NP: In Search of Lost Time

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

I'm rounding the bend with Proust's masterwork, having 
finished Albertine Disparue during a power outage, 
thinking the following would be of interest to p-listers.
It's a longish excerpt, but somehow I'm reminded of 
Kit & Dally, long separations and what we're all doing
while we're busy making other plans:

. . . .In so many people there are different strata which are not 
alike (there were in her her father’s character, and her 
mother’s); we traverse first one, then the other. But, next 
day, their order is reversed. And finally we do not know 
who is going to allot the parts, to whom we are to appeal 
for a hearing. Gilberte was like one of those countries 
with which we dare not form an alliance because of their 
too frequent changes of government. But in reality this 
is a mistake. The memory of the most constant 
personality establishes a sort of identity in the person, 
with the result that he would not fail to abide by promises 
which he remembers even if he has not endorsed them. 
As for intelligence, it was in Gilberte, with certain 
absurdities that she had inherited from her mother, very 
keen. I remember that, in the course of our 
conversations while we took these walks, she said 
things which often surprised me greatly. The first was
: “If you were not too hungry and if it was not so late, 
by taking this road to the left and then turning to the 
right, in less than a quarter of an hour we should be 
at Guermantes.” It was as though she had said: “Turn 
to the left, then the first turning on the right and you will 
touch the intangible, you will reach the inaccessibly 
remote tracts of which we never upon earth know anything 
but the direction, but” (what I thought long ago to be all 
that I could ever know of Guermantes, and perhaps in a 
sense I had not been mistaken) “the ‘way.’” One of my 
other surprises was that of seeing the ‘source of the 
Vivonne’ which I imagined as something as extraterrestrial 
as the Gates of Hell, and which was merely a sort of 
rectangular basin in which bubbles rose to the surface. 
And the third occasion was when Gilberte said to me: 
“If you like, we might go out one afternoon, and then we 
can go to Guermantes, taking the road by Méséglise, it 
is the nicest walk,” a sentence which upset all my childish 
ideas by informing me that the two ‘ways’ were not as 
irreconcilable as I had supposed. But what struck me 
most forcibly was how little, during this visit, I lived over 
again my childish years, how little I desired to see 
Combray, how meagre and ugly I thought the Vivonne. 
But where Gilberte made some of the things come true 
that I had imagined about the Méséglise way was during 
one of those walks which after all were nocturnal even 
if we took them before dinner—for she dined so late. 
Before descending into the mystery of a perfect and 
profound valley carpeted with moonlight, we stopped for 
a moment, like two insects about to plunge into the blue 
calyx of a flower. Gilberte then uttered, perhaps simply 
out of the politeness of a hostess who is sorry that you 
are going away so soon and would have liked to shew you 
more of a country which you seem to appreciate, a speech 
of the sort in which her practice as a woman of the world 
skilled in putting to the best advantage silence, simplicity, 
sobriety in the expression of her feelings, makes you 
believe that you occupy a place in her life which no one 
else could fill. Showering abruptly over her the sentiment 
with which I was filled by the delicious air, the breeze that 
was wafted to my nostrils, I said to her: “You were 
speaking the other day of the little footpath, how I loved 
you then!” She replied: “Why didn’t you tell me? I had no 
idea of it. I was in love with you. Indeed, I flung myself 
twice at your head.” “When?” “The first time at Tansonville, 
you were taking a walk with your family, I was on my way 
home, I had never seen such a dear little boy. I was in the 
habit,” she went on with a vague air of modesty, “of going 
out to play with little boys I knew in the ruins of the keep of 
Roussainville. And you will tell me that I was a very naughty 
girl, for there were girls and boys there of all sorts who took 
advantage of the darkness. The altar-boy from Combray 
church, Théodore, who, I am bound to confess, was very 
nice indeed (Heavens, how charming he was!) and who 
has become quite ugly (he is the chemist now at 
Méséglise), used to amuse himself with all the peasant 
girls of the district. As they let me go out by myself, 
whenever I was able to get away, I used to fly there. I can’t 
tell you how I longed for you to come there too; I remember 
quite well that, as I had only a moment in which to make you 
understand what I wanted, at the risk of being seen by your 
people and mine, I signalled to you so vulgarly that I am 
ashamed of it to this day. But you stared at me so crossly 
that I saw that you didn’t want it.” And, all of a sudden, I 
said to myself that the true Gilberte—the true Albertine—
were perhaps those who had at the first moment yielded 
themselves in their facial expression, one behind the hedge 
of pink hawthorn, the other upon the beach. And it was I 
who, having been incapable of understanding this, having 
failed to recapture the impression until much later in my 
memory after an interval in which, as a result of our 
conversations, a dividing hedge of sentiment had made 
them afraid to be as frank as in the first moments—had 
ruined everything by my clumsiness. I had lost them 
more completely—albeit, to tell the truth, the comparative 
failure with them was less absurd—for the same reasons 
that had made Saint-Loup lose Rachel. . . .



. . . .Of the state of mind which, in that far off year, had 
been simply an unending torture to me, nothing survived. 
For there is in this world in which everything wears out, 
everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, 
that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind 
still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief. . . .

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/p96sw/chapter4.html