The Fugitive

by Marcel Proust

  But the most important thing to admit is this: although, on the one hand, lying is often a trait of character, it is, on the other hand, in women who would not otherwise be liars, a natural defense, at first spontaneous and then gradually more organized, against that sudden danger which is capable of destroying anyone’s life: love. Then again, it is not entirely due to chance if intellectual and sensitive men always offer themselves to insensitive and inferior women and yet still hold them dear, nor if the proof that they are unloved does not cure them of being prepared to sacrifice all in order to keep such a creature by their side. In saying that such men need to suffer, I am telling the truth, while passing over the preliminary truths which would explain this—in a sense involuntary—need to suffer as their perfectly comprehensible consequence. Not to mention the fact that, since entirely consistent characters are rare, a highly intellectual and sensitive man will generally have little will-power, will be the plaything of habit and of that fear of suffering in the immediate future which dooms him to perpetual suffering and that in these conditions he will never wish to repudiate the woman who does not love him. We may be astonished that he is satisfied with so little love, but we should rather imagine the pain that is caused by the love which he himself feels. A pain which we must not pity too much, for the terrible turmoil caused by an unhappy love affair or the departure or death of a lover is like an attack of paralysis which at first lays us low, but after which the muscles tend gradually to recover their vital energy and elasticity. And yet this pain is not without its compensations. These intellectual and sensitive people are generally little inclined toward lying. Lies catch them all the more unawares in that, for all their great intelligence, they have to live in the real world, but rather than reacting vigorously, they continue to live in thrall to the pain that a woman has just inflicted on them rather than in the clear awareness of what she wanted, of what she did, of whom she loved, an awareness mostly the preserve of strong-willed characters, who require it so that they may face the future rather than lament the past. So these intellectual and sensitive people feel betrayed, without quite knowing why. Thus it is that the mediocre woman, whom we were astonished to see them love, enriches their universe far more than an intelligent woman would have done. Behind each of her words they suspect a lie; behind each house she says she has visited, another house, behind each action and person, another action, another person. Doubtless they do not know exactly which ones and have neither the energy nor perhaps even the opportunity to find out. A deceitful woman can use a very simple trick, without bothering to vary it, to delude a great number of people and even use it to delude the same person more than once, when he ought to have been able to see through it. All of which confronts the sensitive intellectual with a universe whose complex depths his jealousy would like to plumb and which are not without their fascination for his intellect.

  Without quite counting myself among their number, I might perhaps, now that Albertine was dead, learn the secret of her life. But do these revelations, which occur only after a person’s terrestrial life is over, not prove that nobody, deep down, believes in an after-life? If these revelations are true, we should fear the resentment of the person whose actions are uncovered as much on the day we will meet her in heaven as we feared it during her lifetime, when we felt bound to honor her secret. And if these revelations are false, made up because she is no longer here to give the lie to them, we should fear the wrath of the dead woman even more if we believed in heaven. But nobody does believe in it. Thus it was possible that a long debate between staying and leaving was staged in Albertine’s heart, but that her decision turned on her aunt or on that young man, rather than on women, whom she may not even have taken into account. The most weighty consideration which I faced was that Andrée, who however no longer had anything to hide from me about Albertine’s morals, swore to me that there was nothing of this kind between Albertine on the one hand and Mlle de Vinteuil and her girl-friend on the other. (Albertine was unaware of her own inclinations when she first met them and they, for fear of mistaking the object of their desire—a fear that leads us into as many errors as does desire itself—considered her to be very hostile to that sort of thing. Perhaps much later they might have learned the conformity of her inclinations with theirs, but by then they knew Albertine too well and Albertine knew them too well even to think about indulging in such things together.) In short, I was still no closer to understanding why Albertine had left me. If a woman’s face is difficult to capture with the eyes, which cannot take in the whole of its mobile surface, or with the lips and even less with the memory, if her social position in relation to our own social level clouds our appreciation, how much thicker a curtain is drawn between those of her actions which we do perceive and her motives! People’s motives lie at a deeper level, which we cannot perceive, and moreover engender other actions, which we fail to recognize and which are often in absolute contradiction with those that we do recognize. Was there any period in history when there was some public figure, believed saintly by his friends, who has not been exposed for committing forgery, robbing the state or betraying his country? How often every year is some great nobleman robbed by the steward whom he has raised on his estate, whom he would have sworn was an honest man and who perhaps was one! And yet how much more impenetrable does this curtain which veils others’ motives become if we feel love for that person! For it confuses our judgment and also the actions of the woman, who, feeling herself loved, ceases suddenly to attach any value to things that otherwise she would have treasured, such as wealth, for instance. It may also tempt her partly to feign this disdain for wealth in the hope of obtaining more by causing us to suffer. Striking a bargain may be another factor, along with others, as may even material events in her life, an intrigue that she has confided to no one for fear that someone might reveal it to us, an intrigue which, despite this precaution, many people might well have discovered if they had had the same passionate desire to find out as we did, while exercising greater independence of mind and arousing less suspicion in the person concerned, an intrigue that was perhaps not unknown to certain persons—but persons whom we neither know nor know how to identify. And among all the reasons for her attitude toward us being inexplicable, one must include those individual traits of character, whether deriving from self-neglect, from hatred, from love of freedom, from sudden attacks of anger, or from fear of what certain people might think, which may drive a person to do the opposite of what we would have expected. And then there are the differences in background and education, which we prefer not to credit because, when we talk to each other, our language effaces them, but which, when each one of us is alone again, return to guide our several actions from such opposed viewpoints that no real encounter is possible.

  “But my dear Andrée, you are lying again. Just remember—you admitted it to me yourself, I telephoned you the day before, don’t you remember?—how badly Albertine had wanted to go to Mme Verdurin’s reception on the day that Mlle Vinteuil was due to appear but hid it from me as something that I was not supposed to know.—Yes, but Albertine had no way of knowing that Mlle Vinteuil would be there.” “Really? You told me yourself that she had met Mme Verdurin a few days earlier. Besides, Andrée, there is no point in our deceiving each other. I found a note this morning in Albertine’s room, a message from Mme Verdurin urging her to come to her reception.” And I showed her this note, which Françoise had managed to bring to my attention a few days before Albertine’s departure by placing it right on top of her affairs so that I would see it, and leaving it there, I fear, in order to make Albertine think that I had been rifling through her possessions or at least to let her know that I had seen this note. And I often wondered if this stratagem, devised by Françoise, had not strongly contributed to Albertine’s departure, making her see that she could keep nothing private from me and feel discouraged and beaten. I showed her the note: I am unrepentant, my perfectly normal family feelings are ample excuse. “You know, Andrée,
don’t you, that Albertine always used to say that Mlle Vinteuil’s girl-friend was in fact a mother or a sister for her.—But you have misunderstood this note. The person that Mme Verdurin wanted Albertine to meet was not her girl-friend at all but the fiancé, ‘the also-ran,’ and the family feelings were those felt by Mme Verdurin for this scoundrel, who is in fact her nephew. And yet I think that Albertine did find out later that Mlle Vinteuil was due to attend, Mme Verdurin might have told her in passing. Of course she was pleased by the idea that she would see her friend, and it recalled past happiness but only in the way that you would be pleased, if you were going somewhere, to know that Elstir would be there at the same time, but no more, not even as much. No, if Albertine did not want to tell you why she wanted to go to see Mme Verdurin, it was because there was a rehearsal to which Mme Verdurin had invited just a very few people, including this nephew whom you had met at Balbec, whom Mme Bontemps wanted Albertine to marry and whom Albertine wanted to talk to. He was quite a rascal. And then there is no need to look for so many explanations,” added Andrée, “God knows how I loved Albertine and how good-natured she was but, especially since she had had typhoid fever (a year before you met us all), she was a real tearaway. She suddenly became disgusted with what she had been doing, she wanted to change, and at a moment’s notice, although doubtless she didn’t even know why herself. Do you remember the first year you came to Balbec, the year when you met us all? One fine day she got someone to send her a telegram calling her back to Paris, with hardly any time for us to help her pack. But she had no reason to leave. All the excuses that she gave out were false. Paris would be desperately dull for her at that time of year. We were all still in Balbec. The golfing season was not over and even the trials for the championship cup which she had so set her heart on had not finished. She would surely have won it. There was only a week to go. But there you are, off she went, at a gallop. I’ve often asked her about it since. She said herself that she didn’t know why she left, that she missed her little home (Paris as her ‘little home,’ can you believe it?), that she did not like Balbec, that she thought there were people there who were making fun of her.” And I thought that the element of truth in what Andrée was saying was that, if differences between minds explain the different impressions produced on one person and another by the same work of art and differences in feeling explain the impossibility of persuading someone to love you if they don’t, there are also differences of character and even differing character traits within a single individual which may motivate an action. Then I stopped musing over this analysis and I reminded myself how difficult it is in life to know the truth. I had of course noticed Albertine’s desire to go to Mme Verdurin’s, and her dissimulation of it, and I had not been mistaken. But just as we grasp one fact, other facts—the underside of a tapestry, the secret behind an act or an intrigue or indeed the intelligence of the heart—of which we never see more than appearances, escape us, and we see only flat shadows pass, of which we say: this is it, that is what it is; it is because of her or some other person. The revelation that Mlle Vinteuil was due to come had seemed to me to be the explanation, especially since Albertine had made the first move in mentioning it to me. And later had she not refused to swear to me that she took no pleasure in Mlle Vinteuil’s presence? And here on the subject of the young man in question I recalled what I had forgotten. A short time previously, while Albertine was living with me, I had met him and, in contrast with his attitude in Balbec, he had been extremely friendly, even affectionate, with me and had begged me to allow him to call on me, although I had refused for a number of reasons. Now, however, I realized that since he quite clearly knew that Albertine was living in my house, he wanted to be in my good books in order to have a free hand to come to see her and take her away from me and I concluded that he was a wretch. Yet when some time later I had this young man’s first works performed for me, I am sure that I continued to think that, if he had been so keen to call on me, it was on account of Albertine and although I blamed him for that, I remembered that if formerly I had set out for Donciéres to see Saint-Loup, it was in fact because I was enamored of Mme de Guermantes. It is true that the two cases were not the same: since Saint-Loup was not in love with Mme de Guermantes, there may well have been an element of duplicity in my affections but no treachery. But afterward I thought that we also feel affection for the person who owns the object of our desire, even if he himself also loves that same object. In this case of course we should struggle to resist a friendship that must lead directly to betrayal. And I believe that this is what I have always done. But in the case of those who are not strong enough to do so, we cannot say that the friendship which they display for the owner of the object of their desire is purely tactical, for they sincerely feel it and because of this they show it with such ardor that, once the treacherous deed has been perpetrated, it causes the deceived husband or lover to declare with indignation and stupor: “If only you could have heard the protestations of affection that the wretch lavished on me! That someone should rob a man of his wealth, I can understand. But that he should feel the diabolical need first to assure him of his friendship shows a degree of ignominy and perversity that beggars the imagination.” And yet, there is no perverse pleasure involved nor even any entirely lucid untruth. The affection of this sort that Albertine’s pseudo-fiancé had shown me that day had yet another excuse, for it was more complex than a simple offshoot of his love for Albertine. It was only very recently that he realized, and admitted to himself, that he wanted to be acknowledged as an intellectual. For the first time pleasures other than those of sport or debauchery existed for him. The fact that I was held in esteem by Elstir and Bergotte, that Albertine had perhaps spoken to him of my opinions of writers, which led her to believe that I could have been a writer myself, made me suddenly seem to him (to the new man that he at last perceived himself to be) someone interesting whom it would be pleasant to get to know better, someone in whom he would have liked to confide his plans and perhaps whom he might ask to introduce him to Elstir. As a result, he was sincere when he asked if he might call on me, expressing a personal sympathy, to which intellectual interest mingled with reflections of Albertine gave added sincerity. Of course it was not for that reason alone that he was so keen to call on me and would have dropped everything in order to be able to do so. But this last reason, which did hardly more than raise the first two to a level of paroxysmal passion, was perhaps unknown to him and the two others did really exist, as Albertine, when she wanted to go to see Mme Verdurin on the afternoon of the rehearsal, may well have really felt a perfectly honorable pleasure in seeing her childhood friends again, who were no more immoral in her eyes than she was in theirs, chatting with them, showing them by her very presence at the Verdurins’ that the poor little girl whom they had known was now invited to a noted salon, as well as the pleasure that she may well have felt in listening to Vinteuil’s music. If all that was true, the blush that had come to Albertine’s cheeks when I had mentioned Mlle Vinteuil came from the fact that I had done so on the subject of the very reception which she had hoped to conceal from me because of the marriage proposal, of which I was supposed to know nothing. Albertine’s refusal to swear to me that she had felt no pleasure at seeing Mlle Vinteuil that afternoon had at the time increased my torment and strengthened my suspicions, but proved to me retrospectively that she had wanted to be sincere and even in an innocent matter, perhaps precisely because it was innocent. There remained, however, what Andrée had told me about her relationship with Albertine. Perhaps, however, even without going so far as to believe that Andrée was making it all up solely in order to prevent me from feeling happy and from believing myself superior to her, yet I could still suppose that she had somewhat exaggerated what she used to do with Albertine and that Albertine, narrowing her analytic criteria and making casuistic use of certain definitions that I had foolishly formulated on the subject, also rather understated what she had done with Andrée, finding that her relationsh
ip with Andrée did not fall into the category of what she needed to confess and that she could deny it without telling a lie. But why should I believe that it was she rather than Andrée who had been lying? Truth and life are indeed an uphill path, and, without ever really getting to know them, I felt that the final impression which they left me was one where sadness was perhaps still overshadowed by fatigue.23