The Fugitive

by Marcel Proust

  Any other false title would have caused the Guermantes fewer problems. But the aristocracy knows how to accommodate such problems, and worse, as long as a marriage judged useful, from whatever point of view, is at stake. Legrandin, backed by the Duc de Guermantes, was the true Comte de Méséglise for some people of that generation and for everyone in the next.

  Another error that any uninitiated young reader might have been tempted to commit would have been to believe that the Baron and Baronne de Forcheville signed the obituary notice in their capacity as parents and parents-in-law of the Marquis de Saint-Loup, that is, as the Guermantes connection. Yet they had no call to figure on their list since it was Robert rather than Gilberte who was related to the Guermantes. Yet if, despite such false inferences, the Baron and the Baronne de Forcheville did figure on the bride’s list and not on that of the Cambremers, the truth is that it was not through the Guermantes but through Jupien, whom our more knowledgeable reader will recognize as a first cousin of Odette.

  After the marriage of his adopted daughter, M. de Charlus brought all his favors to bear on the young Marquis de Cambremer; the latter’s tastes resembled those of the Baron, who, since he had found them no obstacle to the marriage with Mlle d’Oloron, could only find him all the more estimable once he became a widower. This is not to say that the Marquis did not have other qualities, which made him a charming companion for M. de Charlus. But even in the case of a man of great value, it is a quality not to be despised by someone who seeks his personal friendship, and one which comes in very handy if he also plays whist. The young Marquis’s intelligence was remarkable and, as people said even in Féterne when he was still only a child, he really “took after his grandmother,” being just as enthusiastic and musical as she. Certain other family characteristics recurred in him, but more through imitation, as happened with the whole family, than through atavism. Thus it was that, a little while after the death of his wife, having received a letter signed “Léonor,” which I did not recollect as one of his baptismal names, I understood who my correspondent was only when I read the final flourish: “Please accept my true sympathy.” This true, when “placed in context,” added to the first name Léonor the surname Cambremer.

  As the train entered the station in Paris, my mother and I were still discussing these two reports, which, in order to make the journey seem less protracted, she had tried to save for the second stage and had managed to keep from me until we had passed Milan. My mother had very quickly reverted to what was for her the only true opinion, that of my grandmother. My mother had at first thought that my grandmother would have been surprised, and then that she would have been saddened, which was simply a way of saying that my grandmother would have enjoyed such a surprising event and that my mother, unable to tolerate depriving my grandmother of a pleasure, preferred to think that all was for the best, since such news was of a kind that could not have failed to upset her. But hardly had we arrived home than my mother already felt that she had been too selfish in wishing that she could have made my grandmother share all the surprises that life reserves for us. She still preferred to suppose that these would not have surprised my grandmother, whose predictions they merely ratified. And in these surprising events she was determined to see confirmation of my grandmother’s prophetic visions, and proof that she had had a mind that was even profounder and more far-sighted than we had thought. Thus my mother, in her quest to adopt a position of perfect admiration, lost no time in adding: “And yet, who knows whether your poor grandmother might not have approved? She was so understanding. And you know, don’t you, that she counted social connection as opposed to natural distinction for nothing. Well, don’t you remember, surely you remember, however strange they were, both of these girls caught her fancy. Think back to the first time she went to meet Mme de Villeparisis, then when she returned to tell us how vulgar she had found M. de Guermantes, and yet how lyrically she praised Jupien. Poor mother, do you remember? She said of the father: ‘If I had another daughter, I would give her to him, and his daughter is even better than he.’ And Swann’s little girl! She said: ‘I must say that she is charming, just wait and see what a fine marriage she will make.’ Poor mother, would that she could see how well she had judged! Right to the end, even after her departure, she will give us lessons in foresight, kindness and good judgment.” And since the pleasures that we saw my grandmother deprived of were all the simplest and humblest of life’s pleasures: enjoying an actor’s tone of voice, appreciating a favorite menu or the latest novel by a favorite author, Mama said: “Wouldn’t she have been surprised! Wouldn’t she have been amused! What a lovely letter she would have written in reply!” And my mother continued: “Just imagine how pleased our poor Swann would have been, since he was so anxious for his daughter to be invited to the Guermantes’, if he could have seen his daughter become one of the Guermantes!—Under a name not his own, led to the altar as Mlle de Forcheville? Do you think that he would have been as happy as all that?—Ah, that is true, I hadn’t thought of that.—That’s what makes me unable to rejoice for the little ‘hussy’; it’s the thought that she could find it in her heart to drop the name of her father, who was so good to her.—Yes, you are right, after all, perhaps it is better that he never knew of it.” It is as difficult to know whether something would be more likely to cause pleasure or pain to the dead as it is to the living! “I hear that the Saint-Loups are going to live at Tansonville. I wonder if Swann’s father, who so wanted to show off his pond to your poor father, could ever have imagined that the Duc de Guermantes would often see it, especially if he had come to know of his son’s dishonorable marriage. But since you yourself have talked so often to Saint-Loup of the pink hawthorn, the lilac and the irises at Tansonville, he will understand you better. Now they will belong to him.” Thus under the dining-room lamp which encourages them, there unfolded one of those conversations where the wisdom, if not of nations at least of families, seizes on some event—a death, an engagement, an inheritance or a ruin—and places it under the magnifying glass of memory, throwing it into high relief, dissociating, distancing and placing in perspective at different points in time and space things which, for those who have not experienced them, seem to run together on a single plane—the roll of the deceased, changes of address, sources of and changes in wealth, transfers of property. Is this wisdom not inspired by the Muse, whom we should fail to recognize for as long as possible if we want to preserve the freshness of our impressions and some creative power, but whom precisely those of us who have avoided her shall meet in the evening of our lives in the nave of some old village church, at a moment when all of a sudden they feel less touched by the eternal beauty expressed in the carvings on the altar than by the diverse fates which they have suffered, as they moved into a distinguished private collection or a chapel, then into a museum, or by the feeling that we are treading on an almost sentient flagstone, composed of the last remains of Arnauld or Pascal, or quite simply by deciphering the names of the daughters of the nobleman or the commoner inscribed on the copper plate of a wooden prie-dieu, imagining perchance the fresh young faces of these village maidens, the Muse who has assumed everything rejected by the higher Muses of philosophy and art, everything unfounded in truth, everything which is merely contingent but which also reveals other laws: the Muse of history!

  Some old friends of my mother’s, from Combray or nearby, came to see her to talk about Gilberte’s marriage, which did not overawe them at all. “You know who Mlle de Forcheville is, she’s quite simply Mlle Swann. And her best man, Charlus, who passes himself off as a ‘Baron,’ is the old man who used to keep her mother in full sight of Swann, who found it advantageous.—Why, whatever do you mean?” my mother protested. “In the first place, Swann was extremely rich.—Not rich enough, it would seem, not to need other people’s money. But how does the woman do it, how does she manage to hang on to her old lovers like that? She managed to persuade the first one to marry her, then the third, and then she hau
ls the second one back from the brink of the grave to get him to act as best man for the daughter she had with the first, or someone else, since the sheer number is confusing! Even she has lost count! I said the third, but the three-hundredth would be more like it. Besides, you know that she’s no more a Forcheville than you or I, which makes her a good match for the husband, who obviously isn’t noble either. You can be sure that only a fortune-hunter would marry such a creature. They say he’s some M. Dupont or M. Durand or other. If we didn’t have a radical mayor in Combray now, who won’t even talk to the curé, I would have got to the bottom of it. Because you know, of course, that when they published the banns they must have had to give the real name. It’s all very well for the newspapers and the stationers who print the invitations to call you the Marquis de Saint-Loup. It doesn’t harm a soul, and if it suits these good people, I’m the last to want to spoil their fun, what’s it got to do with me? Since I’ll never visit the daughter of a woman with a reputation, she can be a marchioness for her servants till the cows come home. But for the registrar it’s another matter. Ah, if my cousin Sazerat was still deputy mayor, I would have written to him, and he would have told me what name he had used for the banns!”

  This was, moreover, a period when I saw quite a lot of Gilberte, with whom I had resumed my friendship: for in the long term the rhythm of our lives does not scan with the timescale of our friendships. Once a sufficient period of time has elapsed, we see (just as we see the revival of former ministries in politics or of forgotten plays in the theater) friendly relations resumed, after long years of interruption, between the same people as before, and revived with pleasure. After ten years of reasons for one person to be too much in love, and reasons for the other not to tolerate such despotic demands, the reasons cease to exist. Only affinities matter, and everything that Gilberte would have refused me previously, she easily granted me, no doubt because I no longer desired it. Doing something that had always seemed intolerable or impossible to her, she now, without our ever discussing the reason for the change, was always ready to come to me and never in a hurry to leave; this was because the obstacle had vanished, that is, my love.

  A little later I was in fact due to spend a few days at Tansonville. I was rather embarrassed by the trip, for in Paris I kept a girl-friend who slept overnight in the pied-à-terre which I had rented for myself. As some need the scent of a forest or the sound of the lapping waters of a lake, I needed to feel her sleeping beside me at night and, during the day, to have her always beside me in the car. For even if we forget a love affair, it may determine the form of the love affair that follows. Already in the very heart of the earlier love affair daily habits existed whose origins we ourselves had forgotten; it was the anguish we first felt one day which made us desperately desire, then systematically repeat like rituals whose original meaning is forgotten, our beloved all the way back to her door, to move her into our home, to attend in person or through the presence of a trusted friend all her comings and goings—all these habits are smooth highways where every day our love follows paths which in former times were scored out by the molten lava of our ardent emotions. But these habits survive the disappearance of the woman concerned, even her memory. They shape, if not all our love affairs, at least certain of our loves, as they recur in turn. And thus in memory of the forgotten Albertine, my home had demanded the presence of my current mistress, who was hidden from visitors while filling my life in the same way as Albertine. And in order to go to Tansonville, I had to get her to agree to be looked after for a few days by one of my friends who was not attracted to women. I was going because I had learned that Gilberte was unhappy, since Robert was deceiving her, but not in the manner which everyone believed and which perhaps even she still believed, or at any rate declared. But self-respect, the urge to deceive others and deceive oneself, and the inevitably imperfect knowledge of one’s betrayal which is the lot of all deceived people, were aided and abetted by the fact that Robert, a true nephew of M. de Charlus, showed himself off in public with women whom he compromised and whom everyone, no doubt even Gilberte, believed to be his mistresses . . . Society even felt that he did not take enough care, refusing to leave the side of the woman he had brought to a soirée and even escorting her home, leaving Mme de Saint-Loup to make her own way home. Anyone who thought to say that the other woman whom he compromised in this way was not his mistress would have seemed naïve, given the blinding obviousness of the evidence. But unfortunately I had been put on the track of the truth, a truth which caused me no end of suffering, by a few words that Jupien let slip. What was my stupefaction when, a few months before my visit to Tansonville, having gone to take news of M. de Charlus, who had been suffering from cardiac irregularities which gave rise to considerable concern, and finding Jupien on his own, I mentioned some love letters addressed to Robert and signed Bobette, which had been intercepted by Mme de Saint-Loup. I had then learned from the Baron’s former factotum that the person signing himself as Bobette was none other than the violinist and critic whom we have mentioned and who had played a considerable part in the life of M. de Charlus! Jupien was unable to speak without indignation: “The lad was free to do whatever he liked. But if there was one direction he should not have strayed in, it was that of the Baron’s nephew. All the more because the Baron loved his nephew like a son; he tried to upset the marriage, it’s a disgrace. And he had to employ the most fiendish stratagems, for nobody was more opposed by nature to such things than the Marquis de Saint-Loup. Just think of his extravagant behavior with his mistresses! No, the fact that this wretched musician left the Baron in the underhand way that he did, you can say that that’s his business. But to take up with the nephew! There are things that one just does not do.” Jupien’s indignation was sincere; those people we call immoral have a moral indignation just as strong as others’, except only that the object of their indignation is slightly different. Moreover, people whose own hearts are not directly concerned and who constantly judge which relationships are inadvisable and which marriages bad, as if one were free to choose whom one loves, take no account of the delicious mirage which love projects and which so entirely and uniquely enfolds the person whom one loves that the “folly” committed by a man who marries a kitchenmaid or his best friend’s mistress is in general the only poetical act that he will accomplish in the course of his whole existence. I understood that there had very nearly been a separation between Robert and his wife (without Gilberte being aware yet of what the problem was) and that it was Mme de Marsantes, a loving, ambitious and philosophical mother, who had arranged, or rather imposed, the reconciliation. She belonged to that milieu where the endless mingling and recycling of blood, and the dilapidation of inheritances, may at any moment reawaken hereditary vices and compromises, either in the realm of the passions or in that of financial interest. It was with just such energy that she had formerly sponsored Mme Swann or Jupien’s daughter’s marriage, and arranged the marriage of her own son with Gilberte, employing on her own account, with painful resignation, the same atavistic wisdom that she had lavished on the whole Faubourg. And perhaps the only reason why she had suddenly rather clumsily precipitated the marriage between Robert and Gilberte, which certainly gave her less trouble and caused fewer tears to be shed than making him break up with Rachel, was the fear that he might take up again with another tart—or even with the same one, for Robert took a long time to forget Rachel—and perhaps find salvation without her. Now I understood what Robert had tried to tell me at the Princesse de Guermantes’: “It’s a shame that your girlfriend from Balbec does not have the fortune required by my mother, I think that the two of us would have got on well together.” He had meant to imply that she was from Gomorrah as he was from Sodom, or perhaps, if he had not yet arrived there, he enjoyed the company of only those women whom he could love after a certain fashion and in the presence of other women. If I had not thus, apart from some rare flashes of recollection, lost all curiosity to find out anything about my yo
ung friend, I could have questioned not only Gilberte but also her husband on her account. In the end it was the same factor that had inspired both in Robert and in me the desire to marry Albertine (that is, her love for women). But the causes of our desire, like its ends, were opposite. I had been driven to it by the despair I had felt at the discovery, Robert by his satisfaction; I in order to prevent her through constant surveillance from yielding to her inclination; Robert in order to cultivate it and to enjoy the freedom that he would allow her to offer him her girl-friends. Whereas Jupien situated so recently the new orientation that Robert’s carnal tastes had taken, so different from the original, a conversation which I held with Aimé and which made me very unhappy, showed me that the former maître d’hôtel from Balbec dated this divergence or inversion much earlier. This conversation took place during a two- or three-day stay that I made in Balbec, where Saint-Loup himself, during a long period of leave, had come with his wife, whose side, in this first phase, he never left. I had admired how Rachel’s influence on Robert could still be felt. Only a newly-wed who has lived for a long time with a mistress knows how to remove his wife’s coat on entering a restaurant and show her proper respect. During his affair he has received the education that a good husband should have. Not far away, at a table near mine, Bloch, surrounded by pretentious young university dons, exuded an air of bogus relaxation, shouting aloud to one of his friends, “No, no, my dear friend, you give the order. I have never in my life been able to choose a menu. I’ve never been able to give orders!” he repeated with suspect pride and, mingling literature with gourmandise gave his instant opinion on the bottle of champagne that he liked to see enhance a conversation “in totally symbolic fashion.” Whereas Saint-Loup knew how to give orders. He was seated beside Gilberte, who was already pregnant (later he ceaselessly got her with child), just as he slept with her in their double bed at the hotel. He spoke only to his wife, the rest of the hotel seemed not to exist for him, but as soon as a waiter took an order or came near, he raised his limpid eyes and looked straight at him for no more than two seconds, while his clear-sighted gaze seemed to display a series of interests and requests entirely different from those which any other client might have inspired, however long they spent eyeing a page or a waiter in order to make remarks about him, witty or otherwise, that he could retail to his friends. This brief, discreet, indifferent glance, showing that he was interested in the waiter in his own right, would reveal to anyone who observed it that this excellent husband, the previously passionate lover of Rachel, had another dimension to his life, and one which seemed to him to be infinitely more interesting than the one to which his duty assigned him. But this was the only visible sign of it. His eyes had already returned to Gilberte, who had noticed nothing, he introduced her to a friend of his who was passing through, and he left to take her for a walk. Now on this occasion Aimé told me of a much earlier time, the time when I had made the acquaintance of Saint-Loup, also in Balbec, through Mme de Villeparisis.