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unconscious, her ever-dispersed identities and unknowable desires are reeled in; only then does he feel that he possesses this ‘fugitive being’. Gradually he recognizes the futility of trying to control her: contingent events, ill-formed cover stories and half-truths told to conceal earlier lies reveal more to him than years of dedicated investigation ever could. There are many extremely beautiful reflective passages: on changes in the weather, on the cries of street vendors, on sensation and memory. Bergotte dies in a gallery before Vermeer’s View of Delft. Swann too passes away. Charlus, for the benefit of Morel, invites esteemed guests to attend a recital chez Verdurin; the force of art powerfully resurfaces as the Narrator hears for the first time a septet by Vinteuil, posthumously transcribed by his daughter’s lover. The rudeness of Charlus and his guests prompts Mme Verdurin to take revenge, using deceitful rumours and slander to turn Morel against Charlus, who is publicly humiliated. The Narrator buys Albertine elaborate gowns by Fortuny; he claims he wants to separate, then argues otherwise. Jealous turmoil, speculative thinking and reflection on music and the structuring of works of art are tightly interwoven. As long as Albertine’s possible deceptions occupy the Narrator’s mind he is unable to set to work. He longs for Venice and a new start, decides categorically to make a final break with Albertine, only to learn from Françoise that she has packed her things and fled whilst he slept.

The Captive is a disquieting book, full of suspicion, distrust and suffering. At times, however, it promises something beyond this, pulses with beauty and insight that unknit our brows and send us soaring into the heights of artistic revelation. From the outset, the Narrator makes plain his position, referring to ‘Albertine … with whom I was bored, with whom I was indeed clearly conscious that I was not in love’ (C, 4; P, 1611). Such statements are frequent in The Captive, but not loving Albertine is not the same thing as no longer needing her and much of the volume is concerned with the ways in which the Narrator attempts to deal with this need, a need of assurance that her desires are not for other women. In sequestering Albertine, however, he gradually becomes as much a captive as she is, since his jealousy of her unknown habits and past acquaintances is like ‘a phobia … capable of assuming as many forms as the undefined evil that is its cause’ (C, 16; P, 1618). The enduring nature of his dilemma can be seen in the reformulations of this situation throughout the volume (jealousy is later described, for example, as ‘a demon that cannot be exorcised, but constantly reappears in new incarnations’; C, 110; P, 1679).

In leaving Balbec, the Narrator had hoped he could distance Albertine from temptation. It quickly becomes clear, however, that so fixated is he on her possible infidelities that temptation, to his mind at least, is everywhere. Soon the terms used to describe their relation painfully reflect its growing awkwardness, the impossibility of tenderness or satisfaction: ‘our engagement’, as he memorably puts it, ‘was assuming the aspect of a criminal trial’ (C, 58; P, 1645). His problem is that he has to deal not only with the real manifestations of Albertine’s desires, such as the tryst with Andrée that he almost intrudes upon, returning home with a bunch of syringas (C, 54–5; P, 1643–4), but also the host of imagined acts of passion, stolen glances and assignations that his mind tirelessly manufactures. The Narrator’s suffering comes from the creative capability of his mind, not yet channelled towards art and thus free to work obsessively to formulate the destructive fables of jealousy. (Symptomatic of this is the striking regularity with which the word ‘hypothesis’ crops up in this volume.)

Albertine, multiple and mobile in Balbec, is, in Paris to quote just one page, ‘caged’ and ‘cloistered’ (C, 69; P, 1653). Her containment intermittently soothes the Narrator’s suffering, caused by the thought of her desires being untrammelled;