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he previously felt for Mme de Stermaria and Mme de Guermantes: ‘it was my fate to pursue only phantoms, creatures whose reality existed to a great extent in my imagination.’ He looks around, feels that the trees by the road give him ‘a silent counsel to set myself to work at last, before the hour of eternal rest had yet struck’ (SG, 476; 1517). He cannot follow this counsel, however: Albertine’s spell is too strong. He looks at her, at the face which tantalizes him with the ‘enigma of her intentions’; she is ‘a whole state of soul, a whole future existence that had assumed before my eyes the allegorical and fateful form of a girl’ (SG, 485; 1523). The successful deciphering of this complex symbol will determine the future course of his life.

As their complex relationship unfolds, so alongside it does that of Charlus and Morel, separated by age and class, but bound together by desire, although not necessarily always of a mutual, erotic sort. Charlus, besotted, treats Morel like a ward or protégé, showering him with gifts and proffering advice ranging from the interpretation of Beethoven to the finer distinctions between varieties of pear (SG, 472–4; 1515–16). Morel, on the other hand, always puts himself first and happily deceives others for his own gain. Despite this he feels persecuted and rails against ‘universal treachery’; in short he is ‘a mass of contradictions’ and, like the novel in which he appears, ‘extraordinarily composite’ (SG, 498–9; 1532). The image used by the Narrator to describe Charlus’s vulnerability as gradually he becomes an object of derision is full of pathos: he is like a fish unaware of the limits of its aquarium, the spectators beyond the glass and the presence of ‘the all-powerful keeper who, at the unforeseen and fatal moment … will extract it without compunction’ (SG, 518; 1544). His various travails that stud the chapter (the fictitious duel; his spying at the Maineville brothel, nearly – unwittingly – discovering Morel with the Prince de Guermantes; Morel’s laughable stories of algebra lessons that ‘soothe his nerves’ until after 2 a.m.) almost make the Narrator’s relation with Albertine look conventional. The chapter comes to its close, however, with a steady sense of routine, time and space measured out along the stations of the local railway line, their place-names now demystified by Brichot’s etymologies.

In Chapter Four, this calm is shattered by Albertine’s disclosure of her intimacy with Mlle Vinteuil and her friend (SG, 596; 1592). The past is not inert, neatly stored away: the memory of Montjouvain rushes painfully back to the Narrator, with Albertine transposed into the scene. His imagination works overtime, leaping from assumption to assumption; in self-preservation mode he adopts the habit he so fears in Albertine: lying. He veils his true emotions in a fabrication about being engaged to a woman, separating from her and fearing that he might commit suicide out of remorse. This keeps Albertine from guessing the reasons for his distress, but gazing at her he realizes that for him all is lost: the words she spoke magically embed her in the ‘depths of [his] lacerated heart’ before closing it up again, leaving him no idea of how to rid himself of this new suffering at the core of his being (SG, 612; 1602). Keeping her by his side may help limit further damage. Doing so will displease his mother, lukewarm at best about their relationship, but this regret is outweighed by a pathological fear of living without Albertine. So, with a fragile and part-feigned assurance that makes us squirm in our chairs, he announces his desire to marry her.

The Captive

The Captive details the Narrator’s cohabitation with Albertine in Paris. His parents are absent with work and family commitments, leaving the couple alone with Françoise. The Narrator repeatedly states that he no longer loves Albertine yet his jealousy binds him to her. One day he almost catches her and Andrée in flagrante; the suspicions roused on this and similar occasions torment him. He finds some peace observing Albertine sleeping: