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."