My Years With Proust - Day 657

Perhaps, too, she might not have remembered, or she might have lied.  In any case I was no longer interested to know, since my heart had changed even more than Gilberte's face.  This face gave me little pleasure, but above all I was no longer unhappy, and I should have been incapable of conceiving, had I thought about it again, that I could have been so unhappy of Gilberte tripping along by the side of a young man that I had said to myself: "It's all over, I shall never attempt to see her again." Of the state of mind which, in that far-off year, had been tantamount to a long-drawn-out torture for me, nothing survived.  For in this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than Beauty: namely Grief.

Marcel Proust, Times Regained, p. 713

With the death of Albertine, and the reemergence of Gilberte in his life, Marcel now gets to fret about the latter once again.  In this case, as we saw yesterday, he gets to fret about what might have been if he had acted on his earlier fascination with Gilberte - or, for that matter, simply responded to her advances.  Except, he's not actually suffering that much, especially by Proustian standards.  This might be because he's grown and has greater perspective, or maybe he's still numb from Albertine's death.  Apparently nothing survives the ravages of time: "For in this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than Beauty: namely Grief."  If beauty fades with the passing of time, then at least we have the consolation of knowing that so does grief.

My Years With Proust - Day 656

Before descending into the mystery of a deep and flawless 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 you are going away so soon and would have liked to show you more of a countryside which you seem to appreciate, an avowal 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 express of her feelings, makes you believe that you occupy a place in her life which no one else would fill.  Opening my heart to her suddenly with a tenderness born of the exquisite air, the fragrant evening breeze, 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.  I loved you too.  In fact I flung myself twice at your head." "When?" "The first time at Tonsonville.  You were going for a walk with your family, and I was on my way home.  I'd never seen such a pretty little boy.  I was in the habit," she went on with a vaguely bashful air, "of going 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, Theodore, who, I must admit, was very nice indeed (goodness, how handsome he was!) and who has become quite ugly (he's the chemist now at Megeglise), used to amuse himself with all the peasant girls of the district.  As I was allowed to go out by myself, whenever I was able to get away, Used to rush over 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'm ashamed of it to this day.  But you stared at me so crossly that I saw that you didn't want to."

   And suddenly I thought to myself that the true Gilberte, the true Albertine, were perhaps those who had at the first moment yields themselves with their eyes, one through the hedge of pink hawthorn, the other on 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 my conversation, 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 "botched it" more completely - although in fact the comparative failure with them was less absurd - and for the same reasons as Saint-Loup with Rachel.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 711-712

Is there anything worse than the pain of a lost love?  Doubtless, and the most obvious choice would be a "botched" lost love.  Gilberte and Marcel are on a walk when he admits to her, "How I loved you then!"  Classically, she replies: "Why didn't you tell me?  I had no idea.  I loved you too." She continues on with an amusing anecdote about her own youthful adventures, and other boys and girls who "took advantage of the darkness."  Not surprisingly, Marcel hears little of her story because he's immediately saddened by this lost opportunity: "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 my conversation, a dividing hedge of sentiment had made them afraid to be as frank as in the first moments, had ruined everything by my clumsiness."  We've all been in exactly the same situation, although doubtless in our memories we've built a much more dramatic and definite and romantic narrative than the moment actually held.

My Years With Proust - Day 655

   I should have no occasion to dwell upon this visit which I paid to the neighbourhood of Combray at perhaps the moment in my life when I thought least about Combray, had it not, precisely for that reason, brought me what was at least a provisional confirmation of certain ideas which I had first conceived along the Guermantes way, and also of certain other ideas which I had conceived on the Meseliglise way.  I repeated every evening, in the opposite direction, the walks which we used to take at Combray, in the afternoon, when we went the Meseglise way.  One dined now at Tansonville at any hour at which in the past one had long been asleep at Combray. And because of the seasonal heat, and also because Gilberte spent the afternoon painting in the chapel attached to the house, one did not go out for one's walk until about two hours before dinner.  The pleasure of those earlier walks, which was that of seeing, on the way home, the crimson sky framing the Calvary or mirroring itself in the Vivonne, was now replaced by the pleasure of setting forth at nightfall, when one encountered nothing in the village save the blue-grey, irregular and shifting triangle of a flock of sheep being driven home.  Over one half of the fields the sun had already set; above the other half the moon was already alight and would soon bathe them in their entirety.  It sometimes happened that Gilberte let me go without her, and I set off, trailing my shadow behind me, like a boat gliding across enchanted waters.  But as a rule Gilberte came with me.  The walks that we took thus together were very often those that I used to take as a child: how then could I help but feel much more acutely even than in the past on the Guermantes way the conviction that I would never be able to write, reinforced by the conviction that my imagination and my sensibility had weakened, when I found how incurious I was about Combray?  I was distressed to see how little I relived my early years.  I found the Vivonne narrow and ugly alongside the towpath.  Not that I noticed any great physical discrepancies from what I remembered.  But, separated as I was by a whole lifetime from places I now happened to be passing through again, there was lacking between them and me that contiguity from which is born, even before we have perceived it, the immediate, delicious and total deflagration of memory. Having doubtless no very clear conception of its nature, I was saddened by the thought that my faculty of feeling and imagining things must have diminished since I no longer took any pleasure in these walks.

Marcel Proust, Time Regained, p. 709-710

And so we've now passed into Time Regained, the seventh and final volume of Remembrance of Things Past.  I suppose I should do some research into how the last few volumes were published posthumously after Proust's death and the role that others played in finalizing the novel, but at this point I'm mainly concerned with the final copy as it exists and my response to it.  As I've said from the beginning, this isn't meant to be a scholarly examination of Remembrance of Things Past, a task I'm eminently unqualified to bring about.  Still, before my first re-read of the novel, which I'm guessing will be in about three years, I'm hoping to read a biography of Proust and some more scholarly work on Remembrance of Things Past, or, maybe I won't, and instead I'll just happily exist within the confines of the novel. 

As we begin Marcel seems a little sad and struggling with some elegiac memories, but there doesn't seem to be the almost crushing pain that marked so much of The Fugitive.  Instead he's involved with Gilberte, herself very unhappy, in a relationship that has yet to be defined, although it's difficult to read an account of their time together without assuming that they're lovers.  It's not the mad passion of new love, but instead the comfortable relationship that a man would have with an ex-mistress when they get together years later, more of an homage to the past than a celebration of the present or the future.  Essentially, Marcel feels numb, which in its own way is a process of healing.  In these early days of the novel he seems mainly concerned about his lack of connection to the past: "But, separated as I was by a whole lifetime from places I now happened to be passing through again, there was lacking between them and me that contiguity from which is born, even before we have perceived it, the immediate, delicious and total deflagration of memory. Having doubtless no very clear conception of its nature, I was saddened by the thought that my faculty of feeling and imagining things must have diminished since I no longer took any pleasure in these walks."  I suppose most of us feel this pain, and fear, on some level, the loss of the past, but it must have been particularly haunting to Proust since his driving force was to recapture the past, and how was he even to write without this inspiration?

My Years With Proust - Day 654

But when did the change date from?  If from the year of my return to Balbec, hwo was it that he had never once come to see the lift-boy, had never once mentioned him to me?  And as for the first year, how could he have paid any attention to the boy, passionately enamoured as he then was of Rachel? That fist year, I had found Saint-Loup unusual, as was every true Guermantes.  Now he was even odder than I had supposed.  But things of which we have not had a direct intuition, which we have learned only through other people, are such that we no longer have the means, we have missed the chance of conveying them to our inmost soul; its communications with the real are blocked and so we cannot profit by the discovery, it is too late.  Besides, upon any consideration, this discovery distressed me too deeply for me to be able to appreciate it intellectually.  Of course, after what M. de Charlus had told me in Mme Verdurin's house in Paris, I no longer doubted that Robert's case that of any number of respectable people, to be found even among the best and most intelligent of men.  To learn this of anyone else would not have affected me, of anyone in the world save Robert.  The doubt that Aime's words had left me in my mind tarnished all our friendship at Balbec, and Doncieres, and although I did not believe in friendship, or that I had ever felt any real friendship for Robert, when I thought about those stories of the lift-boy and of the restaurant in which I had had lunch with Saint-Loup and Rachel, I was obliged to make an effort to restrain my tears.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, pp. 705-706

And so we draw to the close of The Fugitive, and, as has been my habit, I always include the last passage of each separate novel - as I will also include the beginning of the next one.  And the next one will be the last of the seven volumes that make of Remembrance of Things Past.  While I have enjoyed all of the volumes of Proust's masterpiece, I think that The Fugitive has been my favorite, although Swann's Way would also be in the running (I'm already looking forward to my re-read, when I won't be taking such extensive notes and just give myself over to the flow of the words).  I suspect I like The Fugitive the best simply because it is the one which shows the most transformation in Marcel's personality. By the end of The Captive I was growing annoyed with him, and in this volume the tragedy of Albertine's death if clearly leading him to do an immense amount of self-reflection (not that he doesn't do that throughout the entirety of the novel, of course), but in this case he seems to be actually changing.  Marcel is clearly a changed man, as he sadly tells us, "I did not believe in friendship."

My Years With Proust - Day 653

Personally, I found it absolutely immaterial from a moral point of view whether one took one's pleasures with a man or with a woman, and only too natural and human that one should take it where one could find it.  If, therefore, Robert had not been married, his liaison with Charlie ought not to have caused me pain. And yet I realised that the pain I felt would have been as acute if Robert had been a bachelor. In anyone else, his conduct would have left me indifferent.  But I wept when I reflected that I had once had so great an affection for a different Saint-Loup, an affection which, I sensed all too clearly from the cold and evasive manner which he now adopted, he no longer felt for me, since men, now that they were capable of arousing his desires, could no longer inspire his friendship. How could these tastes have come to birth in a young man who had loved women so passionately that I had seen him brought to a state of almost suicidal despair because "Rachel when from the Lord' had threatened to leave him? Had the resemblance between Charlie and Rachel - invisible to me - been the plank which had enabled Robert to pass from his father's tastes to those of his uncle, in order to complete the physiological evolution which even in the latter had occurred fairly late?

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, p. 704

Last time we asked the question of whether Robert could no longer be friends with men because he now viewed them as potential sex objects.   Proust appears to answer the question in the affirmative: "But I wept when I reflected that I had once had so great an affection for a different Saint-Loup, an affection which, I sensed all too clearly from the cold and evasive manner which he now adopted, he no longer felt for me, since men, now that they were capable of arousing his desires, could no longer inspire his friendship."  Nevertheless, Marcel still finds is mysterious, especially considering how desperately sad, almost suicidally so, that Robert had grown when Rachel had broken things off with him.  However, as we've discussed, aren't all love affairs about self-love and vanity, and that transcends the shape and function of your naughty bits.

What I find more interesting about this section is Proust's statement that Robert's sexuality means nothing morally.  "Personally, I found it absolutely immaterial from a moral point of view whether one took one's pleasures with a man or with a woman, and only too natural and human that one should take it where one could find it."  It's appropriate that he opens the sentence with the word "personally," because this is just about the most personal statement Proust ever uttered in Remembrance of Things Past.  It's also important to remember that Proust wrote this novel over a century ago, and how progressive, if not revolutionary, that statement was then.  Today it constitutes, or should constitute, the very definition of a "duh" statement, but yet think of how much time and anguish and anger are devoted to this non-issue?

My Years With Proust - Day 652

But I was convinced that Saint-Loup's physiological evolution had not begun at that period and that he had then been still exclusively a lover of women.  More than by any other sign, I could tell this retrospectively by the friendship that Saint-Loup had shown me at Balbec.  It was only while he still loved women that he was really capable of friendship.  Afterwards, for some time at least, to the men who did not attract him physically he displayed an indifference which was to some extent, I believe, sincere - for he had become very curt - but which he exaggerated as well in order to make people think that he was interested only in women. . . . That Robert's love may have hovered at times on the boundary which divides the love of a man for a woman from the love of a man for a man was quite possible.  In any case, the memory of Rachel now played only an aesthetic role in this context.  It is indeed improbable that it could have played any other.  One day Robert had gone to see her to ask her to dress up as a man, to leave a lock of hair hanging down, and nevertheless had contended himself with gazing at her, unsatisfied.  He remained none the less attached to her and paid her scrupulously, though without pleasure, the enormous income which had had promised her and which did not prevent her from treating him in the most abominable fashion later on.  This generosity towards Rachel would not have distressed Gilberte if she had known that it was merely the resigned fulfilment of a promise which no longer bore any trace of love.  But love was, on the contrary, precisely what he pretended to feel for Rachel.  Homosexuals would be the best husbands in the world if they did not put on an act of loving other women.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, pp. 700-701

Marcel continues to process the discovery that his friend Robert is gay or is bisexual - or at the least is not the womanizer that he appears (and apparently promotes).  His theory is that Robert underwent a "physiological evolution" and at one time he was "still exclusively a lover of women."  More likely, obviously, Robert was simply being more honest with himself or at least more honest with those around him, or if not more honest with those around him then just a little sloppy in attempts to hide his sexuality (which we also saw with M. de Charlus).  What Marcel is struggling with is how close friends they were at Balbec, which also takes the form of a regret that they were no longer as close.  Writing about Robert, Proust proposes, "It was only while he still loved women that he was really capable of friendship." So, when Robert admitted to himself that he loved men he would then hold men at a distance.  Would this be because men had suddenly switched categories and were now in the Possible Sex Partner category, much like teenage boys who suddenly drop girls as friends because they've entered that same category?

My Years With Proust - Day 651

   Some time later, I went to spend a few days at Tansonville.  This excursion was something of an inconvenience, for I was keeping a girl in Paris who slept in a bachelor flat which I had rented.  As other people need the aroma of forests or the ripple of a lake, so I needed her sleep by my side during the night and, by day, to have her always by my side in the carriage.  For even if one love has passed into oblivion, it may determine the form of the love that is to follow it.  Already, even in the midst of the previous love, daily habits existed, the origin of which we did not ourselves remember; perhaps it was a moment of anguish early on that had made us passionately desire, then permanently adopt, like customs the meaning of which has been forgotten, the habit of those homeward drives to the beloved's door, or her resistance in our home, our presence or the presence of someone we trust during all her outings.  All these habits, which are like great uniform high-roads along which our love passes daily and which were forged long ago in the volcanic fire of an ardent emotion, nevertheless survive the woman, survive even the memory of the woman.  They become the pattern, if not of all our loves, at least of certain of our loves which alternate with the others. And thus my home had demanded, in memory of a forgotten Albertine, the presence of my mistress of the moment whom I concealed from visitors and who filled my life as Albertine had filled it in the past.  And in order to go to Tansonville I had to obtain her consent to being looked after for a few days by one of my friends who did not care for women.  But I had heard that Gilberte was unhappy, because Robert was unfaithful to her, though not in the fashion which everyone believed, which perhaps she herself still believed, which in any case she alleged.  A belief that could be explained by pride, by the desire to hoodwink other people and to hoodwink oneself, not to mention the imperfect knowledge of infidelities which is all that betrayed spouses ever acquire, all the more so as Robert, a true nephew of M. de Charlus, went about openly with women whom he compromised, whom the world believed and whom Gilberte on the whole believed to be his mistresses.  It was even thought in society that he was too barefaced, never stirring, at a party, from the side of some woman whom he afterwards accompanied home, leaving Mme de Saint-Loup to return as best she could.  Anyone who had said that the other woman whom he compromised thus was not really his mistress would have been regarded as a fool, incapable of seeing what was staring him in the face; but I  had been pointed, alas, in the direction of the truth, a truth which caused me infinite distress, by a few words let fall by Jupien.  A few months before my visit to Tansonville I had gone to acquire after M. de Charlus, in whom certain cardiac symptoms had been causing his friends great anxiety, and having mentioned to Jupien, whom I found alone, some love-letters addressed to Robert and sign Bobette which Mme de Saint-Loup had discovered, I was stupefied to learn from the Baron's former factorum that the person who used the signature Bobette was none other than the violinist who had played so important a part in M. de Charlus's life.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, pp. 694-695

Much earlier in Remembrance of Things Past Proust had talked of the dangers of habit, which is ironic if you think about his later life and how he lived his life in an endless loop of hiding out in his apartment during the day and writing all night and never seeing anyone except in the middle of the night when we would walk to a local cafe. His entire life was dictated by habit.  To be fair, he was rushing against death to finish his life's work, and maybe I need to aspire to some measure of that habit so I wouldn't waste so much of my dwindling time.  I would argue that, in addition, women were a habit for him.  As he admits, "For even if one love has passed into oblivion, it may determine the form of the love that is to follow it."  His trip to Tansonville threw his schedule for a loop, and he was "keeping a girl in Paris" and he, after failing to arrange for her to come along, had to arrange for someone to look after her: "And in order to go to Tansonville I had to obtain her consent to being looked after for a few days by one of my friends who did not care for women." He needed her to sleep next to him and he needed to have her ride in the carriage next to him, and apparently he also needed, as he had with Albertine, to control her.  As usual, Proust is spot on in his observation that the love affair that we just had shapes the ones to follow, for good or bad.

In this passage we also learn that Gilberte and Robert de Saint-Loup are already unhappy, which helps explain her being drawn back into Marcel's orbit.  The popular perception is that Robert is sleeping many women, but instead Marcel learns that his friend Robert was "a true nephew of M. de Charlus," meaning, of course, that he was actually gay.  He disguised his love affairs with many men, including Morel who is apparently sleeping with everyone in Remembrance of Things Past, by using a series of women as beards. Marcel reports that the news caused him "infinite distress," which I would theorize was because he wanted Robert to himself, both emotionally and sexually.