No, not the suppression of suffering, but a suffering until then unimagined, that of realising that she would not come back. But had I not told myself many times that she might not come back? I had indeed done so, but now I saw that I had never believed it for a moment. As I needed her presence, her kisses, to enable me to endure the pain that my suspicions caused me, I had formed, since Balbec, the habit of being always with her. Even when she had gone out, when I was alone, I was kissing her still. I had continued to do so since her departure for Touraine. I had less need of her fidelity than of her return. And if my reason might with impunity cast doubt upon it now and again, my imagination never ceased for an instant to picture it for me. Instinctively I drew my hand over my throat, over my lips, which felt themselves kissed by her lips still after she had gone away, and would never be kissed by them again; I drew my hand over them, as Mamma had caressed me at the time of my grandmother's death, saying to me: "My poor boy, your grandmother who was so fond of you will never kiss you again." All my life to come seemed to have been wrenched from my heart. My life to come? Had I not, then, thought at times of living it without Albertine? Of course not! Had I then for a long time past pledged her every minute of my life until my death? I had indeed! This future indissolubly blended with her was something I had never had the vision to perceive, but now that it had just been shattered, I could feel the place that it occupied in my gaping heart. Francoise who still knew nothing, came into my room. In a sudden fury I shouted at her: "What do you want?" Then (sometimes there are words that set a different reality in the same place as that which confronts us; they bewilder us in the same way as a fit of dizziness) she said to me: "Monsieur has no need to look cross. On the contrary he's going to be pleased. Here are two letters from Mademoiselle Albertine."
Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, pp. 485-486
So the question becomes, will Albertine's death prove as redemptive for Marcel as Marley's eventually did for Scrooge? While looking at my notes in the margins of The Captive I found that I increasingly wrote things like "I don't really like Marcel anymore" or "I wonder if he's going to be redeemed after Albertine's dead?" I guess we'll find out soon because we're, nor surprisingly, entering a lengthy period of soul-searching from Marcel.
There's so much in this reasonably short, by Proustian standards, paragraph, but what struck me is this passage: "Instinctively I drew my hand over my throat, over my lips, which felt themselves kissed by her lips still after she had gone away, and would never be kissed by them again; I drew my hand over them, as Mamma had caressed me at the time of my grandmother's death, saying to me: 'My poor boy, your grandmother who was so fond of you will never kiss you again.'" It just seems that we keep coming back to Marcel's love for his mother and especially his grandmother, and the search for that missing unconditional love, which he definitely had with his grandmother (which I guess we all have with our grandmothers). I remember talking to my most excellent friend Cinse, who has been married four times, and suggesting to her that maybe the only men she had ever loved in her entire life were his father and her son. She agreed. The novel opened up with Marcel waiting in his room for his mother to steal away from the dinner party to see him - and maybe the most heartbreaking scene in the entire work is the young Marcel tapping on the wall, knowing that his grandmother would tap back, and come in to see him. When Marcel thought of life without Albertine he dreamed that, first off, it would be his decision, and, secondly, that it wouldn't actually happen or be final. Now Albertine's absence was final, just as his grandmother's death was final. But does this mean he'll never feel their kisses again? I don't think so. Rather, I think they are as real as you want or need them to be.
After fretting endlessly about the possibility of Albertine's theoretical affairs, first with men and then with women, and making both himself and her utterly miserable, Marcel makes a somewhat surprising comment: "I had less need of her fidelity than of her return." Of course, if he had realized this, and stated it, earlier there would have been no need to wish for her return because she never would have left. Beyond the evolutionary, biological tricks that the brain plays on us in regards to having an exclusive pairing, why do we care so much about fidelity, why do we break up perfectly good relationships over one slip up? In the end, doesn't her return always actually mean a hell of a lot more than her fidelity (and it's not even particularly close)? Certainly, part of it is just vanity; we did plant the flag and claim the land for ourselves, after all. We may take an oath before God (no matter what form - he/she/it/they - God takes), but, truthfully, I don't think God cares that much, and he/she/it/they is more concerned with your service to all of humankind, not an ill-spent afternoon. Or maybe we just operate within an intellectual, moral universe where the understood and accepted reality is that everyone in the world is a liar, and that the one thing that we can depend upon is the truth of that one person on that one issue.
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