Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 5: The Fugitive (translated by Peter Collier), Albertine disparue, La fugitive, The Sweet Cheat Gone

The Fugitive (The Sweet Cheat Gone)

The two-minute 'Fugitive'

Marcel dispatches Robert de St. Loup to offer Albertine's aunt 30,000 francs to persuade the fugitive to return. More directly, he writes Albertine that he had ordered a yacht and a Rolls for her; what a pity they won't be used! And he plays the jealousy card by suggesting that Andée could replace her. (He never thinks to say: "I love you. Please come back!") Alas, the next news he gets is from the aunt, telling him that Albertine was killed in a fall from her horse. This sets Marcel off on a hundred-page revel in the metaphysics of grief.

He knows he's healing when he sees a provocative blonde in the street and sets out to learn her name: Forcheville. She proves to be his childhood sweetheart, Gilberte Swann, whose widowed mother has married the impoverished nobleman who was sniffing about her in Swann's Way, and who as part of the deal adopted Gilberte. Marcel then does take up with Andrée, who spins all sorts of lurid stories about the dead girl, some of them involving the violinist Morel.

Marcel and his mother make his long-delayed pilgrimage to Venice, and Gilberte marries Robert St. Loup — who like almost every character in the novel, is now revealed to be a homosexual. Marcel visits Mme. de St. Loup at Tansonville and learns, among other things, that when he first spied her on those premises as a boy, the gesture she flipped him wasn't a scornful dismissal but an invitation to come closer.

On grief and jealousy

As when Marcel grieves for his grandmother on his second visit to Balbec, Proust never writes so compelling as when the subject is loss. Here he is (p. 477-478 of the Allen Lane edition) yearning for Albertine: My imagination sought her in the skies, on evenings like those when we were still able to gaze at it together; I tried to wing my affections towards her, beyond the moonlight that she loved, to console her for no longer being alive, and this love for a person who had become so remote was like a religion, my thoughts rose toward her like prayers.

Less moving, but no less brilliant, is the way (p.554) he shows grief receding. The Duchesse de Guermantes invites him to the opera. But I replied sadly: "No, I cannot go to the theatre, I have lost a friend. She was very dear to me." The tears nearly came to my eyes as I said it and yet for the first time I felt something akin to pleasure in talking about it. 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. That cuts fairly close to the bone!

Because it was never finally reviewed by Proust (who died before it was published), The Fugitive is rough in spots, but also revealing. In the earlier books, I felt that the characters were younger than the conventional wisdom would have them. In In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Marcel and the girls are generally thought to be eighteen, but here Marcel refers to the Albertine of that era (p.469) as "appearing to me at the moment of puberty," which is more or less how I placed all of them at Balbec. (Later, to be sure, he suggests that they were sixteen.)

Ronald Hayman tells us that Proust wanted to cut 250 pages (but see below) from this already-short book, and changed its title from La Fugitive to Albertine disparue. The re-titling was done, but his brother and publisher ignored the cuts in the edition they published in 1925. "It is clear," Hayman writes, "that what [Proust] had in mind was whole volumes to be interpolated between Albertine disparue and Le Temps retrouvé. (Whole volumes, mon dieu!) In the truncated book, Albertine runs off to join her lesbian friends, thus mooting much of Marcel's ponderings about this element of her nature; she dies on the bank of the Vivonne in Combray, instead of in Touraine; and the chapter about Gilbert and Andrée was to be jettisoned.

The Penguin Proust

By this time, I was no longer conscious that I was reading a fresh translation, nor that I was in the hands of seven different translators; I was reading for pleasure. (I doubted at the time that it would be as much fun were I reading Scott Moncrieff for the third time, but now that I've read the Kilmartin-Enright tweaking, I'm not so sure about this.)

I mentioned earlier that the British editions leave Proust's literary quotations in French, with an English translation in the notes, while the American editions do just the opposite. This didn't trouble me until I came to pages 426-427 of the Allen Lane The Prisoner and The Fugitive, where five quotations from Racine appear in the same long paragraph. I found this a bit irritating: if my French is insufficient to allow me to read Proust in the original, why do the editors assume that I can read Racine?

The gotcha! below gave me a reason to compare the available translations. In the Modern Library version of The Fugitive (p.745), I see this: Associated now with the memory of my love, Albertine's physical and social attributes, in spite of which I had loved her, oriented my desire on the contrary towards what at one time it would least readily have chosen: dark girls of the lower middle class.

Which Peter Collier renders for the Allen Lane hardcover (p. 517-518): Now that they were associated with the memory of my love, the physical and social attributes of Albertine, whom I had loved in spite of them, had the opposite effect, that of orientating my desire towards what previously it would have least naturally have chosen, dark-haired girls from the lower-middle classes.

I must admit, I like the Modern Library version better!

Gotcha!

Oh, good grief! On page 518, Mr Collier has Marcel say orientating. This is particularly funny since the verb comes from the French orienter, not orientater! Remembering that I got caught with the British spelling of appal in The Prisoner, I immediately went to the Shorter Oxford, and as I suspected, orientate appears there only as an alternate spelling of the verb orient, with the notation that it is probably a "back-form" from orientation. I detest these superfluous syllables. Why would anyone say orientate for orient, or preventative for preventive?

Funnily enough, only one word was changed in the Kilmartin/Enright update of the 1930 translation, when Marcel had been "attracted" instead of "oriented." If Mr Collier had stuck with Scott Moncrieff, he would have avoided that offense against the English language.

In the Wikipedia article on The Search, the commentators call The Fugiitive "the most editorially vexed" of the novel's seven books, though a lot of that vexing apparently has to do with Proust's apparent intention to cut some 150 pages (not 250) from the text, as revealed in an edited and corrected typescript that surfaced in 1986. Neither the Peguin nor the Modern Library translations accept this change, which was published as Albertine disparue in 1987.

A fault that must be laid to the author's door, or to his too-early death: In Swann's Way, he describes Gilberte as a redhead, but in The Fugitive she is blonde (and remembered as a blonde).

Swann's Way, Guermantes Way

When Gilberte marries St. Loup, the two "ways" of Marcel's boyhood are joined. And when Marcel goes to Tansonville to visit Mme. de St. Loup, he is astonished to have her tell him that the "ways" are actually one and the same: Gilberte said: "If you like, we could still go out one afternoon to walk towards Guermantes, but we could walk past Méséglise [i.e., Swann's way], it's the prettiest route," a sentence which overturned all the ideas of my childhood by revealing that the two ways were not as irreconcilable as I had thought. (P. 654 of the Allen Lane hardcover. I am told that in the most recent French editions, this scene has been moved to the beginning of Le Temps retrouvé, which, together with the deleted pages, brings Albertine disparue down to a svelte 336 pages. If you read French, I'd love to have your comments on this edition.)

Which version to buy?

Since in translation the two books appear together, I'll repeat what I wrote earlier: You can find a few (and pricey) copies of the Allen Lane hardcover at Amazon's US store and also of course at Amazon.co.uk. As always with Amazon, check the description, and when in doubt inquire to make sure the edition on offer is ISBN 0713996080. You can feel safer at the ABE booksellers' website which includes the ISBN on every listing.

And the British paperback of the two Albertine books is imported to the US under the Penguin Classics imprint. British readers will find the same edition on Amazon.co.uk.

The Modern Library paperback of The Captive & The Fugitive retains Scott Moncrieff's title for the first book. Though I prefer Carol Clark's translation of The Prisoner, I am not so sure about Collier's rendering of The Fugitive, so you might well decide to turn to the handsome paperback of Enright - Kilmartin - Scott Moncrieff.

Warning: don't rely on Amazon links or reader reviews, because the store doesn't distinguish between the Modern Library, Penguin, Yale, and 1920 public domain translations!

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