of everything I found it more satisfying that reality should at last conform to what my instincts had first intuitively felt, rather than confirm the wretched and cowardly optimism to which I had later yielded. I preferred life to live up to my intuitions; intuitions, moreover, which I had had the first day on the beach, when I had thought that these girls were the incarnation of vice and frenzied pleasure, and also on the evening when I had seen Albertine’s governess take this passionate girl back into the little villa, as one pushes back into its cage a wild beast that nothing later, despite appearances, will be able to tame; did they not match what Bloch had told me when he made the world seem so beautiful, by showing me something which sent shivers down my spine every time I went out for a ride, every time I met a woman, that is, the universal nature of desire? Perhaps in spite of everything it had been for the best that I should only now encounter these first intuitions a second time, with the corroborating evidence. As long as my love for Albertine was still entirely intact, they would have hurt me too much, and it was better that only a trace of them should remain, my perpetual suspicion of things which I could not see and which, however, were continually occurring so close to me, and perhaps yet another, earlier, vaster trace, which was my love itself. For indeed, did not my choosing and falling in love with Albertine, despite all the denials of my reason, entail knowing Albertine in all her vileness? And even in the moments when our mistrust recedes, is love not its prolongation and its transformation? Is love not a proof of clear-sightedness (a proof unintelligible to the lover himself) since desire, always seeking what is most opposite to us, forces us to love what makes us suffer? The charm of a person, of her eyes, her mouth and her figure, certainly also contains just those elements which, unbeknown to ourselves, are most likely to make us unhappy, so that to feel ourselves drawn toward this person, to start to love her, is, however innocent we claim her to be, already to start reading between the lines all her misdeeds, all her betrayals.

  And did those charms which, in order to attract me, were thus embodied in the noxious,22 dangerous, fatal parts of the person, have a causal relationship with these secret poisons more direct than that which the luxuriant attractions of some venomous flowers have with their poisonous secretions? Perhaps, I thought, it was Albertine’s vice itself, the cause of my later suffering, which had produced in Albertine her frank and generous manner, creating the illusion that one enjoyed with her the same loyal and unrestrained camaraderie as with a man, just as a parallel vice had produced in M. de Charlus a feminine subtlety of wit and sensibility. In the midst of the most utter blindness, our perspicacity subsists in the very guise of predilection and tenderness, so that it is wrong in love to talk of a bad choice, since, as soon as there is a choice, it can be only a bad one. “Did these walks in the Buttes-Chaumont take place when you came here to call for her?” I asked Andrée. “Oh, no, from the day when Albertine went home with you from Balbec, except for what I’ve told you about, she never did anything with me
again. She would not even allow me to mention such things to her any more.—But my dear Andrée, why keep on lying? Quite by chance, for I try never to pry, I learned in the minutest detail that Albertine did that kind of thing, and to be more precise, at the seaside, with a laundry-maid, only a few days before her death.—Ah, perhaps, after she had left you, I don’t know. She sensed that she had not been able to win back your confidence and never would be able to again.” These last words overwhelmed me. Then I thought again about the evening with the syringa and remembered that a fortnight or so later, as my jealousy kept switching from one object to another, I had asked Albertine if she had ever had a relationship with Andrée and that she had replied: “Oh, never! Of course I adore Andrée; I feel great affection for her, but as for a sister, and even if I had the inclinations that you seem to imagine, she’s the last person that I would think of for that. I can swear on anything you like, on my aunt, on my poor mother’s grave.” I had believed her. And yet even if I had not been put on my guard by the contradiction between her former partial confessions to things which she had later denied as soon as she realized that I was not indifferent to them, I ought to have remembered Swann, convinced that M. de Charlus’s friendships were platonic and affirming this to me on the evening of the very day that I had seen the tailor and the Baron in the courtyard; I ought to have realized that there are two worlds, one overlapping the other, one constituted by the things that the best and sincerest people say, and behind it the world composed by the series of these same people’s actions; so that when a married woman says of a young man, “Oh, it’s perfectly true that I am terribly fond of him, but it’s something very innocent, very pure, I can swear to you on my parents’ memory,” we ought, instead of harboring any doubts, to swear to ourselves that she has probably just emerged from the bathroom where she hurriedly retires after each tryst with the young man, in order to avoid having children. The spray of syringa made me feel mortally sad and also the fact that Albertine could have thought, could have told people, that I was deceitful and hated her; and, more than anything perhaps, her lies, which were so unexpected that I found it difficult to reconcile them with my way of thinking. One day she had told me that she had been to an airfield, where the pilot was a friend of hers (doubtless to divert my suspicions away from women, thinking that I would be less jealous of men), that she had been amused to see how entranced Andrée had been by the pilot and how he had flattered Albertine, so much so that Andrée had wanted to take a flight in the airplane with him. But this had been entirely invented, Andrée had never been to this airfield, etc.

  By the time Andrée had left it was time for dinner. “You’ll never guess who came to visit me for at least three hours,” said my mother. “I say three hours, it could have been longer, she arrived almost at the same time as my first guest, who was Mme Cottard, and sat there motionless while all my callers—more than thirty of them—were coming and going, and left me only a quarter of an hour ago. If you hadn’t been with your friend Andrée I would have had someone fetch you.—Well, then, who was it?—Someone who never pays calls.—The Princess of Parma?—I do declare that my son is more intelligent than I would have thought. You spoil the pleasure of making you guess a name, you get it first time.—Did she apologize for being so cold yesterday?—No, that would have been stupid. The visit itself was her apology; your poor grandmother would have really appreciated it. It appears that she asked her footman at about two o’clock to find out if I had an at-home day. They told her that today was the day and up she came.” My first reaction, which I did not dare reveal to my mother, was that the Princess of Parma, who the day before had been immersed in the company of some of her closest and most illustrious lady-friends, those with whom she best loved to converse, had felt no need to hide the irritation she had felt on seeing my mother walk in. And this coldness, which moreover all the Guermantes had generally adopted, was absolutely in the tradition of great German ladies and they thought to make amends for it with scrupulous politeness. But my mother thought, and later I came to share her opinion, that the Princess of Parma had quite simply failed to recognize her and thought she need take no notice of her, but that after my mother had left she had learned who she was, whether from the Duchesse de Guermantes, whom my mother had met downstairs, or from the list of names which the footmen had requested of the lady visitors at the door before inscribing them in their register and allowing them to enter. She had thought it would be impolite to say to my mother or ask someone else to, “I did not recognize you,” but, in a fashion no less suited to the rules of etiquette of the German principalities and the manners of the Guermantes than my first version, she had thought that a visit, an exceptional gesture by her Highness, and especially a visit lasting several hours, would transmit a similar message to my mother in indirect but equally expressive terms, which was in fact the result. But I did not want to waste time asking my mother for an account of the Princess’s visit, since I had just remembered several queries concerning Albertine which I had wanted to put to Andrée but had forgotten. How little I knew, would ever know, may I say, on the subject of Albertine, the only subject whose details could really have interested me or were at least starting to interest me again from time to time! For man is a creature of no fixed age, a creature who has the ability to become years younger in only a few seconds and who, surrounded by walls formed by the periods of time that he has lived through, floats around in their midst but as in a pool whose level keeps constantly changing, thus putting him within reach now of one time period, now of another. I wrote to Andrée asking her to come back. She was not free until a week later. Almost as soon as she had arrived I asked her: “Look, since you claim that Albertine no longer did that kind of thing when she was living here, you must think that she left me so as to be freer to indulge, but who was the girl-friend?—No, absolutely not, that was not the reason at all.—So was it because I was too unpleasant?—No, I don’t think so. I think she was forced to leave you by her aunt, who had ideas for her with a ‘rascal’ you know about, that man you called ‘the Also-ran,’ the young man who loved Albertine and had asked for her hand. Seeing that you were not going to marry her, they were afraid that her scandalously protracted stay with you might prevent that young man from marrying her. Mme Bontemps, who was constantly harried by the young man’s friends and relations, called Albertine back to her side. Deep down Albertine needed her uncle and aunt and, when she realized that they were presenting her with a fait accompli, she left you.” In my jealousy I had never thought of this explanation but only of Albertine’s desires for women and of ways of keeping her under surveillance; I had forgotten that Mme Bontemps also existed and that she might have eventually found strange something that my mother had found shocking from the outset. At least Mme Bontemps feared that it might shock the potential fiancé that she was holding in reserve for her like a pear to slake her thirst, in case I did not marry her. For Albertine, despite what Andrée’s mother had previously thought, had in fact found a fine bourgeois match. And on those occasions when Albertine had wanted to visit Mme Verdurin, had spoken to her in secret, or had been so annoyed that I had been to one of Mme Verdurin’s receptions without telling her, the intrigue between her and Mme Verdurin had been devised in order to allow her to meet, not Mme Vinteuil, but the nephew who was in love with Albertine and on whose behalf Mme Verdurin did not aspire to a rich marriage, taking her satisfaction in working to arrange one of those marriages which are surprising on the part of certain families if one does not entirely understand their mentality. Now, I had never given a second thought to this nephew, who had perhaps been the pioneer thanks to whom I had been kissed by her on the first occasion. And in place of all the layers of anxiety about Albertine that I had constructed I had to substitute a different one or overlay it, since it did not necessarily exclude them, just as a taste for women does not prevent women from marrying. Was this marriage the real reason for Albertine’s departure and had she from self-respect so as not to seem to
depend on her aunt or seem to be forcing me to marry her, preferred not to say so? I started to realize that the systematic explanation of a single action by multiple causes, which Albertine skillfully deployed in her relationships with her girl-friends when she led each of them to believe that it was for her alone that she had called, was no more than a rather artificial and self-conscious symbol of the different aspects that any act takes on according to the point of view from which we consider it. This was neither the first nor the last time that I felt astonishment and a kind of shame at never once having thought that Albertine was living with me in a false situation which could embarrass her aunt. How often has it happened to me, after trying to understand a relationship between two people and the problems that it entails, that I have suddenly heard a third party reveal his own attitude, since he had had even closer links than I with one of the couple, an attitude which might even have been at the heart of their problems! And if their actions are always so indeterminate, how could people themselves not be so? Listening to those who claimed that Albertine was a schemer who had tried to get herself married off first to one man then to another, it is not difficult to suppose how they would have qualified her life with me. And yet in my opinion she had been a victim, perhaps not an entirely innocent victim, but in that case guilty for different reasons, in respect of vices which nobody mentioned.