The Fugitive
PENGUIN CLASSICS DELUXE EDITION
THE FUGITIVE
marcel proust was born in Auteuil in 1871. In his twenties he became a conspicious society figure, frequenting the most fashionable Paris salons of the day. After 1899, however, his chronic asthma, the death of his parents and his growing disillusionment with humanity caused him to lead an increasingly retired life. From 1907 he rarely emerged from a cork-lined room on the Boulevard Haussmann. Here he insulated himself against the distractions of city life, as well as the effect of the trees and flowers—though he loved them they brought on his attacks of asthma. He slept by day and worked by night, writing letters and devoting himself to the completion of In Search of Lost Time. He died in 1922.
peter collier is senior lecturer in French at Cambridge University and a fellow of Sidney Sussex College. He has previously translated Pierre Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus and Émile Zola’s Germinal, and has written a book on Proust and Venice.
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Albertine disparue first published 1925
This translation first published in Great Britain by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 2002
Published in Penguin Books 2021
Translation, introduction, and notes copyright © 2002 by Peter Collier
Note on the translation copyright © 2002 by Lydia Davis
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library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922, author. | Collier, Peter, 1942– translator. | Prendergast, Christopher, editor.
Title: The fugitive / Marcel Proust ; translated with an introduction and
notes by Peter Collier ; general editor: Christopher Prendergast.
Other titles: Albertine disparue. English
Description: New York : Penguin Books, 2021. | Series: In search of lost time ; 6 | Albertine disparue first published in 1925. This English
translation first published in Great Britain by Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2002. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2020023559 (print) | LCCN 2020023560 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143133704 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525505532 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PQ2631.R63 A96413 2021 (print) | LCC PQ2631.R63 (ebook) | DDC 843/.912—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023559
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023560
Cover design: Kelly Blair
pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0
Contents
Introduction, by Peter Collier
A Note on the Translation, by Lydia Davis
THE FUGITIVE
Chapter 1. Grieving and Forgetting
Chapter 2. Mademoiselle de Forcheville
Chapter 3. Staying in Venice
Chapter 4. A New Side to Robert de Saint-Loup
Notes
Synopsis
Introduction
the fugitive (together with the prisoner) appears to form an integral element of In Search of Lost Time. The disappearance of Albertine, Marcel’s anguish, and his first intuitions of the recovery of past selves while in Venice, seem to lead inevitably into the revelations of Finding Time Again. However, Proust’s original plan included only an imprecise role for Albertine. As we know from his notebooks, the original cautionary tale of Swann’s frustrated love for Odette was a model which was intended to run smoothly into the narrator’s similar disappointments in love, art and society, with Marcel’s amorous interests and experience dispersed between his childhood relationship with Gilberte and a variety of young women met later at Balbec and elsewhere, and his ultimate meeting with Gilberte on his return to society after his illness. It was only in 1914, after the publication of The Way by Swann’s and while he was already working on In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, that Proust started to feel the need to develop a new, major section concentrating the narrator’s own experience of sexuality, jealousy, anxiety and loss into his relationship with Albertine, and linking it to other virtuoso but unplaced passages—Marcel’s reading of his article in the Figaro and his visit to Venice—creating a new dialectic of desire and creativity.
Between The Way by Swann’s and Finding Time Again lay the open wastes of superficial encounters with artists and high society, attractive enough to Marcel, but destined ultimately to disappoint him. As Proust continued to write, this central part was steadily expanded from being contained within the Guermantes volumes to occupy the further volumes of Sodom and Gomorrah. Between 1914 and his death in 1922, Proust moved much material concerning Albertine back and forth between the various volumes of Sodom and Gomorrah (where The Prisoner, The Fugitive and Finding Time Again took on their separate identities only toward the end of Proust’s life). The Fugitive finally assumed a dual function: on the one hand as the apotheosis of sexual passion and the jealous quest to know the elusive object of desire, on the other, as the premise of Marcel’s rediscovery of self and its inner sources of creativity, which the protagonist had seemed for so long to have lost, and which would structure Finding Time Again. The Fugitive was first published in 1925 from the 1917 dictated manuscript corrected by Jacques Rivière, Jean Paulhan and Proust’s brother Robert; a fuller version, with variants, was used for the 1954 Pléiade edition. Editors differ in their opinions as to what was actually written, finally revised and ultimately intended by Proust. Matters were complicated by the existence of Proust’s separate review publication of a different version of “Staying in Venice” in 1919, and the acquisition by the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1962 and the publication by Nathalie Mauriac in 1986 of another Fugitive (edited by Proust, and probably intended to be published separately). The Pléiade edition here translated is the best assessment of what Proust would have published if he had lived (although he notoriously rewrote whenever faced with queries by typists or editors).
The Fugitive is in many ways a novel, or even a drama, of identity. One function is to develop Marcel’s realization that gender and desire are often misleading and usually ambiguous. The homosexuality of Charlus and the bisexuality of Saint-Loup are gradually affirmed against the background of Albertine’s lesbian relationships. These orientations turn out to be systematic for Proust. Like Freud, he sees a fundamental bisexuality in the human animal. The discovery by Marcel of Albertine’s likely sexual relations with Andrée or Léa, or her casual encounters in the showers at Balbec, leads him to realize that he did not know her thoughts or desires. And as happened for Swann with Odette, it is this failure to know the beloved, this failure to grasp the core of another person’s being, which leads Marcel into an anguished search for the inner truth of Albertine even after her death, since as long as he fails to find the object of his desire, he cannot, by definition, know the nature of his own passion. Desire, love and jealousy in Proust are all part of a search for truth and knowledge. Albertine, like Gilberte, indeed like Charlus and Saint-Loup, constantly reveals hidden selves, while suggesting yet others, unknown or unknowable. Marcel’s whole project as mature narrator is an investigation into the self, as he struggles to reconstruct his past, while simultaneously displaying and analyzing his own tendency toward self-deception. Proust shows a quasi-Freudian insight into the processes of negation, repression and displacement, as Marcel’s feelings for the alle
gedly forgotten Albertine erupt here and there in devious guises—through the taste of cherries, a shade of twilight or a half-remembered phrase. The focus is also on the dynamic search for his own elusive selves, a search which drives the older Marcel’s narrative and the younger protagonist’s obsessive desire for knowledge of Albertine and exploration of his own suffering and jealousy, leading to a continual process of interpretation by Marcel of all the surface signs of meaning inscribed by individuals in their relations with him and society. These hypotheses, these fictions, these scenarios are also symptomatically woven around past experience, as whole areas of Albertine’s missing life are rewritten by Marcel in order to make sense of the psychodrama that the two lovers had been enacting. Marcel’s attempts to interpret Albertine are constantly deflected—by Aimé’s unreliable letters, by Albertine’s misinterpreted telegrams, by Marcel’s failure to recognize Gilberte at the Guermantes.
All of these misreadings could be seen as part of a general comedy or tragedy of social misunderstanding and psychological failure to grasp the nature of other people, as well as one’s own self. These fluctuations and deliberate ambiguities include the resonant interchange of names and situations between Gilberte and Albertine. Gilberte, the daughter of Swann, was as elusive and unfaithful to the young Marcel in The Way by Swann’s as her mother had been to Swann himself. Now in The Fugitive it is Albertine who repeats the role of the evasive and fleeting fugitive. Their similar-sounding names lead to moments of high drama as Gilberte’s telegram announcing her return and marriage are misread by Marcel as announcing the return from the dead of Albertine and even a marriage proposal from her. Thus the relationship between Saint-Loup and Gilberte in marriage will ironically re-echo those of Marcel and Albertine, and of Swann and Odette. The ironies of fate and reversals of fortune which punctuate In Search of Lost Time, and which culminate in the revelation of the work of time, aging and death in Finding Time Again, are already accelerating in The Fugitive, which presents the outcome of tendencies, actions and facts half-hidden in previous volumes. This process of coming out, revelation and discovery of latent truths prefigures the crucial insight provided at the end of The Fugitive by the realization that the apparently separate Guermantes and Méséglise ways not only lie side by side, but actually meet outside Marcel’s garden gate. And a key factor in this gradual revelation of what people are and how we construct their topology includes the position of the narrator himself as the protagonist who has in fact been guiding us forward and showing us significant moments of his past, without fully revealing or even grasping their significance.
It is in The Fugitive that Marcel at last gains more insight into the key moments of temporal and spatial overlap initiated by the mysterious “epiphany” of the founding madeleine incident in the “Combray” section of The Way by Swann’s. As the sights and sensations of Venice trigger a revival within him of the dead Albertine, he starts to understand the mechanisms of involuntary memory, stored in the senses. The Baptistery of St. Mark’s and the canals of Venice reactivate the experience of the church and the streets of Combray. As daytime Combray lay embedded in the lime-flower tea, so artistic and spiritual Combray lies embedded in the stones and canals of Venice. But Marcel’s retrieval of lost memories is offset by his terror during the moments when he has premonitions of the possibility of forgetting, the possibility of learning to let go of the all-pervasive and all-important emotion of love which previously structured his whole existence. Marcel retrospectively remembers moments of anxious anticipation just as he imagines in advance moments when he will have forgotten what he is now feeling. For in fact we negotiate with the memory of our emotions, as much as, if not more than, with our raw emotions themselves.
From the start of The Fugitive, the narrator notes a split between his intellect and his intuition. He understands rationally that Albertine has left, but all his emotional and bodily responses continue to behave as if she were still there. The problem is that the rational mind is situated at one present moment in time, and does not take into account the whole series of successive selves that we have been over a period of time. We have constructed ourselves largely from a series of habitual actions and visions. The interplay of conscious and unconscious memory structures the dreams and fantasies which occupy most of Marcel’s time in The Fugitive. The force at work behind the dialectic of remembering and forgetting is largely that of the unconscious—and Proust is one of the earliest modern novelists to use “the unconscious” as a noun. His retrospective narrative is interrupted, for instance by a dream of his dead grandmother turned to marble but walking around the room. Likewise, his waking thoughts, too, often assume a dreamlike quality as every seasonal sound and every change of weather bring back visions of past days spent with Albertine, or imagined scenarios of future days spent either together or alone. It is above all this dynamics of remembering, forgetting, dreaming, hypothesizing and imagining which drives the narrative, sometimes forward, sometimes backward and sometimes in spirals.
This may explain why Proust’s style is often wrongly assumed to be composed solely of long and tortuous sentences. In fact Proust does not have, or use, one single style in In Search of Lost Time as a whole, nor in this volume. He uses many voices, ranging from Norpois’s diplomatic pedantry and Aimé’s semi-educated letters, through Françoise’s rustic wisdom, to the conscious exchange of witticisms at the Guermantes salon. Proust is of course noted for his use of metaphor, which has a structural and functional role to play in his whole aesthetic, with its implied rejection of appearances and reality. But although the proliferation of metaphors used by Marcel is a sign of his rich and potentially creative imagination, at the same time Proust’s references and metaphors are usually highly precise, scientific even, drawing on his interest in biology, medicine and chemistry. Proust, like Freud, uses metaphors taken from archaeology, hydraulics and thermodynamics to show how throughout our lives our identity is constantly fractured and shifting; our different selves rise to the surface and fall away, surge forward only to be repressed, or come into conflict with each other in the ebb and flow of psychological and emotional experience.
At other moments, however, Proust’s style may be concise and aphoristic. Marcel’s long and intricate analyses may be punctuated or summarized by brief maxims worthy of La Rochefoucauld, or interrupted by sudden attempts of the will to seize control of his obsessional fantasies, procrastination and doubt. Proust’s use of tenses reinforces the dynamics of memory, imagination and waiting, as elaborate interference between the past historic and the imperfect disrupts the usual relations between singular events, repeated acts and habitual states. Past information may be translated into the future or the conditional tenses, engendering new hypotheses, or the imperfect subjunctive may reveal Marcel’s refusal of visual or verbal reality. It is true that in The Fugitive Proust’s style is unusually tortuous, repetitive, hesitant and self-questioning, as it reflects the obsessions and ramblings of the anxious, obsessively suspicious and jealous mind, but this is a performative use of language, enacting the temporal turmoil and fluctuating will of the anguished Marcel.
In The Fugitive we also recognize aspects of Marcel’s artistic creativity in the context of a more profound experience of reading and writing in general. By the time Marcel is living with Albertine, he has discovered and traversed the desert of Guermantes high society, and has failed to build on the creative intuitions which he had felt when faced with the three steeples of Martinville. His disappointments seem confirmed by the failure of Swann to write, as well as by the shallowness of the novelist Bergotte and the neglect and the suffering of the composer Vinteuil. Marcel’s only creative feat has been an article written for the Figaro which has not even been published. When this article suddenly appears it surprises Marcel, who at first reacts as reader rather than author. He struggles to recognize phrases which he had produced but forgotten. But then the process of reading recreates in his mind a performance which repeats, in anothe
r key, the performance of writing. For a moment, perhaps, Marcel becomes the author of the book that we are reading, as the narrative starts freewheeling in an extraordinary shift into the present tense, uniting the timescales of thinking, writing and reading.
Themes of writing and creativity flicker through The Fugitive, sometimes ironically, sometimes mysteriously, but always in counterpoint to Marcel’s overt concern with desire and with the knowledge of the object of that desire. His visual imagination is often privileged as Marcel learns of Albertine’s seaside and riverside adventures. He constantly visualizes her erotic experience in terms of painting. He remembers Elstir’s paintings of nude bathers (and we suspect that Proust himself is remembering similar paintings by Courbet and Cézanne), then he projects such images retrospectively on to the figure of Albertine. In its turn this artistically derived image is developed, creating a new configuration of naked statues cavorting at Versailles. Marcel proceeds to feed these images back into the reality of Albertine’s desire. But then his mind leaps out again into myth and the imagination, with memories and fantasies based on Leda and the swan. In all this, Marcel is to some extent repeating the experience of Swann, who mapped on to the figure of Odette the visual experience of a Botticelli painting and the musical experience of listening to Vinteuil, before reading back from Odette these reflections of artistic form which he himself had placed in her. For much of the novel before The Fugitive Marcel seemed likely to follow the model of Swann, who subordinated his creative energies to conversation, seduction and dilettantism. Now in The Fugitive, however, we see that even in his jealous fantasies, Marcel is starting to weave more complex mental paintings around the figure of Albertine, rather in the manner of Elstir, whose painting has already been interpreted by Marcel in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower as a process of creative interchange of substances and qualities whereby, for instance, the sea is expressed in terms of land, and vice versa—the epitome of metaphor. This tendency is no doubt confirmed in the section “Staying in Venice,” where the absence of Albertine, gradually accepted by the mind and learned by the body and the emotions, leaves Marcel free to accomplish his long-deferred trip to Venice, quintessential city of art.