My Years With Proust - Day 494

I did not take into account the fact that in these acts of destruction in which I had as an accomplice, in Albertine, her faculty of changing, her ability to forget, almost to hate, the recent object of her love, I was sometimes causing great pain to one or other of those unknown persons with whom she had successively taken her pleasure, and that I was doing so in vain, for they would be abandoned but replaced, and, parallel  to the path strewn with all the derelicts of her light-hearted infidelities, there would continue for me another, pitiless path interrupted only by an occasional respite; so that my suffering, had I thought about it, could end only with Albertine's life or with my own.  Even in the first days after our return to Paris, not satisfied by the information that Andree and the chauffeur had given me as to their expeditions with my mistress, I had felt the environs of Paris to be as baleful as those of Balbec, and had gone off for a few days in the country with Albertine.  But everywhere my uncertainty as to what she might be doing was the same, the possibility that it was something wrong as abundant, surveillance even more difficult, with the result that I had returned with her to Paris.  In leaving Balbec, I had imagined that I was leaving Gomorrah, plucking Albertine from it; it reality, alas, Gomorrah was disseminated all over the world. And partly out of jealousy, partly out of ignorance of such joys (a case which is extremely rare), I had arranged unawares this game of hide and seek in which Albertine would always elude me.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, p. 15

Proust tells us that there are two separate and parallel paths in his relationship with Albertine.  One would be her own desire and the resulting "unknown persons with whom she had successively taken her pleasure . . . [who would] would be abandoned but replaced, and, parallel  to the path strewn with all the derelicts of her light-hearted infidelities." The other path would be Marcel's own jealous misery, and the pain he would cause to himself and to Albertine and to all these other women.  Proust then, in a great spoiler alert, realizes that "my suffering, had I thought about it, could end only with Albertine's life or with my own." The fact that the titles of this chapter and the next are The Captive and The Fugitive give us a pretty good sense where this is heading.  It is amazing how often we realize that a relationship is almost doomed from the start, structurally unsound, but yet we can't do anything to stop the game from playing itself out.  Proust reflects, "I had arranged unawares this game of hide and seek in which Albertine would always elude me."