The Fugitive

by Marcel Proust

  I tried from time to time to look at the newspapers, but I found reading them not only unpleasant but far from innocuous. In fact so many paths branch out from each idea within us, as from a crossing in a forest, that at the moment when I least expected it I found myself faced with a fresh memory. The title of Fauré’s song, “Le Secret,”27 had led me to Le Secret du roi by the Duc de Broglie,28 the name of de Broglie to that of Chaumont. Or again, the words Good Friday had made me think of Golgotha, and Golgotha of the etymology of the word, which, apparently, is equivalent to Calvus mons, Chaumont. But no matter which path I had climbed on my way to Chaumont, when it emerged I was struck with a shock so cruel that from that moment on I thought far more of preventing it from hurting me than searching it for memories. A few moments after the shock, my intellect, lagging behind like thunder after lightning, brought me the explanation. Chaumont had made me think of the Buttes-Chaumont where Mme Bontemps had told me that Andrée often used to go with Albertine, while Albertine had told me that she had never seen the Buttes-Chaumont. After a certain age our memories are so interwoven with each other that the object of our thoughts or the book which we are reading has practically no importance. We have left traces of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries every bit as precious in an advertisement for soap as in Pascal’s Pensées.

  No doubt an incident like that of the Buttes-Chaumont, which had seemed trivial to me at the time, was in itself a much less serious and decisive charge against Albertine than the affair of the bath-house girl or the laundry-maid. But in the first place a memory which we experience fortuitously finds us with our powers of imagination, that is, in this case, with our powers of suffering intact, whereas on the other hand we have already partly blunted these when we have deliberately applied our minds to recreating a memory. And then, I had become accustomed to these memories (of the bath-house girl or the laundry-maid), always present in my memory, however dimly, like furniture placed in a dark corridor, which we somehow avoid bumping into without distinguishing them clearly. But, on the other hand, I had not thought of the Buttes-Chaumont for ages, nor for instance of Albertine looking into the mirror at the casino at Balbec, nor her unexplained expression the evening when I had waited so long for her after the reception at the Guermantes, all those parts of her life which remained outside my heart and which I would have liked to know in order to assimilate them and annex them to it, to add them to gentler memories formed in my heart by an inner Albertine that I really possessed. Raising a corner of the heavy veil of habit (habit which stultifies us and which during the whole course of our existence hides more or less the whole universe from us, and under cover of utter darkness, without changing their labels, substitutes for the most dangerous or intoxicating poisons of life something anodyne which procures no delight), these memories returned to me as on their first appearance, with the same sharp, fresh novelty that each new season brings as it returns, changing our routine time-table and providing us, even in the realm of our pleasures—if we climb into a carriage on the first fine day of spring or leave the house at sunrise—with an exultant awareness of our most insignificant actions, which invests this one intense moment with more value than the totality of the days preceding it. As they recede, passing days gradually cover over those which went before and are themselves buried by those that come after. But each past day remains deposited within us as in some vast library where there are copies even of the oldest books, which probably no one will ever ask to consult. And yet if this past day should pass through the translucent layers of the following eras, rise to the surface and spread out from within us until it covers our whole surface, then for a moment names will resume their former meanings, people their former faces and we our former souls, and we shall feel with a diffuse but newly tolerable and transient sense of suffering, the problems which remained intractable for so long and which caused us so much anguish at the time. Our selves are composed of our successive states, superimposed. But this superimposition is not immutable like the stratification of a mountain. A tremor is liable at any moment to throw older layers back up to the surface. I found myself back at the moment when I left the reception at the Princesse de Guermantes, waiting for Albertine to arrive. What had she been doing that night? Deceiving me? With whom? Aimé’s revelations, even if I accepted them, did not in any way diminish my anxious and desperate interest in this unexpected question, as though each different Albertine, each new memory, asked a specific question of jealousy, which the answers to the others could not resolve.

  But I would have liked to know not only with which woman she had spent the night, but what particular pleasure it had brought her, what was happening inside her at that moment. Sometimes at Balbec Françoise had gone to fetch her and had told me that she had found her leaning out of the window, looking anxious and expectant as though she were waiting for someone. Now let us suppose that I learned that the girl she was waiting for was Andrée, what was Albertine’s state of mind while she was waiting for her, what state of mind lay hidden behind her anxious, expectant expression? How important for Albertine were these inclinations, how large a place did they hold in her concerns? Alas, remembering my own agitation every time that I came across a girl who attracted me, and sometimes when I had only heard her mentioned and had not even seen her, my breaking into a cold sweat in my concern to appear handsome and interesting, I needed only to imagine the same voluptuous excitement in Albertine in order to torment myself, as if I had discovered the device which my aunt Léonie, after the visit of a certain physician who had seemed unconvinced by the reality of her malady, had hoped someone might invent in order to enable the doctor to feel all the sufferings of his patient, so that he would better understand them. And this was already enough to torment me, to tell me that compared to this she must have found our discussions of Stendhal and Victor Hugo truly insignificant, for her heart to be drawn to others, to fly away from mine and take root elsewhere. But even the importance that she attached to this desire and the reticence with which she protected it could not inform me of its qualities, let alone how she experienced those qualities when she talked to herself about it. When our bodies suffer, at least we cannot choose our pain. Our illness determines and imposes it. But with jealousy we are forced as it were to try out all types and scales of suffering before we settle for the one that seems to suit us. And what greater problem could we face than one which concerns the kind of suffering where our beloved takes her pleasure with people other than ourselves, who give her sensations that we are unable to give her, or at least with people who through their characteristics, their behavior and the image they project, create an impression on her totally different from ours! Oh! If only Albertine had been in love with Saint-Loup! How much less I would have suffered, or so it seemed to me!

  There is no doubt that we are unaware of the nature of each individual’s personal sensibility, but generally we do not even know that we are unaware of it, for we are indifferent to other people’s sensibilities. As far as Albertine was concerned, my happiness or unhappiness might have hung on what kind of sensibility she had; I was well aware that it was a mystery to me, and the fact that it was a mystery was already a source of pain. I did once have the illusion of seeing, and on another occasion of hearing, the unknown desires and pleasures felt by Albertine. Of seeing them, when Andrée came to see me, some time after Albertine’s death. For the first time she seemed beautiful to me, I found that her curly, almost frizzy hair, and her moody eyes with their dark rings, must have been what Albertine had fallen in love with, and I saw materialize before my eyes what had nourished her amorous fantasies, what had fired her eyes with anticipated desire the day when she wanted to return from Balbec so precipitously. As if a dark, unknown flower belonging to someone beyond the grave from whom I had been unable to gather it were now recovered and presented to me, this miraculously exhumed and priceless relic seemed to present me with Albertine’s desire incarnate in
the form of Andrée as she appeared to me, just as Venus figured Jupiter’s desire. Andrée mourned for Albertine, but I felt straight away that she did not really miss her friend. Forcibly deprived of her friend by death, Andrée seemed to have come to terms very easily with a final separation that I would not have dared request while Albertine was alive, for fear that Andrée would withhold her consent. On the contrary she seemed to accept this renunciation with no difficulty, albeit only at the very moment when this was of no further use to me; Andrée handed me Albertine, but only now that she was dead and had lost for me not only her life but, in retrospect, something of her reality, as I saw that she was not unique and indispensable for Andrée, who had been able to replace her with other friends.

  While Albertine was alive, I would never have dared ask Andrée to confide in me the nature of the friendship between themselves and with Mlle Vinteuil’s girl-friend, not being at all sure in latter days that Andrée would not tell Albertine everything that I had told her. Now this investigation, even if it delivered no results, would at least hold no danger. I spoke to Andrée, not as if I were questioning her but as if I had always been kept informed, perhaps by Albertine, of Andrée’s own inclinations for women and her own relationship with Mlle Vinteuil. She admitted everything with no inhibition, and with a smile. From this admission I could draw the most hurtful conclusions; first and foremost, since Andrée, who had behaved so affectionately and seductively toward so many young men at Balbec, would never have given anyone to suppose that she indulged in those practices which she now made no attempt to deny, so that by analogy, on discovering this new Andrée, I was led to think that Albertine might just as easily have made a similar confession to anyone other than me, whom she guessed to be jealous. But furthermore, now that Andrée, who had been Albertine’s best friend and the one for whom she had probably returned to Balbec on purpose, had admitted her inclinations, the conclusion which I was bound to draw was that Albertine and Andrée had always had a relationship together. Of course, just as we do not always dare take a look at gifts offered by strangers in their presence, preferring to wait until the donor has left before we undo the wrapping, so, as long as Andrée was there, I could not withdraw within myself to examine the pain that she caused, which I already felt greatly upsetting my bodily dependants, my nerves and my heart, although from politeness I pretended not to notice; on the contrary, I deployed all my reserves of charm in conversing with my young guest, without diverting my gaze toward these inner events. I found it particularly painful to hear Andrée say of Albertine, “Ah, yes, she did like driving out with me in the Chevreuse valley.” The vague, non-existent universe where Albertine and Andrée drove out together seemed to be joined retrospectively by this new and satanic creation, adding to the work of God a valley of the damned. I sensed that Andrée was going to tell me everything that she used to do with Albertine, and, although I did everything I could, from politeness, cunning, self-esteem and perhaps even from gratitude, to appear more and more affectionate, while the space that I was still able to concede to Albertine’s innocence shrank smaller and smaller, I had the impression that despite my efforts I appeared frozen, like an animal trapped but transfixed by the progressively narrowing circles described by a bird of prey taking its own sweet time, knowing that it can choose the moment to strike, since its prey can no longer escape. I looked at her however and summoning the last reserves of good humor, naturalness and self-confidence that remain in a person not wishing to seem to fear being hypnotized by someone’s gaze, I dropped the following casual remark: “I had never spoken to you about it before for fear of upsetting you, but now that it is a comfort to speak of her, I can tell you that for some time I had been aware of the kind of relationship that you enjoyed with Albertine; besides, you will be pleased to know, although you knew it already, that Albertine adored you.” I told Andrée that I would very much like her to let me watch her indulge in this kind of practice (even if she restricted her caresses to those which she would not be too embarrassed to perform in my presence) with those of Albertine’s girl-friends who shared the same tastes, and I mentioned Rosemonde, Berthe and all of Albertine’s friends, to see her reaction. “Apart from the fact that in your presence I would not do what you mention for anything in the world,” replied Andrée, “I do not believe that any of the girls you mention were that way inclined.” Moving closer, despite myself, to the monster that fascinated me, I replied, “Come, now, you cannot expect me to believe that Albertine was the only person in your group that you did these things with!—But I never did do things like that with Albertine.—Listen, my dear Andrée, why deny something that I’ve known about for at least three years? I see nothing wrong in it, quite the opposite. I was just thinking of the evening when she was so keen to go with you to Mme Verdurin’s the next day, perhaps you remember . . .” Before I had come to the end of my sentence, I saw an anxious look, like the face of someone allowed backstage before a play commences who peeps through the curtain then withdraws immediately to avoid being noticed, flash across Andrée’s eyes, making them as narrow and piercing as certain gemstones which are so sharp that jewelers find them almost impossible to use. The anxious look disappeared, everything returned to normal, but I sensed that everything I saw from then on would be artificially arranged for my benefit. At that moment I caught sight of myself in the mirror; I was struck by a certain resemblance between myself and Andrée. If I had not long ceased to shave my upper lip, and if I had still had only the faintest shadow of a mustache, the resemblance would have been complete. Perhaps it was at Balbec, when she had observed my mustache as it was just starting to grow again, that Albertine had suddenly had that impatient, furious urge to return to Paris. “But I can’t tell you something that is not true just because you don’t disapprove of it. I swear that I never did anything with Albertine and I am convinced that she detested that sort of thing. The people who told you that were lying, perhaps from self-interest,” she said, with a suspicious, questioning air. “Well, so be it, since you don’t want to tell me,” I replied, preferring to seem as if I did not want to reveal my evidence, rather than failing to have any. Yet I did refer in an offhand manner to the Buttes-Chaumont, just in case. “I might have gone to the Buttes-Chaumont with Albertine, but is there anything particularly wrong with the place?” I asked her if she might not ask Gisèle about it, since she had at one time been very close to Albertine. But Andrée declared that Gisèle had recently stabbed her in the back, and asking her a favor was the one and only thing that she could never agree to do for me. “If you see her,” she added, “don’t tell her what I’ve told you about her, there’s no need to make an enemy of her. She knows what I think of her, but I have always preferred to avoid getting involved in violent rows with her and then having to patch things up. And then again, she is dangerous, but anyone who had read the letter she sent me last week, where she told such treacherous lies, would understand that nothing, not even the noblest actions in the world, could efface its memory.” In short, if, despite the fact that Andrée followed her inclinations to the point of not trying to hide them and despite the great affection which Albertine had certainly felt for her, Andrée had never had carnal relations with Albertine and had always been ignorant of the fact that Albertine shared her inclinations, then surely it must be because Albertine had not had such inclinations and had never had such relationships, which she would have sought to enjoy with Andrée in preference to anyone else. Thus as soon as Andrée had left, I realized that her trenchant affirmation had calmed me down. But perhaps Andrée had felt obliged by the sense of duty that she felt toward her dead friend, whose memory still lived on within her, not to let anyone believe what Albertine had most likely asked her during her lifetime to deny.