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plea but it crosses with a message from Mme Bontemps informing him of Albertine’s death in a riding accident. His jealous enquiries, through Aimé, and his tortuous self-scrutiny and repeated revisiting of their shared past, however, continue well after her death. Gradually his state of mind improves, he begins to notice other women again, in particular one whose allure seems tinged with familiarity: it is Gilberte, bearing Odette’s new husband’s name, de Forcheville. Hope that an artistic vocation may still be achieved comes when Le Figaro publishes an article by the Narrator. A trip to Venice with his mother reawakens him to the joys of art; simultaneously he begins to conceptualize a world without Albertine at its core. He learns of Gilberte’s marriage to Saint-Loup and, soon after, through hearsay, of the latter’s concealed homosexuality. Time spent with Gilberte at Tansonville and further revelations of Robert’s character lead the Narrator to a retrospective reassessment of people and relations long taken for granted.

Albertine’s departure poses the Narrator the problem of coming to terms with life on his own. Readers will recall his distress as a child, left without his mother’s kiss. The solace derived from Albertine’s kiss and her presence was associated with those of the mother in The Captive. Now the pain of Albertine’s flight, he suggests, brings ‘all the anxieties I had felt ever since my childhood … to amalgamate themselves with it in a homogenous mass that suffocated me’ (F, 483; AD, 1923). This final verb (Proust’s French gives ‘étouffer’) recalls the entrapment of the previous volume but equally serves as a reminder of the respiratory problems from which Proust suffered throughout his life and anticipates the increased use of images of illness and medicine we find in this volume. Even as gradually the Narrator discovered Albertine’s lies and infidelities, her presence consoled him. Now in her absence his mind carries on its jealous fabulations without respite. Persuading himself that their separation will be temporary is harder than expected, since ‘at every moment there was one more of those innumerable and humble “selves” that compose our personality which was still unaware of Albertine’s departure and must be informed of it’ (F, 490; AD, 1927). If this complexity were not enough, there comes the further realization that, like him, she is multiple: even after the death of her physical being she lives on in manifold forms in his memory.

As a result, major themes of The Fugitive are suffering, solitude, memory and the multiplicity of human character. Geographically speaking, this volume is wide-ranging, taking in Paris, Venice, Balbec and the Touraine. Nevertheless, the landscapes to which readers have to become accustomed for long stretches are those of the Narrator’s mind. For the most part we are enclosed with the thoughts, vivid and wild, of the Narrator. Coming to terms with Albertine’s departure involves rethinking his relation to moments of his past, for after her disappearance (and above all after her death) their relationship exists only in his memories. The Fugitive, as a result, might be considered as the archive or memory of the novel up to that point: for the Narrator to be able to move beyond his loss and overcome his anxieties, he must reconsider past incidents, often long distant, and put his past selves (and the multiple Albertines to which they are attached) to rest. Voluntarily and involuntarily, many moments return to the Narrator’s mind, sparking his thoughts and challenging our reading memory. He realizes that forgetting, oblivion (the French ‘oubli’ has both these senses) is what he needs in order to move on; but, just as we cannot voluntarily call to mind all our past experiences, we cannot will oblivion to submerge our past: forgetting takes time and before the period of calm which this eventually brings must come pain; and The Fugitive has this in abundance.

When Françoise matter-of-factly observes that Albertine’s rings, discovered in a drawer, seem to come from the same source