In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5: The Captive, the Fugitive

by Marcel Proust

  It did not occur to me that the apathy reflected in my thus delegating to Andrée or the chauffeur the task of soothing my agitation, by leaving them to keep watch on Albertine, was paralysing and deadening in me all those imaginative impulses of the mind, all those inspirations of the will, which enable us to guess and to forestall what a person is going to do. It was all the more dangerous because by nature I have always been more open to the world of potentiality than to the world of contingent reality. This helps one to understand the human heart, but one is apt to be taken in by individuals. Productive of suffering, my jealousy was born of mental images, not based on probability. Now there may occur in the lives of men and of nations (and there was to occur in mine) a moment when we need to have within us a chief of police, a clear-sighted diplomat, a master-detective, who instead of pondering over the possible contingencies that extend to all the points of the compass, reasons soundly and says to himself: “If Germany announces this, it means that she intends to do something else, not just ‘something’ in the abstract but precisely this or that or the other, which she may perhaps have already begun to do,” or “If so-and-so has fled, it is not in the direction a or b or d, but to the point c, and the place to which we must direct our search for him is c.” Alas, I allowed this faculty, which was not highly developed in me, to grow numb, to lose strength, to disappear, by letting myself be lulled as soon as others were engaged in keeping watch on my behalf.

  As for the reason for my desire to remain at home, I should have been very reluctant to explain it to Albertine. I told her that the doctor had ordered me to stay in bed. This was not true. And if it had been true, his instructions would have been powerless to prevent me from accompanying my mistress. I asked her to excuse me from going out with herself and Andrée. I shall mention only one of my reasons, which was dictated by prudence. Whenever I went out with Albertine, if she left my side for a moment I became anxious, began to imagine that she had spoken to or simply looked at somebody. If she was not in the best of tempers, I thought that I must be causing her to miss or to postpone some appointment. Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far. It is better not to know, to think as little as possible, not to feed one’s jealousy with the slightest concrete detail. Unfortunately, in the absence of an outer life, incidents are created by the inner life too; in the absence of expeditions with Albertine, the random course of my solitary reflexions furnished me at times with some of those tiny fragments of the truth which attract to themselves, like a magnet, an inkling of the unknown, which from that moment becomes painful. Even if one lives under the equivalent of a bell jar, associations of ideas, memories, continue to act upon us. But these internal shocks did not occur immediately; no sooner had Albertine set off on her drive than I was revivified, if only for a few moments, by the exhilarating virtues of solitude. I took my share in the pleasures of the new day; the arbitrary desire—the capricious and purely solipsistic impulse—to savour them would not have sufficed to place them within my reach, had not the particular state of the weather not merely evoked for me their past images but affirmed their present reality, immediately accessible to all men whom a contingent and consequently negligible circumstance did not compel to remain at home. On certain fine days, the weather was so cold, one was in such full communication with the street, that it seemed as though the outer walls of the house had been dismantled, and, whenever a tramcar passed, the sound of its bell reverberated like that of a silver knife striking a house of glass. But it was above all in myself that I heard, with rapture, a new sound emitted by the violin within. Its strings are tautened or relaxed by mere differences in the temperature or the light outside. Within our being, an instrument which the uniformity of habit has rendered mute, song is born of these divergences, these variations, the source of all music: the change of weather on certain days makes us pass at once from one note to another. We recapture the forgotten tune the mathematical necessity of which we might have deduced, and which for the first few moments we sing without recognising it. These modifications alone, internal though they had come from without, gave me a fresh vision of the external world. Communicating doors, long barred, reopened in my brain. The life of certain towns, the gaiety of certain excursions, resumed their place in my consciousness. With my whole being quivering around the vibrating string, I would have sacrificed my dim former existence and my life to come, erased by the india-rubber of habit, for a state so unique.

  If I had not gone out with Albertine on her long expedition, my mind would stray all the further afield, and, because I had refused to savour with my senses this particular morning, I enjoyed in imagination all the similar mornings, past or possible, or more precisely a certain type of morning of which all those of the same kind were but the intermittent apparition which I had at once recognised; for the sharp air blew the book open of its own accord at the right page, and I found before me, already marked, so that I might follow it from my bed, the Gospel for the day. This ideal morning filled my mind full of a permanent reality identical with all similar mornings, and infected me with a joyousness which my physical debility did not diminish: for, a sense of well-being resulting far less from the soundness of our health than from the surplus of our energies, we can achieve it just as well by restricting the scope of our activity as by increasing our strength. The activity with which I was overflowing and which I kept constantly charged as I lay in bed, made me pulsate and leap internally, like a machine which, prevented from moving from its position, turns over on itself.

  Françoise would come in to light the fire, and in order to make it draw, would throw upon it a handful of twigs, the scent of which, forgotten for a year past, traced round the fireplace a magic circle within which, glimpsing myself poring over a book, now at Combray, now at Doncières, I was as joyful, while remaining in my bedroom in Paris, as if I had been on the point of setting out for a walk along the Méséglise way, or of going to join Saint-Loup and his friends on manoeuvres. It often happens that the pleasure which everyone takes in turning over the keepsakes that his memory has collected is keenest in those whom the tyranny of physical illness and the daily hope of its cure prevent, on the one hand, from going out to seek in nature scenes that resemble those memories and, on the other hand, leave so convinced that they will shortly be able to do so that they can remain gazing at them in a state of desire and appetite and not regard them merely as memories or pictures. But, even if they could never have been more than this for me, even if, in recalling them, I could see them as pictures only, they none the less suddenly re-created out of my present self, the whole of that self, by virtue of an identical sensation, the child or the youth who had first seen them. There had been not merely a change in the weather outside, or, inside the room, a change of smells; there had been in myself an alteration in age, the substitution of another person. The scent, in the frosty air, of the twigs of brushwood was like a fragment of the past, an invisible ice-floe detached from some bygone winter advancing into my room, often, moreover, striated with this or that perfume or gleam of light, as though with different years in which I found myself once more submerged, overwhelmed, even before I had identified them, by the exhilaration of hopes long since abandoned. The sun’s rays fell upon my bed and passed through the transparent shell of my attenuated body, warmed me, made me glow like crystal. Then, like a famished convalescent already battening upon all the dishes that are still forbidden him, I wondered whether marriage with Albertine might not spoil my life, not only by making me assume the too arduous task of devoting myself to another person, but by forcing me to live apart from myself because of her continual presence and depriving me for ever of the joys of solitude.

  And not of these alone. Even if one asks of the day nothing but desires, there are some—those that are excited not by things but by people—whose character it is to be personal and particular. So that if, on rising from my bed, I went to the window and drew the curtain aside for a
moment, it was not merely, as a pianist for a moment turns back the lid of his instrument, to ascertain whether, on the balcony and in the street, the sunlight was tuned to exactly the same pitch as in my memory, but also to catch a glimpse of some laundress carrying her linen-basket, a baker-woman in a blue apron, a dairymaid with a tucker and white linen sleeves, carrying the yoke from which her milk-churns are suspended, some haughty fair-haired girl escorted by her governess—an image, in short, which differences of outline, perhaps quantitatively insignificant, were enough to make as different from any other as, in a phrase of music, the difference between two notes, an image but for the vision of which I should have dispossessed my day of the goals which it might have to offer to my desires of happiness. But if the access of joy brought me by the spectacle of women whom it was impossible to imagine a priori made the street, the town, the world, more desirable, more deserving of exploration, it set me longing, for that very reason, to recover my health, to go out of doors and, without Albertine, to be a free man. How often, at the moment when the unknown woman who was to haunt my dreams passed beneath the window, sometimes on foot, sometimes at full speed in a motor-car, did I not suffer from the fact that my body could not follow my gaze which kept pace with her, and falling upon her as though shot from the embrasure of my window by an arquebus, arrest the flight of the face that held out for me the offer of a happiness which, thus cloistered, I should never know!

  Of Albertine, on the other hand, I had nothing more to learn. Every day she seemed to me less pretty. Only the desire that she aroused in others, when, on learning of it, I began to suffer again and wanted to challenge their possession of her, raised her in my eyes to a lofty pinnacle. She was capable of causing me pain, but no longer any joy. Pain alone kept my wearisome attachment alive. As soon as it subsided, and with it the need to appease it, requiring all my attention like some agonising distraction, I felt how utterly meaningless she was to me, as I must be to her. I was miserable at the thought that this state of affairs should persist, and, at certain moments, I longed to hear of something terrible that she had done, something that would keep us estranged until I was cured, giving us a chance to make it up and to reconstitute in a different and more flexible form the chain that bound us.

  In the meantime, I relied on countless events, on countless pleasures, to procure for her in my company the illusion of that happiness which I did not feel capable of giving her. I should have liked, as soon as I was cured, to set off for Venice, but how was I to manage it, if I married Albertine, I who was so jealous of her that even in Paris whenever I decided to stir from my room it was to go out with her? Even when I stayed in the house all the afternoon, my thoughts accompanied her on her drive, traced a distant blue horizon, created round the centre that was myself a fluctuating zone of vague uncertainty. “How completely,” I said to myself, “would Albertine spare me the anguish of separation if, in the course of one of these drives, seeing that I had ceased to talk of marriage, she decided not to come back, and went off to her aunt’s without my having to say good-bye to her!” My heart, now that its scar had begun to heal, was beginning to detach itself from hers; I could, in my imagination, shift her, separate her from myself without pain. No doubt, failing myself, some other man would be her husband, and in her freedom she would indulge in those amorous adventures which filled me with horror. But the day was so fine, I was so certain that she would return in the evening, that even if the idea of possible misbehaviour did enter my mind, I could, by an exercise of free will, imprison it in a part of my brain in which it had no more importance than the vices of an imaginary person would have had in my real life; manipulating the supple hinges of my thought, with an energy which I felt, in my head, at once physical and mental, as it were a muscular movement and a spiritual impulse, I had broken away from the state of perpetual preoccupation in which I had hitherto been confined, and was beginning to move in a free atmosphere, in which the idea of sacrificing everything in order to prevent Albertine from marrying someone else and to put an obstacle in the way of her taste for women seemed as unreasonable in my own eyes as in those of a person who had never known her.

  However, jealousy is one of those intermittent maladies the cause of which is capricious, arbitrary, always identical in the same patient, sometimes entirely different in another. There are asthma sufferers who can assuage their attacks only by opening the windows, inhaling the high winds, the pure air of mountains, others by taking refuge in the heart of the city, in a smoke-filled room. There are few jealous men whose jealousy does not allow certain derogations. One will consent to infidelity provided he is told of it, another provided it is concealed from him, wherein they are equally absurd, since if the latter is more literally deceived inasmuch as the truth is not disclosed to him, the other demands from that truth the aliment, the extension, the renewal of his sufferings.

  What is more, these two inverse idiosyncrasies of jealousy often extend beyond words, whether they implore or reject confidences. We see jealous lovers who are jealous only of the men with whom their mistress has relations in their absence, but allow her to give herself to another man, if it is done with their permission, near at hand, and, if not actually before their eyes, at least under their roof. This case is not at all uncommon among elderly men who are in love with a young woman. They feel the difficulty of winning her favours, sometimes their inability to satisfy her, and, rather than be deceived, prefer to allow into the house, into an adjoining room, some man whom they consider incapable of giving her bad advice, but not incapable of giving her pleasure. With others it will be just the opposite; never allowing their mistress to go out by herself for a single minute in a town they know, keeping her in a state of veritable bondage, they allow her to go for a month to a place they do not know, where they cannot picture to themselves what she may be doing. With regard to Albertine, I had both sorts of soothing quirk. I should not have been jealous if she had enjoyed her pleasures in my vicinity, with my encouragement, completely under my surveillance, thereby relieving me of any fear of mendacity; nor should I have been jealous if she had moved to a place so unfamiliar and remote that I could not imagine, had no possibility of knowing, and no temptation to know, her manner of life. In either case, my uncertainty would have been eliminated by a knowledge or an ignorance equally complete.

  The decline of day plunging me back by an act of memory into a cool atmosphere of long ago, I would inhale it with the same delight as Orpheus the subtle air, unknown upon this earth, of the Elysian Fields. But already the day was ending and I would be overcome by the desolation of evening. Looking mechanically at the clock to see how many hours must elapse before Albertine’s return, I would see that I still had time to dress and go downstairs to ask my landlady, Mme de Guermantes, for particulars of various pretty articles of clothing which I wanted to give Albertine. Sometimes I would meet the Duchess in the courtyard, going out shopping, even if the weather was bad, in a close-fitting hat and furs. I knew quite well that to a number of intelligent people she was merely a lady like any other, the name Duchesse de Guermantes signifying nothing, now that there are no longer any duchies or principalities; but I had adopted a different point of view in my manner of enjoying people and places. This lady in furs braving the bad weather seemed to me to carry with her all the castles of the territories of which she was duchess, princess, viscountess, as the figures carved over a portal hold in their hands the cathedral they have built or the city they have defended. But my mind’s eyes alone could discern these castles and these forests in the gloved hand of the lady in furs who was a cousin of the king. My bodily eyes distinguished in it only, on days when the sky was threatening, an umbrella with which the Duchess did not hesitate to arm herself. “It’s much wiser—one can never be certain, I may find myself miles from home, with a cabman demanding a fare beyond my means.” The words “too dear” and “beyond my means” kept recurring all the time in the Duchess’s conversation, as did also: “I’m too poor”—without its bei
ng possible to decide whether she spoke thus because she thought it amusing to say that she was poor, being so rich, or because she thought it smart, being so aristocratic (that is to say affecting to be a peasant), not to attach to riches the importance that people give them who are merely rich and nothing else and who look down on the poor. Perhaps it was, rather, a habit contracted at a time in her life when, already rich, but not rich enough to satisfy her needs considering the expense of keeping up all those properties, she felt a certain financial embarrassment which she did not wish to appear to be concealing. The things about which we most often jest are generally, on the contrary, the things that worry us but that we do not wish to appear to be worried by, with perhaps a secret hope of the further advantage that the person to whom we are talking, hearing us treat the matter as a joke, will conclude that it is not true.

  But on most evenings at this hour I could count on finding the Duchess at home, and I was glad of this, for it was more convenient for the purpose of discussing at length the particulars that Albertine required. And I would go down almost without thinking how extraordinary it was that I should be calling upon that mysterious Mme de Guermantes of my boyhood simply in order to make use of her for a practical purpose, as one makes use of the telephone, a supernatural instrument before whose miracles we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or to order an ice cream.

  The accessories of costume gave Albertine enormous pleasure. I could not resist giving her some new trifle every day. And whenever she had spoken to me rapturously of a scarf, a stole, a sunshade which, from the window or as they passed one another in the courtyard, her eyes, that so quickly distinguished anything connected with elegance of dress, had seen round the throat, over the shoulders, or in the hand of Mme de Guermantes, knowing how the girl’s naturally fastidious taste (refined still further by the lessons in elegance which Elstir’s conversation had been to her) would by no means be satisfied by any mere substitute, even of a pretty thing, such as fills its place in the eyes of the common herd but differs from it entirely, I would go in secret to ask the Duchess to explain to me where, how, from what model the article had been created that had taken Albertine’s fancy, how I should set about obtaining one exactly similar, in what lay the maker’s secret, the charm (what Albertine called the “chic,” the “style”) of its manner and—the beauty of the material having also its importance—the name and quality of the fabrics that I was to insist upon their using.