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way, then another, like Swann before him, he eventually decides that this would be madness. But almost immediately he decides that he does love Albertine after all, after `kissing her, as I used to kiss my mother at Combray, to calm my anguish'. We finally see the real heart of his problem. He has just told his mother that he is definitely not going to marry Albertine. But next day, after hearing him crying in the night, his mother comes into his room and says `remember your Mamma is going away today and couldn't bear to leave her big pet in such a state'. He takes his mother's head in his arms, still weeping, and says `I know how unhappy I'm going to make you'. But he has been thinking it over all night, and `I absolutely must ... I absolutely must marry Albertine'.

The next volume, `The Captive', centres on the period where Albertine is living in the narrator's flat in Paris, both being looked after by the faithful Francoise (as usual, Marcel is wholly dependent on others for all the practical necessities of life). Again the narrator's love for Albertine switches on and off, punctuated by fits of jealousy and the constantly recurring suspicion that she has been lying to him and secretly engaging in lesbian affairs. So cocooned is he in his own self-centredness that, in wondering whether marriage to Albertine might not spoil his life, `by making me assume the too arduous task of devoting myself to another person', he even suggests that it is `physical desire which alone makes us take an interest in the existence and character of another person'. All we see of their love play is that it is fairly infantile; and Albertine gives the narrator no greater pleasure than the `soothing power' of her presence every evening by his side,

`the like of which I had not experienced since the evenings at Combray long ago when my mother, stooping over my bed, brought me repose in a kiss.'

Nevertheless, as time drags by, it becomes clear their affair is going nowhere, and that our weak, neurotic hero will never be decisive enough to propose marriage. Finally, after a petulant scene when he has yet again interrogated Albertine about her supposed lesbian affairs, he decides to break off their relations forever. He returns to the flat to be told by Francoise `Mlle Albertine est disparue'. She has already packed her bags and left. He is distracted. The `captive' anima has become `The Fugitive', the title of the next volume. He sends his friend Saint-Loup out into the countryside in an attempt to find her. Eventually word comes that Albertine has been killed in a riding accident. The anima is dead.

From his initial shock and grief, the narrator then retreats back into total selfabsorption, as moves through what are described as his `three stages on the road to indifference' about her death. The third of these appropriately is Proust's reconstruction of his visit to Venice with his mother and his friend Reynaldo. In the novel, while he and his mother are there, he receives a telegram from Albertine, appearing to tell him that she is still alive. But this gives him `no joy. Happily back in the company of his beloved mother, he chillingly reflects that `the self' in him which loved Albertine is dead, and there is thus no reason for him to be moved, although subsequently it turns out he has misread the telegram. It had not been from Albertine at all. She really is dead.

In `Time Regained', the final volume, years have gone by and France is in the middle of the First World War. Saint-Loup has married Gilberte; but even this does not provide at least some faint echo of a happy ending, since he too had then started to have affairs, first with other women, then with men. Even this shadow of the narrator's masculinity has finally been sucked down into the twilit sexual underworld, where we glimpse the now ageing, pro-German Baron de Charlus being thrashed for sexual pleasure by a soldier in a dubious hotel, from which the narrator has just seen Saint-Loup emerge. But at least Saint-Loup's manhood survives sufficiently for him to die as an officer