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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.

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[21]. (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[22].

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[23]. 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[24].

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[25].

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[26].

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[27].

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[28]. 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[29].

Hélas Madame le papier me manque au moment où ça allait devenir pas trop mal !

Votre Marcel Proust


[30] [31]

Notes

  1. ↑ Note 1
  2. ↑ Note 2
  3. ↑ Note 3
  4. ↑ Note 4
  5. ↑ Note 5
  6. ↑ Note 6
  7. ↑ Note 7
  8. ↑ Note 8
  9. ↑ Note 9
  10. ↑ Note 10
  11. ↑ Note 11
  12. ↑ Note 12
  13. ↑ Note 13
  14. ↑ Note 14
  15. ↑ Note 15
  16. ↑ Note 16
  17. ↑ Note 17
  18. ↑ Note 18
  19. ↑ Note 19
  20. ↑ Note 20
  21. ↑ Note 21
  22. ↑ Note 22
  23. ↑ Note 23
  24. ↑ Note 24
  25. ↑ Note 25
  26. ↑ Note 26
  27. ↑ Note 27
  28. ↑ Note 28
  29. ↑ Note 29
  30. ↑ Translation notes
  31. ↑ Contributors: Yorktaylors
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