The Fugitive

by Marcel Proust

  How she would hurry to visit me in Balbec whenever I asked to see her, tarrying only a few last moments in order to lace her hair with perfume for my pleasure! These images of Balbec and Paris which I recalled with such pleasure, were the all-too-recent pages of her short life, which had been turned so quickly. Everything that for me was no more than memory had for her been action, the precipitate action of a tragedy, hurtling swiftly toward death. People evolve in one way within us, but also in another way outside us (I had felt this plainly on those evenings when I had noted how Albertine’s character had become enriched with new qualities, and not only due to my memory), and each continually interacts with the other. Although, as I struggled first to understand Albertine, then to possess her entirely, I had done no more than obey our need to reduce the mystery of any person through experience to elements pettily similar to those composing our own selves, I had not been able to do so without in my turn influencing Albertine’s life. Perhaps my wealth and the prospect of a dazzling marriage had attracted her; my jealousy had retained her; her kindness, her intelligence, her feelings of guilt or her sheer skill and cunning had led her to accept, and led me to render increasingly harsh, a captivity forged simply by the progress of the inner workings of my mind, but which had none the less had repercussions on Albertine’s life, destined through their backlash to pose my psyche new and increasingly painful problems, since it was from my prison that she had escaped in order to kill herself riding a horse which without me she would never have owned, leaving me, even after her death, with suspicions whose truth, if confirmed, would perhaps be crueler for me than the discovery at Balbec that Albertine had known Mlle Vinteuil, since Albertine would no longer be there to soothe me. So much so that this long complaint of the soul which believes that it lives enclosed within itself is only superficially a monologue, since the echoes of reality cause it to change tack and since any single life resembles an improvised experiment in subjective psychology, yet one which at a distance provides the “plot” of a purely realist novel belonging to a different reality, a different existence, whose reversals of fortune intervene one after the other to inflect the curve and change the direction of the psychological experiment. How taut had been the mechanism of our love, how swift its evolution and, despite some initial delays, interruptions and hesitations, as in some of Balzac’s short stories or Schumann’s ballads, how swift its resolution! It was within the course of this last year, which had seemed to me to last a century, so much had Albertine’s position changed in my thoughts between Balbec and her departure for Paris, sometimes independently of me and often unbeknown to me, that I had to insert this whole life of affection, which had lasted such a short time and which however appeared to me as a plenitude or even an infinity impossible ever to grasp, and yet which I found indispensable. Indispensable without perhaps having ever been in itself or primarily anything necessary, since I would not have met Albertine if I had not read the description of the church at Balbec in an archaeological treatise; if Swann, telling me that this church was almost Persian, had not orientated my desires toward the Norman Byzantine style; if a company, in building a comfortable and hygienic grand hotel in Balbec, had not persuaded my parents to grant my wish and send me to Balbec. Doubtless once in the Balbec which I had so long desired, I had not found the Persian church of which I dreamed, nor the eternal mists. The charming ten-to-two22 train itself had not matched up to my imaginings. But in exchange for what the imagination leads us to expect and what we take so much trouble to try to discover, life gives us something that we were far from being able to imagine. Who could have thought in Combray, when I awaited my mother’s good-night kiss with such sadness, that these anxieties would be cured and would then one day be revived not in connection with my mother, but with a young lady who at first would be no more than a flower seen against the horizon of the sea that my eyes would every day be drawn to watch, albeit a thinking flower, and one in whose thoughts I desired to take an important place in so puerile a fashion that I suffered from the fact that she did not know that I knew Mme de Villeparisis? Yet it was on account of that good-night kiss from such a stranger that, some years later, I was to suffer just as much as I did as a child when my mother did not come to see me. But I would never have known this now so necessary Albertine, of whose love my soul had become almost entirely composed, if Swann had not spoken to me of Balbec. Her life would perhaps have lasted longer, and mine would have been void of what now constituted my martyrdom. And thus it seemed to me that through my totally selfish affection I had let Albertine die, just as previously I had murdered my grandmother. Even later, even after I had already got to know her at Balbec, I could not have loved her as I did after that. For when I renounced Gilberte and knew that I could one day pursue another woman, I hardly dared doubt that, at least in the past, I could not have loved anyone other than Gilberte. And yet in the case of Albertine I no longer even had any doubt, I was sure that she did not have to be the one that I must love, that it could have been someone else. All it would have needed was for Mlle de Stermaria, the evening when I was to dine with her on the island of the Bois de Boulogne, not to have called it off. There was still time then for this feat of the imagination, which enables us to extract from a woman a notion of the individual so special that she appears to us to be unique in herself as well as predestined and necessary for us, to have been focused on Mlle de Stermaria. At best, viewing things from an almost biological viewpoint, I could say that I might have experienced the same exclusive love for another woman, but not absolutely any other. For although Albertine, who was plump and dark, did not resemble Gilberte, who was slender and red-haired, both none the less shared the same robust health, the same sensual cheeks and the same enigmatic look. They were the kind of woman who would not have caught the attention of some men who, on the other hand, would have done anything, however crazy, for another kind, who “left me cold.”23 A man nearly always has the same manner of catching cold, of falling ill, which is to say that he needs a particular combination of circumstances: it is natural that, when he falls in love, it will be with a certain type of woman, although the type may be loosely defined. The first time that Albertine looked at me and fired my imagination her eyes were not so different from those of Gilberte the first time. I could almost believe that the somber and sensual personality and the cunning, willful character of Gilberte had returned to tempt me, incarnate this time in the body of Albertine, which was quite different and yet was in some ways analogous. In Albertine’s case, thanks to our totally different kind of life together, where within a block of thoughts into which no fissure of distraction or forgetfulness could insinuate itself, my painful preoccupations maintained a permanently cohesive whole, her living body, unlike Gilberte’s, had never for a single day ceased to be the one where I located what I subsequently recognized as what for me was feminine attractiveness (although it would not have been for others). But she was dead. I would forget her. Who knows then whether the same hot-blooded, restless, fantastical qualities might not return again one day to upset me, but incarnate this time in a feminine form which I could not yet foresee. Starting out from Gilberte, I could have as little imagined Albertine, or the fact that I would love her, as the memory of Vinteuil’s sonata could have enabled me to imagine his septet. Worse still, even on the first occasions that I had seen Albertine, I had managed to believe that it would be the other girls whom I would love. Moreover, if I had met her a year earlier, she might even have appeared to me as dull as a gray sky before daybreak. But if I had changed my attitude toward her, she herself had also changed, and the girl who had approached my bedside the day when I had written to Mlle de Stermaria was no longer the same as the one whom I had known at Balbec, whether simply because she had burst out into womanhood after appearing to me at the moment of puberty, or whether because there was some other set of circumstances that I had never been able to fathom. At all events, even if the woman I were one day to love should in some respects resemble her, tha
t is, if my choice of a woman were not entirely free, even perhaps necessarily in some way directed, this meant none the less that it was directed toward something vaster than an individual, toward a type of woman, and this removed all necessity from my love for Albertine. We know full well that this unique woman, whose face we see before our eyes more constantly than the daylight itself—since even with our eyes closed, we never for a moment cease to cherish her lovely eyes and her beautiful nose, and will do anything we can to see them again—could have been a different woman, if we had visited a town other than the one where we met her, if we had walked down different streets, if we had been invited to a different salon. Do we believe her to be unique? She is everywhere. And yet she is consistent and indestructible before our loving eyes, irreplaceable for long after by anyone else. The reason is that this woman has done nothing but use all sorts of magic spells to invoke the thousands of elements of affection which exist within us in a fragmentary state, to assemble and unite them, bridging all the gaps between them; it is we ourselves who, in creating her features, have furnished all the solid substance of the beloved. From this it follows that, even if we are only one among thousands for her, and perhaps last in the line, for us she is the only one, and the one at whom our whole life is aimed. Of course I had even felt quite clearly that this love was not necessary, not only because it could have happened with Mlle de Stermaria, but even without that, as I came to know it better, and started to find that it seemed too similar to what it had been for other women, and also to feel that it was vaster than Albertine, enveloping her without taking any heed of her, like a tide engulfing a fragile reef. But gradually, by dint of living with Albertine, I could no longer disentangle myself from the chains that I myself had forged; the habit of associating the person of Albertine with emotions that I had not derived from her directly led me none the less to feel that they were special to her, just as habit, according to a certain school of philosophers, gives to the simple association of ideas between two phenomena the force and the necessity of a causal law. I had believed that my connections and my wealth would enable me to dispense with suffering, but perhaps too expeditiously, because this seemed to enable me to dispense with feeling, loving and imagining; I felt envious of some poor country girl, who, in the absence of connections or even the telegraph, might spend many months musing over a sorrow that she cannot artificially put to sleep. Yet I now realized that, whereas in the case of Mme de Guermantes, who enjoyed so many advantages that helped maintain an infinite distance between her and me, I had seen the gulf abruptly bridged by public opinion and my analysis, which found social privilege to be no more than an inert and changeable matter, by a converse but reciprocal process my connections, my wealth and all the material means from which both my position and the civilization of the day allowed me to benefit had done no more than postpone the moment of the hand-to-hand struggle with the contradictory, inflexible will of Albertine, which had resisted all pressure. Of course I had been able to exchange telegrams and telephone calls with Saint-Loup and remain in constant touch with the telegraph office in Tours, but had these expectations not been vain, their result null? And did a country girl with no social advantages and no connections, or people who lived before these advances of civilization, not suffer less? Because one desires less and misses less what one has always believed inaccessible and which has, for this reason, remained as it were unreal. We desire a person more when she is about to yield, expectation anticipates possession; but regret, too, amplifies desire. Mlle de Stermaria’s refusal to come to dinner on the island of the Bois de Boulogne is what prevented her from being the person that I loved. This too could have been enough to enable me to love her, if I had seen her soon enough afterward. As soon as I had found out that she would not come, entertaining the implausible hypothesis—which did however turn out to be correct—that if someone were jealous of her and kept her away from company, I might possibly never see her again, I had suffered so much that I would have given anything to see her again, and it was one of the greatest anxieties which I had ever known that Saint-Loup’s arrival had assuaged. Yet after a certain age our loves and our mistresses are daughters of our anguish: our past, and the physical lesions within whose lines it lies inscribed, determine our future. For Albertine in particular, the fact that it was not necessary for her to be the one whom I loved was, even without these neighboring loves, inscribed in the history of my love for her, that is for her and her girl-friends. For it was not even a love like that for Gilberte, but one created by its dispersal among several girls. It is possible that it was because of her, and because they appeared to me to be something analogous to her, that I had enjoyed the company of her girl-friends. And yet I must admit that for quite a time a hesitation among all of them was possible, as my choice wandered from one to the other, and when I thought that I preferred one, it was enough for her to keep me waiting or refuse to see me for me to start feeling love for her. On several occasions it could easily have happened, when Andrée was due to come to see me in Balbec, that if Albertine had let me down just before Andrée’s visit, my heart would have started pounding, I would have thought that I would never see Albertine again and that she was the one whom I loved. And when Andrée did come, I was being perfectly truthful when I told her (as had I told her in Paris when I had learned that Albertine had known Mlle Vinteuil), although she might have thought that I was speaking disingenuously and for her benefit, whereas I would in fact have used the same terms if I had been happy the day before with Albertine: “Alas, if only you had come earlier, now I am in love with someone else.” But even in this case of Andrée replaced by Albertine when I had learned that the latter had known Mlle Vinteuil, my love had alternated between the two of them, and consequently there had in fact been only one love at a time. But there had been cases previously when I had more or less fallen out with two of the girls. Whichever one of them took the first steps to make amends was the one who would soothe my spirits, and it would be the other one whom I would love if she was still sulking, which did not mean that it might not be the first that I would take up with permanently, for she would console me, however imperfectly, for the harshness of the second, whom I would ultimately forget if she never returned. And it did happen that, although I was convinced that one or the other would return to me in the end, neither of them did for quite a time. My anguish was therefore double, like my love, ensuring that I should cease loving whichever one did return, but, until she did, that I should suffer at the hands of both of them. This is a fate which befalls us at a certain age, which may be relatively young, where we may be less attracted by a person than by someone’s rejection, where we ultimately know nothing more of the person we have chosen, whose face has grown dim and whose soul has evaporated, than our all too recent but none the less inexplicable choice itself: the fact is that the only thing that could put an end to our suffering would be if we could hear the words, “Could I come to see you?” My separation from Albertine the day when Françoise had said to me, “Mademoiselle Albertine has left” was like an allegory for so many other separations. For often in order to discover that we are in love, even perhaps in order to fall in love, the day of separation needs to arrive.

  In these cases where it is waiting in vain or hearing a word of rejection that determines our choice, our imagination, spurred on by suffering, which sets to work so swiftly, creates with such speed a love which was until then so inchoate and formless, and destined for months past to remain only sketchy, that our intellect, which has lagged behind our heart, is astonished and cries out: “You must be mad, what painful new thoughts are you plunging us into? None of this is real life.” And indeed at that moment, if the faithless lady were not to relaunch her pursuit, any distractions pleasant enough to bring physical peace to our heart would be enough to abort this love. At all events, although this life with Albertine was not in its essence necessary, it had become indispensable for me. I had trembled when I was in love with Mme de Guermantes because I th
ought that, with all the means of seduction at her disposal, drawing not only on beauty but on situation and wealth, she would be far too free to belong to far too many people and that I would have far too little hold over her. Albertine was poor and obscure, and ought to want to marry me. And yet I had not been able to possess her exclusively. Whatever social conditions prevail, however wise the precautions we take, we can never truly control another person’s life. Why had she not said to me, “I am that way inclined”? I would have yielded, I would have allowed her to indulge her inclinations. In a novel which I had read, there was a woman whom no exhortation by the man who loved her could persuade to speak. On reading it I had found this situation absurd; I myself, I thought, would have first forced the woman to speak, and then we would have come to an agreement. For what was the point of such futile misery? But now I saw that we are not free not to create this for ourselves and that, however well we know our own will, other people do not obey it. And yet how many times, without knowing it and without wishing it, have we uttered these painful and unavoidable truths, which dominated us although we were blind to them—the truth of our feelings, the truth of our destiny—in words which we no doubt believed mendacious but which gained prophetic value retrospectively after the event. I remembered many words which one or other of us had uttered without at the time realizing the truth that they conveyed, even words which we had exchanged believing that we were play-acting, but whose falsehood was very flimsy, insubstantial and born of our pathetic insincerity, compared to the implications which we failed to see in them. Lies and misunderstandings which fell short of the profound reality which we failed to see; beyond lay the truth, the truth of our characters, whose essential laws had escaped us, since they need Time to help them reveal themselves, as with the truth of our fate. I had thought that I was lying when at Balbec I said, “The more I see you, the more I shall love you” (and yet it was this intimacy of every moment, which, through jealousy, had attached me to her), “I feel that I could help improve your mind”; or in Paris, “Try to be careful. Just imagine if you had an accident, I would be heartbroken” (and she said, “But an accident could happen to me”); or in Paris, the evening when I had pretended to want to leave her, saying, “Let me look at you once more, because soon I shall not see you again, and it will be for ever”; and she had said, when that same evening she had looked around her, “To think that I shall never again see this room, these books, this pianola, this whole house, I cannot believe it and yet it is true”; in her last letters, finally, when, as she wrote, she probably thought to herself, “I am faking it”: I leave you the best of myself (and was it not in fact now to the faithfulness and the power of my memory, however fragile, that her intelligence, her kindness and her beauty were confided?) and: That moment, with its twofold twilight (since night was falling and since we were destined to part), will never be erased from my mind until utter darkness finally invades it, that phrase, written the day before the day when indeed her mind had been invaded by utter darkness and when, in those last fleeting glimmerings which anxiety multiplies into infinity, she had perhaps had a vision of our last drive together, and in that moment when everything abandons us and where we construct a faith for ourselves, as atheists become Christians on the battle-field, she had perhaps called for help from the friend whom she had so often cursed but whom she had so respected, who himself—for all religions are similar—had been cruel enough to wish that she herself should also have the time to recognize herself, to give him her last thoughts, to make her confession to him at last, to die within him. But to what avail, since even if then she had had the time to recognize her true self, both of us would have understood where our happiness lay and what we should have done, only when, and only because, this happiness was no longer possible and no longer attainable. As long as things are possible, we defer them, and they can assume their power of attraction and their apparent ease of accomplishment only when, projected into the ideal void of the imagination, they are withdrawn from immersion in the cloying, degrading morass of real life. The idea that we shall die is more cruel than dying itself, but less cruel than the idea that someone else is dead, than the idea that, when the waters of reality close after having engulfed a person’s being, they smoothly, without so much as a ripple, cover the spot from which that being is excluded, where neither will nor knowledge exist any longer, and from which it is as difficult to return to the idea of what that person’s being had experienced as it is difficult, even while memories of their life are still fresh, to think that this person is assimilable to the insubstantial images and memories left by the characters of a novel that we have read.