Day One Hundred Eighty-One: Finding Time Again, pp. 292-322

From "Throughout this conversation Gilberte had talked to me ..." through "... when I'm really just a bundle of nerves.' "

_____

Gilberte and Andrée have become friends, which intrigues the narrator because Rachel, who is performing at the party, had been the mistress of both of their husbands, except that Andrée's husband (Octave) had left Rachel for her. And he speculates that Gilberte feels that Rachel had "been more deeply loved by Robert than she had ever been." Gilberte also reveals her scorn for the hostess, who is now her aunt, "for having been Mme de Saint-Loup since slightly earlier than Mme Verdurin entered the family, she considered herself always to have been a Guermantes and to have been dishonored by the misalliance her uncle had contracted by marrying Mme Verdurin." Gilberte is also rather dismissive of the Duchesse de Guermantes: "I saw you talking to my aunt Oriane, who has plenty of good qualities, but I don't think it would be unfair, do you, to say that she's hardly one of the intellectual elite."

The narrator is thinking of the party as a kind of farewell to the social life: "I intended to resume living in solitude from the next day onward." He recognizes that he is about to turn the lives of the people he has met into fiction, to "take these gestures they made, these things they said, their lives, their natures, and attempt to describe the curve they made and to isolate and define their laws." Which is, in a phrase, pretty much what In Search of Lost Time attempts to do. But he still has a longing for some kind of new life: "a few light love affairs with young girls in flower would be a select nutrient which, if I had to, I might allow my imagination, like the famous horse that was fed on nothing but roses." At the same time, he is prey to nostalgia, to a longing to find that his grandmother or Albertine would somehow turn up to be alive.

I forgot only one thing, which was that if they really were still living, Albertine would now have something like the appearance that Mme Cottard had presented at Balbec, and that my grandmother, being over ninety-five years old, would show me nothing of that beautiful, calm, smiling face with which I still imagined her now.

He notices the Duchesse de Guermantes "deep in conversation with a frightful old woman." Later, he will learn that the woman is Rachel, now a famous actress, one of several that the Duchesse now associates with, having given up the Faubourg Saint-Germain, "which, she said, bored her to death." He tells her of his encounter with Charlus, and when Morel enters, "the Duchesse greeted him with a politeness which I found a little disconcerting." But remembering the marriage into the Cambremer family of the "daughter" (earlier: niece) of Jupien, "the tradesman from our building, and that the additional factor which had enabled her to become a glittering success was that her father procured men for M. de Charlus," he reflects that "a name is always taken at its current valuation." The valuation of the Duchesse, for example, is now low: "The new generations concluded from [her friendship with actresses] that Mme de Guermantes, despite her name, must be some demi-rep who had never really been properly upper-crust." He also wonders if her friendship with Rachel reflects "the antipathy which the unpredictable Duchesse had recently developed towards Gilberte."

The mutability of relationships is further demonstrated by the fact that it was in the Duchesse's home that Rachel "had, long ago, received her most terrible humiliation. Rachel had gradually, not forgotten, but forgiven, but the singular prestige which the Duchesse had, in her eyes, thereby received could never be effaced."

"Meanwhile, at the other end of Paris," as the narrator puts it, the other party to which he was invited, the tea given by La Berma for her daughter and son-in-law is a disaster. Everyone has gone to the Princesse's. La Berma (previously reported as dead) is fatally ill, but "to pay for the luxury her daughter needed and which her son-in-law, idle and with poor health, was unable to provide, she had returned to acting." While on stage, she is vividly alive, but in fact is in great pain. She also resents the fact that Rachel has become a success, for she "still regarded Rachel as a tart who had been allowed to appear in dramas in which she, La Berma, was playing the leading role, because Saint-Loup paid for the dresses she wore on stage." To make matters worse, "the son-in-law was furious that Rachel, whom he and his wife knew very well, had not invited them" to her performance at the Princesse's. A solitary guest shows up at La Berma's tea party.

But soon the blast of air which was sweeping everything towards the Guermantes, and which had swept me there myself, was too strong, and he rose and left, leaving Phèdre, or death, it was not very clear any longer which of the two it was, with her daughter and her son-in-law, to finish eating the funeral cakes.

As it turns out, Rachel's performance is unconventional, and "Everybody looked at one another, not quite knowing what expression to assume" and "a few ill-mannered young people stifled giggles." But the Princesse "was acting as a claque. She was whipping up enthusiasm and creating favorable impressions by constantly giving voice to exclamations of delight. Here alone her Verdurin nature could still be seen."

Now we learn that the narrator is as yet unaware of the identity of the actress, who, "without any gratification of my vanity, for she was old and ugly, ... was giving me the eye, though in a somewhat restrained manner." It turns out that she was trying to get him to recognize her, which he doesn't, until Bloch whispers to him, "Isn't it funny to see Rachel here!" The revelation "instantly shattered the enchantment which had given Saint-Loup's mistress the unknown form of this disgusting old woman." He is made "aware that the passing of time does not necessarily bring about progress in the arts" because "La Berma was, as they say, head and shoulders above Rachel, and time, by making Rachel a star at the same time as Elstir, had overrated a mediocrity and consecrated a genius."

He also becomes aware of what time has done to Mme. de Guermantes, whose wit has grown sour, just as Bergotte "kept his characteristic sentence rhythms, his interjections, his ellipses, his epithets, though all in order to say nothing." And he realizes that the Duchesse, once so exalted, so dazzlingly inaccessible, now treats him as one of her oldest friends, that she has

forgotten certain details which had seemed to me then to be essential, namely that I did not go to Guermantes, and was only a middle-class boy from Combray at the time when she came to Mlle Percepied's nuptial mass, and that for the whole year after her appearance at the Opéra-Comique, despite all Saint-Loup's entreaties she never invited me to her house. To me this seemed terribly important, because it was precisely at this point that the life of the Duchesse de Guermantes appeared to me to be a paradise I would never enter. But to her it just seemed to be a part of the same ordinary life as always.

He reminds her of the time when he first went to the Princesse de Guermantes, uncertain whether he had really been invited, and of the red dress and red shoes she wore, and she grows melancholy about the passage of time. And though she has not forgotten that Rachel once gave that disastrous performance at her house, she remembers it quite differently: "it was I who discovered her, saw how good she was, sang her praises and made people take notice of her at a time when she had no reputation and everybody thought she was ridiculous."

Day One Hundred Seventy-Seven: Finding Time Again, pp. 211-226

From "It was sad for me to think that my love ..." through "... of whom already we are no longer jealous and whom we no longer love."

_____

The narrator comes to realize that the emotions we experience in our relations with others outlive the relationships themselves:

I had indeed suffered one after another for Gilberte, for Mme de Guermantes, for Albertine. One after another, too, I had forgotten them, and only my love, dedicated to different beings, had lasted.... So that I had to resign myself, since nothing can last unless it is generalized, nor without the mind dying to itself, to the idea that even those who were dearest to the writer had done nothing in the end except pose for him like the models for a painter.

He aphoristically remarks that "happiness alone is good for the body; whereas sorrow develops the strength of the mind." This echoes Nietzsche's "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger," except that Proust appends, "Sorrow kills in the end." It also results in a somewhat more sophisticated spin on the cliché that artists must suffer to produce art:

let us accept the physical damage it does to us in return for the spiritual knowledge it brings us; let us leave our body to disintegrate, since each new particle that breaks away from it comes back, now luminous and legible, to add itself to our work, to complete it at the price of sufferings of which others more gifted have no need, to increase its solidity as our emotions are eroding our life.

Sexual passion, in the narrator's scheme of things, is primary: "A woman whom we need, and who makes us suffer, arouses in us a series of feelings far more profound and far more intense than does an unusually gifted man who interests us." But the interrelationship between pleasure and pain is also key: "If one had not been happy, even if only in expectation, unhappiness would be devoid of cruelty and consequently fruitless." The greater the experience of unhappiness, the more likely the work is to succeed: "one can almost say that books, as in artesian wells, rise to a height that is proportionate to the depth to which suffering has bored down into the heart." There is no substitute for the painful experience: "Imagination and thinking can be admirable mechanisms in themselves, but they can also be inert. Suffering sets them in motion."

The narrator makes one of his digressions on homosexuality in reflecting on how his "encounters with M. de Charlus" had revealed "how utterly neutral matter is, and how thought can give it any characteristics it wants; a truth which is more profoundly emphasized by the widely misunderstood and pointlessly censured phenomenon of sexual inversion."

A writer must not take offence when inverts give his heroines masculine faces.... if M. de Charlus had not given to the "faithless one" over whom de Musset weeps in La Nuit d'octobre or in Le Souvenir the face of Morel, he would not have wept, nor understood, since it was by that narrow and circuitous way alone that he gained access to the truths of love.

Similarly, Proust gave his male lovers feminine faces (and names like Albertine and Gilberte and Andrée that betrayed their masculine origins), reinforcing the point here that the emotion -- passion, obsession, desire for possession -- is universal, whatever physical form may inspire it. "The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument which he offers the reader to enable him to discern what without this book he might not perhaps have seen in himself." (On the other hand, Schopenhauer warned, "Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can't expect an angel to look out.")

Reflecting on his life, he reiterates his premise of the primacy of emotion, which exists in the observer, not in the thing observed: "it is only coarse and inaccurate perception which places everything in the object, when everything is in the mind." He had lost the physical presence of his grandmother long before he experienced grief for her death. "I had seen love placing qualities in a person which are only in the person who loves."

Dreams were another, very striking, fact of my life, and had probably done more than anything else to convince me of the purely mental nature of reality, and I did not spurn their help in the composition of my work... this nocturnal muse ... sometimes compensated for the other one.

And he comes to realize the central role that Swann has played in his life:

the raw material of my experience, which was to be the raw material of my book, came to me from Swann, and not merely because of everything that concerned him and Gilberte. It was also he who, ever since the Combray days, had given me the wish to go to Balbec, where without that my parents would never have thought of sending me, and without which I would never have known Albertine, or even the Guermantes, since my grandmother would not have rediscovered Mme de Villeparisis nor I have made the acquaintance of Saint-Loup and M. de Charlus, who had introduced me to the Duchesse de Guermantes, and through her, her cousin, the result of which was that my very presence at this moment in the house of the Prince de Guermantes,where the idea for my work had just suddenly come to me (which meant that I owed Swann not just the material but the decision, too), also came to me from Swann.

But he also realizes that "I would have gone somewhere else, met different people, and my memory, like my books, would be full of quite other pictures which I cannot even imagine." Existence itself is an arbitrary, accidental thing.

Similarly, Albertine played an important role in bringing him to this point of realizing his mission as an artist: "she was so different from me.... If she had been capable of understanding these pages then, for that very reason, she would not have inspired them." 

Day One Hundred Sixty-Eight: Finding Time Again, pp. 29-43

From "Thoughts like these, tending in some cases to diminish..." through "...the monotonous tramp of one's constitutional in the rustic darkness."

_____

Except for a visit in August 1914 for a medical examination, the narrator has been away in a sanatorium "until the time, at the beginning of 1916, when it became impossible any longer to obtain medical staff." He returns to wartime Paris to find Mme. Verdurin and Mme. Bontemps the queens of society. The museums are all closed, so "elegance" has established itself "in the absence of the arts." In fact, the whole aesthetic of the times has changed: Mme. Verdurin goes to Venice but what she admired

was not Venice, nor St. Mark's, nor the palaces, all of which had delighted me so much and for which she had cared very little, but the effect of the searchlights in the sky, searchlights about which she provided information supported by figures. Thus from age to age is reborn a certain realism as a reaction against the art previously admired.

And the cause that had once divided society, the Dreyfus affair, is virtually forgotten: "Dreyfusism was now integrated into a range of respectable and normal things.... Brichot himself, the great nationalist, whenever he made allusion to the Dreyfus case, would say, 'In those prehistoric times.'"

Mme. Verdurin, once so contemptuous of the aristocracy, has changed with the times: "as the number of socially glittering people making advances to Mme Verdurin increased, so the number of those she called 'bores' diminished." The war is the chief topic of conversation, of course, and hostesses vie to outdo themselves with the latest news, so that the salons are also infested with spies. "Mme Verdurin would say: 'Do come in at five o'clock to talk about the war,' just as she would once have said 'to talk about the [Dreyfus] Affair', or more recently: 'Do come and listen to Morel.'" Morel, in fact, "was a deserter, but nobody knew this."

Another star of the salons is Octave, who has been discharged from service for medical reasons, has married Andrée, and has "become for me the author of a series of admirable works which were constantly in my thoughts" -- so constantly that the narrator realizes that Octave was also involved in "Albertine's departure from my house." At this point, the narrator says of Albertine, "I simply never thought about her," although this and other such statements are self-contradictory: realizing that you don't think about something is to think about it, which is what made the Tolstoy family's game of trying not to think about a white bear so difficult.

One person Mme. Verdurin is unsuccessful at luring to her salon is Odette, but the rest of society is "more than happy to take advantage of the luxury of the Verdurins, which continued to increase with their wealth at a time when even the richest people, unable to draw their dividends, were economizing."

The narrator finds himself enjoying a mostly solitary life, watching the airplanes defending the skies over Paris, which he claims did not evoke memories of the airplane sighted on his last visit to Versailles with Albertine, "for the memory of that drive had become indifferent to me." In a restaurant he is touched by the sight of a soldier on leave outside, allowing "his eyes to rest for a moment on the lighted windows," which evokes memories of the people who would gather outside the hotel windows in Balbec to watch the diners there, though it's more poignant, knowing that the man will return to the trenches after seeing "the shirkers rushing to grab their tables." And once again the supposedly forgotten Albertine comes to mind as he reflects "how lovely it would have been, on evenings when I had dined out, to arrange to meet her out of doors, beneath the arcades!"

Day One Hundred Sixty-Four: The Fugitive, pp. 563-587*

*The Fugitive begins on page 387 of the Penguin Classics paperback that also includes The Prisoner

Chapter II: Mademoiselle de Forcheville, concluded, from "The memory of Albertine had become so fragmented within me...."

_____

The narrator claims, "I was happier to have Andrée by my side than I would have been to have Albertine miraculously restored. For Andrée would be able to tell me more about Albertine that Albertine herself had ever told me." And what Andrée tells him as they're making out is pretty hot stuff. For one thing, that Albertine "had met a handsome lad at Mme Verdurin's called Morel," and that Morel had acted as bait, luring "young laundry-maids and young fisher-girls" into threesomes with him and Albertine and once taking Albertine and one of the girls "to a house of ill-fame in Couliville, where four or five women took her together or in succession."

But Andrée also claims that Albertine felt remorse and "hoped that you would save her, that you would marry her." Then she recalls the time that the narrator almost caught them in the act. The narrator's reaction is that "this was the sort of useless truth about the life of a dead mistress, if indeed it was true, which suddenly surfaces from the depths when we no longer have any use for it." He questions Andrée's veracity, and notes that she had been spreading malicious rumors about a "man whom we had met at Balbec and who since then had been living with Rachel." This is Octave, who when he first appears in the novel is a rather foppish young golfer whom Albertine dismisses as "a lounge lizard." He is also a nephew of the Verdurins, whom he mocks. In an extended aside, the narrator tells us that later, Octave is to leave Rachel and marry Andrée, and that he will reveal himself as a talented designer who "introduced into contemporary art a revolution at least equal to hat accomplished by the Ballets Russes." (Peter Collier's note tells us that Octave is modeled in part on Jean Cocteau.)

The narrator continues with Andrée's revelations, including the suggestion that the reason Albertine left the narrator was that she didn't want the other "girls of the little gang" to know she was living with a man to whom she was not married. He finds it satisfying that her revelations confirm his original suspicions instead of "the wretched and cowardly optimism to which I had later yielded." And he forms a theory that Albertine's lesbianism had brought out her "masculine" side, "creating the illusion that one enjoyed with her the same loyal and unrestrained camaraderie as with a man, just as a parallel vice had produced in M. de Charlus a feminine subtlety of wit and sensibility." (Our narrator is of course subject to homophobic hokum.)

His grilling of Andrée is interrupted by dinner with his mother, who reports that the Princess of Parma has paid her a visit -- an unheard of thing. It was her way of making amends for the snub she had delivered the narrator's mother, who "thought, and later I came to share her opinion, that the Princess of Parma had quite simply failed to recognize her annd thought she need take no notice of her." On learning what she had done from the Duchesse de Guermantes, the Princess broke protocol and made her visit.

Andrée and the narrator meet again a week later, when she presents another theory for Albertine's leaving: that her aunt feared the narrator wouldn't marry her, spoiling her for another marriage that Mme. Bontemps had in mind for her. And that the visit Albertine was supposed to make to Mme. Verdurin was not to meet Mlle. Vinteuil there, but this young man. Andrée also claims that there had never been anything physical between Albertine and either Mlle. Vinteuil or her lover. The narrator retains his doubts:

But why should I believe that it was she rather than Andrée who had been lying? Truth and life are indeed an uphill path, and, without ever really getting to know them, I felt that the final impression which they left me was one where sadness was perhaps still overshadowed by fatigue.

Day One Hundred Sixty-Three: The Fugitive, pp. 544-563*

*The Fugitive begins on page 387 of the Penguin Classics paperback that also includes The Prisoner

Chapter II: Mademoiselle de Forcheville, from "A month later, Swann's young daughter...." to "...the snobbery of royalty with that of a domestic servant."

_____

Gilberte was still Mlle. Swann when the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes first deigned to receive her, and they treated her with a certain condescension, pretending to have been barely acquainted with Swann, even though they had received him for more than 25 years. "But this is how the Faubourg Saint-Germain speaks to the bourgeoisie about anyone from the bourgeoisie, whether to flatter their listeners with the exception made in their favour for as long as the conversation lasts, or whether, preferably, to humiliate them at one and the same time." But after Forcheville adopts her, it is Gilberte herself who shies away from being identified as Swann's daughter.

Visiting the Guermantes when Gilberte is there, the narrator notices that two of the Elstir drawings that once were upstairs are now in the drawing room -- "Elstir was now in fashion." Gilberte, too, recognizes them as Elstirs, and the Duchesse has to bite her tongue when she almost slips and says that Swann was the one who recommended that she buy them: "it was precisely your ... some friends of ours who advised us to buy them." And when the narrator starts to say something about their once not being on display, "I saw Mme de Guermantes's frantic signals" and likewise covers the slip.

When he casually works his article in the Figaro into the conversation, he learns that neither the Duchesse nor the Duc has read it. The latter sends a servant to fetch the newspaper and reads it while he's there. Meanwhile, the Duchesse receives a visiting card from Lady Rufus Israels, whom Gilberte denies knowing, even though she does: "The fact is that Gilberte had become quite snobbish," even to the point of sometimes pretending that Swann was not really her father.

Gilberte belonged, or at least had belonged during those years, to the most frequently encountered species of human ostrich, those who bury their heads in the hope, not of not being seen, which they believe to be implausible, but of not seeing themselves being seen, which seems important enough to them and allows them to leave the rest to chance.

The Duc finishes the article and offers "some rather muted compliments," criticizing "the somewhat hackneyed form of my style" but congratulating him on "having found an 'occupation.'" The Duchesse invites him to join her at the opera, but he turns her down, saying that he has recently lost a friend who "was very dear to me.... It was from that moment that I started to write to everyone to tell them of my great sorrow and to cease to feel it."

The Duc and Duchesse aren't the only ones who, contrary to the narrator's hopes, failed to see the article. In fact, he receives only two letters about it: One is from Mme. Goupil, an old neighbor in Combray, and the other from someone named Sautton, a name he doesn't recognize. "Bloch, whose opinion on my article I would have so liked to know, did not write to me," but later reveals in a rather snide fashion that he had read it. "Bergotte had not written me a word," the narrator says, but that shouldn't be surprising since Proust killed him off in The Prisoner -- another continuity gaffe.

The narrator's thoughts turn to Swann, who would have been happy to see Gilberte received by the Guermantes, but disappointed at her failure to acknowledge him as her real father. "And it was not only where Swann was concerned that Gilberte gradually consummated the process of forgetting: she had hastened this process within me in relation to Albertine.

I no longer loved Albertine. At most there were occasional days which brought the kind of weather that, modifying and stimulating our sensitivity, restores our contact with reality, making me feel bitterly sad when I thought of her. I suffered from a love that no longer existed. Thus when the weather changes do amputees feel pain in the leg they have lost.

Albertine's death causes a form of phantom pain, but the narrator takes his ability to mention her death at all "without actually suffering much" as a sign that he's a "new person who would be quite able to live without Albertine." 

Meanwhile, he and Andrée have begun "a semi-carnal relationship" -- whatever that may be. He recalls that they were in his room because "I was banned from the rest of the apartment since it was Mama's at-home day." Here there's a curious aside about his mother's visiting Mme. Sazerat and being bored to death, which spurs another memory about his mother being snubbed by the Princess of Parma. The significance of these asides, if any, is unclear. But as he is going to see Andrée, who is waiting in his room, he discovers that he has other visitors, who were waiting in another room: It's Charlus, who is reciting love poems to Morel, who is leaving for his duty in the reserves. "I left them as swiftly as I could, although I felt that to call on friends with Morel gave M. de Charlus great satisfaction, giving him the momentary illusion of being married again." Evidently, Mme. Verdurin's separation of them hasn't fully taken hold.

Day One Hundred Sixty-One: The Fugitive, pp. 499-522*

*The Fugitive begins on page 387 of the Penguin Classics paperback that also includes The Prisoner

Chapter I: Grieving and Forgetting, concluded, from  "In certain ailments there are secondary infections...."

_____

Proust gives us a nice Proustian definition of "man" in this section: "one of those amphibious creatures plunged simultaneously in the past and in present reality."

The narrator's past with Albertine is receding: "what provoked my astonishment was not, as it had been during the first few days, that the Albertine so alive within me could no longer exist on this earth and could be dead, but that the Albertine who no longer existed on earth, who was dead, could have stayed so alive within me." Yet he begins to feel a sense of release, "the youthful freshness of a bud starting to open and burst through its leaves into flower." He begins to accept "the idea that she was guilty" of relations with other women.

Just as the name of Guermantes had lost the charm and significance of a road bordered with water lilies and of Gilbert le Mauvais's stained-glass window, so Albertine's presence had lost those of the blue valleys of the sea, the names of Swann, the liftboy, the Princesse de Guermantes and so many others, a charm and a significance each entrusted to a single word which they judged mature enough to live on its own, as someone who wants to train a servant will show him the ropes for a couple of weeks and then withdraw, so the painful power of Albertine's guilt would be expelled outside me by habit.

He shares with us his "periods of temporary madness that we call dreams," or rather the ones in which Albertine figures. Reading a novel by Bergotte, he realizes that he is moved by the plight of the characters "who only ever existed in Bergotte's imagination," which confuses him about how he should feel about Albertine, who once existed and no longer does. Habit, he realizes, "stultifies us and ... during the whole course of our existence hides more or less the whole universe from us, and under cover of utter darkness, without changing their labels, substitutes for the most dangerous or intoxicating poisons of life something anodyne which procures no delight." We can't completely bury the past: "Our selves are composed of our successive states, superimposed. But this superimposition is not immutable like the stratification of a mountain. A tremor is liable at any moment to throw older layers back up to the surface."  

The one thing he still can't purge is his jealousy, which makes us "try out all types and scales of suffering before we settle for the one that seems to suit us." His jealousy of Albertine is particularly painful, he thinks, because of what she did with women, who could "give her sensations that we are unable to give her.... Oh! If only Albertine had been in love with Saint-Loup! How much less I would have suffered, or so it seemed to me!" When Andrée comes to visit him, he believes he can see in her what Albertine did. Andrée admits, when he questions her, that she has her own inclinations toward women, but denies that she ever did anything with Albertine, which he doesn't believe. He also fancies "a certain resemblance between myself and Andrée," which may have attracted Albertine to him. He tries to persuade Andrée to let him watch her with other women, such as the members of the little gang from Balbec, but she denies that any of the others were so inclined. So he takes two laundry-maids to "a house of ill-fame," where he watches them.

He comes to a realization about his desire to possess Albertine: "it is only in our minds that we ever possess anything, and we do not possess a painting because we have it in our dining-room, if we do not understand it, nor a country because we merely reside in it without ever looking at it."

Of course what was starting partially to revive within me was the immense desire that my love for Albertine had been unable to assuage, that immense desire to know life which I used to feel on the roads near Balbec or the streets of Paris, the desire which had so made me suffer when, supposing that it also existed in Albertine's heart, I had attempted to deprive her of the means of satisfying that desire with anyone other than myself.

And he concludes that "thoughts tire and memories collapse: the day would come when I would happily give Albertine's room to the first girl who wanted it, as I had given Albertine the agate marble or other gifts of Gilberte's." 

Day One Hundred Fifty-Seven: The Fugitive, pp. 429-450*

*The Fugitive begins on page 387 of the Penguin Classics paperback that also includes The Prisoner

Chapter I: Grieving and Forgetting, from  "Time passes, and gradually all the things which we have falsely alleged..." to "...the same monotonous existence where we knew none of all this."

_____

The narrator learns that in the course of forgetting, the first things one forgets are the bad parts: "the unpleasant sides to Albertine's character and the hours of boredom that I had endured at her side." Consequently, "forgetting, although still working within me to accustom me to our separation, only made me see Albertine as sweeter and more beautiful than ever, and made me desire her return all the more."

Françoise seems to the narrator to take an "odious relish" in being rid of Albertine, and when, in the course of cleaning up her room, Françoise discovers some rings she had left behind in a drawer, an argument develops between her and the narrator. The narrator denies having given them to Albertine, and Françoise says it must have been "somebody rich who has good taste." He counters that the rings "did not come from the same person, one was given her by her aunt and she bought the other herself" -- though he fears that they were given her by a secret lover. Françoise persists in arguing that the rings are identical, and shows him that they both bear the same image of an eagle and Albertine's initials. She even produces a magnifying glass to prove her case. Finally, the narrator orders Françoise out of the room and broods on yet another discovery about Albertine: "My revulsion at her falsehood and my jealousy of someone unknown were augmented by my pain at learning that she had accepted presents in this way."

He is also nettled by Françoise's hope that Albertine won't return, and takes pleasure when a letter from her arrives in "momentarily studying Françoise's eyes, drained of all hope as they read in this augury the imminent return of Albertine." But the letter simply says she will cancel the order for the Rolls-Royce and asks for the name of the agent, and concludes with a reference to their last outing together, which, she says "will never be erased from my mind until blackest night finally invades it." The narrator takes this last sentence (a rather heavy-handed bit of ironic foreshadowing) as "purely rhetorical" because "Albertine could not have kept until her dying day such a sweet memory of an outing which had certainly given her no pleasure, since he had been impatient to leave me."

In his reply, the narrator tells Albertine that he has asked Andrée to come live with him in her place and to marry him, that Andrée is "less charming, but one whose greater compatibility of character ought perhaps to allow her to be happier with me." He means the letter to provoke Albertine's jealousy, but once he sends it he's afraid it will have the opposite effect of making her "pleased to know that Andrée was living with me and was to become my wife, provided that she, Albertine, remained free."

He waits on the staircase for Saint-Loup's arrival, and accidentally hears something that he thinks uncharacteristic of his friend: Saint-Loup advising one of the Duchesse de Guermantes' footmen on how to get rid of a fellow servant the footman dislikes. The narrator is "struck dumb with stupefaction" at the "cruel, Machiavellian" advice from someone whom "until then I had always considered ... fundamentally kind, so sympathetic to those who suffer." He wonders if Saint-Loup "might not have acted treacherously towards me in his mission to Mme Bontemps." He dispels the thought when Saint-Loup enters to talk to him, but is struck with another pang when Saint-Loup mentions that on arriving at the Bontemps, he "went through a kind of outhouse which led into the house, and they took me down a long corridor into the lounge." It's the specificity of the details that bother the narrator so much: Until then he has not been able to visualize the place Albertine has escaped to. "In an outhouse, you can hide with a girlfriend." (The word "outhouse" has an unfortunate connotation for American readers, but here it just means something like an annex.) "And in that lounge, who knows what Albertine did when her aunt was not there?"

I still had not seen the house; never could I have conceived the frightful idea of a lounge, an outhouse and a corridor, which I now saw staring out at me from Saint-Loup's retina, which had seen them, and appearing in the guise of the rooms which Albertine walked into, passed through and lived in; these specific rooms and not an infinity of other possible rooms which had neutralized one another.... Alas! when Saint-Loup told me in addition that while in this lounge he had heard someone singing at the top of her voice in the next room, and that it was Albertine who was singing, I realized with despair that, once rid of me, she was happy! 

Saint-Loup goes on to mention that when he was leaving, he met some other young women entering the house, and that while in the area he had met a friend of Rachel's. The idea that there are other young women in the vicinity of Albertine is "enough to make me see Albertine flushed and smiling with pleasure, held in the arms of a woman whom I did not know."

And so he's tormented by jealousy of an imaginary woman, with the additional touch of paranoia from the revelation that Saint-Loup is not quite the paragon he believed him to be. He even suspects that Saint-Loup might have "devised a whole conspiracy to keep me away from Albertine!" He recalls what he knows of Swann's state of mind during his infatuation with Odette:

If Albertine could have fallen victim to an accident and had lived, I would have had an excuse to rush to her bedside; if she had died, I would have recovered what Swann called the freedom to live. Did I believe this? Swann, who was so refined and thought he knew himself so well, had believed it.

But he is about to learn that Swann was wrong, "that the death of the woman he loved would have liberated him from nothing!" For just as he sends a telegram to Albertine begging her to return, he receives a telegram from Mme. Bontemps informing him that Albertine has been killed in a riding accident.

Proust piles irony on irony here, as Françoise, ignorant of what has happened, enters with two letters from Albertine, one praising Andrée and offering to intercede if she should be reluctant to marry him, the other expressing a second thought and asking "Would it be too late for me to return to you? ... If it were favourable, I would take the next train."

For Albertine's death to have suppressed my suffering, the mortal blow would have had to kill her not only in Touraine, but within me. There, she had never been more alive.

He learns from her death the dark side of involuntary memory, "the perpetual rebirth of moments from the past called forth by identical moments." Everything -- the rain, the sun's rays, the morning sounds -- serves to evoke a memory of their time together.

"Françoise must have been pleased that Albertine was dead, and to be fair I must acknowledge that from a kind of decorum and tact she did not pretend to be sad." She tries to stop the narrator from crying himself sick. "And she added: 'It was bound to happen, she was too happy, poor thing, she didn't know how happy she was." But there's no stopping the narrator's descent into depression.

If an illness, a duel or a runaway horse bring us face to face with death, we realize how richly we would have enjoyed the life, the sexual pleasure and the unknown lands that we are about to be deprived of. And once the danger is past, what we fall back on is the same monotonous existence where we knew none of all this.

Day One Hundred Fifty-Four, The Prisoner, pp. 358-384

From "Meanwhile winter was coming to an end..." to "...I shall ring for you presently."

_____

Springtime brings fantasies:

I was sure that the next day I should be able to begin work and at the same time start getting up, going out, preparing for our departure to some country house which we should buy, where Albertine would be more free to live the country or seaside life, sailing or hunting, which she would enjoy. 

But of course, this is only a fantasy: "Reality is the cleverest of our enemies. It directs its attacks at those points in our heart where we were not expecting them, and where we had prepared no defence." And the reality of his relationship with Albertine continues to be his chief antagonist. He recognizes in her two traits: "the comforting one, was her habit of using a single action to give pleasure to more than one person." So she came to Paris to please not only the narrator but also Andrée, while making each think that he or she was the reason for the move. The character trait he finds more difficult to deal with is "the alacrity with which she seized upon any opportunity of pleasure."

Moreover, he is finding himself trapped in the relationship:

I felt life and the world which I had never explored slipping away from me, exchanged for a woman in whom I could no longer find anything new. I could not even go to Venice where, while I was in bed, I would be tortured by the thought of the advances the gondolier might be making to her, or the people in the hotel, or the Venetian women.

His life as he sees it is bounded by "on the one hand, when I was not jealous, boredom, and on the other, when I was, suffering."  Yet he continues to lavish presents on her, including a Fortuny dress that, "calling up images of Venice, ... made me even more conscious of everything I was giving up for Albertine."

She begins to withdraw from his demonstrations of affection: "instead of returning my kiss, she drew away with the kind of instinctive, sinister stubbornness of animals that feel death upon them." Images of death, as with his watching her sleep, begin to prevail in his thoughts of her. He vacillates "between the fear that Albertine might leave me and a relative calm." He suffers from "anxiety, which, presenting us ... with only two alternatives, [has] something of the appallingly limited character of straightforward physical pain."

For her part, Albertine displays signs of the coming split. One night he hears her "window being violently thrown open" in defiance of his order that windows not be opened at night. He fears that her breaking this rule means that she was ready to break all the agreements they had made between them. And in his nervous state he begins to fear that he is going to die.

They go out together to Versailles, and on the trip he hears "a sound which I did not recognize at first and which my grandmother would also have loved. It was like the buzzing of a wasp. 'Look, said Albertine, there's an aeroplane, it's high, high up.'" The sound stirs in him "a longing for my lost freedom." Even the smell of gasoline from a car driving under his window awakens this longing for freedom. It is

a scent at the appearance of which roads receded in front of me, the look of the ground changed, châteaux appeared from nowhere, the sky turned pale, my strength grew tenfold; this was a scent which seemed to symbolize leaping forward, power, and which renewed the desire I had felt at Balbec to get into the cage of glass and steel, not this time to go and pay visits in familiar houses with a woman I already knew too well, but to go and make love in new places with a woman I did not know at all.

And so he begins to make plans, "forgetting that there was another such desire which I had fulfilled without any pleasure at all, the desire for Balbec, and that Venice, being another visible phenomenon, would probably be no more successful than Balbec in realizing an inexpressible dream." His inability to adjust his fantasies to  actuality, to forestall disillusionment, continues.

And then, when he summons Françoise to ask her to fetch a guidebook and a train time-table, she enters with the word that Albertine has gone, having called for her boxes and left at nine o'clock. Françoise says she wanted to inform him, but she was afraid to go against the strict orders he had made not to enter his room before called for.

Day One Hundred Forty: The Prisoner, pp. 117-136

From "In any case, I was pleased that Andrée was going..." to "...without thereby giving any more reality to my love."

_____

You know when the narrator is happy that Albertine is doing something that it's bound to end badly. So he's all chirpy about Andrée and Albertine going to the Trocadéro instead of to the Verdurins'. It seems to have something to do with the chauffeur's not keeping an eye on her when he drove her to Versailles recently, letting her go off in an carriage on her own. Has he become so obsessed with Albertine's possible homosexuality that he doesn't feel jealousy of the "handsome young" chauffeur of carrying on with her? The narrator reveals that he didn't know then that the chauffeur "was a friend of Morel's" because "he was so superior to the violinist in intelligence and taste." But not to have suspected that she and the chauffeur could have gotten together to make up a story that explained what she had been doing during the seven hours they were supposedly apart in Versailles? He has recently discovered, from talking to Gilberte's maid, that she had been seeing someone else during the time that he was obsessed with her, so he decides that he "would only let her go out escorted by Andrée, whereas before I had thought the chauffeur was protection enough."

Meanwhile, he has developed one of his little fascinations with a girl who works in the dairy: "extravagantly blond in colouring, very tall though still childish-looking, and who, among the other errand girls, seemed to be far away, with a proud, dreamy look." He has Françoise send this girl to his room to run an errand for him:

If one wanted to reduce to a formula the laws of amorous curiosity, one would have to seek it in the maximum divergence between a woman seen and a woman caressed.... [W]e cannot rest until we have tried to see whether the haughty seaside girl, the shop-girl with her worries about what people will think, the preoccupied fruit-seller cannot be persuaded, by crafty manoeuvres on our part, to soften their unbending attitude, to wind round our neck the arms that carried the fruit, to turn upon our mouth, with a smile of consent, those hitherto chilly or faraway eyes.

But this little experiment in Don Juanism ends badly for the narrator when, asking her to hand him a copy of the Figaro so he can find the address to which he wants her to deliver a message, he sees an article in it revealing that Mlle. Léa is to appear in the program Albertine is attending at the Trocadéro. "Léa was the actress who as friendly with the two young girls whom Albertine had looked at in the glass that afternoon at the casino, without seeming to see them." He dismisses the dairy girl and resolves "to stop Albertine going to the Trocadéro and meeting those friends of Léa's" -- even though he doesn't know whether the friends will be there. And so the obsession returns.

Day One Hundred Thirty-Eight: The Prisoner, pp. 82-102

From "What an extraordinary value the most insignificant things..." to "...still silent before the break of day."

_____

Albertine always alarmed me when she said that I was quite right to protect her reputation by saying that I was not her lover, as she said, "you aren't, are you, not really." Perhaps I was not, in the complete sense, but was I then to think that she did with other men all the things we did together, only to say that she had not been their mistress?

The physical nature of the narrator's relations with Albertine continues to perplex readers who can't quite believe that a man who takes pains to dissociate himself from "inverts" could share a bed with a naked woman without actually copulating with her. And continue to be jealous of her. Or that the narrator could claim, "If I did not love Albertine (and I was not sure whether I did or not), her place in my household was not extraordinary: we choose to live only with the thing we do not love, which we have brought to live with us precisely in order to kill off intolerable love, whether the thing in question is a woman, a country, or a woman embodying a country." Certainly, the narrator's endless ruminations about the nature of love -- and of his love for Albertine (or Gilberte, or Mme. de Guermantes) -- come close to exhausting the topic. If not the reader.

He blames it on Albertine, of course:

Her lies were so numerous, because she did not simply lie in the way all human beings do when they believe themselves to be loved, but because she was by nature, quite independently, mendacious and, what is more, so changeable that even if she had told me the truth every time I asked, for example, what she thought of a person, the answer would have been different each time.

Meanwhile, he discovers from talking to Andrée on the telephone that she and Albertine are planning to go to the Verdurins, and when he suggests that he'll join them, Andrée sounds alarmed, further fueling his suspicions that something is going on between them. There follows a little cat-and-mouse game between Albertine and the narrator centering on her plans and what he knows about them, in which each lies to the other.

We learn that one of the things the narrator and Albertine like to do together is watch planes take off. His earlier encounter with an airplane had turned aviation into "a kind of image of freedom," so they "conclude our days out with a visit to one of these aerodromes." Those obsessed with biography will read this as an allusion to Proust's affair with Alfred Agostinelli, who took up flying and was killed in a plane crash.

More and more, the narrator is haunted by the feeling that he is coming to resemble his relatives: "sometimes, as I played the wise man to Albertine, I seemed to hear my grandmother speaking." He is also acutely aware of the differences between Albertine and himself: "After all, the coupling of opposites is the law of life, the principle of fertilization and, as we shall see, the cause of much misery. Normally, we detest what is like us, and our own failings, seen in others, exasperate us." And we return once again to the very beginning of the novel, a kind of da capo:

What I experienced with Albertine on these evenings was not the calming effect of my mother's kiss at Combray, but on the contrary, the anguish of the evenings when my mother said good-night to me only hurriedly, or worse, did not come up to my room at all, whether she was cross with me or kept downstairs by guests.... But though I suffered the anguish of my childhood, the changed being who now inspired it, my different feelings about her, the very changes in my own character made it impossible for me to seek peace from Albertine as I had from my mother.... I came near to thinking Françoise more intelligent than Bergotte or Elstir because she had said to me at Balbec, "That girl will bring you nothing but grief." 

Albertine torments him even when she is unconscious of doing so, as when, one time when she is waking, she calls him "Andrée" by mistake. And when he suggests that she did so because she "had once lain like that next to her," she denies it. "Only, just before making me that answer, she had hidden her face in her hands for a moment."

Day One Hundred Thirty-Six, The Prisoner, pp. 46-67

From "I did not meet M. de Charlus and Morel all that regularly..." to "...so sweet and pink among all that snowy lace."

_____

The narrator begins with "a little incident whose cruel significance escaped me entirely and which I only came to understand much later." He arrives home unexpectedly early one day to find Andrée leaving and when, having forgotten his key, Albertine comes to let him in there is a bit of confusion about finding the light switch and about the fragrant bunch of flowers he is carrying -- Albertine "hates strong scents," as Andrée has reminded him. "I had almost surprised her with Andrée, and she had given herself a breathing-space by switching off all the lights, had gone into my bedroom so that I should not go into hers and see her unmade bed, and pretended to have been writing." The narrator promises that he will explain all this later.

There follows a lengthy analysis of his relationship with Albertine. The real person has grown over-familiar to him, and he appreciates her best when he can work her into his imaginative life, merging his idea of her with works of art and music and literature, "escaping the crushing pressure of matter and floating free in the weightless spaces of thought.... At that moment she seemed like a work of Elstir or of Bergotte, I felt a lofty enthusiasm for her, seeing her distanced by imagination and art." We have seen something similar a long time ago, when the young narrator prioritized the imagination over nature.

He has continued to keep her residence in his home a secret from his friends, for fear that one of them "might take a fancy to her." She in her turn continues to keep secrets from him. "Our engagement was turning into a trial and giving her the timid manner of a guilty prisoner." But she seems agreeable to the arrangement, telling him: "I think it's stupid to let people see who you love; with me it's the opposite, as soon as I'm attracted to  somebody, I seem to take no notice of them. That way nobody knows what's going on."

He continues to lavish her with clothes, and "for the final details of several of them I had written to Mme Swann, who had replied in a letter beginning with the words, 'After your long eclipse, when I read your letter asking about my robes de chambre, I thought I was hearing from a ghost.'" Albertine is "developing into a woman of fashion," thanks to his consultations with the Duchesse and with Odette.

The narrator has concluded that "love is often only the association between the image of a girl (of whom otherwise we would very quickly have tired) and the increased heart rate inseparable from a long, futile wait when the young lady has 'stood us up.'" But he notes that Jupien's niece was undergoing a similar problem with Morel, thanks to his relationship with Charlus. The chauffeur "had praised to her the violinist's supposed infinite delicacy of feeling" while Morel was "telling her what a slave driver M. de Charlus was to him." But then she "discovered in Morel (though it did not make her stop loving him) depths of wickedness and treachery ... and in M. de Charlus an astonishing and limitless kindness." So she is as confused about "what, each in himself, the violinist and his protector were" just as the narrator is "about Andrée, whom I saw every day, and Albertine, who lived in my house."

In the end, it all comes down to the narrator's desire to possess Albertine, a possession that would in essence stop time, suspend its changes. He relishes most the times when she is sound asleep, and he can have the illusion of time in suspension: "Having her asleep at my side offered something as sensually delicious as my moonlit nights on the bay at Balbec, when the water was calm as a lake amid scarcely moving branches, and one could lie on the beach forever, listening to the sound of the sea." (A conventional symbol of eternity.) While she sleeps, "Whole races, atavisms, vices slept in her face. Every time she moved her head she created a new woman, often undreamed of by me. I felt that I possessed not one, but innumerable young girls." When he kisses her without awakening her, "It seemed to me at those moments that I had possessed her more completely, like an unconscious and unresisting part of dumb nature."

And then, as she awakens, comes a famous passage:

Now she began to speak; her first words were ''darling" or ''my darling,'' followed by my Christian name, which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would produce "darling Marcel" or "my darling Marcel." 

This audacious bit of what might be called metafiction has given many license to refer to the narrator of the entire book as Marcel. I'm of two minds about that: For one thing, "Marcel" is easier to type than "the narrator." On the other hand, to call the narrator Marcel is to fall into the trap of identifying narrator with author, which despite the often intensely autobiographical nature of the Search, is to take the easy way out. Proust has always relied on free indirect style, which as James Wood puts it, allows us to "see things through the character's eyes and language but also through the author's eyes and language. We inhabit omniscience and partiality at once." To fuse the narrator and author of the Search into one is to deprive us of the authorial point of view on the narrator, to suggest that he endorses the ideas and emotions of the narrator, when it's clear that he often opens his narrator to criticism.

Another thing to remember is that The Prisoner went unpublished during its author's lifetime: It's entirely possible that Proust might have had second thoughts about this casual breaking down of the fourth wall before he went to print with the book. To have the narrator point out that he's just a narrator and not the author of the work is a betrayal of the contract that the reader makes with an author: that his story should be treated as truth, not fiction. We, the readers, have forgiven the author much, including his frequent violations of point of view -- telling of events the narrator couldn't have witnessed, and even entering into the thoughts of other characters. But this is a more major breach of contract. And it comes at a point when Proust is trying to make the intricacies of a strange sexual and psychological relationship as credible as possible. Frankly, I think he made a mistake with the narrator/Marcel identification, so I'm going to ignore it.

Day One Hundred Thirty-Three: The Prisoner, pp. 3-19

From "From early morning, with my face still turned..." to "...with the brake on running in neutral."

_____

"It was ... mainly from my bedroom that I perceived the world around me at this period." Hardly a new point of view for our narrator. He has brought Albertine back to Paris with him, and "every evening, very late, before leaving me to sleep, she would slip her tongue into my mouth like my daily bread." He thereby experiences a "kind of spiritual sweetness" which he analogizes to "not the night which Captain de Borodino allowed me to spend at the barracks -- a favour which, after all, cured a mere passing malaise -- but that other night when my father sent Mama to sleep in the little bed next to mine." Sometimes comment on Proust is superfluous.

It is a strange ménage, made stranger by the fact that the narrator has once again changed his attitude toward Albertine, "whom I hardly even found pretty any more, in whose company i was bored and whom I had a clear sense of no longer loving." The arrangement is oddly tolerated by his parents: His mother, "did not want to appear more strict than Mme Bontemps, whose place it was, if anyone's, to act, and who did not find the arrangement unsuitable, much to my mother's surprise." His mother is, in any case, preoccupied with her aunt's illness. And the narrator is relieved that she's not there, because it prevents Albertine from mentioning to her that she was friends with Mlle. Vinteuil, which would "have utterly precluded not only a marriage, ... but even a stay in our house by Albertine as a guest."

Andrée visits Albertine at the narrator's, and Albertine reveals to him that Andrée had been in love with him during the first stay in Balbec. The narrator is happiest when the girls go out together, having at least temporarily set aside his fantasies that the two of them are lovers, and he concludes that "I no longer loved Albertine, for nothing remained of the pain, now cured, which I had suffered in the tram at Balbec when I learned what Albertine's adolescence had been, including, perhaps, visits to Montjouvain." Of course, he also reflects that "a chronic illness needs only the smallest pretext to recur." And the narrator has not given up his fantasies about predatory lesbians waiting to seduce young women: "The truth was that in leaving Balbec I had thought I was leaving Gomarrah behind, that I was tearing Albertine away from it; alas! Gomorrah was dispersed to the four corners of the Earth."

He has told Albertine that "the doctor said I had to stay in bed. That was not true." Instead, he finds that it's a matter of out of sight, out of mind. When he's "in public with Albertine" he grows anxious "that she had been speaking to someone or even looking at someone." But when he stays home and she goes out he feels "the elating powers of solitude." 

Day One Hundred Thrty-Two: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 497-514

Part II, Chapter IV, from "I was only awaiting an opportunity..." to "...I absolutely must marry Albertine."

_____

And so the narrator makes a great about-face in the space of a single short chapter.

He announces to his mother, who is leaving Balbec for Combray to stay with her dying aunt, that he has decided not to marry Albertine and will stop seeing her. He plans to tell Albertine that he doesn't love her and to switch his attentions to Andrée. But ... best-laid plans. As they are returning from the evening at Mme. Verdurin's he tells her that he is "beginning to find this life rather stupid" and that he's going to ask the Patronne to have some music played by a musician Albertine probably doesn't know: Vinteuil.

Oops.

It turns out that Albertine has "a girlfriend, older than me, who was like both a mother and sister to me, whom I spent my best years with in Trieste," whom she's meeting in Cherbourg a few weeks from now, "and isn't this extraordinary, is in actual fact the best friend of this Vinteuil's daughter, and I know Vinteuil's daughter almost as well."

Cue the Proustian moment, "suddenly rising up out of the depths of that darkness where it had seemed to lie forever entombed and striking like an Avenger, in order to inaugurate for me a new life, terrible and deserved, perhaps also to explode before my eyes the fateful consequences to which wicked actions give rise indefinitely." And so on.

Albertine the friend of Mlle Vinteuil and of her friend, a practicing and professional sapphist, this, compared with what I had imagined at my most suspicious, was ... a terrible terra incognita on which I had just set foot, a new phase of unsuspected suffering that was opening.

He's so jolted by the news that he asks Albertine to come stay the night at the hotel in Balbec, where, after she goes to her room on another floor, he is racked with sobs. "What I had dreaded, had long vaguely suspected in Albertine, what my instinct had isolated from her whole being, but what my arguments, guided by my desire, had slowly led me to deny, was true! ... For, pretty as Albertine was, how could Mlle Vinteuil, with her proclivities, not have asked her to satisfy them?"

He sends for Albertine and complicates matters more by making up a story about a woman he had left in Paris whom he had been planning to marry, and that he had been thinking of killing himself: "If I was going to die, I'd have liked to say goodbye to you." Albertine falls for this story: "I won't leave you again, I'm going to stay with you." He decides that he must take her to Paris, to prevent her from meeting her old girlfriend in Cherbourg. "True," he reflects, "I might have told myself that in Paris, if Albertine had these proclivities, she would find a great many other people with whom to gratify them." But he asks her anyway, realizing that with his mother in Combray and his father away on "a tour of inspection," they would be alone together in Paris.

He reverts to his old childishness, likening his current emotional torment to "that which used to rise up into my room of old in Combray from the dining room, where I could hear, laughing and talking with strangers, amid the sound of forks, Mamma, who would not be coming up to say good night; like that which, for Swann, had filled the houses where Odette had gone to a soirée in search of unimaginable delights."

Albertine replies that she can't go to Paris now, and urges him to marry the woman there. He replies that he "wouldn't have wanted to make a young woman live with someone so sickly and so tiresome." She protests, of course. But he has revealed a truth about himself: "I was too given to believing that the moment I was in love I could not be loved, and that self-interest alone could attach a woman to me."

After she leaves him, she sends word that "she could, if I wanted, come to Paris that same day." The news reaches the hotel manager, who tries to persuade him to stay. And he has second thoughts on looking around the room:

I two or three times had the idea, momentarily, that the world in which this room and these bookcases were, and in which Albertine counted for so little, was perhaps an intellectual world, which was the sole reality, and my unhappiness something like that which we get from reading a novel, and which a madman alone could make into a lasting and permanent unhappiness, extending into his life. 

Unfortunately, he doesn't have the strength of will to stay in this reality. He has a vision of Albertine taking the place of Mlle. Vinteuil's friend in the room in Montjouvain where he had spied on on them. And when his mother comes to see him  he falls back into the old childishness, which she perhaps unwittingly encourages: "Remember that your mamma is leaving today and is going to be desolate at leaving her darling in this state. All the more, my poor child, because I hardly have time to console you." She has "the look she had worn in Combray for the first time when she had resigned herself to spending the night beside me, that look which at this moment bore an extraordinary resemblance to that of my grandmother when she allowed me to drink cognac."

And so he tells her: "I absolutely must marry Albertine."

Day One Hundred Twenty-Seven: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 419-434

Part II, Chapter III, from "I was naturally most surprised to learn..." to "...and has never acknowledged me since."

_____

Morel's success in getting the coachman fired and the chauffeur hired to replace him coincides with a change in his attitude toward the narrator, who notes that Morel had not only "ceased to keep his distance from me" but would even "literally bound toward me in an effusion of delight." The narrator assumes that Charlus had a hand in this change, but he adds a bit of foreshadowing: 

How at the time could I have guessed what I was told afterward (and of which I have never felt certain, Andrée's assertions concerning anything connected with Albertine, later on especially, having always struck me as needing to be taken with caution, for, as we saw earlier, she was not genuinely fond of my loved one but was jealous of her), what in any event, if it were true, had been remarkably well hidden from me by the two of them: that Albertine knew Morel well?

The narrator then attempts an analysis of Morel's character, which "was full of contradictions." Morel would do anything for money, except that he was "truly a past master" of the violin, having "put ahead of money his diploma as first-prize-winner at the Conservatoire." Morel trusts no one, and had recognized in the chauffeur "one of his own kind, ... a man mistrustful in the proper meaning of the word, who remains stubbornly silent when with decent people but at once sees eye to eye with a debauchee" -- again, a foreshadowing of what is to happen after the narrator returns to Paris. "In actual fact, his nature was really like a sheet of paper in which so many folds have been made in every direction that it is impossible to know where you are."

Meanwhile, Charlus has become "the most faithful" of Mme. Verdurin's set, even though he has been at least partially "outed" among them, and Cottard frets to Ski "whether I can allow him to travel with us after what you've told me." Mme. Cottard, overhearing this conversation, decides that Charlus must be Jewish, which leads to some comic misunderstanding between her and Charlus. Moreover, the others in the group, not knowing of Charlus's social status, conclude that they're doing him a favor by accepting him into their set, and they pride themselves in their tolerance: 

In fact, ... if M. de Charlus did not come, they felt disappointment almost at traveling only among people who were like everyone else and not to have next to them this bedizened, potbellied, and impenetrable personage, reminiscent of a box, of some suspect and exotic provenance, that gives off a curious smell of fruit, the mere thought of sampling which would turn the stomach.

Charlus, the narrator tells us, still believes that only a very few people know that he's gay, "and that none of them were on the Normandy coast." He doesn't know that "on a day when he and Morel were late and had not come by the train," Mme. Verdurin had announced to the group, "We won't wait for the young ladies any longer!" And he evidently doesn't get her true meaning when, on the nights when he and Morel stay over at La Raspelière, she gives them adjoining rooms and announces, "If you feel like making music, don't hesitate; the walls are like that of a fortress, you've no one on your floor, and my husband sleeps like the dead."


Meanwhile, the narrator is still struggling with his feelings for Albertine, still persuading himself that he "no longer felt jealousy or scarcely any love for her, and gave no thought to what she might be doing on the days when I did not see her." But if, on the train to the Verdurins, she goes into another compartment with the other women in the group, he can't sit still. He has to get up and check "too see whether something abnormal might not be going on." 

He also manages to alienate the Princesse Sherbatoff when, one day on the train, he sees Mme. de Villeparisis and talks to her in the Princesse's presence. "I had absolutely no idea, however, that Mme de Villeparisis knew very well who my companion was but had no wish to meet her.... When I said goodbye to the Princesse, the usual smile did not light up her face, a curt nod depressed her chin, she did not even offer me her hand, and she has never spoken to me since." 

Day One Hundred Fifteen: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 211-230

Part II, Chapter II, from "As, on the Bourse, when an upward movement occurs..." to "...tonality of happiness might have long survived within me."

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The narrator continues his conversation with the Mmes. de Cambremer, persuading the younger that Chopin, whom she scorns and her mother-in-law loves, "was Debussy's favorite musician. 'Well, I never; how amusing,' the daughter-in-law said with a smile, as though this were merely a paradox tossed off by the author of Pelléas. Nevertheless, it was quite certain now that she would only every listen to Chopin with respect or even with pleasure." The praise of Chopin delights the dowager Mme. de Cambremer, whose mustache and missing teeth, resulting in "salivary hypersecretion," the narrator has wickedly described, and he is rewarded with an invitation to lunch. This invitation is overheard by the nearby First President from Caen, who is abashed at not being invited too, and when the Mmes. de Cambremer depart warns the narrator, "When you get to be my age, you'll find that society is nothing, really, and you'll regret having attached so much importance to these trifles." 


The social comedy of this scene is followed by one in which the narrator returns to his rooms in the hotel with Albertine. "As soon as we were alone and had started down the corridor, Albertine said to me, 'What have you got against me?'" He pretends to be in love with Andrée instead of her, and confronts her with his suspicion of her lesbian affair with Andrée: 

In the end, I ventured to tell her what had been reported to me as to her mode of life, and that, despite the profound disgust aroused in me by women afflicted with that same vice, I had not felt any concern until they named her accomplice to me, and that she could well understand, loving Andrée to the extent that I did, the grief that I had experienced.

Albertine displays "anger, unhappiness, and, where the unknown slanderer was concerned, a raging curiosity to learn who it was." But "the comfort brought by Albertine's affirmations was all but compromised for a moment because I recalled the story of Odette," who had denied her lesbian affairs to Swann before finally admitting to them. 


Albertine then seduces him with a kiss in which "she passed her tongue lightly over my lips, and tried to part them. To start with, I kept them tightly shut." And then comes a passage in which the narrator regrets not ending the affair at the moment: 

I should have left that evening without ever seeing her again.... I should have left Balbec, have shut myself away in solitude, have remained there in harmony with the dying vibrations of the voice I had been able to turn for a moment into that of love, and of which I would have demanded nothing more than never to address me further; for fear that by some fresh utterance, which from now on could only be different, it might wound by a dissonance the silence of the senses in which, as though thanks to some pedal, the tonality of happiness might have long survived within me. 

In short, he's hooked.    

Day One Hundred Fourteen: Sodom and Gomorrah, pp. 192-211

Poussin, "Landscape With Calm"

Part II, Chapter II, from "It was not even on that evening, however that my cruel mistrust..." to "...continuance. But that time had not yet come."

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The narrator decides to pay a call on Mme. Verdurin, but the train breaks down in Incarville, where he meets Dr. Cottard in the station. While waiting for the repairs to take place, they enter a little casino to which Albertine, Andrée and several of their friends have gone. Because of the lack of male partners, several girls were dancing together. Cottard and the narrator watch Albertine and Andrée waltzing, and Cottard remarks that "the parents are very unwise who let their daughters pick up such habits.... I've forgotten my eyeglass and I can't see properly, but they're certainly at the height of arousal. It's not sufficiently well known that it's chiefly through the breasts that women experience it." And to the eyes of the susceptible narrator, Cottard's observation seems to be correct: "Albertine seemed to be demonstrating, to be making Andrée acknowledge, some secret and voluptuous tremor."

The narrator's suspicions and jealousy increase. They have an argument one day because she wants to leave him to "call on a lady who was 'at home,' it seemed, every day at five o'clock in Infreville." They argue back and forth until the narrator declares that he will go with her, whereupon "Albertine looked as if she had received a terrible blow" and resorts to "an abrupt change of tack," deciding that they should go to dinner on "the other side of Balbec." He turns the argument around, insisting that she should stick to her original plan. 

I sensed that Albertine was giving up on my account something she had arranged that she did not want to tell me about, and that there was someone who would be as unhappy as I had been. Finding that what she had wanted was not possible, since I wanted to go with her, she gave it up unhesitatingly.

A few days later, they see Bloch's sister and cousin in the casino at Balbec. The cousin is openly in a lesbian relationship with an actress. Andrée tells the narrator that she and Albertine disapprove: "there's nothing the two of us find more disgusting." But the narrator senses something different in Albertine's attitude toward Bloch's cousin and, "perhaps on the hypothesis, though I did not as yet consciously entertain it, that Albertine liked women," he tells her that Bloch's sister and cousin paid them no attention. Whereupon, "unthinkingly," Albertine contradicts him. And he realizes that, although she had her back to them, she had been watching them in a mirror.

His suspicions about Albertine cause him to grow angry. 

I thought then about all that I had learned of Swann's love for Odette, and of the way in which Swann had been made a fool of all his life. Fundamentally, if I try to think about it, the hypothesis that led me little by little to construct Albertine's whole character, and to interpret painfully each moment of a life I was unable to control in its entirety, was the memory, the idée fixe, of the character of Mme Swann, such as I had been told that it was like. These accounts helped me to ensure that in future my imagination played the game of supposing that, instead of being a good girl, Albertine might have the same immorality, the same capacity for deception, as a former whore, and I thought of all the suffering that would have awaited me in that event had I ever had to love her.

But before we enter into another extended passage of obsession, of the narrator's desire to possess and control, we take a break with the arrival of the dowager Marquise de Cambremer and her daughter-in-law, Mme. de Cambremer née Legrandin. (It gets a little hard to follow which of the Mmes. de Cambremer is talking or being talked about at any given moment.) They have come to call on the narrator at the hotel, having been urged to do so by Saint-Loup. "You know he's due shortly to come and spend a few days locally," the dowager tells the narrator. "His uncle Charlus is staying in the country at his sister-in-law's, the Duchesse de Luxembourg, and M. de Saint-Loup will take the opportunity to go and greet his aunt and to revisit his old regiment, where he is greatly loved, greatly esteemed." The narrator is accompanied by Albertine and her friends, and introduces them to the dowager Marquise, who then presents Mme. de Cambremer née Legrandin to them. 

The conversation that ensues is largely about art, with the younger Mme. de Cambremer determined to impress them with her enthusiasm for Monet and Debussy. "Mme de Cambremer liked to 'get the blood coursing' by 'squabblng' about art, as others about politics." When she dismisses Poussin as "an untalented old hack," the narrator takes delight in "rehabilitating Poussin" by telling her, 

"M. Degas assures us that he knows of nothing more beautiful than the Poussins at Chantilly." "Oh yes? I don't know the ones at Chantilly," said Mme de Cambremer, who did not want to be of a different opinion from Degas, "but I can talk about those in the Louvre, which are horrors." "Those, too, he admires enormously." "I shall have to look at them again. It's all a bit old in my head," she replied after a moment's silence, and as if the favorable judgment she would certainly soon be delivering on Poussin must depend, not on the news I had just conveyed to her, but on the supplementary and this time definitive examination to which she was relying on subjecting the Poussins in the Louvre so as to facilitate the reversing of her verdict.

The narrator reflects to himself on the vicissitudes of taste: "The day was coming ... when, for a time, Debussy would be declared to be as fragile as Massenet, and the joltings of Mélisande demoted to the rank of those of Manon. For theories and schools, like microbes and globules, devour one another and, by their struggles, ensure life's continuance."               

Day Sixty-Eight: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 507-533

From "About a month after ..." to end. 

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Albertine, preparing to visit her aunt, Mme. Bontemps, for a few days, arranges to spend the night at the hotel because it's close to the train station. And she tells the narrator he "can come up and sit by my bedside while I'm having my dinner." As you can imagine, he's thrilled: "Her words carried me back further than the time when I had been in love with Gilberte, to the days when love had seemed to be a thing that was not only external to myself, but achievable." So he goes to the room in an exhilarated state, finding her in bed and wearing her nightgown. He's "intoxicated" by "her naked throat and her excessively pink cheeks," and the moonlight, the sea, and "the swelling breasts of the closest of the Mainville cliffs":

I leaned over to kiss Albertine. Had death chosen that instant to strike me down, it would have been a matter of indifference to me, or, rather, it would have seemed impossible, for life did not reside somewhere outside me: all of life was contained within me.

Bad move. 


Recovering from her startled and angry rejection, which ends with her pulling the bell to call for a servant, he gives her up. When she returns from her visit to her aunt and forgives him, warning him not to try anything like that again, he turns his attentions to Andrée. 


He reflects on Albertine's popularity and the advantages that her beauty has given her, which overcome her status as the dowryless ward of the stingy M. Bontemps. She tells no one else about "our bedside scene, which a plainer girl might have wanted to share with the world." And he "even began to wonder whether her violent reaction might not have been prompted by some other reason, such as squeamishness (if she had suddenly noticed a bad smell about her person, and thought it might offend me), or timidity (if she believed, in her ignorance of the realities of lovemaking, that my state of nervous debility might somehow be contagious, contractable from a kiss)." 


For her part, she wonders, "What sort of girls must you be familiar with to be surprised at what I did?" (He has already reflected that her behavior was different from what he expected after "Bloch first informed me that women were there for the having.") And she concludes with "I'm sure you're just teasing me! Andrée's the one you really like -- admit it! And I'm sure you're right -- she's much nicer than me, and she's beautiful! Oh, you men!" 


But he has already realized that he doesn't love Andrée: "she was too intellectual, too high-strung, too prone to ailment, too much like myself." She was "never happier than when translating into French a novel by George Eliot." His obsession with Albertine only increases: 

It may be because the personalities I perceived in her at that time were so various that I later took to turning into a different person, depending on which Albertine was in my mind: I became a jealous man, an indifferent man, a voluptuary, a melancholic, a madman, these characters coming over me not just in response to the random recurrence of memories, but also under the variable influence of some intervening belief which afected this or that memory by making me see it differently. 

It's clear that instead of him possessing her, she has possessed him. 


And so the summer ends: "the concerts came to an end, the weather turned bad, and my girls left Balbec, not all at once, as the swallows leave, but within the same week." He and his grandmother and Françoise linger at the hotel, where only a few guests remain, including some wealthy and aristocratic young men, one of whom is the Marquis de Vaudémont. They invite him to join them at a restaurant, but he declines. (But since the name has been introduced, we can bet we'll encounter the marquis again.) The hotel grows emptier and colder, but it has become to feel like home for him, and he is "all the more determined to come back one day."


Finally he and his grandmother and Françoise leave, and we set out on The Guermantes Way.

Day Sixty-Seven: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 496-507

From "The various waves of feeling sent through me ..." to "... and were replaced by others."

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The narrator decides to make his move on Albertine, but as usual he keeps overthinking things, devising oblique strategies to win her over. 


He joins the gang, plus some extras recruited for the game, to play ring-on-a-string. (A ring is threaded onto a long piece of string, which is then tied together to form a circle. The player who is "it" stands in the middle of the circle while the other players pass the ring along the string. "It" tries to find the ring, and if he or she succeeds, the one who was holding the ring becomes "it.") The narrator is ticked off because another boy is next to Albertine, which deprives him of the opportunity to touch her hand. 

A squeeze from the hand of Albertine had a sensual softness which seemed at one with the slightly mauve pink of her skin: it made you feel as though you were penetrating her, entering the privacy of her senses, an impression one had too from her resounding laugh, which was as suggestive of indecency as any throaty murmur of invitation, or as certain cries. 

He lets himself get caught with the ring and, when he takes his position in the center, succeeds in finding the ring as it passes into the hand of the boy next to Albertine, so he can take the boy's place. But he's so preoccupied with touching her hand, and so convinced that she is returning his ardor, that he's shocked when she whispers, "Take the thing, would you! I've been trying to pass it to you for about half an hour!" 


Embarrassed, he leaves the game in the company of Andrée to walk to the cliffs at Les Creuniers, which Elstir had painted. Andrée is clearly flirting with the narrator, but he doesn't notice, trying to say nice things about Albertine that Andrée would repeat to her: "Andrée said she was also very fond of Albertine and thought she was a dear; but the complimentary things I said about her friend did not seem to please her very much." 

Along the way he sees a hawthorn bush, which is associated with his first sighting of Gilberte -- "just as Gilberte had been my first sweetheart among the girls, they had been my first among the flowers." He falls into an imaginary conversation with the bush about its vanished blossoms, and when he returns to Andrée resumes his praises of Albertine, about which he naively reports,  "Despite this, I was never to learn whether Albertine heard a word of what  I said about her." He also maintains his ignorance of Andrée's jealousy of his infatuation with Albertine when he recalls, "If it was suggested that Albertine's marriage prospects might not be as bad as was supposed, Andrée scotched the notion and repeated in a furious tone, 'Of course the girl's unmarriageable! I don't ned to be told -- I think it's terrible!'" 


And so he wanders into another set of self-made barriers that prevent him from achieving his ostensible goal with Albertine, which he might have accomplished with a more direct approach.

I knew now that I loved Albertine, but I was in no hurry, alas, to tell her: the fact was that, since the time when I had played at the Champs-Élysées, my notion of love had undergone a change, while those to whom my love was addressed, though they were consecutive, remained unchanged. For one thing, the confession of love, the declaration of my tenderness to her whom I loved, no longer seemed to be one of love's classic and indispensable scenes; and for another, love itself, instead of appearing to be a reality eternal to me, now seemed a subjective pleasure. I sensed that the less Albertine knew about this pleasure of mine, the more she would be likely to let me go on enjoying it. 

The course of true love never did run smooth, but this is ridiculous. 


Meanwhile, he goes on flirting with Rosemonde and poor Andrée. When he hears that Albertine's aunt, Mme. Bontemps, is arriving for a visit, he desperately wants an introduction to her. So of course he pretends he doesn't, repeatedly scorning Mme. Bontemps to Andrée, while in the meantime arranging an introduction through Elstir. When he tells Andrée that he is invited to meet Albertine's aunt, though he really doesn't want to, she reacts as one might expect her to: "'I knew it all along!' Andrée exclaimed bitterly, gazing away at some invisible point, her eyes enlarged and flawed by displeasure."

Day Sixty-Five: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, pp. 465-480

From "One morning, not long after the day..." to "...the dormant immediacy of its charm.'"

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As the narrator becomes more involved with the gang of girls, the focus of his attention shifts from Albertine to first one and then another, from Gisèle to Rosemonde to Andrée. Gisèle, "the one who looked rather poor and tough," greets him with "a smile, open and affectionate and full of blue eyes." He is walking with Albertine and Andrée, who snub Gisèle, Andrée accusing her of "awful dishonesty" and Albertine referring to her as "a little pest." But on learning that Gisèle is leaving for Paris, the narrator decides to slip away and follow her: "Gisèle would not be surprised to to see me, and once we had changed trains at Doncières, we would have a corridor train to Paris; while the English governess dozed, I would have Gisèle all to myself.... I could have assured her with total veracity that I was no longer attracted to Albertine." 

But he misses the train, so he goes back to his pursuit of the other girls, "all of them having stayed on in Balbec." Gisèle "now could not have been further from my thoughts." He begins spending every day with them, making excuses not to go on a carriage ride with Mme. de Villeparisis, staying away from Elstir's studio unless the girls go there, breaking his promise to visit Saint-Loup. "The Andrée who had struck me to begin with as being the most unfriendly of them all was in fact much more sensitive, affectionate, and astute than Albertine." (Does it need to be pointed out that Andrée is the third girl he's fallen for who has the feminized version of a man's name?) He now finds in Albertine "something of the Gilberte I had known in the earliest days, the explanation of which is that there is a degree of resemblance between the women we love at different times." He also notes that "Andrée, who was extremely wealthy, showed great generosity in sharing her luxury with Albertine, who was poor and an orphan." 

In the company of the girls, he finally pays a visit to Elstir, where the talk turns to the artistic potential of "regattas and gatherings of sportsmen, where women are suffused by the glaucous glow of a seaside racecourse," to women's fashion, and to yachting.