Reading Proust: The Fugitive – The Beginnings of Lost Time
The actual “forgetting” part of Albertine does not happen in Chapter One (in fact, she is never completely forgotten). At the beginning of the next chapter, Marcel understands that “before returning to the state of indifference from which one started, one cannot avoid covering in the reverse direction the distances one had traversed in order to arrive at love, the itinerary one follows, the line one takes, are not necessarily the same.” (page 754)
While taking a walk in Paris, Marcel notices three “well-born girls” of which “the fair one” catches his eye. She gazes back at him from a distance before entering a carriage at the entrance of a hotel and going away. His heart beats wildly. Marcel becomes “madly in love with her” and inquires as to who she is. The concierge gives him the name of a girl that Robert has mentioned having sex with earlier in the novel. Marcel lives mostly in a fantasy world with women at this time, after having felt the void that having sex with various girls created for him.
That evening he receives marvelous news. An artistic piece he wrote has been published in Paris’ leading art and leisure newspaper. At long last his childhood dream of being a writer seems more the possible again. In his excitement he immediately goes to the Guermantes’ drawing room to share his triumph with them. Of course, when he arrives the “fair girl” is there, visiting with them as well. He does not recognize her but she knows him quite well. It is Gilberte, no longer a Swann but now a de Forcheville since Odette remarried after Swann’s death. She is now immensely wealthy thanks to her inheritance not only from Swann but from a rich uncle as well. The last name was misunderstood and misspelled by the concierge. It was not the sexy girl Robert had been with after all. Proust loves to play with these sorts of fallacies all through the novel.
Thus Gilberte reenters the novel significantly for the first time since she, as a red-headed girl, became the first love of a boyish Marcel way back in Swann’s Way (which helps explain why he doesn’t recognize her immediately). She, actually in a quest to get over her father’s death, becomes the first stage in Marcel’s process of truly forgetting Albertine. “And it was not only with regard to Swann that Gilberte was gradually completing the process of forgetting; she had accelerated in me the process with regard to Albertine. Under the influence of desire, and consequently of the desire for happiness which Gilberte had aroused in me during the few hours in which I had supposed her to be someone else, a certain number of miseries, of painful preoccupations, which only a little while earlier had obsessed my mind, had slipped away from me, carrying with them a whole block of memories, probably long since crumbling and precarious, with regard to Albertine.” (page 801)
Strangely, through Gilberte’s grieving and change, Marcel can feel himself starting to become someone different. “I too still wept when I became once again for a moment the former friend of Albertine. But it was into a new personality that I was tending to change altogether. It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them fades; it is because we ourselves are dying.” (page 805)
The next stage in Marcel’s forgetting process occurs when he has “semi-carnal relations” with Andrée, Albertine’s best friend. The two have already spoken earlier in The Fugitive. She visits Marcel just after Albertine’s death for the two to console each other. Of course, perhaps out of habit more than anything, he tries to learn what he can about Albertine’s sexuality but Andrée denies anything like that ever happened between them, that Albertine abhorred such behavior. On their second meeting, the two, being attracted to each other, fool around and Andrée suddenly is more forthcoming about her best friend.
Regarding Albertine: “And my desire to know about her life, because it had diminished less, was now relatively greater than my need for her presence. Moreover, the idea that a woman had perhaps had relations with Albertine no longer aroused in me anything save the desire to have relations with that woman myself. I told Andrée this, caressing her as I spoke. Then, without making the slightest effort to make her words consistent with those of a few months earlier, Andrée said to me with a lurking smile: ‘Ah! Yes, but you’re a man. And so we can’t do quite the same things as I used to do with Albertine.’…‘Ah! we spent many happy hours together; she was so caressing, so passionate. But it wasn’t only with me that she liked to enjoy herself. She had met a handsome young fellow at Mme Verdurin’s called Morel. They came to an understanding at once. He undertook…to entice young fisher-girls in remote villages, or young laundry-girls, who would fall for a boy but might not have responded to a girl’s advances. As soon as the girl was well under his control, he’d bring her to a safe place and hand her over to Albertine. For fear of losing Morel, who took part in it all too, the girl always obeyed…Once he even had the nerve to bring one of these girls, with Albertine, to a brothel…where four or five of the women had her together, or in turn.” (page 811)
Andrée tells him that Albertine had at one time hoped that by marrying him she would resolve her sexual tastes. She also reveals that she and Albertine had sex in her bedroom while she was living with Marcel and were almost caught by him without him realizing it. These revelations are perhaps the most blatant and shocking of all, and yet they did not “assume the magnitude they would have had in our eyes a little earlier.”
Instead Marcel comes to the dark conclusion that: “Lying is essential to humanity. I plays as large a part perhaps as the quest for pleasure, and is moreover governed by that quest. One lies in order to protect one’s pleasure, or one’s honor if the disclosure of one’s pleasure runs counter to one’s honor. One lies all one’s life long, even, especially, perhaps only, to those who love one. For they alone make us fear for our pleasure and desire their esteem.” (page 824)
Andrée’s confession leaves Marcel numb, not knowing how to feel now that he no longer hurts and his memories of Albertine are becoming fragmentary. “But why should I believe that is was she rather than Andrée who was lying? Truth and life are very difficult to fathom, and I retained of them, without really having got to know them, an impression in which sadness was perhaps actually eclipsed by exhaustion.” (page 843) While he will continue to think back upon Albertine a lot, the emotions he used to feel in his intimacy with her are now largely abandoned.
Not long afterward, Marcel finally goes out into the world again, beyond Paris, to visit Venice, a long-time ambition, with his mother. Much of the city reminds him of Combray only in a “far richer key.” This is a section of the novel that Proust probably would have fleshed out more. There are a few long paragraphs regarding the architecture and sculptures and scenery of Venice, the play of light on the buildings and the water, but they are subdued compared with some of the passages on art and beauty that the reader has enjoyed earlier in the novel. As the text stands, the city itself only has equal prominence with Marcel’s continuing fascination with girls.
A humorous moment occurs when a friend of his mother, Mme Sazerat, is being escorted by Marcel to the restaurant for her to meet Mme de Villeparisis, who used to be a prostitute and the lover of Mme Sazerat’s now deceased father, whose heart she broke. She has never met her before and seeks consolation that at least her father once loved “the most beautiful woman of his generation.” Marcel points toward the table where Mme de Valleparisis is seated with her current lover, the elderly diplomat M. de Norpois, returning to the novel after a long absence.
“But, like a blind person who looks everywhere but the right direction, Mme Sazerat did not bring her eyes to rest upon the table at which Mme de Villeparisis was dining, but, looking towards another part of the room, said: ‘But she must have gone, I don’t see her where you say she is.’ And she continued to gaze around the room in quest of the loathed, adored vision that has haunted her imagination for so long. ‘Yes, there she is, at the second table.’ ‘Then we can’t be counting from the same point. At what I count as the second table there’s only an old gentleman and a little hunchbacked, red-faced, hideous woman.’ ‘That’s her!’” (pp. 859 – 860)
This funny moment is actually a narrative theme about the passage of Time that Proust starts to develop more earnestly in this section of the novel, the young grow older and we no longer recognize them nor find what we were once seeking in them. Marcel does not recognize Gilberte initially, for example, due to the passage of years since he was in love with her. He wrestles with this in an almost metaphysical context.
“True, it often happened to me to recall, with an extraordinary violence of desire, some wench of Méséglise or Paris, or the milk-girl I had seen early in the morning at the foot of the hill during my first journey to Balbec. But alas! I remembered them as they were then, that is to say as they certainly would not be now. So that if in the past I had been led to qualify my impression of the uniqueness of a desire by seeking…I had to consent to a further departure from the principle of the individuality of desire: what I must look for is not those who were sixteen then, but those who were sixteen today, for now, in the absence of that which was most distinctive in the person and which eluded me, what I loved was youth. I knew that the youth of those I had known existed no longer except in my impassioned recollection, and that it was not them, however anxious I might be to make contact with them when my memory recalled them to me, that I must cull if I wished to harvest the youth and blossom of the year.” (page 851)
In this way, the search for lost Time truly begins to take shape in the narrative.
A strange thing occurs while Marcel is in Venice. He receives a telegram that is signed by Albertine stating that “I am quite alive.” What surprises Marcel most is not the shock of the telegram, but the fact that he feels nothing toward it. He is changing. “Life, in accordance with its habit which is, by unceasing, infinitesimal labors, to change the face of the world, had not said to me on the morrow of Albertine’s death: ‘Become another person,’ but, by changes too imperceptible for me to be conscious even that I was changing, had altered almost everything in me, with the result that my mind was already accustomed to its new master – my new self – when it became aware that it changed.” (pp. 870 - 871) He realizes he no longer loves Albertine.
As he and his mother are preparing to leave Venice, Marcel, nosy as ever, notices that the hotel register is expecting the arrival of “Mme Putbus and attendants.” His desire to fulfill his fantasy with the chambermaid is once more roused and he initially chooses not to leave with his mother. He will stay behind for awhile and enjoy “hours of causal pleasure.” His mother leaves to catch the train. Marcel is self-conflicted for several pages but ultimately decides to go with his mother, catching the train just in time.
While on the train he takes a moment to read a letter just received from Gilberte announcing that she is going to marry Robert de Saint-Loup. In reading her handwriting it suddenly occurs to him that she writes the capital “G” in her name similarly to a Gothic “A”. This and a few other small handwriting idiosyncrasies are recalled from a letter he received from her all the way back in Within a Budding Grove. The telegram operator must have accidentally mistaken her name to be “Albertine;” another twisted Proustian accident that initially leads to false conclusions. If nothing else, it reveals the extent to which he has now gotten over Albertine even though no one fills the void the loss of her creates in his life.
While short, the final chapter of The Fugitive is dense with narrative elements and complex relationships. Saint-Loup’s marriage to Gilberte turns out to be an unhappy one. He is a notorious womanizer. Marcel reenters Gilberte’s life as a true friend and visits with her at Tansonville, Swann’s old country estate home. The years that have separated them took away all the passion Marcel once felt for her. And, true to Proust’s philosophy of love, because he no longer desires her she is more forthcoming and open and grows closer to him.
For his part, Marcel contents himself with “keeping a girl in Paris…I needed her sleep by my side during the night and, by day, to have her always by my side in the carriage.” These are “daily habits” born of those “homeward drives to the beloved’s door…All these habits, which are like great uniform high-roads along which our love passes daily and which were forged long ago in the volcanic fire of an ardent emotion, nevertheless survive the woman, survive even the memory of the woman.” (page 921) So, while he no longer feels love for Albertine, the many intimate habits that he once shared with her must continue with another (generically nameless) girl whom he does not love at all. Once more, the theme of searching to regain something of the past becomes a more pronounced theme in the novel.
Gilberte shares with Marcel that she has found some love letters addressed to Robert that are signed by “Bobette.” While checking in on M. de Charlus, still recovering from his cardiac condition, Marcel sees Jupien and these letters come up in conversation. Marcel learns that “Bobette” is someone he and the Baron know quite well. It is Morel! So, just as with his uncle M. de Charlus, Robert’s womanizing is a mere cover for his bisexuality (Proust calls it “homosexuality” but I believe, by today’s standards, Robert would be considered bi). This is further confirmed a bit later by Aimé who speaks of knowing that Saint-Loup spent a great deal of time in private at odd hours with the Grand Hotel lift-boy at Balbec.
Gilberte has no idea about her husband’s taste for boys and men. She attempts to deal with Robert’s alleged affairs with women by becoming more like Rachel, the actress/prostitute Robert was so enamored with when Marcel first met him. Like Rachel, she wears “bows of scarlet or pink or yellow ribbon in her hair, which she dressed in a similar style, for she believed that her husband was still in love with Rachel, and so was jealous of her. That Robert’s love may have hovered at times on the boundary which divides the love of a man for a woman from the love of a man for a man was quite possible.” (page 929, Proust is definitely writing here about what we call male bisexuality today, even if he considers Robert “homosexual.”) At one point, Robert goes so far as to ask Gilberte to dress up as a man and “leave a lock of her hair hanging down” over her face – exactly the way Morel wore it for the Baron in The Captive.
Marcel bemoans the passage of time in many relationships at this point of the novel, another way the affects of Time are a consistent undertone in The Fugitive. “But I wept when I reflected that I had once had so great an affection for a different Saint-Loup, an affection which, I sensed all too clearly from the cold and evasive manner which he now adopted, he no longer felt for me, since men, now that they were capable of arousing his desires, could no longer inspire his friendship.” (page 934)
Marcel finds it difficult to deal with this new sadness pervading his life but nevertheless he considers a melancholic hope. “Everything that seems to us imperishable tends towards decay; a position in society, like everything else, is not created once and for all, but, just as much as the power of an empire, is continually rebuilding itself by a sort of perpetual process of creation, which explains the apparent anomalies in social and political history in the course of a half century. The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.” (page 909) Paradoxically, that is both a somber and poignantly hopeful insight of Becoming.
While taking a walk in Paris, Marcel notices three “well-born girls” of which “the fair one” catches his eye. She gazes back at him from a distance before entering a carriage at the entrance of a hotel and going away. His heart beats wildly. Marcel becomes “madly in love with her” and inquires as to who she is. The concierge gives him the name of a girl that Robert has mentioned having sex with earlier in the novel. Marcel lives mostly in a fantasy world with women at this time, after having felt the void that having sex with various girls created for him.
That evening he receives marvelous news. An artistic piece he wrote has been published in Paris’ leading art and leisure newspaper. At long last his childhood dream of being a writer seems more the possible again. In his excitement he immediately goes to the Guermantes’ drawing room to share his triumph with them. Of course, when he arrives the “fair girl” is there, visiting with them as well. He does not recognize her but she knows him quite well. It is Gilberte, no longer a Swann but now a de Forcheville since Odette remarried after Swann’s death. She is now immensely wealthy thanks to her inheritance not only from Swann but from a rich uncle as well. The last name was misunderstood and misspelled by the concierge. It was not the sexy girl Robert had been with after all. Proust loves to play with these sorts of fallacies all through the novel.
Thus Gilberte reenters the novel significantly for the first time since she, as a red-headed girl, became the first love of a boyish Marcel way back in Swann’s Way (which helps explain why he doesn’t recognize her immediately). She, actually in a quest to get over her father’s death, becomes the first stage in Marcel’s process of truly forgetting Albertine. “And it was not only with regard to Swann that Gilberte was gradually completing the process of forgetting; she had accelerated in me the process with regard to Albertine. Under the influence of desire, and consequently of the desire for happiness which Gilberte had aroused in me during the few hours in which I had supposed her to be someone else, a certain number of miseries, of painful preoccupations, which only a little while earlier had obsessed my mind, had slipped away from me, carrying with them a whole block of memories, probably long since crumbling and precarious, with regard to Albertine.” (page 801)
Strangely, through Gilberte’s grieving and change, Marcel can feel himself starting to become someone different. “I too still wept when I became once again for a moment the former friend of Albertine. But it was into a new personality that I was tending to change altogether. It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them fades; it is because we ourselves are dying.” (page 805)
The next stage in Marcel’s forgetting process occurs when he has “semi-carnal relations” with Andrée, Albertine’s best friend. The two have already spoken earlier in The Fugitive. She visits Marcel just after Albertine’s death for the two to console each other. Of course, perhaps out of habit more than anything, he tries to learn what he can about Albertine’s sexuality but Andrée denies anything like that ever happened between them, that Albertine abhorred such behavior. On their second meeting, the two, being attracted to each other, fool around and Andrée suddenly is more forthcoming about her best friend.
Regarding Albertine: “And my desire to know about her life, because it had diminished less, was now relatively greater than my need for her presence. Moreover, the idea that a woman had perhaps had relations with Albertine no longer aroused in me anything save the desire to have relations with that woman myself. I told Andrée this, caressing her as I spoke. Then, without making the slightest effort to make her words consistent with those of a few months earlier, Andrée said to me with a lurking smile: ‘Ah! Yes, but you’re a man. And so we can’t do quite the same things as I used to do with Albertine.’…‘Ah! we spent many happy hours together; she was so caressing, so passionate. But it wasn’t only with me that she liked to enjoy herself. She had met a handsome young fellow at Mme Verdurin’s called Morel. They came to an understanding at once. He undertook…to entice young fisher-girls in remote villages, or young laundry-girls, who would fall for a boy but might not have responded to a girl’s advances. As soon as the girl was well under his control, he’d bring her to a safe place and hand her over to Albertine. For fear of losing Morel, who took part in it all too, the girl always obeyed…Once he even had the nerve to bring one of these girls, with Albertine, to a brothel…where four or five of the women had her together, or in turn.” (page 811)
Andrée tells him that Albertine had at one time hoped that by marrying him she would resolve her sexual tastes. She also reveals that she and Albertine had sex in her bedroom while she was living with Marcel and were almost caught by him without him realizing it. These revelations are perhaps the most blatant and shocking of all, and yet they did not “assume the magnitude they would have had in our eyes a little earlier.”
Instead Marcel comes to the dark conclusion that: “Lying is essential to humanity. I plays as large a part perhaps as the quest for pleasure, and is moreover governed by that quest. One lies in order to protect one’s pleasure, or one’s honor if the disclosure of one’s pleasure runs counter to one’s honor. One lies all one’s life long, even, especially, perhaps only, to those who love one. For they alone make us fear for our pleasure and desire their esteem.” (page 824)
Andrée’s confession leaves Marcel numb, not knowing how to feel now that he no longer hurts and his memories of Albertine are becoming fragmentary. “But why should I believe that is was she rather than Andrée who was lying? Truth and life are very difficult to fathom, and I retained of them, without really having got to know them, an impression in which sadness was perhaps actually eclipsed by exhaustion.” (page 843) While he will continue to think back upon Albertine a lot, the emotions he used to feel in his intimacy with her are now largely abandoned.
Not long afterward, Marcel finally goes out into the world again, beyond Paris, to visit Venice, a long-time ambition, with his mother. Much of the city reminds him of Combray only in a “far richer key.” This is a section of the novel that Proust probably would have fleshed out more. There are a few long paragraphs regarding the architecture and sculptures and scenery of Venice, the play of light on the buildings and the water, but they are subdued compared with some of the passages on art and beauty that the reader has enjoyed earlier in the novel. As the text stands, the city itself only has equal prominence with Marcel’s continuing fascination with girls.
A humorous moment occurs when a friend of his mother, Mme Sazerat, is being escorted by Marcel to the restaurant for her to meet Mme de Villeparisis, who used to be a prostitute and the lover of Mme Sazerat’s now deceased father, whose heart she broke. She has never met her before and seeks consolation that at least her father once loved “the most beautiful woman of his generation.” Marcel points toward the table where Mme de Valleparisis is seated with her current lover, the elderly diplomat M. de Norpois, returning to the novel after a long absence.
“But, like a blind person who looks everywhere but the right direction, Mme Sazerat did not bring her eyes to rest upon the table at which Mme de Villeparisis was dining, but, looking towards another part of the room, said: ‘But she must have gone, I don’t see her where you say she is.’ And she continued to gaze around the room in quest of the loathed, adored vision that has haunted her imagination for so long. ‘Yes, there she is, at the second table.’ ‘Then we can’t be counting from the same point. At what I count as the second table there’s only an old gentleman and a little hunchbacked, red-faced, hideous woman.’ ‘That’s her!’” (pp. 859 – 860)
This funny moment is actually a narrative theme about the passage of Time that Proust starts to develop more earnestly in this section of the novel, the young grow older and we no longer recognize them nor find what we were once seeking in them. Marcel does not recognize Gilberte initially, for example, due to the passage of years since he was in love with her. He wrestles with this in an almost metaphysical context.
“True, it often happened to me to recall, with an extraordinary violence of desire, some wench of Méséglise or Paris, or the milk-girl I had seen early in the morning at the foot of the hill during my first journey to Balbec. But alas! I remembered them as they were then, that is to say as they certainly would not be now. So that if in the past I had been led to qualify my impression of the uniqueness of a desire by seeking…I had to consent to a further departure from the principle of the individuality of desire: what I must look for is not those who were sixteen then, but those who were sixteen today, for now, in the absence of that which was most distinctive in the person and which eluded me, what I loved was youth. I knew that the youth of those I had known existed no longer except in my impassioned recollection, and that it was not them, however anxious I might be to make contact with them when my memory recalled them to me, that I must cull if I wished to harvest the youth and blossom of the year.” (page 851)
In this way, the search for lost Time truly begins to take shape in the narrative.
A strange thing occurs while Marcel is in Venice. He receives a telegram that is signed by Albertine stating that “I am quite alive.” What surprises Marcel most is not the shock of the telegram, but the fact that he feels nothing toward it. He is changing. “Life, in accordance with its habit which is, by unceasing, infinitesimal labors, to change the face of the world, had not said to me on the morrow of Albertine’s death: ‘Become another person,’ but, by changes too imperceptible for me to be conscious even that I was changing, had altered almost everything in me, with the result that my mind was already accustomed to its new master – my new self – when it became aware that it changed.” (pp. 870 - 871) He realizes he no longer loves Albertine.
As he and his mother are preparing to leave Venice, Marcel, nosy as ever, notices that the hotel register is expecting the arrival of “Mme Putbus and attendants.” His desire to fulfill his fantasy with the chambermaid is once more roused and he initially chooses not to leave with his mother. He will stay behind for awhile and enjoy “hours of causal pleasure.” His mother leaves to catch the train. Marcel is self-conflicted for several pages but ultimately decides to go with his mother, catching the train just in time.
While on the train he takes a moment to read a letter just received from Gilberte announcing that she is going to marry Robert de Saint-Loup. In reading her handwriting it suddenly occurs to him that she writes the capital “G” in her name similarly to a Gothic “A”. This and a few other small handwriting idiosyncrasies are recalled from a letter he received from her all the way back in Within a Budding Grove. The telegram operator must have accidentally mistaken her name to be “Albertine;” another twisted Proustian accident that initially leads to false conclusions. If nothing else, it reveals the extent to which he has now gotten over Albertine even though no one fills the void the loss of her creates in his life.
While short, the final chapter of The Fugitive is dense with narrative elements and complex relationships. Saint-Loup’s marriage to Gilberte turns out to be an unhappy one. He is a notorious womanizer. Marcel reenters Gilberte’s life as a true friend and visits with her at Tansonville, Swann’s old country estate home. The years that have separated them took away all the passion Marcel once felt for her. And, true to Proust’s philosophy of love, because he no longer desires her she is more forthcoming and open and grows closer to him.
For his part, Marcel contents himself with “keeping a girl in Paris…I needed her sleep by my side during the night and, by day, to have her always by my side in the carriage.” These are “daily habits” born of those “homeward drives to the beloved’s door…All these habits, which are like great uniform high-roads along which our love passes daily and which were forged long ago in the volcanic fire of an ardent emotion, nevertheless survive the woman, survive even the memory of the woman.” (page 921) So, while he no longer feels love for Albertine, the many intimate habits that he once shared with her must continue with another (generically nameless) girl whom he does not love at all. Once more, the theme of searching to regain something of the past becomes a more pronounced theme in the novel.
Gilberte shares with Marcel that she has found some love letters addressed to Robert that are signed by “Bobette.” While checking in on M. de Charlus, still recovering from his cardiac condition, Marcel sees Jupien and these letters come up in conversation. Marcel learns that “Bobette” is someone he and the Baron know quite well. It is Morel! So, just as with his uncle M. de Charlus, Robert’s womanizing is a mere cover for his bisexuality (Proust calls it “homosexuality” but I believe, by today’s standards, Robert would be considered bi). This is further confirmed a bit later by Aimé who speaks of knowing that Saint-Loup spent a great deal of time in private at odd hours with the Grand Hotel lift-boy at Balbec.
Gilberte has no idea about her husband’s taste for boys and men. She attempts to deal with Robert’s alleged affairs with women by becoming more like Rachel, the actress/prostitute Robert was so enamored with when Marcel first met him. Like Rachel, she wears “bows of scarlet or pink or yellow ribbon in her hair, which she dressed in a similar style, for she believed that her husband was still in love with Rachel, and so was jealous of her. That Robert’s love may have hovered at times on the boundary which divides the love of a man for a woman from the love of a man for a man was quite possible.” (page 929, Proust is definitely writing here about what we call male bisexuality today, even if he considers Robert “homosexual.”) At one point, Robert goes so far as to ask Gilberte to dress up as a man and “leave a lock of her hair hanging down” over her face – exactly the way Morel wore it for the Baron in The Captive.
Marcel bemoans the passage of time in many relationships at this point of the novel, another way the affects of Time are a consistent undertone in The Fugitive. “But I wept when I reflected that I had once had so great an affection for a different Saint-Loup, an affection which, I sensed all too clearly from the cold and evasive manner which he now adopted, he no longer felt for me, since men, now that they were capable of arousing his desires, could no longer inspire his friendship.” (page 934)
Marcel finds it difficult to deal with this new sadness pervading his life but nevertheless he considers a melancholic hope. “Everything that seems to us imperishable tends towards decay; a position in society, like everything else, is not created once and for all, but, just as much as the power of an empire, is continually rebuilding itself by a sort of perpetual process of creation, which explains the apparent anomalies in social and political history in the course of a half century. The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day.” (page 909) Paradoxically, that is both a somber and poignantly hopeful insight of Becoming.
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