"We went back to the wood to pick up the other girls and go home together. I knew now that I was in love with Albertine; but, alas! I did not care to let her know it. This was because, since the days of the games with Gilberte in the Champs-Elysees, my concept of love had become different, even if the persons who whom my love was successively assigned remained almost identical. For one thing, the avowal, the declaration of my passion to her whom I loved no longer seemed to be one of the vital and necessary stages of love, nor love itself an external reality, but simply a subjective pleasure. And I felt that Albertine would do what was necessary to sustain that pleasure all the more readily if she did not know that I was experiencing it."
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 987
So out of the troop Proust has determined that he actually does love Albertine, which we need to know because it sets up so much of the rest of the novel. Classically, and probably wisely, he decides not to tell her because she would lose interest in him. This has sadly been my experience more than once with women who desperately wanted me to tell them that I loved them, only to tire of the new reality once I had made that leap. However, we've discussed this painful topic endlessly so let's let it die a quiet death.
Of more interest is Proust's own personal reasons for not saying it. "For one thing, the avowal, the declaration of my passion to her whom I loved no longer seemed to be one of the vital and necessary stages of love, nor love itself as an external reality, but simply a subjective pleasure." Before leaving the dying patient, maybe this helps make sense of my previous paragraph. While I tend to groan when someone makes a distinction between loving someone and being in love, I do think there is a difference between being in love and focusing on love as a "subjective pleasure." While a woman may tire of love, there's a much greater chance that she'll tire of a "subjective pleasure."
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