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(Created page with "You will see the company she kept renewing itself<ref name="n3" />; yet (without knowing the reason until the end) you will still find Mme Cottard<ref name="n4" /> there exchanging words with Mme Swann such as: “You’re looking very elegant”, Odette said to Mme Cottard, “Redfern fecit<ref name="n5" />?" “No, you know I always stay loyal to Raudnitz<ref name="n6" />. Besides, it’s just something I’ve had done up.” “Well, well! it’s really smart!” “G...")
(Created page with "Albertine had nothing she could reproach me for. We can only be faithful to what we remember, and we can only remember what we have known. My new self, while it grew up in the shadow of the old, the old that had died, had often heard the other speak of Albertine. Through the stories of that moribund self, it believed that it knew her, loved her. But it was only a second hand affection<ref name="n27" />.")
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But I would prefer to introduce you to some characters that you don’t yet know, one above all who plays the most important role and determines the turn of events<ref name="n9" />, Albertine. You will see her when she is still only a “young girl in bloom” in the shadow of whom I spend many happy times in Balbec<ref name="n10" />. Then when I become suspicious of her over trifles, and have my confidence in her restored by trifles - “because it is a characteristic of love that it make us at the same time more distrustful and more credulous<ref name="n11" />". - I should have left it at that. “The wisest course would have been to consider with curiosity, to possess with delight, that little portion of happiness without which I might have died and never have suspected what it could mean to hearts less difficult to please or more favoured. I should have left, I should have shut myself up in solitude, remained there in harmony with the voice which I had contrived to render loving for an instant, and of which I should have asked nothing more than that it might never address another word to me, for fear lest, by an additional word which from then on could only be different, it might shatter with its dissonance the sensory silence in which, as though through the application of a pedal, there might have survived some tonality of happiness<ref name="n12" />." Yet little by little I tire of her, the idea of marrying her is no longer attractive to me; when, one evening, on our return from one of those dinners at “the Verdurins’ in the country” at which you will finally come to know the true personality of M. de Charlus<ref name="n13" />, she tells me as she is saying goodnight to me that the childhood friend whom she had often mentioned to me, and with whom she still kept up an affectionate relationship, was Mlle Vinteuil. You will see the terrible night that I then spend, at the end of which I come in tears to ask my mother’s permission to get engaged to Albertin<ref name="n14" />. Next you see our lives together during our long engagement, the slavery to which my jealousy reduces her, and which, successfully calming my jealousy, causes to evaporate, or so I think, any desire to marry her<ref name="n15" />. But one day when the weather is so fine that, thinking about all the women who pass by, all the journeys that I could take, I am intending upon asking Albertine to leave, Françoise comes into my room and hands me a letter from my fiancée who has decided to break it off with me and has left that very morning. It was what I thought I had wanted! but I was under so much suffering that I was obliged to promise myself that by the same evening a way would be found to make her come back<ref name="n16" />. “A moment ago I had thought that that was what I had wanted. And seeing how much I had deceived myself, I understood how suffering can reach much deeper into our psychology than the best psychologist, and the knowledge that the elements from which our soul is formed is given to us not through the subtle perceptions of our intelligence - hard, glittering, strange, like a suddenly crystallized salt - but by the abrupt reaction of pain<ref name="n17" />." In the days that follow I can barely take more than a few steps into my room, “I tried not to brush against the chairs, to not notice the piano, nor any of the objects that she had used and all of which, in the private language that my memories had taught them, seemed to be seeking to give me a new translation of her departure. I sank down into an armchair, I could not remain in it, because I had only ever sat in it when she was still there; and so at every moment there was one or more of those innumerable and humble selves that compose our personality which would have to be told of Albertine’s departure and which must be made to hear the words that were as yet unknown to it: “Albertine has gone.<ref name="n18" />." “And so for every action I might make, however trivial, and which up until then had been suffused with the blissful atmosphere of her presence, I was obliged, at renewed cost, with the same pain, to begin all over again the apprenticeship of separation. Then the competition of other forms of life…  As soon as I was conscious of this, I was panic-stricken. This calm which I had just enjoyed was the first apparition of that great intermittent force which was now going to wage war in me against grief, against love, and would ultimately get the better of them<ref name="n19" />." This is all about the act of forgetting but this page is already half filled up so I will have to pass over all that if I want to tell you about the end.  Albertine does not come back, I begin to wish for her death so that no one else can possess her. “How could Swann have believed in the past that had Odette perished, the victim of an accident, he would have regained, if not his happiness then at least some calm by the suppression of suffering. The suppression of suffering! Could I really have believed that, have believed that death merely strikes out what exist<ref name="n20" />." I learn of the death of Albertine.
But I would prefer to introduce you to some characters that you don’t yet know, one above all who plays the most important role and determines the turn of events<ref name="n9" />, Albertine. You will see her when she is still only a “young girl in bloom” in the shadow of whom I spend many happy times in Balbec<ref name="n10" />. Then when I become suspicious of her over trifles, and have my confidence in her restored by trifles - “because it is a characteristic of love that it make us at the same time more distrustful and more credulous<ref name="n11" />". - I should have left it at that. “The wisest course would have been to consider with curiosity, to possess with delight, that little portion of happiness without which I might have died and never have suspected what it could mean to hearts less difficult to please or more favoured. I should have left, I should have shut myself up in solitude, remained there in harmony with the voice which I had contrived to render loving for an instant, and of which I should have asked nothing more than that it might never address another word to me, for fear lest, by an additional word which from then on could only be different, it might shatter with its dissonance the sensory silence in which, as though through the application of a pedal, there might have survived some tonality of happiness<ref name="n12" />." Yet little by little I tire of her, the idea of marrying her is no longer attractive to me; when, one evening, on our return from one of those dinners at “the Verdurins’ in the country” at which you will finally come to know the true personality of M. de Charlus<ref name="n13" />, she tells me as she is saying goodnight to me that the childhood friend whom she had often mentioned to me, and with whom she still kept up an affectionate relationship, was Mlle Vinteuil. You will see the terrible night that I then spend, at the end of which I come in tears to ask my mother’s permission to get engaged to Albertin<ref name="n14" />. Next you see our lives together during our long engagement, the slavery to which my jealousy reduces her, and which, successfully calming my jealousy, causes to evaporate, or so I think, any desire to marry her<ref name="n15" />. But one day when the weather is so fine that, thinking about all the women who pass by, all the journeys that I could take, I am intending upon asking Albertine to leave, Françoise comes into my room and hands me a letter from my fiancée who has decided to break it off with me and has left that very morning. It was what I thought I had wanted! but I was under so much suffering that I was obliged to promise myself that by the same evening a way would be found to make her come back<ref name="n16" />. “A moment ago I had thought that that was what I had wanted. And seeing how much I had deceived myself, I understood how suffering can reach much deeper into our psychology than the best psychologist, and the knowledge that the elements from which our soul is formed is given to us not through the subtle perceptions of our intelligence - hard, glittering, strange, like a suddenly crystallized salt - but by the abrupt reaction of pain<ref name="n17" />." In the days that follow I can barely take more than a few steps into my room, “I tried not to brush against the chairs, to not notice the piano, nor any of the objects that she had used and all of which, in the private language that my memories had taught them, seemed to be seeking to give me a new translation of her departure. I sank down into an armchair, I could not remain in it, because I had only ever sat in it when she was still there; and so at every moment there was one or more of those innumerable and humble selves that compose our personality which would have to be told of Albertine’s departure and which must be made to hear the words that were as yet unknown to it: “Albertine has gone.<ref name="n18" />." “And so for every action I might make, however trivial, and which up until then had been suffused with the blissful atmosphere of her presence, I was obliged, at renewed cost, with the same pain, to begin all over again the apprenticeship of separation. Then the competition of other forms of life…  As soon as I was conscious of this, I was panic-stricken. This calm which I had just enjoyed was the first apparition of that great intermittent force which was now going to wage war in me against grief, against love, and would ultimately get the better of them<ref name="n19" />." This is all about the act of forgetting but this page is already half filled up so I will have to pass over all that if I want to tell you about the end.  Albertine does not come back, I begin to wish for her death so that no one else can possess her. “How could Swann have believed in the past that had Odette perished, the victim of an accident, he would have regained, if not his happiness then at least some calm by the suppression of suffering. The suppression of suffering! Could I really have believed that, have believed that death merely strikes out what exist<ref name="n20" />." I learn of the death of Albertine.


<div lang="fr" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr">
For the death of Albertine to be able to eliminate my suffering, the shock would have had to have killed her not only outside of myself, as it had done, but within me. There, she had never been more alive. In order to enter into us, another person must take on the form, bend themselves to the framework of Time; appearing to us only in successive moments, never being able to reveal to us more than one aspect of themselves at a time, or present us with more than a single photograph of themselves. A great weakness no doubt for a person to consist only of a collection of moments; a great strength also: they are a product of memory, and our memory of a certain moment is not informed of everything that has happened since; this moment which it has recorded still endures, and along with it lives the person whose form is outlined there. A disintegration moreover which not only bring the dead back to life but multiplies them When I had reached the point of being able to bear the grief of losing one of those Albertines, it all began again with another, with a hundred others. So that what until then had constituted the sweetness of my life, the perpetual rebirth of moments from the past, became its torment<ref name="n21" />. (Different times, seasons). I wait until summer is over, then autumn. But the first frosts recall other memories so cruel that then, like an invalid (who sees things from the point of view of his body, his chest and his cough, but in my case mentally) I felt that what I had still to dread most for my grief, for my heart, was the return of winter. Associated as it was to all of the seasons, in order for me to lose the memory of Albertine I should have had to forget them all, only to learn them all over again like a stroke victim learning to read again. Only the actual death of my own self  would have consoled me for hers. But one’s own death is nothing so extraordinary, it is consummated every day in spite of ourselves<ref name="n22" />.
Pour que la mort d'Albertine eût pu supprimer mes souffrances, il eût fallu que le choc l'eût tuée non seulement hors de moi comme il avait fait, mais en moi. Jamais elle n'y avait été plus vivante. Pour entrer en nous, un être est obligé de prendre la forme, de se plier au cadre du Temps ; ne nous apparaissant que par minutes successives, il n'a jamais pu nous livrer de lui qu'un seul aspect à la fois, nous débiter de lui qu'une seule photographie. Grande faiblesse sans doute pour un être de ne consister qu'en une collection de moments ; grande force aussi : car il relève de la mémoire et la mémoire d'un certain moment n'est pas instruite de ce qui s'est passé depuis ; le moment qu'elle a enregistré dure encore et avec lui vit l'être qui s'y profilait. Émiettement d'ailleurs qui ne fait pas seulement vivre la morte mais la multiplie. Quand j'étais arrivé à supporter le chagrin d'avoir perdu une de ces Albertine, tout était à recommencer avec une autre, avec cent autres. Alors ce qui avait fait jusque-là la douceur de ma vie, la perpétuelle renaissance des moments anciens, en devint le supplice<ref name="n21" />. (Diverses heures, saisons.) J'attends que l'été finisse, puis l'automne. Mais les premières gelées me rappellent d'autres souvenirs si cruels, qu'alors, comme un malade (qui se place lui au point de vue de son corps, de sa poitrine et de sa toux, mais moi moralement) je sentis ce que j'avais encore le plus à redouter pour mon chagrin, pour mon cœur, c'était le retour de l'hiver. Lié à toutes les saisons, pour que je perdisse le souvenir d'Albertine, il aurait fallu que je les oubliasse toutes, quitte à les réapprendre comme un hémiplégique qui rapprend à lire. Seule une véritable mort de moi-même m'eût consolé de la sienne. Mais la mort de soi-même n'est pas chose si extraordinaire, elle se consomme malgré nous chaque jour<ref name="n22" />.
</div>


<div lang="fr" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr">
Since, merely by thinking about her, I brought her back to life, her infidelities could never be those of a dead person; the moment when she had committed them became the present moment, not only for her but for that one of my evoked “selves” who was thinking about her. So that no anachronism could ever separate the indissoluble couple, where with each new culprit a still contemporaneous and jealous lover was immediately paired<ref name="n23" />. After all it is no more absurd to regret that a dead woman does not know that she has not succeeded in deceiving us, than it is to hope that our name will be known in two hundred years’ time. What we feel is the only thing that exists for us, and we project it into the past, or into the future, without allowing ourselves to be stopped by the fictitious barriers of death<ref name="n24" />.
Puisque rien qu'en pensant à elle, je la ressuscitais, ses trahisons ne pouvaient jamais être celles d'une morte ; l'instant où elle les avait commises, devenait l'instant actuel non pas seulement pour elle mais pour celui de mes « moi » évoqués, qui la contemplais. De sorte qu'aucun anachronisme ne pourrait jamais séparer le couple indissoluble où à chaque nouvelle coupable, s'appariait aussitôt un jaloux toujours contemporain<ref name="n23" />. Après tout, il n'est pas plus absurde de regretter qu'une morte ignore qu'elle n'a pas réussi à nous tromper, que de désirer que dans deux cents ans notre nom soit connu. Ce que nous sentons existe seul pour nous, nous le projetons dans le passé, dans l'avenir, sans nous laisser arrêter par les barrières fictives de la mort<ref name="n24" />.
</div>


<div lang="fr" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr">
And when my strongest memories no longer brought her back to me, it was the small insignificant things that had that power. Because memories of love are no exception to the general laws of memory, which themselves are governed by Habit which weakens everything. And so what best reminds us of a person is precisely what we had forgotten, because it was of no importance<ref name="n25" />.
Et quand mes grands souvenirs ne me la rappelèrent plus, de petites choses insignifiantes eurent ce pouvoir. Car les souvenirs d'amour ne font pas exception aux lois générales de la mémoire elle-même régie par l'Habitude laquelle affaiblit tout. Et ainsi ce qui nous rappelle le mieux un être, c'est justement ce que nous avions oublié parce que c'était sans importance<ref name="n25" />.
</div>


<div lang="fr" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr">
Little by little I began to submit to the forces of forgetting, that powerful instrument of adaptation to reality, that destroyer in us of this surviving past which is in constant contradiction with it. Not that I no longer loved Albertine. But already I was no longer in love with her as I was during the final days, but as in the earliest days of our love. Before forgetting her altogether, before attaining my  initial indifference, like a traveller who returns by the same route to the point where he started, I would have to traverse in the opposite direction all the feelings through which I had passed. But these stages do not appear to us as immovable. While one is stopped at one of them, one has the illusion that the train is setting off again, but in the direction of the place from which one has come, as one did the first time. Such is the cruelty of memory<ref name="n26" />.
Je commençai à subir peu à peu la force de l'oubli, ce puissant instrument d'adaptation à la réalité, destructeur en nous de ce passé survivant qui est en constante contradiction avec elle. Non pas que je n'aimasse plus Albertine. Mais déjà je ne l'aimais plus comme dans les derniers temps mais comme en des jours plus anciens de notre amour. Avant de l'oublier tout à fait, il me faudrait, comme un voyageur qui revient par la même route, au point d'où il est parti, avant d'atteindre à l'indifférence initiale traverser en sens inverse tous les sentiments par lesquels j'avais passé. Mais ces étapes ne nous semblent pas immobiles. Tandis que l'on est arrêté à l'une d'elles, on a l'illusion que le train repart dans le sens du lieu d'où l'on vient comme on avait fait la première fois. Telle est la cruauté du souvenir<ref name="n26" />.
</div>


<div lang="fr" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr">
Albertine had nothing she could reproach me for. We can only be faithful to what we remember, and we can only remember what we have known. My new self, while it grew up in the shadow of the old, the old that had died, had often heard the other speak of Albertine. Through the stories of that moribund self, it believed that it knew her, loved her. But it was only a second hand affection<ref name="n27" />.
Albertine n'aurait rien pu me reprocher. On ne peut être fidèle qu'à ce dont on se souvient, on ne peut se souvenir que de ce qu'on a connu. Mon moi nouveau tandis qu'il grandissait à l'ombre de l'ancien qui mourait avait souvent entendu celui-ci parler d'Albertine. À travers les récits du moribond, il croyait la connaître, l'aimer. Mais ce n'était qu'une tendresse de seconde main<ref name="n27" />.
</div>


<div lang="fr" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr">
Like certain pieces of good fortune, there are also pieces of misfortune which come to us too late, and can no longer assume the magnitude they would have had for us a little earlier<ref name="n28" />. By the time I learned this I was already consoled. And there was no reason to be surprised by it. Regret really is a physical malady, but between physical maladies we must distinguish those that only act on the body by the intermediary of memory. In the last case the prognosis is generally favourable. After a certain period of time a patient who is suffering from cancer will be dead. It is very rarely that the grief of an inconsolable widower is not healed after a period of time<ref name="n29" />.
Comme certains bonheurs, il y a des malheurs qui nous arrivent trop tard, quand ils ne peuvent plus prendre en nous la grandeur que plus tôt ils auraient eue<ref name="n28" />. Quand j'appris cela j'étais déjà consolé. Et il n'y avait pas lieu d'en être étonné. Le regret est bien un mal physique, mais entre les maux physiques, il faut distinguer ceux qui n'agissent sur le corps que par l'intermédiaire de la mémoire. Dans le dernier cas le pronostic est généralement favorable. Au bout de quelque temps un malade atteint de cancer sera mort. Il est bien rare qu'un veuf inconsolable au bout du même temps ne soit pas guéri<ref name="n29" />.
</div>


<div lang="fr" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr">
Alas Madame, I have run out of paper just as it was getting rather good!
Hélas Madame le papier me manque au moment où ça allait devenir pas trop mal !
</div>


<div lang="fr" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr">
Your Marcel Proust
Votre Marcel Proust
</div>




Revision as of 13:39, 6 December 2021


Other languages:

Marcel Proust to Madame Scheikévitch [shortly after Wednesday 3 November 1915]

(Click on the link above to see this letter and its notes in the Corr-Proust digital edition, including all relevant hyperlinks.)

[1]

To Madame Scheikévitch

Madame, you wanted to know what became of Mme Swann as she got older. It’s quite difficult to summarize for you. I can tell you that she became more beautiful: “This was mainly the result of what happened during her mid-life, when after a period of time Odette had discovered, or invented for herself, her own personal look, an unalterable “character”, a “style” of beauty; and on her disjointed features - which for so long, prey to the dangerous and futile vagaries of the flesh, taking on years for the briefest of moments, and at the slightest fatigue, a sort of fleeting old age, had composed in her for better or worse, according to her mood and her state of health, a dishevelled, changeable, formless and charming face - had now bestowed on her this fixed type, a sort of “eternal youth[2]".

You will see the company she kept renewing itself[3]; yet (without knowing the reason until the end) you will still find Mme Cottard[4] there exchanging words with Mme Swann such as: “You’re looking very elegant”, Odette said to Mme Cottard, “Redfern fecit[5]?" “No, you know I always stay loyal to Raudnitz[6]. Besides, it’s just something I’ve had done up.” “Well, well! it’s really smart!” “Guess how much… No, change the first figure![7]" “Oh! it’s very bad of you to give the signal for everyone to leave, I see that my tea party hasn’t been a great success.” “Do try one of these little horrors, they are rather good actually[8]".

But I would prefer to introduce you to some characters that you don’t yet know, one above all who plays the most important role and determines the turn of events[9], Albertine. You will see her when she is still only a “young girl in bloom” in the shadow of whom I spend many happy times in Balbec[10]. Then when I become suspicious of her over trifles, and have my confidence in her restored by trifles - “because it is a characteristic of love that it make us at the same time more distrustful and more credulous[11]". - I should have left it at that. “The wisest course would have been to consider with curiosity, to possess with delight, that little portion of happiness without which I might have died and never have suspected what it could mean to hearts less difficult to please or more favoured. I should have left, I should have shut myself up in solitude, remained there in harmony with the voice which I had contrived to render loving for an instant, and of which I should have asked nothing more than that it might never address another word to me, for fear lest, by an additional word which from then on could only be different, it might shatter with its dissonance the sensory silence in which, as though through the application of a pedal, there might have survived some tonality of happiness[12]." Yet little by little I tire of her, the idea of marrying her is no longer attractive to me; when, one evening, on our return from one of those dinners at “the Verdurins’ in the country” at which you will finally come to know the true personality of M. de Charlus[13], she tells me as she is saying goodnight to me that the childhood friend whom she had often mentioned to me, and with whom she still kept up an affectionate relationship, was Mlle Vinteuil. You will see the terrible night that I then spend, at the end of which I come in tears to ask my mother’s permission to get engaged to Albertin[14]. Next you see our lives together during our long engagement, the slavery to which my jealousy reduces her, and which, successfully calming my jealousy, causes to evaporate, or so I think, any desire to marry her[15]. But one day when the weather is so fine that, thinking about all the women who pass by, all the journeys that I could take, I am intending upon asking Albertine to leave, Françoise comes into my room and hands me a letter from my fiancée who has decided to break it off with me and has left that very morning. It was what I thought I had wanted! but I was under so much suffering that I was obliged to promise myself that by the same evening a way would be found to make her come back[16]. “A moment ago I had thought that that was what I had wanted. And seeing how much I had deceived myself, I understood how suffering can reach much deeper into our psychology than the best psychologist, and the knowledge that the elements from which our soul is formed is given to us not through the subtle perceptions of our intelligence - hard, glittering, strange, like a suddenly crystallized salt - but by the abrupt reaction of pain[17]." In the days that follow I can barely take more than a few steps into my room, “I tried not to brush against the chairs, to not notice the piano, nor any of the objects that she had used and all of which, in the private language that my memories had taught them, seemed to be seeking to give me a new translation of her departure. I sank down into an armchair, I could not remain in it, because I had only ever sat in it when she was still there; and so at every moment there was one or more of those innumerable and humble selves that compose our personality which would have to be told of Albertine’s departure and which must be made to hear the words that were as yet unknown to it: “Albertine has gone.[18]." “And so for every action I might make, however trivial, and which up until then had been suffused with the blissful atmosphere of her presence, I was obliged, at renewed cost, with the same pain, to begin all over again the apprenticeship of separation. Then the competition of other forms of life… As soon as I was conscious of this, I was panic-stricken. This calm which I had just enjoyed was the first apparition of that great intermittent force which was now going to wage war in me against grief, against love, and would ultimately get the better of them[19]." This is all about the act of forgetting but this page is already half filled up so I will have to pass over all that if I want to tell you about the end. Albertine does not come back, I begin to wish for her death so that no one else can possess her. “How could Swann have believed in the past that had Odette perished, the victim of an accident, he would have regained, if not his happiness then at least some calm by the suppression of suffering. The suppression of suffering! Could I really have believed that, have believed that death merely strikes out what exist[20]." I learn of the death of Albertine.

For the death of Albertine to be able to eliminate my suffering, the shock would have had to have killed her not only outside of myself, as it had done, but within me. There, she had never been more alive. In order to enter into us, another person must take on the form, bend themselves to the framework of Time; appearing to us only in successive moments, never being able to reveal to us more than one aspect of themselves at a time, or present us with more than a single photograph of themselves. A great weakness no doubt for a person to consist only of a collection of moments; a great strength also: they are a product of memory, and our memory of a certain moment is not informed of everything that has happened since; this moment which it has recorded still endures, and along with it lives the person whose form is outlined there. A disintegration moreover which not only bring the dead back to life but multiplies them When I had reached the point of being able to bear the grief of losing one of those Albertines, it all began again with another, with a hundred others. So that what until then had constituted the sweetness of my life, the perpetual rebirth of moments from the past, became its torment[21]. (Different times, seasons). I wait until summer is over, then autumn. But the first frosts recall other memories so cruel that then, like an invalid (who sees things from the point of view of his body, his chest and his cough, but in my case mentally) I felt that what I had still to dread most for my grief, for my heart, was the return of winter. Associated as it was to all of the seasons, in order for me to lose the memory of Albertine I should have had to forget them all, only to learn them all over again like a stroke victim learning to read again. Only the actual death of my own self would have consoled me for hers. But one’s own death is nothing so extraordinary, it is consummated every day in spite of ourselves[22].

Since, merely by thinking about her, I brought her back to life, her infidelities could never be those of a dead person; the moment when she had committed them became the present moment, not only for her but for that one of my evoked “selves” who was thinking about her. So that no anachronism could ever separate the indissoluble couple, where with each new culprit a still contemporaneous and jealous lover was immediately paired[23]. After all it is no more absurd to regret that a dead woman does not know that she has not succeeded in deceiving us, than it is to hope that our name will be known in two hundred years’ time. What we feel is the only thing that exists for us, and we project it into the past, or into the future, without allowing ourselves to be stopped by the fictitious barriers of death[24].

And when my strongest memories no longer brought her back to me, it was the small insignificant things that had that power. Because memories of love are no exception to the general laws of memory, which themselves are governed by Habit which weakens everything. And so what best reminds us of a person is precisely what we had forgotten, because it was of no importance[25].

Little by little I began to submit to the forces of forgetting, that powerful instrument of adaptation to reality, that destroyer in us of this surviving past which is in constant contradiction with it. Not that I no longer loved Albertine. But already I was no longer in love with her as I was during the final days, but as in the earliest days of our love. Before forgetting her altogether, before attaining my initial indifference, like a traveller who returns by the same route to the point where he started, I would have to traverse in the opposite direction all the feelings through which I had passed. But these stages do not appear to us as immovable. While one is stopped at one of them, one has the illusion that the train is setting off again, but in the direction of the place from which one has come, as one did the first time. Such is the cruelty of memory[26].

Albertine had nothing she could reproach me for. We can only be faithful to what we remember, and we can only remember what we have known. My new self, while it grew up in the shadow of the old, the old that had died, had often heard the other speak of Albertine. Through the stories of that moribund self, it believed that it knew her, loved her. But it was only a second hand affection[27].

Like certain pieces of good fortune, there are also pieces of misfortune which come to us too late, and can no longer assume the magnitude they would have had for us a little earlier[28]. By the time I learned this I was already consoled. And there was no reason to be surprised by it. Regret really is a physical malady, but between physical maladies we must distinguish those that only act on the body by the intermediary of memory. In the last case the prognosis is generally favourable. After a certain period of time a patient who is suffering from cancer will be dead. It is very rarely that the grief of an inconsolable widower is not healed after a period of time[29].

Alas Madame, I have run out of paper just as it was getting rather good!

Your Marcel Proust


[30] [31]

Notes

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  30. ↑ Translation notes
  31. ↑ Contributors: Yorktaylors
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