Albertine has “gone” 🐎 and the long process of grieving has begun.

Albertine has “disappeared” 🐎 and the long process of mourning has begun. The narrator launches into a veritable litany punctuated by constant reminders of Albertine’s death. Somewhere between investigation and introspection 🕵🏻‍♂️, Marcel spends months shut away; his parents are no longer even mentioned, and Françoise is rarely referred to.

Proust certainly drew on his entire experience of bereavement 💔 in this volume: the loss of his father Adrien, who died in 1903; his mother Jeanne, who died in 1906; his friends who died at the front (Bertrand de Fénelon, for example), and also the guilt-ridden grief over Alfred Agostinelli, one of Albertine’s main models, in the spring of 1914, 110 years ago.

🖋️ “It was often in the darkest recesses of my own mind, when I could no longer form any clear image of Albertine, that a name would, quite by chance, stir up painful reactions within me that I no longer thought possible, much like those dying people whose brains no longer think and whose limbs can be made to twitch by pricking them with a needle. And for long periods, these stirrings would occur so rarely that I found myself actively seeking out occasions for grief or a fit of jealousy, in an attempt to reconnect with the past and remember her more clearly. For, just as regret for a woman is merely a rekindling of love and remains subject to the same laws as that love, the intensity of my regret was heightened by the very same factors which, whilst Albertine was still alive, would have deepened my love for her—and foremost amongst these had always been jealousy and sorrow.”

— “The Fugitive” (“La Futitive”), 1925
Pléiade 1954 (ed. Clarac and Ferré), p. 537

#MarcelProust #LaFugitive #RTP #proustagram #AlbertineDisparue #ÀlaRechercheduTempsperdu #AlfredAgostinelli #JeanneWeil #AdrienProust