The Fugitive

by Marcel Proust

  My mother had brought my mail to my room and placed it casually on the bed, as if thinking of something else. And as she withdrew immediately to leave me on my own, she smiled. And knowing my dear mother’s stratagems and knowing that one could always decipher her expression with no fear of mistake if one took as its key her desire to please others, I too smiled, thinking: “There is something interesting for me in the mail, and Mama has adopted her indifferent and absentminded air to allow me to enjoy the surprise to the full, so as to avoid being like those people who ruin half of your pleasure by announcing it in advance. And she did not stay, because she feared that from pride I would hide the pleasure I felt, and thus feel it less keenly.” Meanwhile, as she was nearing the door, she had met Françoise, who was about to enter my room with my telegram in her hand. As soon as she had given it to me my mother forced her to beat a retreat and dragged her outside, flustered, offended and surprised. For Françoise considered that her duties included the privilege of entering my room at any time and staying there, if she wanted to. But already on her face astonishment and anger had disappeared beneath her sticky black smile of transcendental pity and philosophical irony, a viscous ointment secreted by her wounded pride to heal its scar. To avoid feeling despised, she despised us. For she knew full well that we were masters, that is, capricious creatures who are not noted for their intellectual-brilliance and who enjoy using fear in order to show plainly that they are the masters, to impose on those more thinking creatures, their domestic servants, absurd obligations such as boiling water in times of epidemic, mopping my room with a wet cloth, and having to leave the room precisely when they had wanted to enter. Mama had placed my mail right by my side, so that I could not miss it. But I sensed that there was nothing but newspapers. No doubt there was some article by an author whom I liked but, because he wrote infrequently, it would be a surprise for me. I went over to the window and drew back the curtains. Above the pale misty daylight the sky, which was as pink as the stoves that are lit in the kitchens at this time of day, filled me with hope and the urge to spend the night and wake up in the morning at the little mountain resort where I had seen the pink-cheeked milkmaid. I opened the Figaro. How tedious! The leading article bore precisely the same title as the one which I had submitted but which had not been published.2 But not only the same title, here and there were one or two identical words. That was too much. I would write in to complain. And I heard Françoise, who was indignant at having been expelled from my room where she considered that she was free to come and go as she pleased, grumbling: “The very idea! A child that I saw born. Of course I didn’t see him when his mother bore him, but let me tell you that when I first met him he hadn’t been born for more than five years!” But there were not just those few words, there was everything, even my signature . . . It was my article, which had at last appeared! But my mind, which already in those days had started to age and to tire a little, continued for a moment to reason as if it had not understood that it was my own article, like those old men who are obliged to continue with a movement once they have started, even if it has become pointless, even if an unforeseen obstacle which they should immediately avoid has rendered it dangerous. Then I considered the spiritual bread that a newspaper constitutes, still warm and moist as it emerges from the press and the morning mist in which it has been delivered at crack of dawn to the housemaids who take it to their masters with a bowl of milk, this miraculous loaf, multiplied ten-thousandfold and yet unique, which stays unchanged for everyone while proliferating across every threshold.

  What I was holding in my hand was not one particular copy of the newspaper, it was any one out of ten thousand; it was not only something written by me, it was something written by me and read by everyone. To appreciate the exact phenomenon as it occurs in each household, I must read this article not as an author but as one of the other readers of the newspaper; what I was holding in my hand was not just what I had written, it was the symbol of its incarnation in so many minds. Thus in order to read it I must for a moment stop being its author and become an ordinary reader of the newspaper. But now I feel a first pang of anxiety. Will the unsuspecting reader see this article? I open the newspaper absentmindedly as would this unsuspecting reader, even wearing on my face my usual expression of not knowing what there is in the newspaper this morning and being impatient to look at the social or political news. But my article is so long that my eyes, which are trying to avoid it (to respect the truth and not load the dice in my favor, just as someone who is waiting deliberately counts too slowly), cannot help chancing on an extract in passing. Yet many of those who notice the leading article, and even of those who read it, do not look at the signature. Even I would have been unable to say who had written the leading article the day before. And now I promise myself always to read them and their author’s name; but like a jealous lover, who avoids deceiving his mistress in order to make himself believe in her fidelity, I think sadly that my future attentions will not compel, as they have not compelled, the reciprocal attentions of others. And then there are the people who have gone out hunting and those who have left for work too early. And yet, some people will still read it. I follow their example. I make a start. As I read the article, even though I know that many of the people who read it will detest it, what I see behind each word seems to be printed there in black and white, I cannot believe that anyone who casts his eyes upon it will not see exactly the same images as those I see, for I assume, with all the naïvety of those who believe that it is the actual words we utter which travel down the telephone wires, that the author’s thoughts are directly perceived by the reader, whereas it is other thoughts which are constructed in his mind; at the very moment when I am trying to be the ordinary reader, my mind, as I read, is rewriting the article. If M. de Guermantes did not understand such and such a phrase that Bloch would appreciate, he was able on the other hand to smile at some remark that Bloch would treat with disdain. Thus each passage that a previous reader seemed to cast aside would attract a new admirer, the whole of the article would be praised to the skies by the masses and would overcome my own self-doubt so that I would no longer need to defend it myself. For in truth the quality of an article, however remarkable, is similar to that of those sentences in Parliamentary reports where the words “We shall have to see” uttered by the minister only take on their full import in the following context: “the prime minister, minister for home and religious affairs: We shall have to see. (Loud exclamations on the far left. ‘Hear, hear!’ on some of the left and center benches)” (an ending which is finer than the middle of the passage, worthy of its beginning): for part of its beauty—and this is the original sin in this kind of literature, from which even the famous Lundis3 are not exempt—lies in the impression which it produces on its readers. It is a collective Venus, of which we grasp only a severed limb if we merely take account of the author’s thought, for this is completely realized only in the minds of its readers. That is where all is accomplished. And as a crowd, however select, is not an artist, its ultimate seal of approval always retains something of the common touch. Thus Sainte-Beuve, on Mondays, could imagine Mme de Boigne4 in her four-poster bed reading his article in the Constitutionnel, appreciating some elegant phrase which he had lovingly crafted and which would perhaps never have materialized had he not seen fit to pack it into his weekly column in order to broaden its appeal. No doubt the chancellor, reading it himself, elsewhere, would mention it to his old companion when he visited her later. And taking him back that evening in his carriage, the Duc de Noailles in his gray suit would tell Sainte-Beuve what society had thought of it, if a comment by Mme d’Arbouville had not already informed him. And countering my own self-doubt with the ten thousand voices of approval that supported me, I drew as great a feeling of strength and of belief in my talent from the reading which I was undertaking at this moment as I had drawn self-doubt when what I had written was addressed only to me. I saw my thoughts or even, failing my thoughts, for those who were u
nable to understand them, the repetition of my name and a kind of glorified echo of my person radiate over so many people at that very moment, coloring their thoughts with a dawning light which filled me with more strength and triumphal joy than the rosy fingers of dawn which pressed simultaneously at countless window panes. I saw Bloch, the Guermantes, Legrandin and Andrée drawing from each sentence the images contained in the article; and now, at the very moment when I am trying to be an ordinary reader, I am reading as an author, albeit not only as an author. So as to help the impossible creature that I am trying to become to reconcile all the contradictions in the way most favorable to me, although I am reading as an author, I am judging as a reader, making none of the demands that a piece of writing faces from the person who expects it to match up to the ideal which he wanted it to express. When I wrote them, the sentences of my article were so weak compared to my thought, so complicated and opaque compared to my harmonious and transparent vision, so full of gaps which I had not managed to fill, that reading them caused me to suffer, they had only accentuated my feelings of impotence and an incurable lack of talent. But now in forcing myself to become a reader, if I delegated to others the painful duty of judging me, I was at least able to wipe the slate clean of what I had intended to do, by reading what I had done. I read the article, struggling to convince myself that it had been written by someone else. Then all my images, all my reflections and all my epithets, taken in themselves and with no memory of the failure of my aims that they represented, charmed me with their brilliance, their novelty and their profundity. And when I sensed too great a failure, I took refuge in the soul of your average admiring reader, and said: “Well, how could a reader notice that? There may be something lacking there, I admit. But heavens above, they ought to count themselves lucky! It’s full enough of good things as it is, far more than they usually get.”

  Thus, hardly had I finished this reassuring reading than, despite not having dared reread my own manuscript, I wanted to start rereading it immediately, there being nothing better suited to the dictum “if you can read it once you can read it twice” than an old article by oneself. I promised myself that I would ask Françoise to buy more copies, I would tell her they were to give to my friends, but in fact it would be to hold in my hands the miracle of my self-multiplying thought and read the same pages in a different copy, as if each time I were a different gentleman opening the Figaro. This turned out to be the same day when I intended to go to the Guermantes’, whom I had not seen for ages, in order to meet Mlle d’Éporcheville, and during my visit I would find out from them what opinion people had formed of my article.

  I imagined one such female reader in her bedroom, which I would have so liked to enter, to whom the newspaper would bring, if not my thoughts, which she would not be able to understand, at least my name as if in homage to me. But homage paid to something we do not care for is no more able to sway our hearts than the thoughts of a mind which we cannot understand are able to move our minds. As for other friends, I argued that, if the state of my health continued to deteriorate and if I could no longer see them, it would be pleasant to continue to write, to retain access to them in this way, to speak to them between the lines, to get them to follow my own trains of thought, to please them and be welcomed into their hearts. This is what I told myself, for social relations had until then figured as part of my daily life, so I was frightened by a future that might hold no place for them, and I found solace in this expedient which would enable me to retain my friends’ interest, perhaps elicit their admiration, until the day when I would be well enough to start to visit them again; this is what I thought, but still I realized that it was not true, that although I liked to imagine their attention as the object of my pleasure, this pleasure was profoundly internal and spiritual, a supreme pleasure which they could not provide and which I could find not through conversing with them, but through writing at a distance; and I felt that, if I started to write, in order to meet them indirectly, to give them the best impression of me, to prepare a better social situation for me, perhaps writing might alleviate the desire to meet them and with it the social situation that literature might perhaps have procured me, and I would no longer want to enjoy it, for my pleasure would no longer be in society but in literature.

  So after luncheon, when I went to visit Mme de Guermantes it was less on account of Mlle d’Éporcheville, who because of Saint-Loup’s telegram had lost the better part of her character, than to see in the Duchesse herself one of those ladies who might have read my article and who might enable me to imagine what the public who subscribed to or bought the Figaro would have thought of it. Apart from which, it was not without pleasure that I went to visit her. It was all very well in my eyes to tell myself that what marked out her salon from the others for me was the long period it had spent waiting in my imagination, yet knowing the reason for this difference did not eliminate it. Moreover, there were for me several versions of the name of Guermantes. If the one which my memory had inscribed merely as in an address book was accompanied by no poetry, older versions, those which went back to the time when I did not know Mme de Guermantes, were liable to take shape again within me, especially when I had not seen her for some time and the crude light of the person with her human face did not extinguish the mysterious radiance of the name. Then once again I would start to think of Mme de Guermantes’s dwelling as something beyond the real, in the same way as I used to start thinking of Balbec through the mist of my earliest day-dreams and as though I had not since then made the journey there, as though I had never taken the ten-to-two train. I would forget for a moment my knowledge that none of this existed, as we sometimes think of someone we love, forgetting for a moment that they are dead. Then notions of reality returned as I entered the Duchesse’s hall. But I consoled myself with the thought that she was none the less for me the true point of intersection between dream and reality.

  As I entered the drawing-room, I saw the young blonde lady whom I had believed for twenty-four hours to be the one referred to by Saint-Loup. She herself asked the Duchesse to “reintroduce” me to her. And in fact from the moment I arrived I had the feeling that I knew her rather well, but this feeling was dispelled by the Duchesse, who said to me, “Oh, you have already met Mlle de Forcheville.” Whereas on the contrary I was quite sure that I had never been introduced to any young lady of that name, which would certainly have struck me, as it was so familiar to my memory since I had heard the retrospective account of Odette’s love affairs and Swann’s jealousy. In itself my twofold misunderstanding of the name, recalling “de l’Orgeville” as being “d’Éporcheville” and having reconstrued as “Éporcheville” what was really “Forcheville,” was far from extraordinary. Our error stems from believing that things habitually appear to us as they are in reality, names as they are written, people as the static concepts presented by photography and psychology. But in fact reality is not at all what we usually perceive. We see, hear and conceive the world inside out and back to front. We repeat a name as we first heard it, until experience rectifies the error—but this does not always happen. Everyone in Combray spoke to Françoise of Mme Sazerat, and yet Françoise continued to call her Mme Sazerin, not through that willful and proud persistance in error that was her habit, a habit which was only confirmed by our disagreement and which was the only concession to the egalitarian principles of 1789 which she allowed to modify the traditional French values of Saint-André-des-Champs (she claimed only one of her citizen’s rights, that of pronouncing differently from us and maintaining that “hôtel,” “été” and “air” were of feminine gender), but because in fact she still continued to hear it as “Sazerin.” This perpetual error, which is nothing but “life” itself, does not invest with its thousand forms the visible and audible universes alone but also the social, sentimental, historical and other universes, too. As far as the wife of the High Court judge is concerned, the Princess of Luxembourg is little more than a tart and is, moreover, of little interes
t; what does take on more interest, where Swann is concerned, is the fact that Odette is a morally fastidious lady, and he constructs a whole fiction on the subject, which becomes all the more painful when he understands his error; what is even more significant is that in the eyes of the Germans the French dream only of revenge. We have only formless, fragmented visions of the world, which we fill out with arbitrary associations of ideas, creating dangerous suggestions. I should not therefore have been very surprised to hear the name Forcheville (and already I was wondering whether she was related to the Forcheville whom I had heard so much about) if the blonde girl, doubtless hoping tactfully to forestall questions which she might have found unpleasant, had not straight away said to me: “Don’t you remember that you used to know me very well, you used to visit my house, I am your friend Gilberte. I realized that you did not recognize me. But I recognized you straight away.” (She said this as if she had recognized me the moment I entered the drawing-room but the truth is that she had recognized me in the street and had greeted me, for later Mme de Guermantes told me that she had told her, as if it were most amusing and quite extraordinary, that I had followed her and brushed up against her as if I had mistaken her for a tart.) It was only after she had left that I learned why she was called Mlle de Forcheville. After Swann’s death, Odette, who surprised everyone with her profound, prolonged and sincere suffering, found that she had become a very rich widow. Forcheville married her, after undertaking a long round of châteaux and reassuring himself that his family would accept his wife. (The family protested mildly but yielded to the overwhelming argument of no longer having to subsidize the expenses of a needy relative once he proposed to move from imminent poverty to sudden opulence.) Soon afterward one of Swann’s uncles, into whose hands an enormous fortune had fallen after the successive demise of a number of relatives, died, leaving this whole fortune to Gilberte, who thus became one of the richest heiresses in France. But this was the time when the aftermath of the Dreyfus case gave rise to an anti-Semitic movement, in conjunction with a movement toward a greater infiltration of society by the children of Israel. The politicians were not wrong to think that the discovery of the judicial error would strike a blow against anti-Semitism. But, at least in the short term, anti-Semitism in high society was on the contrary augmented and exacerbated. Forcheville, who like any self-respecting nobleman had drawn from family discussions the certainty that his name was more ancient than that of La Rochefoucauld, considered that in marrying the widow of a Jew he had acted with the same charitable spirit as a millionaire who picks up a prostitute in the street and saves her from poverty and the gutter. He was ready to extend his generous principles to include the very person of Gilberte, whose countless millions could hardly fail to help, but whose absurd name, Swann, made the marriage embarrassing. He declared that he would adopt her. As we know, Mme de Guermantes, to the astonishment of her social circle—which she was accustomed and delighted to provoke—had refused to talk to Swann’s wife or his daughter after his marriage. This refusal had appeared all the more cruel in as much as what had for so long made his marriage with Odette appear viable was the likely introduction of his daughter to Mme de Guermantes. And no doubt, with all his experience of life, he should have known that these scenes which we picture never come true, for various reasons but among them one which made him think of this lost introduction with little regret. This reason is that—whatever the picture, from eating a trout at sunset, which inspires a stay-at-home man to take the train, to the desire to dazzle a high-minded cashier one evening by drawing up at her front door in a splendid carriage, which decides an unscrupulous man either to commit a murder or to yearn for the death and legacy of his family and, according to whether he is brave or lazy, either to rush to put his ideals into practice or to stay musing over the first step to take—the action which is destined to enable us to complete the picture, whether this action be a journey, a marriage, a crime, or whatever, changes us so profoundly that we attach no further importance to the reason which drove us to perform it in the first place. It may even happen that we never again see in our mind’s eye the picture formulated by us when we were not yet the man who was to become the traveler, the husband, the criminal, or the recluse (the man who set to work in search of fame but has, through this very effort, become detached from the desire for fame), etc. Moreover, even if we did try obstinately to avoid acting in vain, it is probable that the effect of the sunset would not be repeated, that when the moment arrived we would feel cold and prefer hot soup by the fireside rather than trout alfresco, that our carriage would fail to impress the cashier, who might have had considerable esteem for us for entirely different reasons but who might feel suspicious of this sudden display of wealth. In short, we saw Swann, once married, attach importance above all to the relations of his wife and his daughter with Mme Bontemps and the like.