Albertine Gone: Chapter I (28th post)

 I have already indicated (see my 22^nd post) that for this part of the novel, I would be departing from Scott Moncrieff's volume titles as I find his use of The Sweet Cheat Gone, a line from Walter de la Mare's poem Ghost, to be forced, awkward and unsuitable. The title in French is Albertine disparue, but it was originally going to be La Fugitive, and publishers sometimes still use this latter title. That has prompted a number of English translators to call the volume The Fugitive, which has the merit of following on logically from The Captive. However, I think Albertine Gone is to be preferred because, although she was subject to Marcel's controlling behaviour, Albertine was not a prisoner as she was free to leave (see my 25^th and 27^th posts), which she did at the end of the previous volume. Accordingly, as she has not escaped, she is not a fugitive either. Albertine Gone is a more literal translation of Albertine disparue and importantly, like the French, contains a suggestion of something more than simple departure, a nuance to which we shall come later in this post.

On learning from Françoise that Albertine has left him, Marcel quickly discovers that he does not want, after all, what he had thought he wanted: “I had supposed that this separation without a final meeting was precisely what I wished” but he now feels “an anguish so keen that I would not be able to endure it for any length of time. And so what I had supposed to mean nothing to me was the only thing in my whole life. How ignorant we are of ourselves … I had been mistaken in thinking that I could see clearly into my own heart” (pp.1-2 XI Scott Moncrieff, pp.425-426 III Kilmartin). His shock is very great: the word “anguish” (“souffrance”) is used repeatedly; Françoise's announcement had opened up an “unimaginable hell”; he feels “horror”; his heart has been struck a “physical blow”; “this calamity was the greatest that I had experienced in my life”; and he suffers a “physical anguish which my heart … could endure no longer” (pp.8-15 XI SM, pp.430-435 III TK). Marcel, therefore, resolves to get Albertine to come back as quickly as possible and he asks Saint-Loup to go to her aunt's, where she is staying, as part of some unnecessarily convoluted plan in which, without Albertine seeing him, Robert is to offer the aunt money to give to her husband. Unfortunately, Albertine spots Robert, who has to abort the plan for the present. Marcel then receives a letter from Albertine in which she chides him for having sent an emissary and says: “My dear boy, if you needed me why did you not write to me myself, I should have been only too delighted to come back, do not let us have any more of these absurd complications” (pp.33, 48-50 XI SM, pp.448-461 III TK).

Marcel replies expressing the opposite of what he feels and wants. Too late he realises the possible counter-productivity of his disingenuous strategy: “No doubt, just as I had said in the past to Albertine: 'I am not in love with you,' in order that she might love me; 'I forget people when I do not see them,' in order that she might come often to see me; 'I have decided to leave you,' in order to forestall any idea of a parting, now it was because I was absolutely determined that she must return within a week that I said to her: 'Farewell for ever'; it was because I wished to see her again that I said to her: 'I think it would be dangerous to see you'; it was because living apart from her seemed to me worse than death that I wrote to her: 'You were right, we should be wretched together.' Alas, this false letter, when I wrote it in order to appear not to be dependent upon her and also to enjoy the pleasure of saying certain things which could arouse emotion only in myself and not in her, I ought to have foreseen from the start that it was possible that it would result in a negative response” (pp.51-55 XI SM, pp.462-465 III TK). What an idiot!

Marcel realises that, before posting his letter, he ought to have thought about what he would do if Albertine replied negatively, but at the time he had been confident that his letter would make her return. He then begins to regret sending it because if she came back it would lead to their “disastrous” marriage. Luckily, Françoise has not yet posted it. But Marcel changes his mind again: he still hopes Albertine will not return, but it has to be her decision (pp.56-57 XI SM, pp.465-467 III TK). Despite this, he is angry with Saint-Loup when he returns and tells Marcel that the plan did not work on Albertine's aunt. He reflects: “How I should have been lying now had I written to her, as I used to say to her in Paris, that I hoped that no accident might befall her. Ah! if some accident had occurred, my life, instead of being poisoned for ever by this incessant jealousy, would at once regain, if not happiness, at least a state of calm through the suppression of suffering” (pp.75-81 XI SM, pp.480-484 III TK).

Picture by Henry Hintermeister

However, his mood swings once more and he sends her “a despairing telegram begging her to return on any conditions. It is at this point that he receives a telegram from Albertine's aunt informing him that Albertine has died in a riding accident. Very shortly afterwards, by a cruel twist of fate, a letter arrives from Albertine, which was written just before her death, asking him to take her back (pp.82-84 XI SM, pp.485-487 III TK). We now see why Albertine Gone is a more suitable title than The Fugitive. We are only a fifth of the way into the volume and if Albertine were ever a fugitive – which she was not – she certainly is not one for the remaining four-fifths. Furthermore, “Albertine disparue” carries with it a hint of death - “disparition” can mean death, while “disparu(e)” used as a noun can mean a dead person, and although “disparue” is here being used as an adjective which does not carry that connotation, nevertheless, by an association of ideas, the idea of Albertine's demise is very subtly whispered. And “Albertine Gone” also bears a secondary meaning suggestive of her death.

Marcel discovers that Albertine lives on within him after her death: “For the death of Albertine to be able to suppress my suffering, the shock of the fall [from her horse] would have had to kill her not only [where she fell] but in myself. There, never had she been more alive”. She had entered into his memory in the form of a succession of momentary flashes which remain, as his memory is not affected by anything that happens afterwards. “To find consolation, it was not one, it was innumerable Albertines that I must first forget. When I had reached the stage of enduring the grief of losing this Albertine, I must begin afresh with another, with a hundred others” (p.85 XI SM, p.487 III TK). But what is left of her within him? “She is now comparable with the unsubstantial images, with the memories left us by the characters in a novel which we have been reading” (p.128 XI SM, p.519 III TK). Marcel wants more than that: “My imagination sought for her in the sky, through the nights on which we had gazed at it when still together; beyond that moonlight which she loved, I tried to raise up to her my affection so that it might be a consolation to her for being no longer alive, and this love for a being so remote was like a religion, my thoughts rose towards her like prayers” (p.132 XI SM, p.522 III TK).

And just as Albertine lives on within him, so do his suspicions and jealousy. Marcel sends Aimé (the maitre d' at the Grand Hotel in Balbec) to make inquiries about Albertine at the local baths, where a woman who worked there tells him that she remembers Albertine coming with other women and girls (pp.136-138 XI SM, pp.525-526 III TK). This arouses in Marcel a “retrospective jealousy”, although it is not clear that it provides conclusive confirmation of his suspicions, which he eventually realises himself: “What importance could the story have that the woman had told Aimé? Especially as, after all, she had seen nothing. A girl can come and take baths with her friends without having any evil intention” (p.144 XI SM, pp.530-531 III TK). However, a little later Aimé sends Marcel more evidence of Albertine's lesbianism, which makes him reflect: “What I had possessed of her, what I carried in my heart, was only quite a small part of her … [she] had deceived me as to her profoundest humanity, the fact that she did not belong to the ordinary human race, but to an alien race which moves among it; conceals itself among it and never blends with it” (pp.149-153 XI SM, pp.535-537 III TK). This reaction goes too far and is contradicted a couple of pages later when he considers the “many Albertines” and remembers some of them who had been good, intelligent, serious and sporty: “If a vicious Albertine had existed, it did not mean that there had not been others, she who enjoyed talking to me about Saint-Simon”. And imaging a conversation with her about Aimé's claim, he considers, from her point of view, that Aimé had made up the story rather than report back with nothing. He then reaches the mature conclusion that “if the story was true, and Albertine had concealed her tastes from me, it was in order not to make me unhappy” (pp.156-158 XI SM, pp.540-541 III TK).

Marcel's obsessive quest to discover posthumously Albertine's sexuality continues when Andrée visits him. He begins by pretending that he already knows of Andrée's fondness for women and of her relations with Mlle Vinteuil's friend, which she then freely admits. Encouraged by this easy success, he now pretends he knows about her and Albertine, but Andrée informs him that Albertine did not have those tastes: “I never did anything with Albertine, and I am convinced that she detested that sort of thing. The people who told you were lying to you, probably with some ulterior motive”. After Andrée leaves, Marcel realises that “so definitive a statement had brought me peace of mind”, but it does not last – his jealousy and suspicions immediately resume as he imagines Albertine had begged Andrée never to reveal the truth (pp.178-184 XI SM, pp.556-560 III TK).

Marcel's taste in girls is now based on their likeness to Albertine or their being the sort that would have appealed to her, such as “dark sorts of the lower middles class”, and he observes: “I could now understand the widowers whom we suppose to have found consolation and who prove on the contrary that they are inconsolable when they marry their deceased wife's sister.” And when he contemplates all the other attributes the girl should have (wanting to live with him, kissing him goodnight, playing Vinteuil's music, talking about Elstir), he realises that finding such a girl is impossible. Besides which, any such girl would make him “all the more conscious of the absence of what I had been unconsciously seeking, of what was indispensable to the revival of my happiness, that is to say, Albertine herself” and he concludes that “she alone could give me that happiness” (pp.185-192 XI SM, pp.563-567 III TK).

However, in time, Marcel's love for Albertine changes because “oblivion […] gradually destroys in us the surviving past”. He accepts that “my love was not so much a love for her as a love in myself” and so, as it was “a mental state, it might easily long survive the person, but also that having no genuine connection with that person, it must, like every mental state, even the most permanent, find itself one day obsolete” (pp.193-194 XI SM, p.568 III TK).