The Fugitive

by Marcel Proust

  “But, my dear Sir, yes, of course, it’s common knowledge, I’ve known it for ages. The first year that your good self was in Balbec, M. le Marquis took my liftboy upstairs, on the pretext of developing some photos of your own lady grandmother. The lad tried to complain, we had to go to an awful lot of trouble to keep things quiet. And then, Sir, I’m sure Sir will remember the day when he came to dine with the Marquis de Saint-Loup and his mistress, who served as a screen for M. le Marquis. I am sure Sir will remember that M. le Marquis left on the pretext of a fit of temper. Of course you know that I am not saying that Madam was right. She really made him suffer. But you can’t stop me believing that on that occasion M. le Marquis’s anger was faked, and he needed to get away from Sir and Madam.” At least as far as that day was concerned, I am sure that, even if Aimé was not deliberately lying, he was entirely mistaken. I remembered only too well the state that Robert was in and the slap that he had administered to the journalist. And indeed it was the same for Balbec, either the liftboy had lied, or it was Aimé who was lying. At least that was what I believed; absolute certainty eluded me; we never see more than one side of things, and had it not made me suffer, I would have found a certain beauty in the fact that, while for me the errand of the “lift” to Saint-Loup had been an easy way to deliver him a letter and receive a reply, for Saint-Loup it had served to get him acquainted with someone who had attracted him. There are at least two sides to every question. Starting from the most insignificant action that one man accomplishes, another would launch into an entirely different series of actions. There is no doubt that I was no more likely to guess the repercussions of the episode involving Saint-Loup and the liftboy, if it ever took place, that would follow the banal dispatch of my letter than someone with no knowledge of Wagner other than the duet from Lohengrin could foresee the prelude to Tristan.11 Doubtless, objects present man with no more than a limited number of their innumerable attributes, because of the poverty of our senses. Things are colored because we have eyes; how many other epithets might they not deserve if we had hundreds of senses? But this different aspect that they could have had is made easier for us to understand by what in life is a minimal incident of which we know only a part, believing it to be the whole, and which someone else perceives as if through a window on the other side of the house giving a different view. Supposing that Aimé was not mistaken, Saint-Loup’s blush when Bloch had mentioned the “lift” to him did not perhaps spring only from the fact that he pronounced the word as “lifed.” But I was convinced that Saint-Loup’s physiological evolution had not started at this time and that then he still loved only women. I was able to deduce this retrospectively more from the friendship that Saint-Loup had shown me at Balbec than from any other evidence. It was only as long as he still loved women that he was really capable of friendship. Afterward, at least for a period of time, the men who did not interest him directly were subject to a display of indifference, which was, I believe, partly sincere, since he had become very cold, but which was also partly an act, designed to make people believe that he was interested only in women. None the less I remember that one day at Doncières as I was setting out to dine with the Verdurins and as he had just been looking rather lingeringly at Charlie, he had said to me: “It’s strange how this lad reminds me of Rachel. Doesn’t it strike you too? I find that they have some identical features. Not that it is of any interest to me.” And yet meanwhile his gaze remained afterward trained for some time on the horizon, as when, before returning to a round of cards or leaving to dine on the town, we are thinking of one of those long journeys which we suspect we will never undertake but for which we have felt a sudden pang of yearning. But if Robert saw something of Rachel in Charlie, Gilberte, for her part, tried to take on something of Rachel in order to please her husband, tying her hair with yellow, pink or poppy-red silk ribbons and adopting the same hair-style, for she was jealous because she thought that her husband was still in love with Rachel. It may well be possible that Robert’s love hovered on the boundary between that of a man in love with a woman and that of a man in love with another man. At all events the memory of Rachel played no more than an aesthetic role, and it is even improbable that it could have acted otherwise. One day Robert went so far as to ask her to dress as a man and to let her forelock hang loose, and yet he was content merely to look at her, feeling no satisfaction. He remained none the less attached to her and paid her scrupulously, if coldly, the enormous allowance which he had promised her and which did not prevent her later from dealing with him in the most despicable manner. Gilberte would not have suffered from this generosity toward Rachel if she had known that it was simply the dutiful discharge of a promise which no longer corresponded to any real love. But love was precisely what he feigned to feel for Rachel. Homosexuals would be the best husbands in the world if they did not pretend that they loved women. Actually, Gilberte did not complain. It was the fact that she had thought that Robert had been loved by Rachel, over such a long period of time, that had made her desire him, and had made her renounce on his behalf the most attractive matches; she felt in some way that he was making a concession by marrying her. And indeed at first he made comparisons between the two women (who were yet so different in charm and in beauty) which were unfavorable to the delicious Gilberte. But afterward the latter grew in her husband’s esteem while Rachel diminished visibly. Another person who had to eat her words was Mme Swann. If, in Gilberte’s eyes, Robert was already surrounded before the marriage by the double halo generated, on the one hand by his life with Rachel, constantly impugned in Mme de Marsantes’s lamentations and, on the other hand, by the prestige which the Guermantes had always had for her father and which she had inherited from him, Mme de Forcheville, however, would have preferred a more dazzling marriage, perhaps with a prince (there were impoverished royal families who would have been glad of the money—which it should be said turned out to be considerably less than the eighty million francs that had been mentioned—once rendered odorless by the attribution of the name of Forcheville) and a son-in-law less devalued by a life spent outside society. She had been unable to vanquish Gilberte’s will, complained bitterly to everyone and poured scorn on her son-in-law. But one fine day everything had changed, the son-in-law had become an angel and he was mocked only in private asides. This was because age had not deprived Mme Swann (now Mme de Forcheville) of her habitual tastes as a kept woman, but, since her admirers had deserted her, it had deprived her of the means to gratify them. She desired a new necklace every day, a new dress sewn with diamonds, a more luxurious car, but she did not have a large fortune, since Forcheville had spent nearly everything, and—what Jewish ancestry had thus informed Gilberte?—she had an adorable but dreadfully mean daughter, who calculated every penny of her husband’s budget and, naturally, that of her mother even more so. Now, suddenly she had caught scent of and found a protector in Robert. The fact that she was no longer in her prime was of little importance in the eyes of a son-in-law who did not love women. All that he asked of his mother-in-law was that she smooth over the occasional difficulty that might arise between him and Gilberte and consent to a trip which he planned to make with Morel. As soon as Odette had got to work, she was rewarded with a magnificent ruby. Which meant that Gilberte needed to be even more generous to her husband. Odette persuaded her all the more fervently since she herself would be the beneficiary. Thus, thanks to Robert, she was able, on the threshold of her fiftieth (some said her sixtieth) year to dazzle with extraordinary luxury at any dinner-table and every soirée to which she was invited, without needing as she had done before to have a “friend,” who now would no longer have forked out, or even acted his part. Thus she embarked upon a final period of chastity, which seemed definitive, and she had never been more elegant.

  It was not only the ill-will and resentment of the former pauper for the master who has made him rich, while none the less making him feel the difference in their conditions (which was in Charlus’s character, and showed
even more in his vocabulary), that had driven Charlie toward Saint-Loup in order to inflict more suffering on the Baron. It was also perhaps self-interest. I gained the impression that Robert must be giving him considerable sums of money. At one reception where I had met Robert before leaving for Combray and where his manner of exhibiting himself with an elegant woman who passed for his mistress, clinging to her sides and publicly entangled in her skirts as if they were one and the same being, made me think of a sort of ancestral gesture, albeit in this case more nervous and excited, that I had noticed in M. de Charlus, as it were billowing in the drapery of Mme Molé or her like, bearing the standard of a gynophile cause which was not his own but which he liked, however undeservedly, to flaunt in this fashion, whether because he found it afforded protection, or whether aesthetic pleasure, I was struck on my return by how economical this young man, who was so generous when he was far less rich, had become. That people care only for their possessions, and that he who was profligate with his occasional windfalls should then start saving when he comes into his fortune, is no doubt a fairly common phenomenon, but one which none the less seems in this case to take on a different aspect. Saint-Loup refused to hire a cab, and I noticed that he had kept a tramway transfer-ticket. Doubtless in this way Saint-Loup exploited, to different ends, talents which he had acquired during his long liaison with Rachel. A young man who has spent a long time living with a woman is very different from the virgin whose bride is his first woman. It was sufficient, on the rare occasions when Robert took his wife out to a restaurant, to observe his skill and respect in removing her hat and coat, his art in ordering dinner and having it served, his care in smoothing Gilberte’s sleeves before she put her jacket back on, to realize that he had spent a long time as another woman’s lover before becoming this one’s husband. Similarly, having been obliged to intervene in the minutest details of Rachel’s housekeeping, partly because she herself had no idea how to manage it, then later because his jealousy drove him to supervise her servants with a firm hand, he managed in administrating his wife’s property and her household to sustain this skillfully learned role which Gilberte might possibly not have been able to play and which she willingly left to him. But no doubt he did it above all to enable Charlie to benefit from the slightest cheese-paring savings, ultimately keeping him in style without Gilberte noticing or suffering. Perhaps even because he believed the violinist to be a spendthrift “like all artists” (Charlie used the title in this way with no pride and little conviction in order to provide an excuse for not replying to letters, etc., and for a host of other faults that he thought were universally agreed to be part and parcel of an artist’s psychology). Personally I found that it made no difference from a moral point of view whether one took one’s pleasure with a man or a woman, and only too natural and human to take it wherever one could find it. So that if Robert had not been married, his liaison with Charlie ought not to have caused me the slightest pain. And yet I did feel that the pain I experienced would have been just as sharp if Robert had still been a bachelor. Coming from anyone else, what he was doing would have left me indifferent. But I wept to think that I had in times gone by felt so great an affection for a different Saint-Loup, and that I felt clearly from his newly cold and evasive manner that this was no longer reciprocated, for, since he had found that men could arouse his desire, they no longer inspired his friendship. How could that have occurred in a young man who had so loved women that I had seen him in despair when “Rachel, when of the Lord” had tried to leave him? Had the resemblance between Charlie and Rachel—which was lost on me—been the springboard for Robert to pass from the tastes of his father to those of his uncle, thus accomplishing the evolution that even in the latter had happened rather late in life? And yet on occasion Aimé’s words returned to disturb me; I remembered Robert that year in Balbec; he had a way of not looking at the liftboy when he was talking to him in a way that much recalled M. de Charlus’s manner of speaking to certain men. But Robert could very well have inherited this from M. de Charlus and a certain hauteur and physical deportment of the Guermantes, and not at all from the Baron’s special tastes. Thus it was that the Duc de Guermantes, who had absolutely no such tastes, had the same nervous manner of twisting his wrist, as if he were fastening a lace cuff around it, and also some shrill and affected tones in his voice, all mannerisms which in M. de Charlus would have invited a different interpretation and to which he himself gave another, as the individual expresses his particularities through impersonal, atavistic traits which are perhaps merely personal characteristics from former times which have become crystallized in terms of voice and gesture. In the light of this latter hypothesis, which borders on natural history, one would not call M. de Charlus a Guermantes affected by a flaw and expressing it partly through the characteristics of the Guermantes race, rather, it would be the Duc de Guermantes who would be the odd one out in a perverted family, an individual whom the hereditary malady has so well spared that the external stigmata which it has marked him with have lost all their meaning. I remembered that the first day at Balbec when I had seen Saint-Loup, with his fair complexion and refined physique, seemingly wrought from some precious substance and looking so mannered as he waved his monocle in front of him, I had found that he had an effeminate air, which was certainly not the result of what I was now learning about him, but a grace specific to the Guermantes, that fineness of Dresden porcelain in which the Duchesse too was modeled. I also remembered his affection for me, and his tender and sentimental way of showing it, and thought that this too, which might have misled someone else, meant something entirely different at the time, even quite the opposite, from what I was now discovering. But when had it started? If it was the year when I had returned to Balbec, how was it that he had not returned even once to see the “lift,” and had never mentioned him to me? And as for the first year, how could he have noticed him, being as passionately enamored of Rachel as he was at the time? That first year, I had found Saint-Loup eccentric, like a true Guermantes. But he was even more peculiar than I had thought. Yet when we have had no direct intuition of something but have learned it only from others, it is too late, we are unable to transmit it to our soul, for its lines of communication with reality are closed; so we cannot enjoy the discovery, it comes too late. Besides, in any case, this discovery hurt me too much for me to take any intellectual pleasure in it. Of course, after what M. de Charlus had told me at Mme Verdurin’s in Paris, I no longer doubted that Robert’s case was common to a host of honorable citizens, even the best and the most intelligent among them. Learning it of anyone but Robert would have left me indifferent. The doubts which Aimé inspired in me tarnished our whole friendship in Balbec and Doncières, and, although I believed neither in friendship nor that I had ever really felt it for Robert, when I thought back over these stories about the “lift” and the restaurant where I had dined with Saint-Loup and Rachel, I had to make an effort not to weep.

  However, I should not have to dwell on this visit to the country near Combray, and at the time in my life when perhaps I thought least of Combray, if it had not provided, precisely because of this, at least temporary confirmation of certain ideas which had first struck me on the way to Guermantes, and of other ideas that had struck me on the way to Méséglise. Every evening I retraced, albeit in the opposite direction, the steps of the walk which we used to take in the afternoon in Combray when we went out toward Méséglise. Now at Tansonville we dined long after the hour when in Combray in days gone by we would have been asleep. And because of the hot weather, and because Gilberte spent the afternoons painting in the château chapel, we did not set out for our walk until about two hours before dinner. Our former pleasure, of observing on our way home how the crimson sky framed the wayside calvary or dipped into the Vivonne, was replaced by that of leaving at nightfall and finding the village deserted except for the shifting blue tones and irregular triangular forms of the sheep coming home. Over one half of the fields the sun was setting; over the
other the moon was already lit and preparing to bathe them entirely in its light. Sometimes Gilberte let me go on my own, and I walked onward leaving my shadow in my wake, like a boat sailing forth through enchanted waters; but usually she came with me. The walks we took then were most often the same as those we had taken in earlier days when we were children: now on my way to Guermantes, how could I have avoided experiencing even more strongly than ever the feeling that I would never be capable of writing, added to the realization that my imagination and my sensitivity had weakened, when I saw how little curiosity Combray inspired in me? I was sad to see how little I relived my past years. I found the Vivonne narrow and ugly beside the tow-path. Not that I discovered any major material discrepancy with what I recalled. But, since I had been separated by my totally divergent life from the places which I now happened to rediscover, there was not between them and me that contiguity which, even before one is aware of it, gives birth to the sudden, delicious, all-enveloping irruption of memory. Doubtless because I did not understand their nature, I felt sad to think that my faculties of feeling and imagining must have diminished if I was experiencing no pleasure on these walks with Gilberte. Gilberte herself, who understood me even less well than I did myself, increased my sadness by sharing my astonishment. “However can you not be moved,” she asked, “when you take the same steep little track that you used to climb in the past?” And she herself was so changed that I no longer found her beautiful, and in fact, she was no longer beautiful at all. While we walked, I saw the landscape change, as we first climbed steep slopes, but then walked downhill. I chatted with Gilberte, which I found very pleasant. And yet it was not all that easy. In so many individuals there are different, dissimilar layers, the character of the father, the character of the mother; we traverse first one, then the other. But the next day the order of the layering is reversed. And ultimately we no longer know who could separate the parts and who could be trusted to sit in judgment. Gilberte was like one of those countries with which we dare not conclude an alliance because they change government too often. Yet basically we are wrong. However discontinuous the life of an individual, memory establishes within him a sort of identity, with the result that he does not want to break promises that he remembers, even if he did not sign them himself. As for intelligence, Gilberte’s was very shrewd, give or take a few eccentricities inherited from her mother. But independently of her intrinsic qualities, I remember how greatly she astonished me on several occasions, during the conversations which we held while out walking. Once, the first time, by telling me that, “If you weren’t too hungry and it weren’t so late, if we took the path on the left and then turned to the right it would take us less than a quarter of an hour to reach the Guermantes.” It was as if she had said, “Turn left, then turn right, and you will grasp the intangible, you will reach the distant and unattainable goals of which on earth we know only the direction, and only”—something I had always previously thought of as all I could ever know of the Guermantes, and perhaps in a sense I was not entirely wrong—“the ‘way’ toward them.” One of my other moments of astonishment was to see the “source of the Vivonne,” which I had imagined to be something as extra-terrestrial as the entrance to Hell, and which was no more than a kind of square wash-tub full of bubbles. And the third time was when Gilberte said: “If you like, we could still go out one afternoon to walk toward Guermantes, but we could walk past Méséglise, it’s the prettiest route,” a sentence which overturned all the ideas of my childhood by revealing that the two ways were not as irreconcilable as I had thought. But what struck me the most was how little, during this stay, I relived my former years, how little I wanted to revisit Combray, and how narrow and ugly I found the Vivonne. Yet it was during one of those quasi-nocturnal albeit pre-prandial walks—since she dined so late!—that she did authenticate for me the fantasies which I had formed around the way to Méséglise. Just as we were about to enter a mysteriously smooth and deep valley bathed in moonlight, we stopped for a moment, like two insects about to dive into the depths of a blue-tinted calyx. Then Gilberte, perhaps merely acting the well-mannered hostess, reluctant to let you leave so early and wishing she could have given you a deeper appreciation of the countryside that you seemed to like, spoke to me with all the skill of a sophisticated woman adept at mingling silence, simplicity and sobriety with the expression of feeling, leading you to believe that you have a place in her life which no one else could replace. Gushing suddenly with an affection inspired by the sweetness and warmth of the evening breeze, I replied, “You mentioned the steep little track the other day. How I loved you then!” She answered, “Why didn’t you tell me? I had no idea. I loved you too. And I even once threw myself at your feet.—Whenever was that?—The first time, at Tansonville, you were out walking with your family, I was on my way home, and had never seen such a handsome little boy. I used,” she added with an absent and modest air, “to go to play with my young friends in the ruins of the dungeon at Roussainville. And you can guess how naughty it was, for it was a group of boys and girls of all sorts, and we took full advantage of the darkness. The choir-boy from Combray, Théodore, who, I have to admit, was very nice (my God, he was handsome!) but who has become extremely ugly (now he’s the chemist at Méséglise), had fun with all the little village girls for miles around. Since they let me out on my own, as soon as I could get away, I rushed off to join them. I can’t tell you how much I would have loved to see you there; I remember only too well, since I had only a moment to tell you, given the danger of being seen by your parents and mine, how I showed you so crudely what I wanted that I’m ashamed of it now. But you looked at me so fiercely that I realized that you didn’t want to.” And suddenly I thought that the real Gilberte and the real Albertine were perhaps those who offered themselves up in a single glance, one by a hedgerow of pink hawthorn, the other on the beach. And it was I, unable to understand something which I was to retrieve only later in my memory, after a delay during which the whole emotional undercurrent of my conversation had made them fear to be as frank as they had been in the first instance, who had spoiled everything with my clumsiness. I had “bungled” things more completely with them than Saint-Loup had with Rachel, and for the same reasons, although I have to say that my relative failure with them was less absurd. “And the second time,” continued Gilberte, “was years later when I saw you in your doorway, the day before I met you at my aunt Oriane’s; I didn’t recognize you straight away, or rather I recognized you without realizing it, since I felt the same urges that I had at Tansonville.—But in between, there was the Champs-Elysées.—Yes, but then you were too much in love with me, I felt that you were spying on my every move.” I did not think to ask her the identity of the young man with whom I saw her walking down the Champs-Elysées the day that I had set out to meet her again, when I might have been reconciled with her while there was still time, on a day which would perhaps have changed my life if I had not met two shadowy figures coming toward me side by side in the twilight. If I had asked her, she might have told me the truth, as might Albertine, if she had come back to life. And indeed, does death not come between us and women whom we no longer love but meet again years later, just as if they were no longer of this world, since the fact that our love no longer exists makes of the women that they used to be, or the men that we were, dead people? Perhaps also she might not have remembered, or she might have lied. In any case I no longer saw any interest in finding out, since my heart had already changed more than Gilberte’s face. It no longer appealed to me, but the main thing was that I was no longer unhappy, and I could not have imagined, if I had thought of it again, that I could have been so unhappy to see Gilberte walking slowly side by side with another young man that I could have thought, “It’s all over, I refuse ever to see her again.” Of the state of mind which, for the whole of that far-off year, had been nothing but endless torture to me, nothing remained. For in this world where everything wears out, where everything perishes, there is one thing that collap
ses and is more completely destroyed than anything else, and leaves fewer traces than beauty itself: and that is grief.