The Fugitive

by Marcel Proust

  “Suppression of suffering”? Could I really have believed it, believed that death erases only what exists and leaves everything else in the state it was before, that it removes the pain from the heart of the man for whom the existence of his partner is no longer anything but a cause of pain, that it removes the pain and leaves nothing in its place? Suppression of pain! As I browsed through the news items in the papers, I regretted not having been brave enough to formulate the same wish as Swann. If Albertine could have fallen victim to an accident and had lived, I would have had an excuse to rush to her bedside; if she had died, I would have recovered what Swann called the freedom to live. Did I believe this? Swann, who was so refined and thought he knew himself so well, had believed it. How little we know of what lies in our hearts! How well I could have taught him a little later, had be still been alive, that his wish was as absurd as it was criminal and that the death of the woman he loved would have liberated him from nothing!

  I abandoned all pride concerning Albertine, I sent her a desperate telegram asking her to return on any terms, saying that she would be able to do whatever she liked, that I would ask only to kiss her for a minute before bedtime three times a week. And had she said “Only once a week,” I would have accepted that “once.” She never returned. My telegram had barely been sent when another arrived for me. It was from Mme Bontemps. The world is not given to each individual in advance. During the course of a lifetime things that we could never have guessed are added in. Ah! It was not suppression of suffering that the first two lines of the telegram produced in me: “My poor friend, our little Albertine is no more, forgive me for having to tell you this terrible thing, knowing that you loved her so much. She was thrown against a tree by her horse while out riding. We did everything we could, but could not revive her. Would that I had died in her place!” No, not the suppression of suffering, but a previously unknown kind of suffering, that of learning that she would not return. But had I not told myself several times that she might not return? I had indeed said this to myself, but I now realized that I had never believed it for a moment. As I needed her presence and her kisses to help to bear the pain caused by my suspicions, I had acquired the habit, ever since Balbec, of being always with her. Even when she was out of the house and I was on my own, I would still be kissing her. I had continued to do so since she had left for Touraine. I needed her fidelity less than her return. And if my intellect could sometimes with impunity doubt this return, my imagination did not cease for one minute to picture it. Instinctively I stroked my neck and my lips, which had imagined themselves being kissed by her since she had left, yet which would never be kissed by her again; I stroked them as Mama had caressed me on my grandmother’s death, saying to me, “My poor child, your grandmother who loved you so much will never kiss you again.” My whole future life had been torn out of my heart. My future life? Had I then never on any occasion thought of living it without Albertine? No, never. Had I not for so long dedicated to her every minute of my life until my dying day? Of course I had! This future inseparable from her was not something that I had been able to perceive, but now that it had been cut loose I felt a gaping hole in the place where it had been in my heart. Françoise, who as yet knew nothing, came into my room; I shouted at her furiously, “What is it?,” then she said to me (and there are sometimes words that place an alternative reality in the same place as the one which we see before our eyes, making us reel with dizziness), “There’s no need for Monsieur to look angry. On the contrary, he is going to be very pleased. It’s two letters from Mademoiselle Albertine.” I realized afterward that I must have had the look of a man taking leave of his senses. I did not feel happy, nor even incredulous. I was like a man who sees the same place in his room taken up by a sofa and a grotto. Since nothing seems real any more, he collapses to the floor. Albertine’s two letters must have been written shortly before the ride where she had met her death. The first one said: “My dear friend, many thanks for showing your confidence in me by telling me of your intention to invite Andrée into your home. I am sure that she will accept with great pleasure and I think that she is very lucky. Gifted as she is, she will make the most of the company of a man like you and of the admirable influence that you are able to exert over a fellow creature. I think that your proposal will bring as much benefit to her as to you. So, should she show the slightest reticence (although I do not think this likely), send me a telegram, and I shall take her in hand.” The second letter was dated a day later. In fact she must have written them both within a few moments of each other and then pre-dated the first. For all the while I had been absurdly misinterpreting her intentions, which had been merely to return to my side, whereas someone with no stake in the affair, say a man of no imagination, the negotiator of a peace treaty, or a businessman auditing a transaction, would have judged better than I. The letter contained only these words: “Would it be too late for me to return to you? If you have not yet written to Andrée, would you agree to take me back? I shall be bound by your decision, which I beg you to let me know without delay, since you can imagine how impatiently I await it. If it were favorable, I would take the next train. Yours with all my heart, Albertine.”

  For Albertine’s death to have suppressed my suffering, the mortal blow would have had to kill her not only in Touraine, but within me. There, she had never been more alive. To enter inside us, people have been obliged to take on the form and to fit into the framework of time; appearing to us only in successive instants, they have never managed to reveal to us more than one aspect, print more than a single photograph of themselves at a time. This is no doubt a great weakness in human beings, to consist in a simple collection of moments; yet a great strength too; they depend on memory, and our memory of a moment is not informed of everything that has happened since, the moment which it registered still lives on and, with it, the person whose form was sketched within it. And then this fragmentation not only makes the dead person live on, it multiplies her forms. In order to console myself, I would have had to forget not one but innumerable Albertines. When I had succeeded in accepting the grief of having lost one of them, I would have to begin again with another, with a hundred others.

  So then my life was entirely changed. What had constituted its sweetness was not Albertine in person, but, in parallel with her, when I was alone, the perpetual rebirth of moments from the past called forth by identical moments. The sound of the rain brought back to me the scent of lilac in Combray; the sun’s rays moving over the balcony brought the pigeons from the Champs-Elysées; the sounds muffled by the morning heat brought the coolness of cherries; the yearning for Brittany or Venice was borne by the sound of the wind and the return of Easter. Summer was on its way, the days grew longer. It was the season when pupils and teachers leave before mid-morning to go to the public gardens to prepare for their final examinations under the trees, to catch the last drop of coolness falling from a sky less burning than in the heat of the day, but already arid and bare. From my darkened room, with a force of evocation which equaled that of former times but now brought only suffering, I sensed that the sun hung heavy in the air outside as it set, garishly daubing the verticals of houses and churches. And if Françoise on her return were accidentally to ruffle the folds of the lined curtains, I would smother a cry escaping from the inner wound that had just been reopened by the sliver of antique sunlight which had made the modern façade of Bricqueville I’Orgueilleuse seem beautiful, when Albertine had said, “It has been restored.” Not knowing how to explain my sighs to Françoise, I said, “Oh, I am so thirsty.” She went out and then returned, but I had to turn away abruptly, assailed by the painful charge of one of those thousands of invisible memories which erupted in the shadows around me at every moment: I had just noticed that she had brought me cider and cherries, the cider and cherries which a farm lad had brought out to us in the car at Balbec, those substances which in former days would have enabled me to commune in perfect harmony with the rainbow filtering through shady
dining-rooms on torrid days. Then for the first time I thought back to the farm at Les Écorres, and I thought that on certain days at Balbec when Albertine told me that she was not free because she had to go out with her aunt, she was perhaps with one or other of her girl-friends on a farm with which she knew that I was not familiar and where, while I was waiting around at the Marie-Antoinette farm19 on the off-chance of a meeting only to be told, “We have not seen her today,” she treated her friend to the same words that she had spoken to me when we had been for a drive together: “He will never think of looking for us here, so we will not be disturbed.” I asked Françoise to draw the curtains to save me from seeing the ray of sunlight. But it continued to infiltrate my memory just as corrosively. “I don’t like it, it has been restored, but tomorrow we will go to Saint-Martin-le-Vetu, and the day after to . . .” Tomorrow, the day after, it was a future life that we would share together, perhaps for ever, that was starting to take shape; my heart leaped out toward it, but it was no longer there, Albertine was dead.

  I asked Françoise what time it was. Six o’clock. At last, thank God, the oppressive heat that Albertine and I used to so complain about, and so enjoy, was going to disappear. The day was drawing to a close. But what benefit did this bring me? The coolness of evening set in, the sun went down; in my memory, at the end of the road along which we were driving home together, I noticed, beyond the last village, something that looked like another resort in the distance, but too far to reach the same evening, so that we would stop in Balbec and stay there together. Together then. But now, alone, I had to pull up short before this same abyss, she was dead. It was no longer enough to draw the curtains, I tried to plug the eyes and ears of my memory, so as not to see this orange-tinted strip of sunset, so as not to hear those invisible birds who called to each other from tree to tree. All around me while I was being so tenderly kissed by the girl who now lay dead, I tried to avoid the sensations invoked by the dampness of leaves at evening, the switchback rise and fall of roads. But already these sensations had taken hold of me again, borne me quite far from the present moment, allowing the idea that Albertine was dead to fall back far enough to gather all the more momentum before it returned to strike me again. Oh, I would never again enter a forest and walk beneath the trees. But would the open plains be any less cruel to me? How often in order to fetch Albertine, or returning with her, had I crossed the open plain of Criqueville, sometimes in misty weather when the waves of fog gave us the impression of being surrounded by a vast lake, sometimes on limpid nights when the moonlight, draining the earth of matter and making it seem celestial just two feet away whereas in daylight it does so only at a distance, subsumed the fields and the woods into the heavens and sealed the whole in a single block of blue chalcedony! Françoise must have been pleased that Albertine was dead, and to be fair I must acknowledge that from a kind of decorum and tact she did not pretend to be sad. But the unwritten rules of her ancient code of law and the tradition of the medieval peasant weeping over tales of chivalry were deeper rooted than her hatred of Albertine or even Eulalie. Thus on one of those late afternoons, when I was too slow to hide my suffering, she noticed my tears, aided by her experience on a farm as a little girl who had been used to capturing animals and making them suffer, experiencing pure joy in strangling chickens and boiling lobsters alive, and when I was ill, in observing my sick complexion, as if I were an owl she had injured, and then commenting on it in lugubrious tones, as if it were a harbinger of doom. But her practice of the “common law” of Combray would not allow her to take tears and grief lightly; she judged them as sinister as removing one’s flannel vest or picking at one’s food. “Oh, no, Monsieur, you mustn’t cry like that, you’ll make yourself ill!” And in wanting to stop my tears she looked as worried as if they had been streams of blood. Unfortunately for her I adopted a cold expression which cut short her intended, but perhaps none the less sincere, effusions. She probably felt the same about Albertine as she had about Eulalie, and now that my friend could no longer derive any profit from me, Françoise no longer hated her. She was determined to show me, however, that she was well aware that I was crying and that, simply following my family’s morbid habit, I did not want to “let people see.” “You mustn’t cry, Monsieur,” she said, in calmer tones this time, rather to show me her insight than to display any pity. And she added: “It was bound to happen, she was too happy, poor thing, she didn’t know how happy she was.”

  How long it takes the day to die on these never-ending summer evenings! The pale ghost of the house opposite continued for ever painting the sky with its persistent white water-color. At last night fell inside the apartment, I stumbled into the furniture in the lobby, but, amid what I had taken for total darkness, the glazed panel in the door to the staircase shone translucent and blue, with the blue of a flower or an insect’s wing, a blue that would have seemed beautiful to me if I had not felt that with this parting reflection the relentlessly cruel daylight dealt me a final thrust, as sharp as steel.

  Complete darkness would, however, finally fall, but then I had only to see a star beside the tree in the courtyard to remember leaving by car after dinner for the woods of Chantepie, carpeted by moonlight. And even in the streets, I might happen to focus and reflect upon the natural purity of a beam of moonlight striking the back of a bench amid the artificial lights of Paris, as it brought the city into the countryside for a moment in my imagination, evoking the eternal silence of quiet pastures and permeating Paris with the painful memory of the rides that I had shared with Albertine. Would the night never end? But at the first cool draft of dawn I shivered, for it had brought back to me the softness of that summer when from Balbec to Incarville, from Incarville to Balbec, we had so often accompanied one another home and back again until the first light dawned. I had one single hope for the future, a hope much more poignant than a fear—which was to forget Albertine. I knew that I would forget her one day, I had after all forgotten Gilberte, Mme de Guermantes, and even my grandmother. And our most just and cruel punishment for the forgetting, as absolute and silent as that of the grave, which detaches us from those whom we no longer love, is that we should sense this same act of forgetting to be inevitable even in respect of those whom we do still love. To tell the truth, we know that it is a painless state, a state of indifference. But not being able to link simultaneously what I was then and what I would become, I thought in despair of this whole integument of kisses, caresses and friendly slumber, which I would soon have to shed for ever. The wave of such tender memories, coming to break over the idea that Albertine was dead, overwhelmed me with the clash of such contrary tides that I could not stay still; I got up, but suddenly I stopped dead in my tracks; the same early light of dawn that I used to see at the time when I had just left Albertine, feeling still warm and radiant from her kisses, had just drawn over my curtains its now funereal blade, whose cold, dense and implacable whiteness entered and struck me like a knife blow.