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

by Marcel Proust

  I wanted something to eat. We stopped at a big pastry-cook’s, situated almost outside the town, which at the time enjoyed a certain vogue. A lady was leaving the place, and asked the proprietress for her things. And after the lady had gone, Albertine cast repeated glances at the proprietress as though she wished to attract her attention while she was putting away cups, plates, cakes, for it was already late. She approached us only if I asked for something. And it happened then that, as the woman, who incidentally was extremely tall, was standing up while she waited on us and Albertine was seated beside me, Albertine, each time, in an attempt to attract her attention, raised vertically towards her a sunny gaze which compelled her to elevate her pupils to an inordinate height since, the woman being close up against us, Albertine had no possibility of tempering the angle with a sidelong glance. She was obliged, without raising her head unduly, to make her eyes ascend to that disproportionate height at which the woman’s eyes were situated. Out of consideration for me, Albertine would quickly lower her eyes and then, the woman having paid no attention to her, would begin again. This led to a series of vain imploring elevations before an inaccessible deity. Then the proprietress moved away to clear a large table next to ours. Now Albertine could look sideways. But never once did the woman’s eyes come to rest upon my mistress. This did not surprise me, for I knew that this woman, with whom I was slightly acquainted, had lovers, although she was married, but managed skilfully to conceal her intrigues, which astonished me vastly in view of her prodigious stupidity. I studied the woman while we finished our meal. Engrossed in her task, she carried her disregard for Albertine’s glances (which incidentally were in no way improper) almost to the point of rudeness. She went on clearing away and arranging things without letting anything distract her. The putting away of the coffee-spoons, the fruit-knives, might have been entrusted not to this large and handsome woman, but, by a labour-saving device, to a mere machine, and you would not have seen so complete an isolation from Albertine’s attention; and yet she did not lower her eyes, did not appear self-absorbed, allowed her eyes, her charms to shine in an undivided attention to her work. It is true that if this woman had not been a particularly stupid person (not only was this her reputation, but I knew it from experience), this detachment might have been a supreme proof of guile. And I know very well that the stupidest person, if his desire or his pocket is involved, can, in that sole instance, emerging from the nullity of his stupid life, adapt himself immediately to the workings of the most complicated machinery; all the same, this would have been too subtle a supposition in the case of a woman as brainless as this. Her stupidity even took her to improbable lengths of impoliteness. Not once did she look at Albertine whom, after all, she could not help seeing. It was not very flattering for my mistress, but, when all was said, I was delighted that Albertine should receive this little lesson and should see that frequently women paid no attention to her. We left the pastry-cook’s, got into our carriage and were already on our way home when I was seized by a sudden regret that I had not taken the proprietress aside and begged her on no account to tell the lady who had come out of the shop as we were going in my name and address, which she must know perfectly well because of the orders I had constantly left with her. It was undesirable that the lady should be enabled thus to learn, indirectly, Albertine’s address. But I felt that it was not worth while turning back for so small a matter, and that I should appear to be attaching too great an importance to it in the eyes of the idiotic and deceitful proprietress. I decided, however, that I should have to return there, in a week’s time, to make this request, and that it is a great bore, since one always forgets half the things one has to say, to have to do even the simplest things in instalments.

  We returned home very late, in a half-light through which here and there, by the roadside, a pair of red breeches pressed against a skirt revealed an amorous couple. Our carriage passed in through the Porte Maillot. For the monuments of Paris had been substituted, pure, linear, two-dimensional, a drawing of the monuments of Paris, as though in an attempt to recapture the appearance of a city that had been destroyed. But, at the edges of this picture, there rose so delicately the pale-blue mounting in which it was framed that one’s thirsty eyes sought everywhere for a little more of that delicious hue which was too sparingly meted out to them: the moon was shining. Albertine admired the moonlight. I dared not tell her that I would have admired it more if I had been alone, or in quest of an unknown woman. I recited to her some lines of verse or passages of prose about moonlight, pointing out to her how from “silvery” which it had been at one time, it had turned “blue” in Chateaubriand, and in the Victor Hugo of Eviradnus and La Fete chez Thérèse, to become in turn yellow and metallic in Baudelaire and Leconte de Lisle. Then, reminding her of the image that is used for the crescent moon at the end of Booz endormi, I talked to her about the whole poem.

  Looking back, I find it difficult to describe how densely her life was covered in a network of alternating, fugitive, often contradictory desires. No doubt falsehood complicated this still further, for, as she retained no accurate memory of our conversations, if, for example, she had said to me: “Ah! that was a pretty girl, if you like, and a good golfer,” and, when I had asked the girl’s name, had answered with that detached, universal, superior air of which no doubt there is always enough and to spare, for all liars of this category borrow it for a moment when they do not wish to answer a question, and it never fails them: “Ah, I’m afraid I don’t know” (with regret at her inability to enlighten me), “I never knew her name, I used to see her on the golf course, but I didn’t know what she was called”—if, a month later, I said to her: “Albertine, you remember that pretty girl you mentioned to me, who used to play golf so well,” “Ah, yes,” she would answer without thinking, “Emilie Daltier, I don’t know what’s become of her.” And the lie, like a line of earthworks, was carried back from the defence of the name, now captured, to the possibilities of meeting her again. “Oh, I couldn’t say, I never knew her address. I can’t think of anyone who could give it to you. Oh, no! Andrée never knew her. She wasn’t one of our little band, now so scattered.”

  At other times the lie took the form of a base admission: “Ah! if I had three hundred thousand francs a year …” She bit her lip. “Well? what would you do then?” “I should ask your permission,” she said, kissing me, “to stay with you always. Where else could I be so happy?”

  But, even allowing for her lies, it was incredible how spasmodic her life was, how fugitive her strongest desires. She would be mad about a person whom, three days later, she would refuse to see. She could not wait for an hour while I sent out for canvas and colours, for she wished to start painting again. For two whole days she would be impatient, almost shed the tears, quickly dried, of an infant that has just been weaned from its nurse. And this instability of her feelings with regard to people, things, occupations, arts, places, was in fact so universal that, if she did love money, which I do not believe, she cannot have loved it for longer than anything else. When she said: “Ah! if I had three hundred thousand francs a year!” or even if she expressed a nefarious but short-lived thought, she could not have held on to it any longer than to the idea of going to Les Rochers, of which she had seen an engraving in my grandmother’s edition of Mme de Sévigné, of meeting an old friend from the golf course, of going up in an aeroplane, of going to spend Christmas with her aunt, or of taking up painting again.

  “By the way, since neither of us is really hungry, we might look in at the Verdurins’,” Albertine said to me. “This is their day and their hour.”

  “But I thought you were cross with them?”

  “Oh! there are all sorts of stories about them, but really they’re not so bad as all that. Madame Verdurin has always been very nice to me. Besides, one can’t keep on quarrelling all the time with everybody. They have their faults, but who hasn’t?”

  “You’re not properly dressed, you would have to go home and dress, and tha
t would make us very late.”

  “Yes, you’re right, let’s just go home,” replied Albertine with that marvellous docility which never ceased to amaze me.

  The fine weather, that night, made a leap forward as the mercury in a thermometer darts upwards in the heat. On those early-risen spring mornings I could hear from my bed the tramcars rumbling through a cloud of perfumes, in an atmosphere which became more and more saturated by the warmth until it reached the solidification and density of noon. In my bedroom, where on the contrary it was cooler, when the unctuous air had succeeded in glazing and isolating the smell of the wash-stand, the smell of the wardrobe, the smell of the sofa, simply by the sharpness with which they stood out, vertical and erect, in adjacent but distinct slices, in a pearly chiaroscuro which added a softer glaze to the shimmer of the curtains and the blue satin armchairs, I saw myself, not by a mere caprice of my imagination but because it was physically possible, following, in some new suburban quarter like that in which Bloch’s house at Balbec was situated, the streets blinded by the sun, and finding in them not the dull butchers’ shops and the white freestone facings, but the country dining-room which I could reach in no time, and the smells that I would find there on my arrival, the smell of the bowl of cherries and apricots, the smell of cider, the smell of gruyère cheese, held in suspense in the luminous coagulation of shadow which they delicately vein like the heart of an agate, while the knife-rests of prismatic glass scatter rainbows athwart the room or paint the oilcloth here and there with peacock-eyes.

  Like a wind that swells in a steady roar, I heard with joy a car beneath the window. I sniffed its smell of petrol. The latter may seem regrettable to the oversensitive (who are always materialists and for whom it spoils the country), and to certain thinkers (materialists after their own fashion also) who, believing in the importance of facts, imagine that man would be happier, capable of higher flights of poetry, if his eyes were able to perceive more colours and his nostrils to distinguish more scents, a philosophical misrepresentation of the naive idea of those who believe that life was finer when men wore sumptuous costumes instead of black coats. But to me (just as an aroma, unpleasing perhaps in itself, of naphthalene and vetiver would have thrilled me by bringing back to me the blue purity of the sea on the day of my arrival at Balbec), this smell of petrol which, together with the smoke from the exhaust of the car, had so often melted into the pale azure on those scorching days when I used to drive from Saint-Jean-de-la-Haise to Gourville, since it had accompanied me on my excursions during those summer afternoons when I left Albertine painting, called into blossom now on either side of me, for all that I was lying in my darkened bedroom, corn-flowers, poppies and red clover, intoxicated me like a country scent, not circumscribed and fixed like that of the hawthorns which, held in by its dense, oleaginous elements, hangs with a certain stability about the hedge, but like a scent before which the roads sped away, the landscape changed, stately houses came hurrying to meet me, the sky turned pale, forces were increased tenfold, a scent which was like a symbol of elastic motion and power and which revived the desire that I had felt at Balbec to climb into the cage of steel and crystal, but this time no longer to pay visits to familiar houses with a woman I knew too well, but to make love in new places with a woman unknown. A scent that was accompanied incessantly by the horns of passing motors, which I set to words like a military summons: “Parisian, get up, get up, come out and picnic in the country, and take a boat on the river, under the trees, with a pretty girl; get up, get up!” And all these day-dreams were so agreeable that I congratulated myself upon the “stern decree” which prescribed that until I had rung my bell no “timid mortal,” whether Françoise or Albertine, should dare come in and disturb me “within this palace” where a majesty so terrible

  Means that to my subjects I remain invisible.24

  But all of a sudden the scene changed; it was the memory, no longer of old impressions but of an old desire, only recently reawakened by the Fortuny gown in blue and gold, that spread before me another spring, a spring not leafy at all but on the contrary suddenly stripped of its trees and flowers by the name that I had just murmured to myself: “Venice;” a decanted springtime, which is reduced to its own essence and expresses the lengthening, the warming, the gradual unfolding of its days in the progressive fermentation, no longer, now, of an impure soil, but of a blue and virginal water, springlike without bud or blossom, which could answer the call of May only by gleaming facets fashioned and polished by May, harmonising exactly with it in the radiant, unalterable nakedness of its dusky sapphire. Likewise, too, no more than the seasons to its flowerless creeks, do modern times bring any change to the Gothic city; I knew it, even if I could not imagine it, or rather, imagining it, this was what I longed for with the same desire which long ago, when I was a boy, in the very ardour of departure, had broken and robbed me of the strength to make the journey: to find myself face to face with my Venetian imaginings, to observe how that divided sea enclosed in its meanderings, like the sinuosities of the ocean stream, an urbane and refined civilisation, but one that, isolated by their azure girdle, had evolved independently, had had its own schools of painting and architecture, to admire that fabulous garden of fruits and birds in coloured stone, flowering in the midst of the sea which kept it refreshed, lapped the base of the columns with its tide, and, like a sombre azure gaze watching in the shadows, kept patches of light perpetually flickering on the bold relief of the capitals.

  Yes, I must go, the time had come. Now that Albertine no longer appeared to be angry with me, the possession of her no longer seemed to me a treasure in exchange for which one is prepared to sacrifice every other. For perhaps one would have done so only to rid oneself of a grief, an anxiety, which are now appeased. One has succeeded in jumping through the calico hoop through which one thought for a moment that one would never be able to pass. One has dispersed the storm, returned to a smiling serenity. The agonising mystery of a hatred with no known cause, and perhaps no end, is dispelled. Henceforward one finds oneself once more face to face with the problem, momentarily thrust aside, of a happiness which one knows to be impossible.

  It might well occur to us, were we better able to analyse our loves, to see that women often attract us only because of the counterpoise of all the men with whom we have to compete for them, although we suffer agonies from having thus to compete; this counterpoise removed, the charm of the woman declines. We have a painful and cautionary example of this in the predilection men have for women who have strayed before they came to know them, for those women whom they feel to be sinking in perilous quicksands and whom they must spend the whole period of their love in rescuing; a posthumous example, on the other hand, and one that is not in the least tragic, in the man who, conscious of a decline in his affection for the woman he loves, spontaneously applies the rules that he has deduced, and, to make sure that he does not cease to love the woman, places her in a dangerous environment where he is obliged to protect her daily. (The opposite of the men who insist on a woman’s retiring from the stage even though it was because she was on the stage that they fell in love with her.)

  Now that life with Albertine had become possible once again, I felt that I could derive nothing from it but misery, since she did not love me; better to part from her in the gentle solace of her acquiescence, which I would prolong in memory. Yes, this was the moment; I must make quite certain of the date on which Andrée was leaving Paris, use all my influence with Mme Bontemps to make sure that at that moment Albertine should not be able to go either to Holland or to Montjouvain; and when in this way there were no immediate drawbacks to Albertine’s departure, choose a fine day like this—and there would be plenty of them before long—when she had ceased to matter to me, when I was tempted by countless desires. I should have to let her leave the house without my seeing her, then, getting up and preparing myself in haste, leave a note for her, taking advantage of the fact that as she could not for the time being go anywhere that would up
set me, I might be spared, during my travels, from imagining the wicked things which she might do—and which in any case for the moment seemed quite unimportant—and, without seeing her again, set off for Venice.