Reading Proust: The Captive – Sex and Lies
“…she used to slide her tongue between my lips like a portion of daily bread, a nourishing food that had the almost sacred character of all flesh upon which the sufferings that we have endured on its account have come in time to confer a sort of spiritual grace…” (page 2)
The Captive features some of Proust's most erotic moments, giving us an intimate, rather than objective as in Sodom and Gomorrah, view of physical desire. Sex is an underlying tension throughout the volume. Even the irrational jealousy and possessiveness has an intensity about it that feeds into the erotic side of things. This toxic relationship is full of sexuality but it harbors more mutual deceit and distrust than anything.
It has been three weeks since the conclusion of Sodom and Gomorrah. Albertine is now installed in a spare bedroom of the narrator’s home in Paris. The intention, of course, is that she will become his fiancé and they will be married. But, the relationship develops more darkly than either of them anticipated.
Before we attempt to dissect his relationship with Albertine more thoroughly, it is worth mentioning how Proust teases the reader in a literary sense throughout The Captive. He continues to occasionally break from the narrative form and address the reader directly with phrases like “I might ask the reader, as one might ask a friend with regard to whom one has forgotten…” (page 312) In this case he (the overarching narrator?) is wondering out loud whether the reader remembers something that was brought up back in The Guermantes Way.
Proust openly reflects upon his narrative style, a sort of self-critique, with the reader. Regarding the narrator's jealousy for Albertine and the fact that, earlier in the novel, he believed himself to be in love with Andrée: “…when jealousy had revived my love for her. My words, therefore, did not in the least reflect my feelings. If the reader has no more than a faint impression of these, that is because, as narrator, I expose my feeling to him at the same time as I repeat my words. But if I concealed the former and he were acquainted only with the latter, my actions, so little in keeping with them, would so often give him the impression of strange reversals that he would think me more or less mad.” (page 467)
The multiple levels of the narration are revealed in several passages. Reflecting back from his overarching perspective, “I was but imperfectly aware of the nature which guided my actions; today, I have a clear conception of its subjective truth. As for it objective truth, that is to say whether the intuitions of that nature grasped more exactly than my reason Albertine’s true intentions, whether I was right to trust to that nature or whether on the contrary it did not alter Albertine’s intentions instead of making them plain – that I find difficult to say.” (page 468) The use of the word “today” indicates a present moment in the future of where we are in the story and this admission of lack of clarity on the narrator’s part is revealing of his confusion over discovering the “authentic” Albertine that his neurotic paranoia desires.
In discussing how Albertine refers to the narrator we get these lines in the midst of passionate caressing: “Then she would find her tongue and say: ‘My –‘ or ‘My darling –‘ followed by my Christian name, which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would be ‘My Marcel,’ or ‘My darling Marcel.’” (page 91) We are told that Albertine was also in the habit of writing letters to him as “’My darling dear Marcel…’” (page 202) and “’What a Marcel! What a Marcel! Always and ever your Albertine.’” (page 203) Given these instances where the narrator is obviously toying with the reader like this, I will refer to him as “Marcel” for the remainder of the novel.
There are many passages making it clear that, for all its faults, Marcel's relationship with Albertine is a sensual one of mutual physical attraction.
“…I undressed and went to bed, and, with Albertine perched on the side of the bed, we would resume our game or conversation interrupted by kisses; and in the physical desire that alone makes us take an interest in the existence and character of another person, we remain so true to our own nature…catching sight of myself in the mirror at the moment when I was kissing Albertine and calling her ‘my little girl,’ the sorrowful passionate expression on my face, similar to the expression it would have worn long ago with Gilberte whom I no longer remembered…made me think that…I was performing duties of an ardent and painful devotion dedicated as a oblation to the youth and beauty of Woman. And yet with this desire by which I was honoring youth with a votive offering, with my memories too of Balbec, there was blended, in my need to keep Albertine thus every evening by my side, something that had hitherto been foreign to my amorous existence, at least, if it was not entirely new to my life. It was a soothing power the like of which I had not experienced since the evenings at Combray long ago when my mother, stooping over my bed, brought me repose in a kiss.” (page 93)
More so than the physical pleasure she offers him, however, Marcel feels satisfaction in knowing that his relationship prevents Albertine from finding pleasure with anyone else. “…for my pleasure in having Albertine to live with me was much less a positive pleasure than a pleasure of having withdrawn from the world, where everyone was free to enjoy her in turn, the blossoming girl who, if she did not bring me any great joy, was at least withholding joy from others. Ambition and fame would have left me unmoved. Even more was I incapable of feeling hatred. And yet to love carnally was none the less, for me, to enjoy a triumph over countless rivals.” (page 94)
Their intimacy is often exquisite. “Before Albertine obeyed and took off her shoes, I would open her chemise. He two little uplifted breasts were so round that they seemed not so much to be an integral part of her body as to have ripened there like fruit; and her belly…was closed, at the junction of her thighs, by two valves with a curve as languid, as reposeful, as cloistral as that of the horizon after the sun has set. She would take off her shoes and lie down by my side.” (page 97)
But Marcel’s sensuality is greater than Albertine could satisfy. His mind is constantly ruminating on other possible liaisons…and of the freedom to travel away from Albertine. He is particularly interested in working class girls. Among those he mentions are: “a laundry girl,” “the baker’s girl,” “the greengrocer’s girl,” and “various young female employees.” It is a striking fact that the very thing he fears about Albertine (that she has liaisons with other girls) is so allowable in Marcel himself. He is a tough protagonist to root for sometimes.
“Perhaps the habit that I had acquired of nursing within me certain desires, the desire for a young girl of good family…especially for the girl whom Saint-Loup had mentioned to me..the desire for some lady’s-maids, and especially for Mms Putbus’s, the desire to go to the country in early spring and to see once again hawthorns, apple-trees in blossom, storms, the desire for Venice…” (page 106)
The artist-lover. “…the law of our amorous curiosities…We are sculptors. We want to obtain of a woman a statue entirely different from the one she presented to us…we will not rest until we discover by experiment whether the proud girl…cannot be made, by skillful handling on our part, to relax their uncompromising attitude, to throw about our necks those arms that are laden with fruit, to bend towards our lips, with a smile of consent, eyes hitherto cold or absent…allow their pupils to light up with sunny laughter when we speak of making love!” (pp. 182- 183)
But does he love her? Marcel’s tortured heart and mind are as waffling and confused as ever in The Captive. The general sense is that, now that she is living with him, now that he has “captured” her and sealed her off from the world, even though she is allowed to take day trips and travel a bit without him, he has become even more indifferent to her. “I no longer loved Albertine…” But, we also still get these objective declarations. “…my love for Albertine…” “If I was not in love with Albertine (and of this I could not be sure)…” At one point Marcel converses with her: “’Albertine, you distrust me although I love you…” This is as close as we come to a subjective declaration of love. Later, he tells us of his “fear of telling Albertine that I loved her.”
It seems that he holds more jealousy and possessiveness for Albertine than anything else and that these, along with his obvious sexual attraction to her, are the only basis for any “love” he might feel toward her. “We love only what we do not wholly possess,” he tells us. “Only the desire that she aroused in others, when, on learning of it, I began to suffer again and wanted to challenge their possession of her.” “I was taking possession of her more completely…”
Yet, his sense of possession is inescapably shallow. He finds Albertine a “fugitive being” with a “beautiful laugh…so voluptuous.” She is “fugitive” in the sense that, as another person, she is opaque. Marcel cannot penetrate into her and know her actual past, her actual ambitions, sexual or otherwise. She denies any impropriety every time he brings it up.
Albertine is under the rather strict control of Marcel. He showers her with expensive gifts, clothing and accessories. They go out together to the finest restaurants. He spoils her at every opportunity. But this is not out of love so much as out of possession and jealousy. Ironically, it is Marcel who finds his sense of freedom curtailed. He discusses “…the fact that Albertine had put a full stop to my freedom” and refers to his own “bondage.”
Upon his return from the afternoon salon at the Verdurins’ Marcel discovers “the feeling that I myself was a captive.” He refers to “my captivity in Paris” as he dreams of visiting Venice. He admits that “Albertine was far more of a prisoner than I” but that is of little consolation. She is his captive, but she remains a “fugitive” to him. He is a captive of his own need to monitor and control Albertine, who he may or may not love, who he cannot truly know to the extent is neurotic jealousy apparently requires. Out of this possessive jealousy merges a relationship that is obviously sexual but also stifling and imprisoning, leading to a rotting mess of suspicion and lies.
There are many lies told throughout The Captive, beyond the ones already cooked up by the Verdurins in my previous post. Virtually all other lies are told between Marcel and Albertine. Marcel admits: “To tell the truth, I knew nothing that Albertine had done since I had come to know her, or even before. But in her conversation…there were certain contradictions, certain embellishments which seemed to me as decisive as catching her red-handed, but less usable against Albertine who, often caught out like a child, had invariably, by dint of sudden, strategic changes of front, stultified my cruel attacks and retrieved the situation.” (pp. 197- 198)
Marcel’s initial suspicions were purely reflective, wondering about how many lies she has told him since they first met years ago in Balbec. Though they gnaw at him, he represses these in the beginning in favor of “contenting myself with kissing her.” But, gradually, he catches her in other lies, particularly about where she has gone and what she had done in his absence. She tells him she met Bergotte on a day after the great author died. She lies about going to Balbec when, in fact, she went somewhere else. She states (confesses?) that she has met Lea, an infamous lesbian, at Balbec after previously telling him that she had never met Lea at all. Supposedly, at one point in the past, she meets Gilberte and the latter makes the strange inquiry as to “whether I was fond of women.” Supposedly, Albertine answered yes. But always Albertine declares herself innocent of the sexuality that Marcel suspects of her.
In reality, it seems that Marcel’s suspicions far exceed Albertine’s lies. For every time he catches her at something there are several other instances when he is simply being paranoid or possessive. The lies cut both ways, too. Marcel often tells a falsehood under the pretense of getting Albertine to admit something or other. This is a sad, toxic relationship with distrust eating at its core. Marcel’s instance on “keeping” Albertine with him (to ultimately marry her) and controlling her as much as possible is literally housed within a basic lack of trust.
This twisted psychological maze created out of all manner of falsehood, big and small, is frankly rather tedious to read by this point in the novel. The reader has already endured such treachery and deceit in Sodom and Gomorrah. Now we get hundreds more pages of it. But things are not completely filled with neurotic doubts and distrust between them. There are beautiful moments as well, as mentioned previously with their sexual attraction (even though it is plain that this attraction is not limited to her alone on the part of Marcel, and possibly she has liaisons on the side, though it remains murky at this point how much she is lying about her sexuality, if any).
The couple share a few wonderful moments. As an example, she play parts of Vinteuil’s sonata for him. This offers Marcel some relief as : “…I could dispose of my thoughts, detach them for a moment from Albertine, apply them to the sonata…I was carried back to Combray…when I longed to become an artist.” (page 204) They sit by the fireside with each other, enjoying lively conversations. When music isn’t played, she reads aloud to him in the evenings. He is soothed by this. Of course, there are constant “caresses and kissing” between them, which Marcel discovers has taken the place of his childish need for a kiss from his mother every night. Albertine fulfills this basic need. The sonata also connects this love relationship with Swann and Odette in book one.
One of the most beautiful passages in the novel is also one of the most erotic ones. It involves Marcel watching Albertine sleep on his bed. “For sometimes, when I got up to fetch a book from my father’s study, my mistress, having asked my permission to lie down while I was out of the room, was so tired after her long outing in the morning and afternoon in the open air that, even if I had been away for a moment only, when I returned I found her asleep and did not wake her. Stretched out at full length on my bed, in an attitude so natural that no art could have devised it, she reminded me of a long blossoming stem that had been laid there…her sleep realized to a certain extent the possibility of love: alone, I could think of her, but I missed her, I did not possess her; when she was present, I spoke to her, but was too absent from myself to be able to think of her; when she was asleep, I no longer had to talk, I knew I was no longer observed by her, I no longer needed to live on the surface of myself.
“By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped off, one after another, the different human personalities by which she had deceived me ever since the day I made her acquaintance…I had an impression of possessing her entirely which I never had when she was awake. Her life was submitted to me, exhaled towards me its gentle breath.
“I listened to this murmuring, mysterious emanation, soft as a sea breeze, magical as a gleam of moonlight, that was her sleep. So long as it lasted, I was free to dream about her and yet at the same time to look at her, and, when that sleep grew deeper, to touch and kiss her. What I felt then was a love as pure, as immaterial, as mysterious, as if I had been in the presence of those inanimate creatures which are the beauties of nature.” (pp. 84 – 85)
“Carriages went rattling past in the street, but her brow remained as smooth and untroubled, her breath as light, reduced to the simple expulsion of the necessary quantity of air. Then, seeing that her sleep would not be disturbed, I would advance cautiously, sit down on the chair that stood by the bedside, then on the bed itself. I spent many a charming evening talking and playing with Albertine, but none so sweet as when I was watching her sleep.
“I would run my eyes over her, stretched out below me. From time to time a slight, unaccountable tremor ran through her, as the leaves of a tree are shaken for a few moments by a sudden breath of wind. She would touch her hair and then, not having arranged it to her liking, would raise her hand to it again with motions so consecutive, so deliberate, that I was convinced that she was about to wake. Not at all; she grew calm again in the sleep from which she had not emerged.” (pp. 85 – 86)
“I, who was acquainted with many Albertines in one person, seemed now to see many more again reposing by my side. He eyebrows, arched as I had never noticed them, encircled the globes of her eyelids like a halcyon’s downy nest. Races, atavisms, vices reposed upon her face…I seemed to possess not one but countless girls…I would climb deliberately and noiselessly on to the bed, lie down by her side, clasp her waist in one arm, and place my lips upon her cheek and my free hand on her heart and then on every part of her body in turn, so that it too was raised, like the pearls, by her breathing; I myself was gently rocked by its regular motion…
“Sometimes it afforded me a pleasure that was less pure…my leg to dangle against hers…imparting to it now and again a gentle oscillation…I chose, in gazing at her, the aspect of her face which one never saw and which was so beautiful…The sound of her breathing, which had grown louder, might have given the illusion of the panting of sexual pleasure, and when mine was at its climax, I could kiss her without having interrupted her sleep.” (pp. 87 – 88)
Marcel masturbates on his sleeping girlfriend. The act is couched in marvelous prose of the turn of the last century, but that is clearly what happens here. It is one of the most vividly erotic moments in the novel, filled with such gentle, sensual energy (the actual passage is about four pages long). It is one of the most intimate moments we have of the two of them together when they are not arguing or being interrogated or spending money. But it is also, clearly, the pure objectification of a woman by a sexually aroused man. That’s not PC but it’s still hot. Marcel has many qualities as a narrator that are sensual and erotic but, even more so, we are stuck with a protagonist who is as neurotic as he is aesthetic, perhaps one infuses the other.
The Captive ends with Marcel and Albertine together. We get more of Proust’s twisted philosophy of love here as the narrator realizes his growing indifference toward Albertine. He feels his life swings constantly between boredom and painful jealousy. Albertine refuses Marcel’s suggestion that she has had sex with various women, particularly with Andrée, something Albertine calls a “pretty tale” and a “slander.” One evening among all these evenings he asks her to undress for him in his bedroom but she refuses. She agrees to sit on is bed and they talk civilly but she does not kiss him when she leaves his room.
The next couple of days they go out together, taking trips around Paris. They visit the Louvre. They go shopping for fancy overcoats. They see an airplane high overhead, still a novelty. Marcel considers how “fugitive her strongest desires” are from him. He cannot know them. His jealousy subsides and is replaced by indifference. He will not marry her. He makes plans to go visit Venice after all. When he is awakened by Francoise the next morning he is told that Albertine packed some boxes and left him a letter. Fear suddenly grips him. Has she escaped for a liaison? But the contents of the letter are not revealed to the reader – yet.
Both Sodom and Gomorrah and The Captive are wonderful works of sexuality, philosophy, and art/nature. I would rank them as the best two books within the novel, in that order respectively. The Captive, while unfinished, is like Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, a masterpiece. It suffers a bit from the tedium of the toxic relationship, but it makes up for it with stunning prose, interesting ideas and inquiries, and what is certainly one of the best social episodes in the whole novel.
The Captive features some of Proust's most erotic moments, giving us an intimate, rather than objective as in Sodom and Gomorrah, view of physical desire. Sex is an underlying tension throughout the volume. Even the irrational jealousy and possessiveness has an intensity about it that feeds into the erotic side of things. This toxic relationship is full of sexuality but it harbors more mutual deceit and distrust than anything.
It has been three weeks since the conclusion of Sodom and Gomorrah. Albertine is now installed in a spare bedroom of the narrator’s home in Paris. The intention, of course, is that she will become his fiancé and they will be married. But, the relationship develops more darkly than either of them anticipated.
Before we attempt to dissect his relationship with Albertine more thoroughly, it is worth mentioning how Proust teases the reader in a literary sense throughout The Captive. He continues to occasionally break from the narrative form and address the reader directly with phrases like “I might ask the reader, as one might ask a friend with regard to whom one has forgotten…” (page 312) In this case he (the overarching narrator?) is wondering out loud whether the reader remembers something that was brought up back in The Guermantes Way.
Proust openly reflects upon his narrative style, a sort of self-critique, with the reader. Regarding the narrator's jealousy for Albertine and the fact that, earlier in the novel, he believed himself to be in love with Andrée: “…when jealousy had revived my love for her. My words, therefore, did not in the least reflect my feelings. If the reader has no more than a faint impression of these, that is because, as narrator, I expose my feeling to him at the same time as I repeat my words. But if I concealed the former and he were acquainted only with the latter, my actions, so little in keeping with them, would so often give him the impression of strange reversals that he would think me more or less mad.” (page 467)
The multiple levels of the narration are revealed in several passages. Reflecting back from his overarching perspective, “I was but imperfectly aware of the nature which guided my actions; today, I have a clear conception of its subjective truth. As for it objective truth, that is to say whether the intuitions of that nature grasped more exactly than my reason Albertine’s true intentions, whether I was right to trust to that nature or whether on the contrary it did not alter Albertine’s intentions instead of making them plain – that I find difficult to say.” (page 468) The use of the word “today” indicates a present moment in the future of where we are in the story and this admission of lack of clarity on the narrator’s part is revealing of his confusion over discovering the “authentic” Albertine that his neurotic paranoia desires.
In discussing how Albertine refers to the narrator we get these lines in the midst of passionate caressing: “Then she would find her tongue and say: ‘My –‘ or ‘My darling –‘ followed by my Christian name, which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would be ‘My Marcel,’ or ‘My darling Marcel.’” (page 91) We are told that Albertine was also in the habit of writing letters to him as “’My darling dear Marcel…’” (page 202) and “’What a Marcel! What a Marcel! Always and ever your Albertine.’” (page 203) Given these instances where the narrator is obviously toying with the reader like this, I will refer to him as “Marcel” for the remainder of the novel.
There are many passages making it clear that, for all its faults, Marcel's relationship with Albertine is a sensual one of mutual physical attraction.
“…I undressed and went to bed, and, with Albertine perched on the side of the bed, we would resume our game or conversation interrupted by kisses; and in the physical desire that alone makes us take an interest in the existence and character of another person, we remain so true to our own nature…catching sight of myself in the mirror at the moment when I was kissing Albertine and calling her ‘my little girl,’ the sorrowful passionate expression on my face, similar to the expression it would have worn long ago with Gilberte whom I no longer remembered…made me think that…I was performing duties of an ardent and painful devotion dedicated as a oblation to the youth and beauty of Woman. And yet with this desire by which I was honoring youth with a votive offering, with my memories too of Balbec, there was blended, in my need to keep Albertine thus every evening by my side, something that had hitherto been foreign to my amorous existence, at least, if it was not entirely new to my life. It was a soothing power the like of which I had not experienced since the evenings at Combray long ago when my mother, stooping over my bed, brought me repose in a kiss.” (page 93)
More so than the physical pleasure she offers him, however, Marcel feels satisfaction in knowing that his relationship prevents Albertine from finding pleasure with anyone else. “…for my pleasure in having Albertine to live with me was much less a positive pleasure than a pleasure of having withdrawn from the world, where everyone was free to enjoy her in turn, the blossoming girl who, if she did not bring me any great joy, was at least withholding joy from others. Ambition and fame would have left me unmoved. Even more was I incapable of feeling hatred. And yet to love carnally was none the less, for me, to enjoy a triumph over countless rivals.” (page 94)
Their intimacy is often exquisite. “Before Albertine obeyed and took off her shoes, I would open her chemise. He two little uplifted breasts were so round that they seemed not so much to be an integral part of her body as to have ripened there like fruit; and her belly…was closed, at the junction of her thighs, by two valves with a curve as languid, as reposeful, as cloistral as that of the horizon after the sun has set. She would take off her shoes and lie down by my side.” (page 97)
But Marcel’s sensuality is greater than Albertine could satisfy. His mind is constantly ruminating on other possible liaisons…and of the freedom to travel away from Albertine. He is particularly interested in working class girls. Among those he mentions are: “a laundry girl,” “the baker’s girl,” “the greengrocer’s girl,” and “various young female employees.” It is a striking fact that the very thing he fears about Albertine (that she has liaisons with other girls) is so allowable in Marcel himself. He is a tough protagonist to root for sometimes.
“Perhaps the habit that I had acquired of nursing within me certain desires, the desire for a young girl of good family…especially for the girl whom Saint-Loup had mentioned to me..the desire for some lady’s-maids, and especially for Mms Putbus’s, the desire to go to the country in early spring and to see once again hawthorns, apple-trees in blossom, storms, the desire for Venice…” (page 106)
The artist-lover. “…the law of our amorous curiosities…We are sculptors. We want to obtain of a woman a statue entirely different from the one she presented to us…we will not rest until we discover by experiment whether the proud girl…cannot be made, by skillful handling on our part, to relax their uncompromising attitude, to throw about our necks those arms that are laden with fruit, to bend towards our lips, with a smile of consent, eyes hitherto cold or absent…allow their pupils to light up with sunny laughter when we speak of making love!” (pp. 182- 183)
But does he love her? Marcel’s tortured heart and mind are as waffling and confused as ever in The Captive. The general sense is that, now that she is living with him, now that he has “captured” her and sealed her off from the world, even though she is allowed to take day trips and travel a bit without him, he has become even more indifferent to her. “I no longer loved Albertine…” But, we also still get these objective declarations. “…my love for Albertine…” “If I was not in love with Albertine (and of this I could not be sure)…” At one point Marcel converses with her: “’Albertine, you distrust me although I love you…” This is as close as we come to a subjective declaration of love. Later, he tells us of his “fear of telling Albertine that I loved her.”
It seems that he holds more jealousy and possessiveness for Albertine than anything else and that these, along with his obvious sexual attraction to her, are the only basis for any “love” he might feel toward her. “We love only what we do not wholly possess,” he tells us. “Only the desire that she aroused in others, when, on learning of it, I began to suffer again and wanted to challenge their possession of her.” “I was taking possession of her more completely…”
Yet, his sense of possession is inescapably shallow. He finds Albertine a “fugitive being” with a “beautiful laugh…so voluptuous.” She is “fugitive” in the sense that, as another person, she is opaque. Marcel cannot penetrate into her and know her actual past, her actual ambitions, sexual or otherwise. She denies any impropriety every time he brings it up.
Albertine is under the rather strict control of Marcel. He showers her with expensive gifts, clothing and accessories. They go out together to the finest restaurants. He spoils her at every opportunity. But this is not out of love so much as out of possession and jealousy. Ironically, it is Marcel who finds his sense of freedom curtailed. He discusses “…the fact that Albertine had put a full stop to my freedom” and refers to his own “bondage.”
Upon his return from the afternoon salon at the Verdurins’ Marcel discovers “the feeling that I myself was a captive.” He refers to “my captivity in Paris” as he dreams of visiting Venice. He admits that “Albertine was far more of a prisoner than I” but that is of little consolation. She is his captive, but she remains a “fugitive” to him. He is a captive of his own need to monitor and control Albertine, who he may or may not love, who he cannot truly know to the extent is neurotic jealousy apparently requires. Out of this possessive jealousy merges a relationship that is obviously sexual but also stifling and imprisoning, leading to a rotting mess of suspicion and lies.
There are many lies told throughout The Captive, beyond the ones already cooked up by the Verdurins in my previous post. Virtually all other lies are told between Marcel and Albertine. Marcel admits: “To tell the truth, I knew nothing that Albertine had done since I had come to know her, or even before. But in her conversation…there were certain contradictions, certain embellishments which seemed to me as decisive as catching her red-handed, but less usable against Albertine who, often caught out like a child, had invariably, by dint of sudden, strategic changes of front, stultified my cruel attacks and retrieved the situation.” (pp. 197- 198)
Marcel’s initial suspicions were purely reflective, wondering about how many lies she has told him since they first met years ago in Balbec. Though they gnaw at him, he represses these in the beginning in favor of “contenting myself with kissing her.” But, gradually, he catches her in other lies, particularly about where she has gone and what she had done in his absence. She tells him she met Bergotte on a day after the great author died. She lies about going to Balbec when, in fact, she went somewhere else. She states (confesses?) that she has met Lea, an infamous lesbian, at Balbec after previously telling him that she had never met Lea at all. Supposedly, at one point in the past, she meets Gilberte and the latter makes the strange inquiry as to “whether I was fond of women.” Supposedly, Albertine answered yes. But always Albertine declares herself innocent of the sexuality that Marcel suspects of her.
In reality, it seems that Marcel’s suspicions far exceed Albertine’s lies. For every time he catches her at something there are several other instances when he is simply being paranoid or possessive. The lies cut both ways, too. Marcel often tells a falsehood under the pretense of getting Albertine to admit something or other. This is a sad, toxic relationship with distrust eating at its core. Marcel’s instance on “keeping” Albertine with him (to ultimately marry her) and controlling her as much as possible is literally housed within a basic lack of trust.
This twisted psychological maze created out of all manner of falsehood, big and small, is frankly rather tedious to read by this point in the novel. The reader has already endured such treachery and deceit in Sodom and Gomorrah. Now we get hundreds more pages of it. But things are not completely filled with neurotic doubts and distrust between them. There are beautiful moments as well, as mentioned previously with their sexual attraction (even though it is plain that this attraction is not limited to her alone on the part of Marcel, and possibly she has liaisons on the side, though it remains murky at this point how much she is lying about her sexuality, if any).
The couple share a few wonderful moments. As an example, she play parts of Vinteuil’s sonata for him. This offers Marcel some relief as : “…I could dispose of my thoughts, detach them for a moment from Albertine, apply them to the sonata…I was carried back to Combray…when I longed to become an artist.” (page 204) They sit by the fireside with each other, enjoying lively conversations. When music isn’t played, she reads aloud to him in the evenings. He is soothed by this. Of course, there are constant “caresses and kissing” between them, which Marcel discovers has taken the place of his childish need for a kiss from his mother every night. Albertine fulfills this basic need. The sonata also connects this love relationship with Swann and Odette in book one.
One of the most beautiful passages in the novel is also one of the most erotic ones. It involves Marcel watching Albertine sleep on his bed. “For sometimes, when I got up to fetch a book from my father’s study, my mistress, having asked my permission to lie down while I was out of the room, was so tired after her long outing in the morning and afternoon in the open air that, even if I had been away for a moment only, when I returned I found her asleep and did not wake her. Stretched out at full length on my bed, in an attitude so natural that no art could have devised it, she reminded me of a long blossoming stem that had been laid there…her sleep realized to a certain extent the possibility of love: alone, I could think of her, but I missed her, I did not possess her; when she was present, I spoke to her, but was too absent from myself to be able to think of her; when she was asleep, I no longer had to talk, I knew I was no longer observed by her, I no longer needed to live on the surface of myself.
“By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped off, one after another, the different human personalities by which she had deceived me ever since the day I made her acquaintance…I had an impression of possessing her entirely which I never had when she was awake. Her life was submitted to me, exhaled towards me its gentle breath.
“I listened to this murmuring, mysterious emanation, soft as a sea breeze, magical as a gleam of moonlight, that was her sleep. So long as it lasted, I was free to dream about her and yet at the same time to look at her, and, when that sleep grew deeper, to touch and kiss her. What I felt then was a love as pure, as immaterial, as mysterious, as if I had been in the presence of those inanimate creatures which are the beauties of nature.” (pp. 84 – 85)
“Carriages went rattling past in the street, but her brow remained as smooth and untroubled, her breath as light, reduced to the simple expulsion of the necessary quantity of air. Then, seeing that her sleep would not be disturbed, I would advance cautiously, sit down on the chair that stood by the bedside, then on the bed itself. I spent many a charming evening talking and playing with Albertine, but none so sweet as when I was watching her sleep.
“I would run my eyes over her, stretched out below me. From time to time a slight, unaccountable tremor ran through her, as the leaves of a tree are shaken for a few moments by a sudden breath of wind. She would touch her hair and then, not having arranged it to her liking, would raise her hand to it again with motions so consecutive, so deliberate, that I was convinced that she was about to wake. Not at all; she grew calm again in the sleep from which she had not emerged.” (pp. 85 – 86)
“I, who was acquainted with many Albertines in one person, seemed now to see many more again reposing by my side. He eyebrows, arched as I had never noticed them, encircled the globes of her eyelids like a halcyon’s downy nest. Races, atavisms, vices reposed upon her face…I seemed to possess not one but countless girls…I would climb deliberately and noiselessly on to the bed, lie down by her side, clasp her waist in one arm, and place my lips upon her cheek and my free hand on her heart and then on every part of her body in turn, so that it too was raised, like the pearls, by her breathing; I myself was gently rocked by its regular motion…
“Sometimes it afforded me a pleasure that was less pure…my leg to dangle against hers…imparting to it now and again a gentle oscillation…I chose, in gazing at her, the aspect of her face which one never saw and which was so beautiful…The sound of her breathing, which had grown louder, might have given the illusion of the panting of sexual pleasure, and when mine was at its climax, I could kiss her without having interrupted her sleep.” (pp. 87 – 88)
Marcel masturbates on his sleeping girlfriend. The act is couched in marvelous prose of the turn of the last century, but that is clearly what happens here. It is one of the most vividly erotic moments in the novel, filled with such gentle, sensual energy (the actual passage is about four pages long). It is one of the most intimate moments we have of the two of them together when they are not arguing or being interrogated or spending money. But it is also, clearly, the pure objectification of a woman by a sexually aroused man. That’s not PC but it’s still hot. Marcel has many qualities as a narrator that are sensual and erotic but, even more so, we are stuck with a protagonist who is as neurotic as he is aesthetic, perhaps one infuses the other.
The Captive ends with Marcel and Albertine together. We get more of Proust’s twisted philosophy of love here as the narrator realizes his growing indifference toward Albertine. He feels his life swings constantly between boredom and painful jealousy. Albertine refuses Marcel’s suggestion that she has had sex with various women, particularly with Andrée, something Albertine calls a “pretty tale” and a “slander.” One evening among all these evenings he asks her to undress for him in his bedroom but she refuses. She agrees to sit on is bed and they talk civilly but she does not kiss him when she leaves his room.
The next couple of days they go out together, taking trips around Paris. They visit the Louvre. They go shopping for fancy overcoats. They see an airplane high overhead, still a novelty. Marcel considers how “fugitive her strongest desires” are from him. He cannot know them. His jealousy subsides and is replaced by indifference. He will not marry her. He makes plans to go visit Venice after all. When he is awakened by Francoise the next morning he is told that Albertine packed some boxes and left him a letter. Fear suddenly grips him. Has she escaped for a liaison? But the contents of the letter are not revealed to the reader – yet.
Both Sodom and Gomorrah and The Captive are wonderful works of sexuality, philosophy, and art/nature. I would rank them as the best two books within the novel, in that order respectively. The Captive, while unfinished, is like Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, a masterpiece. It suffers a bit from the tedium of the toxic relationship, but it makes up for it with stunning prose, interesting ideas and inquiries, and what is certainly one of the best social episodes in the whole novel.
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