My Years With Proust - Day 589

"My Dear Friend,

   Forgive me for not having dared to say to you in person what I am now writing, but I am such a coward, and have always been so afraid in your presence, that however much I tried to force myself I could not find the courage to do so.  This is what I should have said to you. Our life together has become impossible; indeed you must have realised, from your outburst the other evening, that there had been a change in our relations.  What we were able to patch up that night would become irreparable in a few days' time.  It is better for us, therefore, since we have had the good fortune to be reconciled, to part as friends.  That is why, my darling, I am sending you this line, and I beg you to be kind enough to forgive me if I am causing you a little grief when you think of the immensity of mine.  Dearest one, I do not want to become your enemy; it will be bad enough to become by degrees, and all too soon, a stranger to you; and so, as I have absolutely made up my mind, before sending you this letter by Francoise I shall have asked her to let me have my boxes.  Good-bye: I leave you the best of myself.

                              Albertine"

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, p. 427

"Good-bye: I leave you the best of myself."

In the last couple posts we discussed Albertine actually leaving Marcel; well, at least we discussed his immediate response to the event.  As you might expect, with Proust there's going to be a lot of reflection and analysis down the road.  Shortly after she left he receives the requisite Dear Marcel note, which is what is included above.  There are a lot of things I could discuss about the note, but what struck me was the final line: "Good-bye: I leave you the best of myself."  At first blush it just seems like the ubiquitous and utterly bland and meaningless statement that we've all left in a break-up note or said during a break-up.  However, I think there's actually more going on here, and, it relates to an essential truth, especially in relation to Proust.  Sometimes I think about women that I have known and loved and even constructed an imagined future with, and I have those moments of pain and doubt and fear and regret - as we all do - when we think of paths that we were afraid to take or which we abandoned because other paths seemed more promising.  Of course, I am probably (although not necessarily) romanticizing the relationship and clumsily cherry-picking moments to fuel these elegiac moments.  That said, did they, like Albertine, leave me the best of themselves, and, in turn, did I leave them "the best of myself"?  If we've learned anything from Proust it's that it always come down to questions of perception and memory, and our perception of what the time with the perception will be like is inevitably better than what turns out to be - and we doubtless do something similar with their memory.  Considering how unhappy they were together, didn't Albertine actually leave him the best of herself?  I hope that every woman I've ever loved - or has loved me - thinks gently of me, and even if you only possess my memory it's undoubtedly the best part of me.

Every so often I include commentary from a friend, and my excellent friend Kathy volunteered pinch-hit this week.  Later we'll be joined by my friend Cyndi, who has agreed to participate as part of her 50 for 50 project (essentially, 50 new things for the year she turns 50).

KS wrote:

Many thanks to my excellent colleague, Professor Scudder, who has (foolishly) welcomed my completely inadequate literary reflections, yet again, on a book I haven’t even read.

My first reaction to this passage was lack of respect for Albertine – she took the cowardly route and decided to write a note to break up with Marcel rather than tell him face to face. In today’s world, she probably would have written a text like this:

Sry cant stay w/u

I suck :’(

                                                                                                Bae bye

Then, I thought about it a little more, and realized I was being very 21^st century about this and needed to change my approach. Albertine was a “kept” woman. Marcel convinced her to come live with him and she did, but he never made her an “honest” woman by marrying her. Women at the time had no rights, were seen more as property and decoration, and whose primary responsibility was to keep the race going by giving birth and putting up with whatever their man told them to do. Yeah, not so different in the current White House, I know, but there’s progress in other places in this world.

The reality of Albertine having secretly lived as Marcel’s live-in lover for so long was likely scandalous, even if it perhaps was more common than history makes us believe. Marcel gets what he wants – possession of her, but probably sees himself as progressive since he doesn’t marry her. Yet once he possesses Albertine, he no longer wants her to the point of deciding he doesn’t even love her anymore. Albertine, while she may have played the shrinking violet, was clearly nothing of the sort. The delicious irony is that she figured it out so well that she played along for a while (from what I can tell from the blog), happily winding him up to torture him right back when she felt his affection waning. Then, when she realized her position as live-in lover was about to be upended by Marcel, she beats him to the punch and leaves him first. Damn girl! Albertine today would have put Marcel’s things in a box “to the left (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EwViQxSJJQ).”

As for the letter, that was probably a wise choice, upon further reflection. Albertine almost comes across as an abused woman, but it’s likely her victimization is emotional, although she may have feared Marcel physically as well, particularly if he was prone to fits of jealousy. She may have physically feared him, but more than anything, she may have gone the letter route to try to attempt to have some modicum of control over her own life – again, rather revolutionary for a woman of the time. She was free of children so could do such a thing without nearly the same repercussions as if she had given birth to his children. (And on a side note, isn’t it interesting that she never had any of his kids?).

What strikes me the most is her heartfelt sadness at leaving, however. She mourns the loss of his familiarity, noting “…; it will be bad enough to become by degrees, and all too soon, a stranger to you…”. I can imagine it would be a rare thing indeed to be able to stay friends with a former lover in the pre-technology world. So an ending such as this is truly an ENDING.

But even more heartbreaking to me is the final line:

“I leave you the best of myself.”

Are these words of truth? Is there a person in our lives who literally took the “best” of us, or to which we gave the “best” of ourselves and we have no more to give? That would imply that there couldn’t be healing after that person and no wellspring within us to find deep love and affection for another again. Or are these simply words of hurt in a moment of pain and agony at the ending of an intense relationship? We may never know, although for Albertine, it may be both (foreshadowing). Regardless, Marcel’s world has just unraveled and Albertine pulled the string, which gave her all the control. How Marcel’s world will now play out… well, I guess I’ll have to keep reading the blog.