Marcel Proust, The Sweet Cheat Gone (aKA The Fugitive) (Vol 11) Trans CK Scott Moncrieff, 1961 Chatto & Windus, London.
Grief and oblivion
“Mademoiselle Albertine est disparue!” announced Françoise, a phrase that occasioned Marcel an anguish so keen that he found it unbearable, and caused his hands to sweat. Françoise brought him Albertine’s letter announcing the bad news, “that there has been a change in our relations”, and that it was better that they part as friends, addressing Marcel as “my dear friend” and “my dear old boy” nevertheless, Marcel despatches Saint-Loup to intercede on his behalf via her aunt, Mme Bontemps. Marcel writes to Albertine a letter of greater length (falsely) accepting that it is all over between them.
Meanwhile, while doing Albertine’s room, Françoise, who loathes her, comes across her jewellery, two rings, in a drawer. Françoise alludes to the fact that they must have been given to her by another admirer. Albertine responds to Marcel’s letter, accepting what he has said and, as it were signing off. Marcel pretends that he has not received this letter and writes her another telling her that he has asked Andrée to move in with him in her place. All the while, Marcel is playing a game of cat and mouse with Françoise dropping hints that she may yet return. Saint-Loup returns from his mission apologising for not keeping in touch, and explains that in entering the house in Touraine where Albertine was living with her aunt he “passed a shed, entered the house and at the end of a long passage was shown into a drawing-room”. This causes Marcel some anguish because he never imagined the house where Albertine was staying having these attributes and phantasises that Albertine may be having affairs there. What is worse, Albertine is actually in the house singing when Saint-Loup calls and thus becomes aware of the latter’s mission. Marcel becomes paranoid about Saint-Loup’s intentions, thinking he may have organised a plot to separate him from Albertine.
Marcel now regrets his earlier off-handedness and sends Albertine a telegram begging her to return. He receives a telegram from her aunt in response telling him that Albertine has been killed in a horse-riding accident. He then receives not one but two posthumous letters from Albertine, one written shortly after the other, the latter asking him to take her back. He reminisces about their time together, which now all seems rather surreal since she is no more. He recalls a time at Balbec when her bath-wrap came under discussion and she blushed. He recalls rumours at the time that she and other ladies were frequenting the hotel’s bathing facilities “not merely for the purpose of taking baths”. Now looking at this in a whole new light, even though Albertine is now no more, he is jealous and commissions the hotel’s headwaiter, Aimé, to investigate.
“Mademoiselle Albertine est disparue!” announced Françoise, a phrase that occasioned Marcel an anguish so keen that he found it unbearable, and caused his hands to sweat. Françoise brought him Albertine’s letter announcing the bad news, “that there has been a change in our relations”, and that it was better that they part as friends, addressing Marcel as “my dear friend” and “my dear old boy” nevertheless, Marcel despatches Saint-Loup to intercede on his behalf via her aunt, Mme Bontemps. Marcel writes to Albertine a letter of greater length (falsely) accepting that it is all over between them.
Meanwhile, while doing Albertine’s room, Françoise, who loathes her, comes across her jewellery, two rings, in a drawer. Françoise alludes to the fact that they must have been given to her by another admirer. Albertine responds to Marcel’s letter, accepting what he has said and, as it were signing off. Marcel pretends that he has not received this letter and writes her another telling her that he has asked Andrée to move in with him in her place. All the while, Marcel is playing a game of cat and mouse with Françoise dropping hints that she may yet return. Saint-Loup returns from his mission apologising for not keeping in touch, and explains that in entering the house in Touraine where Albertine was living with her aunt he “passed a shed, entered the house and at the end of a long passage was shown into a drawing-room”. This causes Marcel some anguish because he never imagined the house where Albertine was staying having these attributes and phantasises that Albertine may be having affairs there. What is worse, Albertine is actually in the house singing when Saint-Loup calls and thus becomes aware of the latter’s mission. Marcel becomes paranoid about Saint-Loup’s intentions, thinking he may have organised a plot to separate him from Albertine.
Marcel now regrets his earlier off-handedness and sends Albertine a telegram begging her to return. He receives a telegram from her aunt in response telling him that Albertine has been killed in a horse-riding accident. He then receives not one but two posthumous letters from Albertine, one written shortly after the other, the latter asking him to take her back. He reminisces about their time together, which now all seems rather surreal since she is no more. He recalls a time at Balbec when her bath-wrap came under discussion and she blushed. He recalls rumours at the time that she and other ladies were frequenting the hotel’s bathing facilities “not merely for the purpose of taking baths”. Now looking at this in a whole new light, even though Albertine is now no more, he is jealous and commissions the hotel’s headwaiter, Aimé, to investigate.
After a time, Aimé reports back and Marcel’s worst fears are realised – Albertine was accustomed to having trysts, with a mysterious older, taller lady in grey, shut up in the dressing box adjacent to the baths and they weren’t “just stringing beads”. Albertine also spent time there with younger women. Marcel determines to know more, this time as to how Ambertine was conducting herself in the region of Mme Bontemp’s villa. He lavishes more money on Aimé's investigation. This time Aimé discovers that she has been having an affair with a young laundress, whom she had actually bitten in one of their passionate encounters. They often met on the banks of the Loire where they went bathing in a secluded spot. One such encounter was only a few days before she met her death. Marcel realises that this was a different Albertine to the one he knew, “heaping up lies and deceits one upon another”. He regrets not being able to say to her directly, I know everything - the laundress on the bank of the Loire, You said to her “Oh, it’s just heavenly”. I have seen the bite!” He wishes he could have known the true Albertine whom he would have accepted despite her caprices.
In an episode of involuntary memory, he ties a scarf behind his neck instead of in front, and recalls a drive he and Albertine went on, which he had never thought about since, preceding the which Albertine had arranged his scarf thus after kissing him so that he wouldn’t catch cold. The memory of this drive gave him the same pleasure as one might attach to intimate objects of a deceased person once held dear. His grief was enriched by it, “all the more so because he had never since given another thought to the scarf in question”. He muses about the contradiction between the living memory of Albertine and his consciousness of her death. What surprises him was that Albertine who no longer existed should nevertheless remain so, living in himself. He begins to grow accustomed to the idea of her death, despite constant reminders that renew his grief.
Some time after Albertine’s death, Andrée pays him a visit and he questions her about her relationship with Albertine. She admits her own inclination, but denies any impropriety with Albertine. He concludes that this is because during her life, Albertine had requested her to deny it if asked. He continues to reflect upon his relationship with Albertine and in so doing he conjures up the happy memories of the many places they visited together such as Balbec and Combray, now intimately linking them to present-day experiences. He realises that before he reaches the stage of indifference, he will have travelled the full course of their relationship again, but this time in reverse direction.
In an episode of involuntary memory, he ties a scarf behind his neck instead of in front, and recalls a drive he and Albertine went on, which he had never thought about since, preceding the which Albertine had arranged his scarf thus after kissing him so that he wouldn’t catch cold. The memory of this drive gave him the same pleasure as one might attach to intimate objects of a deceased person once held dear. His grief was enriched by it, “all the more so because he had never since given another thought to the scarf in question”. He muses about the contradiction between the living memory of Albertine and his consciousness of her death. What surprises him was that Albertine who no longer existed should nevertheless remain so, living in himself. He begins to grow accustomed to the idea of her death, despite constant reminders that renew his grief.
Some time after Albertine’s death, Andrée pays him a visit and he questions her about her relationship with Albertine. She admits her own inclination, but denies any impropriety with Albertine. He concludes that this is because during her life, Albertine had requested her to deny it if asked. He continues to reflect upon his relationship with Albertine and in so doing he conjures up the happy memories of the many places they visited together such as Balbec and Combray, now intimately linking them to present-day experiences. He realises that before he reaches the stage of indifference, he will have travelled the full course of their relationship again, but this time in reverse direction.
2 Habit - an annihilating force which suppresses the originality and even our consciousness of our perceptions; now I perceived it as a dread deity, so riveted to ourself, its meaningless attitude so incrusted in our heart, that if it detaches itself, if it turns away from us, this deity which we can barely distinguish inflicts upon us sufferings more terrible than any other and is then as cruel as death itself.
12 The sources of great events are like those of rivers, in vain do we explore the earth's surface, we can never find them. 22 Diplomacy The spirit in which Albertine had left me was similar no doubt to that of the nations who pave the way by a demonstration of their armed force for the exercise of their diplomacy. 25 What we call experience is merely the revelation to our own eyes of a trait in our character which naturally reappears, and reappears all the more markedly because we have already brought it into prominence of own accord, so that the spontaneous impulse which guided us on the first occasion finds itself reinforced by all the suggestions of memory. The human plagiarism which is most difficult to avoid, for individuals (and even for nations which persevere in their faults and continue to aggravate them) is the plagiarism of ourself. 36 The incident with the little girl There are moments in life when a sort of beauty is created by the multiplicity of the troubles that assail us, intertwined like Wagnerian leitmotiv, from the idea also, which then emerges, that events are not situated in the content of the reflections portrayed in the wretched little mirror which the mind holds in front of it and which is called the future, that they are somewhere outside, and spring up as suddenly as a person who comes to accuse us of a crime. 41 And when I thought that I had not lived chastely with her (Albertine), I found in the punishment that had been inflicted upon me for having forced an unknown little girl to accept money, that relation which almost always exists in human sanctions, the effect of which is that there is hardly ever either a fair sentence or a judicial error, but a sort of compromise between the false idea that the judge forms of an innocent action and the culpable deeds of which he is unaware. 46-7 The bonds that unite another person to ourself exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter relaxes them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would fain be cheated and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we cheat other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying. 61 .. born of our belief in the success of our enterprise, it is simply an anticipation of the disappointment which we should very soon feel in the presence of a satisfied desire. |
70 .. to see whether I was not inventing, in the same way in which, when the butler, to make her (Françoise) angry, read out to her, changing the words, some political news which she hesitated to believe, as for instance the report of the closing of the churches and expulsion of the clergy,..
90-1 Oblivion and indifference Marcel ruminates on forgetting Gilberte, Mme de Guermantes, his grandmother and now Albertine: And it is our most cruel punishment, for that so complete oblivion, as tranquil as the oblivion of the graveyard, by which we have detached ourself from those whom we no longer love, that we can see this same oblivion to be inevitable in the case of those whom we love still. To tell the truth, we know it to be a state not painful, a state of indifference. 99 Our memories, humours, ideas sail out of sight and when we awake cruise upon the consciousness of our consciousness We exist only by virtue of what we possess; we possess only what is really present to us, and so many of our memories, our humours, our ideas set out to voyage far away from us, until they are lost to sight! Then we can no longer make them enter into our reckoning of the total which is our personality. But they know of secret paths by which to return to us. And… on awakening I found a whole fleet of memories which had come to cruise upon the surface of my clearest consciousness, and seemed marvelously distinct. 100-1 We do not constitute simply one person but countless persons as we weave our passage through life A little statuette as we drove to the island, a large, calm, coarsely-grained face above the pianola, she was thus by turns rain-soaked and swift, provoking and diaphanous, motionless and smiling, an angel of music. So that what would have to be obliterated in me was not one only, but countless Albertines. Each of these was thus attached to a moment to the date of which I found myself carried back when I saw again that particular Albertine. And the moments of the past do not remain still; they retain in our memory the motion which drew them towards the future, towards a future which has itself become the past, and draw us on in their train. It was not Albertine alone that was simply a series of moments, it was also myself:.. I was not one man only, but the steady advance hour after hour of an army in close formation, in which there appeared, according to the moment impassioned men, indifferent men, jealous men no two of whom were jealous of the same woman. In a composite mass, these elements may, one by one, without our noticing it, be replaced by others, which others again eliminate or reinforce, until in the end a change has been brought about which it would be impossible to conceive if we were a single person. 102-3 Jealousy and the past which is always present And now, what lay before me, like a counterpart of the future – as absorbing as the future because it was equally uncertain, as difficult to decipher, as mysterious…- was no longer Albertine’s future, it was her Past. Her Past! That is the wrong word, since for jealousy there can be neither past nor future, and what it invariably imagines is invariably the present. |
103 Memory All of a sudden it was an impression which I had not felt for a long time - for it had remained dissolved in the fluid and invisible expanse of my memory, that became crystallised.
104 Sometimes I came in collision in the dark lanes of sleep with one of those bad dreams …. 109 We alter those we love to suit our own desires and fears There could be no denying that I had known people whose intelligence was greater. But the infinitude of love, or its egoism, has the result that the people whom we love are those whose intellectual and moral physiognomy is least defined objectively in our eyes, we alter them incessantly to suit our desires and fears, we do not separate them from ourself, they are only a vast and vague place in which our affections take root. We have not of our own body, into which flow perpetually so many discomforts and pleasures, as clear an outline as we have of a tree or house, or of a passer-by. 111-2 A simple crescent of bread, but one which we are eating, gives us more pleasure than all the ortolans, young rabbits and barbavelles that were set before Louis XIV and the blade of grass which, a few inches away, quivers before our eye, while we are lying upon the mountain-side, may conceal from us the sheer summit of another peak, if it is several miles away. 131 .People do not die at once for us, they remain bathed in a sort of aura of life in which there is no true immortality but which means that they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were travelling abroad. 132-3 We change day by day on our journey through life Desire is very powerful, it engenders belief; I had believed that Albertine would not leave me because I desired that she might not. I required that, after my own death, I should find her again in her body, as though eternity were like life. Life, did I say! Had she been alive, Albertine, even physically, would gradually have changed, day by day I should have adapted myself to that change. But my memory, calling up only detached moments of her life, asked to see her again as she would already have ceased to be, had she lived; what is required was a miracle which would satisfy the natural and arbitrary limitations of memory which cannot emerge from the past.. Her death being a sort of dream, my love would seem to her an unlooked for happiness; I saw in death only the convenience and optimism of a solution which simplifies, which arranges everything. 135 Albertine, subdivided according to a series of fractions of time Besides, from a single fact, if it is certain, can we not, like a scientist making experiments, extract the truth as to all the orders of similar facts? Is not a single little fact, if it is well chosen, sufficient to enable the experimenter to deduce a general law which will make him know the truth as to thousands of analogous facts? Albertine might indeed exist in my memory only m the state in which she had successively appeared to me in the course of her life, that is to say subdivided according to a series of fractions of time, my mind, reestablishing unity in her, made her a single person, and it was upon this person that I sought to bring a general judgment to bear, to know whether she had lied to me, whether she loved women, whether it was in order to be free to associate with them that she had left me.. 143-4 The optical error of seeking retrospective approbation for our actions after death When we try to consider what happens to us after our own death, is it not still our living self which by mistake we project before us? And is it much more absurd, when all is said, to regret that a woman who no longer exists is unaware that we have learned what she was doing six years ago than to desire of ourself, who will be dead, the public shall still speak with approval a century hence? If there is more real foundation in the latter than in the former case, the regrets of my retrospective jealousy proceeded none the less from the same optical error as in other men the desire for posthumous fame. 148-9 We love, even though the person we love is but a memory or dead No doubt there was nothing extraordinary in the fact that Albertine's death had so little altered my preoccupations. When our mistress is alive, a great part of the thoughts which form what we call our loves come to us during the hours when she is not by our side. Thus we have as the object of our meditation an absent person, and one who, even if she remains absent a few hours only, during those hours is no more than a memory. And so death does not make any great difference. I may say that throughout this year my life remained filled with love, with a true bond of affection. And she who was its object was a corpse. We say at times-that something may survive of a man after his death, if the man was an artist and took a certain amount of pains with his work. It is perhaps in the same way that a sort of cutting taken from one person and grafted on the heart of another continues to carry on its existence, even when the person from whom it had been detached has perished. |
162 But a healer of broken hearts, had such a person visited me, would have found that, in other respects, my grief itself was on the road to recovery. No doubt in myself, since I was a man, one of those amphibious creatures who are plunged simultaneously in the past and in the reality of the moment, there still existed a contradiction between the living memory of Albertine and my consciousness of her death. But this contradiction was so to speak the opposite of what it had been before. The idea that Albertine was dead, this idea which at first used to contest so furiously with the idea that she was alive that I was obliged to run away from as children run away from a breaking wave…had ended by capturing the place in my mind that, a short while ago, was still occupied by the idea of her life. 163 When monstrous reality becomes the norm People who were alive during the war of 1870, for instance, say that the idea of war ended by seeming to them natural, not because they were not thinking sufficiently of the war, but because they could think or nothing else… It was necessary for them to forget for a moment that war was being waged…until all of a sudden upon the momentary blank there stood out at length distinct the monstrous reality which they had long ceased to see, since there had been nothing else visible. 165 We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full. 175-6 When I raised a comer of the heavy curtain of habit (and stupefying habit which during the whole course of our life conceals from us almost the whole universe, and in the dead of night, without changing the label, substitutes for the most dangerous or intoxicating poisons of life some kind of anodyne which does not procure any delight), such a memory would come back to me as on the day of the incident itself with that fresh and piercing novelty of a recurring season, of a change in the routine of our hours, which, in the realm of pleasures also, if we get into a carriage on the first day in spring, or leave the house at sunrise, makes us observe our own insignificant actions with a lucid exaltation which makes that intense minute worth more than the sum-total of the preceding days… 176 Days in the past cover up little by little those that preceded them and are themselves buried beneath those that follow them. But each past day has remained deposited in us, as in a vast library in which there are older books, a volume which, doubtless, nobody will ever ask to see. And yet should this day from the past, traversing the lucidity of the subsequent epochs, rise to the surface and spread itself over us whom it entirely covers, then for a moment the names resume their former meaning, people their former aspect, we ourself our state of mind at the time, and we feel, with a vague suffering which however is endurable and will not last for long, the problems which have long ago become insoluble and which caused us such anguish at the time. Our ego is composed of the superimposition of our successive states. But this superimposition is not unalterable like the stratification of a mountain. Incessant upheavals raise to the surface ancient deposits. 186 No doubt it is only in our mind that we possess things, and we do not possess a picture because it hangs in our dining-room if we are incapable of understanding it, or a landscape because we live in front of it without even glancing at it. 187 .. Albertine’s physical and social attributes, in spite of which I loved her, attracted my desire on the contrary towards what at one time it would least readily have chosen: dark girls of the lower middle class. 193 The geometry of space, time, oblivion and reality As there is a geometry in space, so there is a psychology in time, in which the calculations of a plane psychology would no longer be accurate because we should not be taking into account time and one of the forms that it assumes, oblivion; oblivion, the force of which I was beginning to feel and which is so powerful an instrument of adaptation to reality because it gradually destroys in us the surviving past which is a perpetual contradiction of it. |