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in a bid to prove a commitment to honesty, admits that she once had a three-week holiday with Léa. The Narrator’s metaphor for the impact of this admission is a forceful one: ‘I watched a tongue of flame seize and devour in an instant a novel which I had spent millions of minutes in writing’ (C, 399; P, 1866). Despite his mental turmoil, when it comes to the moment of action, the Narrator cannot bring himself to split from Albertine: he play-acts a reconciliation and they agree to renounce the plan to separate. Reflecting on this episode, the Narrator’s summary of his predicament puts one in mind of the tortuous situational dramas of Samuel Beckett, one of Proust’s most sensitive early critics: the Narrator laments ‘the impossibility of living together which is the cause of our daily suffering, a suffering preferred by us to that of a separation, which will, however, end by separating us in spite of ourselves’ (C, 410; P, 1873).

A preoccupation of the Narrator’s since the earliest stages of the Search is Venice; repeatedly in The Captive he alludes to the fact that Albertine’s presence prevents him from fulfilling his dream of visiting the city. He delights in the Fortuny gowns he buys Albertine, whose designs borrow motifs from paintings by Carpaccio and Titian, thus layering the artistry of the contemporary designer with that of the Renaissance painters. The bewitching multiplicity of these garments has its downside, however: the reminders of Venice they provide make the Narrator feel his ‘captivity’ in Paris all the more sharply.

As the winter gives way to spring his desire for Venice increases, shifts in the weather once more influencing his own mental readiness for change. Before his decision comes, however, there occurs a final positively inflected scene, a last glimmer of hope before we are hauled through the fraught and frantic pages of The Fugitive. This scene bears close examination for it offers us once again a model of interpretive practice that we might apply to our reading of the Search and beyond. Albertine sits at the pianola and plays pieces of music for the Narrator several times over, knowing from habit that he likes in this way gradually to piece together the disparate lines of the works’ structure. Once again we find our keyword: ‘She knew and, I think, understood the joy that my mind derived … from this task of modelling a still shapeless nebula’ (C, 425; P, 1883; my emphasis). Like the Narrator in this scene, often the best approach to the Search is to apply these principles of careful, repeated appraisal; so doing, in time, the work’s internal structuring, cross-currents and echoes become more familiar, more accessible. Listening to Vinteuil in this way affords the Narrator the realization that the joys of great art can approximate to those he felt tasting the madeleine or seeing the shifting bell-towers at Martinville: the artist’s apprehension of the world, the impression it makes on him or her, is communicated, transposed into art and projected to listeners or viewers through it (C, 426–8; P, 1884–5). Here we have the beginnings of the Narrator’s theory of art, which will have its full expression in the library scene in Time Regained. For now, however, these pleasures are fleeting and the promise of an artistic vocation unfulfilled, for the Narrator’s captive soon becomes a fugitive

The Fugitive

The fraught pages of The Fugitive tell of the Narrator’s coming to terms with Albertine’s disappearance. Each of his many selves must, in turn, adapt to his new circumstances. He constructs and unpicks seemingly endless hypotheses regarding the motivations for her departure and takes solace from bringing young girls to his apartment, a habit that earns him a police summons. Saint-Loup is sent to scout for Albertine in the Touraine where her aunt has a house. She spots him, however, and writes to the Narrator, claiming to be willing to return provided he cease his underhand tactics. He attempts, unsuccessfully, to call Albertine’s bluff and make her return. Eventually he sends her a despairing