Reading Proust: The Fugitive – Grieving and Forgetting
At about 370 pages, The Fugitive is the shortest volume in the novel. This is entirely due to the fact the Proust died as he was writing it. Nevertheless, as I mentioned in my post on The Captive, there is a complete narrative structure with associated subplots and musings, so The Fugitive can be fully comprehended from start to finish. But, unlike the previous volume, Proust, working in a semi-comatose state at times, did something significant to The Fugitive just before he died. He obsessively marked through about two-thirds of the piece, as if he wanted to cut most of it out.
In his biography of the author, Jean-Yves Tadie explains that Proust worked from a typed manuscript that was duplicated by carbon copy. The author did not touch the carbon copy and worked with only the “top copy” when it came to expanding and rewriting his text. Tadie makes the sensible claim that Proust “always made additions and never deleted material.” So, in his opinion, it was not Proust’s intent to remove the 250 or so pages but, rather, to rework them.
Since Proust died before any of it could be rewritten, virtually all translators have chosen to go with the carbon copy text as the final version. There is simply no way to ascertain what Proust intended to change (or expand) about The Fugitive. Obviously, this is a unique controversy concerning In Search of Lost Time. Nevertheless, what we have today is a quick read compared with the rest of the novel. Not only because it is hundreds of pages shorter than the other books but because his practice of constructing labyrinthine sentences is also minimized.
Having said that, The Fugitive is not short on story or ideas. A lot is expressed in this portion of the novel. What occurs and what Proust explores philosophically contains as much literary weight as any other part of the novel. The philosophy of Memory is again on display, but Proust also returns to Habit and offers us some additional insight. Mostly, it is the story of Marcel losing Albertine and somewhat recovering. There is a beautiful chapter devoted to Marcel’s trip to Venice. While not quite as erotically charged as The Captive, this book nevertheless is filled with sexual undertones.
Chapter One, “Grieving and Forgetting,” is 189 pages long in my Enright edition. Chapter Two, “Mademoiselle de Forcheville” is 91 pages, “Sojourn to Venice” is 46 pages and “New Aspect of Robert de Saint-Loup” is 45 pages in length. Once again, Proust works with wildly unequal chapter lengths. Despite the differences in number of pages, all of these possess more or less the same narrative weight, perhaps a further indication of how much filling remained for Proust to do had he had time to rework the book. In this blog post, we will look at Chapter One.
“Mademoiselle Albertine has gone!” Marcel proclaims to himself. In fact, he must painfully proclaim it to many “selves.” “I sank down on one of those blue satin armchairs…Alas, I had never sat in one of them until this minute when Albertine was still with me. And so I could not remain sitting there, and stood up again; and thus, at every moment, innumerable and humble ‘selves’ that compose our personality which was still unaware of Albertine’s departure and must be informed of it; I was obliged…to announce to all these beings, to all these ‘selves’ who did not yet know of it, the calamity that had just occurred; each of them in turn must hear for the first time the words: ‘Albertine has asked for her boxes’…‘Albertine has gone.’ Each of them had to be told of my grief, the grief which is in no way a pessimistic conclusion freely drawn from an accumulation of baneful circumstances, but it is the intermittent and involuntary reviviscence of a specific impression that has come to us from without and was not chosen by us…For instance, the ‘self’ that I was when I was having my hair cut. I had forgotten this ‘self,’ and his arrival made me burst into tears, as, at a funeral, does the appearance of an old retired servant who has not forgotten the deceased.” (pp. 578 – 579) The multiplicity of “selves” within the human psyche is a big psychological area of interest to Proust.
Proust formerly saw Habit as “an annihilating force” but now, in the apparent loss of Albertine, it has become “a dread deity, so riveted to one’s being.” Seeing Albertine every day, as much as he pleased, made Habit a dark, powerful force in Marcel’s life. The familiarity of her, when removed, became annihilating in a different way. It created a void where the familiarity of habit vanished.
Albertine’s letter reads that “our life together has become impossible.” Marcel feels a lot of emotions. Sorrow, love again (apparently since Albertine can no longer be possessed by him), anger, fear. Mostly, he feels existentially isolated. “The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is a creature who cannot escape himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.” (page 607)
It isn’t a grand mystery as to where Albertine escaped. Marcel soon discovers that she is with her aunt in a nearby town. Instead of writing to her or going there personally, Marcel concocts a ridiculous, almost comical strategy to get her back without Albertine knowing he wants her back. The plan is a pathetic failure. Albertine writes him: “My dearest, if you needed me, why did you not write me direct? I should have been only too delighted to come back.” (page 610)
“I had only to do what she said, to write to her that I needed her, and she would return. So I was going to see her again, the Albertine of Balbec.” (page 611) It all seems so simple. And what does Marcel do next? He writes her a letter that will screw everything up. He desperately wants her back but instead he writes that she made the right choice and he won’t ask for her return even though he has made many plans for their future together, which include, ridiculously, a yacht and a Rolls-Royce. His twisted logic is driven by the need for her to return of her own volition and not because of Marcel’s clinginess. He is convinced she cannot live without him.
Sending the letter, he goes neurotic on the reader again, feeling that the absurd letter will definitely entice her to come back to him: “I began to regret that I had sent it. For when I pictured to myself Albertine’s return and what an easy matter it was after all, suddenly all the reasons which made our marriage a thing disastrous to myself returned in their fullest force. I hoped that she would refuse to come back. I was in the process of calculating that my liberty, my whole future depended upon her refusal, that I had been mad to write her, that I ought to have retrieved my letter which, alas, had gone, when Francoise brought it back to me (at the same time handing me the newspaper which she had just brought upstairs). She was not certain how many stamps it required. But immediately I changed my mind; I hoped that Albertine would not return, but I wanted the decision to come from her, and I handed the letter back to Francoise.” (page 617) A bit of humor there. Marcel ends up twice sending the letter he wished he had never sent. The psychological contortions are obvious.
Proust uses The Fugitive to better flesh out the character of Francoise. She has been around since helping Marcel’s aunt in Swann’s Way. Mostly, she is a background character but she has several significant interactions with Marcel while he is suffering from the loss of Albertine. It is Francoise that shares his initial disturbance over Albertine’s escape. She discovers Albertine’s rings, left behind, and gives them to Marcel with a animated and humorous conversation about the details of the rings. She serves as Marcel’s domestic shadow and her lively, simple character offers a refreshing change of pace in this part of the novel.
After bumbling the entire situation trying to get her back without asking for her, Marcel does what he should have done to begin with. He sends “a despairing telegram begging for her to return.” As he sends this another telegram coincidentally arrives for him. It is from Albertine’s aunt. Albertine has died in a horse riding accident. Simultaneously with this, Francoise brings two new handwritten letters to Marcel from Albertine. She mailed them just before her accident. “Is it too late for me to return to you?” Albertine asks this haunting question in one of the letters. She was actually doing what he wanted all along, asking to return of her own volition. The abrupt juxtaposition of these various communications is almost more than our narrator can take. He contemplates the essence of his grief, the workings of memory and multiplicity. Now the core of the novel, the “lost time” aspect, begins to take sharper focus.
“In order to enter into us, another must first have assumed the form, have adapted himself to the framework of time; appearing to us only as a succession of momentary flashes, he has never been able to reveal to us more than one aspect of himself at a time, to present us with more than a single photograph of himself. A great weakness no doubt for a person, to consist of merely a collection of moments; a great strength also: he is a product of memory, and our memory of the moment is not informed of everything that has happened since; this moment which it has recorded endures still, lives still, and with it the person whose form is outlined in it…this disintegration…multiples him or her…I would have to forget, not one, but innumerable Albertines.
“So then my life was entirely altered. What had constituted its sweetness…was precisely the perpetual resurgence, at the bidding of identical moments, of moments from the past. From the sound of pattering raindrops I recaptured the scent of the lilacs at Combrey; from the shifting of the sun’s rays on the balcony the pigeons in the Champs-Elysées; from the muffling of sounds in the heat of the morning hours, the cool taste of cherries; the longing for Brittany or Venice from the noise of the wind and the return of Easter.” (pp. 644 – 645)
The process of grieving gives way to the process of forgetting. “I knew that I should forget her one day; I had forgotten Gilberte and Mme de Guermantes; I had forgotten my grandmother. And it is our most just and cruel punishment for that forgetfulness, as total and as tranquil as the oblivion of the graveyard, through which we have always detached ourselves from those we no longer love, that we should recognize it to be inevitable in the case of those we love still…I thought with despair of all the integument of caresses, of kisses, of friendly slumber, of which I must presently let myself be stripped forever.” (page 650)
Sensual memory is dealt with. “I could see Albertine now, seated at the pianola, pink-faced beneath her dark hair; I could feel against my lips, which she would try to part, her tongue, her maternal, incontestable, nutritious, hallowed tongue, whose secret dewy flame, even when she ran it over the surface of my neck or my stomach, gave to those caresses of hers, superficial but somehow imparted by the inside of her flesh, externalized like a piece of material reversed to show its lining, as it were the mysterious sweetness of a penetration.” (pp. 671 – 672)
It is worth noting that Marcel does not attend Albertine’s funeral nor does he ever visit her grave, or, if he does, he does not share that with the reader. Instead, still obsessing, he hires Aimé, a head waiter he has known for awhile in the novel, first at Balbec and later in Paris, to investigate Albertine’s sexuality at Balbec. Aimé discovers that Albertine used to take showers at the beach with “a tall woman older than herself, always dressed in grey.” They would then spend a long time in a nearby cabin, the older one always leaving a big tip.
This is the first outright, tangible example we have of Albertine’s bisexuality. Next, Marcel sends Aimé to the town where her aunt lives where, it is discovered, a sexual encounter happened just after she left Marcel. Aimé finds a “young laundry-girl” who eventually admits to knowing Albertine and having “bathed” with her, usually in the early mornings. Aimé writes in a letter to Marcel: “The young laundry-girl confessed to me that she enjoyed playing around with her girlfriends and that seeing Mlle Albertine was always rubbing up against her in her bathing-wrap she made her take it off and used to caress her with her tongue along the throat and arms, even on the soles of her feet which Albertine held out to her. The laundry-girl undressed too, and they played at pushing each other into the water…I took the young laundry-girl to bed with me. She asked me if I would like her to do to me what she used to do to Mlle Albertine when she took off her bathing-dress. And she said to me: ‘If you could have seen how she used to wriggle, that young lady, she said to me ‘oh, it’s too heavenly’ and she got so excited that she could not keep from biting me.’ I could still see the marks on the laundry-girl’s arms. And I can understand Mlle Albertine’s pleasure, for that young wench is really a very good performer.” (page 708)
In Albertine’s absence, Marcel can no longer experience her comforting reassurances (even though many of them were lies). Her sweetness has turned into “a different girl, heaping up lies and deceit” without the condolence of her presence. Marcel feels that, at last, he is seeing “into the core of Albertine’s own being” and that “Albertine had deceived me as to her profoundest humanity.” As with most things, Proust finds an aesthetic approach to reveal Marcel’s state of being.
“I had as it happened seen two paintings by Elstir showing naked women in a thickly wooded landscape. In one of them, a girl is pushing into the water another girl who gaily resists, her thigh raised, her foot barely dipping into the blue water. I remembered now that the raised thigh made the same swan’s-neck curve with an angle of the knee as was made by the line of Albertine’s thigh when she was lying by my side on the bed, and I had often meant to tell her that she reminded me of those paintings. But I had refrained from doing so, for fear of awakening in her mind the image of female naked bodies.” (pp. 710 – 711)
Marcel’s reaction to Aimé’s second letter is to go out and find some girls for an erotic experiment. Once more he eavesdrops, this time from a neighboring room: “I had had two young laundry-girls, from a district where Albertine had often gone, brought to a house of assignation. One of them, beneath the caresses of the other, suddenly began to utter sounds which at first I found rather difficult to identify; for one never understands precisely the meaning of an original sound expressive of a sensation which one does not experience oneself…and it took me some time, too, to understand that this noise expressed what, by analogy with the (very different) sensations I myself had felt, I called pleasure; and the pleasure must have been great to overwhelm to this extent the person who was expressing it...” (pp. 741 – 742) But this passion only disappoints Marcel. “In any case these two girls could tell me nothing, as they had no idea who Albertine was.”
Gradually, of course, his pain subsides. He begins to “take home with me other girls” and concludes that “...life, by disclosing to me little by little the permanence of our needs, had taught me that failing one person we must content ourselves with another…” But this does not turn out well. These other girls lack the nature of Albertine that attracted him to begin with. After enough of them he experiences a void.
“The same vacuum that I had found in my room since Albertine had left, and had supposed that I could fill by taking women in my arms, I regained with them. They had never spoken to me, these women, of Vinteuil’s music, of Saint-Simon’s memoirs, they had not sprayed themselves with an overpowering scent before coming to see me, they had not played at intertwining their eyelashes with mine, all of which things are important because they seem to enable one to weave dreams around the sexual act itself and to give oneself the illusion of love, but in reality because they formed part of my memory of Albertine and it was she whom I wanted there.” (page 750)
The original English translation of this volume by Moncrieff is entitled Sweet Cheat Gone, which, if old-fashioned, is perhaps somewhat more indicative of this part of the novel than The Fugitive. Marcel comes to terms with the loss of Albertine and the confirmation of his neurotic fears. She was a “cheat”, after all, and she is “gone” in the most tragic sense. All of this leads to an unsatisfying catharsis.
In the voice of the overarching narrator: “And I really ought to have discovered sooner that one day I would no longer be in love with Albertine. When I had realized the difference that existed between what the importance of her person and of her actions was to me and what it was to other people, that my love was not so much a love for her as a love for myself…” (page 751)
(To be continued)
In his biography of the author, Jean-Yves Tadie explains that Proust worked from a typed manuscript that was duplicated by carbon copy. The author did not touch the carbon copy and worked with only the “top copy” when it came to expanding and rewriting his text. Tadie makes the sensible claim that Proust “always made additions and never deleted material.” So, in his opinion, it was not Proust’s intent to remove the 250 or so pages but, rather, to rework them.
Since Proust died before any of it could be rewritten, virtually all translators have chosen to go with the carbon copy text as the final version. There is simply no way to ascertain what Proust intended to change (or expand) about The Fugitive. Obviously, this is a unique controversy concerning In Search of Lost Time. Nevertheless, what we have today is a quick read compared with the rest of the novel. Not only because it is hundreds of pages shorter than the other books but because his practice of constructing labyrinthine sentences is also minimized.
Having said that, The Fugitive is not short on story or ideas. A lot is expressed in this portion of the novel. What occurs and what Proust explores philosophically contains as much literary weight as any other part of the novel. The philosophy of Memory is again on display, but Proust also returns to Habit and offers us some additional insight. Mostly, it is the story of Marcel losing Albertine and somewhat recovering. There is a beautiful chapter devoted to Marcel’s trip to Venice. While not quite as erotically charged as The Captive, this book nevertheless is filled with sexual undertones.
Chapter One, “Grieving and Forgetting,” is 189 pages long in my Enright edition. Chapter Two, “Mademoiselle de Forcheville” is 91 pages, “Sojourn to Venice” is 46 pages and “New Aspect of Robert de Saint-Loup” is 45 pages in length. Once again, Proust works with wildly unequal chapter lengths. Despite the differences in number of pages, all of these possess more or less the same narrative weight, perhaps a further indication of how much filling remained for Proust to do had he had time to rework the book. In this blog post, we will look at Chapter One.
“Mademoiselle Albertine has gone!” Marcel proclaims to himself. In fact, he must painfully proclaim it to many “selves.” “I sank down on one of those blue satin armchairs…Alas, I had never sat in one of them until this minute when Albertine was still with me. And so I could not remain sitting there, and stood up again; and thus, at every moment, innumerable and humble ‘selves’ that compose our personality which was still unaware of Albertine’s departure and must be informed of it; I was obliged…to announce to all these beings, to all these ‘selves’ who did not yet know of it, the calamity that had just occurred; each of them in turn must hear for the first time the words: ‘Albertine has asked for her boxes’…‘Albertine has gone.’ Each of them had to be told of my grief, the grief which is in no way a pessimistic conclusion freely drawn from an accumulation of baneful circumstances, but it is the intermittent and involuntary reviviscence of a specific impression that has come to us from without and was not chosen by us…For instance, the ‘self’ that I was when I was having my hair cut. I had forgotten this ‘self,’ and his arrival made me burst into tears, as, at a funeral, does the appearance of an old retired servant who has not forgotten the deceased.” (pp. 578 – 579) The multiplicity of “selves” within the human psyche is a big psychological area of interest to Proust.
Proust formerly saw Habit as “an annihilating force” but now, in the apparent loss of Albertine, it has become “a dread deity, so riveted to one’s being.” Seeing Albertine every day, as much as he pleased, made Habit a dark, powerful force in Marcel’s life. The familiarity of her, when removed, became annihilating in a different way. It created a void where the familiarity of habit vanished.
Albertine’s letter reads that “our life together has become impossible.” Marcel feels a lot of emotions. Sorrow, love again (apparently since Albertine can no longer be possessed by him), anger, fear. Mostly, he feels existentially isolated. “The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is a creature who cannot escape himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.” (page 607)
It isn’t a grand mystery as to where Albertine escaped. Marcel soon discovers that she is with her aunt in a nearby town. Instead of writing to her or going there personally, Marcel concocts a ridiculous, almost comical strategy to get her back without Albertine knowing he wants her back. The plan is a pathetic failure. Albertine writes him: “My dearest, if you needed me, why did you not write me direct? I should have been only too delighted to come back.” (page 610)
“I had only to do what she said, to write to her that I needed her, and she would return. So I was going to see her again, the Albertine of Balbec.” (page 611) It all seems so simple. And what does Marcel do next? He writes her a letter that will screw everything up. He desperately wants her back but instead he writes that she made the right choice and he won’t ask for her return even though he has made many plans for their future together, which include, ridiculously, a yacht and a Rolls-Royce. His twisted logic is driven by the need for her to return of her own volition and not because of Marcel’s clinginess. He is convinced she cannot live without him.
Sending the letter, he goes neurotic on the reader again, feeling that the absurd letter will definitely entice her to come back to him: “I began to regret that I had sent it. For when I pictured to myself Albertine’s return and what an easy matter it was after all, suddenly all the reasons which made our marriage a thing disastrous to myself returned in their fullest force. I hoped that she would refuse to come back. I was in the process of calculating that my liberty, my whole future depended upon her refusal, that I had been mad to write her, that I ought to have retrieved my letter which, alas, had gone, when Francoise brought it back to me (at the same time handing me the newspaper which she had just brought upstairs). She was not certain how many stamps it required. But immediately I changed my mind; I hoped that Albertine would not return, but I wanted the decision to come from her, and I handed the letter back to Francoise.” (page 617) A bit of humor there. Marcel ends up twice sending the letter he wished he had never sent. The psychological contortions are obvious.
Proust uses The Fugitive to better flesh out the character of Francoise. She has been around since helping Marcel’s aunt in Swann’s Way. Mostly, she is a background character but she has several significant interactions with Marcel while he is suffering from the loss of Albertine. It is Francoise that shares his initial disturbance over Albertine’s escape. She discovers Albertine’s rings, left behind, and gives them to Marcel with a animated and humorous conversation about the details of the rings. She serves as Marcel’s domestic shadow and her lively, simple character offers a refreshing change of pace in this part of the novel.
After bumbling the entire situation trying to get her back without asking for her, Marcel does what he should have done to begin with. He sends “a despairing telegram begging for her to return.” As he sends this another telegram coincidentally arrives for him. It is from Albertine’s aunt. Albertine has died in a horse riding accident. Simultaneously with this, Francoise brings two new handwritten letters to Marcel from Albertine. She mailed them just before her accident. “Is it too late for me to return to you?” Albertine asks this haunting question in one of the letters. She was actually doing what he wanted all along, asking to return of her own volition. The abrupt juxtaposition of these various communications is almost more than our narrator can take. He contemplates the essence of his grief, the workings of memory and multiplicity. Now the core of the novel, the “lost time” aspect, begins to take sharper focus.
“In order to enter into us, another must first have assumed the form, have adapted himself to the framework of time; appearing to us only as a succession of momentary flashes, he has never been able to reveal to us more than one aspect of himself at a time, to present us with more than a single photograph of himself. A great weakness no doubt for a person, to consist of merely a collection of moments; a great strength also: he is a product of memory, and our memory of the moment is not informed of everything that has happened since; this moment which it has recorded endures still, lives still, and with it the person whose form is outlined in it…this disintegration…multiples him or her…I would have to forget, not one, but innumerable Albertines.
“So then my life was entirely altered. What had constituted its sweetness…was precisely the perpetual resurgence, at the bidding of identical moments, of moments from the past. From the sound of pattering raindrops I recaptured the scent of the lilacs at Combrey; from the shifting of the sun’s rays on the balcony the pigeons in the Champs-Elysées; from the muffling of sounds in the heat of the morning hours, the cool taste of cherries; the longing for Brittany or Venice from the noise of the wind and the return of Easter.” (pp. 644 – 645)
The process of grieving gives way to the process of forgetting. “I knew that I should forget her one day; I had forgotten Gilberte and Mme de Guermantes; I had forgotten my grandmother. And it is our most just and cruel punishment for that forgetfulness, as total and as tranquil as the oblivion of the graveyard, through which we have always detached ourselves from those we no longer love, that we should recognize it to be inevitable in the case of those we love still…I thought with despair of all the integument of caresses, of kisses, of friendly slumber, of which I must presently let myself be stripped forever.” (page 650)
Sensual memory is dealt with. “I could see Albertine now, seated at the pianola, pink-faced beneath her dark hair; I could feel against my lips, which she would try to part, her tongue, her maternal, incontestable, nutritious, hallowed tongue, whose secret dewy flame, even when she ran it over the surface of my neck or my stomach, gave to those caresses of hers, superficial but somehow imparted by the inside of her flesh, externalized like a piece of material reversed to show its lining, as it were the mysterious sweetness of a penetration.” (pp. 671 – 672)
It is worth noting that Marcel does not attend Albertine’s funeral nor does he ever visit her grave, or, if he does, he does not share that with the reader. Instead, still obsessing, he hires Aimé, a head waiter he has known for awhile in the novel, first at Balbec and later in Paris, to investigate Albertine’s sexuality at Balbec. Aimé discovers that Albertine used to take showers at the beach with “a tall woman older than herself, always dressed in grey.” They would then spend a long time in a nearby cabin, the older one always leaving a big tip.
This is the first outright, tangible example we have of Albertine’s bisexuality. Next, Marcel sends Aimé to the town where her aunt lives where, it is discovered, a sexual encounter happened just after she left Marcel. Aimé finds a “young laundry-girl” who eventually admits to knowing Albertine and having “bathed” with her, usually in the early mornings. Aimé writes in a letter to Marcel: “The young laundry-girl confessed to me that she enjoyed playing around with her girlfriends and that seeing Mlle Albertine was always rubbing up against her in her bathing-wrap she made her take it off and used to caress her with her tongue along the throat and arms, even on the soles of her feet which Albertine held out to her. The laundry-girl undressed too, and they played at pushing each other into the water…I took the young laundry-girl to bed with me. She asked me if I would like her to do to me what she used to do to Mlle Albertine when she took off her bathing-dress. And she said to me: ‘If you could have seen how she used to wriggle, that young lady, she said to me ‘oh, it’s too heavenly’ and she got so excited that she could not keep from biting me.’ I could still see the marks on the laundry-girl’s arms. And I can understand Mlle Albertine’s pleasure, for that young wench is really a very good performer.” (page 708)
In Albertine’s absence, Marcel can no longer experience her comforting reassurances (even though many of them were lies). Her sweetness has turned into “a different girl, heaping up lies and deceit” without the condolence of her presence. Marcel feels that, at last, he is seeing “into the core of Albertine’s own being” and that “Albertine had deceived me as to her profoundest humanity.” As with most things, Proust finds an aesthetic approach to reveal Marcel’s state of being.
“I had as it happened seen two paintings by Elstir showing naked women in a thickly wooded landscape. In one of them, a girl is pushing into the water another girl who gaily resists, her thigh raised, her foot barely dipping into the blue water. I remembered now that the raised thigh made the same swan’s-neck curve with an angle of the knee as was made by the line of Albertine’s thigh when she was lying by my side on the bed, and I had often meant to tell her that she reminded me of those paintings. But I had refrained from doing so, for fear of awakening in her mind the image of female naked bodies.” (pp. 710 – 711)
Marcel’s reaction to Aimé’s second letter is to go out and find some girls for an erotic experiment. Once more he eavesdrops, this time from a neighboring room: “I had had two young laundry-girls, from a district where Albertine had often gone, brought to a house of assignation. One of them, beneath the caresses of the other, suddenly began to utter sounds which at first I found rather difficult to identify; for one never understands precisely the meaning of an original sound expressive of a sensation which one does not experience oneself…and it took me some time, too, to understand that this noise expressed what, by analogy with the (very different) sensations I myself had felt, I called pleasure; and the pleasure must have been great to overwhelm to this extent the person who was expressing it...” (pp. 741 – 742) But this passion only disappoints Marcel. “In any case these two girls could tell me nothing, as they had no idea who Albertine was.”
Gradually, of course, his pain subsides. He begins to “take home with me other girls” and concludes that “...life, by disclosing to me little by little the permanence of our needs, had taught me that failing one person we must content ourselves with another…” But this does not turn out well. These other girls lack the nature of Albertine that attracted him to begin with. After enough of them he experiences a void.
“The same vacuum that I had found in my room since Albertine had left, and had supposed that I could fill by taking women in my arms, I regained with them. They had never spoken to me, these women, of Vinteuil’s music, of Saint-Simon’s memoirs, they had not sprayed themselves with an overpowering scent before coming to see me, they had not played at intertwining their eyelashes with mine, all of which things are important because they seem to enable one to weave dreams around the sexual act itself and to give oneself the illusion of love, but in reality because they formed part of my memory of Albertine and it was she whom I wanted there.” (page 750)
The original English translation of this volume by Moncrieff is entitled Sweet Cheat Gone, which, if old-fashioned, is perhaps somewhat more indicative of this part of the novel than The Fugitive. Marcel comes to terms with the loss of Albertine and the confirmation of his neurotic fears. She was a “cheat”, after all, and she is “gone” in the most tragic sense. All of this leads to an unsatisfying catharsis.
In the voice of the overarching narrator: “And I really ought to have discovered sooner that one day I would no longer be in love with Albertine. When I had realized the difference that existed between what the importance of her person and of her actions was to me and what it was to other people, that my love was not so much a love for her as a love for myself…” (page 751)
(To be continued)
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